New York Times (Dec5,2k9) Op-Ed reported by Olga Orda (Dec17,2k9) for the ecology website Green Options. Dr Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at the University of California at Los Angeles, is the author of Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997) (which I've read and deeply appreciate) and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive (2005):
[Diamond's] article struck me as unusual -- both with its street smarts and nuanced analysis -- for two reasons.
One, the author ... [has] a real ear to the street and clearly, the boardroom, [and, of course, he is now a target whom] stoic environmental advocates immediately write off as nothing but “greenwash”. [Err, "greenwasher," shoud I re-write? -- rW]
I am talking about household names like Coca-Cola, Chevron and Wal-Mart that the author says [is a corporation] “many critics of business love to hate, in my opinion, unjustly.”
In the case of Chevron: “Not even in any national park have I seen such rigorous environmental protection as I encountered in five visits to new Chevron-managed oil fields in Papua New Guinea [on the geography-attuned anthropological history of which Diamond is a/the leading expert - rW]. (Chevron has since sold its stake in these properties to a New Guinea-based oil company.) And, the publicly traded company gives five savvy reasonson why it needs to care and is spending the money to prove it cares.
And then there is Wal-Mart, for whom scale is both a beast and blessing. Case in point: “This is what Wal-Mart did with fuel costs, which the company reduced by $26 million per year simply by changing the way it managed its enormous truck fleet. Instead of running a truck’s engine all night to heat or cool the cab during mandatory 10-hour rest stops, the company installed small auxiliary power units to do the job. In addition to lowering fuel costs, the move eliminated the carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to taking 18,300 passenger vehicles off the road.”
Second, Diamond states exactly what underpins and is attractive about the whole "sustainability means consuming less" argument. It is that consumption rates and standards of living are only loosely correlated, because so much of our consumption is wasteful [the waste does not meet the norm of optimality; see Hendrik Hart, Understanding our world: An integral ontology (1983, subsequent editions) - rW] and doesn’t contribute to our quality of life. Hello, Western Europe with less of our American stuff and more happiness due to more access to medical care, financial security after retirement, infant mortality, life expectancy, literacy and public transport. So, happiness is more complex than that, but definitely the social foundation matters.
Third, Diamond spoke with striking clarity on some of the actions Washington, D.C. can take to stimulate more businesses to adopt sustainability practices that keep the planet healthy. Namely:
“My friends in the business world keep telling me that Washington can help on two fronts: by investing in green research, offering tax incentives and passing cap-and-trade legislation; and by setting and enforcing tough standards to ensure that companies with cheap, dirty standards don’t have a competitive advantage over those businesses protecting the environment.”
So, if you have not already, read Diamond’s article. It will grab your attention too.
I join her in urging you to read it, and to click on and read Ordo's own write-up in
Green Options (see above for the live-link to her article).
The fact that Diamond's main book is atheist historiography, is no obstacle to recommending that author to those who are, like me, of Christian faith or other non-atheist religions (atheism is equally religious in its own ways, and there are several varieties incompatible with one another -- that is, atheism actually is several religions, all of which have arisen in history, in future some may die and others may be born). I discount the unrelieved atheist undertone as I read Diamond, which may not be possible for all readers. It is work to do so.
My biblical interpretation, unlike that of so-called "creationists," proceeds from Creator and a law-order for His creation (also a creation law-order for the creatures which appear over time, in a Christian evolutionary way of thinking, which is quite different from evolutionism and its atheist religions). No to atheistic theories of cosmic, earthic, and humanic evolution(ism). Yes to Christian philosophical explanation to bridge the narratives in the Bible and various sciences relevant to evolution. But, at the same time, in my view these stories cannot be fruitfully and integrally reduced to one another. I think this is the mistake, however much a valiant one, as introduced to reformational thawt by Roy Clouser's
The myth of neutrality: An essay on the hidden role of religious belief in theories (2005 rev ed, paperback) which seeks to meld these two different narratives, but which Christian philosophizing shoud first respect in their distinct ownnesses (
eigenheiden) in accord with a philosophic explanatory bridge-analysis of both.
This has taken us far from focus on the role of mega-corporations in "saving" the world from ecological collapse, but to Christians who have biblistic-historistic tendencies of thawt and who thus tend to over-historicize these chapter of Genesis -- it must be said that neither the hermeneutics of confession (Spykman), covenant (classical and new), nor the classical historical-literary hermeneutics, has offered us sufficient grounds to faith-affirm the
ecological-cultural mandate for human maintenance of a genuine human stewardship over Earth as commanded in Genesis 1-3 (thus, the ecological element that shoud be powerfully motivating in our reformational reading of Scripture and our reformational ecological organizations). Reviving the confessional hermeneutics approach more recently,
Craig Bartholmew tends to the "problem" of the rise of yet another hermeneutical approach Scripture, called "Canon Criticism" (
Brevard Childs and
Bernhard Anderson).
Albert Wolters seems to be of this view, as well. But I have not yet acquired the necessary books to read these latter writers on the subject.
-- EconoMix
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