Sublime

This is more or less the argument of Roger Scruton in positioning environmentalism as a deservedly (politically) conservative cause. He writes in Green Philosophy, For the conservative, politics concerns the maintenance and repair of homeostatic systems — systems that correct themselves in response to destabilizing change. Markets are homeostatic s

scientist, author, Senior Fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute, and one of the foremost analysts of our energy future, explained it to me: In short, our rate of consumption is overshooting our planet’s sustainable sources of production. According to the Global Footprint Network, humanity is currently using the equivalent of 1.75 Earths to provide th

In making the planet brighter and louder, we have also fragmented it. While razing rainforests and bleaching coral reefs, we have also endangered sensory environments. That must now change. We have to save the quiet, and preserve the dark.

This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.

A world in which the environment itself was dominant, an ecological world, is of much longer duration and, despite the thoughtless exercise of our power, has never gone away. Indeed, the tumult in which we find ourselves today might be considered its violent reassertion.

Mark Elvin has cautioned that late imperial China witnessed almost the entire spectrum of practices towards nature, from reverential approaches to an anthropocosmic order unified by qi cosmic flows to large-scale engineering schemes on land and water. By the late imperial period, the toll taken by massive hydraulic projects, deforestation and inten