Word: environmentalists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...depends upon recognition of the codependence of every position in the ecological web. Thus Purdy conceives of understanding human interpersonal responsibility as "moral ecology," individual responsibility to the public sphere as "social ecology," and environmental responsibility as, well, "ecology." Not, perhaps, the neatest of aphoristic parallelisms in an American environmentalist tradition that has been marked by the brilliant aphoristic prose of its writers: but Purdy, despite his occasional lapses in tone, is an heir to the aphoristic tradition of the environmentalists, and to their conviction that sincere beliefs must root themselves in the solid realities of the physical environment...
...think any such judgments must be preceeded by an attempt to understand where this book comes from. For Common Things is remarkable for, among other things, its fidelity to the tradition of American environmentalist writing in particular. Since its beginnings, American writing has been infused with the conviction that the personal must somehow stand for the nation. It is characteristic of what has been called the American Self that the particular events of the individual life are understood to somehow trend towards universality...
Perhaps this tendency of the American Self evidences itself nowhere more clearly than in environmentalist literature and eco-criticism. It wasn't narcissism but selflessness--in the most authentic sense of the term, the vanishing of the self--that led Thoreau to tell us about his life in the woods: it was his conviction that individual choices possess some kind of cosmic exemplary significance. Walden is a sort of spiritual biography of man in Nature, told through Thoreau's experience in the woods. The notion is that experience is transcendent of the personal, and indexes the general...
There is a measure of validity on both sides of the argument. The reality lies somewhere in-between the environmentalist model, (humanity will succumb to natural restraints), and the economic model (human nature can circumvent such natural restraints). We may be able to bend the laws of nature a bit, but it would be both arrogant and foolish to believe that we can continue to overburden the earth indefinitely...
...Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Auckland. Sir Edmund won't, however, meet the Rodham Clinton Hillary, who is staying home. The White House insists that New York Senate politics has nothing to do with the get-together. Rather, a spokesman said, the President considers the explorer a leading environmentalist and one of the greatest athletes of the 20th century...