11.22.08
Darwinism vs environmentalism
How the Rich Are Destroying the Earth
There is an emergency. In less than a decade we will have to change course, but there are a few major obstacles blocking the way.
One thing that might help is to create a postdarwinian left. It seems impossible for any sector of the liberal/left intelligentsia to grasp the ideological character of Darwinism, and the way it deviates completely from sound environmental knowledge.
Darwinian thinking, matched with fallacious economic models, creates a reductionist view of the environment, which leads implicitly to its exploitation. Nature in is global planetary action is not understood by reductionist science, and it is no accident that a culture of belief based on Darwinism and ‘survival of the fittest’ logic should also be seeing massive species extinctions.
A century of Darwinists have gotten it wrong.
As the system goes into convulsions, it is time Darwinism went with it.
This hiatus is at the heart of political life. The left will be reborn by uniting the causes of inequality and the environment — or, unfit, it will disappear in the general disorder that will sweep it and everything else away. And yet, let us be optimistic. Optimistic, because there are ever more of us who understand — unlike all the conservatives — the historical novelty of the situation: we are living out a new, never-seen-before phase of the human species’ history, the moment when, having conquered the Earth and reached its limits, humanity must rethink its relationship to nature, to space, to its destiny.