Invited to speak to a couple different groups recently, I prepared by asking myself: What’s the best way I can think of to communicate what I have to say about the size changes we need to make in order to keep our planet inhabitable. I decided to talk about ideas that have changed how I think, moving me further into the OneEarth paradigm. Here are three of those ideas.
1. Pose this request to Earth: “Earth, please teach me OneEarth living.” This request reverses how civilizers have talked to our planet over the past 12 millennia. For 12,000 years Homo sapiens have been the primary, if not the only, speices telling Earth what to do. Most species communicate cooperatively with Earth and listen to what she says. None of them tell Earth how to behave in order to add greater amounts to their benefits. So, “Please, Earth, teach me how to live respectfully with all other life in the abundance you provide.”
2. Add the word “project” whenever you hear the word “civilization.” We commonly think of civilization as the story of history. In fact, Earth history differs greatly from the history of Earth’s civilizers. Civilizers are all of us who took the position that Nature is wild and needs civilizing. But many Homo sapiens have never been inclined to such an interpretation. Indigenous peoples globally have thought of themselves as part of Nature, not as civilizers of it. “Civilization,” it turns out, is a project of all Homo sapiens inclined to think they can organize life in superior systems to what Nature has been doing for billions of years. Civilization is a project of humans whose psychological-spiritual development did not move beyond the stage of ego-consciousness, which is the stage of childhood and adolescence. MultiEarth living is the best ego-centered consciousness can manage. The greater consciousness needed for OneEarth living requires shifting to a different identity center, a center Carl Jung called the Self. The greater consciousness of Self matures, with struggle and determination, into the capacities necessary for living cooperatively with all species on our planet.
3. Begin the story of humans 200,000 years ago, not the more usual 12,000 years ago. Everything before 10,000 BCE usually gets called “prehistory.” It’s how civilizers make it sound inferior to “history,” which, of course, begins with their story, the story of civilization. When we insist that OneEarth living is the story to live by, then the civilization story becomes an aberration. Though it has long touted itself as a better story to live by, a story of progress and prosperity, we now see that it is the story of global climate change. Rather than a superior, modern story to live by, it has become a story heading toward death. Our planet will become uninhabitable for millions of species unless we change stories. Insisting on a 200,000 year long story for our species rather than a 12,000 year one, changes the game.
These three mind-changing ideas continue to impact me week-by-week as I seek to move further into OneEarth living.