The Final Environmental Solution
There's something facist about environmentalism as it's being spun.
The World Without Us is an interesting thought experiment, and has a lot of really interesting imagery. But the gestalt is basically anti-human. The idea is purity.
Slate's daily podcast a few days ago (I can't figure out how to get a link to a podcast here...) was about environmentalist novels that imagine a postapocalyptic world with fewer people, so that we can all go back to this one essential, true way of being. With women cooking and men hunting or whatever. Everybody's on horseback. Sweet!
It's that romance--that clinging to the idea that there is a correct way to do things and that we have been wrong--that's the problem with the way we look at environmentalism. It's comforting, but it's not true. Native Americans wrought environmental devastation. They threw their garbage off cliffs, too. Civilizations have been going extinct for environmental reasons for a long time.
We are not especially bad.
Environmentalism is a matter of necessity, not virtue. And so we need not imagine a cleansing apocalypse--a Final Environmental Solution--as much as we need to harness the human tendencies that wrought all this mess in a different direction.
Love buildings. Love cities. Love your garbage and love your computer and all the other people around you. Love plastic. Love everything that got us here, every mistake. Love the industrial revolution and the green revolution and the revolutions of your tires because these things actually make the earth something we can grasp as a whole entity.
This morning I feel certain that every mistake we have made brings us closer to something better. And I believe that all the power we have created over the earth--our ability to move over it quickly; build perpendicular to it; shelter ourselves and find and use all the things inside the earth that we can't see--this is what it means to be human.
We are explorer-builders. And we have something new--a grand environmental resistance--to explore and build against.














