Listen now | What’s Plato got to do with the environmental crisis? Everything, according to Carl Safina, ecologist, author, fellow, and winner of the MacArthur genius grant. Carl discussds his new book which examines culture’s across the world, and their relationship to the planet. He argues that Plato’s concept of profanity engendered the Judeo-Christian monotheistic religions which view the world, and man, as sinful, in turn creating a Western culture which has no respect nor care for the natural world.
This sounds similar to the thoughts about Western philosophy and the Ecological Crisis expressed in Jeremy Lent's "The Patterning Instinct", although I found that book very hard to digest. This conversation was much easier to get your head round, I'll be looking out for Carl Safina's books.
Hi Rachel: You're a good interviewer, so congrats on that. Here's a quote from Morris Berman's "The Reenchantment of the World" (1981):
“… the forces that triumphed in the second half of the seventeenth century were those of bourgeois ideology and laissez-faire capitalism. Not only was the idea of living matter heresy to such groups, it was also economically inconvenient. … if nature is dead, there are no restraints on exploiting it for profit.”
This cuts to the heart of your conversation: many ideas and forces were in play at the time, but capitalism and its supporters won. Nature was therefore reduced to molecules and motion (Safina's "machinery"), and life was construed as non-relational. For my related comments, see chapter 8 in "Youth Ecological Revolution" at ecologicalsurvival.org. For a look at capitalism's extraordinary takeover of science as a whole in the 20th century, see appendix E.
In my view this line of thought is far more likely to lead to a workable survival strategy than discursive talk about cultures.
This sounds similar to the thoughts about Western philosophy and the Ecological Crisis expressed in Jeremy Lent's "The Patterning Instinct", although I found that book very hard to digest. This conversation was much easier to get your head round, I'll be looking out for Carl Safina's books.
Hi Rachel: You're a good interviewer, so congrats on that. Here's a quote from Morris Berman's "The Reenchantment of the World" (1981):
“… the forces that triumphed in the second half of the seventeenth century were those of bourgeois ideology and laissez-faire capitalism. Not only was the idea of living matter heresy to such groups, it was also economically inconvenient. … if nature is dead, there are no restraints on exploiting it for profit.”
This cuts to the heart of your conversation: many ideas and forces were in play at the time, but capitalism and its supporters won. Nature was therefore reduced to molecules and motion (Safina's "machinery"), and life was construed as non-relational. For my related comments, see chapter 8 in "Youth Ecological Revolution" at ecologicalsurvival.org. For a look at capitalism's extraordinary takeover of science as a whole in the 20th century, see appendix E.
In my view this line of thought is far more likely to lead to a workable survival strategy than discursive talk about cultures.