No Heaven on Earth

Why are so many of us so skep­ti­cal when con­fronted with the over­whelm­ing evi­dence for envi­ron­men­tal con­se­quences of destroy­ing every­thing we come in con­tact with? In her review of Amer­i­can Earth, an anthol­ogy of Amer­i­can envi­ron­men­tal­ist views, Ver­lyn Klinkenborg has this reac­tion to the bar­rage of evi­dence and entreaties to recon­nect with nature:

After a day or two, I found myself read­ing this anthol­ogy as if it were a series of reports from a dis­tant planet in a dis­tant time — as an appen­dix, per­haps, to Doris Lessing’s Cano­pus in Argos nov­els. Read­ing Amer­i­can Earth in that light helped make sev­eral things clear. First, each doc­u­ment in the vol­ume is a minor­ity report — some­times a minor­ity of one. The assump­tions, the hopes, the argu­ments in nearly every one of these pieces, no mat­ter when they were writ­ten, are con­tra­dicted by the way the vast major­ity of Amer­i­cans live and by the polit­i­cal and eco­nomic struc­tures that deter­mine that lifestyle. Sec­ond, the fun­da­men­tal envi­ron­men­tal­ist argu­ments — the fun­da­men­tal per­cep­tions — are unchang­ing over time; only the details vary. We are still catch­ing up to Thoreau, still com­ing to terms with the out­rage George Perkins Marsh expressed in 1864, his wor­ries about “cli­matic excess” and our “rest­less love of change.” Third, writ­ers in every gen­er­a­tion take a crack at find­ing the crys­talline argu­ment that will induce an epiphany in skep­ti­cal read­ers — for noth­ing less than an epiphany will do to per­suade them to change the way they go about liv­ing. Yet every gen­er­a­tion fails, in part because skep­ti­cal read­ers so sel­dom pick up this kind of writ­ing or sub­mit to its evidence.

Her con­clu­sion is also worth not­ing. She reaches for Kafka (There is infi­nite hope, but not for us.) and writes regret­fully: I would say some­thing dif­fer­ent if I could. I have every faith in nature’s recu­per­a­tive powers.…What I doubt is our abil­ity, as a species, to see and, hav­ing seen, to con­tinue to pay attention.