Environmentalist Quotes

Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the 'environmentalist' view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.

We’re so self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. “Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.” And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. I’m tired of this shit. I’m tired of f-ing Earth Day. I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me. The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are! We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?” Plastic… asshole.

Trees we plant today are forests we enjoy tomorrow.

Only people with full stomachs become environmentalists.

Even the most ardent environmentalist doesn't really want to stop pollution. If he thinks about it, and doesn't just talk about it, he wants to have the right amount of pollution. We can't really afford to eliminate it - not without abandoning all the benefits of technology that we not only enjoy but on which we depend.

People experience anger when their expectations around how they should be treated don’t align with their actual treatment (or when they expect a thing to happen based on some series of actions and it does not happen).

Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the welder, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist.

Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies.

A NATION'S GREATNESS DEPENDS ON ITS LEADER To vastly improve your country and truly make it great again, start by choosing a better leader. Do not let the media or the establishment make you pick from the people they choose, but instead choose from those they do not pick. Pick a leader from among the people who is heart-driven, one who identifies with the common man on the street and understands what the country needs on every level. Do not pick a leader who is only money-driven and does not understand or identify with the common man, but only what corporations need on every level. Pick a peacemaker. One who unites, not divides. A cultured leader who supports the arts and true freedom of speech, not censorship. Pick a leader who will not only bail out banks and airlines, but also families from losing their homes -- or jobs due to their companies moving to other countries. Pick a leader who will fund schools, not limit spending on education and allow libraries to close. Pick a leader who chooses diplomacy over war. An honest broker in foreign relations. A leader with integrity, one who says what they mean, keeps their word and does not lie to their people. Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist. Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies. Most importantly, a great leader must serve the best interests of the people first, not those of multinational corporations. Human life should never be sacrificed for monetary profit. There are no exceptions. In addition, a leader should always be open to criticism, not silencing dissent. Any leader who does not tolerate criticism from the public is afraid of their dirty hands to be revealed under heavy light. And such a leader is dangerous, because they only feel secure in the darkness. Only a leader who is free from corruption welcomes scrutiny; for scrutiny allows a good leader to be an even greater leader. And lastly, pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.

We are the first generations to grow up surrounded by evidence that our attempt to separate ourselves from ‘nature’ has been a grim failure, proof not of our genius but our hubris.

Okay then, can the police take the plants and leave Kevin? They aren’t his plants, he’s just looking after them as a concerned environmentalist.

Global environmentalists have said and written enough to leave no doubt that their goal is to destroy the prosperous economies of the world's richest nations.

Around the world–even in some of the countries most troubled by poverty or civil war or pollution–many thoughtful people are making a deep, concerted search for a way to live in harmony with each other and the earth. Their efforts, which rarely reach the headlines, are among the most important events occurring today. Sometimes these people call themselves peace workers, at other times environmentalists, but most of the time they work in humble anonymity. They are simply quiet people changing the world by changing themselves.

We will preserve the capacity for independent thought through a society so heterogeneous that it will make our own look trite. We will intentionally craft new ethnicities, religions, and ways of existing. The genome will be our canvas and flesh our clay. Man is a young species. We still occupy the same bodies with which our ancestors hunted and picked berries. We are so trapped by the limitations of our biology that we lack the capacity to conceive our ultimate potential. 

On a grander scale, when a society segregates itself, the consequences affect the economy, the emotions, and the ecology. That's one reason why it's easy for pro-lifers to eat factory-raised animals that disrespect everything sacred about creation. And that is why it's easy for rabid environmentalists to hate chainsaws even though they snuggle into a mattress supported by a black walnut bedstead.

The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay and the disabled make up the American quilt

A developer is someone who wants to build a house in the woods. An environmentalist is someone who already has a house in the woods.

Pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.

Pick a leader who will not only bail out banks and airlines, but also families from losing their homes -- or jobs due to their companies moving to other countries. Pick a leader who will fund schools, not limit spending on education and allow libraries to close. Pick a leader who chooses diplomacy over war. An honest broker in foreign relations. A leader with integrity, one who says what they mean, keeps their word and does not lie to their people. Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist.

To speak of ‘limits to growth’ under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Attempts to ‘green’ capitalism, to make it ‘ecological’, are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.

And our conservationist-environmentalist-moral outrage is often (in its frustration) aimed at the logger or the rancher, when the real power is in the hands of people who make unimaginably larger sums of money, people impeccably groomed, excellently educated at the best universities - male and female alike - eating fine foods and reading classy literature, while orchestrating the investment and legislation that ruin the world.

The recognition that human beings are specifically and deliberately responsible for whatever aberrances farm animals may embody, that their discordances reflect our, not their, primary disruption of natural rhythms, and that we owe them more rather than less for having stripped them of their birthright and earthrights has not entered into the environmentalist discussions that I've encountered to date.

Environmentalists, by and large, are very deeply invested in tactics that have worked to their satisfaction over the last thirty years, namely scaring and shaming people.... I am questioning whether you can go on doing that indefinitely ... [pushing] that same fear-guilt button over and over again. As psychologists will tell you, when a client comes in with an addiction, they are already ashamed. You don't shame them further.

Alaska is much larger than France and Germany—combined. Yet its population is less than one-tenth that of New York City. Keep that in mind the next time you hear some environmentalist hysteria about the danger of “spoiling” Alaska by drilling for oil in an area smaller than Dulles Airport.

Environmentalists generally object to battery-powered devices and for good reason: batteries require mined minerals, employ manufacturing processes that leak toxins into local ecosystems and leave behind an even-worse trail of side effects upon disposal. Though when it comes to the largest mass-produced battery-powered gadget ever created—the electric car—environmentalists cannot jump from their seats fast enough to applaud it.

If there’s anything worse than a limousine liberal,” Morton said, “it’s a Gulfstream environmentalist.

MichaelTobias Evolution does not condemn us. Only our choices can do that. It is imperative that we cherish, nurture, and endeavor to protect all life forms. That is the wake-up call of this generation. No environmentalist can be true to him/herself if they inflict pain on other creatures. Vegetarian ethics is basic to the last ecological frontier.

By now, ten trees must have been cut down just to document my mental health, which Nikki will hate hearing, as she is an avid environmentalist who gave me at least one tree in the rain forest every Christmas

To a considerable extent the environmental movement was hijacked by political and social activists who learned to use green language to cloak agendas that had more to do with anticapitalism and antiglobalization than with science or ecology.

A foolish environmentalist wants to save nature from the greed of the market by exposing it to the tragedy of the commons. A smart environmentalist wants to save nature from the tragedy of the commons by exposing it to the greed of the market.

Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: We're producers of one thing at work, consumers of a great many things all the rest of the time, and then, once a year or so, we take on the temporary role of citizen and cast a vote. Virtually all our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another - our meals to the food industry, our health to the medical profession, entertainment to Hollywood and the media, mental health to the therapist or the drug company, caring for nature to the environmentalist, political action to the politician, and on and on it goes. Before long it becomes hard to imagine doing much of anything for ourselves - anything, that is, except the work we do "to make a living." For everything else, we feel like we've lost the skills, or that there's someone who can do it better... it seems as though we can no longer imagine anyone but a professional or an institution or a product supplying our daily needs or solving our problems.

But I hate being a grandfather. It's indecent. In my mind's eye, I'm still twenty-five. Thirty-three max. Certainly not sixty-seven, reeking of decay and dashed hopes. My breath sour. My limbs in dire need of a lube job. And now that I've been blessed with a plastic hip-socket replacement, I'm no longer even biodegradable. Environmentalists will protest my burial.

Environmentalists and secular humanists insist that humans will destroy the planet. Corporate capitalists and many religious fundamentalists have no regard for wildlife and nature. Ultimately, this dualistic battle is based on false premises. In fact, this planet is more powerful than the human species.

Humanity has overcome the food chain, and having surpassed all other predators, has now turned to a strange form of cannibalism: humanity preys upon itself. We cull our own herd. We murder our own children. This is what we call “progress”.

We live in the post-trash, man. It'll be a real short eon. Down in the ectoplasmic circuitry where humanity's leaders are all linked up unconsciously with each other and with the masses, man, there's been this unanimous worldwide decision to trash the planet and get on to a new one.

A photograph of a disposable diaper floating in the arctic miles away from human habitat fueled my daily determination to save at least one disposable diaper from being used and created. One cloth diaper after another, days accumulated into years and now our next child is using the cloth diapers we bought for our firstborn.

The appeal by twentieth-century pluralists to scientific method was also ideologically—and even messianically—driven. It ignored scientific data that interfered with environmentalist assumptions and misrepresented socialist faith as “scientific planning.

What obligation is more binding than to protect the cherished, to defend whoever or whatever cannot defend itself, and to nurture in turn that which has given nourishment? I’m reminded of words written by John Seed, an Australian environmentalist. When he began considering these questions, he believed, “I am protecting the rain forest.” But as his thought evolved, he realized, “I am part of the rain forest protecting myself.

American students, we are told, are falling behind in reading and math; on test after test, they score below most European students (at the level of Lithuania), and the solution, rather than seeking to engage their curiosity, has been testing and more testing— a dry and brittle method that produces lackluster results. And so resources are pulled from the “soft” fields that are not being tested. Music teachers are being fired or not replaced; art classes are quietly dropped from the curriculum; history is simplified and moralized, with little expectation that any facts will be learned or retained; and instead of reading short stories, poems and novels, students are invited to read train schedules and EPA reports whose jargon could put even the most committed environmentalist to sleep.

A well-fed person has many problems, a hungry person has but one.

Most simply put, someone who regularly eats factory-farmed animal products cannot call himself an environmentalist without divorcing that word from its meaning.

If you are a feminist and are not a vegan, you are ignoring the exploitation of female nonhumans and the commodification of their reproductive processes, as well as the destruction of their relationship with their babies; If you are an environmentalist and not a vegan, you are ignoring the undeniable fact that animal agriculture is an ecological disaster; If you embrace nonviolence but are not a vegan, then words of nonviolence come out of your mouth as the products of torture and death go into it; If you claim to love animals but you are eating them or products made from them, or otherwise consuming them, you see loving as consistent with harming that which you claim to love. Stop trying to make excuses. There are no good ones to make. Go vegan.

Sand did not suddenly come into being because we had need for glass and silicone. Neither did wild flowers suddenly spring up because a bunch of environmentalists in Texas wanted alternative ways of helping the world without dumping more chemicals into it - these things were already there.

....Environmentalists try to preserve these ecosystems through political action. Yet no law will succeed in preserving something that people know only from a distance or do not understand at close range.

Pick a leader who will fund schools, not limit spending on education and allow libraries to close. Pick a leader who chooses diplomacy over war. An honest broker in foreign relations. A leader with integrity, one who says what they mean, keeps their word and does not lie to their people. Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist.

I didn’t know golden showers are your jam. I am happy to accommodate this.” “Chase!” she shrieked. “What? It’d save water. I’m just being an environmentalist.” Somehow I thought Greta Thunberg still wouldn’t approve.

I love when the environmentalist David Orr says, “The planet does not need more ‘successful people.’ The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of all kinds. It needs people to live well in their places. It needs people with moral courage willing to join the struggle to make the world habitable and humane, and these qualities have little to do with success as our culture defines it.

Rather than let author and environmentalist Edward Abbey be buried in a traditional cemetery, his friends stole his body, wrapped it in a sleeping bag, and hauled it in the back of his pickup truck to the Cabeza Prieta Desert in Arizona. They drove down a long dirt road and dug a hole when they reached the end of it, marking Abbey’s name on a nearby stone and pouring whiskey onto the grave. Fitting tribute for Abbey, who spent his career warning humanity of the harm in separating ourselves from nature. “If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves,” he once said. Left

I can't speak the language of science without a corresponding poetry.

Two years ago, when leaders in neighboring Mathews County broached the subject of sea-level rise, Tea Partiers packed meetings, warning of an environmentalist plot to “put nature above man.” They linked a proposal to build dikes to a United Nations sustainability plan known as Agenda 21, which has inspired a number of conspiracy theories among far-right activists.

People talk about New York and Los Angeles when they discuss terrible traffic, but those people are dilettantes. Any true connoisseur of terrible traffic knows that Seattle is something special. In fact, Rutherford suspected that a big part of the reason there were so many environmentalists in Seattle was that the city itself was designed to make you hate your car.

But the real danger is that liberal environmentalists and feminists will strengthen the right by lending credibility to reactionary arguments. Adopting the argument that population growth causes global warming endorses the strongest argument the right has against the social and economic changes that are really needed to stop climate change and environmental destruction.

Over time, our beliefs begin to blend into our identity. Your belief in CrossFit makes you a CrossFitter, your belief in climate change makes you an environmentalist, and your belief in primal eating makes you paleo. When your beliefs and your identity are one and the same, changing your mind means changing your identity—which is why disagreements often turn into existential death matches.

So often, environmentalists and others working to slow the destruction are capable of plainly describing the problems (Who wouldn’t be? The problems are neither subtle nor cognitively challenging), yet when faced with the emotionally daunting task of fashioning a response to these clear and clearly insoluble problems, we generally suffer a failure of nerve and imagination. Gandhi wrote a letter to Hitler asking him to stop committing atrocities, and was mystified that it didn’t work. I continue to write letters to the editor pointing out untruths, and continue to be surprised each time the newspaper publishes its next absurdity. At least I’ve stopped writing to politicians.

More broadly, the Nazis were ardent animal lovers and environmentalists who promoted calisthenics and healthy living, regular trips into the countryside, and far-reaching animal rights policies as they rose to power. Göring took pride in sponsoring wildlife sanctuaries ("green

...many of us know deep down, whether we choose to admit it or not, a number of simple truths: the global capitalist economy is incompatible with life. As numerous environmentalist authors... have noted, the global economy effectively creates infinite demand and no natural community can support infinite demand, especially when nothing beneficial is given back. A global economy is extractive, it gives nothing back, but follows the ecocidal pattern of a genocidal machine converting raw materials into power at the expense of living things and living systems.

Full citizenship rights are the bare minimum one should expect from the government. Yet, for two-thirds of our history, full citizenship was denied to those who built this country from theory to life. African slaves and Chinese workers and Native American environmentalists and Latino gauchos and Irish farmers—and half the population: women. Over the course of our history, these men and women, these patriots and defenders of liberty, have been denied the most profound currency of citizenship: power. Because, let’s be honest, that is the core of this fight. The right to be seen, the right to be heard, the right to direct the course of history are markers of power. In the United States, democracy makes politics one of the key levers to exercising power. So, it should shock none of us that the struggle for dominion over our nation’s future and who will participate is simply a battle for American power.

In this book, Doc Ford references “snag fishing” for tarpon in Boca Grande Pass on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Thanks to Kenneth W. Wright—Florida Environmentalist of the Decade, in the minds of many anglers—this “jigging” technique has finally been exposed as a fraud. Mr. Wright, and a group of knowledgeable,

A year ago, I was at a dinner in Amsterdam when the question came up of whether each of us loved his or her country. The German shuddered, the Dutch were equivocal, the Brit said he was "comfortable" with Britain, the expatriate American said no. And I said yes. Driving across the arid lands, the red lands, I wondered what it was I loved. the places, the sagebrush basins, the rivers digging themselves deep canyons through arid lands, the incomparable cloud formations of summer monsoons, the way the underside of clouds turns the same blue as the underside of a great blue heron's wings when the storm is about to break. Beyond that, for anything you can say about the United States, you can also say the opposite: we're rootless except we're also the Hopi, who haven't moved in several centuries; we're violent except we're also the Franciscans nonviolently resisting nucelar weapons out here; we're consumers except the West is studded with visionary environmentalists...and the landscape of the West seems like the stage on which such dramas are played out, a space without boundaries, in which anything can be realized, a moral ground, out here where your shadow can stretch hundreds of feet just before sunset, where you loom large, and lonely.

The imaginary child implied by the toys on exhibit in Hong Kong was impossible to reconcile with my actual child. I didn't think I'd like to meet the imaginary child they implied. That child was mad with contradictions. He was a machine-gun-toting, Chopin-playing psychopath with a sugar high and a short attention span.

My interest in Sufism began when I was a college student. At the time, I was a rebellious young woman who liked to wrap several shawls of ‘-isms’ around her shoulders: I was a leftist, feminist, nihilist, environmentalist, anarcho-pacifist…I wasn’t interested in any religion and the difference between ‘religiosity’ and ‘spirituality’ was lost to me. Having spent some time of my childhood with a loving grandmother with many superstitions and beliefs, I had a sense the world was not composed of solely material things and there was more to life than I could see. But the truth is, I wasn’t interested in understanding the world. I only wanted to change it.

Many conscientious environmentalists are repelled by the word "abundance," automatically associating it with irresponsible consumerism and plundering of Earth's resources. In the context of grassroots frustration, insensitive enthusing about the potential for energy abundance usually elicits an annoyed retort. "We have to conserve." The authors believe the human family also has to _choose_. The people we speak with at the recycling depot or organic juice bar are for the most part not looking at the _difference_ between harmony-with-nature technologies and exploitative practices such as mountaintop coal mining. "Destructive" was yesterday's technology of choice. As a result, the words "science and technology" are repugnant to many of the people who passionately care about health, peace, justice and the biosphere. Usually these acquaintances haven't heard about the variety of constructive yet powerful clean energy technologies that have the potential to gradually replace oil and nuclear industries if allowed. Wastewater-into-energy technologies could clean up waterways and other variations solve the problem of polluting feedlots and landfills.

Romanticizing the past' is a familiar accusation, made mostly by people who think it is more grown-up to romanticize the future.

While it is wise to think globally, all organisms are affected locally!

Perhaps the problem is not that we didn't work well enough together, but that we worked to well. In fact, maybe if we hadn't worked so well together, we wouldn't be destroying the earth so rapidly.

I had married an environmentalist and didn’t know it. I knew without having to look that there was no tree hugging indemnity clause even in the fine print of our marriage certificate. But we’d been manacled together in the Catholic Church. I wondered if I could get some leverage with the religious institution if I pinned my wife with the label of nature-worshipping Wiccan or possibly even Druid.

Separate the people from the problem. Focus on interests rather than positions. Generate a variety of options before settling on an agreement; and Insist that the agreement be based on objective criteria.

A revolutionary ecology movement must also organize among poor and working people. With the exception of the toxics movement and the native land rights movement most U.S. environmentalists are white and privileged. This group is too invested in the system to pose it much of a threat. A revolutionary ideology in the hands of privileged people can indeed bring about some disruption and change in the system. But a revolutionary ideology in the hands of working people can bring that system to a halt. For it is the working people who have their hands on the machinery. And only by stopping the machinery of destruction can we ever hope to stop this madness.

To accept the environmentalist argument that the suffering of individual animals is inconsequential compared to the ozone layer, we must be willing to admit that the sufferings of minority groups, raped women, battered wives, abused children, people sitting on death row, and our loved ones are small potatoes beneath the hole in the sky. To worry about any of them is, in effect, to miniaturize the big picture to portraits of battered puppy dogs.

Increasingly, though, for those penned into cities with no view of the stars and no taste of clean air and nothing but grass between the cracks in the pavement to nourish their sense of the wild, this is no freedom at all. We have made ourselves caged animals, and all the gadgets in the world cannot compensate for what we have lost. Humans

The “real” agenda of environmentalists—and the scientists who provided the data on which they relied—was to destroy capitalism and replace it with some sort of worldwide utopian Socialism—or perhaps Communism. That echoed a common right-wing refrain in the early 1990s: that environmental regulation was the slippery slope to Socialism. In 1992, columnist George Will encapsulated this view, saying that environmentalism was a “green tree with red roots.”99

McMansions in sprawling suburbs, without mountains of unnecessary packaging, without giant mechanized monofarms, without energy-hogging big-box stores, without electronic billboards, without endless piles of throwaway junk, without the overconsumption of consumer goods no one really needs is not an impoverished world. I disagree with those environmentalists who say we are going to have to make do with less. In fact, we are going to make do with more: more beauty, more community, more fulfillment, more art, more music, and material objects that are fewer in number but superior in utility and aesthetics. The cheap stuff that fills our lives today, however great its quantity, can only cheapen life.

Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher's England to Deng's Dhina, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty than ever in human history. Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regular your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but--even better--in the name of Earth itself. Environmentalists are Gaia's priests, instructing us in her proper service and casting out those who refuse to genuflect. And having proclaimed the ultimate commandment--carbon chastity--they are preparing the supporting canonical legislation that will tell you how much you can travel, what kind of light you will read by and what temperature you may set your bedroom thermostat.

Ironically, this retreat from science and logic was partly a response to society’s growing acceptance of environmental values. Some activists simply couldn’t make the transition from confrontation to consensus; it was as if they needed a common enemy. When a majority of people decide they agree with all your reasonable ideas the only way you can remain confrontational and antiestablishment is to adopt ever more extreme positions, eventually abandoning science and logic altogether in favor of zero-tolerance policies.

The emotional pattern seems to be something like, “[Karl] Polanyi, a person of the left like me, says many true things, beautifully. Therefore his tales about what happened in economic history must be true.” Marx before him got similar treatment. Lately the more eloquent of the environmentalists, such as Wendell Berry, get it too. People want to believe that beauty is truth. A supporting emotional frame on the left arises from the very idea of historical progress: “We must be able to do so much better than this wretched capitalism.” It is not true, but it motivates.

While disputes about overpopulation, racial equality, pesticides, resource limits, nuclear power, biotechnology, and global warming may appear to be about different subjects, they are ultimately but different faces of the same conflict: a fundamental debate over the worth of humankind.

The coming decades are likely to challenge much of what we think we know about what progress is, and about who we are in relation to the rest of nature. Can you think, or act, like the librarian of a monastery through the Dark Ages, guarding the old books as empires rise and fall outside?

I believe this movement will prevail. I don’t mean it will defeat, conquer, or create harm to someone else. Quite the opposite. I don’t tender the claim in an oracular sense. I mean that the thinking that informs the movement’s goals will reign. It will soon suffuse most institutions, but before then, it will change a sufficient number of people so as to begin the reversal of centuries of frenzied self-destructive behavior. Some say it is too late, but people never change when they are comfortable. Helen Keller threw aside the gnawing fears of chronic bad news when she declared, “I rejoice to live in such a splendidly disturbing time!” In such a time, history is suspended and thus unfinished. It will be the stroke of midnight for the rest of our lives. My hopefulness about the resilience of human nature is matched by the gravity of our environmental and social condition. If we squander all our attention on what is wrong, we will miss the prize: In the chaos engulfing the world, a hopeful future resides because the past is disintegrating before us. If that is difficult to believe, take a winter off and calculate what it requires to create a single springtime. It’s not too late for the world’s largest institutions and corporations to join in saving the planet, but cooperation must be on the planet’s terms. The “Help Wanted” signs are everywhere. All people and institutions including commerce, governments, schools, churches and cities, need to learn from life and reimagine the world from the bottom up, based on the first principles if justice and ecology. Ecological restoration is extraordinarily simple: You remove whatever prevents the system from healing itself. Social restoration is no different. We have the heart, knowledge, money and sense to optimize out social and ecological fabric. It is time for all that is harmful to leave. One million escorts are here to transform the nightmares of empire and the disgrace of war on people and place. We are the transgressors and we are the forgivers. “We” means all of us, everyone. There can be no green movement unless there is also a black, brown and copper movement. What is more harmful resides within is, the accumulated wounds of the past, the sorrow, shame, deceit, and ignominy shared by every culture, passed down to every person, as surely as DNA, as history of violence and greed. There is not question that the environmental movement is most critical to our survival. Our house is literally burning, and it is only logical that environmentalists expect the social justice movement to get on the environmental bus. But is actually the other way around; the only way we are going to put out this fire is to get on the social justice bus and heal our wounds, because in the end, there is only one bus. Armed with that growing realization, we can address all that is harmful externally. What will guide us is a living intelligence that creates miracles every second, carried forth by a movement with no name.

I was relieved not to find yet another crabby and wounded ex-environmentalist, and I asked her how she was managing to live in a world that she found so discouraging. The answer wasn't reassuring. She told me about the Taoists in ancient China. "They looked around and saw they were facing the same situation, a world that was disintegrating around them. And they realized the best thing to do is do as little as possible. Don't feed any new energy into a system that's falling apart, because you don't know what that energy will wind up being spit back as." Rather than try to change society, it's better to retreat.

A system that has only one goal, the maximization of profits in an endless quest for the accumulation of capital on an ever-ending scale, and which thus seeks to transform every single thing on earth into a community with a price, is a system that is soulless; it can never have a soul, never be green. It can never stand still, but is driven to manipulate and fabricate whims and wants in order to grow and sell more... forever. Nothing is allowed to stand in its path.

The problem of our time has never been with technology as such. There is no inner working of technology that inevitably leads to human subjection. The tendency exists merely because, by allowing an overwhelming increase in the numbers of the superfluous, it gives them and those who cater to them power when it is mixed with democracy. The left environmentalist, among many others, is misguided because he wants more power given to such people. He attacks precisely those elements of the modern West, of modern technology, even of modern culture, that can mitigate somewhat the rule of the superfluous and their destruction of nature, including human nature

Today, rather than a democracy we have a plutocracy (rule by moneyed interests) in which some of the formal elements of democracy nonetheless remain. Needless to say a real democracy ... is impossible where income, wealth, and power are concentrated and where inequality is growing, that is, in the normal ways of things under capitalism

There was something else amusing about the house: the irony that the most important battle of the American Revolution--the shoot-out at the Old North Bridge--had taken place just outside the residence of the pacifist Ralph Waldo Emerson. True, Emerson was born after the battle in 1803, but his grandfather had been living in the house at the time of the Revolution, and the juxtaposition of such pacifism against such violence struck Paul as a symbol of an eternal truth about American history: Nixon, that goofy Vietnam War mortician, was right: the silent majority ruled (not the rebellious, pacifist fringe); the majority killed for their property; and there was nothing really revolutionary about the minutemen , who won a war and took over the entire country to ultimately build fast-food restaurants and Disneyland while abolitionists, pacifists, hippies, and environmentalists were left to make well-intended flatulent noises--to write poems such as Ginsberg's "Howl"--in books for other defeated noisemakers.

He found it puzzling that so many rural people were hostile to, even terrified of, the place where they lived. It wasn't just that hard-working country folk had no time for the precious concerns of the effete urban environmentalists, what amazed Rice was how you could spend your whole life physically immersed in a particular ecological system and yet remain blinded to it by superstition, tradition, prejudice. Out west, it was ranchers' holy war on predators and their veneration of Indo-European domestic animals they husbanded on land too dry to support them. Here in the Appalachians, you saw rugged country men who refused to walk in the woods all summer because they were scared of snakes.

It could be that the climate alarmists have answers to rebut these critics and their data, but if so, they are not showing it. Rather than engaging in scientific debate, they have evaded it, choosing instead to try to stop dissenting publications and cut off the funding of their opponents. That is not the way to do science. That is the way to do fraud.

science and reason, which has found itself in recent decades under attack on many fronts: right-wing ideologues who do not understand science; religious-right conservatives who fear science; left-wing postmodernists who do not trust science when it doesn’t support progressive tenets about human nature; extreme environmentalists who want to return to a prescientific and preindustrial agrarian society; antivaxxers who wrongly imagine that vaccinations cause autism and other maladies; anti-GMO (genetically modified food) activists who worry about Frankenfoods; and educators of all stripes who cannot articulate why Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) are so vital to a modern democratic nation.

In the secular world, women are also credited with having a sense of good that is intrinsically female, a sense of good that men do not have. This is a frequent feature of contemporary environmentalist or antimilitarist movements. Women are seen to have an inborn commitment to both clean air and peace, a moral nature that abhors pollution and murder. Being good or moral is viewed as a particular biological capacity of women and as a result women are the natural guardians of morality: a moral vanguard as it were. Organizers use this appeal to women all the time. Motherhood is especially invoked as biological proof that women have a special relationship to life, a special sensitivity to its meaning, a special, intuitive knowledge of what is right. Any political group can appropriate the special moral sensibility of women to its own ends: most groups do, usually in place of offering substantive relief to women with respect to sexism in the group itself. Women all along the male-defined political spectrum give special credence to this view of a female biological nature that is morally good.

Actually it is the top environmentalist intellectuals who lack climate wisdom. Because they are unwilling to think in an unbiased way about the benefits and risks of fossil fuels according to a human standard of value, they are blinded to the fact that the fossil fuel industry is the reason they’re alive and not “helpless at the mercy of that wind in the middle of some such plain.

He parked the car, pressed the button for the roof to fold back, and undid his seat belt. "It's an emergency." Goldilocks giggled. She unfastened her belt and hopped onto her knees. "Yes, I can see" - she glanced down at his crotch - "That we're in danger of a detonation. What's the protocol in a situation like this, Mr. Environmentalist?" "I'm afraid I have no choice but to advocate for release.

Far from being just part of the problem, the people of the South are leading the global fight against ecological destruction. They are our allies, not our enemies, and if we are serious about working with them, then no part of our work should involve efforts to turn immigrants from their countries away at our borders. Support for immigration controls strengthens the most regressive forces in our societies and weakens our ability to deal with the real causes of environmental problems. It gives conservative governments and politicians an easy way out, allowing them to pose as friends of the environment by restricting immigration, while continuing with business as usual. It hands a weapon to reactionaries, allowing them to portray environmentalists as hostile to the legitimate aspirations of the poorest and most oppressed people in the world.

There is a tendency among environmentalists to single out the big players in the market as the principal culprits: to pin environmental crime on those – like oil companies, motor manufacturers, logging corporations, agribusinesses, supermarkets – that make their profits by exporting their costs to others (including others who are not yet born). But this is to mistake the effect for the cause. In a free economy such ways of making money emerge by an invisible hand from choices made by all of us. It is the demand for cars, oil, cheap food and expendable luxuries that is the real cause of the industries that provide these things. Of course it is true that the big players externalize their costs whenever they can. But so do we. Whenever we travel by air, visit the supermarket, or consume fossil fuels, we are exporting our costs to others, and to future generations. A free economy is driven by individual demand. And in a free economy individuals, just as much as big businesses, strive to pass on their costs to others, while keeping the benefits. The solution is not the socialist one, of abolishing the free economy, since this merely places massive economic power in the hands of unaccountable bureaucrats, who are equally in the business of exporting their costs, while enjoying secure rents on the social product.16 The solution is to adjust our demands, so as to bear the costs of them ourselves, and to find the way to put pressure on businesses to do likewise. And

The biophilia hypothesis is not your run-of-the-mill Berkeley/Al Gore/Eat Your Spinach environmentalism. It does not appeal directly to our sense of stewardship or responsibility. It appeals to a much more base, and common, human proclivity: selfishness. It says, in effect, protect the environment because it will make you happy. For a country like the United States, with the word “happiness” in its founding document, you’d think environmentalists would have latched on to biophilia a long time ago.

We have cut ourselves off from everything else that lives, and because we don't believe that it does live, we have ended up talking only to ourselves. We have ended what Thomas Berry called 'the great conversation' between humans and other forms of life. We are becoming human narcissists, entombed in our cities, staring into our screens, seeing our faces and our minds reflected back and believing this is all there is. And outside the forests fall, the ice melts, the corals die back and extinctions roll on; but we keep writing our love letters to ourselves, oblivious.

To make way for more resorts with spectacular views, developers destroy native habitats and ignore local concerns. Preservationists decry the growing propensity to bulldoze old hotels and buildings in favor of constructing new resorts, water holes and entertainment spots that look identical whether in Singapore, Dubai or Johannesburg; a world where diversity is replaced with homogeneity. Another catastrophe for countries betting on tourism has come from wealthy vacationers who fall in love with a country and buy so many second houses that locals can no longer afford to live in their own towns and villages. Among the more thoughtful questions is how mass tourism has changed cultures. African children told anthropologists that they want to grow up to be tourists so they could spend the day doing nothing but eating. The tourists who do not speak the local language and rely on guides to tell them what they are seeing and what to think marvel at countries like China with its new wealth and appearance of democracy. Environmentalists wonder how long the globe can continue to support 1 billion people racing around the world for a long weekend on a beach or a ten-day tour of an African game park.

Like all cults, this new one adeptly represses heresy. . . . In defiance of the Western scientific tradition, which maintains that skepticism of inferences drawn from observation is always in order, and that all accepted conclusions are always subject to review and potential overthrow by new data, the climate catastrophists insist that ‘the science is settled’ (science is never ‘settled’) and that therefore no debate, and no new data, can or should be entertained. Those wishing to advance theories or data contrary to the accepted orthodoxy are not merely wrong, but criminal ‘deniers’ who should be silenced, vilified, and if possible, prosecuted.

The victims of right-wing violence are typically immigrants, Muslims, and people of color, while the targets of environmental and animal rights activism are among “the most powerful corporations on the planet” — hence the state’s relative indifference to the one and obsession with the other. The broader pattern helps to explain one partial exception to the left/right gap in official scrutiny—namely, the domestic aspects of the “War on Terror.” Al Qaeda is clearly a reactionary organization. Like much of the American far right, it is theocratic, anti-Semitic, and patriarchal. Like Timothy McVeigh, the 9/11 hijackers attacked symbols of institutional power, killing a great many innocent people to further their cause. But while the state’s bias favors the right over the left, the Islamists were the wrong kind of right-wing fanatic. These right-wing terrorists were foreigners, they were Muslim, and above all they were not white. And so, in retrospect and by comparison, the state’s response to the Oklahoma City bombing seems relatively restrained—short-lived, focused, selectively targeting unlawful behavior for prosecution. The government’s reaction to the September 11th attacks has been something else entirely — an open-ended war fought at home and abroad, using all variety of legal, illegal, and extra-legal military, police, and intelligence tactics, arbitrarily jailing large numbers of people and spying on entire communities of immigrants, Muslims, and Middle Eastern ethnic groups. At the same time, law enforcement was also obsessively pursuing — and sometimes fabricating—cases against environmentalists, animal rights activists, and anarchists while ignoring or obscuring racist violence against people of color. What that shows, I think, is that the left/right imbalance persists, but sometimes other biases matter more.

Withdrawing. If you do this, a lot of people will call you a ‘defeatist’ or a ‘doomer’, or claim you are ‘burned out’. They will tell you that you have an obligation to work for climate justice or world peace or the end of bad things everywhere, and that ‘fighting’ is always better than ‘quitting’. Ignore them, and take part in a very ancient practical and spiritual tradition: withdrawing from the fray. Withdraw not with cynicism, but with a questing mind. Withdraw so that you can allow yourself to sit back quietly and feel – intuit – work out what is right for you, and what nature might need from you. Withdraw because refusing to help the machine advance – refusing to tighten the ratchet further – is a deeply moral position. Withdraw because action is not always more effective than inaction. Withdraw to examine your worldview: the cosmology, the paradigm, the assumptions, the direction of travel. All real change starts with withdrawal.

From every direction, the place is under assault—and unlike in the past, the adversary is not concentrated in a single force, such as the Bureau of Reclamation, but takes the form of separate outfits conducting smaller attacks that are, in many ways, far more insidious. From directly above, the air-tour industry has succeeded in scuttling all efforts to dial it back, most recently through the intervention of Arizona’s senators, John Kyl and John McCain, and is continuing to destroy one of the canyon’s greatest treasures, which is its silence. From the east has come a dramatic increase in uranium-mining claims, while the once remote and untrammeled country of the North Rim now suffers from an ever-growing influx of recreational ATVs. On the South Rim, an Italian real estate company recently secured approval for a massive development whose water demands are all but guaranteed to compromise many of the canyon’s springs, along with the oases that they nourish. Worst of all, the Navajo tribe is currently planning to cooperate in constructing a monstrous tramway to the bottom of the canyon, complete with a restaurant and a resort, at the confluence of the Little Colorado and the Colorado, the very spot where John Wesley Powell made his famous journal entry in the summer of 1869 about venturing “down the Great Unknown.” As vexing as all these things are, what Litton finds even more disheartening is the country’s failure to rally to the canyon’s defense—or for that matter, to the defense of its other imperiled natural wonders. The movement that he and David Brower helped build is not only in retreat but finds itself the target of bottomless contempt. On talk radio and cable TV, environmentalists are derided as “wackos” and “extremists.” The country has swung decisively toward something smaller and more selfish than what it once was, and in addition to ushering in a disdain for the notion that wilderness might have a value that extends beyond the metrics of economics or business, much of the nation ignorantly embraces the benefits of engineering and technology while simultaneously rejecting basic science.

They [anarchists and radical environmentalists] point out that the state and its philosophers, having retrospectively sold us a social contract we never saw nor signed, seem anyway to have reneged on their side of the bargain which was to protect our lives and liberties. The new institutionally guaranteed ‘freedoms’, to democracy, free speech, individual liberty, so dearly brought, constantly fail to live up to expectation. What does it mean to have political freedom when the parties on offer are ideologically identical clones? What kind of intellectual freedom is it that brands all those who dare to think differently dangerous extremists? What kind of individuality expects us all to conform within such narrow limits? What freedoms are even possible when the very air we breathe is poisoned and the food we eat contaminated with the so-called ‘by-products’ of progress? In such circumstances, it is surely not surprising that some might choose the dream of pre-contractual state of natural innocence to the increasingly nightmarish ‘reality’ of Locke’s post-contractual culture.

Government By The Industry, For The Industry Vice President George Bush sat in his chair across from four Monsanto executives. They had come to the White House with an unusual request. They wanted more regulation. They were venturing into a new technology, the genetic modification of food, and they were actually asking the government to oversee their emerging industry. But this was late 1986. Ronald Reagan was president and the administration was busily deregulating business. Bush needed convincing. “We bugged him for regulation,” said Leonard Guarraia, one of the executives at the meeting. “We told him that we have to be regulated.”[1] Monsanto was about to make a multibillion-dollar gamble. With this new technology, they could engineer and patent a whole new kind of food. Later, by buying up seed companies around the world, Monsanto could replace the natural seeds with their patented engineered seeds and control a hefty portion of the food supply. But there was fear among Monsanto’s ranks—fear of consumers’ and environmentalists’ reactions. Their fear was borne of experience. Years earlier, Monsanto had assured the public that their Agent Orange, the defoliant used during the Vietnam War, was safe for humans. It wasn’t. Thousands of veterans and tens of thousand of Vietnamese who suffered a wide range of maladies, including cancer, neurological disorders, and birth defects, blame Monsanto.