Ecologist vs. Developer

EARTHKEEPING NEWS
A NEWSLETTER OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COALITION FOR CHRISTIANITY AND ECOLOGY

Volume Three, Number Four
March/April 1994

ECOLOGIST VS. DEVELOPER CONFLICT REPLACES LIBERAL VS. CONSERVATIVE

The older political tension between conservative and liberal, based on social orientation, is being replaced with the dominant tension between developers and ecologists, based on orientation toward the natural world. This is now the primary all-pervasive tension throughout every realm of human affairs.

In this new alignment those committed to industrial, commercial and housing development of natural areas see these as inherently progressive. Those committed to the integrity of the natural world see this as degradation, since the intrusion of the human upon the life systems of the planet has already gone far beyond any acceptable limits. Reconciliation of these two views is especially difficult because the commercial-industrial powers have so overwhelmed the natural world in these past two centuries that there is, to the ecologist, no question of further adaptation of natural systems to the human. The oppression of the natural world by the plundering of the industrial powers has so endangered the basic functioning of natural forces that we are already on the verge of a total dysfunctioning of the planet. We cannot mediate the situation as though there were presently some minimal balance already existing that could be slightly modified so that a general balance could come into being.

The violence already done to the Earth is on a scale beyond all understanding. It can only be considered as the consequence of a deep cultural pathology. The change required by the ecologist is a drastic reduction in the plundering processes of the commercial industrial economy.

Never before has the human community been confronted with a situation that required such sudden and total change in life style under the threat of a comprehensive degradation of the planet. The conflict can only increase.

This conflict is all-pervasive. It extends throughout all the professions, throughout all the institutions of our society. The intensity of conflict increases daily, mainly because some members of the human community are becoming ever more clear about the absurdity of the present economic system of accounting, and the intrusion of crass industrial processes into the most precious interior experiences that give to human life its deepest modes of fulfillment. A special poignancy is experienced in a realization that future generations will be living amid the ruins, not simply amid the ruined infrastructures of the industrial world, but amid the ruins of the natural world itself.

To cut old-growth forests is not simply to destroy the last five percent of the primordial forests left in this country. It is also to lose the wonder and majesty, the poetry and music and spiritual exaltation evoked by the experience of such awesome expression of the ultimate mysteries of existence. All this is considered irrelevant by the developers as soon as it is experienced as a place where there is money to be made.

Already the assault of developers on the ecologists has increased in its pervasiveness and intensity. A polarity has evolved that finds expression in every aspect of contemporary life, in all our social and political and economic institutions, in all our professions of medicine and law, in our educational programs and religious traditions.

The profoundly degraded ecological situation reveals a deadening of some parts of human intelligence, and also the paralysis of human sensitivities. Developers have lost the capacity for experiencing the loss of beauty and magnificence as we devastate the woodlands and ruin the habitat of birds and butterflies and so many other living creatures.

A person need only read the publications of the business world to observe the abandonment of any discipline that would limit the money-making greed of our society.

It is important to understand the inherent difficulty of reconciliation, and the new language that has come into being. Every institution of American society is involved at its deepest level. We must reinvent all our professional institutions in this new context. We must in a manner reinvent the human as a mode of being. Eventually this implies rethinking the planet itself and our role within the planetary process.