definitionism

Do you feel as though you are increasingly encouraged to define yourself according to socio-political parameters? Not in a Kant 'man v. modern society' sort of way, or in dealing with a collective shift in our psychological paradigm. No, I thinking of a reduced clique of self-definition. One is either hill-billy jamboree, elitist leftist holier-than-thou-yet-opposes-public-spirituality, real holier-than-thou evangelist brimstone, market fundamentalist, or any number of sub-genres of the pseudo anti-authority types.
What happed to the renaissance man?

post religious post

Like a wine soaked ode to that rarefied state of contentment, I'm getting on my highhorse: at what point to value the wealth of realization more than the material? I don't claim, like to some self-righteous nouveu-spirtual fuck, that I've come to believe that a young lad from North California can really get my fingers around the numinous nature of our collective predicament. But I think calling out that 900-pound gorilla of lost spiritual curiosity is a start. What happened to the quest? I'm not a scripturalist, atheist, pandering agnostic, or given to orthodoxy of any kind, but do I have to be? Religions come and go, and the death-rattle of this archaic nonsense would be a boon growth in our very metaphysics. This isn't a Soviet prediction of replacement ideology, but when the thinking man isn't afraid of his faith, then true faith shines through.
Traditions have allowed this at points, but we're caught between the fanaticism of the Right and Left. Agnosticism is pleading the fifth. Evangelism is fucking disrespectful. Atheism is ignorant and reeks of the perfect megalomaniac. Bring god out, ask it questions, pour it a drink and proceed.

"don't discrimihate 'case you done read a book or two..."

Oh André; cutting edge wisdom finds no greater champion than Outkast. When all you have is a hammer indeed... It seems environmental-justice-ism looks to publications, studies, reports, et al, that simply reinforce the presumptions already made. Corporations are malevolent and hate minorities. Obviously. They grab their big toxic pistols and take aim at low income, black or Latino neighborhoods, and fire away with gleeful disregard for the health of ethnic America.

When all you have is the race-card, the whole world looks like a bigot.

The most brilliant point made in "Break Through" about the reason that poor (to wit, minority) neighborhoods bear the brunt of toxicity is price. No company, operating on the bottom line, would ship waste to expensive real estate. The forces driving industrial waste to poor neighborhoods is the same reason that the poor were driven there in the first place: cost. If minorities were more economically integrated into American markets, than they could mobilize out of these so-called toxic slums.

Obviously this is far more difficult that just giving jobs to poor blacks or Latinos (or Russians, or Hmong, or regular ole' poor white folk). But acknowledging that the problem is one of economics rather than corporate environmental maliciousness is the first step in meaningful discourse about solutions.

True, there are generations of minorities, especially black Americans, who have been excluded from equal participation in the economy, but lets start with education, business development, and so on, rather than pointing fingers and reiterating that rich, white corporate America is out to get everyone. By prioritizing a stabilization of economies, we willl stabilize the environment.

Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, and he might give a damn when industrial waste lights his river on fire.

And let's face it, empty bellies are easy to fill not just with disregard for long-term environmental consequences, but also ethnic blame and hatred, religious fanaticism, and savage political collusion. Dissent becomes taboo, free thought becomes contraband.

I suppose any weak-willed faux-intellectual will not willingly give credit to ideas that undermine the foundations of his or her thought. EJism is no different.
What we need is a renaissance away from the specialization of intellect so that we may look at at challenges holistically.

white man's burnden (Break Through)

I get a sense of the common idealism pervading the established environmental clique, as provided by Nordhaus and Shellenberger: the paternal idealist.

Have environmentalists (in the traditional sense) been granted access to that rarefied club of 'father knows best,' with such honored peers as European colonialism, 19th century anthropology, Catholicism in Latin America, Cold War American anti-communist policies?
Just as the 'white man's burden' lay heavy on the British and their exploitation of southern Africa and India, is it now the 'green man's burden' to wrest nature away from humanity for our own sake?

I've always taken zealots of any stripe with a grain of salt if their mantra was rank with absolutism. I'm liberal but not necessarily a Democrat; spiritual but not denominational or scripturalist; deeply in love with my country and American ideals but not a naive warmonger.
The world is cast in shades of gray.
I must admit, however, that I hadn't looked at environmental groups with the same scrutiny until about half-way through "Break Through." Self-righteous yes, but not really misguided. Alas, as Nordaus and Shellenberger detail, all the pieces fit to point to environmentalism as preservationist not for the sake of ecology, but preservationist for sake of protecting its establishment. Like General Musharref or the California Prison Guards' Union, the goal seems to be protection of institutions that guarantee patronage; longevity through power rather than effectiveness.

In the Brazilian context, it seems unthinkable that anyone believes that Brazil's citizenry have less of an interest in protecting the Amazon than foreign idealists. The old adage of not shitting where you eat is perhaps the most powerful argument for Brazil's case for environmental sovereignty. Ironically, I happened to catch the last half of the brilliant film, "City of God," last night, and you'd be damn sure that I'd be running for the Amazon if I lived in a favela.

My only gripe thus far, is the treating Jared Diamond's "Collapse" in the same context as stagnate environmental doctrine. While Diamond has his moments of doomsdaying, he hardly paints indigenous peoples as benign stewards of natural harmony. If anything, his discussion of Easter Island supports the idea of economic and cultural restructuring as a means of environmental stability. Like Brazil (albeit on a much, much smaller scale), Easter Island was a resource-driven economy within a highly stratified society. Competition among the elite came at the expense of both the poor and the environment. Hoarding at the top harmed those at the bottom. Similarly, if Brazil was somewhat more egalitarian economically (I'm not screaming socialism, by any means), there would be less pressure on the lower classes to seek survival at the expense of things like virgin forest and biodiversity.

Paternalism can be a nasty thing. This is is not saying I'm a cultural relativist in any way. Democracy is better than ethnic or religious autocracies. Free-market and idea driven economies do create problems, but they are far more adept at fixing them quickly than state-controlled systems. However, these systems must develop organically to a degree. Hurling democracy or capitalism at a society with no history of either results in a mockery of both. Look at the democratically elected terrorist organization of Hamas, or the wild-west, thug capitalism of Russia. I won't even touch Iraq. Similarly, espousing Euro-American environmental elitism to people without the economic or social luxury of conservation is not only blind, but grossly insensitive to the poor.

water no get no enemy (Break Through)

I though I'd open this whole mess with some Fela Kuti. I don't know if Mr. Kuti meant it in any context close to how I see it, but great art is always subjective. Anyhow, it seems pertinent to the arguments in Break Through; the idea that our progress is in constant conflict with the natural world feels, at this point, antiquated. We've grown and progressed along side the elements, spurred by the convulsions of Mother Earth, not in spite of them.

The challenges of surviving among the forces of nature has given birth to all that defines of as a species and makes us unique: religion, science, philosophy, art...they all are responses our position within the greater scope of existence. Sometimes we've confronted nature as the "other," something to harness and exploit. These were in times, however, when the very existence was threatened. We expand when food is scarce, harvest timber so as not to freeze, mine precious minerals to stabilize economies and maintain social order.

Now, in our time of plenty, we try to isolate nature as the "other" to preserve its aesthetics and innate harmony. As Nordhaus and Shellenberger argue, it is precisely our success that has allowed us to expand our awareness to include the postindustrial desire of environmentalism.
We cannot abandon the forces that have created our impetus for change and progress. It is our history of being part of the environment at large that drives our ingenuity; so now, in a self-righteous paternalism, are we to treat our surroundings as a fragile mechanism separate from our own movement?

Nature made us, and we cannot relegate it to obsolescence and muséification any more than we can disregard and pillage at will. Children do not cast off their parents as soon as they can speak, nor should we alienate the very forces that have given us our creative voice. We are not enemies with nature any more than we are its police. After all, water no get no enemy.