71
commentary suffused by near-instantaneous circumstances. One recognizes its contours and coloration, like some greater bird-of-paradise watching sunset over the
jungles of Indonesia’s Aru Islands, or that meadowed sward of a sloping hospice,
the Selva di Val Gardena, in the Italian Dolomites, photographed by James Buchan
on the cover of National Geographic’s publication Greatest Landscapes.
8
But such
ideal calculus corresponds with a Self that wields a particular language that has
evolved out of ecosystems, all ecosystems, only to challenge itself, its selves for
countless reasons, some of which we will explore. That Self forges new languages
predicated upon the human history since the Holocene in which destruction not
sympathies for Others, love of life as a principle, has dominated the New Nature
that is humanity. In every fallacy, like that of the Netherlands’, there is a perpetual
and novel promise which whispers its delusional originality to whomever will listen.
This variability of linguistic development, in consciousness, has meant a distinct
and pantheistic perversion that we know too well. It spins and skews and coordinates by way of a promulgation at the species level of deception. In the case of the
Netherlands there is that deeply affecting dichotomy. At once we are compelled by
the Dutch Renaissance and all the beauty and innovation it produced. But then,
today, we need not second-guess a prevarication from Vermeer and all that Simon
Schama ruefully dissected of Holland’s Golden Age.
9
Instead, we find a blurred
motif that the Dutch, for example, have supposedly been able to successfully maintain the 18th largest economy or so in the world without ecological repercussions.
This mirrors a certain infantile Weltanschauung held by the early seventeenthcentury Calvinist Church in Holland with respect to Jews. Writes, Schama,
“Paradoxically, the church’s predilection for describing its own flock as the reborn
Hebrews did not dispose it to favor the real thing,” notwithstanding a paranoid
Church looking to the Jews, “children of the Covenant” to somehow help usher in
the much anticipated “Last Days”.
10
While seventeenth-century Dutch antisemitism
was meted out, sadly pervasively, sometimes, by clear edict, in other instances by
fanatical elitism, there still remained a level of tolerance that enabled Jewish communities to prosper. Today, it would be difficult to argue that there is not a similar
cultural paradox perpetually played out in both the Dutch and the global perception
of all things Holland. It is not about Calvinists and Jews but all of the Dutch and
their environment. As The Economist has declared some years ago, “The Green
image of the Dutch is at odds with the reality”.
11
Hence the name, “the Netherlands Fallacy.” A national crisis of pollution in large
measure brought about by the enormous number of standing bovines, pigs, and
sheep, with all their manure tainting the soil, and ground water; not to mention its
8 Stunning Photographs That Inspire And Astonish, Foreword by George Steinmetz, Text by Susan
Tyler Hitchock, National Geographic, Washington D.C., 2016.
9 See The Embarrassment Of Riches – An Interpretation Of Dutch Culture In the Golden Age,
Simon Schama, Alfred Knopf, New York, 1987.
10 ibid., Schama, p. 591.
11 “Dirty Dikes,” February 4, 2012, https://www.economist.com/europe/2012/02/04/dirty-dikes,
Accessed January 21, 2019.
8.2 Ecosystem-Scaled Paradox
commentary suffused by near-instantaneous circumstances. One recognizes its contours and coloration, like some greater bird-of-paradise watching sunset over the
jungles of Indonesia’s Aru Islands, or that meadowed sward of a sloping hospice,
the Selva di Val Gardena, in the Italian Dolomites, photographed by James Buchan
on the cover of National Geographic’s publication Greatest Landscapes.
8
But such
ideal calculus corresponds with a Self that wields a particular language that has
evolved out of ecosystems, all ecosystems, only to challenge itself, its selves for
countless reasons, some of which we will explore. That Self forges new languages
predicated upon the human history since the Holocene in which destruction not
sympathies for Others, love of life as a principle, has dominated the New Nature
that is humanity. In every fallacy, like that of the Netherlands’, there is a perpetual
and novel promise which whispers its delusional originality to whomever will listen.
This variability of linguistic development, in consciousness, has meant a distinct
and pantheistic perversion that we know too well. It spins and skews and coordinates by way of a promulgation at the species level of deception. In the case of the
Netherlands there is that deeply affecting dichotomy. At once we are compelled by
the Dutch Renaissance and all the beauty and innovation it produced. But then,
today, we need not second-guess a prevarication from Vermeer and all that Simon
Schama ruefully dissected of Holland’s Golden Age.
9
Instead, we find a blurred
motif that the Dutch, for example, have supposedly been able to successfully maintain the 18th largest economy or so in the world without ecological repercussions.
This mirrors a certain infantile Weltanschauung held by the early seventeenthcentury Calvinist Church in Holland with respect to Jews. Writes, Schama,
“Paradoxically, the church’s predilection for describing its own flock as the reborn
Hebrews did not dispose it to favor the real thing,” notwithstanding a paranoid
Church looking to the Jews, “children of the Covenant” to somehow help usher in
the much anticipated “Last Days”.
10
While seventeenth-century Dutch antisemitism
was meted out, sadly pervasively, sometimes, by clear edict, in other instances by
fanatical elitism, there still remained a level of tolerance that enabled Jewish communities to prosper. Today, it would be difficult to argue that there is not a similar
cultural paradox perpetually played out in both the Dutch and the global perception
of all things Holland. It is not about Calvinists and Jews but all of the Dutch and
their environment. As The Economist has declared some years ago, “The Green
image of the Dutch is at odds with the reality”.
11
Hence the name, “the Netherlands Fallacy.” A national crisis of pollution in large
measure brought about by the enormous number of standing bovines, pigs, and
sheep, with all their manure tainting the soil, and ground water; not to mention its
8 Stunning Photographs That Inspire And Astonish, Foreword by George Steinmetz, Text by Susan
Tyler Hitchock, National Geographic, Washington D.C., 2016.
9 See The Embarrassment Of Riches – An Interpretation Of Dutch Culture In the Golden Age,
Simon Schama, Alfred Knopf, New York, 1987.
10 ibid., Schama, p. 591.
11 “Dirty Dikes,” February 4, 2012, https://www.economist.com/europe/2012/02/04/dirty-dikes,
Accessed January 21, 2019.
8.2 Ecosystem-Scaled Paradox