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of others, their own future happiness will not be harmed. Furthermore,
this expansion of rights is only one element within the wider effect of
industrialization itself, which liberated people from the endless drudgery
of preindustrial labor. Released in this way, people had time for educa-
tion and leisure activities, money for a vast range of consumer items, and
an opportunity to extend to their fellow citizens a chance for happiness
like their own.
An ecological movement does not follow these rules: it forces us to
consider whether economic growth, which inevitably involves a greater
use of natural resources, is even viable in the long term, and if so, what
it might look like;
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it demands that we reconstruct our entire industrial
infrastructure and potentially deindustrialize many of our practices; it
forces us to give up our assumption that we can continue to “develop”
previously undisturbed natural spaces; and as a result, it asks us to relin-
quish, or at least consider relinquishing, the idea that our collective abun-
dance will forever increase. To demand change without the promise of
greater plenty would require making an appeal on pure principle. Few
previous atempts of this kind have succeeded; as I mentioned in the
introduction, the movement to abolish slavery was fought on the same
basis, came up against the realities of an entire economic system, and did
not succeed until the nation endured a Civil War. Needless to say, that is
not a good precedent. Even worse, such an appeal would go further than
merely doing
without
the help of the trends in production, population,
and setlement that, broadly speaking, enabled previous movements to
gain general acceptance; it would potentially argue
against
them. An eco-
logical movement worth its salt asks for more, and seems to offer less,
than any previous social cause—even if its ultimate purpose is to safe-
guard the happiness of human beings. Here again, the demands of the
Earth and of our own beter selves conlict with our traditions.
The revolution of our time cuts against the grain in these ways in
part because it does not have what most people would recognize as an
immediate human constituency. Every previous revolution had a discern-
ible protagonist, a group of people who would truly benefit from social
change. This time, the immediate constituency is the Earth itself, all its
ecosystems, and the human race as a whole. But it turns out that geting
the concerns of
that
constituency recognized within our political system
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