photographer
Really Really Experienced
- Joined
- Jun 6, 2001
- Posts
- 307
Having problems with your planet?
You can still change the world by dreaming it,
You still have your tricks, old, unteachable, untameable;
You could still make an eland from a piece of old boot,
You could still create the moon from an old bent shoe.
A good friend of mine, an environmental lawyer, and I were discussing the world’s illnesses. He got to wondering why all laws treated humans as subjects and everything else as objects.
“The only rights recognised in law are those enforceable in a court of law, and these may only be held by human beings. This means that, from the perspective of our legal systems, the millions of other species on the planet are outlaws. And that’s precisely how we treat them”
“Thirteen billion years ago the universe began as hydrogen. Left entirely to itself, the hydrogen became rose bushes, giraffes and humans.”
Physicist Brian Swimme
The timescale of earth is divided into eras,. Precambrian beginning about 800 million years ago, then moving up to the present through Palaeozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic.
In the 70 million years of the Cenozoic Era the story of life on the planet flowed over into what could be termed the lyric period of Earth history. The trees had developed nearly 200 million years before this, the flowers had appeared perhaps 30 million years before, mammals already existed in rudimentary form.
But in the Cenozoic Era there was wave upon wave of life development, with the flowers, the birds, the trees and the mammal species, particularly, all leading to that luxuriant display of life upon Earth such as we have known it. All without human interference.
Towards the end of the Cenozoic our ancestors arrived on the scene, but for most of their 3 million or so years, they existed alongside the rest of creation without interfering much.
Then, in the late 18th century, we began the wide-scale use of fossil fuels, and with this came the tools and social conditions to utterly alter the planet’s biological and geographic history.
How did we do this?
Well, take carbon. It’s a magical element, present in all living things, but too much of it in the wrong places is a bad thing, as anyone who lives downwind from a factory will tell you. The Earth has immense quantities of the stuff, but nature achieved a safe balance by storing it in coal and oil deposits and great forests. By liberating it through burning, humans have profoundly affected the rhythms of the atmospheric world. Then there’s river pollution, sea pollution, mono-crop production, ozone depletion, habitat destruction, mass species extinction ……..
While we achieved magnificent things, we’ve stacked up deadly problems at the planetary level.
In the 20th Century, for the first time, the industrial context of human society was a defining element in the functioning of other life systems on the planet.
This is a time of planetary depletion of resources in which humans are the primary agents of biological history. It’s a period in which extinctions are taking place on a scale unequalled since the terminal phase of the Mesozoic Era (which saw the end of the dinosaurs). Some estimates place the loss of species at around 10 000 a year.
We are upsetting the entire Earth system, which, over billions of years and through an endless sequence of groping, of trials and errors, has produced a magnificent array of living forms, forms capable of seasonal renewal over vast periods of time. Most amazing is the inability of our religious or educational establishments to provide any effective religious or ethical judgement on what is happening.
The natural world surrounding us is simply regarded as the context in which human affairs takes place. In the presence of humans, the natural world has no rights. We have a moral sense of suicide, homicide and genocide, but no moral sense of biocide or geocide, the killing of the life systems themselves and even the killing of the Earth.
We find ourselves ethically destitute just when, for the first time, we are faced with the irreversible closing down of the Earth’s functioning in its major life systems.
Both science and religion suffer from a ‘dysfunctional cosmology’. Unless we learn that the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects, that our actions and laws are subordinate to those of the planet, we are heading into an evolutionary cul-de-sac. The result will be survivors, if there are any, living with all their resentments amid the destroyed infrastructures of the industrial world and amid the ruins of the natural world itself.
The solution lies not in science or technology, but in a moral, ethical, legal and spiritual re-tracking. For millennia, life systems have worked on balance, where no life system utterly overwhelms another. But our technologies have enabled us to transcend this situation. We have no limit. So the basic recipe for our survival has to be self-limiting with regard to resources, habitat, population and consumption. We have to learn, by fear if necessary, that everything lives in and by everything else.
We could term this era the Ecozoic Era, a time in which harmony with nature is restored by force of will.
We are, in these final years of the Cenozoic Era, “between stories”. What we need now is a new Great Story to heal our rift with the spirit of nature.
No one ever before could tell, in such lyrical language as we can now, the story of the primordial flaring forth of the universe at its beginning, the shaping of the immense number of stars gathered into galaxies, the collapse of the first generation of stars to create 90-something elements, the gravitational gathering of scattered star-stuff into our solar system with its nine planets, the formation of Earth with its seas and atmospheres and the continents crashing and rifting as they move over the asthenosphere, and awakening of life.
Such a marvel is this 15-billion year process; such infinite numbers of living things on Earth, such limitless variety of flowering species and forms of animal life, such tropical luxuriance. Now we are experiencing the pathos of witnessing the desecration of all this.
We urgently need to tell this story, to meditate on it, and listen to it as it is told by every breeze that blows, by every cloud in the sky, by every mountain and river and woodland, and by the song of every cricket ….
Looking for alternatives, the realisation slowly dawns that the answer may come from the remnants of older cultures: the Bushmen, the Amerindian, Aborigines and others, people who, for thousands of years, learned to live in harmony with nature.
They have the ingredients for the new Great Story. We need to cherish them and learn their stories with humility before they are lost forever.
We should all strive to think like a mountain, breathe like a tree and allow our minds to move like water.
You can still change the world by dreaming it,
You still have your tricks, old, unteachable, untameable;
You could still make an eland from a piece of old boot,
You could still create the moon from an old bent shoe.
A good friend of mine, an environmental lawyer, and I were discussing the world’s illnesses. He got to wondering why all laws treated humans as subjects and everything else as objects.
“The only rights recognised in law are those enforceable in a court of law, and these may only be held by human beings. This means that, from the perspective of our legal systems, the millions of other species on the planet are outlaws. And that’s precisely how we treat them”
“Thirteen billion years ago the universe began as hydrogen. Left entirely to itself, the hydrogen became rose bushes, giraffes and humans.”
Physicist Brian Swimme
The timescale of earth is divided into eras,. Precambrian beginning about 800 million years ago, then moving up to the present through Palaeozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic.
In the 70 million years of the Cenozoic Era the story of life on the planet flowed over into what could be termed the lyric period of Earth history. The trees had developed nearly 200 million years before this, the flowers had appeared perhaps 30 million years before, mammals already existed in rudimentary form.
But in the Cenozoic Era there was wave upon wave of life development, with the flowers, the birds, the trees and the mammal species, particularly, all leading to that luxuriant display of life upon Earth such as we have known it. All without human interference.
Towards the end of the Cenozoic our ancestors arrived on the scene, but for most of their 3 million or so years, they existed alongside the rest of creation without interfering much.
Then, in the late 18th century, we began the wide-scale use of fossil fuels, and with this came the tools and social conditions to utterly alter the planet’s biological and geographic history.
How did we do this?
Well, take carbon. It’s a magical element, present in all living things, but too much of it in the wrong places is a bad thing, as anyone who lives downwind from a factory will tell you. The Earth has immense quantities of the stuff, but nature achieved a safe balance by storing it in coal and oil deposits and great forests. By liberating it through burning, humans have profoundly affected the rhythms of the atmospheric world. Then there’s river pollution, sea pollution, mono-crop production, ozone depletion, habitat destruction, mass species extinction ……..
While we achieved magnificent things, we’ve stacked up deadly problems at the planetary level.
In the 20th Century, for the first time, the industrial context of human society was a defining element in the functioning of other life systems on the planet.
This is a time of planetary depletion of resources in which humans are the primary agents of biological history. It’s a period in which extinctions are taking place on a scale unequalled since the terminal phase of the Mesozoic Era (which saw the end of the dinosaurs). Some estimates place the loss of species at around 10 000 a year.
We are upsetting the entire Earth system, which, over billions of years and through an endless sequence of groping, of trials and errors, has produced a magnificent array of living forms, forms capable of seasonal renewal over vast periods of time. Most amazing is the inability of our religious or educational establishments to provide any effective religious or ethical judgement on what is happening.
The natural world surrounding us is simply regarded as the context in which human affairs takes place. In the presence of humans, the natural world has no rights. We have a moral sense of suicide, homicide and genocide, but no moral sense of biocide or geocide, the killing of the life systems themselves and even the killing of the Earth.
We find ourselves ethically destitute just when, for the first time, we are faced with the irreversible closing down of the Earth’s functioning in its major life systems.
Both science and religion suffer from a ‘dysfunctional cosmology’. Unless we learn that the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects, that our actions and laws are subordinate to those of the planet, we are heading into an evolutionary cul-de-sac. The result will be survivors, if there are any, living with all their resentments amid the destroyed infrastructures of the industrial world and amid the ruins of the natural world itself.
The solution lies not in science or technology, but in a moral, ethical, legal and spiritual re-tracking. For millennia, life systems have worked on balance, where no life system utterly overwhelms another. But our technologies have enabled us to transcend this situation. We have no limit. So the basic recipe for our survival has to be self-limiting with regard to resources, habitat, population and consumption. We have to learn, by fear if necessary, that everything lives in and by everything else.
We could term this era the Ecozoic Era, a time in which harmony with nature is restored by force of will.
We are, in these final years of the Cenozoic Era, “between stories”. What we need now is a new Great Story to heal our rift with the spirit of nature.
No one ever before could tell, in such lyrical language as we can now, the story of the primordial flaring forth of the universe at its beginning, the shaping of the immense number of stars gathered into galaxies, the collapse of the first generation of stars to create 90-something elements, the gravitational gathering of scattered star-stuff into our solar system with its nine planets, the formation of Earth with its seas and atmospheres and the continents crashing and rifting as they move over the asthenosphere, and awakening of life.
Such a marvel is this 15-billion year process; such infinite numbers of living things on Earth, such limitless variety of flowering species and forms of animal life, such tropical luxuriance. Now we are experiencing the pathos of witnessing the desecration of all this.
We urgently need to tell this story, to meditate on it, and listen to it as it is told by every breeze that blows, by every cloud in the sky, by every mountain and river and woodland, and by the song of every cricket ….
Looking for alternatives, the realisation slowly dawns that the answer may come from the remnants of older cultures: the Bushmen, the Amerindian, Aborigines and others, people who, for thousands of years, learned to live in harmony with nature.
They have the ingredients for the new Great Story. We need to cherish them and learn their stories with humility before they are lost forever.
We should all strive to think like a mountain, breathe like a tree and allow our minds to move like water.
