A New Age of Environmentalism
I have a tenuous relationship with our environment. I love it for its beauty and functional aesthetics; that is, I can overlay my own objectives onto its curves and ditches and valleys and hills as if the land were made for one such action. A thin creek crossing means that I can hop over it and continue my walk. A cliff means I need to go another way. There are very few times that I blame our environment for being inhospitable to a walk. If I am vehemently against the application of “what is, is” to a world that is human, all-too-human, I do say of our environment: que sera, sera.
And that is where my relationship with our environment nearly ends. I have little to no passion for identifying its rocks, plants, and animals, they are progressive forms of our environment’s expression—along with ourselves of course, but even a bird approaches the world with a bit of solipsism. I appreciate when other, more capable biologists can identify and explain the functionings of the life among us—especially if a plant life is edible or a species is rare! But I realize that this abstraction of our environment, this labelling of each and every moving and growing piece is a social interaction: without others to share these labels with, birders and dendrologists have a private language for a world that does not care what it is called, nor needs to know what it does so instinctually.
Alone, my relationship with our environment has no private language, for it does not speak. It is a beautiful being, with many shapes and sizes moving about, but does not need my validation. That would be like an ant complimenting the front lawn for its accomplishments. I believe that people attempt communication with the environment for the naïve thought that if and when it speaks, it would be finally worth all this time and effort of protection.
However, in its several billion history of non-communication, our environment can still emit truths for us to discover, with the most pertinent being: it is not predicated on our existence.
This truth must be what the biologists and physicists and naturalists and spiritualists lose when they start labelling pieces of our environment. With each new label and innovative description of our reality, they forget that these labels and concepts won’t disappear with us, they’ll just exist, incommunicable until other species arrive, wanting to communicate with their environment. The reality is that we are not labelling and conceptualizing for the benefit and protection of our environment, but for the benefit of ourselves.
This must be heard for the next generation of environmentalists, who have been besieged by myths of our relationship with our environment from spiritualists and naturalists, which also resulted in a distortion of science’s role in our lives. The environmentalists of yesterday believed that we are disconnected from our environment, that the living world was like an unprotected infant perpetually abused by our evil species. Paradoxically, these environmentalists believed that Latin names and dissections of our environment brought us closer than before. But here are two abstractions of our species’ relationship with our environment, one constructed to instill guilt and suspicion with our environment and the other to develop a one-sided relationship, where we ask the incommunicable world to appreciate what we have done for it. On both sides, our environment says nothing, for it is inconsequential to the matters of the material world.
I do not want to diminish the achievements of yesterday’s environmentalists, but to re-contextualize their primary objective; our guilt and passions were not developed out of a love for “the environment”, but out of a respect for ourselves and in extension, our human-livable environment. We are guilty for having treated ourselves so poorly the past few millennia, for having destroyed our home. We want to connect with our home, so we try to understand how it works so we can pass that knowledge on to future generations to build on that knowledge and treat our home with care more based in reality. But yesterday’s environmentalists thought that they were against “People”; little did yesterday’s environmentalists know that they were attempting to find words to be the most respectful to them.