http://www.diigo.com/user/Vespertine/environment Tue, 24 Apr 2007 07:41:58 -0000 Tue, 24 Apr 2007 07:41:58 -0000 http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/267 <p></p><p><strong>Highlights and Sticky Notes:</strong><p><div class="content">a reverence for creation and a shared commitment to the idea that religion is finally about understanding how to live in faithful relation to what has been given to us in creation</div></p><p><div class="content">Not for nothing did the philosopher Paul Ricoeur once observe that capitalism is “a failure that cannot be defeated.”</div></p><p><div class="content">we need a culture that understands success as <i>life</i>. For John Ruskin, humans should make “good and beautiful things” because those things will re-create us as good and beautiful in their turn. To make cheap and ugly and destructive things will kill us, as indeed we are being killed through poverty, through war, through the cheapening of our public and private lives, and through the destruction of the natural world.</div></p><p><div class="content">Our culture’s assumption that there is virtue in work flatters us into thinking that we’re doing something noble ("supporting our families,” “putting food on the table,” “making sacrifices") when we are really only allowing ourselves to be treated like automatons. We all have our place, our “job,” and it is an ever less human place. We are diligent, disciplined, and responsible, but because of these virtues we are also thoughtless.</div></p><p><div class="content">If all this is so, it is only possible to conclude from our behavior for the last two hundred years that ours is not a human society; that it is a society outside of the human in some terrible sense. And, in fact, it was one of the earliest insights of Karl Marx that the kind of work provided by capitalism was alienating. That is, it made us something other than what we are. It dehumanized us. And so, in our no-longer-human state, it became perfectly natural for us to destroy nature (which should sound to you just as perverse as the situation really is). Alienation in work means that instead of knowing something about a lot of things concerned with human fundamentals like food, housing, clothing, and the wise and creative use of our free time, we know one small thing. One task in an ocean of possible tasks.</div></p><p><p><strong>Tags:</strong> <a href='http://www.diigo.com/user/vespertine/environment' rel='tag'>environment</a> <a href='http://www.diigo.com/user/vespertine/work' rel='tag'>work</a> </p><p><strong>Posted by:</strong> <a href='http://www.diigo.com/user/vespertine'>vespertine</a></p> Tue, 24 Apr 2007 07:41:58 -0000 http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2006/06/09/nasa_shelves_climate_satellites/?page=1 <p></p><p><strong>Tags:</strong> <a href='http://www.diigo.com/user/vespertine/climatechange' rel='tag'>climatechange</a> <a href='http://www.diigo.com/user/vespertine/environment' rel='tag'>environment</a> <a href='http://www.diigo.com/user/vespertine/science' rel='tag'>science</a> </p><p><strong>Posted by:</strong> <a href='http://www.diigo.com/user/vespertine'>vespertine</a></p> Thu, 24 Aug 2006 02:51:30 -0000 http://grist.org/news/maindish/2006/02/13/pate/ <p></p><p><strong>Tags:</strong> <a href='http://www.diigo.com/user/vespertine/development' rel='tag'>development</a> <a href='http://www.diigo.com/user/vespertine/economics' rel='tag'>economics</a> <a href='http://www.diigo.com/user/vespertine/environment' rel='tag'>environment</a> </p><p><strong>Posted by:</strong> <a href='http://www.diigo.com/user/vespertine'>vespertine</a></p> Thu, 24 Aug 2006 02:51:30 -0000 60