Environmentalism and Half a Century of Political Division
One of the most prominent features of environmentalism is the profound political rift it causes. I’m reminded of this as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which many credit as the launching pad for the modern environmentalist movement.
But precisely why is the area so divisive? Wouldn’t one think that a respect for the natural world on the only planet we have would fit with practically any rational philosophic viewpoint? In a new biography of Carson, William Souder writes: “The hostile reaction to Silent Spring contained the seeds of a partisan divide over environmental matters that has since hardened into a permanent wall of bitterness and mistrust….. (yet) there is no objective reason why environmentalism should be the exclusive province of any one political party or ideology.”
Sure, there is no objective reason, but that sure hasn’t prevented the subject to be divided across party lines, at least in the U.S. I’ve had conversations with people who tell me that the people who share my viewpoints on environmental regulation are transplants from the pre-1989 USSR, hell-bent on destroying capitalism. I normally respond: “Dude, that’s a bit glib. I was a businessman for 30 years. I had hundreds of employees and clients all over the world. I think you’re going to have to look at this a little more deeply if you want to get at the truth.”
Yet such discourse does little to change anyone’s mind on the subject.
There is a powerful reason for the political divide, and specifically for the rejection, by the most business-friendly power-elite within our political spectrum, of every attempt at sound environmental stewardship.
Environmentalism represents a return to the reality of kinship with the natural world, and a return to the truth of the Public Commons as was first represented in that cooperation in shared labor and resources without which our species could never have crawled from the jungle. This is a kinship that we see denied in every aging and misguided dogmatism that has been established to plague our collective subconscious. This is a truth that is subverted in every new property law scrawled across the scarred face of human history.
Environmentalism is therefore a potent threat against all those errant souls who wish to see realized that nightmare world toward which we’ve now already long been spiraling in a deepening eddy.
That nightmare world appears to these fearsome souls as a blinding dream of abject madness, where self-interest is the only virtue and materialism the only faith – where active compassion is sin and communal pursuits are folly.
It is a world in which those most vicious few – who, by guile and by brute force, come to possess the most and finest property and the greatest fiscal weight – should be allowed alone to steer and compound the grand machinery of our false prosperity, as it continues to burn and to poison ever-widening swaths of the delicate and tattered web of nature that still sustains us all.
The ravenous abyss salivates.
For each of these souls, and for each of us who see their reckless blindness, there is a moment when gone is the very last opportunity to preserve the shining ideal of human civilization, and our collective descent into starvation and decay is inexorable.
Perhaps that moment is upon us, or perhaps it is passed. That moment certainly does not long linger in the future. In any case, it remains for we who yet believe in the brightness of the human spirit to act as best we can on behalf of our common humanity.
We must not give up.
At the very least, in the distant future, it may persist within the dim and animalistic memory of scattered bands of human survivors, that there were those among us who saw and tried.
Should our best hopes come to fruition, we will have helped each other together to wrest our ship’s helm from avarice, arrogance and ignorance, and chart instead a wiser course to the brilliant horizon of a lushly green and harmonic continuum.
This is nothing less than a life or death struggle for the fate of humankind. Choose life. Act now, and again tomorrow. Time is short.