“What good is a world view, anyway?” we might well ask, if environmentalists are allowed to put them on and take them off like hats. This is serious business; after all—it’s no fashion show—the future of the planet is at stake. We have noted that environmentalists lack a fully developed world view, a complete conceptual, theoretical, and evaluative framework for interpreting the world. Environmentalists have generally, as David did in facing Goliath, gone into battle against the powerful forces of exploitation, which are well armed with a reductionistic world view, with just slingshots and pebbles. But environmentalists have done remarkably well, given the apparently uneven distribution of intellectual armaments. The hit-and-run tactics of guerilla warfare have obvious benefits. Playing fast and loose with metaphysical and moral principles, environmentalists have gained considerable political clout by employing that value which seems particularly appropriate for a given issue, or by emphasizing a particular world view that will be effective in reaching a coveted constituency. But guerilla warfare has important costs as well. Environmentalists can appear to outsiders as disorganized and fractious, especially if one listens to their rhetoric, rather than observing their political actions. Further, the fragmentation of environmentalists’ world views has real costs internal to the movement because it results in failures of communication and mistrust, even among individuals and groups that are pursuing identical or nearly identical policies. For example, while committees formed by the Group of Ten could reach a detailed consensus on policy in all areas of environmental concern, they were unable to present the document as endorsed by their respective organizations because some organizations wished not to be publicly associated with others because of differing attitudes toward hunting. The most important cost of world view fragmentation among environmentalists, however, exists not in the past or in the present, but in the future. Environmentalists have failed to articulate a positive vision for the future; they cannot explain in terms comprehensible to each other or to the public at large what is their positive dream. As is sometimes said, environmentalists are always “against something.”
Habermas and Ratzinger on the Future of Religion
