3 December 2007
The Human Dilemma
Posted by Carleton Schade under: Sustainability; Wisdom .
It is said that it takes a very aware fish to know that it’s wet. And we—the human species—are just becoming aware the physical and cultural medium which we inhabit. And just as we are waking up to a deep interconnection with all that is living and nonliving, we are becoming aware of the profound magnitude of the destruction we have wrought to our life-support systems. This is the human dilemma.
Collectively and individually—we are becoming more aware of our relationship to ourselves, other humans, to the earth and the universe. We understand—intellectually, at least—that our evolutionary nature implies a deep material relationship with all other life. We understand that the earth furnishes us with everything that we have and everything of which we’re composed. We understand that almost all the energy we ever use ultimately comes from the sun, and that it is the earth through its wondrous bio-geochemical processes that transforms the sun’s energy into the food for our sustenance and all our energy needs and makes the material for our shelter and clothing and medicines and all our other wants and needs. We understand this.
However, we don’t truly grok it. It’s obvious we don’t fully grok it because we—individually and collectively—are still doing all the things that are destroying and degrading the quality of our life support system—the web of life, the soil, oil and water resources. We are aware of our dependence on the earth, we realize that what we are doing is harmful to the life support systems, and yet we have been powerless to stop our behavior. The present Bush administration has epitomized our situation wonderfully. On the one hand, president Bush—in an ironic moment of clarity—told a country in a State of the Union message that “We are addicted to oil.” And on the other hand, vice-president Cheney announced that, “The American way of life is not negotionable.” Some will argue that these two statements are not contradictory, that we can continue our high-consuming way of life without using oil. At the moment, I won’t argue against this position, but I will say that history up to now has not been kind to it.
The human dilemma can be visualized as two trajectories rocketing into the future at ever accelerating velocities. On one, we have a continued degradation of our life-support system. The climatologists are telling us that the earth is warming; the oceanographers are telling us that the ocean is becoming more acidic; biologists are speaking of deforestation, extinctions and endangered species; agronomists are deeply concerned about the quality and quantity of arable land; and the hydrologists say that water scarcity will be humanity’s biggest concern in the upcoming years. Meanwhile, the other trajectory rocketing into the unknown include the information and innovation explosion and our growing awareness as evidenced by the world-wide web, the cross-fertilization of East and West (Science and spirit, the external and the internal), the charities such as the Gates Foundation, venture capitalists‘ four trillion dollar interest in everything green—green buildings, green architecture, etc. Switching metaphors, the question becomes: Which train is running faster? Which one has the greatest force?
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5 January 2008 at 6:05 am.
Carlton,
My long lost geology buddy from Florida State! I have been trying to
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I have been in Hawaii for 23 years, doing a bunch of wild stuff - science,
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