Beyond Climate Fundamentalism
By Charles Eisenstein Excerpted From
Climate: A New Story
“Someday, Charles, you are going to have to decide if you want to be relevant.
So said to me a prominent environmentalist after hearing me describe the diverse fields of my activity and interest. What he meant was something like this:
There is a shrinking window for climate action before irreversible feedback loops render human extinction inevitable. Therefore, the only relevant action you can take right now is to put 100 percent of your efforts into cutting greenhouse gas emissions as swiftly as possible by whatever means necessary. Your other interests are irrelevant. If we don’t implement a meaningful carbon tax soon, then the healing of the relation between the masculine and feminine won’t matter. Nor will saving the whales. Nor will ending the school-to-prison pipeline. Social justice, education, psych meds, holistic medicine, scientific anomalies, attachment parenting, community building, new economics, philosophy, history, cosmology, neo-Lamarckian biology, sacred plant medicines, nonviolent communication, plant intelligence, threatened languages, indigenous sovereignty, pansubjective metaphysics–none of the issues you write about matter unless they have a direct, significant, near-term impact on greenhouse gases. Once we’ve won that fight, we can turn our attention to those other things. So are you going to join the fight?
This pattern of thinking is called fundamentalism, and it closely parallels the dynamics of two defining institutions of our civilization: money and war. Fundamentalism reduces the complex to the simple and demands the sacrifice of the immediate, the human, or the personal in service to an overarching ulterior goal that trumps all.
Disciplined by the promise of heavenly rewards or hellish punishments, the extreme...
Continues at: https://www.utne.com/environment/beyond-climate-fundamentalism-zm0z18wzgsch/
