Losing Victories Already Won?

A different public, existing in those times beyond the scope of my nature or my public, though perhaps not beyond my scope of natures or publics, lay in the 1950s and the inception of environmentalism as an anti movement. This distinction, this separation from my subject does not add grace to mine or any other historical project, yet this distance can hardly be a defect. For it is as the gaze of a lover’s longing, that science and its public’s infatuation with distance must be described; it is hard to trace a shape here, a meandering flow of consequences stretching to the horizon, no matter how distant the horizon, yet consequences felt ever more personally, ever more apparent on each and every doorstep. It is a connectedness of such depth and richness as cannot be fathomed, and so it is viewed from afar with scope and speculation, and it is pined after by intellect and passion.

And it is ignored, this connectedness, it is turned away from whenever we choose to greet distance with distance only. No child consciously turns away from recognized benefice. No adult willingly admits to turning away from recognized benefice.[1] As the child’s wisdom is pleasant – inclination to that which is life giving and wellness improving (despite the occasional over indulgence) – so the adult’s neglect and denial is difficult. Through joyous song and immersion to avoidant struggle and incapacity; or, should you choose such distinctions, from romantic to industrial, from mystic to enlightened, and so forth even up to my own inescapable unknown, environmentalism has shifted with the collective unconscious, the collective representations, the categories of the imagination.

There have been environmental constants, of course. To these constants we owe the establishment of the movement. But it is not and, so I dearly hope, nor will it become, a constant of the environmental movement, this continuous response to malpractice, this effort-filled chasing of perpetrators of the cause. I am referring to the assumptive anti of environmentalism, as I perceive it at least since the publication of Carson’s Silent Spring. Why does this exhausting effort to battle the establishment appeal to even the most complacent of self-proclaimed environmentalists?[2] Has the self-loathed public, battling itself, neglected to identify and utilize solutions already proposed by the movement, if only to stay engaged in the battle? Are we losing victories already won?

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[1] Even sacrifice, in those adults with sacrificial tendencies, is performed in consideration of a greater benefice.

[2] In such a case, granted, the battle itself is a very complacent and perhaps even shallow manifestation.