Those institutions we create and participate in constitute the broader culture. Unless they are small and local, our participation is minimal or nonexistent. So such institutions become bureaucracy, unreachable and uncontrollable. That is the kind of world we live in today. It is not a participatory one nor one that can be reformed by individuals. Instead we elect representatives and then desperately try to insure that they serve our interests. But it is a losing battle.
The big global ecological battles we are fighting today are the most consequential and all evidence to date indicates we are losing. “We are already fighting World War III and we are losing; it is the war against the earth” (Raymond Dasmann, sometime during the 1980s). But WE individuals are not fighting it. It is an uncountable crowd of surrogates with their own agenda or ideology, only occasionally acting in the interest of the people……as, incidentally, Richard Nixon did around 1971 when he signed the most important environmental federal laws on the books in response to Earth Day 1970.
Earth Day was not a political parade. It was a social uprising and changed the character and values of this country dramatically and, seemingly, permanently. The decade that followed was the most fruitful and progressive one of our time as individuals, academia and the media embraced a new paradigm: one in which humans acknowledged their dependence on the rest of the planet’s inhabitants and systems. But this paradigm was crushed under the monstrous tsunami of economic growth and overconsumption.
Now there are two forces that have disrupted and essentially sidelined this movement: ideology of the left (social justice) and right (capitalism), and abandonment of the understanding of our place in the world, to the point of becoming the main disrupters and destroyers of the earth in the sole interest of material comforts and acquisition of wealth and power.
Neither of these can be combatted through legislation. We inhabit a poisonous paradigm that must be replaced with a gentler one that diminishes humanity’s power over its resources, lands and living species, one that reduces our maladaptive behavior and attitudes while broadening our compassion to include non-human nature as our equal, not as aresource to be exploited.
We need not elections but a new blueprint of how to co-exist on the planet, a new SOCIAL paradigm, not another political party or ideology (or religion). Many thoughtful and insightful scientists have articulated what we must do: first create an ethical biocentric paradigm in which all forms of life are equal in value; second, behave personally as if this were true; third, persuade, through example and reward, the rest of humanity to join us in restoring as far as possible the damage done to the planet and to human societies. The objective: to achieve a Conserver Society with a relocalized steady state economy, cut down to “human scale”, as Kirkpatrick Sale puts it, with a small population and smaller impact on the planet.
This is cultural change, not economic or political. And it depends on the BASE, not on the elite or the elected. It depends on our rejecting as far as humanly possible the choices offered to us everywhere on a daily basis, the choices of overconsumption and destruction of the very lands and resources that we are exploiting under the false illusion that this is progress.
Right now there are individuals who understand this, notably Greta Thunberg in Europe, arguably our most important leader. We have had many false and faulty leaders in this country, as the wiser ones have passed on. At this time we lack principled leadership, both secular and religious, which understands the bases of the multiple crises. We need to create this leadership and empower it to represent what is best about humans, not worst as at present. This requires not more facts but more thought of a different kind, to create a new society and a new world. We dont have much time to do it. And if we defer action, Nature will do it for us and the outcome will not be welcome.
“If we continue in the same direction, we’ll get to where we’re headed”.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lorna Salzman is the author of Politics as if Evolution Mattered: Darwin, Ecology, and Social Justice and has written for The Ecologist, Resurgence, Business & Society Review, Index on Censorship and Humanist Perspectives. She was regional representative of Friends of the Earth, an editor at National Audubon Society’s journal American Birds, and natural resource specialist at the NYC Dept. of Environmental Protection. She co-founded the NYS Green Party, ran for congress on the Suffolk County Green Party line in 2002, and sought the U.S. Green Party’s presidential nomination in 2004.
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