2.24.2008

Environmentalism

I don't much trust people whose idea of "the environment" is land designed by Olmstead:
Environmentalism is a left-wing politics of fear because it rests on the deeply fearful idea that only an overweening threat to our physical and collective health can inspire us to “transcendence.” Threats to the very conditions of life, rather than social controversies over power and distribution, come to motivate political engagement – an engagement that presumes setting to one side inequality and unfreedom as the central categories of political contestation. As Slavoj Zizek says, “popular imagination is persecuted by the visions of the forthcoming 'breakdown of nature' . . . it seems easier to imagine the 'end of the world' than a far more modest change in the mode of production.” In the Bush years we have seen that security is an unstable foundation for institutions – the separation of powers, constitutionalism, federalism, civil society – that liberals have recently sought to rehabilitate. It is a principle that can only constrain and limit politics, not renew our political imagination. No social change is possible without a great deal of uncertainty, and even the production of insecurity. No truly democratic choice comes with a guarantee of success, and always produces unintended outcomes. Democracy must embrace an experimental attitude toward society. While it may seem odd to take aim at environmentalism while the uglier war on terror still presides, it is because we wish to move past the politics of fear that we should subject all the alternatives to rigorous scrutiny. As critics of the war on terror struggle to find a new legitimating principle, it appears they face a risk of renovating and reviving the same obsession with security and survival.

Sigh...