Humans are remarkably adaptable. Not in a physical sense but in a behavioral sense. Cultural evolution long ago outstripped physical evolution as the primary means of adaptation for humans. They don't reinvent themselves out of whole cloth so much as noodle a bit at the margins - it's evolution not revolution - but the stages are so rapid that incremental change adds up to great change in comparatively short order, compared to physical evolution that is.

Still, progress is slow from the perspective of any short lived individual, almost imperceptible except in hindsight. That slowness is exacerbated by the yearning for continuity which gives rise to interpretation. Old ways aren't changed so much as redescribed and where the practices don't match the rhetoric words are more likely to be redefined than practices altered.

This new post by Nicole-Ann Boyer is a case study of this behavior pattern. The intent is to celebrate a new religion, a break with the past and an improvement better suited to current realities, but it's really the same ideology as ever but tarted up in highly stressed language that has been stretched to breaking trying to stuff the flab of the ages into the more youthful cut of new ideas.

The failed ideas of a cohort of silverback futurists, focusing in this case on Paul Hawken but also dropping other names such as Stewart Brand, Peter Schwartz, and Kevin Kelly - are repackaged for resale in a new era. The contents are unchanged from those of 20 or 30 years ago - longer in some cases - and were backward looking even then.

At core it's just tired old anti-capitalist rhetoric but having been exposed as fraudulent as an economic critique it is repackaged as an environmental critique in hopes of being able to move the stale stock off the shelves.

We're awash in n-time scenarios these days, starts Paul. Both Abrahamic religions -- Christianity and Islam -- have in their scriptures strong visions of Armageddon and the end of the world. And while Hindus see time as being cyclical, they also have what they call the Kaligua phase (sp?) where the world heads into a downward spiral of destruction. Interestingly enough, the Kaligua gets the "prophetic nod" in its quirky list of indicators predicting the on-set of this phase, including things like: food becoming tasteless (check), young girls becoming mothers (check), old men becoming youthful (viagra, check), and this list goes on! Perversely amusing.

We're awash in these apocalyptic visions because fundamentalist factions of these religions believe (and/or employ for their power plays ) a belief that the time for reckoning is nigh. Like perfect mirrors of each other -- or using Paul's metaphor, like isomorphs -- both believe the other is the culprit. The Christian Right in the US, and a view strongly represented within the Administration, has it that with Al Queda as his army Osama bin Laden is as close as we're going to get as the Antichrist. Whereas the fundamentalist Islamic sects believe that Osama is the Mahdi, their new prophet, who is going to chase out the infidels from the Middle East and recapture the lost territory of Andalusia.

The green movement, by contrast, are very much of this world. They are the stay behinds and by choice. They are the people who don't want the world to end. They don't want to leave. But they are also not happy with the landlords of the planet and their upkeep of the place. These are people who have a deep sense of continuity with this place we call Earth. These people believe that the best way to ensure a better future for their offspring -- and the offspring they'll never see in generations to come -- is by taking care of one's habitat. Empirical evidence throughout human history and evolution seems to support this case in spades. Just read Jared Diamond's latest book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, for how this works.

No sale. The "green movement" is solidly millenarian - apocalyptic in the extreme - differing only from other narratives in that it lacks a happy ending. This brief article from The Economist, A brief history of The end of the world, was far more insightful.

Millenarians tend to place history at a moment just before the decisive final showdown. The apocalyptic mind looks through the surface reality of the world and sees history's epic, true nature: “apocalypse” comes from the Greek word meaning to uncover, or disclose...

The Raelians' claim to be atheists who belong to the secular world must come as no surprise to Mr Cohn, who has long detected patterns of religious apocalyptic thought in what is supposedly rational, secular belief. He has traced “egalitarian and communistic fantasies” to the ancient-world idea of an ideal state of nature, in which all men are genuinely equal and none is persecuted. As Mr Cohn has put it, “The old religious idiom has been replaced by a secular one, and this tends to obscure what otherwise would be obvious. For it is the simple truth that, stripped of their original supernatural sanction, revolutionary millenarianism and mystical anarchism are with us still.”

Nicholas Campion, a British historian and astrologer, has expanded on Mr Cohn's ideas. In his book, “The Great Year”, Mr Campion draws parallels between the “scientific” historical materialism of Marx and the religious apocalyptic experience. Thus primitive communism is the Garden of Eden, the emergence of private property and the class system is the fall, the final gasps of capitalism are the last days, the proletariat are the chosen people and the socialist revolution is the second coming and the New Jerusalem...

Science treasures its own apocalypses. The modern environmental movement appears to have borrowed only half of the apocalyptic narrative. There is a Garden of Eden (unspoilt nature), a fall (economic development), the usual moral degeneracy (it's all man's fault) and the pressing sense that the world is enjoying its final days (time is running out: please donate now!). So far, however, the green lobby does not appear to have realised it is missing the standard happy ending...

So there you have it. The apocalypse is the locomotive of capitalism, the inspiration for revolutionary socialism, the bedrock of America's manifest destiny and the undeclared religion of all those pseudo-rationalists who, like The Economist, champion the progress of liberal democracy. Perhaps, deep down, there is something inside everyone which yearns for the New Jerusalem, a place where, as a beautiful bit of Revelation puts it:

God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away.

Like every other millenarian Hawken claims to have seen through the surface reality of the world and sees history's epic, true nature - and like every other sees only doom. But unlike older millenarian thinkers he sees no salvation.

In each case this is a sort of anhedonic mental defect, the inability to see beauty in the world or take pleasure in society. The ever present defects are focused on to the exclusion of all else, despair feeding despair in spiral descent into a helpless and hopeless condition. Honestly, these folks could screw up a wet dream. Pathetic, even children can get that right.

Environmentalism is not a movement. It's not a sect, a religion, a way of knowing, an ideology or a political stance. It's housekeeping. It's what we once called women's work - birthing and tail wiping, feeding and clothing, making ends meet and keeping the home fires burning, burying the dead and weeping for both the living and the dead in an endless cycle. Women's work is never done. The failure to grasp this ancient fact of life is perhaps the core confusion of those like Hawken who foggily dream of some future when the work is done, that can be reached by heroic effort begun in the present.

So, Paul concludes: environmentalism emerged from great alienation and separation. Today, the environment movement has effectively gone, he argues. It has morphed into something else, something that is a subset of a much larger movement. Social justice and environmentalism are coming together, for instance. People are not seeing the problem as just a resource flow issue, but also a quality of life and diversity problem. As we get a more sophisticated way of seeing the world, we're starting to see connections between poverty, disease, and private sector patterns towards resources. So this is a movement that spans a mind-boggling array of issues -- everything from indigenous rights, to immigration, to ecotoxcity, to emissions controls, to alternative healthcare, to restoration ecology, etc. It's becoming clear that these issues are connected in a deep structural way. And, to quote exactly, this has something to do with "humanity’s collective immune response to resist and heal political disease, economic infection, and ecological corruption caused by ideologies."...

Paul argues that this is the largest movement in the world and growing. There are at least 130,000 groups at minimum, but they could be off by a factor or 2 or 4 in measuring this. A half million groups could easily exist today. These are self-healing, civic groups -- some large, some small -- and they are in every country around the world. There are so many groups that even leaders like Paul can't keep track of them, although he is trying to study them at his new organization, The Natural Capitalism Institute, which is a direct offshoot of his book, "Natural Capitalism" which he coauthored with Amory and Hunter Lovins and "The Ecology of Commerce". What's clear is that this is bigger than anything else around. Bigger than Al Queda, bigger than the Catholic Church, bigger than the Neoconservative agenda.

No sale. It's still movement thinking, still misses the mark widely. It's nice that the focus is less narrow than in the past but still tries to frame everyday life as a struggle against some nebulous other - Catholics, neocons, what-have-you - some bad guys that need to be killed or converted or both. Both more often than not. Let blog sort them out. It's the same tired, steam age political craparooney with information age kit.

A great deal of women's work has been automated, but just the easy bits. Automatic dish and clothing washers are nice, vacuum cleaners beat the pants off brooms, and food preparation is no longer a daily chore so much as an art practiced only by the wealthy. Others eat prepared foods quickly heated in a variety of devices or carried home in bags and boxes to be inhaled luke-warm. The hard bits, the caring and weeping, resist automation and remain largely unchanged though shared out more equitably than in the past.

The trick, the mental tool, is to see the surface of reality as well as its depths, the good and the bad, pleasure and pain, and smile anyway. As Wendell Berry says it in The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

The grayness and despair of movement types, when looked at with the same x-ray lens they aim at others, is just a marketing ploy to sell their books and speaking engagements and otherwise profit from doom-saying. It reminds me of nothing so much as the line from the old blues tune - Son House IIRC - "I'm going to become a preacher / So I don't have to work". Practice sales resistance. Point and laugh at movement types - whatever movement they are selling - and work at becoming human in the fullest sense, wise with both the joy and sorrow of life and so better able to be useful in its continuance. Clean up your own messes, help a friend clean theirs... hell help a stranger. When the defectors and free-riders come around with their movement crap just joke them off and continue doing useful work. Like lice they have always been with us and always will be, an unavoidable nuisance that only becomes a real problem when allowed to take over.

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