Citizen, Heal Thyself.

• Author: Ayres, Ed
• Position: The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror - Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves - The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It's Too Late - Book Review

The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror

by David W. Orr (Island Press, 2004)

Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves

edited by Kenny Ausubel with J.P. Harpignies (Sierra Club Books, 2004)

The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It's Too Late

by Thom Hartmann (Three Rivers Press, 2004)

Almost no-one who isn't in a stupor would disagree that the world is in crisis, but there are radically different views of just what the crisis is. To the neoconservatives who now control the American state, the crisis has to do with foreign terrorists and foreign cultural or economic threats, and to deal with that trouble means establishing armed camps and surveillance on foreign soil. To many others, the crisis is primarily an internal American one, and to deal with it means waking up our leaders to the impacts of our own unsustainable economy on human and environmental health. The authors of three new books all share the latter view, which holds that the fate of the whole planet now depends very heavily on whether--or how--we Americans will take responsibility for what we have wrought.

All three authors would seem to agree that the potentially catastrophic course humanity has taken can no longer be simply described as an "environmental" crisis, but is essentially a political one--though not political in the traditional sense. What we face now is a crisis of erosion, not of the soil in which we grow our food, but of the fundamental democratic processes from which springs our national life. The problem--and the gap between the two views of what's wrong--is summarized by David Orr, a professor of environmental studies at Oberlin College, in The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror. In his Introduction, Orr writes: "The present administration asserts American-style democracy is the answer to problems in Iraq, but democracy at home is in tatters."

Democracy in tatters? Presumably, the Bush administration would beg to differ; its zeal for executing "regime change" in foreign places is obviously predicated on the assumption that American democracy is the correct model for all other nations to emulate. But Orr argues that in fact, American democracy is on life-support. The kind of broad citizen participation that could keep air and water clean, and global warming or ecological collapse at bay, is not doing so. It's not that...