save the planet ?

when I worked for Greenpeace briefly in the early 90s, running the Vancouver Island canvass and occasionally
driving Zodiacs, we published a tri-fold pamphlet with the headline, Hope For The Planet

around that time, someone published a catalog of environment challenges and do-able solutions for each one

I started sometimes saying, except at the doors of course, that "the pamphlet (was) misleading, because there (was) no hope for the planet; we could save the planet, but there's no profit in it"

since then I have come to understand that the planet, solar plasma bursts notwithstanding, will likely out-survive Neanderthals and their descendants by millions or billions of years; hope for homo sapiens, however, is a different matter, although we are likely to out-survive frogs and butterflies

while environmentalists still preach a gospel of hope, there’s an inherent contradiction in their hopeful environmental message, according to Michael Nelson and John Vucetich; UTNE Reader’s posted an abstract of their article in Ecologist

In his 2006 essay Beyond Hope, posted to Orion Magazine, Derrick Jensen opened by sharing that …

‘THE MOST COMMON WORDS I hear spoken by any environmentalists anywhere are, We’re fucked. …’

later, he suggests …

‘... When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to “hope” at all. We simply do the work. We make sure salmon survive. We make sure prairie dogs survive. We make sure grizzlies survive. We do whatever it takes. …’

more next time

Blessed Be