Environmental Ethics: Castles in the Sky

Sunday, September 9, 2012

Castles in the Sky

One of the questions I would like to address is about a quote on page 36 of Blessed Unrest regarding Thoreau and how activists should conceive their "dreams" or movements. He basically suggests that you should go big or go home. If you want something done you should build your castles in the air, "that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them," My question is whether or not you believe this is a successful technique for the environmental activist? Does this put off the "mainstream" or inspire? While many people during his day believed that Thoreau's endeavors at Walden were unsuccessful, his first book initially flopped,it is obvious that his time at Walden has been a major influence not only on literary world but also on the environmental movement. Does that mean we should all stop paying our taxes and live off the land? Will we change the world or just go back to making pencils? What do y'all think?

1 comment:

SchwarzwaldSeptember 9, 2012 at 11:42 PM
I personally believe in balance, for every dreamer building castles in the air, there must be 10,000 doers prepared to slave over the foundation, and a couple slave drivers and architects to make sure everyones in check, and that the foundation isn't built on a marsh.

Dreamers aren't worthless, they inspire, they cause the change, but don't facilitate it. Which means their words should be taken no more seriously than a pep talk before a football game.

Sure, when coach said go out there and steamroll them, it got you amped up, but A.) he doesn't actually expect you to wheel a steamroller out to the field, and B.) literally doing it wouldn't win you a football game. He meants get the intended goal accomplished, and thats all such dreamy flowery talk can be interpreted as "get the job done, make a change, accomplish the goal within the means you have."
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First things first--a proper education

“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It's proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" - which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.” ― Wendell Berry

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“The American college may be considered a continuation, at the human level, of the self-education process of the earth itself: universe education, earth education, and human education are stages of development in a single unbroken process...The entire college project can be seen as that of enabling the student to understand the immense story of the universe and the role of the student in creating the next phase of the story.” --Thomas Berry, “The American College in the Ecological Age,” in The Dream of the Earth

“Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.”
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“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“How can we be so arrogant? The planet is, was, and always will be stronger than us. We can't destroy it; if we overstep the mark, the planet will simply erase us from its surface and carry on existing. Why don't they start talking about not letting the planet destroy us?”
― Paulo Coelho, The Winner Stands Alone

“When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: if you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse.”
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― T.S. Eliot

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― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the
single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this
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“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.”
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“The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them.”
― Ivan Illich

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Sunday, September 9, 2012

Castles in the Sky

1 comment:

Peripatetics