« A Table Contrasting Multi Earth and One Earth Worldviews (Part 1) »

While teaching a group of bright, second-career students at the Chaplaincy Institute for the Arts and Interfaith Ministries in Berkeley, CA, this past June, one asked, “Can you tell us more what you mean by Multi Earth and One Earth?” I wished, then, that I could hand them a table contrasting the two. But I didn’t have one. Now I do. Below is the first of half a dozen installments that will come along on this blog, not necessarily in succession. It’s a work in progress that your comments can surely improve. 

The table shows that worldviews impact all of our structures and behaviors throughout society. It is not comprehensive, but illustrative. The six contrasting points in the first section give a general “Overview.” Subsections that will follow will elaborate on how the two worldviews contrast with one another.

Multi Earth Worldview	One Earth Worldview
Human species strives for lifestyles that use more resources than available on one planet	Human species aims for lifestyles within the abundant resources of one planet
All systems from food production to finance, commerce, and government designed to extract more and more despite creational order and limits	All systems from food production to finance, commerce, and government designed with a sense of abundance within creational order and limits
Ecological footprint exceeds one planet	Ecological footprint fits within one planet
Emphasis on individualism socially and economically reflects the effort to understand all of reality by finding, separating, and examining every particle of matter in search of the basic building block for the whole; energy, community and spirit/Spirit are in a sidebar to essential reality	Emphasis on the entire community of life socially and ecologically reflects the effort to understand all of reality by observing the interdependence of all things, and the energy and spirit/Spirit that holds all systems in vibrant, evolving interconnection
Timeframes shaped by rewarding those who act most quickly to gain advantages in economics and power	Timeframes shaped by rewarding those whose actions consider other species, future generations, nature’s seasons, and Earth’s eco-region cycles
Technology brings convenience, speed, improvement, health, wealth, and scores of advantages in overcoming obstacles to human life and progress; optimism abounds because of wealth created by new products and how they fix and save human enterprises	Technology brings benefits when it is to scale within the parameters of planetary and species wellbeing; skepticism comes from destruction of the planet and people that result from manufacture and use of many technologies