Amerika

All of us have grown up in a time dominated by the Leftist ideology and as a result, find it difficult to conceive of the world except on its terms. As part of that, we condition ourselves to believe that the obvious solutions we need are too extreme, and content ourselves with hybrid Leftist “solutions” that defeat our aims.

On a similar level, environmentalists struggle with this issue as well. Since the rise of the Deep Ecology movement, it has been clear that the only possible environmental salvation — from a fate worse than climate change, namely the destruction of our ecosystem and its replacement by a less functional one — is a redesign of society to incorporate living that does not have deleterious effects. Edward O. Wilson tells the plain truth on that one:

The Half-Earth solution does not mean dividing the planet into hemispheric halves or any other large pieces the size of continents or nation-states. Nor does it require changing ownership of any of the pieces, but instead only the stipulation that they be allowed to exist unharmed. It does, on the other hand, mean setting aside the largest reserves possible for nature, hence for the millions of other species still alive.

The key to saving one-half of the planet is the ecological footprint, defined as the amount of space required to meet all of the needs of an average person. It comprises the land used for habitation, fresh water, food production and delivery, personal transportation, communication, governance, other public functions, medical support, burial, and entertainment. In the same way the ecological footprint is scattered in pieces around the world, so are Earth’s surviving wildlands on the land and in the sea. The pieces range in size from the major desert and forest wildernesses to pockets of restored habitats as small as a few hectares.

His approach is similar to that of anyone who has had to balance a budget: if spending is excessive, cut it in half across the board. Instead of trying to target specific human activities, like washing your clothes in a dryer that is not energy saving rated, he suggests we should measure whole impact, and cut that. This in turn implies that humanity needs to have a discussion about its future, its population and the average load that people can exert on the environment. That in turn calls into question the design of our society itself.

Liberal democracy remains highly popular because it is a growth engine. It is essentially anarchy with a pretense of government that keeps business functional, since it requires institutions and courts, and for the early part of its reign liberal democracy seems like a good thing. As time passes, the hidden consequences of anarchy with grocery stores emerges: people, conditioned by the process of democratic thinking, become unrealistic and society goes crazy, then self-destructs.

For this reason, many ideas that were previously considered “too extreme” — like Wilson’s half earth — are now suddenly looking good. People make choices by comparing options, and if the default option is a further slide in Brazil 2.0 where your rape in the favelas will be televised, competing options which seemed too hardcore when we assumed liberal democracy was working now become viable. The same is true of other areas as well:

• Ethnic nationalism. Diversity makes groups compete and hate each other, and its “success” would be the creation of a new brown race just like the one in most third world nations across the globe. There is no scenario for actual success with diversity. It seems unthinkable that we could deport everyone who lacks an unbroken Western European background, but that is what we must do in Europe and the USA to preserve ourselves.
• Death of the welfare state. The bennies/freebies culture is very popular but it fails for two reasons. We cannot afford it, and it like democracy conditions our people to think like zombies. We cannot afford to, as happened in the last century, more than double our national budgets to pay for Great Society programs and their descendants; even worse, this massive increase in size of government makes a tyrannical Nanny State. Psychologically, welfare is also devastating. When reward comes before performance, performance becomes optional, and so everything declines in quality just as it did in the Soviet Union. In addition, the maze of rules and extra work required to pay for this makes jobs miserable and people into alienated little monsters.
• Inequality is good. Inequality is how nature motivates some to rise above the rest, and is also how we grant special roles to certain groups. Women, for example, are happiest when not expected to work and thrust directly into the role of managing a family, in a chaste and traditional environment where marriage is forever and so they are always cared for. Caste systems give each person a job they can do well and a position that, barring absolute ludicrous incompetence, will always be there for them.
• The death of the death of God. Atheism has failed, and many have noticed how it is a darling of the Left. That alone is reason to oppose it, as is the simple truth that non-Atheists seem happier. But even more, our understanding of the cosmos has changed. Our science has now reached the point where it is again, like the ancients, looking at patterns and information as a underlying structure to all reality, much like Plato did with his forms. Atheism died not of our ignorance, but its ignorance.
• Existential importance returns. For the past century or more, we have seen ourselves as means to the end of ideology. No more: people are realizing that on both practical and personal levels, this approach is unworkable. People need to enjoy life and relax more, and even get nice and bored so they can figure themselves out in that void, so that they are more functional. But more than that, they need to be able to believe that life itself is pleasurable and good, not a grim task of implementing illogical and unrealistic rules against the resistance of the world. Our people are miserable and make bad decisions as a result, and that must change.

We have lived in despair for too long because of the Leftist indocrination that the family of theories and methods beginning with equality was the only path. Now we see differently, and as if by the turning of the world, new possibilities emerge. We are able to look at recent history as error and recognize what we must do to fix it, even if that denies everything we have known.

Tags: deep ecology, environment, half earth