Current World-View
The Current World-View
Many green thinkers agree that this mechanistic world-view has brought us to the brink of a catastrophe so great that our very civilization is threatened, and that we urgently need to make peace with nature by rediscovering and embodying a world-view that reconnects us with a deep sense of participating in a cosmos suffused with intelligence, beauty, intrinsic value and profound meaning.
Stephan Harding from Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia
The planet and the human beings that exist in this environment are under extreme stress. The current state of the planet, such as global warming, acid rain, toxic oceans, and species going extinct everyday, all require the planet and many species to exist with high levels of toxic stress that impede on their quality of life. The majority of this environmental stress is being produced from how contemporary industrial human culture has been functioning for hundreds of years.
The current paradigm or world-view is one that perceives the environment around us as inanimate and for our personal use. Craig Chalquist, co-editor of Ecotherapy writes that the current Western culture “considers the natural world as a separate Other, subject to potential manipulation and control.” (Chalquist 2007, p. 18). This objective perception that values separation and utilitarianism has resulted in an ecological crisis that is only getting greater as time passes. “We have knowledge of our impact on the environment, we can perceive the pollution and degradation of the land. The water, the air- but we do not attend to it, we do not connect that knowledge with other aspects of our total experience. Perhaps it would be more accurate, and fair to say that individuals feel unable to respond to the natural world appropriately, because the political, economic, and education institutions in which we are involved all have this disassociation built into them. Dissociative alienation has been a feature of Western culture for centuries…” (Metzner 1995, p. 65).
Since Rachel Carson’s book, “Silent Spring” published in the 1960’s, the environmental movement has been trying toprevent the acceleration of degradation of the planet caused by current industrial society through external rules and regulations of individuals and corporations. However, in these past fifty years not enough progress has been made to substantially change the toxicity of the planet. Humans have too great a rate of growth and expansion to stop their toxin producing practices without a larger core belief change. The current band-aids of recycling, and reduction of material goods, as well as preservation efforts, and the “green” movement, have all been efforts to lesson the stress on this planet and on our own bodies. However, these small-scale material movements have not have the power to stop the ecological break down that is occurring. Global warming continues with glaciers melting, sea levels rising and heat waves across the planet. Tom Love Joy, from the Heinz Center, says that “if the current trends continue, by 2050 something on the order of a third or 40% of all species will either have become extinct or be on the threshold of going extinct. Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute says, “more than a billion people don’t have access to clean drinking water. Sylvia Earle with Deep Ocean and Research states that, “ in half a century we have lost on the order of 90% of the big fish in the ocean (Journey to Planet Earth, PBS Online).
A World-View Shift
Our behavior is a function of our experience, we act according to the way we see things.
R.D. Lang
It is my belief that only a total world-view shift within human modern culture will produce the life changing effects where this earth, and all the beings that live within, will be able to thrive in the future. Many contemporary ecologists, psychologists, and philosophers such as Joanna Macy, Theodore Roszak, Craig Chalquist, and many more, hold this same hope for a complete paradigm shift that could result in a more sustainable planet. R.D. Lang writes that, “Our behavior is a function of our experience, we act according to the way we see things” (Jensen 2000, p. 1). “Many green thinkers agree that this mechanistic world-view has brought us to the brink of a catastrophe so great that our very civilization is threatened, and that we urgently need to make peace with nature by rediscovering and embodying a world-view that reconnects us with a deep sense of participating in a cosmos suffused with intelligence, beauty, intrinsic value and profound meaning” (Harding 2006, p. 19). Through changing our way of perceiving life from an experience of disconnected movements separate from their environment, to experiencing life and our surroundings as something that is alive and something that we are in relationship with, the planet and our culture may change to a more sustainable and resilient course of growth. When we feel connected and perceive the livingness and intrinsic worth of something, we are more likely to honor, care for and respect it’s right to exist.
This experiential paradigm shift is an essential ingredient for creating a resilient and sustainable planet and human culture for the benefit of all beings. Through belief and perception change, this paradigm shift that ecopsychology asks for, may produce the long-term world change that is needed to re-animate the world for this culture. The shift has the potential to create a deeper sense of reciprocity and integration between human and the non-human world, for we are all made of the same eloquent numinous matter. My work is in service to the earth, so it may flourish and receive respect, as well as for human beings, so they can feel connected again to each other, themselves and with their surroundings. I wish us all to feel at home in our own skin and love the experience of being living on this planet. My work will support the eco-centric world-view shift that is needed in this culture to produce an enlivened balanced world where all beings can co-exist and thrive in the vibrant wildness of being alive on this earth