Chapter 8:16N The Environmental or Green Movement

Again, as far as offering an effective way to transcend the realities of the human condition, feminism’s flaw was that while it superficially dispensed with the problem of humans’ divisive reality, humans remained the focus of attention and that was confronting. The solution that emerged to counter this limitation was the Environmental or Green Movement, which removed all need to confront and think about the human state because all focus was diverted from self onto the environment—as the aforementioned quote acknowledged, ‘The environment became the last best cause, the ultimate guilt-free issue.’ In response to a question about people’s focus on ‘climate change’, the psychologist Jordan Peterson spoke the truth when he said, ‘People have things within their personal purview [range of experience] that are difficult to deal with and that they’re avoiding and generally the way they avoid them is by adopting pseudo-moralistic stances on large-scale social issues, so they look good to their friends and neighbours’ (Australia’s ABC program Q&A, 25 Feb. 2019). Of course, the obvious truth is that by not addressing the cause of the destruction of the natural world, namely the issue of our human condition’s massively upset, angry, egocentric and alienated state, there can be no real let up in the pace of our world’s devastation, as these quotes emphasise: ‘The trees aren’t the problem. The problem is us’ (Simply Living mag. Sep. 1989), and ‘We need to do something about the environmental damage in our heads’ (TIME, 24 May 1993). The bumper sticker ‘SAVE THE HUMANS’ that parodies the green movement’s ‘Save the Environment’ slogan makes the point about how evasive of the real issue the environmental movement is—as does the following statement made by Ray Evans, an Australian business leader and political activist: ‘Environmentalism has largely superseded Christianity as the religion of the upper classes in Europe and to a lesser extent in the United States. It is a form of religious belief which fosters a sense of moral superiority in the believer, but which places no importance on telling the truth [about the real issue of our corrupted condition]’ (Nine Facts About Climate Change, 2006; see <www.wtmsources.com/169>).