UPDATE: Listen to the audio recording of this event.
Has environmentalism lost its way? What does sustainability really have to do with a healthy planet? Please plan to join a dialogue with Paul Kingsnorth, author of “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist” in the January/February 2012 issue of Orion, on January 18th, at 4 p.m. Eastern, 1 p.m. Pacific.
According to Kingsnorth, environmentalism has effectively died: it’s not only been absorbed by the political left, which has diluted its ecocentric message; it’s also become enamored with “sustainable economics,” which, according to Kingsnorth, amounts to business-as-usual without the carbon. Has the movement’s original deep connection to nature been lost? Are green projects doing more harm than good? Kingsnorth will be joined by authors Lierre Keith and David Abram to discuss and expand on these thoughts during this live web event. This event is free and open to all, but registration is required—please register here.
Orion hosts live web events every month. Sign up here to be alerted by e-mail when a new one is announced.
Comments
Hedgehogs have many quills; does the environmental movement require one single focus? Maybe or even probably yes: this is a genuine enquiry, not a rhetorical question.
I was arrested along with about 200 others at Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canada for our Tar Sands Action in September.
What pushed me over the barricade was First Nations first-hand stories there of an enviro-nightmare I can hardly face on YouTube. I went over for them-but because of the corporate curse that had befallen their land. Was I a good environmentalist or a flawed hybrid? Or neither?
Perhaps the human community is about to confront the worst of both worlds: the results of a human population explosion and a human population crash. The leviathan-like size of the human population in our time puts Earth’s finite resources and its frangible environs at risk because the exploding human population worldwide dissipates resources and pollutes the environment faster than the Earth can replenish itself for human benefit. As a consequence of the population explosion, many too many human beings are invited to engage in rapacious per capita consumption and unconscionable individual hoarding of Earth’s body, and recklessly degrading its ecology with pollutants. Soon to become patently unsustainable overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities of the human species appear to be fast approaching a point in human history when the monstrous size of the human population so overspreads the Earth that humankind ends up being the precipitant of an unimaginable sort of global ecological wreckage and a human population crash?