🚀 go-pugleaf

Robert Parson writes:

> He [Martin Lewis] describes five varieties [of radical environmentalist]:
>
>1.  Antihumanist eco-anarchists (most "deep ecologists")
>
>2. Primitivists  (e.g. Dave Foreman)
>
>3. Humanist eco-anarchists  (e.g. Murray Bookchin)
>
>4. ecomarxists (mostly academics)
>
>5. radical ecofeminists (e.g. Carolyn Merchant)

...
>
> He implicitly defines a sixth category of
> "eclectics" who combine, in different ways, radical and moderate sentiments. 
> Paul Ehrlich, Barry Commoner, and Herman Daly fall into this group. 

Far and away the most interesting views have been relegated to the grab-bag of
eclecticism in this typology, suggesting that it is a quite superficial set
of "varieties".

One major element which *ought* to be present in any "radical" environmentalism
that deserves the name is an unwillingness to impose a prior humanistically
-based historical political position on the natural world. While anarchism 
is a possible outcome of that unwillingness, it is, you might say, the 
"no-brainer" outcome.

Where should we classify someone who insists on both justice towards humans
-- social and economic justice -- and justice towards the natural world, the
latter defined as allowing it room and resources enough to flourish? [Not so
very different from justice for humans, at that.] 

Work backwards from those desiderata to arrive at a political system. It won't
be anarchy. It will be a system which is both globally and bioregionally 
organized around life in healthy ecosystems. It will limit the number of humans
and their total resource consumption to what the biosphere can tolerate in 
ecological good health. It will insist that the resource for each person be 
sufficient for a human life to prosper, but not necessarily that all humans 
have exactly the same share of resources. Beyond that it will allow, even 
encourage, much local variation and experimentation, subject only to the basic
constraints of justice -- social, economic and ecological.

It will have sufficient global enforcement capability to prevent violent 
regional conflicts, and to prevent severe or chronic damage to ecosystems for 
short-sighted gains. It will have enough technology to do all of the above and
to restore the health of human-damaged ecosystems where that is possible,
but it will not seek technological change for its own sake as avidly as we
do -- changes will be vetted much more closely for possible harm (especially
so for new *substances* or new *organisms*). It will not in any sense be an
*exponentiating* society, but one which is constantly making adaptive 
adjustments to its equilibrium with the biosphere. Changes will tend to happen
primarily when they contribute to that end. Like a adult organism, it will
seek homeostasis and the maintenance of life, but not ceaseless growth, except
of things that increase resource consumption very little per their increase,
e.g. knowledge.

Now, is this unclassifiable "eclecticism" or is just what we need to thrive as
diverse humans in a thriving, diverse natural world? It doesn't fit any one of 
the categories 1) - 5) but contains elements from each of them. Maybe we had
better name this position so that we can point out how 1) - 5) take small
parts of *it* to unneccessary or unworkable extremes.

I'd call it ecological common sense, myself. 

------------
Alan McGowen