I’m traveling with friends at this time. Some of our talks about worldviews. I decided to do a post today, with ideas excerpted from my still unpublished book about environmental worldviews. It a book first started by a wonderful colleague and mentor of mine, John Disinger, who passed away several years ago. I took over the book project and changed it to meet my passion about worldviews, rather than just an environmental account of environmental actions and policies. But the end idea is similar. How do we understand our behaviors and what causes the actions that have led to the destructive environmental, ecological, and socio-economic systems we currently think of as acceptably ‘normal’?
I talk a lot about worldviews, but my goal is the inevitable question – so what? Worldviews about the natural world and its resources have dominated our actions and policies for millennia. The last two centuries have been characterized by a rapid increase in resource use, and in more recent decades, expanded thinking in how those resources have needed conservation efforts to maintain their efficacy in a world of rising resource demand, increasing human population, and a dysfunctional economic system.
The environmental movement was an awakening to the dire consequences of the side-effects of modern industrial technology and economic growth on the quality of life around the entire planet. It is now that we again ask, how did we get to this point in human worldviews about the environment and where can we expect to go from here? Looking into the future is always fraught with problems since the systems we are trying to understand are understandable complex and increasing chaotic. Yet, we can view trends and consider what trajectories seem more likely.
At this current time in 2023, the projections of how the future may look, depending on one’s worldview, range from one extreme of impending multiple ecosystem failures and potential societal collapse to recognition that ecological problems exist, to one that humanity has plenty of time within this century to find solutions. There are various aspects of worldviews today that lend themselves to the interpretation of potential futures.
Thoughtful analyses of real-world environmental dilemmas ultimately lead us to evaluate our worldviews, whether-or-not they are well thought out or precisely defined. This does not necessarily mean that we will change them – we are a stubborn species when it comes to change. But evaluating our worldviews can help us to clarify them in our own minds, in our own discourse, and in our own relationships with our environments and with one another. It may also lead us to make the effort to understand the environmental worldviews of others, whether-or-not we are willing to accept them.
Ultimately, recognition and understanding of disparate environmental perspectives facilitates both individual and societal decision-making. What happens when those decisions must be made in a real world, where conflicting priorities abound? While worldviews can be rigid, they are not necessarily fixed. I find this is a critical point since there are many that consider worldviews as immutable. Our beliefs and value systems have been set by the conditioning of our cultural upbringing, but an awakening mind willing to go beyond the conditioning will find a world with myriad perspectives about how the natural world interacts with humanity. And the natural world does interact whether we admit it or not. Part of human hubris has always been to believe that because of technology we are now somehow outside of nature’s embrace.
Exposure to why others think differently can have a cathartic effect on an individual’s thinking. Aldo Leopold set out to influence his readers by leading them down a path filled with logic and revelation, in order to help them understand values towards the natural world that they may not have initially considered of high priority, if at all.
Public opinion, idealistic as it was in his time (1940s), and still is, has not been enough to create a clear, successful environmental or sustainability agenda within the many world governments. Political and polarized interest group rhetoric dominates the political stage with economics cited as a reason to act, or not act, on environmental issues. The verbal messages of the various governmental ‘environmental’ offices are clearly pro-environmental, but contradict econo-political positions that are anti-environmental, since they are framed through fiscal concerns.
But are these situations really that simple? Were the environmental issues involved reducible to black vs. white, right vs. wrong? In any case, environmental issues have truly never been a priority despite what the verbiage said. Other issues take political precedence in the calculus of governmental decision-making as awareness of environmental concerns are effectively inundated by demands for attention by other politically sensitive issues – balanced budgets, possibilities of tax cuts, presidential impeachment, a war on terror, and so on.
Local situations are comparatively closer at hand, seem more real, are likely to engender more direct interactions and confrontations among individuals, are subject to less political posturing, and are appreciably less likely to be lost in the noise given to more abstract priorities. Because “the environment” is where people live, they are particularly sensitive to, and concerned about, their at-hand environments. While noting that “They also have in common an appreciation of the importance of place, or at least a love of their particular place,” Historian Susan Flader comments; “Although different groups and individuals have varying attitudes on the importance of community versus individualism, public trust versus private rights, and the role and efficacy of federal governments, their shared commitment to localities is evidence of a powerful decentralist urge around the world today. This suggests that the place to work out disagreements and contested visions is, insofar as possible, around the table at the local level.”
As the saying goes, the devil is in the detail. The details of environmental issues are not trivial, nor are they always clear. Most certainly, as is usually the case, issues concerning the environment are open to multiple interpretations, as typically more than one perspective is involved. Mutually satisfactory resolutions, or at least mutually acceptable compromises, are more likely to be achieved around the table at local levels, rather than in the courts or in the media at any levels. More simply put, we are more likely to find ways to deal at some level of adequacy with local problems, because we have to live more closely with the environments affected and interact more frequently with the other people involved, including those who see things differently. Worldviews drive our beliefs and values and hence our priorities on what is most important. The biggest problem is thinking too simplistically, which seems to be the path humanity has been following.
But the fact that environmental issues are appreciably more complex, dauntingly more difficult to define, approach, and resolve at national and international/global levels does not excuse us from the need to identify and tackle them, and continue to pursue them until we reach viable solutions. One of transitions we will have to consider quickly, is a move away from symptomatic thinking where problems are solved one at a time in isolation of the system, to that of systemic thinking where, as Wendell Berry noted, we “solve for pattern” where we solve multiple problems simultaneously without creating new ones. In keeping with the theme of this narrative, we need to tackle the root problems borne out of our worldviews – overpopulation, over-consumption, fossil fuel use, linear and inefficient thinking, and a frontier mentality – and not the myriad symptoms created by them.
To Be Continued ……………
0 Comments