We inhabit a small planet, near a small star, among stars more numerous than grains of sand on the beach. It is a warm planet of vast continents and oceans enveloped in a transparent atmosphere. It’s a real jewel of a planet, wonderfully colorful and full of sound and motion, beautiful to behold. We orbit the star each year as we’ve been doing for millions of years, living, as we do, amid innumerable living beings, intricately beautiful, and complexly coexisting and evolving. We are animals evolved on Earth. We are parts of the system of water and gases and minerals, that, through energy from the star, organize into myriad life forms and ecosystems that surround us. We are a part of this planet we call Earth. It is our home.

We say that we “live in the environment,” though we could not live apart from it. It is as vital to us as our own bodies, as close to us as our own skin, as intimate as the recesses of our own lungs. We owe it the same respect we give our own bodies, yet everywhere about us we are witnessing a relentless degradation of the natural systems we depend on for life. In just three hundred years the human population has grown from 0.6 billion to over 6.0 billion people. Earth will probably have 8.5 billion people in another 25 years. The environmental and social problems attending human population growth are truly awesome.  We are witnessing mass extinctions, annihilation of whole ecosystems, global climate change, pollution of atmosphere, fresh water, and oceans with industrial and agroindustrial wastes, desertification of arable land, depletion of renewable and nonrenewable resources, and the rise of poverty and human suffering beyond imagination. But instead of seeking lasting solutions we invest ever more heavily in weapons and military power to wage war on the poorest of the poor who, not surprisingly, are increasingly restless and desperate with a prosperous civilization that has left them behind and wants only the resources beneath their soils.

The evidence for impending catastrophic environmental degradation is overwhelming, the evidence of human suffering is undeniable, yet most of us in the "developed nations" continue living our lives as though resource depletion, environmental degradation, global poverty and social upheaval, and the limits to growth are somehow not our concerns!

What is going on here? Some even contend that there are no problems, at least none that can’t be fixed with a little technological ingenuity and innovation. Even the mainstream environmental movement sees the necessary change as little more than amendments to business as usual. Meanwhile we move ever closer to a very perilous time in the history of humankind. We are inexorably nearing a time of crisis, a time of great danger, but also a time of great opportunity. We are, some would say, at a turning point in human history.

Social change is inevitable. If the change is to be effective in bringing humankind into balance with the natural world we depend on for our survival, it must be intentional and rational change, and it must be change that addresses the root causes of environmental problems rather than merely treating the symptoms. How we manage ourselves as a species on this planet, and how we change the way we manage ourselves in the coming decades, may decide the fate of our descendants and the rest of Earth’s inhabitants for many millennia to come. How we tend the Earth now will influence who and what we are to become in the far and deep reaches of the future.

One thing is almost certain: we are and will remain inhabitants of this little blue and green planet for millions of years, but only if we understand our place in the system well enough to prevent our own extinction or impoverishment on a scale that can only mean we become something less than what we are accustomed to thinking of as "human."  This course is an unflinching glance at environmental problems that plague humanity at the Turn of the Millennium. It is a search for answers to the most perplexing dilemmas of our time, and a quest for ways of understanding what our collective and individual roles might be in the shape of things to come.
 
 

Active Citizenship in service of the environment requires knowledge and practice in gathering, analyzing, and wielding intelligence about the workings of governments, multinational corporations, industries, and cultures.  In particular, a keen awareness of ways that people and institutions adversely affect the integrity of the environment is essential.  This entails a broad synthesis of scientific accounts of the how the environment works and analyses of the socio-political and economic underpinnings of practices that are detrimental, unsustainable, or counter to the principles of environmental health and environmental justice.  The Actions of Citizens in service of the environment, if they are to be effective and well-founded, must stem from a broad comprehension of both the historical roots of the Environmental Movement and the philosophical and ethical dimensions of thought that have motivated the Movement.  That is the scope of this course.  Web sources for entering this synthesis and practice are available at the linked site, Environmental Intelligence.
 

Thoughts in the Presence of Fear

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

by Wendell Berry

I. The time will soon come when we will not be able to remember the horrors of September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism that ended on that day.

II. This optimism rested on the proposition that we were living in a "new world order" and a "new economy" that would "grow" on and on, bringing a prosperity of which every new increment would be "unprecedented."

III. The dominant politicians, corporate officers, and investors who believed this proposition did not acknowledge that the prosperity was limited to a tiny percent of the world's people, and to an ever smaller number of people even in the United States; that it was founded upon the oppressive labor of poor people all over the world; and that its ecological costs increasingly threatened all life, including the lives of the supposedly prosperous.

IV. The "developed" nations had given to the "free market" the status of a god, and were sacrificing to it their farmers, farmlands, and communities, their forests, wetlands, and prairies, their ecosystems and watersheds. They had accepted universal pollution and global warming as normal costs of doing business.

V. There was, as a consequence, a growing worldwide effort on behalf of economic decentralization, economic justice, and ecological responsibility. We must recognize that the events of September 11 make this effort more necessary than ever. We citizens of the industrial countries must continue the labor of self-criticism and self-correction. We must recognize our mistakes.

VI. The paramount doctrine of the economic and technological euphoria of recent decades has been that everything depends on innovation. It was understood as desirable, and even necessary, that we should go on and on from one technological innovation to the next, which would cause the economy to "grow" and make everything better and better. This of course implied at every point a hatred of the past, of all [past] innovations [which] , whatever their value might have been, were discounted as of no value at all.

VII. We did not anticipate anything like what has now happened. We did not foresee that all our sequence of innovations might be at once overridden by a greater one: the invention of a new kind of war that would turn our previous innovations against us, discovering and exploiting the debits and the dangers that we had ignored. We never considered the possibility that we might be trapped in the webwork of communication and transport that was supposed to make us free.

VIII. Nor did we foresee that the weaponry and the war science that we marketed and taught to the world would become available, not just to recognized national governments, which possess so uncannily the power to legitimate large-scale violence, but also to "rogue nations," dissident or fanatical groups and individuals whose violence, though never worse than that of nations, is judged by the nations to be illegitimate.

IX. We had accepted uncritically the belief that technology is only good; that it cannot serve evil as well as good; that it cannot serve our enemies as well as ourselves; that it cannot be used to destroy what is good, including our homelands and our lives.

X. We had accepted too the corollary belief that an economy (either as a money economy or as a life-support system) that is global in extent, technologically complex, and centralized is invulnerable to terrorism, sabotage, or war, and that it is protectable by "national defense."

XI. We now have a clear, inescapable choice that we must make. We can continue to promote a global economic system of unlimited "free trade" among corporations, held together by long and highly vulnerable lines of communication and supply, but now recognizing that such a system will have to be protected by a hugely expensive police force that will be worldwide, whether maintained by one nation or several or all, and that such a police force will be effective precisely to the extent that it oversways the freedom and privacy of the citizens of every nation.

XII. Or we can promote a decentralized world economy which would have the aim of assuring to every nation and region a local self-sufficiency in life-supporting goods. This would not eliminate international trade, but it would tend toward a trade in surpluses after local needs had been met.

XIII. One of the gravest dangers to us now, second only to further terrorist attacks against our people, is that we will attempt to go on as before with the corporate program of global "free trade," whatever the cost in freedom and civil rights, without self-questioning or self-criticism or public debate.

XIV. This is why the substitution of rhetoric for thought, always a temptation in a national crisis, must be resisted by officials and citizens alike. It is hard for ordinary citizens to know what is actually happening in Washington in a time of such great trouble; for all we know, serious and difficult thought may be taking place there. But the talk that we are hearing from politicians, bureaucrats, and commentators has so far tended to reduce the complex problems now facing us to issues of unity, security, normality, and retaliation.

XV. National self-righteousness, like personal self-righteousness, is a mistake. It is misleading. It is a sign of weakness. Any war that we may make now against terrorism will come as a new installment in a history of war in which we have fully participated. We are not innocent of making war against civilian populations. The modern doctrine of such warfare was set forth and enacted by General William Tecumseh Sherman, who held that a civilian population could be declared guilty and rightly subjected to military punishment. We have never repudiated that doctrine.

XVI. It is a mistake also -- as events since September 11 have shown -- to suppose that a government can promote and participate in a global economy and at the same time act exclusively in its own interest by abrogating its international treaties and standing apart from international cooperation on moral issues.

XVII. And surely, in our country, under our Constitution, it is a fundamental error to suppose that any crisis or emergency can justify any form of political oppression. Since September 11, far too many public voices have presumed to "speak for us" in saying that Americans will gladly accept a reduction of freedom in exchange for greater "security." Some would, maybe. But some others would accept a reduction in security (and in global trade) far more willingly than they would accept any abridgement of our Constitutional rights.

XVIII. In a time such as this, when we have been seriously and most cruelly hurt by those who hate us, and when we must consider ourselves to be gravely threatened by those same people, it is hard to speak of the ways of peace and to remember that Christ enjoined us to love our enemies, but this is no less necessary for being difficult.

XIX. Even now we dare not forget that since the attack on Pearl Harbor -- to which the present attack has been often and not usefully compared -- we humans have suffered an almost uninterrupted sequence of wars, none of which has brought peace or made us more peaceable.

XX. The aim and result of war necessarily is not peace but victory, and any victory won by violence necessarily justifies the violence that won it and leads to further violence. If we are serious about innovation, must we not conclude that we need something new to replace our perpetual "war to end war"?

XXI. What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being. We should recognize that while we have extravagantly subsidized the means of war, we have almost totally neglected the ways of peaceableness. We have, for example, several national military academies, but not one peace academy. We have ignored the teachings and the examples of Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other peaceable leaders. And here we have an inescapable duty to notice also that war is profitable, whereas the means of peaceableness, being cheap or free, make no money.

XXII. The key to peaceableness is continuous practice. It is wrong to suppose that we can exploit and impoverish the poorer countries, while arming them and instructing them in the newest means of war, and then reasonably expect them to be peaceable.

XXIII. We must not again allow public emotion or the public media to caricature our enemies. If our enemies are now to be some nations of Islam, then we should undertake to know those enemies. Our schools should begin to teach the histories, cultures, arts, and language of the Islamic nations. And our leaders should have the humility and the wisdom to ask the reasons some of those people have for hating us.

XXIV. Starting with the economies of food and farming, we should promote at home, and encourage abroad, the ideal of local self-sufficiency. We should recognize that this is the surest, the safest, and the cheapest way for the world to live. We should not countenance the loss or destruction of any local capacity to produce necessary goods.

XXV. We should reconsider and renew and extend our efforts to protect the natural foundations of the human economy: soil, water, and air. We should protect every intact ecosystem and watershed that we have left, and begin restoration of those that have been damaged.

XXVI. The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, neither by job-training nor by industry-subsidized research. Its proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or "accessing" what we now call "information" -- which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.

XXVII. The first thing we must begin to teach our children (and learn ourselves) is that we cannot spend and consume endlessly. We have got to learn to save and conserve. We do need a "new economy," but one that is founded on thrift and care, on saving and conserving, not on excess and waste. An economy based on waste is inherently and hopelessly violent, and war is its inevitable by-product. We need a peaceable economy.