For the week of Sept 25 - Oct 1, 2002

The new politics: developers vs. ecologists

Commentary by DICK DORWORTH

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The past several years has seen an incongruous, even surreal tone to many political arguments throughout the world, as if the two sides are speaking different languages, looking at different worlds, breathing different air.

The old divisions between conservatives and liberals traditionally based on social orientation and economics still exists, and the core issues and the language used to debate them are well understood by most interested citizens. Roughly, at least in the United States, those who wish to privatize Social Security, deregulate public utilities, keep the Securities and Exchange Commission powerless to do its job, support the World Trade Organization and farm subsidies for agribusiness, and cut taxes for the wealthy and for large corporations are usually conservatives.

Those who believe in socialized medicine, affordable housing, a minimum wage from which one could actually live, public transportation, wilderness, more National Parks, ballot initiatives and voting reform are usually liberals; but today there is a far more significant tension in modern human affairs that has replaced the familiar liberal and conservative one.

This is the incompatibility between the developers of the world and the ecologists of the world. Part of the surreal tone to current political arguments is that the core issue is argued around at great length but seldom addressed in anything approaching the terms of reality.

The real terms of the new politics are not those between conservatives and liberals, but, rather, between those who view humanity as an integral part of the natural world and those who view the natural world as a resource to be plundered for man’s short term benefit. The new political divisions are between the environmentalist and ecologist and the extractive commercial industrial establishment.

Because the health of the planet has already been degraded beyond any acceptable limits by the cleverness of man’s technologies, the usual protocols of compromise do not and will not work. Cunning phrases like "wise use," "smart growth" and "sustainable development" may or may not be well intentioned and useful in a political dialogue, but, in any meaningful and long terms sense, they are oxymoronic and avoid the basic issue.

One way to sum up that basic issue is in this question: Is it man’s place to adapt to nature, or is it nature’s place to adapt to man? The new politics are aligning themselves along the various answers to that question, and to carry on political debate with the language of liberals and conservatives is to create images and concepts and (mis)understandings as surreal as, say, a Salvadore Dali painting.

It is evident that nature as we know it cannot sustain the burdens imposed upon it by man’s commercial-industrial exploitation. The air, the water and the soils of the earth are polluted and in many places saturated with toxic chemicals. We have no idea of the long term physical and psychic consequences of such contamination for our grandchildren or great-great grandchildren, nor do we know what the effects will be on the other creatures and biology of the planet.

Some seem not to care. Perhaps a variant in the new political dialogue will be between those who care and those who don’t.

Allan Fitzsimmons is a case in point, one of those who, apparently, don’t care. His environmental pronouncements on behalf of big business include the surreal and overpoweringly uninformed bit of inside information that ecosystems do not exist outside the human imagination. Unfortunately for the people and forests of America, the man for whom ecosystems are unreal is the George Bush’s choice to head the new wildfire prevention program which it calls the "Healthy Forest Initiative."

Fitzsimmons has been a free-market policy analyst and writer for libertarian and conservative think tanks for many years, specializing in applying "market principles to environmental problems," a central policy for those who would have nature adapt itself to man’s marketing strategies.

In one of his papers, entitled "Ecological Confusion among the Clergy," the new head of this administration’s Healthy Forest Initiative criticizes religious leaders who encourage their parishioners to worship God by protecting the environment. He took particular issue with Catholic bishops who in 1997 issued their own paper in support of protecting and restoring the Columbia River watershed.

Fitzsimmons wrote, "By urging the public to make changes in their lives to accommodate nonexistent ecosystem needs, one wonders if the bishops are beginning inadvertently to make an idol out of their own creation, what they call the Columbia Basin ecosystem."

The Catholic bishops did not create the Columbia Basin ecosystem, either in their heads or under their feet, but Fitzsimmons’ takes the language of the new politics into new realms of airhead dottiness with his Marie Antoinette like postulation that the biodiversity crisis religious leaders often point to is not a crisis at all.

There are between 250,000 and 750,000 species in the United States, and 1,201 are on the Fish and Wildlife Service's endangered and threatened list. Fitzsimmons writes, "If each of these species were to become extinct tomorrow, our total biological endowment would decline by less than 1 percent, which would be a disconcerting loss but would not constitute a crisis."

In the language of the new politics, a one percent loss of species would not constitute a crisis for the developers. For ecologists, the species in question and each of its members and any living entity that might be connected to them through an ecosystem or what that supposedly confused clergy refers to as the creation, it most definitely is a crisis.

In the language of the new politics, I say out with all those who make light of the environment and who would make a buck at the expense of a species. In the reality of the new politics, I say we need to vote out at the first voting opportunity all those who would plunder, pollute and poison the natural world on behalf of their corporate sponsors.

Two of the first to go should be George Bush and Larry Craig, developers to the core.

 

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