HHDL speaks about .....

[tobes]

I don't agree. What one is liberated from are the afflictions, one is liberated in the world. The common metaphor of environmental harmony in classical Indian sources is the rishi surrounded by predators and prey in a jungle retreat where all are abiding peacefully.

Yes, I suppose another thing to take into account are the planting/offering of forest groves and forest retreats in the rainy season for the early sangha ~ which clearly prioritise a kind of natural harmony. However, I still think this is quite a radically different ontology of the natural world than is found in Tibetan-Sino-Japanese Mahayana traditions. The forest might be considered to be a place conducive to tame the mind, and of course all things, once the mind is tamed, abide peacefully.....an arhat who goes to a doom concert would also find that everything there abides peacefully. It doesn't follow that the doom scene is ontologically peaceful to begin with.

[tobes]

But here is a quintessential and often ignored principle of Naess's thinking. Many people unfairly claim that deep ecology insists that human beings must sacrifice themselves on the cross of environmental martyrdom, and sadly, many people professing the deep ecology view do make these kinds of claims -- but both parties have either not read Naess clearly, or they are choosing to ignore him. He writes:

Right, I haven't read Naess directly.....my critique of deep ecology comes more from the kind of ethos I have seen expressed and embodied by people who endorse it. But like all movements, misreadings and misinterpretations are probably rife. Sounds like he's worth reading.

[tobes]

"The special obligation we have for our own species requires us in the long run to ensure that a population has what is necessary to provide the conditions for reaching the ultimate goals of humankind and satisfying vital needs. Beyond that, our obligation is to life in general and to the earth as a whole aquire priority."

What does he think the 'ultimate goals of humankind' are? How is that worked out? What if there is radical disagreement about that question?

[Malcolm]

What does he think the 'ultimate goals of humankind' are? How is that worked out?

Pleasure, happiness, and self-realization. The goal of deep ecology is to work this out, since it is obvious to me, the Dalai Lama, and so on, that the great malaise of modern industrial society is that people are not happy and they have no path to self-realization because of the alienaton caused by the trenchant inversion of human relationships with the natural world.

N

[Malcolm]

But here is a quintessential and often ignored principle of Naess's thinking. Many people unfairly claim that deep ecology insists that human beings must sacrifice themselves on the cross of environmental martyrdom, and sadly, many people professing the deep ecology view do make these kinds of claims -- but both parties have either not read Naess clearly, or they are choosing to ignore him. He writes:

Right, I haven't read Naess directly.....my critique of deep ecology comes more from the kind of ethos I have seen expressed and embodied by people who endorse it. But like all movements, misreadings and misinterpretations are probably rife. Sounds like he's worth reading.

The Ecology of Wisdom in many ways is more accessible than some of his other writing.

[tobes]

What does he think the 'ultimate goals of humankind' are? How is that worked out?

Pleasure, happiness, and self-realization. The goal of deep ecology is to work this out, since it is obvious to me, the Dalai Lama, and so on, that the great malaise of modern industrial society is that people are not happy and they have no path to self-realization because of the alienaton caused by the trenchant inversion of human relationships with the natural world.

N

Right. I guess the problem is that a lot of disparate economic ideologies agree with that starting premise and those three ultimate goals:

Von mises was an Aristotelian ~ he thought that the individual freedom supposedly granted by free markets is the best way for a society to realise eudaimonia.

Likewise contemporary Marxists such as Marcuse and Alasdair McIntyre; Marx was himself very concerned with that fundamental premise.

So, I totally agree that pleasure, happiness and self-realisation ought to be the core normative values which drive economics and production.

The real question is how we actually configure economics and production such that those values manifest.

My sense is that we really don't have the answers to that question at the moment ~ but I'd certainly agree that deep ecology has a critical contribution to make.

[tobes]

The Ecology of Wisdom in many ways is more accessible than some of his other writing.

Thanks for the tip. I've got a very healthy respect for Spinoza, so I will pursue this when I have some time.

[Heruka]

What does he think the 'ultimate goals of humankind' are? How is that worked out?

Pleasure, happiness, and self-realization.
N

"A" typical sociopath.

[Virgo]

What does he think the 'ultimate goals of humankind' are? How is that worked out?

Pleasure, happiness, and self-realization.
N

"A" typical sociopath.

Having those ideals has nothing to do with being sociopathological, or having ASPD, the diagnosis often given to sociopaths.

Kevin

[Heruka]

really?

i guess some would be fooled and play the submissive in that power show, no matter how clever we think we are.

[Virgo]

really?

i guess some would be fooled and play the submissive in that power show, no matter how clever we think we are.

The times they are a changing.

Kevin

[Virgo]

As for an increase in delusion, maybe people will start to forget about spiritual practice and religion and start to think that the "best" spirituallity is brotherhood of man (with no deeper philosophies involved). Maybe they will start to adhere to these principles and see the importance of the earth as a whole. Maybe global detest will cause old structures (metaphorically speaking) to fall down. And perhaps our enlarged attachment will suck us right into this.

Kevin

[Heruka]

really?

i guess some would be fooled and play the submissive in that power show, no matter how clever we think we are.

The times they are a changing.

Kevin

no my birth sign, carrier of the harvest, i learned to trade with the lakota, in that there is real natural law and rights of man....no change, it is the same as it has ever been.

you see, really, truly there has only ever been man and nature.

what makes for division and seperation, is man vs nature.

[Malcolm]

What does he think the 'ultimate goals of humankind' are? How is that worked out?

Pleasure, happiness, and self-realization.
N

"A" typical sociopath.

Guess that makes all Buddhists sociopaths then, since the point of practicing Dharma is pleasure (freedom from physcial suffering); happiness (freedom from mental suffering), and self-realization (freedom from ignorance and affliction).

N

[Malcolm]

you see, really, truly there has only ever been man and nature.

what makes for division and seperation, is man vs nature.

Yes, this is the basic argument of deep ecology, and ecological thinking in general. What do we do with this self-reflexivity that has caused us to imagine ourselves to be outside of the matrix that spawned us? Do we continue to use it destructively, as the Greco/Roman/Abrahamic civilization has done? Shall we exhaust our resource base, as the Mayans and Roman civilization in North Africa did? Or do we overcome the otherness our own self-awareness has spawned and understand limitations imposed upon us by our world?

I really suggest you read Greer, or at least read his blog.

"Think back, dear reader, to the time when you first became aware of peak oil. Odds are that when you first encountered the concept, you found it disquieting or even repellent, but at a certain point—maybe in that first encounter, maybe later on—something suddenly shifted. A moment later you were living in a different world, one in which earlier priorities and beliefs had to make room for the immense and terrifying fact that your civilization was in deep trouble and next to nobody was willing to see that, much less do anything about it. That was your initiation into peak oil, and the feverish reading and thinking that most of you probably did over the weeks and months that followed were the equivalent of the magical student’s daily meditations and rituals, which stabilize the new pattern and begin the hard work of teaching the initiate how to make constructive use of what the initiation has provided."
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ ... ation.html

[Karma Dondrup Tashi]

Meanwhile, back at the ranch ...

[Malcolm]

Sad but true...

Meanwhile, back at the ranch ...

[Karma Dondrup Tashi]

See N-la this is where my concern is. I mean an ant on an anthill is "part of the matrix". So I mean what's to stop a human queen bee with all her soldier ants making all of us "part of the matrix" too? This is where I still think that the Western idea of property rights is of some use because it is a safeguard against precisely that kind of concern.

I totally accept your concern about large scale rapacious capitalism. But where do we meet in the middle here? You yourself said that we could still have businesses and factories "where permissible" - again that scary word. So how do we meet in the middle here? At what point does someone trading a basket for someone else's spear become rapacious upon the environment? In other words at what point does trade that is "free" become harmful?

When I say I am an anarcho "capitalist" what I really mean is that collectivism scares me more than individualism. And being subsumed back into the "matrix that spawned us" sounds to me an awful lot like a type of collectivism that is going to have to be enforced via coercion.

I mean when we have collapsed the cave of hope and fear are we still deep ecologists? Isn't it just another reference point?

[Malcolm]

See N-la this is where my concern is. I mean an ant on an anthill is "part of the matrix". So I mean what's to stop a human queen bee with all her soldier ants making all of us "part of the matrix" too? This is where I still think that the Western idea of property rights is of some use because it is a safeguard against precisely that kind of concern.

I totally accept your concern about large scale rapacious capitalism. But where do we meet in the middle here? You yourself said that we could still have businesses and factories "where permissible" - again that scary word. So how do we meet in the middle here? At what point does someone trading a basket for someone else's spear become rapacious upon the environment? In other words at what point does trade that is "free" become harmful?

When I say I am an anarcho "capitalist" what I really mean is that collectivism scares me more than individualism. And being subsumed back into the "matrix that spawned us" sounds to me an awful lot like a type of collectivism that is going to have to be enforced via coercion.

I mean when we have collapsed the cave of hope and fear are we still deep ecologists? Isn't it just another reference point?

From my perspective, your concerns are more appropriately voiced with reference to social ecology, which for all of its pretense to be an ecological theory, is still basically marxist, still basically a collectivism, now rebranded as communalism. Trust me, I am no more interested in living on a commune, or a kibbutz, than you are.

Permissible in this context means that when the necessary cultural transformation occurs that will allow for a deep green society to unfold, people will understand what kinds of industries are appropriate and what are not. Will there be needs for some kinds of controls (regulations), sure. Everyone can see that markets, for example, are part of the commons, and therefore, also require protection. This is actually the underlying notion of a so called "free" market. It is free because everyone can participate in it. It is also something which needs protection from time to time because markets show a marked inability to regulate themselves when subject to certain pathological pressures. When you understand that markets are a commons, then you will understand why it is necessary to protect everything that can enter a market. Markets are no more self-regulating than any other natural system. Like every other natural system, they only find a balance when they are in their proper niche. When they invade other niches, other "commons", they become unhealthy and cancerous. Free Market Ideology and the ensuing liberalization of trade around the world has lead to this state of affairs. These are all faults not of regulation, but of deregulation. Cap and trade is a failure because it represents an attempt to let the market determine the price of pollution, thus leading to the atrocities mentioned by Heruka. The present form of green capitalism is doomed to failure for the same reasons the housing industry failed. It is another bubble. You heard it here first.

Capitalism eats itself. This is the main problem with unrestricted capitalism.

So the issue comes, how do we determine how much capitalism, how much manufacturing, what kind, etc. All of these are problems for which I confess I have no solution apart from a radical change in our social values, what we find important.

Property rights translated into civil rights when the notion of ownership transitioned from "pater famililias" to the individual person. We need to both extend the notion of rights to creatures (as we already do in Buddhism) and to our environment. We need to understand that all creatures have rights merely by virtue of being sentient. From a Buddhist POV, after all, this is what natural virtue and non-virtue is based on i.e. the fundamental recognition that taking the life of creatures of immoral, and so on. Sooner or later we have to realize that destroying our environment is immoral because of the "civil" rights of our environment. Our world is not inert dead matter. It is teaming with life, and it is not just there as ours to take and dispose of as we wish.

N

[Heruka]

at the end of the day its about who controls resources and who decides about shutting that down in the name of sustainability. Its about ideaologs cherry picking and directing the science instead of the science directing policy, im afraid at the heart of the green movement is just more power grabing in the name of telling others what is good for the earth means austerity for you. That is also true about insider crony captalism.

its classic pressure from above and pressure from below.

i would prefer a more common sense approach.