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Please read the critique on Daniel Quinn in order to fully understand the following... (you might also want to have a look at ishmael.html for more qritique on hippies).

"Every little helps" - A famous bon mot - the modern environmentalist have taken on them to make it appear an academic argument.

The problem here isn't academic. It's psychological. People, especially ones with PhDs after their names ("Psychological Human Disorders"?, surely not! -nw), aren't too stupid to interpret the extreme ramifications of the facts presented by Daniel Quinns arguments. They lack the psychological strenght to think about the radical consequences in reality - and thus they elaborate thought structures to defend themselves, ignoring and stressing facts according to their convenience. And Daniel Quinn isn't an exeption.

I was disappointed when Daniel Quinn, in an interview I think, talked about what he thought was a good example of what we could or should do. The owner of a carper manufacturing plant, who upon reading Ismael, modified his business practices to be more green by introducing recycling. In practice this meant reducing both materials needed in the manufacturing and the waste products. This is profoundly inconsistant with DQ's principle about needing new visions and not new programs. What this plant owner did is a program - it offers no new vision upon which to built a new world. It actually makes stronger the current industrial system by temporarily slowing down the process of environmental degradation and the use of diminishing resources and thus offers a PR opportunity for our culture to justify it's existance and to divert attention from deeper problems it does not want us to examine.

Let us say we help to bioremedete the soil around a chemical plant (what ever that means?). We have then inadvertently given the PR department of that company food for the their fire and distracted public's attention from the fact that the whole concept of such a plant is in itself unsustainable no matter how clean it will ever be.

This same tragedy can be seen in the mainstream environmental movement. A new life-style environmentalism has been borne - of recycling and eating organic food - that has taken over the agendas and occupied the minds of people. They no longer bother their consciousnesses with wide-scale ecological problems since they feel 'content with' doing what ever they think they are capable of doing. Talking to these people you discover that they do in fact recognise, just as you, that their actions will not 'save the earth', but they feel rightous about 'doing something' and justify it by saying that there is nothing more they could do.

I do not know exactly what we should do 'to save the earth'. However I do see what we shouldn't do and is irrelevant. While other people claim to be content with what they think they are doing, I don't pretend to 'make a difference'. Instead I use all my time trying to find a real solution. For those of you who share my vision I would like to to hear from you...

email: namelesswildness@subdimension.com