Auschwitz and The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the Stern Report are the most sobering and distressing evaluations of the state of our environment. This essay probably will offend many but is a musing on the relationship of complacency to evil. I offer you no consolation but to consider the reality of our environment as being increasingly the consequence of human decisions.
Imagine yourself as a German in 1945. Throughout the Nazi period you have tried to live the values you today hold precious. You are faced with Auschwitz. The rest of humaninty is now calling you to judgment.
Nazis repulsed you; it made you sick to see Brown Shirts and SS black. You saw people disappear, but they were Jews and you did not know them (equating them in today’s terms like illegal aliens – a class of people you saw but had no interaction with – they were merely “others”). Opposition to Nazism probably took the form of passive-aggressive resistance or listening to the BBC. In other words, you accommodated out of fear, frustration, or surrender – you took a generally quietest approach just in order to get by.
You knew you lived under an evil banner even before 1939. You were subject to Nazism, but not a subject of the Nazis in the sense of the conquered lands. You were family, part of the bourgeois world as a merchant or as a worker. You saw or believed that capitalism was the engine that generated the well-being you accepted as the reward for doing you job well. As a good Christian, you possibly saw the hand of the Deity at work. You ended you daily prayers or down your pilsner with a heartfelt “mit Gott erhaltz!”
But it is now 1945. In that cold grey spring, you are surrounded by smoking ruins. The victors force you to confront the gaunt faces of camp survivors and the stacked dead who could not be burned in the Reich’s final days.
The Reich ran like a business, was supported by business, and millions of your countrymen that flocked to the banner. The Nazi state was corporatist and ran like the giant cartels of Bayer and Krupp. The price of autobahns and of vigor and of things running on time was possibly the evil spawn, clause or corollary of the material values you held most dear.
Transpose yourself to today and substitute Millennium Assessment for Auschwitz.
The evil of Auschwitz becomes the evil of an environment on the road to collapse. The decisions of banal and mundane men destroyed more than six million of your fellow humans. The decisions of banal and mundane men today in following well thought-out business plans threaten to befoul our very home, the only home we have.
Sadly, it is the same economic model that spawned the Nazis.
BBC reported that The Millennium Ecosystem is “the most comprehensive survey ever into the state of the planet [and] concludes that human activities threated the Earth’s ability to sustain future generations.”
The report, set out as an audit, much like an accounting process, concludes that most of our accounts are in the red. Desperate to foster a business climate (rather than a sustainable climate), our leaders juggle the environmental books with Clear Skies and Healthy Forest initiatives, all of which make Enron look penny-ante in comparison.
In California and Washington, Rate payers scratched their heads in wonderment at rate increases created to make red look black. Papers reported of talk of 75% reductions in harvest, waater districts working with 10% to 20% of their average water supply. The Oregon Food Bank experiences fewer contributions from food-industry donations. Water-based tourism suffers – one year a mountain reservoir community, the next year commercial fishing along the Pacific.
And where are our leaders. They have all the ethical and oral fiber of their Enron counterparts. They, like their Enron counterparts cannot do the right thing because they are compromised and would have to go against their inclinations and their supporters.
And what about us? We cannot see that our land use policy and our city planning goals represented our commitment to a sustainable future. Greed, disguised as fairness means we let property owners do what they want with “their” properties.
Enjoy the weather while you can. And don’t complain about, because increasing we caused it.
We contributed to the problem; we can also contribute to the solution. That means getting our local government officials to pull their heads out of the sand. It means looking at city issues from a perspective of future benefit rather than present gain. It means turning back the legislative termites destroying our land conservation heritage. And for all of us it means consciously and contentiously taking the moral high ground to be stewards and leave this a better place than we found it.
Imagine yourself as a German in 1945. Throughout the Nazi period you have tried to live the values you today hold precious. You are faced with Auschwitz. The rest of humaninty is now calling you to judgment.
Nazis repulsed you; it made you sick to see Brown Shirts and SS black. You saw people disappear, but they were Jews and you did not know them (equating them in today’s terms like illegal aliens – a class of people you saw but had no interaction with – they were merely “others”). Opposition to Nazism probably took the form of passive-aggressive resistance or listening to the BBC. In other words, you accommodated out of fear, frustration, or surrender – you took a generally quietest approach just in order to get by.
You knew you lived under an evil banner even before 1939. You were subject to Nazism, but not a subject of the Nazis in the sense of the conquered lands. You were family, part of the bourgeois world as a merchant or as a worker. You saw or believed that capitalism was the engine that generated the well-being you accepted as the reward for doing you job well. As a good Christian, you possibly saw the hand of the Deity at work. You ended you daily prayers or down your pilsner with a heartfelt “mit Gott erhaltz!”
But it is now 1945. In that cold grey spring, you are surrounded by smoking ruins. The victors force you to confront the gaunt faces of camp survivors and the stacked dead who could not be burned in the Reich’s final days.
The Reich ran like a business, was supported by business, and millions of your countrymen that flocked to the banner. The Nazi state was corporatist and ran like the giant cartels of Bayer and Krupp. The price of autobahns and of vigor and of things running on time was possibly the evil spawn, clause or corollary of the material values you held most dear.
Transpose yourself to today and substitute Millennium Assessment for Auschwitz.
The evil of Auschwitz becomes the evil of an environment on the road to collapse. The decisions of banal and mundane men destroyed more than six million of your fellow humans. The decisions of banal and mundane men today in following well thought-out business plans threaten to befoul our very home, the only home we have.
Sadly, it is the same economic model that spawned the Nazis.
BBC reported that The Millennium Ecosystem is “the most comprehensive survey ever into the state of the planet [and] concludes that human activities threated the Earth’s ability to sustain future generations.”
The report, set out as an audit, much like an accounting process, concludes that most of our accounts are in the red. Desperate to foster a business climate (rather than a sustainable climate), our leaders juggle the environmental books with Clear Skies and Healthy Forest initiatives, all of which make Enron look penny-ante in comparison.
In California and Washington, Rate payers scratched their heads in wonderment at rate increases created to make red look black. Papers reported of talk of 75% reductions in harvest, waater districts working with 10% to 20% of their average water supply. The Oregon Food Bank experiences fewer contributions from food-industry donations. Water-based tourism suffers – one year a mountain reservoir community, the next year commercial fishing along the Pacific.
And where are our leaders. They have all the ethical and oral fiber of their Enron counterparts. They, like their Enron counterparts cannot do the right thing because they are compromised and would have to go against their inclinations and their supporters.
And what about us? We cannot see that our land use policy and our city planning goals represented our commitment to a sustainable future. Greed, disguised as fairness means we let property owners do what they want with “their” properties.
Enjoy the weather while you can. And don’t complain about, because increasing we caused it.
We contributed to the problem; we can also contribute to the solution. That means getting our local government officials to pull their heads out of the sand. It means looking at city issues from a perspective of future benefit rather than present gain. It means turning back the legislative termites destroying our land conservation heritage. And for all of us it means consciously and contentiously taking the moral high ground to be stewards and leave this a better place than we found it.
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