MANKIND IS THE DISEASE AND THEY'RE THE CURE:

Stop your sobbing: Doomsayers like Al Gore and Jared Diamond aren't doing the environment much good. To save the earth, we need to stop blaming and start celebrating ourselves. (Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Oct. 09, 2007, Salon)

Eco-tragedies are premised on the notion that humankind's survival depends on understanding that ecological crises are a consequence of human intrusions on Nature, and that humans must let go of their consumer, religious, and ideological fantasies and recognize where their true self-interest lies.

Grounded in a tradition of eco-tragedy begun by Carson and motivated by the lack of progress on the ecological crisis, environmental writers have produced a flood of high-profile books that take the tragic narrative of humankind's fall from Nature to new heights: Sir Martin Rees's 2003 "Our Final Hour," Richard Posner's 2004 "Catastrophe," Paul and Anne Ehrlich's 2004 "One with Nineveh," James Kunstler's 2005 "The Long Emergency," James Lovelock's 2006 "The Revenge of Gaia," and Al Gore's 2006 "An Inconvenient Truth," to name just a few.

For the most part, these environmentalist cautionary tales have had the opposite of their intended effect, provoking fatalism, conservatism, and survivalism among readers and the lay public, not the rational embrace of environmental policies. Constantly surprised and angered when people fail to behave as environmentalists would like them to, environment writers complain that the public is irrational, in denial, or just plain foolish. They presume that the failure of the public to heed their warnings says something meaningful about human nature itself, attributing humanity's disregard for Nature to desires like the lust for power and concluding that, in the end, we are all little more than reactive apes, insufficiently evolved to take the long view and understand the complexity and interconnectedness of the natural systems on which we depend.

Kunstler begins "The Long Emergency" by quoting Carl Jung as saying, "People cannot stand too much reality." In fact, it was T.S. Eliot, not Jung, who said "Humankind cannot bear very much reality." But the attitude of such doomsayers recalls something Jung actually did say: "If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool."

Environmental tales of tragedy begin with Nature in harmony and almost always end in a quasi-authoritarian politics. Eco-tragic narratives diagnose human desire, aspiration, and striving to overcome the constraints of our world as illnesses to be cured or sins to be punished. They aim to short-circuit democratic values by establishing Nature as it is understood and interpreted by scientists as the ultimate authority that human societies must obey. And they insist that humanity's future is a zero-sum proposition -- that there is only so much prosperity, material comfort, and modernity to go around. The story told by these eco-tragedies is not that humankind cannot stand too much reality but rather that Nature cannot stand too much humanity.

Indeed, it is the Malthusians who can't stand the reality that we just keep adding people by the billion and prosper rather than descend into an atavistic struggle for survival.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 9, 2007 8:36 AM