« Earth, Our One-Planet Home, Evolves Her Story »

Here is excerpt #4 from the forthcoming book and media project on one-Earth living, namely, an economic model that fits within the resources of our one-planet home and how we can practice that now. Please offer your critiques to these excerpts.

Earth is our one-planet home. Whatever economy we design and use, sooner or later Earth will require it to fit her magnificent order.

Spinning and orbiting around a thermonuclear star every year, she holds us close in her gravitational love. Her mystery and math awaken our sense of the sacred. Divine Presence speaks and teaches through her, alternating explosive drama with silence and space. Her birth, about 4 billion years ago, brought forth a magnificent miracle in our universe. Since her birth, she has continued to create. Her evolution has not waned. Her capacities for abundance generate endless, varied cycles of life and death and life again…. As some forms wane and die, new forms emerge. Her patient, persistent generativity has overcome large extinctions as her deep sources to birth new creations reconfigure over millennia. Neither the language of science or poetry can say what she says in language older than words.

Homo Sapiens Emerge and “Fit in”

So where do we humans fit in? Pardon the ego-centric nature of the question. Yet, “fitting in” is what we humans have recently, meaning the past several millennia, done poorly. As wealth has increased, we humans have been very dissatisfied with Earth’s wardrobe. Her desire to clothe all has not matched the desires of humans with more power and affluence to be clothed in privileges amassed for themselves. We often behave more as misfits than good fits. So, “fitting in” is a universal issue for humans in the 21st century. Are we inside of Earth’s four billion year awe and wonder? Or, during this current geological epoch, have we used rational thinking to construct a platform outside of her truth? Have we now put our trust in a story of progress full of improvements on her evolutionary genius?

Earth’s story proceeds for over 3.5 billion years before it comes to the chapter in which humans evolved. Homo sapiens, the first human ancestors with anatomies like ours, emerged perhaps 200,000 years ago in the Omo River valley of what is today Ethiopia, though some students of fossil records propose the emergence happened in multiple areas, not only one. Either way, we humans do have a long story, but it is much shorter than the 4 billion year story of Earth. Even shorter is the time when what we call “culture” first appeared. Tool use is one of the indicators anthropologists use to determine that cultures were forming. Though in use for 2.5 million years, well before homo sapiens emerged, tool use increased greatly beginning about 50,000 years ago, or 150,000 after the emergence of homo sapiens. Verbal language, a very important indicator of culture, does not appear in the fossil record, of course, but it presumably was used a long time before the written languages that appear 5,000 to 6,000 years ago.

Geologists, anthropologists, and paleontologists continue to read the text of Earth written in a language older than words. Their careful and self-correcting readings and interpretations of Earth’s story, lavishly shared through many web articles, continually reveal the intricate interconnecting dynamics to all of us who want to know more about our one planet home.