Gaia and Humanity

It’s time to take a long-term and more Gaiaistic view of humanity’s relationship to the ecosphere. Technological civilisation is a natural and inevitable extension of that ecosphere, not an existential threat to it.

 

The Historical Context of Today’s Environmental Problems

The environmental problems we currently face are an intrinsic consequence of running a technological civilisation on the surface of a planet. These are problems we were destined to face for at least since the development of agriculture (12,000 years ago) and probably since humans became behaviourally modern (60,000 years ago).

To set our issues with the ecosphere and environmental sustainability in fundamental terms: this universe, and in particular this planet, is set up in such a way that once a species of hyper-intelligent tool-using omnivores (with apparently bottomless ingenuity and imagination) got going their activities were bound, sooner or later, to start freaking out the ecosphere of the planet on which they lived.

Now we do perceive these problems and everybody is arguing about them, it would help if we were more realistic about the historical context of those discussions.

 

He puts the current search for sustainability in the context of human evolution …
arguing forcefully that there is no way to go back
—and that growth and sustainability do not have to be mutually exclusive 
– Treehugger.com

 

Links: Gaia and Humanity:

Economic Growth and Sustainability are not Mutually Exclusive – basic features of civilisation’s economic evolution

Gaia and Humanity – sustainability in the context of human evolution

World Systems - putting climate change in its larger historical context.

 

Next: Religious Architecture > 

 

Links – worldview section:

 

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