815
• Intergenerational, biosemiotic politics that are inspired by interspecies compacts;
animal liberation charter documents as sacred and binding as those covenants
and community standards that engendered the democracies in San Marino,
Iceland, the Isle of Man, the Iroquois Nation, as well as such traditions as the
Digambara Jains, Quakers, Hindu Bishnoi, South Indian Todas, Essenes, and
Vajrayana Buddhists.
• An end to military service and the revocation of all guns and all weapons development, as was successfully initiated during Japan’s Tokugawa Shogunate during the Imperial Regent Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s rule.
• And so on.
Of course, as with each one of the above injunctions, human natures (citing Paul
Ehrlich’s famed book title
26
) invoke the inevitability of a Tragedy of the Commons—
like altercation between individuals, regions, and nation-states, regardless of their
respective previous signatory status to international treaties, conventions, or other
declared policy positions, which change from hour to hour, town hall meeting to
meeting. Hence, is ecological paradox so intractable as to render all idealism no
more than a quixotry? The idle stare of frustration with too much time on its hands?
It is not our intention to sabotage abiding aspiration but, rather, embrace honest faith
in its fullest revivification on behalf of all those who remain hopeful, open-minded.
Deep reflection embracing a planetary ethic and kinship keeping the fire going on a
freezing night are not incommensurate, in our view.
But let us agree that—geopolitically, economically, pragmatically—the issues of
governance fundamentally comprise a blind and grasping minimum set of standards
(which we have seen the worst of in most current animal-related legislation) in order
to seduce the rank and file, moderate voters, energized base, other cliché demographics that are entirely opposite the intuitive, reclusive life that simply finds the
crowd, the mob, the vision of shared prosperity—a vacuous lure borne of egalitarian, arrogant speciesism. Does a bipedal gait and opposable thumb allow for a
behaviorally different large vertebrate collective? Could our evolution have been
different? At this point, only anecdotally so: an anthropological and literary tease
which, by the day, grows more and more remote.
A philosophy of retreat, age-old, venerable, taken as a spiritual defense on the
edge of the last forest, is the very ecological rallying cry of the individual that is
willing to sit down on that forest floor and re-think everything. But we have no
theory pretending to believe that at the species-wide level, this is as yet possible. For
now, we see only infernal contests over whose property rights restrict access to that
same forest floor.
A true politics of peace calls for a thorough assessment of the human fall-out, its
unrelenting undermining of ecological stability, and continued depredation of every
integral ecosystem and wild and feral inhabitant. Much of that census has been done
for charismatic species and habitat. There are a lot of people which translates into
26 Human Natures – Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect, by Paul R. Ehrlich, Island Press/
Shearwater Books, Washington, DC, Covelo, CA, 2000.
93.3 The Geopolitics of Ecological Resolution
• Intergenerational, biosemiotic politics that are inspired by interspecies compacts;
animal liberation charter documents as sacred and binding as those covenants
and community standards that engendered the democracies in San Marino,
Iceland, the Isle of Man, the Iroquois Nation, as well as such traditions as the
Digambara Jains, Quakers, Hindu Bishnoi, South Indian Todas, Essenes, and
Vajrayana Buddhists.
• An end to military service and the revocation of all guns and all weapons development, as was successfully initiated during Japan’s Tokugawa Shogunate during the Imperial Regent Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s rule.
• And so on.
Of course, as with each one of the above injunctions, human natures (citing Paul
Ehrlich’s famed book title
26
) invoke the inevitability of a Tragedy of the Commons—
like altercation between individuals, regions, and nation-states, regardless of their
respective previous signatory status to international treaties, conventions, or other
declared policy positions, which change from hour to hour, town hall meeting to
meeting. Hence, is ecological paradox so intractable as to render all idealism no
more than a quixotry? The idle stare of frustration with too much time on its hands?
It is not our intention to sabotage abiding aspiration but, rather, embrace honest faith
in its fullest revivification on behalf of all those who remain hopeful, open-minded.
Deep reflection embracing a planetary ethic and kinship keeping the fire going on a
freezing night are not incommensurate, in our view.
But let us agree that—geopolitically, economically, pragmatically—the issues of
governance fundamentally comprise a blind and grasping minimum set of standards
(which we have seen the worst of in most current animal-related legislation) in order
to seduce the rank and file, moderate voters, energized base, other cliché demographics that are entirely opposite the intuitive, reclusive life that simply finds the
crowd, the mob, the vision of shared prosperity—a vacuous lure borne of egalitarian, arrogant speciesism. Does a bipedal gait and opposable thumb allow for a
behaviorally different large vertebrate collective? Could our evolution have been
different? At this point, only anecdotally so: an anthropological and literary tease
which, by the day, grows more and more remote.
A philosophy of retreat, age-old, venerable, taken as a spiritual defense on the
edge of the last forest, is the very ecological rallying cry of the individual that is
willing to sit down on that forest floor and re-think everything. But we have no
theory pretending to believe that at the species-wide level, this is as yet possible. For
now, we see only infernal contests over whose property rights restrict access to that
same forest floor.
A true politics of peace calls for a thorough assessment of the human fall-out, its
unrelenting undermining of ecological stability, and continued depredation of every
integral ecosystem and wild and feral inhabitant. Much of that census has been done
for charismatic species and habitat. There are a lot of people which translates into
26 Human Natures – Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect, by Paul R. Ehrlich, Island Press/
Shearwater Books, Washington, DC, Covelo, CA, 2000.
93.3 The Geopolitics of Ecological Resolution