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Gerbil Pi
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Eco Sanity
I don't think of human beings as
being in a position to save the world. It's more like, get out of the way so the
world can take care of itself. So my vision doesn't include a 'humans saving the
world' concept.
The Earth's biosphere, best we can tell with our crude abilities to find things
out, is an interconnection of living systems that will maintain their own
ongoing, life sustaining balance without the guidance of human beings. The earth
has never needed human beings to maintain its life forces. Instead, what human
beings may have become, actually very probably have, is now a potential danger
to the complex living systems that make up the total biosphere, and ironically,
in pursuit of our own aggrandizement, we have devised some clandestine
adaptation strategies that appear capable of unbalancing all the self sustaining
processes of the earth, much as a cancer unbalances the self sustaining process
of an individual organism by its own, myopic focus on what cancer cells are
genetically designed to do to survive.
The difference between human beings and cancer is we have the potential to make
a choice about what we do. ...Well, that's hypothetical, I guess. Maybe cancer
does have a choice and we don't, or both, or neither.
Western globalized culture has become
like what we call in ecology, an r-selected species. Because of what humans can
do as a group with their unique abilities to create cultures as an interface
with their environment, we have cleverly devised culture based systems that act
as our own, evolutionary eco niche adatation process, only with ours, we can
take over just about any niche. It's a unique process we can use without
changing our biology, as many other species must do to adapt. Such normally
biologically based species (cancer being one, lemmings another) are adapted to
low succession ecosystems. Examples of low succession ecosystems are fields of
corn, where much external energy is required to till, plant, fertilize and keep
out various forms of species that would also like to populate the field where
the corn grows, until finally the crop can be harvested.
Human beings have for some time
transformed environments with their built places and their agriculture. Now with
increasing speed, thanks to the cheap and abundant energy discovered under the
surface of the earth, humans continue to raze the many precious and
irreplaceable complex ecosystems of the planet, destroying in the process
species that will never be seen again, and could take millions of years to
regenerate in some comparable ecologically adapted form, so that those areas can
be turned into low succession, high yield "resources" for human beings, who
themselves now number 6.6 billion in number, but much more than that when the
factors of eco foot print is taken into consideration for the more highly
technologized societies. This population growth over the last 150 years has
roughly the same curve on a graph as any r-selected species.
So human beings, through their cultural
adaptations, have made themselves (a species that otherwise has all the
characteristics of a K-selected species) into an r-selected species, and with
that, they have employed the traits built into their gene pool that allows them
to transform their environment, and hence all the environments of the planet
that they can, into low succession, low speciated environments. The loss of
genetic material in the process may very well completely transform the life of
the biosphere to one that does not support most of the life we see around us
now.
The solution I see is for humans to
recognize what they are doing, and reorient their cultural adaptation away from
control oriented technologies and more towards ecologically reflexive,
sustainable ones. One of the ways to do that is for each human to begin to
reawaken their deep connection to the earth, the one that is part of our
evolution, and begin a
renewing
of the old ways of seeing and interacting with our environment, combined with
the knowledge we have developed through the cultural devices of our ecological
sciences. If any of our sciences can guide us, those would be the ones.
We need to rediscover the "ways," as in the "cultural ways," or the "Way of
Zen," those kinds of ways that acknowledge the psychological unhealthiness of
separating ourselves as we do in our isolating built environments. Environments
of our own distorting creation that ignore natural needs of the living biosphere
while we grow ever more dependent, in the process, on economic systems that are
essentially cancerous. We need to "see" this and then renew, or invent ways that
will reverse our progress on a path of destruction, and go in new directions
with our adaptation strategies, based on a healthy and direct interaction with
life processes, so that we are reminded by our daily existence of our connection
to the planet's life. That reminder is the basis of individual sanity and
psychological balance. An abstract idea about it is insufficient.
That recognition and societal redirection, of course, entails a dramatic
rearrangement of whole systems of thought and ideas. A whole new mental paradigm
must come about. That's what I'm working on, ideas combined with actions for
what that might be, ways of becoming healthy and balanced with a new vision of
who we are as living beings within a self sustaining biosphere, not controllers
and guardians, as some Western religious doctrines would have us believe.
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Ecotherapy -- discovering spirit in the land, the
animals, and the people
