Quote from The Development Dictionary

I won’t ramble on about this today, but I wanted to post a couple quotes from a brilliant book called The Development Dictionary. It is a collection of essays on development, environment, economy, poverty, technology, and more. This quote comes from the essay titled “Environment” by Wolfgang Sachs. The essay itself is a discerning look at the history of concepts relating to development and environment, an exploration of the meanings attached to words like nature, environment, and ecology, and a prophetic blessing as well as critique to those engaged in development or who are concerned about the environment..

When I read the quote today it reminded me of my ponderings yesterday related to earlier perceptions of the environmentally concerned as the eccentric ones. The context of the quote is an argument that the ecological movement has been successful in its use of modernist means to critique the modern paradigms but cautions that the back door is left open to re-usher in an attempt to heal the problems created with the very things that created them.

“…without recourse to science, the ecology movement would probably have remained a bunch of nature freaks and never acquired the power of a historical force… the ecology movement seems to be the first anti-modernist movement attempting to justify its claims with the enemy’s own means. It resorts not only to the arts (like the romantics), to organicism (like the conservatives), to the glory of nature (like preservationists), or to a transcendental creed (like fundamentalist), although all these themes are present, but it bases its challenge on ecosystems theory which integrates physics, chemistry, and biology… and it is this concept of ecosystem that gave to the ecology movement a quasi-spiritual dimension and scientific credibility at the same time.” – p.30