FORWARD

The environment is not a separate issue that appears in the press along with politics, sports, and entertainment. It is in fact the context in which all other events take place. It is only in our highly mechanized technological world that we have lost touch with this self-evident reality.

CIVILIZATION FIRST BEGAN DISCONNECTING ITSELF from the natural world on which we are all dependent in the seventeenth century, when great advances in astronomy placed the earth in a universe of other planets, spinning around the sun. These discoveries, in diminishing the authority of the church, paved the way to modern philosophy.

In 1620, Francis Bacon published his treatise Novum Organum, in which he denounced the philosophy of .the Greeks for its inaction. He called for a utilitarian science that would lead to the empowerment of mankind over nature. Bacon is credited with the origin of the scientific method as we know it today. He was the first to speak of objective truths, derived from scientific experimentation, and he believed that with objective knowledge, mankind could gain control over nature, harness her powers, and create a more secure, ordered world.

Picking up where-Bacon left off, the French philosopher Rene Descartes argued that the way to measure objective-truths was with mathematics, which he called mankind's greatest agent for unraveling the mysteries of the universe. He developed a mechanistic view of the world, in which natural systems could be defined with mathematical formulas; and order could be established put of the chaos and uncertainty that had-plagued a world overseen by an unknowable God.

Isaac Newton provided powerful-confirmation of Descartes' view with his discovery of the three laws of motion which bore such universality they could be applied both to a falling apple and to the planets orbiting around the sun. Newton's discoveries were so applauded that they permanently established the mechanistic world view in the universities of the time. Bacon's utilitarian science had triumphed, and there developed a sense of the limitless power of mankind to better himself. The concept of progress, which we take for granted in the twentieth century, was born.

The philosopher John Locke embraced this new freedom from theology and ethics with a treatise of human interaction which held –that material, self-interest was the basis for all human behavior. According to Locke, the role of government was to subjugate nature and allow the individual to prosper through the accumulation of material wealth. In his view, unused natural resources were a waste.

In 1776 Adam-Smith, in his seminal work The Wealth of Nations, argued that there were universal laws of commerce just as there were laws of nature. He proposed that government should not interfere with the material progress of the individual, and that the success of one would lead to the betterment of society on the whole. Smith's new economic view gave, sanctity to the pursuit of profit, and introduced the concept that industrial "productivity" would better society as a whole.

WITH THESE GREAT THINKERS was born the modern, world view: Human reason would triumph over irrationality and faith. All natural systems could be defined by universal, laws; nature could be ordered, categorized, and dissected, her mysteries defined. Scientific truth was more knowable than God himself, and so more empowering. For the first time there was the notion that the history of civilization was a progression towards perfection, achievable by the infallibility of mathematics and science. Nature was the enemy of order, and man's role was, in the words of Francis Bacon, "to extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe."

Through the stunning vindication of the scientific process, the industrial revolution blossomed. True to Bacon's hypothesis, what, drove this spectacular human progress was the power of reason and the subjugation of nature. Fossil fuels, timber, steel, and the riches of the soil were harnessed during the industrial age with ever increasing efficiency. The urban landscape ballooned as the population flooded to the cities to find work in factories, producing standardized goods at an ever accelerating, pace. For the first time, in human history, a middle class was born with access to material pleasures, and increasingly, people found themselves cut off from the natural world.

The world paradigm of Bacon, Descartes and Newton, combined with the philosophies of self-interest put forth by Locke and Smith, have lead to an economic and social structure in which efficiency and material progress are the defining measures of success, and "productivity" is an end in itself. Religious faith has effectively been replaced by faith in the scientific method: the religion of technology, legality, and economics. This was by no means a theme of capitalist thought alone: Karl Marx saw nature as having no value until human labor was applied to it, and his economic philosophies were founded on the assumption that natural resources were a constant in any economic formula. The environment remained fully outside the scope of human discourse because natural resources seemed infinite.

NOW, AT THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, we find our selves on the brink of environmental disaster. Our industrial civilization is irrevocably depleting and polluting its natural capital of air, water and soil, to generate the artificial capital of our economic system. We are literally robbing future generations of a livable world for the abstract gains of our Gross National Product. It has become increasingly clear that the economic systems on which we have built Western civilization do not address ethical, social, or ecological reality.

And yet as we turn inward to conjure, the strength to save ourselves we find a spiritual poverty brought on by three hundred years of sanctified self-interest. We have cultivated not only the environmental crisis, but a crisis of civilization itself. Western man, and increasingly, the world community, has lost a sense of balance between a utilitarian world view and a spiritual, ethical world view. With an unshakable faith in the scientific method as the only means to absolute truth, we have arrogantly condemned spiritual and intuitive awareness and developed a world class not of citizens but of consumers, while oppressing and obliterating cultures and traditions deemed irrational and primitive: An economic system which registers wars, highway disasters, and strip mining as positive economic activities because they stimulate the exchange of goods and services, while ignoring the activities of child rearing, housekeeping, and preventive health care, needs to reexamine its priorities.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT is not about bike paths and granola; it is about redirecting history and the priorities set by the strange fruits of Bacon's dream. The economics-driven industrial-military-medical complex, which has a stronghold on the direction of humanity's future, charts a blind destructive path, defeats any chance for a sustainable future, and promises to bring about inequities and miseries that humankind has not yet encountered. The environmental movement challenges the assumption that all of life's experience can be defined by mathematical formulas. It challenges the idea that natural resources have no value until they are turned into products by human endeavor. And it challenges the notion that the more material we amass, the greater security and happiness we will achieve. The environmental movement seeks, to redefine what is meant by "progress" and "productivity," and to find a new world paradigm as seductive as the Newtonian model; but not as costly to the well-being of man and this planet.

Principally, this new world-paradigm will redefine the priorities set by our current economic system. A more; realistic profile of the finiteness of natural resources will be incorporated into our evaluation of goods and services. In essence, it "will redefine economic success not in terms of immediate profit, but in terms of long-term sustainability;
Similarly, scientific and technological advances will be judged by then-real cost and long term value to society as a whole. Finally, in reframing our priorities as a culture, we will have the potential to reawaken a social and spiritual life whose absence has contributed so devastatingly to the malcontent and destructiveness of modern man.

OUR LITTLE BOOK is designed with the idea that every small difference will contribute to a greater change. We discuss available resources and services which contribute to a sustainable future. We propose a number of ways to make your dollar speak for change. Ultimately, we hope to suggest that in every walk of life, in every business, there are changes that can be made now that challenge the politics and economics of stagnation, apathy and ignorance.