Is Global Culture Warming up?

Abstract

During brief appearance at the 1990 Earth Day rally on Capitol Hill, Paul Ehrlich, biologist and ecological futurist, urged the assembled crowd and the television audience to accept that our problems are absolutely global: a cow breaks wind in Indonesia, and your grandchildren could die in food riots in the United States. What kind of logic was at work in this remark? Lateral thinking? Instant karma? Weird science? Under any circumstances, it sounds like strange claim to make, almost lampoon, hyperbolically warping whatever causal logic might link these two sets of events. But Ehrlich judged his audience well enough; and he could count on his long experience in the ecology movement to know that most of them shared the paradigm, scientific and political, that framed such remark. A well-documented history of scientific research and recent scientific claims about the greenhouse effect filled out the picture; the politics encouraged by his speech were based on the globalist premises shared by his constituency. Given the media's widespread public airing of both the science and the politics in advance of Earth Day 1990, Ehrlich and others could hope that the remark sounded logical enough to pass for sense, or, at least, would come to resemble common sense at some point in the near future. As an attempt to give concrete, or even proverbial, form to developed political philosophy, Ehrlich's remark wouldn't, of course, rank as great success. It was little too smart, and thus too much of short cut for an argument that required many more causal connections to be made along the way. Perhaps its underlying meaning was still too obscure to the public mind. At any rate, the remark seemed to lack the sensuous immediacy that makes good spontaneous philosophy out of mature body of political thought. This is not to say that the ecology movement hasn't produced its own effective behavioral slogans, like Think Global, Act Local, or Arne Naess's simple in means, rich in ends, or Barry Commoner's four laws of ecology: Everything is connected to everything else; Everything has to go somewhere; There's no such thing as free lunch; and Nature knows best. For the most part, however, they have been trite and touchy-feely, at least when compared, in terms of their