November - December 2001 Sierran

Can we “Protect the Planet”?
by John Kurmann

As you may have already noticed, there are many shades of green in the green movement. Most people would probably call me a green after they got to know me, and I suppose that’s fair, but I definitely don’t think I’m your average green. Why am I different? Because I proceed on the basis of different assumptions. Before I give you a peek at mine, though, let me demonstrate the assumptions I detect underlying the vision of most greens.

Some organizations expose their assumptions right up front, in their names, which makes my job here easy. The Natural Resources Defense Council , Environmental Defense  and Defenders of Wildlife  are a few prominent examples.

With others, I only have to look a little deeper: The World Wildlife Fund  seeks “to protect nature and the biological diversity that we all need to survive.” The National Wildlife Federation of the U.S.A.  strives “to protect wildlife, wild places, and the environment.” The World Resources Institute wants “to move human society to live in ways that protect Earth’s environment and its capacity to provide for the needs and aspirations of current and future generations.” Our own Sierra Club , the largest green organization in the United States (with a branch in Canada, too, of course), exhorts us to “explore, enjoy and protect the planet” and says it’s “protecting the environment…for our families, for our future.” Earth First!  insists on “no compromise in defense of Mother Earth” and the Earth Liberation Front  exists “to take direct action in defense of the earth.”

Despite some distinct differences in wording, style and tactics among these organizations, I trust you’ve noticed the common theme here. Even with organizations operating under ambiguous names, I don’t generally have to look far to find the rhetoric of “protect” and “defend.”

If you truly want to understand the assumptions an organization runs on, though, you need only look at their actions, which can always be trusted to demonstrate more accurately than their words what their assumptions are. This is especially the case with the assumptions that lie so deep folks don’t think of them as assumptions at all but rather as self-evident truths. Fortunately, in the cases of the cited organizations, their words are consonant with their actions.

For simplicity’s sake, because this is the Ozark Sierran, and because I’m a member of this Club, I’m going to focus on the wording it uses. The exhortation to “protect the planet” sums up quite nicely the assumptions I want to address.
What does it mean to say one’s goal is to “protect the planet”? Well, first, it obviously means that the person or group making this declaration perceives the planet to be under some sort of attack. Why else would one commit to protecting it?

But where is this besieged planet? The phrasing suggests that the implicit “we” will protect the planet as something separate from us. Can anyone tell me how to distinguish where the planet ends and we begin, though? Every tool I use is made of planet-stuff, every morsel of food and drop of water I sustain myself with is planet-stuff, and every bit of waste I produce continues to cycle through the regenerative life processes of the planet. It’s fundamentally true that I am made of planet-stuff, too, and I see no reason to think you're any different. Consequently, if the planet is under attack, then we are under attack as part of it.

But under attack by whom? Clearly, anyone making such a declaration means under attack by someone else. After all, you don’t set out to protect anyone or anything from your own attack on it, you set out to protect it from the attacks of some other(s). If you found out your own attacks were the source of the damage, you wouldn’t need to figure out how to protect the planet from yourself, you’d need to figure out how to stop attacking it.

So, who is it that’s attacking the planet? Obviously we’re not talking about an alien invasion here, with spaceships hovering ominously over our cities, rayguns flashing, and hideous creatures with big, crunchy teeth snarfing our entrails. No, this perceived “enemy” is obviously much closer to home than that.

Lots of people would probably point to corporations as the attackers, given the common misconception that our present ecological crisis grew out of the industrial revolution, but what is a corporation? It’s a legal construct and nothing more. It has no true life of its own. It’s an organization made up of people, and people make the decisions that produce its actions.

Of course, it’s also true that, as a legal entity, a corporation has an existence that transcends any individual employee, executive, boardmember or stockholder. Well, then, maybe the enemy is to be found among the drafters of the laws that govern corporate behavior – except they’re people, too (yes, even the politicians). The legislators that passed the laws governing corporate behavior, the presidents and governors that signed the laws, and the judges that interpreted the laws to give corporations the legal status of persons – we find people everywhere we look for enemies.

But we're people, and I already pointed out that it doesn't make much sense to set out to protect the planet from ourselves. So, then, it must be other people that environmental groups are determined to protect the planet from. You know, selfish people, greedy people, careless people – those kinds of people. Except I have been known to exhibit behavior that could be described as selfish, greedy, and careless at times, too, and I'm a Sierra Club member.

And while I wish I could honestly say that I live a sustainable lifestyle – a lifestyle that doesn’t appear to contribute to the progressive degradation of the life support systems that sustain me – I’d be a liar if I did. Am I an aberration among Sierra Club members in this regard? With all due respect (and that’s considerable), I doubt it.

Does it make any sense to imagine ourselves the protectors of the planet when we’re taking part in the destruction? I don't think so. Degrees of destructiveness certainly vary from person to person, but most – maybe all – Sierra Club members are living unsustainably. I have a feeling we’d get a much warmer reception from the more destructive folks if we stopped casting ourselves as the good guys who are brave and altruistic enough to protect the planet from the bad guys – from them.

If we really want to create a world we’d like to live as part of, I think we’d be wise to stop dogging other people and start addressing these questions: Why are so many people destructive? Why are some people more destructive than others?

I could write a book exploring the various permutations of those questions, but I’m going to have to stick with what I feel is the most important one here: are people destructive to the world simply because it’s human nature to be destructive to the world? Most people in industrialized countries seem to think so, and consequently that assumption also seems to me to underlie the vast majority of the green movement’s efforts to do something about the damage being done. I could be mistaken, but what other explanation is there for the fact that most groups are focused on forcing people to change? Some groups do this primarily through direct action, but the vast majority focus on lobbying the government to legislate and regulate behavior. If these groups believed people truly want to live sustainably, and are able to live sustainably by their own choices, wouldn’t they focus on helping people to do that rather than relying on the blunt instrument of coercion? Change comes much more quickly and is far more effective when people want it than when they’re pushed into it kicking and screaming.

Does the available evidence support the assumption that people are destructive to the world by their nature? I think not. The first species of the genus Homo (which includes all the human species that have ever existed) is thought to have emerged in the community of life on the order of 3 million years ago – and yet the world went on doing just fine. Our own subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens, emerged in the community of life more than a hundred thousand years ago – and yet the world went on doing just fine after that, too.

Which is not to say that nothing changed, for, of course, things did change. The emergence of every new species (or subspecies) produces ripple effects throughout the community, and Homo sapiens sapiens was no exception. Already existing species are inevitably affected as the new species “makes room” for its own existence and, in some instances, for some species, the ultimate effect is extinction. In fact, some scientists feel the evidence indicates that ancient humans did cause the extinctions of other species as they spread around the world.

Whether this hypothesis is correct or not, the important point to remember is that, even if people did cause those extinctions, they were limited events. People moved into a new area, behaved in such a way that one or more extinctions resulted, and then found a way to live that worked for that part of the world (or died out themselves). They didn’t practice a way of life that caused more and more extinctions from one year to the next, eventually threatening the biological diversity and stability of the community of life – which is what we’re doing.

Now, if people of our species have lived for more than a hundred thousand years without destroying the world, how can anyone reasonably claim that people are destructive to the world by their very nature?

Moreover, there are still people – the people of the remaining tribal cultures – living today in ways that don’t destroy the world. They’re generally referred to by such loaded terms as “primitives,” but they’re just as modern in their own ways as we are in ours. They’re also as fully human as we are, and they don’t live in a way that destroys the world. Since we’re biologically the same species, what is the difference between us?

It only takes one word to answer that question: culture. There’s much more detail that could be added, but what it comes down to is that our civilized culture is founded on growth without limit and tribal cultures are not.

Once you recognize that human nature is not the source of our troubles here and our civilized culture is, the foolishness of trying to protect the planet becomes clear. We don’t need to protect the planet – we need to transform our culture from our worldview out. We may choose to do some protecting along the way, but changing minds must be our focus if we’re to have any hope of succeeding.

As long as we cling to a mindset that assumes the best we can hope for is to protect the planet, we’re certain to fail because we won’t have changed the way the people of our culture think. With their minds unchanged, people will continue to make new choices that destroy the world, and we’ll spend our lives racing around trying to repair the damage of their old choices. We’ll also find ourselves with ever-less of the wild places we love to explore and enjoy – and that is exactly what we’ve seen happen over the last 40 years or so of the modern green movement. To recycle an old saying, only the insane keep doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result every time.

We cannot protect the planet – or the environment, or nature, or biodiversity either. We also cannot defend earth, or wildlife, or wild places – not even natural resources. Fortunately, we don’t need to.

You can reach John at dsdnt@mshadow.com.