Environmental rationality

Environmental awareness builds on our identities in relation with other diverse bodies in the nature. Environmental crisis leads to rethinking identities in search of connecting, managing and improving complex relation with the environment – one dimension that has been much neglected in the past. As Porritt emphasis on the green movement that must forge an “evolved, intelligent and elegant” form of capitalism with sustainability at its heart. Changing rationality that prevailed as if environmental resources are costless and infinite.

Environmental rationality seeks to reestablish the links between knowing, certainties, and purpose of our surroundings and the way we get on with them. We are defining new roles and spaces. Consequences of ignoring environmental signals and delaying environmental democracy are greater than expected. For example global warming and water scarcity has become the major motivating factor for countries in central Asia to escalate into conflicts over access to water. In China, 100 million people live on crops grown with underground water that is not being refilled: water tables are falling fast all over the north China plain. Studies found that we survive today as a result of borrowing from the future.

Many large cities built near shoreline rely on underground lenses of fresh water, effectively floating, within the porous rocks, on salt water which has soaked into the land from the sea. As the fresh water is sucked out, the salt water rises and can start to contaminate the aquifer. This is already happening in hundreds of places. The worst case is the Gaza Strip, which relies entirely on underground water that is now almost undrinkable. As the sea level rises as a result of climate change, salt pollution in coastal regions is likely to accelerate.

Pressing environment rationality implies the reconstitution of identities beyond instrumental modern thinking, calculating and planning. The solution to the global environmental crisis is revising mind sets, perceptions and values in addition to institutional changes. Environmental democracy modifies the logic of the calculating control of the world, of the technological domination of nature, of the prevailing administration of the environment. And in so doing develops culture of adaptation to the nature. Over reliance on science that assisted to liberate man from underdevelopment and oppression has generated one dimensional alienated society.

The focus is on identity issues that revolve around environmental democracy particularly access to water and its state of affairs for which researches need to examine and compare behaviour, decision making and the grasp of risks involved in different social context, in our democratic response to global warming, over population and resource depletion.

Sources:

Johnaton Porritt, Capitalism As If The World Matters, 2005
George Monbiot, Guardian, The freshwater boom is over. Our rivers are starting to run dry, 10 Oct 2006