Environmentalism Critique
Environmentalism Critique
Evaluation: Environmentalism is an ideology that is spreading throughout the world. Promoting conservation of nature and its resources it has captured the attention of the political spectrum. In Wendell Berry’s “Getting Along with Nature”, he suggests that one of the great flaws in our human interaction with nature is that we as a culture tend to establish a kind of partisanship, those who ignorantly exploit nature and those who seek to separate from nature as a means of saving it from exploitation. William Ophuls feels that given the interaction of ecological, economic, and social factors, the disruption of ecosystems will have economic and social consequences. Also, fundamental changes in the economic and social subsystems will lead to changes in the ecosystem. In Dolbeare and Medcalf’s American Ideologies Today, they speak of the impact environmentalism has brought into the American life than any other set of beliefs. Both authors provide an insight into the distinctions ecology and the environment; they introduce different belief systems such as the Gaians, Ecofeminists, and the most noted Greens; and provide the different strategies and tactics enacted by the environmentalist movement.
Explanation: In Wendell Berry's "Getting Along with Nature" people cannot live apart from nature … And yet, people cannot live in nature without changing it’. He speaks of preserving wildness, if it is to survive, but this preservation may not be enough. If our cities cannot be preserved than wildness cannot be preserved either. Berry states that nature and human nature are interdependent. If humans want wildness to be possible they must make it possible. Berry emphasizes that we can be true to nature only by being true to human nature. However, the work by which good humans and natural possibilities are preserved is complex and difficult, and it probably cannot be accomplished by raw intelligence and information. Berry concludes by saying that to achieve continuity between the natural and the human, we have only two sources of instruction. The first being nature herself, and the second being our cultural tradition. Berry also states that no good thing is destroyed by goodness. However, good things are destroyed by wickedness. William Ophuls applied himself to the question whether our current political institutions, or the liberal democratic basis for our social order as a whole, are tenable in an age of ecological scarcity. In essence, he concluded that many of the basic principles of modern...