[Mb-civic] Everything and Everyone is Connected

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

This is a great essay on our global environment.  A little long for an email but 
addresses issues that every human needs to think about if our grandchildren and their 
grandchildren are gonna have any chance for a decent life.  So let's take a momentary 
break from thinking about Iraq and Bush vs Kerry (altho those issues are utterly 
related to this larger one) and consider this.....

Everything and Everyone is Connected

Earth Meanders
http://www.environmentalsustainability.info/
By Dr. Glen Barry
August 19, 2004

The global environmental crisis requires holistic approaches, based upon
the revelation that all of the Earth's life is sacred and connected.  All
environmental ills that threaten the Earth and her life are illustrative
of the same issue - too many people, consuming too much, while having lost
touch with their oneness with the Earth.  The Earth and her water,
forests, air and oceans have been afforded little worth and are treated as
little more than expendable trash dumps.

Environmentalists are doing valuable work on single issues such as climate
change, forest and water conservation, and toxics.  There are good reasons
to focus on more scoped and manageable issues in isolation.  Solutions are
easier and less intrusive, lending themselves to reformist policies that
do not threaten the status quo.

However, it is highly unlikely that any single major environmental issue
facing the world will ever be solved without progress on all the others.
Forests will not be sustained if climate change is not addressed.  Soils
will continue to be eroded and water diminished as long as forests and
wetlands are lost.  

Recent flooding in Asia and Haiti illustrates comprehensive collapse of
ecological systems in whole.  There climate change brought intense
rainfall, water run-off was exacerbated by poor land management, and great
human suffering and further ecological decline resulted.  Numerous studies
have recently shown that air pollution is global, i.e. America receives
Asia's pollution, while itself polluting Europe.

The global ecological whole - which I like to refer to as Gaia - is a
tightly coupled system composed of ecological sub-systems that cycle
nutrients and energy.  This finally honed ecological apparatus of immense
complexity makes life possible.  Thus photosynthesizers release oxygen
while consuming carbon dioxide, and animals do the reverse, completing the
cycle.  Oceans and terrestrial ecosystems effect and are effected by
climate.  Water is the life blood of all life.  

Failure of any one ecological system reverberates through the whole.  The
realization that forests are connected to the well being of virtually
every other ecological system, and vice versa, has turned this forest
conservationist into a global ecological sustainability crusader. Forests,
climate, water and oceans - and the Earth in total - will only be
sustained if there is more emphasis upon the big picture and the
interactions between these issues.

Humanity cannot continue to procreate and consume as if the Earth does not
matter.  The Earth does matter - other species and emergent ecosystem
processes make humanity and our society possible.  There are real physical
and biological limits to the Earth's capacity to provide sustenance and
maintain a habitable environment for humans.  Increasing numbers of people
are being faced with this reality as their water supplies falter, climatic
patterns fade, land becomes desert, and oceans are made lifeless.

Humanity and all that we have been able to achieve has been by and of the
Earth.  Wal-Mart parking lots do not sustain us - the wind, water and
trees do.  Any suggestion that the Earth's intricate ecosystem services
can or should be engineered is misguided foolishness.  The Earth is a
tightly honed system perfected for one purpose - to provide for all her
life.  

Why tinker with the perfection found in a seed?  All the Earth requires in
return for making our lives possible is an acknowledgement of our oneness
with her, and that we not dismantle the ecological machinery whereby the
Earth is maintained, regulated and restored.  This seems reasonable.


The Human Nation

It may be easier to accept that we are all connected to the natural world
than to accept we - all of humanity - are deeply dependent upon each
other.  As ecological, political, social and technological trends
converge, the idea of nation-states has become antiquated.  For
globalization to be sustainable, desirable and successful the concept of
the human nation must be embraced.  

I am a strange messenger to be delivering the message that the fate of all
humans is linked.  I do not much like people, and have spent much of my
life feeling depressed and alienated.  Yet my experiences have led me to
conclude that what happens to a poor child in Bangladesh is intimately
bound with my and my Planet's fate.

In the globalized world there is no such thing as another country's
problem.  How much longer can the luxurious over-developed world expect
billions to peacefully suffer a fate of acute human need and desperation?
It is greedy and evil for American and other mega-polluters to demand that
peasants in China limit their carbon emissions before Americans work to
reduce their much larger impact.  

An expenditure of some 40 billion dollars a year would provide basic
health services, clean water, and primary education to everyone in the
World.  This is some 1/10 of what the United States alone spends on its
militaristic solutions to world conflict.  Might does not make right, and
security in a globalized world will not come solely from the barrel of a
gun.

Liberal democracy and market economies need not be synonymous with
militarism, Earth devouring industrialism, nor continuation of massive
economic inequities and other social injustices.  

We are one human nation.  For the Earth to have a future we can not afford
to think otherwise.


Life Journeys

Realizing that everything and everyone is connected, and thus sacred, has
been a long journey for me.  I first caught a glimpse of this in my young
adulthood spent in the Peace Corps in Papua New Guinea.  I was faced with,
and tried to make sense of, the evil of huge logging concessions of
ancient rainforests to make cardboard boxes and toilet paper while local
peoples continued to live in abject material poverty.  

During this time, I crudely sought to synthesize what I was learning of
life's meaning with spirituality and ecology.   I wrote that given "Truth
is God" in the Ghandian tradition, and that I was coming to realize that
"Earth is Truth", then it must be that "Earth is God".   

These first attempts to enunciate the ecological intuition that all life
is connected and their sum - Gaia - is holy, met with a wide range of
responses.  These ranged from appearances on public radio, to speaking
events; to derision, ridicule and incomprehensive by naïve and consumerist
relatives.

I love the Earth and all her life very much.  It is this love that
restores me constantly.  Never, ever let the laughter of the consuming
heathens thwart your deep emotional attachment to Mother Earth.  As goes
the Earth will go us all.


******

Earth Meanders is a series of personal essays that places questions of
environmental sustainability within the context of other contemporary
issues.  Past writings can be found at
http://www.environmentalsustainability.info/blog/archives/cat_earth_meande
rs.htm Permission is granted to reprint this essay provided it is properly
credited.

NEXT EARTH MEANDER: More on Conservative Fascism and the Earth

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Action is the antidote to despair.  ----Joan Baez
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