Devastated old-growth forest. Oregon.
Different cultures have always related to the environment in different ways. In all cases, culture profoundly affects attitudes toward the environment. No culture is without its deep flaws, and none is without its benefits. But with human populations burgeoning, and with the newfound technological powers unleashed by modern science, the sheer scale of our impact upon the world places the flaws at center stage.
America being my land, its culture my culture, my cultural criticism can be most effectively and properly deployed here. And there is much to criticize. The United States claims the honor of being the most consumptive, wasteful society---per capita and in aggregate---that the world has ever known. Here, in addition to our apparent fixation with outdated and implausible religious tenets, we pay almost worshipful homage to the perpetual growth of the Gross Domestic Product---that index of economic flux which utterly fails to account for long term damage or for the exhaustion of natural resources, measuring only the sheer intake of our collective appetites. This is the home of consumerism--consumption for consumption's sake, consumption as a near-patriotic duty. And in exporting this culture America is helping to cover the third world with plastic and other non-biodegradable wastes, the toxic refuse of our high-tech industries. In India, where several decades ago the landscape was free of such detritus, plastic now litters a country too impoverished and crowded to properly deal with it; the same is true in Latin America; the same is true everywhere. Indeed, the same is true in America itself, which manifestly does not properly handle its synthetic waste.
Other cultures have their ample flaws as well: in much of China, the cultural fascination with eating all living things---especially the rare, the exotic, the endangered---threatens to single-handedly liquidate the remaining biodiversity of Asia. In Latin America, the wide influence of Catholic belief abets increasing overpopulation, as do other religious creeds elsewhere in the world, thus encouraging the multiplication of human misery and the magnification of human environmental impacts. Under the influence of their respective apocalyptic eschatologies, the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam reinforce a blindness to future environmental consequences, with fundamentalists firm in the faith that the future will not be long.
Indeed, the reigning values in each of the dominant world cultures are so antiquated and so out of touch with reality as to demand wholesale revision---though 'revision' is actually too soft a term. What is needed is a hard-headed "revaluation of all values," with a critical eye on the ends those values serve, and a will to fashion new values: values suited to the goal of living in the world in such a manner as to honor that which makes life worth living at all. Such values must bow first to facts---they must recognize and be consonant with our humble status in the cosmos. Neither humanity nor its manufactured deities can continue to claim the cosmic center. The physical revolution championed by Copernicus and Galileo must find its echo in the realm of values and culture.
