Raffi: The Environment Is Dead: Long Live Mother Nature
The Environment Is Dead: Long Live Mother Nature
David Suzuki’s recent essay,
Environmentalism Has Failed: On Adopting a Biocentric Viewpoint, on the fundamental failure of environmentalism is ominous. The world faces not only environmental calamities such as deforestation, coral reef depletion, and freshwater shortages, it is also mired in economic crises and harsh political realities. Despite the promise of “Arab Springs” and the global Occupy movement, we are increasingly in planetary peril. Throughout his life, David Suzuki has been a leading educator on planetary health; his conclusion about the environmental movement’s failure must be agonizing. Perhaps that’s why his blog offered no new way forward.
Primary among the many factors that can be cited is the growth of corporate concentration, power and dominance. This in part may explain the gridlock among nations when it comes to concerted eco-progress. Perhaps it’s also been a failure of imagination and language.
Nature became “the environment”: a reductionist term devoid of relationship. The grandeur of Gaia thus reduced and objectified separated us from our Earth Mother. And environmentalism itself became divisive. While environmentalists struggled mightily to save this species/habitat and protect that, activist hubris pitted “environmentalists” against those who were not.
Humanity is in a survival crisis—a crisis of identity, conscience and spirit. Who are we as an evolving species? Do we really care more about money than our children? Or is a collective spirit stirring millions to rally for more just and equitable societies?
