The forlorn hope of environmentalism

[GliderGuider]

Daniel Drumright describes himself as "a lifelong radical environmentalist who has followed climate science for the last 25 years." This is a penetrating essay on a wide variety of cultural issues, examined in light of his acceptance of the possibility of near-term human extinction due to ecological collapse.

In the introduction he says, "... the following has been written for an extremely limited audience. This essay is ONLY for those who have come to accept the probability of our near term extinction and the emotional anguish it obviously generates." I take that to mean that the issues he raises will seem most comprehensible and significant to those who are at that point in their personal journey through this wrenching emotional landscape.

Though the essay touches a wide range of topics, from thermodynamics and evolutionary psychology to Deep Green Resistance and suicide, the following few paragraphs caught my attention.

The Last of Everything: Reassessing the Meaning of Suicide through the Lens of Our Near-Term Extinction

Environmentalism has always been a game of chance, where the odds have always been stacked against any significant societal change ever occurring. The cultural impediments have never been anything other than stupefying; capitalism has been as immovable as our competing self-interests. And while resistance has never seemed like anything other than a losing battle, there was at least the perceived opportunity for a major sea change of consciousness to at least start to take root, or least “we” imagined there was still enough time for such a transformation to manifest. No matter how slim or distant that prospect has always been, the environmental movement of the last five decades could at least hold the high moral ground, as well as logically out debate any counter argument to maintaining the self-evident destructive trajectory of the status-quo.

However, while environmentalism has always been a game of chance, it has also always been a race against time. And not a race where we get to continually move the finish line as every new generation of vanguards is handed off the baton, but a race that mother nature eventually decides she is just tired of watching, or rather, the laws of thermodynamics eventually shift to a new equilibrium.

The major blind spot of environmentalism has been the moral imperative itself, for it has blinded us to the fact that humanity’s biological imperative has always superseded any subcultures concept of ethical behavior. In light of NTHE, only certain eastern religious branches and western nihilism can now in hindsight claim to have always known the greater “truth,” while we western radicals now find ourselves twisting in the wind at the end of a rope that was only ever attached to a castle in the sky.

It is not by accident that over the last fifty years, most environmental protest movements have been overwhelmingly generational youth movements as well, and in the same inverse vein, it is not by accident the adherents of NTHE are now overwhelmingly near or beyond retirement age. Relatively the same imperative and cultural obstacles still exist as they always have, the only difference is how long one has honestly lived with these cultural impediments; the number of years one has repeatedly banged their head against the epitaph of immovable human nature (growth). All that is eventually lost over the years is just our open-minded naivety and the illusion of human agency where there apparently never was any (i.e., the essence of hopium).

[defacto7]

1. If you can take it...

This is what I have been saying for years... to and empty room.

If you not able to handle the truth, that's OK, because that part doesn't matter....

What does matter is that we still keep trying because if there is a small light in the heart of humankind it must shine for as long as possible. We really won't be here for many generations, but what time there is left, those of us few open-minded, naive humans with illusions of agency will defy the destroyers of our kind, exhaling to the last winds of life saying that we were, and could have been.