Despite the enormous success of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 70s, we have fundamentally failed to use each of those battles to broaden the public understanding of why we were battling. It wasn’t just the power of environmentalists against developers, environmentalists against the oil industry. It was because we had a different way of looking at the world.
Environmentalism is a way of seeing our place within the biosphere. That’s what the battles were fought over. But we have failed to shift the perspective; or in the popular jargon, we failed to move or shift the paradigm. We are still stuck in the old way of seeing things.
I come to many of the politicians and corporate executives that environmentalists have been fighting all these years. They are driven by a totally different set of values, by the drive for profit, for growth, and for power. In that drive, they fail to see the bigger picture that environmentalism informs us about.
Look at the largest corporations like Apple, Walmart, Shell, Exxon, Monsanto – they are bigger and richer than most governments. And we treat them as if they are people. They are corporations, they’re not people. Why do we allow them to fund politicians, for God’s sake? They’re not people.
Politicians are running to look out for our future. But because corporations have the wealth to fund to a massive...
