Environmentalism or Individualism? (Part 4: Philosophic Conflict)
By Robert Bidinotto -- August 14, 2024
Ed. Note: This is Part 4 of a six-part series on the ideology of environmentalism and its incompatibility with the foundational individualist philosophy of the United States. Parts 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here.
“The fundamental concern of environmentalists is about the logical incompatibility of the values underlying a modern, technological, capitalist society, and the values embodied in the environmentalists’ image of Eden.”
Why, despite such transparent manipulations of fact and science, and their overt indifference to economics, have environmentalists been winning the battle for the hearts and minds of ordinary people?
Because they’ve never based their appeals primarily on facts, statistics, science, or economics. They rest their case ultimately on ethical and philosophical grounds. Both their appeal and their shamelessness arise from the widespread belief that they are idealists: that they are champions of the Good against the forces of Evil that are sullying and raping a once-virginal planet.
Reading environmentalist literature or listening to the movement’s founders and leaders, one is always struck by the style of the language: a hybrid of the spiritual, the self-righteous, the aesthetic, and the apocalyptic. This religiosity is not surprising, given the movement’s historic roots in Greek and Judeo-Christian mythology, and in the pantheism and transcendentalism of the movement’s nineteenth-century intellectual forerunners. Nor does their basic premise—the allegedly “intrinsic value” of untouched nature—allow much wiggle room for compromise. After all, if a virginal planet is to be our moral and aesthetic ideal, just how much planet-raping by Man are we going to allow?
https://www.masterresource.org/deep-ecology/environmentalism-or-individualism-4/
