From: Alan McGowen <beaver.cs.washington.edu!gnosys!hpindbu.cup.hp.com!alanm>
Subject: Re: Two Paths for Environmentalism
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 1992 17:49:13 GMT

Original-Sender: Alan McGowen <hpindbu.cup.hp.com!alanm>

>
Peshewegunzh wrote:
>
>
> Sadly, the Sierra Club for this area issued a news release
> just before the hurricane struck, which was exultant that a
> hurricane was hitting this area, so that nature would correct (destroy) what
> man had destroyed (built).

Perhaps some quotation, providing enough context for the reader to form
a judgement as to what the news release might have said, would help here.
Or was the author's opinion formed only from news reports *about* the
Sierra Club press release? Though one occasionally encounters pieces in
the journal Earth First! which could be construed in such a way, it is
unlikely that one of the most politically successful conservation organizations
in the country would noise abroad such an unpopular line. By any chance, were
hints of electoral politics involved? Any related mention of "environmental
extremists" and certain senators from Tennessee?

>Granted, there have been thoughtless and
> grievous errors in the development that has been built here. No question.
> But what was stunning, and increasingly archetypal, was
> that there was absolutely no thought of the loss and suffering of
> life that would ensue for those here, including the various Indian
> nations in the Everglades, let alone the countless dead wildlife we now
> see, at least in a sympathetic sense. The news media comments were
> generally, well, here's somebody who's happy about a hurricane coming,
> in the manner of man bites dog stories. This developing attitude
> is frightening, because it makes nature into a God, and therefore
> all compass for compassionate behavior is vastly diminished.

In my part of the world, the major threat is earthquakes, and it is not
considered uncommpassionate to advocate building codes which increase
protection against them. If humans have built artificial communities of
structures which are unstable against recurrant storms over what had
been the natural ecosystems of South Florida, it can hardly be surpising
if such communities prove less survivable than the ecosystems which they
replaced had done. This is not a "man bites dog" point of view, it is
a realistic and naturalistic point of view. Perhaps more thought as to
the type of stuctures needed, and the maximum human population size which
can be safely supported in the area, is needed to prevent a recurrence of
such tragedy in the future. However, I suspect that the latter line of
thought in particular would be ruled out by the author's (and many peoples')
notions of "compassion" and hence that the whole thing will happen again
in a few decades:  and the higher the human population density, the larger
the tragedy will be.

Sympathy for wildlife which dies in storms is also a little misplaced,
since it is a recurrent natural phenomenon to which ecosystems have been
long adapted. The tragedy here is that many species have had their ranges
so reduced by the expansion of the human population and the pressures
which attend it that such natural impacts, which in past could have been
more readily recouped, can now constitute as significant additional impetus
towards extinction. For this reason, human intervention may be required
to compensate for the damage wrought by storms in reserve areas, but properly
seen what we are compensating for is our own encraochment, and not the
storm's.

>This is,
> unfortunately, strikingly similar to totalitarian mindsets of various
> stripes in the past (and perhaps future) which abolished spirituality
> and placed a kind of pragmatism in its place in which anything became
> permissible if it was deemed necessary. I will note that socialism in
> its modern roots in Marx made much of a belief in Darwin to justify
> such tools as terrorism (right in Marx and Engels' own writings) and
> that Nazism adopted a kind of pagan naturism dependent on similar
> underpinnings - and that both were viciously hostile to the idea of
> the Great Spirit consciously and lovingly creating life - that is, to
> monotheistic spiritual beliefs originating in antiquity, held by
> many cultures.
>

Again the author again confuses social Darwinism and other political movements
with Darwin's explanation of evolution as a product of natural selection.
Perhaps he is unaware that under Stalin, Darwin's theory was held to
be "bourgoise error" in the Soviet Union, and the official doctrine which
biologists were required to believe was the Larmarkian theory as championed
by Lysenko. This, it was obvious, was far more "compassionate" towards the
workers, and therefore had to be true.

"Nazi paganism", by the way, has also been blamed for the rise of quantum
mechanics, so what not ecology as well? :-) It makes at least as much sense
as the Nazi's own idea that Einstein's theories were "Jewish Physics" and that
they were dense with equations in order to confuse German Youth, who had much
better think about politics than nature.

------------
Alan McGowen






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