Climate: A New Story by Charles Eisenstein

Author:Charles Eisenstein [Eisenstein, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781623172497
Published: 2018-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Once upon a time, science saw notions like the personhood of nature ridiculous. Although the science is changing (for example, a growing contingent of biologists is seriously considering the possibility of plant intelligence), to this day many would feel vulnerable to accusations of fuzzy-headedness if we said, “Who cares about the costs and benefits. Let’s save this forest just because we love it. Let’s save it because it is just so beautiful.”

That is not to say we should never cut down trees. It is to say that such an act should not be facilitated by an ideology that holds trees—and all life—as anything other than sacred. When we see the forests in terms of board feet or timber value, when we see the oceans in terms of tons of protein or dollars’ worth of fish catch, when we speak of nations as “economies” and people as “consumers”; when we see a place as a source of iron ore or bauxite or gold, when we see these minerals as nothing but minerals, randomly deposited and unrelated to the processes of life around them, when we see a forest or peat bog in terms of its carbon sequestration potential, then we are seeing Earth as a machine, not an organism, dead and not alive.

The reason our current system of material production kills the world is that it starts by seeing the world as dead. What then is there to love?

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