Sierra Club Told To Name ELF, ALF Terrorists

Can we “Protect the Planet”? by John Kurmann

As you may have already noticed, there are
many shades of green in the green movement.
Most people would probably call me a green
after they got to know me, and I suppose
that’s fair, but I definitely don’t think I’m
your average green. Why am I different?
Because I proceed on the basis of different
assumptions. Before I give you a peek at
mine, though, let me demonstrate the
assumptions I detect underlying the vision of
most greens.

Some organizations expose their assumptions
right up front, in their names, which makes
my job here easy. The Natural Resources
Defense Council , Environmental Defense  and
Defenders of Wildlife  are a few prominent
examples.

With others, I only have to look a little
deeper: The World Wildlife Fund  seeks “to
protect nature and the biological diversity
that we all need to survive.” The National
Wildlife Federation of the U.S.A.  strives
“to protect wildlife, wild places, and the
environment.” The World Resources Institute
wants “to move human society to live in ways
that protect Earth’s environment and its
capacity to provide for the needs and
aspirations of current and future
generations.” Our own Sierra Club , the
largest green organization in the United
States (with a branch in Canada, too, of
course), exhorts us to “explore, enjoy and
protect the planet” and says it’s “protecting
the environment…for our families, for our
future.” Earth First!  insists on “no
compromise in defense of Mother Earth” and
the Earth Liberation Front  exists “to take
direct action in defense of the earth.”

Despite some distinct differences in wording,
style and tactics among these organizations,
I trust you’ve noticed the common theme here.
Even with organizations operating under
ambiguous names, I don’t generally have to
look far to find the rhetoric of “protect”
and “defend.”

If you truly want to understand the
assumptions an organization runs on, though,
you need only look at their actions, which
can always be trusted to demonstrate more
accurately than their words what their
assumptions are. This is especially the case
with the assumptions that lie so deep folks
don’t think of them as assumptions at all but
rather as self-evident truths. Fortunately,
in the cases of the cited organizations,
their words are consonant with their actions.

For simplicity’s sake, because this is the
Ozark Sierran, and because I’m a member of
this Club, I’m going to focus on the wording
it uses. The exhortation to “protect the
planet” sums up quite nicely the assumptions
I want to address. What does it mean to say
one’s goal is to “protect the planet”? Well,
first, it obviously means that the person or
group making this declaration perceives the
planet to be under some sort of attack. Why
else would one commit to protecting it?

But where is this besieged planet? The
phrasing suggests that the implicit “we” will
protect the planet as something separate from
us. Can anyone tell me how to distinguish
where the planet ends and we begin, though?
Every tool I use is made of planet-stuff,
every morsel of food and drop of water I
sustain myself with is planet-stuff, and
every bit of waste I produce continues to
cycle through the regenerative life processes
of the planet. It’s fundamentally true that I
am made of planet-stuff, too, and I see no
reason to think you're any different.
Consequently, if the planet is under attack,
then we are under attack as part of it.

But under attack by whom? Clearly, anyone
making such a declaration means under attack
by someone else. After all, you don’t set out
to protect anyone or anything from your own
attack on it, you set out to protect it from
the attacks of some other(s). If you found
out your own attacks were the source of the
damage, you wouldn’t need to figure out how
to protect the planet from yourself, you’d
need to figure out how to stop attacking it.

So, who is it that’s attacking the planet?
Obviously we’re not talking about an alien
invasion here, with spaceships hovering
ominously over our cities, rayguns flashing,
and hideous creatures with big, crunchy teeth
snarfing our entrails. No, this perceived
“enemy” is obviously much closer to home than
that.

Lots of people would probably point to
corporations as the attackers, given the
common misconception that our present
ecological crisis grew out of the industrial
revolution, but what is a corporation? It’s a
legal construct and nothing more. It has no
true life of its own. It’s an organization
made up of people, and people make the
decisions that produce its actions.

Of course, it’s also true that, as a legal
entity, a corporation has an existence that
transcends any individual employee,
executive, boardmember or stockholder. Well,
then, maybe the enemy is to be found among
the drafters of the laws that govern
corporate behavior – except they’re people,
too (yes, even the politicians). The
legislators that passed the laws governing
corporate behavior, the presidents and
governors that signed the laws, and the
judges that interpreted the laws to give
corporations the legal status of persons – we
find people everywhere we look for enemies.

But we're people, and I already pointed out
that it doesn't make much sense to set out to
protect the planet from ourselves. So, then,
it must be other people that environmental
groups are determined to protect the planet
from. You know, selfish people, greedy
people, careless people – those kinds of
people. Except I have been known to exhibit
behavior that could be described as selfish,
greedy, and careless at times, too, and I'm a
Sierra Club member.

And while I wish I could honestly say that I
live a sustainable lifestyle – a lifestyle
that doesn’t appear to contribute to the
progressive degradation of the life support
systems that sustain me – I’d be a liar if I
did. Am I an aberration among Sierra Club
members in this regard? With all due respect
(and that’s considerable), I doubt it.

Does it make any sense to imagine ourselves
the protectors of the planet when we’re
taking part in the destruction? I don't think
so. Degrees of destructiveness certainly vary
from person to person, but most – maybe all –
Sierra Club members are living unsustainably.
I have a feeling we’d get a much warmer
reception from the more destructive folks if
we stopped casting ourselves as the good guys
who are brave and altruistic enough to
protect the planet from the bad guys – from
them.

If we really want to create a world we’d like
to live as part of, I think we’d be wise to
stop dogging other people and start
addressing these questions: Why are so many
people destructive? Why are some people more
destructive than others?

I could write a book exploring the various
permutations of those questions, but I’m
going to have to stick with what I feel is
the most important one here: are people
destructive to the world simply because it’s
human nature to be destructive to the world?
Most people in industrialized countries seem
to think so, and consequently that assumption
also seems to me to underlie the vast
majority of the green movement’s efforts to
do something about the damage being done. I
could be mistaken, but what other explanation
is there for the fact that most groups are
focused on forcing people to change? Some
groups do this primarily through direct
action, but the vast majority focus on
lobbying the government to legislate and
regulate behavior. If these groups believed
people truly want to live sustainably, and
are able to live sustainably by their own
choices, wouldn’t they focus on helping
people to do that rather than relying on the
blunt instrument of coercion? Change comes
much more quickly and is far more effective
when people want it than when they’re pushed
into it kicking and screaming.

Does the available evidence support the
assumption that people are destructive to the
world by their nature? I think not. The first
species of the genus Homo (which includes all
the human species that have ever existed) is
thought to have emerged in the community of
life on the order of 3 million years ago –
and yet the world went on doing just fine.
Our own subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens,
emerged in the community of life more than a
hundred thousand years ago – and yet the
world went on doing just fine after that,
too.

Which is not to say that nothing changed,
for, of course, things did change. The
emergence of every new species (or
subspecies) produces ripple effects
throughout the community, and Homo sapiens
sapiens was no exception. Already existing
species are inevitably affected as the new
species “makes room” for its own existence
and, in some instances, for some species, the
ultimate effect is extinction. In fact, some
scientists feel the evidence indicates that
ancient humans did cause the extinctions of
other species as they spread around the
world.

Whether this hypothesis is correct or not,
the important point to remember is that, even
if people did cause those extinctions, they
were limited events. People moved into a new
area, behaved in such a way that one or more
extinctions resulted, and then found a way to
live that worked for that part of the world
(or died out themselves). They didn’t
practice a way of life that caused more and
more extinctions from one year to the next,
eventually threatening the biological
diversity and stability of the community of
life – which is what we’re doing.

Now, if people of our species have lived for
more than a hundred thousand years without
destroying the world, how can anyone
reasonably claim that people are destructive
to the world by their very nature?

Moreover, there are still people – the people
of the remaining tribal cultures – living
today in ways that don’t destroy the world.
They’re generally referred to by such loaded
terms as “primitives,” but they’re just as
modern in their own ways as we are in ours.
They’re also as fully human as we are, and
they don’t live in a way that destroys the
world. Since we’re biologically the same
species, what is the difference between us?

It only takes one word to answer that
question: culture. There’s much more detail
that could be added, but what it comes down
to is that our civilized culture is founded
on growth without limit and tribal cultures
are not.

Once you recognize that human nature is not
the source of our troubles here and our
civilized culture is, the foolishness of
trying to protect the planet becomes clear.
We don’t need to protect the planet – we need
to transform our culture from our worldview
out. We may choose to do some protecting
along the way, but changing minds must be our
focus if we’re to have any hope of
succeeding.

As long as we cling to a mindset that assumes
the best we can hope for is to protect the
planet, we’re certain to fail because we
won’t have changed the way the people of our
culture think. With their minds unchanged,
people will continue to make new choices that
destroy the world, and we’ll spend our lives
racing around trying to repair the damage of
their old choices. We’ll also find ourselves
with ever-less of the wild places we love to
explore and enjoy – and that is exactly what
we’ve seen happen over the last 40 years or
so of the modern green movement. To recycle
an old saying, only the insane keep doing the
same thing over and over while expecting a
different result every time.

We cannot protect the planet – or the
environment, or nature, or biodiversity
either. We also cannot defend earth, or
wildlife, or wild places – not even natural
resources. Fortunately, we don’t need to.

You can reach John at dsdnt [at] mshadow.com.