Page 53 - ECOlogic Book

says Gore, “is not so much our effect on the environment as our relationship
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with the environment.”

As long as we continue to think of ourselves as separate from the natural
world, we will continue this headlong rush toward environmental destruction.
We will not bring to the problem a “moral response.” When such a
response is deemed impossible, says Gore, “the image that briefly caused us
to consider responding becomes not just startling, but also painful. At that
point, we begin to react not to the image, but to the pain it now produces,
thus severing a more basic link in our relationship to the world: the link
between our senses and our emotions. Our eyes glaze over and our hearts
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close. We look but we don’t see. We hear but refuse to listen.”

But we cannot this easily disengage with our environs because, as Wendell
Berry says, “The world that environs us, that is around us, is also within us.
We are made of it; we eat, drink, and breathe it; it is bone of our bone and
flesh of our flesh. It is also a Creation, a holy mystery, made for and to
some extent by creatures, some but by no means all of whom are humans.
This world, this Creation, belongs in a limited sense to us . . . but we also
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belong to it, and it makes certain rightful claims upon us.”

“We are in fact conducting a massive, unprecedented – some say unethical –
experiment,” says Gore. “As we contemplate a choice between adapting to
the changes we are causing and preventing those changes, we should bear
in mind that our choice will bind not only ourselves, but our grandchildren
and their grandchildren as well. And of course, many of the changes, such a
predicted extinction of half the living creatures on earth, - would be
irreversible.”
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Can we afford to ignore so immense a responsibility, to the planet, to other
species, to ourselves, to our very souls? The price we pay is the loss of our
spiritual lives. $14.50 for a camo dog visor may sound like a cheap answer
to the problems of Ozone Depletion and Global Warming. The question is,
can we really afford the cost of so cheap an answer?

56 Op. Cit., Gore, P. 92.

57 Op. Cit. , Gore, P. 28.

58 Berry, Wendell, “Conservation is Good Work”, Amicus Journal, Winter,, 1992.

59 Op, Cit., Gore, P. 92.

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