Making this bind even tighter is the fact that we’ve been systematically trained to identify more closely with industrial capitalism than with life itself, and to care more about industrial capitalism than about life itself. To convince yourself of this, simply contrast how much routine attention is paid to the height of the stock market versus that paid to the health of the natural world, and contrast the response by the government to the collapse of the economy versus that paid to the collapse of the natural world. Here’s a tangible example: a forty-year study of songbird populations recently revealed what we all know, which is that many are collapsing, as are so many populations of so many wild beings. Bobwhites, down more than 80 percent. Whippoorwills, down 70 percent. Boreal chickadees, 60 percent. Rufous hummingbirds, almost 60 percent. And the response in public by a mainstream environmentalist (Carol Browner, former head of the EPA, former head of Audubon, and current Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change) was to tell us this is not an emergency. I can guarantee that if the stock market or GNP declined 80 percent, we would constantly hear that this is an emergency. It’s a measure of the grotesque, irredeemable, and near-complete insanity of this culture that GNP is deemed more important than life, and more to the point, it’s a measure of how much most of us have been trained to identify more with the economy than with the real world.
So because we’ve been taught to identify more closely with the industrial economy than with life itself, the continued existence of the industrial economy must never be questioned, much less threatened. Further, since we must always be disallowed from realizing that the problem is the culture, not us (just as in any abusive situation all people must always be disallowed from realizing that the problems are caused by the abuser, not the victims), many of us make the very reasonable choice to “fight back” by decreasing our involvement in the industrial economy, by “living simply so that others may simply live.” So we eat less. We drive less. We don’t own a car. We take shorter showers. We live more and more simply. We feel more and more pure. The bottom line is that we are doing what we know we can control.
Living simply is a good thing to do. Sadly, it in no way stops this culture from killing the planet. In no way is it a sufficient response to this culture’s destructiveness. In no way is it a substitute for actively and effectively resisting actions and policies that harm our (and others’) habitat. That’s why I brought up activists living in Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa, and so on: in those circumstances we can easily see that personal simple living would have been insufficient to bring about social change. It can be much more difficult to see that when we don’t have the perspective history brings.
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