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https://theconversation.com/a-flourishing-ecology-and-a-healthy-economy-henry-david-thoreau-thought-you-couldnt-have-one-without-the-other-183336>
"Australians have just decided another “climate election”. What this meant,
basically, was that we had to choose between two difficult futures. The result
has yielded a new mandate for meaningful work on climate policy.
“Liberal democracies” are facing some of the deepest challenges they have yet
encountered in their relatively short histories. Historic carbon emissions from
the richest countries – especially the nation of my birth, the United States –
warm our Earth, making life difficult for us and for all things. Many species
have gone extinct. Many peoples have lost their homelands. Australia has
endured droughts and fires and floods.
In democracies like ours, in elections like the one we have just witnessed,
politicians often frame environmental questions as a competition between two
values: ecology and economy.
On the one hand, they tell us, they know that ecological flourishing is vital
to society. They do their best to contribute to sustainability. They nurture
green cities and promote environmental reform. On the other hand, they say, we
are also reliant on a flourishing economy. Without the economic system in which
we all work and exchange goods, we would not eat or find shelter.
They are not wrong. Both a flourishing ecology and a healthy economy are
required for liveable human society.
But in framing ecology and economy as competing values, and all environmental
questions as requiring trade-offs between them, contemporary politicians depart
from older, more holistic ways of thinking about the well-being of our
communities. Some of these ways of thinking do not position economy and ecology
as competitive.
In Australia, of course, some of those more holistic ways of thinking include
vital Indigenous knowledges about living connected to Country. In addition,
there are traditions of dissent from the competitive paradigm among some
environmental thinkers within European and American culture.
In my recent book
Thoreau’s Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the
Politics of Asceticism (2021), about the 19th-century American author of
Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), I argued that Henry David Thoreau’s
commitment to ecology was driven by a hope for a just economy. In this, he
offers a few key points of resistance to the contemporary vision of competition
between ecology and economy."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
