Joao Raposo, Portugal, nihilibert@hotmail.com
April 10, 2011
1. Summary
In the present period of human
All human actions derive from the mind. To be able to develop sustainable actions, we need to work on an ecology of the mind. Without ecological mentality one cannot act ecologically. In this way, we can focus on work for a development of global ecological consciousness, from where, we can act properly towards sustainable life and human evolution. Thus the question becomes: How to rise global ecological awareness? Humanity itself has already begun to answer such questions. The process has begun, we just need to join in and contribute for this evolutionary process.
During this talk I’ll be presenting proposals for working in an Educational Process for Sustainable Planetary Human Consciousness, which will include:
2. Rethinking the way to use human capacities, especially how to use technology.
3. Re-understanding human nature
4. Re-understanding human diversity.
5. Re-connecting with the earth.
At this present moment in history we can feel the organic urge for a new evolution coming both from the earth’s ecosystem and from ourselves as a species. The aim of this work is to encourage truthful dynamic responses to that organic appeal.
To change something we have to build a new model and make the existing obsolete.
– Buckminster Fuller
2. Rethinking the way to use human capacities, especially how to use technology
For the first time in history it is now possible to take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than we have ever known. Technological development has reached the point where this can be accomplished. All humanity now has the option of becoming enduringly successful.
This affirmation by Buckminster Fuller is from 1980. Although the world population has risen greatly, imagine the advances people have made in the field of sustainable technology in the last 25 years!
Often people consider this kind of visions to be an utopia, or give it a deriding judgment calling it a dream of a minority. We have, indeed, reached a scientific and technological knowledge which, if properly applied, can provide wellbeing for all humanity without ecological damage. Why are we still using and developing technology with consequences of mass destruction? Why are we still contributing to a way of life that we know it is not sustainable?
For the realization of this view of Buckminster Fuller we need to rethink the way we use technology, raising important questions:
– How it is developed and for what purposes:
The Indian scientist an environmentalist Vandana Shiva and her colleagues explain in their book BioPolitics how the irresponsible development of genetic manipulation is endangering biodiversity on the planet, by developing standard genes that may lead other types of genes to extinction. Development of technologies seems in many cases to have the purpose of controlling nature. What needs to be pointed out is that we should learn how to control our capacities and ourselves before pretending to control nature. Technology is in many cases unconsciously being developed against nature and against our own lives. We have the responsibility to tame our power and craving – There is enough in the world for everyone’s needs, but not for some people’s greed as Mahatma Gandhi pointed out.
New concepts and practices of biotechnology, human technology and eco-technology should be developed, technologies that interact ecologically between different living organisms that can be sustainable and play with, not against, nature.
– How it affects humans and the environment:
As a student of computers systems and information technology, I was naively surprised to learn how professionals which develop technologies are not taught, or given time for discussion, about the social or ecological impacts of new technologies. Everyone knows that the use of certain technologies results in large scale pollution, health problems and ecological damage and that a inappropriate introduction of technologies is done, in many cases, by imposing violent changes in people’s life’s that can result in poverty and health problems due to maladjustment between people’s habits and new technologies in the places where they live. Technological progress is too fast for the adaptation of many cultures that didn’t live through the process of modernization since industrial revolution most of which are non-western countries. Thus technologists and engineers should have a better awareness of the consequences of their work; their education should include responsible analysis of the ecological and social impact of their developments.
Scientific experiments are part of the organic need of the human species to learn more, to understand how life works. But today we have the responsibility to apply our knowledge about sustainability. Technology is an expression of the human capacity of transforming the world around us for our needs. Recognizing the need of wellbeing for all humanity as a priority, the common goal of global scientific investigation should be to save the human species and providing good living conditions for who doesn’t have them. As long as this goal has not been accomplished to satisfaction this should remain priority.
Our ability of creating what we think seems almost unlimited. We can now use this ability in a sustainable manner, and integrate technology and human capacities within the framework of a sustainable planetary consciousness.
3. Re-understanding human nature
Because of the “artificialization” of so many aspects of our lives, we have lost much of our understanding of our true nature. Jean Liedloff in her book The Continuum Concept reminds us that we are the same mammalian species as the non-civilized humans, that our nature is the same and that our babies have the same natural needs. Even though we have changed our habitats and culture greatly, our innate organic needs for wellbeing remains the same, because all of us are the same in our true essence. Liedloff explains how we are misunderstanding our nature as we fail to fully provide the natural wellbeing to our civilized children when she writes:
Evolution has not prepared the human infant for this kind of experience. He cannot comprehend why his desperate cries for the fulfillment of his innate expectations go unanswered, and he develops a sense of wrongness and shame about himself and his desires.
Without achieving a proper wellbeing humans cannot provide wellbeing to others or to nature in general, thus it becomes more difficult for them to achieve ecological awareness. For a true sustainable education of the new generations, we have to recover our natural mammal senses of wellbeing, and raise our children with that awareness, in order to give continuity to our natural evolution. We have been changing our life conditions without having a priority consideration of our nature as living species on this planet. Liedloff gives us a parent’s guidance for recovering that natural sense of giving safety and strength to our children, with which they can better feel and be aware that they are part of the earth, not apart from the earth.
4. Re-understanding human diversity
It is also very important to recognize that all cultures are unique, to understand their own value and their togetherness for a sustainable human species. The communication between different cultures helped us reach a global understanding of the human species. But the globalization, as it is at present being done, doesn’t really undertake a good understanding of the human species. Globalization means, like a virus, to globalize something, to spread something with the intention of becoming global. This globalization is the process of globalizing modern human culture all over the entire planet; it is nothing else than the colonization of one or few cultures over others. A true global understanding of the human species is about recognizing the global importance of every human culture. What should be globalized is the ecological awareness that can save us as a species and help us into true evolution; what should be globalized is the efforts for unification not uniformization, of human cultures. What should be globalized is the respect for human diversity and biodiversity as fundamental for life on earth.
My personal proposal for a sustainable globalization project is a convergence of human knowledge relevant for the achievement of wellbeing for all and for helping our species into a natural new evolution; to converge knowledge from human diversity and to be able to establish new models of sustainable planetary education. By converging human knowledge we can evolve into planetary human beings and work on education towards such awareness, not as a complex international organization, but more as a complex biological organism. A global planetary consciousness means a convergence of all earthly consciousnesses – human, vegetable animal and others in which we don’t see ourselves separated from the rest of the life on earth.
It is also important to point out that such a global human process begins with individual work. All around the world we can see a diversity of healing methods arising from an organic need of every individual to work on its own ecological state of being to be able to join the planetary evolution. Humans build the world at their own image. To be able to create a beautiful unpolluted world outside of us, we must first clean ours, purify our minds, and act within a planetary awareness.
5. Re-connecting with the Earth
After so much destruction done to the planet and human life, and after realizing that killing the Earth is killing ourselves, we need, for our own survival, to develop a new connection with the Earth. The Earth can be regarded as the womb of all of us, the Earth can be a paradise for humans and all other life-forms, the Earth is the natural habitat of humans – She is our mother. The earth is a living system of which we are an integral part of and from which we are in no way separable. James Lovelock in his Gaia hypothesis states that life influences the environment and life is influenced by and adapts to the environment. His point behind Gaia is that the Earth will suppress those organisms that interfere with the environment by transforming “herself” in to state of inhospitable conditions for such interfering organisms. Human beings are very much such interfering organisms, which could be eliminated in such an integral recovery of the earth.
Buddha and others talked and taught about the karmic Law of Nature – how everything one does is returned logically and equally by the universe and how everything is in a constant unstoppable process of change. For humans to be happy and live sustainably they should understand and live to this Law of Nature, just because we are nature.
Jose Arguelles in his latest book Time and Technosphere based on discoveries of the Russian scientist Verdansky, teaches us about the Law of Time and how humans became separated from natural time since the clock was invented, thus creating the artificial time feeling in which civilized human cultures are living. For being truly connected with earth’s nature we should change from the artificial time based on the clock and calendar to the natural cycles of the earth included in the Law of Time. Living constantly under the obligation of the clock (“I have to do this”) creates the great pressure and unnecessary stress in us that is the cause of many of our problems.
The education for a new consciousness should also include the teaching of our earthly nature – the mentioned law of nature and law of time and the re-adaptation of humans to the natural flow of living organisms. For a true sustainable consciousness we need, as has been showed, to recognize ourselves as part of the earth, using our capacities and technologies in that awareness.
Concluding:
To work for sustainable education, it has here been proposed to raise our consciousness to a planetary level and join the global natural evolution process that is unrolling. To reach that, an individual and collective process has to be initiated where we can develop:
- Re-understanding of human nature and human relations
- Re-understanding the use of technology
- Re-connecting with the earth
Such re-understandings should be made within a planetary consciousness and with sustainable awareness so that the human species can evolve to a consciousness in togetherness with the general life systems it belongs to. If we teach ourselves and the next generations planetary sustainable manners to use our minds, to use our tools and to connect with the Earth, we can become a human family, living ecologically together with each other and with Nature.
Note: In my research Humans, Technology and Nature – Studies for Evolutionary Symbiosis, I will develop a convergence of Human Knowledge relevant for the mentioned re-understandings. The final “product” of such research is hoped to be a tool for humankind to consult on understanding evolutionary symbiosis connection with technology and the earth: and on practical ways to work for sustainability implementation and education.