April 1981 RAIN Page 7 some method be developed for the free expression of choice. Value questions-those arising from informed and objective analysisare central to any society that gives even lip service to citizen control over decision making. Indeed, the more complex a society becomes, the more urgent is the need for this kind of popular planning. With the advent of a new anti-ecological national leadership, the nurturing of a new generation of grass roots, citizen-based organizations becomes a necessity. The positive emerging from the Reagan negative is the hard reminder that we no longer have an option to the tough and often controversial work of local organizing. In a mote profound fashion than ever before, ecology has now emerged as a truly "subversive" science, calling into question not only the technological practices, but the underlying values of the society. As always, the questions of ethics-the development of a systematic framework for analysis and the setting of standards for human conduct and action-are best dealt with by ordinary people facing up to the realities of survival in their own time. While governments can sometimes help to define such questions, they can rarely do much to implement a viable ethic in the national consciousness. Americans-reflecting back on the limitations of a Carter environmentalism and teetering on the edge of a Reagan redux-should find some comfort in the knowledge that ultimately power does rest with the people so long as the people are prepared to work to effect the changes governments tend to ignore. Those of us who feel that more decentralized public control over resource management and the means of production are requ.irements for ecological survival need to make our beginning points clear. Environmentalists may find it uncomfortable to have to think about the need for both ideological reformulation within the environmental movement and the requirement for a new standard of self-criticism within it. Those persons who are essentially content within the existing economic and political orders (including perhaps a majority within the environmental movement) may resent the suggestion that we take our conceptual beginning points more seriously. What seems incontrovertible, however, is that much of the malaise of the age-non-limits to growth, underdevelopment and overdevelopment both domestically and around the world, poverty and disease, militarism, inequities within the global production and distribution systems, the double disadvantages for many of racism and sexism-all stem from the same social causes as the ecocrisis. No one of these probleins can be solved apart from sound political and economic analysis and appropriate strategies for action. People who are concerned for the development of a more politically mature environmentalism will not content themselves with simply joining the nearest conservation group. They may do this, but they will become increasingly concerned for the struggle around what Andre Gorz has called "non-reformist" reforms, those efforts to resolve the contradictions and structural imbalances in the social order which lead to environmental disturbances. The old American idea that the pursuit of private gain will inevitably result in benefit to the society at large is , in spite of Reagan, the refuge of only a very small coterie of true believers. This means that those of us who feel that more decentralized public control over resource management and the means of production are in fact requirements for ecological survival need to make our beginning points clear. This does not mean endorsement of the whole positions of the ideologues of either left or right. It' is too easy for comfortable reformists to construct post-revolutionary fantasi6. It does mean carefully assessing who are one's friends and enemies, when compromise is possible and when it is not. The second decade since Earth Day will surely see a continuation and a reinforcement of some of the negative emergent trends of the seventies: bureaucratic co-optation of environmental leadership, efforts to focus on single issues and opposition to the necessary process of linking environmental issues to other social problems, and ever more direct assaults on those entrenched environmental programs which threaten the profits of American industry. If such efforts can push us back to our roots, however- to local organizing, to the building of powerful community coaiJtions, to the development of broadly conceived social strategies and a more careful delineation of first principles-then the Reagan era may prove after all to be less an obstacle to the emergence of a national environmental consciousness than many are now predicting. When Thomas Becket faced his tormentors in Eliot's Murder In the Cathedral, he stated, ''The last temptation is the greatest treason, to do the right deed for the wrong reason." Only by being reasonably clear about both our environmental ends- and the political means to achieve biospheric integrity-will we be able to guard against the relativizing tendencies of those who seem increasingly indifferent to the possibility of nature's death.DD Alan S. Miller teaches Conseroation and Resou rce Studies at the University of California , Berkeley. He is currently involved ill the development of a new Institute of Political Ecology in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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