Chapter Thirty-Four:
The Ecorealist Manifesto

The second section considered environmental problems from the perspective of women and men alive today: a short-term perspective, yet one that can be adjusted to incorporate the wisdom embodied in eons of natural transitions.

The final section will suggest how the long-term purview of nature might be combined with the short-term insights of genus Homo in ways that allow people, machines, and nature to learn to work together for each other's mutual benefit.

Before broaching that final topic let's summarize the principles of a new view of ecological thought, the new view called ecorealism. The founding concept of ecorealism is this: Logic, not sentiment, best serves the interests of nature.

If the worthy inclinations of environmentalism are to be transformed from an ephemeral late-twentieth-century political fashion to a lasting component of human thought, the ecological impulse must become grounded in rationality. The straightforward, rational case for the environment will prove more durable than the fiercest doomsday emotion. Love nature? Learn science and speak logic. Many lesser creatures will thank you.

And now some principles of ecorealism:

RATIONALISM

• If ecological rationalism sometimes shows that environmental problems are not as bad as expected, that means warnings will be all the more persuasive when genuine problems are found.

• Graduation from overstatement will make the environmental movement stronger, not weaker.

• The worst thing the environmental movement could become is another absentminded interest group stumbling along toward preconceived ends regardless of what the evidence suggests.

• Skeptical debate is good for the environmental movement. The public need not to be brainwashed into believing in ecological protection, since a clean environment is in everyone's interest. Thus the environmental movement must learn to entertain skeptical debate in a reasoned manner or will discredit itself, as all close-minded political movements eventually discredit themselves.

• Market forces and cost-benefit thinking aren't perfect but generally will be good for the environment. This is so if only because society may be able to afford several cost-effective conservation initiatives for the price of one poorly conceived program.

• Optimism not only flows from a reasoned reading of natural history, it will be an effective political tool.

• In the Western world the Age of Pollution is nearly over. Almost every pollution issue will be solved within the lifetimes of readers of this book.

• In the West many forms of pollution have begun to decline in the very period that environmental doctrine has declared them growing worse.

• Most recoveries from pollution will happen faster than even optimists project.

• Weapons aside, technology is not growing more dangerous and wasteful. It grows cleaner and more resource-efficient.

• Clean technology will be the successor to high technology. Most brute-force systems of material production will be supplanted by production based mainly on knowledge. Nature's creatures make extremely sophisticated "products" with hardly any input of energy or resources. People will learn to do the same.

• Sometimes approximated environmental rules are good ideas even if the result is a less than perfect cleanup. Better to realize 90 percent of an ecological restoration fast than to spend decades conducting lawsuits on how to achieve 100 percent.

• As positive as trends are in the First World, they are negative in the Third. One reason the West must shake off instant doomsday thinking about the United States and Western Europe is so that resources can be diverted to ecological protection in the developing world.

• It is pointless for men and women to debate what the "correct" reality for nature might have been before people arrived on the scene. There has never been and can never be any fixed, correct environmental reality. There are only moments on the Earth, moments that may be good or bad.

• Every environment and habitat comes into existence fated to end. This is not sad. It should inspire women and men to seek to prolong moments on the Earth, through conservation.

• All environmental errors are reversible save one: extinction. Therefore the prevention of extinctions is a priority.

• Though humanity may today be a cause of species extinction, in a very short time by nature's standards it can become an agent for species preservation.

  
  

• People may not sit above animals and plants in any metaphysical sense, but clearly are superior in their placement in the natural order. Decent material conditions must be provided for all of the former before there can be long-term assurance of protection for the latter.

• Either humanity was created by a higher power, in which case it is absurd for environmental dogma to consider the human role in nature to be bad; or humanity rose to its position through purely natural processes, in which case it is absurd for environmental dogma to consider the human role in nature to be bad.

• However the deed was done, once genus Homo was called forth into being, the wholly spontaneous ordering of the environment ended. And unless there is an extinction of intellect, wholly spontaneous nature will never return. Nature is not diminished by this. A fairly straightforward reading of natural history suggests that evolution spent 3.8 billion years working assiduously to bring about the demise of the wholly spontaneous order, via the creation of intellect.

• In principle the human population is no enemy of nature. Someday that population may be many times larger than at present, without ecological harm. But the world of the present knows more people than current social institutions and technical knowledge can support at an adequate material standard. Thus short-term global population stabilization is desperately required, though the prospect of dramatic long-term expansion of the human population should not be discounted.

  
  

• Nature is not ending, nor is human damage to the environment "unprecedented." Nature has repelled forces of a magnitude many times greater than the worst human malfeasance.

• Nature is not ponderously slow. It's just old. Old and slow are quite different concepts. That the living world can adjust with surprising alacrity is the reason nature has been able to get old. Most natural recoveries from ecological duress happen with amazing speed.

• Significant human tampering with the environment has been in progress for at least ten millennia and perhaps longer. If nature has been interacting with genus Homo for thousands of years, then the living things that made it to the present day may be ones whose genetic treasury renders them best suited to resist human mischief. This does not insure any creature will continue to survive any clash with humankind. It does make survival more likely than doomsday orthodoxy asserts.

• If nature's adjustment to the human presence began thousands of years ago, perhaps it will soon be complete. Far from reeling helplessly before a human onslaught, nature may be on the verge of reasserting itself.

• Nature still rules much more of the Earth than does genus Homo. To the statistical majority of nature's creatures the arrival of men and women goes unnoticed.

• To people the distinction between artificial and natural means a great deal. To nature it means nothing at all.

• The fundamental force of nature is not amoral struggle between hunter and hunted. Most living things center their existence on cooperation and coexistence, the sort of behavior women and men should emulate. This is one reason nature will soon be viewed again in the way it was by the thinkers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment -- as a trove of wisdom and an exemplar for society.

  
  

• Nature, limited by spontaneous interactions among elements randomly disturbed, may have an upper-bound limit on its potential to foster life and to evolve. Yet nature appears to enjoy fostering life and evolving. So perhaps nature hoped to acquire new sets of abilities, such as action by design.

• Therefore maybe nature needs us.