“The
danger now is that those who are concerned will believe that the
solution to the “environmental crisis” can be merely political—that the
problems, being large, can be solved by large solutions generated by a
few people to whom we will give our proxies to police the economic
proxies that we have already given. The danger, in other words ,
is that people will think they have made a sufficient change if they
have altered their “values,” or had a “change of heart,” or experienced
a “spiritual awakening,” and that such a change in passive consumers
will necessarily cause appropriate changes in the public experts,
politicians, and corporate executives to whom they have granted their
political and economic proxies.”
“The trouble
with this is that a proper concern for nature and our use of nature
must be practiced, not by our proxy-holders, but by ourselves. A
change of heart or of values without a practice is only another
pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life. The
“environmental crisis,” in fact, can be solved only if people,
individually and in their communities recover responsibility for their
thoughtlessly given proxies. If people begin the effort to take
back into their own power a significant portion of their economic
responsibility, then their inevitable first discovery is that the
“environmental crisis” is no such thing; it is not a crisis of our
environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals,
as family members, as community members, and as citizens. We have
an “environmental crisis” because we have consented to an economy in
which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying
ourselves we are destroying the natural, the God-given world.”
***
“The folly at
the root of this foolish economy began with the idea that a corporation
should be regarded, legally, as “a person.” But the limitless
destructiveness of the economy comes about precisely because a
corporation is not a person. A corporation, essentially, is a
pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral
allegiance. Unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It
does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the
shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the
future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in
particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no
change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its
business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a
bigger pile of money. The stockholders essentially are usurers,
people who “let their money work for them,” expecting high pay in
return for causing others to work for low pay. The World Trade
Organization enlarges the old idea of the corporation-as-person by
giving the global corporate economy the status of a super government
with the power to overrule nations.”
“I don’t mean to
say, of course, that all corporate executives and stockholders are bad
people. I am only saying that all of them are very seriously
implicated in a bad economy.”