http://www.utne.com/Environment/Give-Up-Hope-for-the-Environment.aspx

4/8/2009 12:40:35 PM

by Bennett Gordon
Tags: Environment, Spirituality, hope, global warming

Give Up Hope for the Environment Global warming, massive species extinctions, pollution, and myriad other looming environmental catastrophes continue to threaten the planet, while environmentalists insist on preaching a gospel of hope. There’s an inherent contradiction in the hopeful environmental message, Michael Nelson and John Vucetich write for the Ecologist. They point out that films like An Inconvenient Truth and other environmental motivators often boil down to:

1) Scientists give good reasons to think profound environmental disaster is eminent
2) It is urgent that you live up to a challengingly high standard—sustainability
And 3) the reason to live sustainably is that doing so gives hope for averting disaster.

The contradiction of asking people to be hopeful in a hopeless situation threatens to undermine the environmental movement. Instead, Nelson and Vucetich write that environmentalists should abandon hope and instead stress that sustainable living is the ethical and virtuous way to live. People shouldn’t hold out hope for a sustainable future that may never come. People should live sustainably because it’s the right thing to do.

“A wonderful thing happens when you give up on hope,” Derrick Jensen wrote for Orion in 2006, “which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place.” Hope implies powerlessness, a lack of agency, and a reliance on forces beyond your control. To focus on an abstract sustainable future neglects the real-world actions that can be taken right now. “When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to ‘hope’ at all,” Jensen writes. “We simply do the work.”

In response to the article posted that concerns giving up hope on the environment, the entire premise is built on the false notion that scientists are overwhelmingly supportive of any of the items noted in the film "An Inconvenient Truth". The vast majority of independent climate scientists, geological experts and honest meteorologists, such as John Coleman, Ph.D., do not support this thesis of man made global warming (AGW), massive species extinctions, or extraordinary environmental catastrophes caused by the average man, woman or child. All industrial pollution problems that do exist could easily be reversed or tempered without destroying our industrial base if there was a mandate to do so. Remember how the polluted-to-the-point-of-burning rivers were cleansed almost overnight in the 1970's? This mandate has not been forthcoming from any Congress, be it a Republican controlled one or a Democrat one. (As an aside, think how easy it would be to get one of the most toxic compounds on the face of the earth, fluoride sludge from the smokestack scrubbers of the phosphate fertilizer industry, out of our drinking water. Not only won't they prohibit dumping it into our water systems, they actually promote its use. Why aren't ecologists concerned and offering the public information and the ridiculously simple solution?) We must stop letting the contrived dichotomy of what is a "left" issue and what is a "right" issue cloud our critical thinking skills. The ice caps have reformed, the bears are thriving, and the earth has cooled almost alarmingly quickly when you look at the geological history of the planet. The last four glacial periods (and there were more before that) have occurred at 100,000 year intervals. We are nearing that time period right now, and, coinciding with this, we are in an era of unusually low sunspot activity. For a far more extensive scientific explanation please look at http://wwwnov55.com. Mr. Novis is only one of tens of thousands of independent scientists NOT chasing the grant monies given to those willing to "fix" the science, like the attempt made by the IPCC with their AGW agenda and its debunked hockey stick graph. Novis and others find vastly different answers than those used by Al Gore in his propaganda piece. One should do research on "sustainability" before endorsing it because it sounds so warm and fuzzy. There is a history to that word that is far more worrisome than the idea of a warming period, which would actually be a very good thing for the earth and mankind. It would open up vasts new tracts of arable land and actually lead to real sustainability. As mentioned in a previous post, Greenland was indeed, once green.
Conservation of natural resources and good stewardship of the earth are laudable, but if they are based on false science they do no good and allow others to manipulate the populace.