Page 11 - ECOlogic Book

inevitable by-product of our modern industrial civilization, dominated by
capitalist production and consumption and serviced and protected by various
institutions of government, federal to local.”

Like Prometheus, we believe we are still free to choose actions that are in
disharmony with the natural world. But we no longer have that choice. Bill
McKibbon tells us that if we do not cut back immediately on our use of fossil
fuels, we will not be free to choose any kind of future. Kirk Sale goes
further, stating that a new vocabulary and new modes of thought are
necessary for a true change of consciousness. And a true change of
consciousness is what is needed. “We need, for example,” he says, “to think
of recycling centers not as the answer to our waste problems, but as a
confession that the system of packaging and production in this society is out
of control.” Likewise, our addiction to fossil fuel-powered individual
transportation and the need to make these products and their manufacture
more environmentally friendly is a confession that the American ingenuity
from our proud past has failed us. Not only do we need a rebirth of the fires
of our deeper creativity to meet the coming challenges, we need to start
from scratch with an entirely new vision of what a sustainable society might
be like. “Nothing less than a drastic overhaul of this civilization and an
abandonment of its ingrained gods – progress, growth, exploitation,
technology, materialism, anthropocentricity, and power – will do anything
substantial to halt our path to environmental destruction . . .”, says Sale.

It is not an either/or situation – “either we take care of the environment or
we take care of the economy,” Sale continues, “We have reached the point
where ecological abuse is no longer profitable.” Sustainability is the new
bottom line. The politics of the future will not be growth vs. green. If you
want to grow, you have to be green. It’s not a question of stasis or
dynamism. Continuing down this road will surely bring about paralysis as
the natural world shuts down and refuses to support our hubris any more.
The successful entrepreneur will be the most alert ecologist; the one who
makes deep changes in the way things are done at the beginning of the
consumer cycle. Those who do not will find exploitation, conscious or
unconscious, too expensive. The new bottom line will still be profits, but it
will become widely recognized that environmental exploitation is no longer
profitable.

“Continued progress,” says Libby Harris, director of the Eastern Michigan
Environmental Action Council, “will be possible only to the degree that we
are willing to reexamine and change the relationship of our lives and
economic activities to the natural world.”

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