So I added a couple “banners” or “buttons” to the right hand side of this shindig. One of which is the
Mac OSX 10.3 Panther metal X and the other is a link to
Undo.org, a campaign to reduce fossil fuel emissions, and thus “undo” global warming. That probably doesn’t surprise a lot of people, given my general inclination to environmental causes and whatnot. However, what most people would be surprised by is my disagreement with a lot of environmentalist rhetoric.
Undoit’s opening phrase is that “humans caused global warming”. I don’t neccessarily disagree with this, but the entire site is dedicated to a type of alarmism that I’m just not comfortable with. It’s the age old argument that our actions are going to destroy the Earth, and they are upsetting the natural balance. I take extreme argument with this for a couple for reasons.
× The Earth has survived worse than us.
× Whose definition of natural?
The first is fairly debatable, I’ll admit. I mean asteroid impacts, mass extinctions, and continental shifting aren’t
that big of a deal right? They aren’t, I don’t know…catastrophic? And guess what’s still here? Old terra firma. The big Gaia herself. Earth. Our actions, short of some center of the Earth nuclear explosion is going to “destroy the Earth”. It may render it uninhabitable to humans, but I’ll come back to that in a later point.
The second point, in my opinion, isn’t debatable. The dichotomy that the modern day environmentalist has created between ourselves and everything else is bizarre. By many environmentalists, anything created by man is “not natural”. I once ascribed myself to this definition, until I thought about it in the context that we are not alone in the construction of of structures in nature. Bees create intricate hives, beavers cease the flow of rivers with dams, termites destroy trees for houses, and birds build nests for their young to live in. The idea of construction and manipulation of natural resources is not uniquely human, and nor should we pretend it to be. Our creations are simply that, manipulations of natural resources and a conversion into structures of some kind. Yes, there are such processes which aren’t as responsible in Ecological terms, but this does not render them any less “natural”. All of our actions are a part of nature, and thus you cannot delineate between the two without creating a fallacy of argumentative logic.
So if our actions are all-natural™ and we stand no large change of destroying the Earth, what’s the problem? Well, before I said that “[our actions] may render it uninhabitable to humans”, and that is the fundamental problem. The only real approach to preservationist environmentalism is an anthropocentric one. You can argue for regression, fuel efficiency, consumption reduction, or any other method, but you are not doing it for the good of “nature”. Our over-consumption is natural. It may not be sustainable, or wise from a population ecology perspective, but it is most assuredly a natural process. We’re really in this to protect the Earth so that we can live here the longest that we can. We want to keep it the way that suits us the best. Many (including myself) think that we may have changed the Earth enough that it doesn’t suit us as properly as it should, and should probably try to reverse the effects of our misguided actions. Not that crazy of an idea, and thus is why I support groups such as Undoit.org.
To many, these little discrepancies don’t matter that much. Many of these people are the ones working on the issues themselves. But I think that it’s important to understand the root of your believes. The root of why you are doing something is the only thing that can keep you on the route towards your end goal. This lack of focus has been the downfall of many movements, and can result in the corruption of one. “Staying true” isn’t just a terrible slogan in hardcore music, but a reality for someone dedicated to change.
justinª