4 ~ Sunday, May 6, 1990 - North Shore News IN THE end, if the ecology movement completely had its way, would we all end up controlled by a Central World Eco-Police State? If conditions go bad enough, why not? Many intellectuals by then might be more willing to concede that the destruction of the true global Moiherland (or Fatherland), would mean all ‘‘volk’’ will inevitably perish. Ergo, a true ecological Gotterdamerung is at hand. We all bear witness. What plays nightly on the newscasts if not Twilight of The Gods? Deserts on the move. Oceans turned black and lifeless. Birds vanishing from the sky. Jungles burning. Smog tightening its car- bon monoxide grip around city after city, while the countryside turns to sand, More northern forests aflame than ever. The sky itself rotting before our com- puterized censors while we do nothing to save it, or ourselves, from perishing in a few genera- tions from unbearable extra ultra- violet radiation. A storm called Greenhouse Ef- fect. Like a new kind of all-at-once global tsunami of savage climatic gyrations. A steady percolating- to-the-boiling-point inside the glass-bow! atmosphere. Super- hurricanes sweep the soil away across empty lakebeds. The nightmare this very day, you can truthfully agree, is no longer a future prediction. It is upon us. . And for the most part, in shock, we seem to be sleep-walking, never having had, as dumbish creattres, to contend with such enormous responsibilities before, never hav- ing had to make decisions even remotely as complex as the ones that must be made now. So what it means is that we ei- ther “‘grow up”’ into smarter creatures — echoes of Nietzsche here! — or the planet will go out of whack and crash as an eco- system, destroying all our natural habitats; the mythical expulsion from Eden thereby turning out to have been a foreshadowing of his- tory, rather than an ancient cau- tionary tale. Modern Greens, at least those “Tea, Nothing Succeeds Like Sussex nan PROTECT YOUR GS N’T SMOKE Beitish Columbia Lung Association functioning in the advanced indus- trial societies, have as part of their three-century-old philosophy a direct link to generic German naturism: described in its time as a “‘life-philosophy that ... abolishe(s) the traditional dif- ference between nature and culture.’’ **..lt is time for ecologism, not just environmen- talism. ”’ It was called Lebensphilosophie. Man and nature were one. From these revolutionary no- tions catne a group called the ‘philosophical anthropologists,” who went so far as to conclude that man’s intellect was ‘‘not autonomous.”’ About this time the Nazis mate- rialized and plugged into the enormous — even primeval — energy that was in the process of being released by these crazy, paradigm-smashing ideas. Not autonomous! Not alone. Not striving ina vacuum, An aspect of Nature! Such a notion smacks of legend- ary old-world magicians who could reportedly make nature do their bidding. They worked their miracles, apparently, through a profound understanding of nature’s modus operandi, enough so that a grand and fantastic co- operative effort between man and nature could occur. Maybe it is a time for magician- ship, if such a thing is possible. Certainly, it is a time for ecologism, not just environmen- talism. It is high time to face up to the likelihood that if ecological condi- tions are allowed to deteriorate to the point where an entire genera- tion finds itself enguifed in a burn- ing, radiation-lashed hell on earth, it will be too late for any solution except the one imposed by some ecological Fuehrer in the name of global Lebensraum. Concerned as 1 am about the “volkish”’ latencies of eco-activism in its extreme form, I cannot avoid the nagging feeling that change — good, solid environmental refor- mist type of change — is just not coming fast enough. If we are as close to the edge as I fear we are, our reactions should be a lot swifter: we should be leap- ing for our lives. I think when the real Greenhouse Effect hits we'll wake up en masse in a hurry. But we might be into something that has snowballed too far and can’t be stopped. Strongly suspecting this scenario to be the one that really happens, isn’t my duty to start resisting disaster immediately? Not tomor- row. Not next New Year's Eve. The disaster we are talking about would leave my children — certainly my grandchildren — nowhere to run. It would leave my community and my country in rubble. It would devastate — has already devastated — my very planet. Everybody must consider that in the absence of a pea-sful settle- ment of the struggle over the re- maining commons — the seas, the rivers, the atmosphere, Antarctica, orbital space — a ‘‘war of the millenium”? may indeed fall quite possibly too late upon the shoulders of today’s young and not-so-young — and by then con- ditions will be enormously worse. The generation of the Eco- Holocaust will look back on the present moment of history as a hallucination — so swiftly en- joyed, with the wealth so quickly squandered, then gone forever, leaving only ruin. e VOLKSWAGEN, TOYOTA, BMW, HONDA, FORD, CHRYSLER. . . fem Lease for less when you call Steve Coles my of Copilano Auto Lease. Steve can get the cor you want ot a price you con’t tum down. For more ALL MAKE LEASE information call: STEVE COLES 985-LEASE (5327) 1151 MARINE CR,, N.V. 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