Parting words

LISTEN. My parting words in the CoPhilosophy course (which is what I call Intro to Philosophy) mostly have to do with loving the questions that express and expand our curiosity.  Philosophy begins, after all, in wonder.

Same message applies here, with an added explicitness about the indispensable prerequisite of curiosity and wonder, namely: a planetary home to host us wondrous, curious questioners. Our lives are mutually bound up with one another and with the natural world, with "those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy," said Professor Einstein. Our fates are intertwined, and inseparable from the fate of the Earth. "The environment is everything that isn't me," he said, but of course he knew it's also me-it just isn't all about me. We are all connected by the gift of having been so improbably born on a lovely planet, against all odds. We have every reason to be, as my old mentor said, grateful for and in love with life.

To love life is to love its enabling conditions, and to revile whatever would disable them. Thus, we've been reading and discussing texts from Ellis, Klein, Leutjen, McKibben, and your many cli-fi selections that sound an alarm - a warning that those life-conditions are at this particular moment profoundly threatened, but that we owe it to one another and to our progeny to not just sit here and surrender to a doom of our own making.

This is not fear-mongering, unless you think the alarm that sounds down at the firehouse is fear-mongering. It's meant to be a wake-up alarm, a call to action. Activists, you must realize if you think about it, are optimists: they insist we do something, because we can.

And so, it's heartening to see Naomi Klein speaking so hopefully of the new crop of enviro-activist leaders in the Congress, and Bill McKibben drawing the upbeat moral that we don't have to secede or abandon civility, in standing up and pushing back against the small-minded malefactors who've temporarily seized the levers of power.

Again, I ask you to reflect on the various fictional dystopias we've encountered this semester and ask yourself if it's really time to toss in the towel on humanity? Or, can we use those dark visions to push us towards the light? 

Are there, in fact, grounds for "guarded optimism" in your book, or in your own worldview? What do you think of Bill McKibben's* and Naomi Klein'srecent expressions of optimism? Does your book motivate you to be more engaged in environmental activism, or to be more fatalistic about the future? Or both?

For my part, I still intend to move to the light so long as light remains... as Dr. Flicker advised.

Here's some light-inducing wisdom to exit on:

“What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?”

― Henry David Thoreau, Familiar Letters

“Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children's children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.” 

==

“Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us to restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations. The movement for the conservation of wildlife and the larger movement for the conservation of all our natural resources are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method.”

― Theodore Roosevelt

“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.”

― Ansel Adams

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.” 

==

“One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.” 

― Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water

“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.” 

==

But even the most articulate public protest is not enough. We don't live in the government or in institutions or in our public utterances and acts, and the environmental crisis has its roots in our lives. By the same token, environmental health will also be rooted in our lives. That is, I take it, simply a fact, and in the light of it we can see how superficial and foolish we would be to think that we could correct what is wrong merely by tinkering with the institutional machinery. The changes that are required are fundamental changes in the way we are living.”

― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“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

“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.”

― Martin Keogh, Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World

“An attitude to life which seeks fulfilment in the
single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short, materialism - does not fit into this
world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the
environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.”

― E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

“Saving the world requires saving democracy. That requires well-informed citizens. Conservation, environment, poverty, community, education, family, health, economy- these combine to make one quest: liberty and justice for all. Whether one's special emphasis is global warming or child welfare, the cause is the same cause. And justice comes from the same place being human comes from: compassion.”

― Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World

“The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.”

― Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

“Humanity is a biological species, living in a biological environment, because like all species, we are exquisitely adapted in everything: from our behavior, to our genetics, to our physiology, to that particular environment in which we live. The earth is our home. Unless we preserve the rest of life, as a sacred duty, we will be endangering ourselves by destroying the home in which we evolved, and on which we completely depend.”

― Edward Osborne Wilson

“In the world we grew up in, our most ingrained economic and political habit was growth; it’s the reflex we’re going to have to temper, and it’s going to be tough.” 

==

“I am still a consumer; the consumer world was the world I emerged into, whose air I breathed for a very long time, and its assumptions still dominate my psyche—but maybe a little less each year....There are times when I can feel the spell breaking in my mind….There are times when I can almost feel myself simply being.” 

==

“Very few people on earth ever get to say: "I am doing, right now, the most important thing I could possibly be doing." If you'll join this fight that's what you'll get to say.”

==

“when confronted by small men doing big and stupid things, we need to resist with all the creativity and wit we can muster, and if we can do so without losing the civility that makes life enjoyable, then so much the better.” 

― Bill McKibben