Vox Populi:

Once, environmentalism was about saving wild beings and wild places. “The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind,” Rachel Carson wrote to a friend. “That, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done.” Silent Spring, which inspired the formation of the modern environmental movement, was more than a critique of pesticides—it was a clarion call against industrialized society’s destruction of the natural world.

            That destruction has put us in peril. Like all animals, we need a home: a blanket of air, a cradle of soil, and a vast assemblage of creatures who make both. We can’t create oxygen, but others—from tiny plankton to towering redwoods—can. We can’t build soil, but the slow circling of bacteria, bison, and sweetgrass do.

            All of them are bleeding out, species by species, like Noah in reverse, while the carbon swells and the heat burns on. Five decades of environmental activism haven’t stopped the destruction. We haven’t even slowed it. Instead, the beings and biomes who were once the center of our concern have disappeared from the conversation and the goal of environmentalism has been transformed to a singular question: “How can we save industrial civilization?” 

Go to link