Correspondence
It was difficult for me to read Leath Tonino’s interview with Michael Soule because of the grim picture he paints of our dying ecosystem. It was additionally difficult because Soule failed to implicate the biodiversity-killing, overpopulation-producing, and health-destroying animal-agriculture industry. With ten farmed animals for every person on earth, animal agriculture consumes and pollutes nature in pace with dirty energy and dirty fuel.
Carla Golden
Hilton Head Island, South Carolina
I appreciate Michael Soule’s work to protect the environment but am concerned about the frequency with which he makes hyperbolic statements.
Soule’s mentor at Stanford, Paul Ehrlich, is well known for having made dire predictions about the future that have not come to pass. Perhaps those dark forecasts helped spur initiatives that proved Ehrlich wrong, but such pessimism often promotes a focus on self-interest. If we believe things can’t get better, many of us just double down on looking out for ourselves.
It’s absolutely possible to create sustainable and humane energy, food, production, and other systems. Many people are successfully working toward these goals. Within a decade or two, for instance, cultured animal cells may well end the cruelty, habitat destruction, and pollution that our animal agriculture system has wrought.
Soule says he hopes for “a catastrophe.” What a sad conclusion, especially when there are practical and effective means for protecting our planet and solving our problems. We must focus on educating a generation able to solve the challenges before us. As Oberlin professor David Orr wrote, “Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up.”
Zoe Weil
Surry, Maine
This morning I went hunting through Leath Tonino’s interview with Michael Soule [“We Only Protect What We Love,” April 2018] for a line that had stuck with me: “I was looking at the shells of land snails and wondering about their components. Where had that calcium traveled, and what shapes had it taken over the course of geologic history? It possibly had been in the bones of dinosaurs, in the teeth of mastodons. . . .” I wrote the passage down but left out a letter, thereby changing the first word of the last sentence: “I possibly had been in the bones of dinosaurs, in the teeth of mastodons.”
I hadn’t thought of it that way. It felt like exactly what Soule was getting at.
Jeff Droubay
Upland, California
Michael Soule is an admirable man with much wisdom about the natural world, but he lacks an understanding of (or fails to acknowledge) contemporary environmentalism’s vital union with the fight for social justice.
Our culture’s selfish, ecologically rapacious behavior is not universal, despite Soule’s assertions. There have, in fact, been cultures in which a deep ecological worldview was the norm. To quote activist and author Naomi Klein, “these systems existed and still exist, but they are erased every time we say that the climate crisis is a crisis of ‘human nature.’ ” These largely indigenous cultures have been brutalized but are resilient.
Young environmental activists are solidifying the connection between human rights and the rights of nature. In failing to acknowledge this essential strand of contemporary environmentalism, Soule either can’t or won’t see the promise of civilizations that offer us a wiser way to live.
Daniela Naomi Molnar
Portland, Oregon
I knew Michael Soule when we both worked in the environmental-studies program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The interdisciplinary faculty there predicted dilemmas and threats that now, several decades later, have become widely recognized. Central among them is financial investment in activities that do environmental damage. The worst of these investments are in industries that facilitate and prepare for war.
There is an elephant in the room. We deny it at our peril.
Paul Niebanck
Seattle, Washington
Leath Tonino’s interview with Michael Soule [“We Only Protect What We Love,” April 2018] brought me to my knees. As someone who cares deeply about the environment, I grieve for the state of our world — and for the reality that change is unlikely because we are driven more by immediate gratification than by the long-term impact of our collective behaviors. It is a truth that I knew on some level but did not want to hear. I felt hopeful when Soule mentioned the possibility of a catastrophe that would wake people up, but my overriding response to the interview was one of sadness. I’m glad he described his emotional responses to nature and how change has to come from a place of love.
After reading the interview I listened to some of Soule’s talks and was again moved by his love of the natural world.
Farrell Sylvest
Asheville, North Carolina
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