I declared the end of the Environmental Movement in my October 27th blog. I was just looking at the absence of a grassroots constituency and the failure of the movement to find any successful new sky-is-falling hysterias to rally the troops in the past decade.
Now I see an additional reason. The absence of intelligence, subtlety or sophistication at the intellectual level of the movement. This will take a little reading on your part.
This is the essay I submitted to the Shell-Economist contest. The Shell planning department that set up this contest was the mother of GBN, Global Business Network, an environmental-business-scenario consulting firm. Die-hard fanatics, but also the main thinkers in the environmental field. My essay, jointly authored with a close friend who writes well, argues that the environment, our own physical characteristics and especially our perceptions of the world are all interactive and constantly evolving. We give examples and offer what I feel to be an intelligent, subtle and sophisticated argument suggesting we, humans, don't know what our environment actually is. We can't know what our environment is with any reliability. The argument is tightly underpinned by contemporary American pragmatic philosophy.
The winner of the contest wrote a piece that is stylistically beautiful: the world from the vantage point of a fungus. The following is the main point of the essay:
"With the advantage of hindsight, I think we can summarize it (the development of human society in the past 20,000 years) as a failed experiment in individualism. The idea of the individual – and there is no fungal equivalent – arose during a period of rapid change in human society. In the abstract, individualism looked defensible, even appealing. The ideal individual was to be educated and enlightened, someone we’d all like to know. However, as a practical matter, the culture of enlightened individualism reformed itself after a brief period into a cult of personal freedom.
"Over the next several centuries, unbridled personal freedom and chance distributions of natural resources led to the creation of certain wealthy and isolated colonies of humans. Their prosperity excited envy and the rest of the world did what they could to emulate them. Large populations of humans moved from a very simple experience of the natural world to the expectation of a lifestyle similar to what the exploiters were enjoying. This clamour for plenitude – for meat in daily diets, for manufactured goods, for personal comfort, for leisure activities – put enormous stress on the biosphere. "
The literary quality of the piece is adult, the perspective is fourth grade marxist. The judges, one of whom I know, must view the public as left-wing ideological fools to commend this childish vision of the environment.