To Cherish What Remains

To cherish what remains of the Earth

and to foster its renewal is our only

legitimate hope of survival.

Wendell Berry

HUMAN LIFE HAS MADE many positive strides: increased life expectance, lower global violence and poverty, [See Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now] and even a reduction of release of ozone into the atmosphere.  And yet, in 2016, there are, for example, continuing steep global declines in freshwater resources (water scarcity now for 3 billion is anticipated to increase for 5 billion), forests, vertebrate species (declined by 58 percent between 1970 and 2012), marine catch (with fishing effort increasing), as well as steep increases in ocean dead zones, CO2 emissions, temperature change and human (+2 billion since 1992, +35.5 percent) and ruminant livestock population (+20.5 percent), and toxic chemical application on landscape. (See William Ripple, et al.{15, 364 scientist signatories], World Scientists‘ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice, BioScience, 67, 12, Dec 2017, pp. 1026-1028. This report follows “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” in 1992).   

Ecocide: These impacts are reaching a point where the decimation of the biosphere has caused a mass extinction event and a failing, very rapid trajectory in sustainability efforts that may have already crossed the point where desecration can be reversed. 

The Phoenix-level challenges (i.e., to ascend out of ashes rather than simply improve) to cease pushing the limits of what the biosphere can tolerate to support the web of life are critical mega-changes that are needed immediately.  For example, these challenges involve limiting population growth by reducing fertility rates, reduced greenhouse gases, incentivizing renewable energy and  promoting new green technologies, a well-funded restored ecosystem and halting conversion of forests, grasslands and other native habitats, pollution curbing, halting defaunation, reduction of food waste and dietary shifts toward plant-based foods.  While such efforts are typically viewed as taking away from human needs, the good news, first, is an unrecognized sense that the cost of making such changes will cost far less than not making these changes (i.e., natural ecosystem provides rich economic value) and, second, that these changes are essential for human health and human sustainability rather than for a nature that is perceived to be “outside” of human life.  

Short of explosive human decimation, the critical need to re-prioritize human actions will involve a shift from the domination of a homo-centric orientation rather than an ecocentric one.  

Improving or reducing the quality of human life involves more than attention to human life.  The needed shift is a realization that the Earth is a living being rather than a physical planetary stage-set that is separate from human life (based on strong beliefs that human life originates outside the physical Earth).  Therefore, for human life and the biosphere, the first priority in human actions is the emphasis on not doing anything that degrades the biosphere.  We now have the global technological monitoring that reveals the whole Earth to be one ecosystem so that what happens on another side or in a variety of places affects everywhere else.  Without this vision and having peopled the Earth, we essentially commit ecocide in most of our actions that we might blindly assume “improve” human life.

Perhaps the bio-destiny and natural bio-purpose of human life is to degrade the Earth, causing ecocide that degrades (and even extinguishes human life) and the Earth ecosystem.  And yet, perhaps a good chance remains that human life can make an abrupt turn toward a deep economy that is eco-centric first.  

The Great Renascent Work of the 21st Century involves the reintegration of human life into the larger Earth Community.  [See Thomas Berry, The Great Work]. To what do we belong in the long run of things, and what is our true home?

I pledge allegiance to the biosphere of the Earth

And to the cosmos that expresses and nurtures it.

Seeing the many as one, indivisible,

I pledge grace toward all beings and landscapes

Seeking legal standing and justice for all.