Hank
I’m actually agreeing with you, believe it or not.
From your narrative, Montana is a place where the dialectic has swung too far in one direction, a situation which is inherently unstable and will doubtless change as those particular social forces play themselves out.
I can’t comment too deeply on the Montana situation because I have been too busy working for and studying both environmental groups and resource extraction industries here in BC.
Modern environmentalism was actually born here in BC. I skipped out of high school in Victoria to attend a demonstration against setting off a nuclear bomb on the Aleutian island of Amchitka – doesn’t that seem like utter madness these days? – the very same demonstration that gave birth to Greenpeace. I have volunteered and worked with some of those environmentalists over the years, but have also worked in resource extraction industries as well as investing in them.
In contrast to Montana, the dialectic between development and conservation has swung too far the other direction in places like China, or to put it more correctly, the dialectic never got established in the first place because the principles of environmentalism until recently have never had the chance to play out against the “development at all costs” approach.
Social forces and movements don’t just appear out of nowhere but come into being as the result of individual and collective experiences, actions, and beliefs.
For me, the bottom line is that we need both environmentalism and resource extraction. I am not advocating Parsonian reductionism, but I would argue that each is crucial for the functioning of our society in spite of their seemingly incompatible goals.
As to which is “right”, to me that is an unanswerable question, particularly when you try to answer it at one point in time.
This attitude always gets me in trouble. When I was in academia, whenever there was a paradigm split in a field I was studying, often both sides would end excluding me because I wouldn’t pick one over the other.
For instance, in sociology there is a huge split between quantitative – it doesn’t exist unless you can measure it – and qualitative – it doesn’t exist unless you can describe its non-quantifiable essence. Me, I see quantitative analysis as better for answering certain questions and qualitative as better for others, and think every self-respecting sociologist should have both sets of tools in his or her quiver.
You can guess how that went over.
I know my absolute favourite places in the world, those where I feel most deeply what it is to be alive, are those that have been least touched by humans.
But I also know that merely by being there I am doing my part to destroy those special places, and that it requires the destruction of other equally unspoiled places to provide me with the resources to get to those special spots in the first place.
LC |
