Or, what’s wrong with the simplicity movement

by Derrick Jensen

A FEW MONTHS AGO at a gathering of activist friends someone

asked, “If our world is really looking down the barrel of environ-

mental catastrophe, how do I live my life right now?”

The question stuck with me for a few reasons. The first is that

it’s the world, not our world. The notion that the world

belongs to us—instead of us belonging to the world—is a

good part of the problem.

The second is that this is pretty much the only question

that’s asked in mainstream media (and even among some

environmentalists) about the state of the world and our

response to it. The phrase “green living” brings up

7,250,000 Google hits, or more than Mick Jagger and Keith

Richards combined (or, to look at it another way, more

than a thousand times more than the crucial environmental

philosophers John A. Livingston and Neil Evernden combined).

If you click on the websites that come up, you find just

what you’d expect, stuff like “The Green Guide: Shop,

Save, Conserve,” “Personal Solutions for All of Us,”

and “Tissue Paper Guide for Consumers.”

The third and most important reason the question stuck

with me is that it’s precisely the wrong question.

By looking at how it’s the wrong question, we can

start looking for some of the right questions. This

is terribly important, because coming up with right

answers to wrong questions isn’t particularly helpful.

So, part of the problem is that “looking down the

barrel of environmental catastrophe” makes it seem

as though environmental catastrophe is the problem.

But it’s not. It’s a symptom—an effect, not a cause.

Think about global warming and attempts to “solve”

or “stop” or “mitigate” it. Global warming (or

global climate catastrophe, as some rightly call

it), as terrifying as it is, isn’t first and

foremost a threat. It’s a consequence. I’m not

saying pikas aren’t going extinct, or the ice

caps aren’t melting, or weather patterns aren’t

changing, but to blame global warming for those

disasters is like blaming the lead projectile

for the death of someone who got shot. I’m also

not saying we shouldn’t work to solve, stop,

or mitigate global climate catastrophe; I’m

merely saying we’ll have a better chance of

succeeding if we recognize it as a predictable

(at this point) result of burning oil and gas,

of deforestation, of dam construction, of industrial agriculture,

and so on. The real threat is all of these.

Read the rest at http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4697/

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