Honourable companions,
"Think Globally Act Locally" is a key phrase that was used to rally
support for
local recycling programmes, park clean-up initiatives, waste reduction
campaigns, and other similar environmentally friendly civic activities.
It is also an affirmation of the civil environmentalis ts' view that
activism need not be violent or confrontational. I cite it as a
paradigmatic example of the way in which civil activists say we ought to
address the environmental crisis. As a rallying cry it can be found
beside other slogans such as "Reduce, Re-use, Recycle", or "Pick It Up,
Don't Litter". All of these are intended to produce results that are,
undoubtedly, life-positive: a reduction of litter, and of waste ordinarily
destined for landfills or incineration, is probably a good thing for th e
environment. However, the principle "Think Globally Act Locally", is
particularly important since it does not address itself specifically to
one type of activity (like waste production, as in the case of the other
two slogans). It is applicable to any
activity intended to improve environmental conditions, on a local scale.
Moreover it encourages us to look for ways in our own private lives to
help keep the environment clean, in addition to community-funded
collaborative projects like recycling progra mmes.
To "Think Globally", it seems to me, means to concern oneself
primarily with the issues and problems that are world-wide in scope. It
means to think beyond the divisions of the "here" and "not-here", the
"mine" and "not-mine", the "now" and "not-now". These are the terms of
cross-divisional principle which I have characterised as "spiritual". It
would seem to follow that one whose attention is focused on the whole
globe should try to do things with global ramifications, or, at any rate,
things with th e widest range of ramifications that it is in her power to
create. However, the second term of the premise, "Act Locally", means
quite the reverse: it means to restrict yourself to doing things that are
going to impact only one's immediate and nearby env ironment.
Now, I fully favour and applaud local river clean-up initiatives
and city recycling programmes. And I agree that public parks ought to
have waste bins for people's trash and city workers to empty them out once
in a while. However, the notion "Think Glo bally Act Locally" somehow
tricks us into thinking that by participating in small scale environmental
initatives, we have fulfilled the totality of our moral obligation to
protect the global environment. We are tricked into thinking that small
scale envi ronmental protection strategies are somehow equivalent to large
scale environmental exploitation. The reality is that local environmental
protection strategies are not enough to reverse, to halt, or even to slow
down the global processes of environmental
exploitation. Clearly, the proponents of "think globally act locally" are
operating with one or more repressed premises, that enables them to avoid
recognising the disjunction built within the principle itself.
It is tacitly assumed, but rarely articulated, that it is not
possible for one person alone to "act globally". It may be that while
contemplating the global degeneration of environmental health we feel
powerless to do anything at all. A variation of th e reasoning of "the
tragedy of the commons" is at work in presuppositions of this kind. It is
supposed that the efforts of one person alone are futile against the
overwhelming tide of forces currently engaged in destroying our
environment. It would be l ike trying to fight against the waves of the
sea with one's hands, as did the Irish mythic hero Cu Chullain. What is
unrecognised by this reasoning is that the damage to the environment has
been a co-ordinated, organised, and collaborative affair. It is
organised by corporations, and stimulated by consumer demand for
resource-consuming products. To a large degree it is also sustained by the
actions of individuals, such as automobile drivers.
It should be added that consumer demand is itself stimulated by
the same corporations. This is the function and purpose of advertising.
Especially in urban areas, our visual and auditory fields are saturated
with advertising, from billboards and poster s to broadcast media. The
products continue to sell themselves to the purchasers who already bought
them, and to their associates, with the prominently displayed corporate
logos of the manufacturer. Therefore even the privacy of home is no
escape from t he saturation of our sensory fields with advertising. This
is aesthetic pollution, or as it may be put more simply, "mental noise".
It serves to condition and programme our consciousness, so that legitimate
life serving need may be confused with, and me rged into, non life serving
want. In this way it sustains the pathological disorder of the will to
life within us all. It should be recognised that efforts aimed at slowing
or ending damage to the environment, and constructively healing the
environment, may also be collaborative as well as individual. However,
our slogan seems to select against collaborative activity by way of
promoting individual activity. "Think globally act locally" more or less
entails "think collaboratively act individually", or "think big-group
collaboration act small-group collaboration". Again, the slogan entails
that one is the equivalent of t he other.
The repressed premese is a false adjunction of contradictory
obligations. Acceptance of this repressed premise serves to sustain the
pathological disorder of the will to life. Individual efforts towards
preservation of the environment are without a dou bt life-serving, but the
repressed premise redirects our efforts to a realm where they would be
nearly useless against the global problem. The repressed premise leads us
to believe that local and individual efforts are enough. A local park
clean-up and a decent recycling programme might inspire a city council to
declare itself a "green city"1, but if such a city had high-polluting,
high waste-producing factories in its wards, such a declaration would be
hollow, misleading, empty, and meaningless. For f ailing to recognise the
totality of the situation, such a declaration would be symptomatic of the
same pathological disorder that sustains the parasitism of human society
on the earth.
If we were under an obligation to "think globally act globally",
which is what the moral message would look like if it were free from its
repressed false premise, then we may find ourselves beset with larger
moral obligations. In addition to reducing th e amount of paper we use or
refusing to own an automobile, we might, for example, try to revoke the
corporate charter of one or more paper mills and auto manufacturers. In
addition to refusing to buy food that was sprayed with toxic pesticides,
one might
try to revoke the corporate charter of the pesticide supplier. We might
also have to make larger investments than we already do in organic food
production, public transportation, and paper made from other plants such
as hemp. It may be that one is posi tively discouraged from acting
globally, lest we reduce or cease production of lumber, automobiles, food,
oil, steel, and the like, and also disemploy the workers in these
industries. In order to avoid reaching grandiose conclusions such as
these, we rem ain content to limit the sphere of our moral responsibility
to the small scale.
To "think globally act locally" does not seem to require one to
engage in any confrontational or radical activism such as street-theatre
or monkeywrenching. It therefore gives environmentally conscious people a
platform of moral righteousness by which t o criticise the confrontational
activists. Eugene Hargrove, a renowned environmental philosopher himself,
characterised monkeywrenching as "paramilitary operations... closer to
terrorism than civil disobedience..."2 Terrorism, however, involves
threaten ing a person or a group of people with death, unless they comply
with some demand; this is clearly not the same as monkeywrenching, which
involves the sabotage of property but not violence or threatened violence
against people. Cases of real violence, fo r example the bombing of the
Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior by the French government, do not get
called 'terrorism' when the terrorists themselves claim the moral high
ground.3 Only radicals, after all, can be terrorists.
Dave Foreman, the founder of Earth First!, regarded
monkeywrenching as not terrorist at all but as "thoughtful" and
"deliberate". He described it as non-violent (that is, not violent
against people), not organised, individual, targeted, timely, disperse d,
diverse, fun, not revolutionary, simple, and deliberate & ethical.4 The
only point at which a civil activist may claim moral superiority over a
monkeywrencher is the fact that civil activists do not break the law. A
monkeywrencher might counter by cl aiming that, in the light of higher
moral obligations on which civil activists do not act, certain laws ought
to be disobeyed. The obligation to protect the Earth is, as Foreman put
it, "the most moral of all actions", which puts it above the obligation to
respect property. So, the supposed moral high ground on which a
law-abiding environmentalist stands does not really exist.
Cathbad
Out of the Grove
And in the season of Imbolc, 2000
1 An example of this is the "Green Olympics", declared by Melbourne,
Australia, for the Summer Olympic Games of 2000.
2 Eugene Hargrove, "Ecological Sabotage: Pranks or Terrorism?"
Environmental Ethics Vol 4(1982), pg. 292.
3 Regarding the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior by French commandoes in the
harbour of Wellington, New Zealand, in which one crewmember drowned: "when
a member of the British Parliament said to then Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher, "It's a British ship wi th a British flag and a British captain
and a British crew in a British Commonwealth harbour sunk by the French
government", she said, "It's none of our concern..."" D. VanDeVeer & C.
Pierce, eds. The Environmental Ethics and Policy Book, pg. 601.
4 Each of these eleven claims is given a short paragraph of explanation by
Foreman. It is worth reprinting the last: "Monkeywrenching is not
something to do cavalierly. Monkeywrenchers are very conscious of the
gravity of what they do. They are deliber ate about taking such a serious
step. They are thoughtful. Monkeywrenchers --although nonviolent-- are
warriors. They are exposing themselves to possible arrest or injury. It
is not a casual or flippant affair. They keep a pure heart and mind about
i t. They remember that they are engaged in the most moral of all
actions: protecting life, defending the Earth." D. Foreman, "Strategic
Monkeywrenching" The Environmental Ethics and Policy Book pg. 606.
