The call to paradox
Though social media’s pitfalls are well known, one of the unexpected pleasures of Twitter is to just have people drop in out of the blue. The latest person to follow @ClimateCultures is independent filmmaker Ross Harrison. When I spotted his article on Medium, I knew I could make today’s mini-post even shorter than usual: “What he said: paradox.”
His essay, he says “is an invitation to pay attention to paradox. Doing so makes us better at finding balance, and finding balance is what’s needed to live well, both as individuals and together. The rallying cries to save the world from the threats of environmental crises are flawed because they’ve been perpetuating the imbalances they seek to overcome: pitting humans against nature and the future against the present.” This is not a call to ignore The Call and party on like there’s no tomorrow. But “without a broader and deeper sense of our situation” our rallying cries fail to alter course. “We don’t have to pick a side in this false dichotomy. The urge to do so stems from our modern tendency to objectify the truth: to figure out reality in the one concrete, absolute form we assume it takes.”