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🧵 Thread (25 tweets)
“In fact, they are at least half right . . .” “They are right to say that a world of 9 billion people all seeking the status of middle-class consumers cannot be sustained by vernacular approaches.” https://t.co/ouHvPtTeVl https://t.co/uG22DKcfNn
“They are right to say that the human-scale, convivial approaches of those 1970s thinkers are never going to work if the world continues to formulate itself according to the demands of late capitalist industrialism”, which it is
“What do we value about the Amazon forest? Do people seek to protect it because they believe it is “pristine” and “pre-human”? Clearly not, since it’s inhabited and harvested by large numbers of tribal people, some of whom have been there for millennia.” https://t.co/8G87qpLxyY
“‘Nature’ is a resource for people, and always has been” “But that doesn’t preclude us understanding that it has a practical, cultural, emotional, and even spiritual value beyond that too, which is equally necessary for our well-being.” https://t.co/AV23aThpmi
“The neo-environmentalists, needless to say, have no time for this kind of fluff” “they cluster around a few key think tanks: then, the Institute of Economic Affairs, Cato Institute, Adam Smith Institute; now the Breakthrough Institute, Long Now Foundation, Copenhagen Consensus” https://t.co/zUm7qQXn9N
“‘Conservation will measure its achievement in large part by its relevance to people.’” “gone their naïve, romantic, and antiscientific belief that nonhuman life has any value beyond what we very modern humans can make use of.”
the author does not deny the neo-environmentalist’s post-wilderness premise there is no untouched to go back to. no biome to rewind to but he articulates the primary value of the wild: that in it lies an autonomy beyond ours
“instead of two people mutually co-participating in . . . a field that hasn’t fully resolved yet” it is assumed there is simply the thing to be controlled and the controller https://t.co/snsJPI6yoj
like the EAs, the neo-environmentalists feel the loss of wilderness but they replace that feeling with a plan for more control i daresay they emotionally bypass because to truly emotionally confront that place actually leaves you in a very bad place
—the same one that Ted Kaczynski found himself in. and the author one where they are almost confronted with the uselessness of their position both at the global scale and at the individual scale https://t.co/nUlRZ5hVou
to confront this emotionally you pass through helplessness, paralysis. resentment, revenge i spent my life avoiding those feelings and instead planning. i planned for a better future, and truly, i got it https://t.co/82t34Hi1s9
in my case, i avoided blaming the system, i avoided blaming my circumstances, i only considered what i might do from there, and made my way out of my home country to a boarding school in the US, and from there, even richer foundations
i never blamed or resented, and so i got along well with power. i did not steep in paralysis or helplessness, and so i continued to act it was a clinical, rational course of action that afforded me my current life but that could only take me so far
the authors most concrete suggestion is this: withdrawal of withdrawal he says: https://t.co/cPJbRSpJ9U
one may even dare to make the comparison between withdrawing and Focusing or to more ancient practices still of withdrawing from the fray or quiet contemplation https://t.co/jxmefPpnPU
withdrawal is the use of intuition to intuit next the way sometimes intuition is intuited through. sometimes it is through inaction https://t.co/EvuxwEN5uH https://t.co/Hooy3Tstso
more on withdrawal https://t.co/KM3pSmdxAX