It looks obvious

Salon published a very interesting excerpt from the book Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. It is quite fascinating how every ideological, value based, approach try to justify its moral choices by harnessing the science - mostly wrongfully. But the debate with environmentalism isn’t about science rather on moral and ideological choice:

In the Book of Genesis, the Fall from Eden occurs because Adam and Eve eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. In the environmentalist’s telling of our fall, humans are being punished by Nature with ecological crises like global warming for our original sin of eating from the tree of knowledge. Our fall from Nature was triggered by our control of fire, the rise of agriculture, the birth of modern civilization, or by modern science itself — which is ironic, given the privileged role the so-called natural sciences played in inventing the idea of a Nature as separate from humans in the first place.

The eco-tragedy narrative imagines humans as living in a fallen world where wildness no longer exists and a profound sadness pervades a dying Earth. The unstated aspiration is to return to a time when humans lived in harmony with their surroundings. That tragic narrative is tied to an apocalyptic vision of the future — an uncanny parallel to humankind’s Fall from Eden in the Book of Genesis and the end of the world in the final Book of Revelation.

[...]

There is a very different story that can be told about human history, one that embraces our agency, and that is the story of constant human overcoming. Whereas the tragic story imagines that humans have fallen, the narrative of overcoming imagines that we have risen.

Consider how much our ancestors — human and nonhuman — overcame for us to become what we are today. For beginners, they were prey. Given how quickly and efficiently humans are driving the extinction of nonhuman animal species, the notion that our ancestors were food seems preposterous. And yet, understanding that we evolved from being prey goes a long way to understanding some of the feelings and motivations that drive us into suicidal wars and equally suicidal ecological collapses.

Against the happy accounts of harmonious premodern human societies at one with Nature, there is the reality that life was exceedingly short and difficult. Of course, life could also be wonderful and joyous. But it was hunger, not obesity, oppression, not depression, and violence, not loneliness, that were humankind’s primary concerns.

Just as the past offers plenty of stories of humanity’s failure, it also offers plenty of stories of human overcoming. Indeed, we can only speak of past collapses because we have survived them. There are billions more people on earth than there were when the tiny societies of the Anasazi in the North American southwest and the Norse in Greenland collapsed in the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, respectively. That there are nearly seven billion of us alive today is a sign of our success, not failure.

I am pretty sure that environmentalists will embrace this airline:

AN INDIAN entrepreneur has given a new twist to the concept of low-cost airlines. The passengers boarding his Airbus 300 in Delhi do not expect to go anywhere because it never takes off.

All they want is the chance to know what it is like to sit on a plane, listen to announcements and be waited on by stewardesses bustling up and down the aisle.

Sweden open it education market to its version of school vouchers. Here is something you not going to here me write often - why can’t we learn from the Swedish example?

One of the most common arguments against the Bush tax cut was that it is only benefiting the very rich. Analysis of the actual numbers reveal, not surprisingly, different results.

… And not one word about the Presidential campaign