Politeness and Civility

The lesson is that it’s not that so-called deep ecologists are too pessimist, in a sense of ‘Oh, we betrayed mother earth,’ and so on, no, in a way, they are too optimistic, even. Why? Because they still presuppose, how should I put it, that there is at least a level of stability, nature, natural balance, sustainability and so on, that we have somewhere to return to, as it were. I claim civilization is radically open. We don’t have anywhere to return to, even. There is no standard of natural balance which we should take as the ideal. All we can do is improvise, test, and you can never be quite sure if by doing something, you will not, at a different level, cause an even larger catastrophe. […]

For example, a guy in Germany recently claimed that the problem is that nature itself is already, nature itself, by this he means the reproduction, the cycle of nature on our earth, the entire earth as biosphere, is already so much accustomed to a certain degree of our pollution, that if we change things radically, even if for the good, you never know what kind of imbalance this will cause in nature. You see the paradox: we have nowhere to return to.

The Road

Once, there were brook-trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current, where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived, all things were older than man, and they hummed of mystery.