The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy Read Online Free PDF

they are often loud, and sound influential, but they are small in number in global terms. Most ordinary individuals do not care, because the consequences are not yet visited upon them (although they will be), and also because people are quite naturally focused on their own concerns, which often seem harmless enough, and do not grasp that the essence of the trouble to come is their own individual choices, multiplied seven billion times.
    Furthermore, the destruction of humanity’s home by humanity’s own actions is not something that can be coped with adequately – and that means, confronted – by our current belief system, which we might term liberal secular humanism. This creed, which has held sway since the Second World War, has a single, honourable aim: to advance human welfare. It wants people everywhere to be free from hunger and fear and disease, and in so far as is possible, to be happy and to live fulfilled lives. It is principled and upright. It is admirable. But there is a gap at its core: the failure to acknowledge that humans are not necessarily good. Still less does it admit that, more, there may be something intrinsically troubling about humans as a species: that Homo sapiens may be the earth’s problem child.
    Many, indeed, would be outraged by the suggestion, for poverty and hunger and disease are terrible enough without proposing that people as a whole are in some way flawed. Yet for the Greeks, the founders of our culture, this idea was central to their morality. There was a continual problem with man. Man was glorious, almost godlike, and continually striving upwards; yet only the gods were actually Up There, and if man tried to get too high, as he often did, the gods would destroy him. The gods represented man’s limits. We think of Icarus, of course, but there are deeper lessons to be learned. The principal fault of Oedipus in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex , remember, was not that he murdered his father and married his mother; those were the incidentals of his fate. His real fault was that he thought he knew everything, he had answered the riddle of the Sphinx, he was beyond peradventure wise. The gods showed him he was not (and in the greatest of all tragic ironies, he puts out his eyes to punish himself for having been blind to his true situation, which now he can see).
    In the modern consensus, in liberal secular humanism, this spiritual view of man as having limits, as not being able to do everything he chooses, and of potentially being a problem creature – for what else is a species which destroys its own home? – is missing entirely. There is no trace of it whatsoever. To suggest it, is absolute anathema. For with the dying of religion and the vanishing of spirituality we have become our own moral yardstick: at the heart of our notions of good and bad lies human suffering, and what we can do to avoid it. This is so deep-rooted in us now, so instinctive, that it has been internalised in the language: one of our most prized virtues is humanity, one of our deepest tributes to another person, that they are humane. He, or she, is a humane human. It’s only one letter, one squiggle away from saying he, or she, is a human human. Our morality now is entirely anthropocentric: we automatically define objective good by what is best for ourselves. So where humanity’s interests clash with other interests, the other are likely to get short shrift from us, even when they involve the proper functioning of the planet, which is the only place we have to live.
    This has made the effective defence of the natural world very difficult in recent decades, especially in the face of development imperatives which may seem overwhelming. Environmentalists and conservationists, the people concerned with the fate of the earth’s natural systems, have often been contemptuously dismissed by the development movement as middle-class birdwatchers, and it has long been hard to counter the assertive battle-cry of those turning