A Gaian Worldview
by Ross Jackson. This is an excerpt from the Worldview dimension of Gaia Education’s Design for Sustainability curriculum.
Imagine how a global society might look — politically and economically — if we are able to evolve into a truly sustainable and equitable global civilization based on the emerging holistic worldview, which I call the Gaian Paradigm. How would it differ from current society and why? What are the major barriers to be overcome if we are to make any progress towards the desired utopia? What are the deeper causes that are hindering movement in the right direction? In the following, I will summarize some of my answers to the above questions and conclude with the broad outline of a proposal for a possible political initiative, which I call the breakaway strategy, which hopefully will be able to surmount the identified barriers and thus put our civilization on a trajectory that can lead toward the desired long term goal.
The Global Crisis
Our planetary civilization is in a very precarious and vulnerable state at this time as several global threats confront us, some of which could be fatal for humanity if not dealt with. Global warming is probably the threat, which most people immediately think of in this regard. The reality of the threat to our climate, caused primarily by burning fossil fuels, has not only broad scientific support, but the message has been received and accepted as real by a growing majority of world citizens and political leaders. But other threats are just as important and not yet widely recognized.
Even if we were able to magically resolve the global warming problem immediately with the wave of a magic wand, we would still be faced with the just as critical issue of over-consumption of our natural capital (water aquifers, topsoil, micro-organisms, and biomass). Our so-called ‘ecological footprint’ measures the number of hectares of land that would be required by the population of a region in order to provide the renewable resources consumed and the sinks to absorb waste products. Globally, roughly 2.7 hectares per person was required in 2005 according to the most recent measures from WWF.1 However, the available land and sea space was only 2.1 hectares per capita for a population of 6.6 billion. This means we had an over-consumption or ‘overshoot’ of about 30% in 2005, and the overshoot is getting higher each year as population and economic growth increase.
The distribution of this overshoot is skewed with a heavy overweight to the most industrialized countries. This situation is clearly not sustainable. We are consuming the natural capital that sustains us. No one knows for sure how much overload the ecosystem can tolerate before it collapses, but a continuation of current policies will lead to certain disaster sooner or later. Nevertheless, rather than deal with this threat by reducing consumption, every country is doing precisely the opposite by adopting more economic growth as its major political goal.
At an international conference on fertility in June 2007, one of the world’s leading fertility researchers, Niels Skakkebæk of Denmark, sounded an alarm concerning the phenomenon of declining male fertility due to estrogen-like endocrine disruptors and pesticide residues in mother’s milk, a threat he declared was every bit as serious as global warming. A leading British expert in biochemical genetics, Mae-Wan Ho, has published a similar dire warning on genetic engineering technology, as scientists have removed the barriers to virus recombination and gene transfer that have been closed for millennia, an opening, which could in the worst case, she claims, threaten human existence. She calls the field an ‘unprecedented alliance between bad science and big business’. While the above four threats are all potentially fatal for humanity, a
different kind of threat, while not fatal, could prove far more important in the short run, namely Peak Oil. Oil geologists are in general agreement that global oil production will peak soon and go into permanent decline, while oil demand is inexorably increasing due to the political focus on economic growth. Demand will soon exceed supply for the first time ever. The danger is that exploding oil prices will throw the global economy into a long period of chaos, recession and negative growth.
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How Did We Get Into This Mess?
I claim that all of the above threats can be traced to the same underlying cause. We are experiencing the shadow side of a centuries-old worldview that separates Man from Nature. This worldview sees the world as a mechanical machine made up of individual parts that can be manipulated separately. Nature is something outside of us, having no intrinsic value, and is to be conquered. This reductionist way of looking at the world has been the foundation of modern science and has provided us with an enormous increase in living standards. It is generally considered a great success by most people. However, we are beginning to realize that there were many hidden costs, and the bills are now coming due.
As long as we were relatively few people and our technologies were relatively harmless, the future seemed to be an unending horizon of growth and material progress. But in recent years we have begun to meet the limits to growth on a finite planet while simultaneously developing powerful technologies with far-reaching effects. Now we can mine minerals by blowing the tops off mountains and fish by violent scraping of the seabed, destroying much sea and plant life indiscriminately. We are collectively learning an important lesson in these years, namely that the ecological system is far more complex and unpredictable than we ever realized. A seemingly rational development in one area, burning fossil fuels, results in a threat elsewhere, in climate change. A shift from natural to synthetic materials, while apparently cost-effective, results in a threat to fertility from something as simple as the plastic lining in a can of beans. Genetically engineered plants may be more robust but at the high cost of disabling nature’s anti-virus defences. We are discovering that we are an integral part of a living organism — Gaia — here every component is interconnected in ways we do not fully understand.
And yet, our political system seems unable to take coordinated global action to deal with the multi-dimensional crisis facing us. Why? Because our political organization reflects the same separatist worldview. Every country looks out for its own interests. There is no global governance, no international institution that has the interest of the whole planet as its mandate and the power to do something about it.
A Gaian Society ― One Hundred Years Hence
A global society based on a Gaian worldview would be very different from today’s world. In the Worldview dimension, we are imagining how things might be in a world that was organized according to the principles of the Gaian Paradigm, say one hundred years from now.
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This is an excerpt from the Worldview dimension of Gaia Education’s online course in Design for Sustainability. You can learn more about how the work is viewed from a Gaian perspective in our online course where we will cover more topics, including Holistic Worldviews, Reconnecting with Nature, Transformation of Consciousness, and more.
The course will start on 1 June 2020. You can find out more about this course here. You are able to book your space with a 20% Early Bird discount if you register by 20 April 2020 (Discount code: WVGE20GAIA).
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