HOW THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT CAN FIND ITS WAY AGAIN

CHARLES EISENSTEIN challenges our current understanding of environmental sustainability, and asks us to reconsider our approaches and practices to environmentalism. He also dares us to realize that it will only work once we become nature lovers.

- CHARLES EISENSTEIN

If we are to focus our attention on a single substance, it should be not carbon dioxide but water. Beyond greenhouse effects, water is crucial in the ways the world maintains conditions for life to thrive. One function of water is as a vehicle of heat transport, part of the physiology of this living planet. Please watch the animated video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoJyInmTTo&t=2s about how plants influence local and global temperatures through the movement of water.

This video, along with companion pieces on the biotic pump and hydrology, comes from an emerging understanding among many environmentalists that we have made a scientific, strategic, rhetorical, and political error by reducing the ecological crisis to climate, and the climate crisis to carbon. Earth is best understood as a living being with a complex physiology, whose health depends on the health of her constituent organs. Her organs are the forests, the wetlands, the grasslands, the estuaries, the reefs, the apex predators, the keystone species, the soil, the insects, and indeed every intact ecosystem and every species on Earth. If we continue to degrade them, drain them, cut them, poison them, pave them, and kill them, earth will die a death of a million cuts. She will die of organ failure regardless of the levels of greenhouse gases.