“In these times of planetary polycrisis, we try to get our bearings by looking to the past.”
That’s just the problem however. The planetary crisis is unprecedented. Therefore history cannot provide an adequate
guide.
Can human beings understand the basic nature of the crisis humankind faces? I feel we can.
Most commentators aren’t even coming close however. They try to place the unparalleled challenge in some comforting
context of the past.
It’s a “New Cold War,” or “The Age of Unpeace.” Or it’s “a new Age of Revolutions,” in which we can learn something from
the French, Industrial and American revolutions.
Even “The Anthropocene Age” is an absurd explanation, since it attempts to place man’s decimation of the earth in the
context of geologic time, as if a single sentient species plundering the planet that gave rise to it is in the natural
course of things.
David Boyd, UN special rapporteur on human rights and the environment from 2018 to April 2024, diagnoses the external
problem, but his old prescription falls far short.
“The powerful human right of a healthy environment is up against an even more powerful force in the global economy, a
system that is absolutely based on the exploitation of people and nature,” Boyd said in his parting reflections.
That’s undeniable. However it’s essential to delve deeper than the standard, weary remedy: “Dislodging this system
requires a huge grassroots movement using tools like human rights and public protest and every other tool in the arsenal
of change-makers.”
Marches and encampments may be necessary, but they certainly aren’t sufficient.
The exploitation of people, much less war, has its roots in man’s exploitation of nature. The global economic and
political crisis reflects an intensifying crisis of man’s consciousness, which gave rise to the planetary crisis of the
present.
For tens of thousands of years, the earth seemed huge and inexhaustible, and humans seemed small and vulnerable.
But as man’s exploitative technologies grew, the earth shrank. Now scientists think man is as powerful as the forces
that shaped the earth, even as individuals feel more powerless than ever before.
Given the woefully inadequate response to the multi-faceted crisis that man has generated, David Boyd, in what reads
like a cri de coeur, concludes: “I can’t get people to bat an eyelash. It’s like there’s something wrong with our brains that we can’t understand just how grave this situation is.”
The problem is not our brains however; it’s our minds. At the emotional level, most people feel the enormity of the
crisis we face as a species. But they also feel overwhelmed by its scale and depth, and believe there is nothing they
can do about it.
Calling for “a huge grassroots movement” to combat “the exploitation of nature and people” only contributes to the
feeling of powerlessness. For people not only run up against not only the powerful forces of huge vested interests, such
as Big Oil, but primitive aspects of human nature itself.
Our true power as individuals is that we can address the basic forces within ourselves. Doing so will have an
immeasurably greater impact than protests and activism.
In short, before we can adequately respond to the external forces derived from human nature and the human mind, we must
understand the internal tendencies toward self-centeredness, greed and exploitation within ourselves.
It’s true, as Boyd said, “The right to a healthy environment is actually the foundation that we require to enjoy all
other human rights. If we don’t have a living, healthy planet Earth, then all the other rights are just words on paper.”
Gaining deepening insight within ourselves into how the human brain, dominated by symbolic thought, brought us to this
perilous pass is therefore the highest priority and true prescription.
Looking first inwardly rather than outwardly for causes, we awaken the qualities of sapience now so urgently needed:
self-knowing and the wisdom that flows from it.
Martin LeFevre
Lefevremartin77 at gmail