Spinoza the environmentalist

LISTEN. In Environmental Ethics today we finish Hope Jahren's Story of More, after first turning to Spinoza in CoPhi. 

Jahren's last lines, in her Acknowledgements, have me thinking she may just be a Spinozist. She thanks the anonymous graffiti-ist who inscribed our species' indictment for excessive energy consumption on  "the electrical box at the corner of Blindernveien and Apelveien with: 'We worship an invisible god and slaughter a visible nature--without realizing that this nature we slaughter is the invisible god we worship.' It got me to thinking," she concludes.

But I'm thinking a Spinozist tackling climate change with the passionate and resolute will we will require, to alter our present course of naturo-cidal self-destruction, will have to be a different sort of Spinozist. She'll have to be less stoically understanding-and-accepting of the complex of causes and effects our past actions and inaction have turned into a climate in crisis, more committed to channeling our personal and collective wills to alter the trajectory of ever-expanding energy consumption and rapid fossil fuel depletion we've been on. We'll have to be more than "supreme rationalists"...

“Spinoza was the supreme rationalist. He saw an endless stream of causality in the world. For him there is no such entity as will or will power. Nothing happens capriciously. Everything is caused by something prior, and the more we devote ourselves to the understanding of this causative network, the more free we become." ... "I'm sure he would have said that you are subject to passions that are driven by inadequate ideas rather than by the ideas that flow from a true quest for understanding the nature of reality." ... "He states explicitly that a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a more clear and distinct idea of it--that is, the causative nexus underlying the passion." ― Irvin D. Yalom, The Spinoza Problem

We'll have to form a clear and distinct vision that only the passion of a dedicated and active pragmatist and naturalist can sustain. We'll have to be engaged and commmitted, not indifferent or defeatist. Sir David Attenborough on 60 Minutes last night: "What good does it do to say, 'Oh, to hell with it, I don't care.' You can't say that. Not if you love your children. Not if you love the rest of humanity — how can you say that?"

Yesterday was the anniversary of the 1962 publication of Silent Spring. Rachel Carson gave a commencement address in California earlier that summer that students still need to hear.

Today our whole earth has become only another shore from which we look out across the dark ocean of space, uncertain what we shall find when we sail out among the stars…

The stream of time moves forward and mankind moves with it. Your generation must come to terms with the environment. You must face realities instead of taking refuge in ignorance and evasion of truth. Yours is a grave and sobering responsibility, but it is also a shining opportunity. You go out into a world where mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself.
Therein lies our hope and our destiny. BP

It won't be enough to save humanly-hospitable nature, just to understand and love it. As Jahren says, it's the combination of love and work that realizes dreams. Grandfather Philosophy knows, "we need to look at things in a different way." And then we need to do things in a different way.