What if We Stopped Fighting For Preservation?

by Tom Butler from CASSE. 

Tim Murray’s essay “What If We Stopped Fighting for Preservation and Fought Economic Growth Instead?” is provocative for sure. Murray is a compelling writer, and I admire his unflinching focus on the root causes of ecological collapse including human overpopulation, consumerism, mass migration, and the religion of endless growth. He’ll get no argument from me about these factors as systemic drivers of biodiversity loss, and I share his frustration that many reform-minded environmentalists and large NGOs often are unwilling to acknowledge the fundamental contradiction between wild nature’s flourishing and the intrinsic logic of a techno-industrial growth society based on corporate capitalism.

This blogger, in contrast to Murray, correctly identifies the root problem of capitalism, but continues to support efforts to ameliorate the inexorable logic of capitalism--growth. Their disagreement is like two physicians arguing whether to treat pains due to cancer with aspirin or codeine, instead of removing the cancerous tumor. Too many activists in the US have bought into the neo-liberal notion that "there is no alternative" to capitalism.