Wyatt Verlen: Can We Still Celebrate Earth Day?

By Wyatt Verlen (Crawling out of a spring creek to write this half naked)

At one point you could count me in on the most wild-eyed variations of hardcore eco-modernism. The point, you might say, was that we could simply manipulate the world to our advantage, and create luxurious eco-systems out of it to live in. In fact, I wrote repeatedly about this, citing Trotsky and others to justify this position.

But I don’t really believe this anymore.

Sure, humans are in some sense magical-we are, after all, the only creatures that we know of that can write and reflect on our experience of living in this universe (of course, I must write as a matter of obligation, I want to believe, whenever extraterrestrials are hinted at as even a possibility). But are we really the center of the universe on this basis alone? It may be a conservative impulse, in some sense, to say no to this. After all, saying no means saying no to the idea of raping the planet so that we can become star trek galactic socialists (although, it should be noted, it does not preclude being star-trek-galactic-socialists altogether; rather, it precludes making that our goal and moreover precludes us from raping the earth to get there).

There is a basic controversy at the heart of actual Marxism (and perhaps a good reason to not be a Marxist), over whether or not humans can be changed for the sake of society. Of course, eugenics could change humans for the sake of society, but even then there are limits (I fully expect a future eugenically bred human race to still have to pee from time to time, for instance). Biologically, humans really just aren’t meant to live without access to greenery, birds singing, places to roam unbothered. We certainly aren’t biologically or psychologically adapted to a 9-5 work week in a factory or office (this is a good argument for Marxism’s demand to reduce labor time, so one point for Marxism there). We see the human race twist itself in bizarre ways under the weight of things like the smartphone and social media as well (it ends of course with a return to our biology-how much of the internet is just pornography replacing real sex, or dating apps replacing real socializing; or, on the flip side, watching nature documentaries).

Back to earth day. The environmentalist movement today is mostly a public health movement (“we have to save the rainforest because maybe it has cancer curing drugs!”), and a climate change movement (nevermind the fact that climate change is but one threat to the environment-and the others are probably more immediately remedied) these days. The idea of wilderness has been rejected because white men like it (or so I am told), so we can and should throw up strip mines (and strip malls) provided they are owned by “indigenous people”, in Yosemite (there are some people that actually believe this). It is no longer a movement built on love of a landscape, or a river, or hearing the birds chirp someplace. That is tragic.

To the socialists still blathering about their anthropocentric dreams, it really is a question of whether those dreams can be reconciled with the authentic human desire for open spaces filled with life. At some deep level, we love the monarch butterfly, and a higher, more elevated humanity would recognize the butterfly has a right to exist as much as we do. This would mean a rejection of viewing ourselves as the center of moral claims about nature, even if we still view ourselves as primary to maintaining it in some capacity (for instance, massive afforestation to reduce climate change and climate impacts, or more locally, restoring a stream to be more hospitable to wildlife).