Curtis White: The Idols of Environmentalism

“No one,” he said during this evening’s talk, “is more surprised than I am to hear me talking about spirituality.”

White, an iconoclastic novelist and provocative cultural critic, spoke to a small but appreciative community college audience on the topic of sustainability—also touching upon Life, The Universe and Everything.

Although not noted for a background in environmental issues, he was asked by Orion* to examine our global predicament from his own quirky macrocosmic perspective: "...Only a weak and fearful society could invest so much desperate energy in protecting activities that are the equivalent of suicide."

In the course of this examination he has begun to formulate a series of Theses on the Spirit of Disobedience: Take Back Your Emptiness, not yet complete, a draft of which he shared with the audience. Here is thesis 3: "We are trapped between dogma and empire. It is possible to articulate an alternative notion of the spirit that is neither irrational nor in collaboration with empire, but it is not easy and mostly not familiar."

On the strength of tonight's experience, I’ve purchased White’s current non-fiction book, The Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work. My expectation is that it will contain something to delight and also to affront everyone —yes, everyone— from a little lovefest/interview with James Kunstler, to a surgical dissection of “holy whores” Al Franken and Bill Maher.

But I’ll get back to you on that.


*Part One of this article may be found in the March/April 2007 issue of Orion magazine. If you aren't familiar with this publication, it deftly and beautifully explores the human place in the world through poetry, science, visual arts, and spiritual inquiry. White's article, for example, opens with a wee cool Parke-Harrison.