here's a brief illustration of what i mean on environment: biosphere 2 (earth was supposed to be biosphere 1). the idea was to create a completely enclosed ecosystem, a sort of model for the way they thought about the earth, or perhaps the way they thought about various local ecosystems: as essentially isolated, balanced, stable systems. they tried to simulate the balance and stability supposedly displayed by nature before man's depredations. not to put too fine a point on it, the thing was a miserable failure by that standard: they actually never effectively sealed it: the inside was continually leaking out and the outside in. to the extent the could seal it, it started to die and became non-viable. e.g. all the pollinating insects died, which would have compromised the whole thing if they hadn't started importing stuff. they couldn't achieve a stable oxygen level, even with all their plants. etc. eventually they just gave up, and the thing came to be regarded as a boondoggle. in short, unsustainable.

but the experiment could have been regarded as a success in this sense: it disconfirmed (not decisively of course) the picture of what an ecosystem is and what makes it workable with which they started. the earth itself even as a whole is not an integral self-contained system. start, um, with the source of light (including the sudden blast of solar flares etc), or the role of meteor impacts on species and evolution. but there is certainly no ecosystem on earth that's not in constant interchange with those surrounding it. even island ecosystems do not maintain precisely the same species etc through long periods of time, but which i mean hundreds or thousands, not millions of years. we have this fantasy of nature as a stable underlying reality which we are disturbing; this is false both about those systems and about us.  

the environmental movement still has this idea of nature as wise (and it is a wisdom to which we must return). it's like a fantasy mother, lovely and harmonious; we are her straying children, though through "sustainability," for example, we could simulate in ourselves her ideal condition. whatever this may be, it is not an empirical result; actually it's almost bizarre in its detachment from our real experience or natural history. no doubt nature does display various spatially and temporally limited relative balances, or is relatively stable in some places over significant stretches of time. the mutual interdependent adaptation of creatures is astonishing. right. but all of that is in the context of an extremely volatile, radically unstable system constantly subject to change from within and without, and exquisite adaptations lead to sudden mutual extinctions because of weather, or warming or cooling, or microbes suddenly wafting in from south america, or strange ducks crossing the pacific. we are such ducks.

 

Comments

[Cb]

Yes, that's one model...there's the other model that recognizes treating the worlds natural resources as am unlimited supply of stuff is in fact directly causing the exdtinction and mitigation of every species - except humans - and is an unsustainable basis to rest civilization upon. Not to mention the current threat of insufficient drinking water for the world. Even if one concedes that the environment is not an equally balanced system of love, it does not follow that everything environmentalist stand for is
Wrong, nor that the civilized worlds way of Life is sustainable or just. For that reason, I think narrowing in on the relatively harmless environmentalists consistently over those doing actual destructive damage to other species and humans through practices assumed inexhaustible, is cruel; or at least daft.

[crispy]

yes that's roughly true, CB. but i also think that it's our illusion of separation from nature - a sort of fantasy or nightmare of religion or some kinds of environmentalism - that is part of the heart of the problem. i think we need to re-conceive ourselves as inextricably and entirely of the order of nature, and cease to pretend to be alien in it or alienated from it. so could there be an environmental practice that conceived human beings as 100% natural creatures even when they're releasing carbon or creating toxic waste dumps? that's sort of my problem. i'd like to work on that!

[CB]

I think the distinction that is drawn, or should be drawn - although 9 times out of 10 I hate it when people do this - is recognizing the rationality and foresight of humans. Obviously if a bobcat poops in a stream that an indigenous community takes water from, they don't realize they could harm that community. Where as if some jagoff from BP decides to go drilling for oil in the worlds oceans, he knows good and well what the consequences could be. We can still accept that we are entirely part of the environment, inextricable linked, and natural creatures; but there is the distinction of seeing our own consequences that other animals sometimes cant.

[CB]

And this is why it bugs me when you write post that discuss how perhaps no one is at fault for the BP oil spill, but then spend considerable time harping on environmentalists. I would much rather strive to create the environmentalists utopia, knowing it won't succeed, then trying to create the BP execs utopia, knowing equally well it won't succeed. One of these two parties is significantly less harmful than the other.

[Andrew Dobbs]

If I'm not mistaken, Paulie Shore and one of the Baldwins fucked the project up.

[CF Oxtrot]

"Obviously if a bobcat poops in a stream that an indigenous community takes water from, they don't realize they could harm that community."

You'd be surprised what wild animals "know" about what their shit and pee do to their environment.

The fact that they don't speak Human languages doesn't mean they don't have parallel forms of "knowing" or understanding their environments. It's rare to see wild animals shit or pee near where they sleep, eat, give birth, or raise young.

Cows, on the other hand, will shit and pee directly into the streams they're standing in, drinking from.

*******

CB's first comment makes sense to me. The fact that some enviros are dweeby trustafarians and mentally vacant Gaia-worshipers doesn't mean that interconnectedness isn't real, doesn't mean that industrial process isn't ruining the ecosystems human live within, doesn't mean we can successfully imagine technological fixes for the finite nature of those resources which otherwise occur naturally.

Obviously, someone who says buying and driving a Prius is a "green" measure is someone who can't quite understand the way things interrelate. That sad irony doesn't mean we should ignore the consequences of consumerism and materialism, what they wreak upon our natural environment.