Page 180 - Contribution To Phenomenology

PHILOSOPHY AND ECOLOGICAL CRISIS 173

According to the Club of Rome, "traditional structures, governments and
institutions don't have the problems in their present size under control."^
Sitting on mountains of recorded data, of scientific knowledge and
technological expertise, of historical and social experience, there exists
nevertheless a kind of individual and collective helplessness to stop the
escalating spiral of destruction, the rapid increase of ecological and social
entropy.
The complete and final breakdown of real-existing Socialism, the
terrible and undeniable truth about its inhumanity, its ecological
destructiveness and its economic incompetence, which have been fully
revealed retrospectively in the aftermath of this breakdown, has radically
discredited the socialist-revolutionary alternative. There are no social
liberation movements any longer, there is no revolutionary strategy and
no revolutionary hope anymore. Instead there are blind and violent
revolts, pillage and looting, large-scale organized crime, barbaric strife
and wars fuelled by nationalistic and religious fanaticism, much of it being
the nihilistic response of the dispossessed and frustrated victims of the
existing world-order which is defined by the iron logic of productivity and
profitability. And there is the swelling tide of migrating people and
refugees which are being uprooted and driven away from their home-regi-
ons by famine, poverty and war. In the meantime the West is reorganiz-
ing and restructuring its miUtary capabihties and strategies in order to be
able to defend Western civilization with barbaric means against the rising
tide of barbarism.
This, of course, is only a very rough sketch of a global human
household which finds itself locked in an exterministic dynamic which, if
not broken, threatens to culminate in the not too distant future in an
ecological holocaust and a global civil war. Time is running out quickly.
According to Sandra Postel in the latest report of the World-Watch-Instit-
ute, "the nineties will be a decisive decade for the planet and its
inhabitants.'** And Lester Brown in his concluding article of this report
states: "Either we turn things around quickly or the self-reinforcing

^ Alexander King, Bertrand Schneider, Die globale Revolution. Ein Bericht des
Club of Rome (Spiegel Verlag: Hamburg, 1991), 74.
* Sandra Postel, "Denial in the Decisive Decade," in: State of the World 1991
A WorldWatch Institute Report on Progress toward a Sustainable Society, by Lester
Brown et el. (W.W. Norton & Co.: New York/London, 1992), 3.