Answering Monbiot's Ounce of Hope Worth a Ton of Despair

Answering Monbiot's Ounce of Hope Worth a Ton of Despair

by Michael Major

The 18th century american revolution harnessed citizenship, personal freedom, can-do community empowerment, humane aspirations, open debate and a deep appreciation for the pervasive shared wonderment and democratizing influence of accessible and compulsory public education. But it also gave free rein to resourcism, environmental exploitation, capitalism and colonialism.

Environmentalism rightly finds its source and inspiration in appreciation of nature, the appreciation of complex natural systems and in the revolutionary values which animated our best characteristics in the last 200 years of search for a way to live in peace and comfort with the world, its species, its nations and peoples and in genuine shared stewardship of our environment, our lives and our scarcest resources.

But according to Monbiot in order to gain political traction with the aristocrats, plutocrats, patriarchs, financiers, generals, industrialists, pragmatists and other would be rulers of the universe, our culture embraced the jargon of industrial efficiency, class entitlement and financial necessity and then we manufactured elite consent for a little green window-dressing on the expansionary fabrication of illusory fossil fueled progress.

In regards to the problem, Monbiot is precisely correct. But in terms of his advocated solution --selling the green sugar of hope to sweeten the millennial angst of environmental despair --it will not prevent the environmental train wreck, though it may comfort the horror stricken bystanders' wish to see the environmental death throe miseries terminated with the victim's dimming eyes gazing on (mixed heaven metaphor) a golden cross, a shining new Jerusalem, a once and future king, pie in the sky and Elysian fields. What death door dreams, memories and fears does the dying environment experience? Resilience, integrity, biodiversity, fertility, virility, complexity, species lost and found, ecosystems generalized and expansive and incrementally changing across moisture, temperature ranges and nutrient horizons and some very tightly focused in temporal and spatial niches awaiting opportunities for expansion and subsequent contraction.

We are not the anthropomorphic environment. The environment is not unfortunately deathly ill. This environment, at the downtown corner of 2nd and Main and at the holocene anthropocene boundary, has been murdered by humanity through accelerated industrial exploitation, wilderness and resource depletion, ecosystem disruption, toxification and pollution of the terrestrial, aquatic, atmospheric and oceanic ecosystems.

This long reigning environment is passing away and in the fullness of time, it will be succeeded -- perhaps with an archetypal memory of the errant Icarus species which lost the capacity to remain sufficiently grounded in enduring contemplation of the evolving wonder and magnificence of it all.

At one time, humans functioned at highest purpose as the living memory of the environment's exploring and remembering itself. We have lost our purpose and our environment has lost its memory and its poets have been converted into its murderers and consumers.

Hope won't fix the environment. The environment needs relief from exploitation. This relief occurs naturally in the form of chaotic interregna in which volatility beyond the evolved tolerance of endemic megafauna eliminates large scale and regional trophic endurance and predictability. Alternatively this relief from exploitation can occur in our case by desisting from compromising the tolerance, biodiversity and resilience of large scale ecosystems by paying particular attention to the key indicator species of their systemic distress.

We could have worked, co-existed and lived well within the tolerance of the enveloping environment. But, like Icarus we exceeded our grasp with our reach. We should now leave behind our own lessons as mythology and toolkit for any other megafauna who may evolve and follow.

For posterity, we remember the antediluvian Titans and their surviving Olympians and what brave new name will we now give ourselves to mark the mythic ascendance of this egregious petroleum fueled folly?