Must Read
- Chris Smaje, Dark Thoughts on Ecomodernism
Should Read
- William Rhoden (NYT), Muhammad Ali: The Champion Who Never Sold Out
- Matt Taibbi, Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie: Instead of a reality check for the party, it’ll be smugness redoubled
Worth Reading
- Stanley Boyd Eaton, The Eden Model
- Richard Reese, How Did Things Get To Be This Way?t
An excerpt from Reese’s essay (emphasis mine):
Conservation writer Charles Little has given many lectures on tree death in America. He is often asked one question: ‘A hand will be raised at the back of the room. “But what can we do?” the petitioner will ask. Do? What can we do? What a question that is when we scarcely understand what we have already done!’ [Ed.: Related reading] Indeed! How can the human journey avoid one more cycle of repeated mistakes when we fail to understand most of the mistakes?
Biologist Paul Ehrlich once spent time among the Inuit of Hudson Bay, Canada. He was shocked to discover that the entire knowledge-base of their cultural information was known by everyone — how to hunt seals, tan pelts, weave a net, sew a coat, and so on. Yet, in our advanced civilisation, nobody knows even a millionth of our cultural information. You can get a PhD from Stanford and never learn anything about agriculture. Food is one thing we truly need. What is the plan for feeding 11 billion? Is it possible?…
Recently, I’ve become fascinated by our closest living relatives, the chimps and bonobos. We share something like 99 percent of our genes with them. Their ancestors have inhabited the same place for millions of years, without trashing it. Imagine that! They still enjoy a healthy life in a healthy place. Is that really so terrible? Once upon a time, our ancestors lived in the same region, in much the same way. What happened?
Chimps and bonobos did not make serious weapons, wage war against ape-eating predators, spread around the world, invent agriculture, explode in numbers, live in filth, and die by the millions from infectious diseases. They did not wage war against infectious diseases, soar into extreme overshoot, load the atmosphere with crud, and blindside the planet’s climate. Instead, they inhabit a niche in their ecosystem, and live as they have for millions of years, without rocking the boat. Is there something we could learn from their example?
It’s a good question. Smaje I think provides an even better frame (emphasis mine):
For its part, the Dark Mountain manifesto [Ed.: link added] describes progress as a myth. I largely agree, or at least I reject the metaphorical topography of going ‘back’ or moving ‘forwards’ as a way of thinking about ‘progress’ historically. Here is the anxiety in the ecomodernist argument: once you abandon the notion of a smooth upward progress undergirded by technology, once you abandon the common or garden ethnocentrism that our own times and our own people sit at the apex of human achievement, then it’s possible to look at other peoples and ask open-mindedly whether there is anything we can learn from them, not so that we can live just like them, but so we can live better in our own terms.
Keep an open mind not because we necessarily want to copy what others do (or have done) but so that we can learn and perhaps live better in our own terms.