This Year's Earth Day Steaming Mound Of Shit: Greens Just Need To Stop Being So Darn Gloomy!

[hatrack]

EDIT

Peter Kareiva is one environmentalist who says the movement needs a big rethink. He’s the senior scientist for the Nature Conservancy, the largest environmental non-profit in the United States. He argues that the purists have been terrible for environmentalism because they’ve alienated the public with their misanthropic, anti-growth, anti-technology, dogmatic, zealous, romantic, backward-looking message. (As a young scientist, he testified in favour of restricting logging to save the spotted owl. Then he saw the loggers sitting at the back of the room, with their children on their shoulders. After that, he became convinced that environmentalism wouldn’t work so long as it was framed in terms of either/or.)

EDIT

“Anthropocene” is a term that describes the age we now live in – one shaped primarily not by geology but by humans. Purists think this is a catastrophe, and want to repeal it. Mr. Kareiva says it’s here to stay, and we can shape it for the better by embracing, not rejecting, new technologies. He also says in his essay that “ecologists and conservationists have grossly overstated the fragility of nature, frequently arguing that once an ecosystem is altered, it is gone forever.” But the evidence proves just the opposite. “Nature is so resilient that it can recover rapidly from even the most powerful human disturbances.”

Peter Kareiva and his fellow enviro-optimists are the key to saving environmentalism from terminal irrelevance. Global warming is the biggest case in point. The challenge is far too great to solve with carbon treaties (which are, in any case, politically impossible) or restraint. Just look at projections for energy use in the developing world, or consult any expert on how long it would take to wean the world off oil even if we found the perfect fuel tomorrow. The fixes for global warming will require dramatically different new technologies, and will only be available in the long term.

Meantime, the planet may indeed be more resilient than we thought. So, on Earth Day, please do something to improve your corner of it. And cheer up – the Anthropocene Age might be better than you think.

EDIT/END

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/can-enviro-optimists-save-the-movement-from-itself/article11418189/comments/

[MAD Dave]

1. May I also refer you to....

Http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/09/whole-earth-catalog-book-review

Stewart Brand lays out an interestingly similar point of view. After reading it, I definitely consider myself an ecopragmatist.

YMMV.....

[wtmusic]

2. In what way?

AFAIK the tone or framing of the message doesn't matter to Brand.

It is what it is.

[MAD Dave]

8. A couple ways

First, that brand was once a "traditional" environmentalist but has more recently adopted a more IMO modern and progressive view of environmentalism.

Second, that Brand suggests we embrace the attitude that GW is happening and that we develop ways to mitigate its effects.

[wtmusic]

3. Love this one: "Meantime, the planet may indeed be more resilient than we thought."

Makes me want to go out and buy a bunch of shit.

[JimDandy]

7. Good...

Shit makes great fertilizer!

[wtmusic]

9. No need to buy that kind...

I'll just recycle some of my DU posts!

[JimDandy]

12. LOL

If we all joined you in that, we'd have a lot of PU compost.

[CRH]

4. Dear Peter Kareiva, ...

Gloomy is all I can be, when the senior scientist for the Nature Conservancy compares the anthropocene era (200 years), against geologic history as recorded in land and ice cores, ( many millions of years), and tells the 'purists' of the environmental movement they need to chill and allow for a new age interpretation of environmentalism.

Well Peter, you can peddle your enviro-optimist's views to those who are blind and deaf of news of the planetary melting ice, eco systems compromised on continents and in oceans, and species meeting extinction as we speak; and, you can say the environmentalist of past is, "misanthropic, anti-growth, anti-technology, dogmatic, zealous, romantic, backward-looking" and whatever else you want; but please, provide us with some reason for techno driven hope in any technologies developed to date. Talk is cheap, optimism without substance, passes with less relevance.

Count me as a dinosaur environmental 'purist'. You want to change the definition of environmentalist, find a term that encompasses high material consumption, generation x and beyond, toy driven mentalities; who find solace not in contemplation or the garden, but within constant stimulation, materialism, and gratification. When you find that term, coin it, but do not try to bastardize the term environmentalist to fit your new age techno visions of the future.

Sorry for the rant Peter, but, it is people like you who paint themselves green, that make me blue.

[Buzz Clik]

5. Well, hatrack, you and I see eye-to-eye on most things, but not this.

I have witnessed the slow spiral of the American environmental movement, much to my dismay. It has trended toward splashy, noisy, headline grabbing activities rather than well considered, science driven, goal-oriented stands. Some of my pet peeves:

1) Keystone XL. Why the hell are we drawing the line in the sand on this one? We got them to avoid environmentally sensitive areas, and that was a big victory. Now, force them to make it safe and fully equipped to prevent Arkansas-styled leaks, and we've won. Putting so much effort into stopping the last segment of the pipeline will not save the tar sands or have the slightest impact on global climate change. We are way past the time for moral, symbolic victories.

2) GMOs. This one sends me reeling every time the hysteria begins. So little solid information is behind the chatter that it is truly disheartening. Are we truly this scientifically ignorant?

3) Bee colony collapse disorder. After a decade or so of chasing every pesticide, GMO, and human insult imaginable, we finally have found the problem. Yes, it was a pesticide, but no, it was not one that ever hit the radar screen previously. Now we look like total idiots.

Let's get smart, close ranks, and fight the big battles. No more tilting at windmills. Please?

[wtmusic]

10. Peter Kareiva is flat-out wrong on at least one issue

Last edited Sun Apr 21, 2013, 12:10 PM - Edit history (1)

"Nature is so resilient that it can recover rapidly from even the most powerful human disturbances.”

vs:

"Are humans causing a mass extinction on the magnitude of the one that killed the dinosaurs?

The answer is yes, according to a new analysis — but we still have some time to stop it.

Mass extinctions include events in which 75 percent of the species on Earth disappear within a geologically short time period, usually on the order of a few hundred thousand to a couple million years. It's happened only five times before in the past 540 million years of multicellular life on Earth. (The last great extinction occurred 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs were wiped out.) At current rates of extinction, the study found, Earth will enter its sixth mass extinction within the next 300 to 2,000 years."

http://www.livescience.com/13038-humans-causing-sixth-mass-extinction.html

You're a pilot landing a 747 in the fog and you're on final approach at an airport you know well. Suddenly an alarm goes off telling you your altitude is 500ft when you "should" be at 3,000. What's the best way to handle it? Pull up and abort, making everyone with connections on the flight miss them and wasting fuel, or assume the alarm is broken and continue on your flight path?

[Buzz Clik]

13. I agree, wtmusic. That comment was far too extreme, and I don't even buy into the general philosophy

[On the Road]

6. The Truth in That Line

is that that the environmental movement needs expectations that stand the test of time, at least over a few decades.

Since the early 70s, the earth has warmed, but it has not turned into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. If you think this is hyerbole, read some of the projections made by notable people on the original Earth Day.

[wtmusic]

11. And if we don't have a few decades, then what?

When faced with evidence of an impending disaster it's human nature to reject it - not because of any valid criterion but only because it's "too different" from our day-to-day experience. That's ridiculous, and at the very least the precautionary principle would suggest to act on it anyway with all possible haste.

"'Don't worry about it.'

Those words, which he uttered on a peaceful Sunday morning in 1941 on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, would haunt Kermit A. Tyler for the rest of his life.

Mr. Tyler was the Army Air Forces' first lieutenant on temporary duty at Fort Shafter's radar information center on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, when a radar operator on the northern tip of the island reported that he and another private were seeing an unusually large "blip" on their radar screen, indicating a large number of aircraft about 132 miles away and fast approaching.

"Don't worry about it," Mr. Tyler told the radar operator, thinking it was a flight of U.S. B-17 bombers that was due in from the mainland."

http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/obituaries/obituary-kermit-a-tyler-officer-who-ignored-radar-warning-of-pearl-harbor-raid-235617

[phantom power]

14. big gloomy doomer kick

[stuntcat]

15. the Anthropocene Mass Extinction is only going to speed up and get worse

What's to cheer?

Oh yeah, I know!! The funny show on the TEEVEE, my team winning!, the green light I made! The preshuss laugh of lil' bundle #7,000,698,378

I'm just gonna go out in my crowded stinking suburb and roll around happy in the grass, the way the neighbors' babies do! Happy 2090 lil' dudes!

[The2ndWheel]

16. Gloomy, happy, it doesn't really make a difference

We're going to try to do what we're able to try to do, so the gloomy people will continue to be gloomy. However, whatever we try to do won't really fix the problem, but that won't stop the happy people from continuing to be happy.

Which is why in my opinion we can't stop, but we can't continue.

[joshcryer]

17. translation: greens need to stop being realists / rationalists