Photo credit: Lea Barouch
It is fair to say that most people in the modern world regard nature as a collection of “resources” that exist solely for our aggrandizement. Even the foremost putative “progressives” now on the national stage (Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, et al.) argue that we should continue to exploit resources to keep the capitalist growth machine humming, but that we must do it more gently, more ”sustainably,” with more intensive application of advanced technology, with “green” production of energy from wind, solar, hydro, and the like.
The central problem of our time, I’ve come to conclude, is that humanity now consists predominantly of “resourcists” — which is to say, humanists. I mean humanists in the ugliest and most benighted sense of that word...