Page 184 - Contribution To Phenomenology

PHILOSOPHY AND ECOLOGICAL CRISIS 111

socially, ecologically and cognitively, and also aesthetically and spiritual-

The implications of Goldsmith's view are obviously far-reaching. We
have to return to the situation where human societies are in nature
again, where humans are plain citizens again besides and together with
a myriad of other life-forms in Gaian community and where non-human
nature is the vast backdrop again for human life. We as a species have
to fit in again, we have to submit ourselves to the laws and constraints
of pregiven, self-organizing nature and its own evolution. This would
require, it seems, a manifold reduction of the world-population and an
almost complete dismantling of the industrial technosphere. According to
the radical German ecologist Rudolf Bahro, who equally thinks that what
he calls the industrial-capitalistic system is incurably exterministic we can
only survive on earth *^vith a subsistence-economy of voluntary simplicity
and of frugal beauty"^^ and if we limit our numbers. "This contractive
way of life"^* means "that we must give up most of our large-scale
material transformations, that we stop tourism, drive no cars, use almost
no drugs, don't participate in the money-circulation of the banks any
longer, and refrain from positivistic science etc."^^
It is difficult to take these radical therapies seriously. It looks as if we
are being asked to undo ten thousand years of human civilization and
return to a precivilized tribal life or perhaps to move forward to a
post-civilized tribal life. This seems beyond the imagination of most of us.
But of course, it may nevertheless be true that the industrial techno-
sphere and its expansive reproduction is fundamentally unsustainable.
According to Christian Schiitze, a German writer on environmental
problems, "all systems in nature are geared to a low flow of energy.
They are more fit for life the less energy they transform in entropy,
which they have to carry off. The economic process of the industrial
society with its massive "throughput" of free energy and concentrated
resources, with its massive production of entropy in the form of waste

1^ Edward Goldsmith, "The Way: An Ecological Worldview," 183.
^^ Rudolf Bahro, Die Logik der Rettung. Wer kann die Apokafypse aufhalten?
Ein Versuch fiber die Grundlagen okologischer Ethik (Weitbrecht: Stuttgart/Wien,
1987), 230,
^^ Ibid.
'' Ibid,, 319.