Environment doesn’t exist without a subject.
The most curious insight came to me in a conversation the other day, served on a silver plate. He said:
There is no such thing as an environment without a subject. There has to be someone there to live their environment, to have a subjective point of view on it in order for it to be an environment.
It struck me that it seems to be true, at least in the way we talk about the environment and our environments. They’d exist without us, they’re not subjective in that way. But they wouldn’t need to be environments if that was the case, they’d just be.
On top of that, we’ve given our environment all types of voices and some of them a consciousness. Mother earth, for example, isn’t really a mother as yours. It’s an environment in which we human beings have found ourselves and become aware enough for it to be an environment. Mother earth isn’t an environment, it doesn’t have an environment. We created a fictional consciousness for our environment.
That means that the environmental crisis that we’ve been talking about for quite some time now ins’t at all an environmental crisis, it’s a human crisis. The environment itself, the earth, doesn’t care as far as we know. For that to happen, it would need to be sentient in the same way we are. The crisis however, is human, in the sense that the effects are impacting human beings.
Look at it this way: In a million years, the earth won’t notice whether or not we’re here, at least not in any way we know now. We’ll know other people if we get to stay around for that long as a species, that care about being around.
There is a point to all this rambling, and it isn’t that there’s nothing bad going on in our environment caused by humans. That’s absolutely true, the environment is taking a hit. But the focus, and the result is important. To whom is it a crisis? To humans? Or to the environment itself?
I’d say the former. After deciding that, you need to decide on your priorities. My environment and the environment we humans have around us, isn’t that important to me. It’s much more important for me that human beings are doing good, having a good time, and in the next step that we’re surviving as a species.
What’s the focus of the formulation of the problem you’re looking at?
