Ecology Crisis Quotes

The abuse of the Earth is the ecological crisis.

Make no mistake, they are connected, these disease outbreaks coming one after another. And they are not simply happening to us; they represent the unintended results of things we are doing. They reflect the convergence of two forms of crisis on our planet. The first crisis is ecological, the second is medical.

We can and must respond creatively to the triple crisis and simultaneously overcome dehumanization, economic inequality, and, ecological catastrophe.

Any attempt to solve the ecological crisis within a bourgeois framework must be dismissed as chimerical. Capitalism is inherently anti-ecological. Competition and accumulation constitute its very law of life, a law … summarised in the phrase, ‘production for the sake of production.’ Anything, however hallowed or rare, ‘has its price’ and is fair game for the marketplace. In a society of this kind, nature is necessarily treated as a mere resource to be plundered and exploited. The destruction of the natural world, far being the result of mere hubristic blunders, follows inexorably from the very logic of capitalist production.

The ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren't enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.

Contemporaneous with the financial crisis we have an ecological crisis and a health crisis. They are intimately interlinked. We cannot convert much more of the earth into money, or much more of our health into money, before the basis of life itself is threatened.

If the earth is a mother then rivers are her veins.

Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence in the middle to long term, has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.

Climate change is like that; it’s hard to keep it in your head for very long. We engage in this odd form of on-again-off-again ecological amnesia for perfectly rational reasons. We deny because we fear that letting in the full reality of this crisis will change everything. And we are right.5

There is a saying that 'the psychotic drowns in the waters that the mystic swims in.' The health and structural integrity of the ego means the difference between spiritual emergence, the unfolding of a transpersonal identity; and a spiritual emergency a crisis brought on by the same unfolding, during which the foundations of sanity can be shaken.

the immersive ugliness of the built environment in the USA is entropy made visible. It indicates not simple carelessness but a vivid drive toward destruction, decay and death: the stage-set of a literal “death trip,” of a society determined to commit suicide. Far from being a mere matter of aesthetics, suburbia represents a compound economic catastrophe, ecological debacle, political nightmare, and spiritual crisis — for a nation of people conditioned to spend their lives in places not worth caring about.

The chief causes of the environmental destruction that faces us today are not biological, or the product of individual human choice. They are social and historical, rooted in the productive relations, technological imperatives, and historically conditioned demographic trends that characterize the dominant social system. Hence, what is ignored or downplayed in most proposals to remedy the environmental crisis is the most critical challenge of all: the need to transform the major social bases of environmental degradation, and not simply to tinker with its minor technical bases. As long as prevailing social relations remain unquestioned, those who are concerned about what is happening are left with few visible avenues for environmental action other than purely personal commitments to recycling and green shopping, socially untenable choices between jobs and the environment, or broad appeals to corporations, political policy-makers, and the scientific establishment--the very interests most responsible for the current ecological mess.

Let’s start with the most prominent ecological crisis of our time: global warming. When you look seriously at the numbers, you find that switching from a meat-based to a plant-based diet would do more to curb and reverse global warming than any other initiative.

The ecological crisis we face is so obvious that it becomes easy -- for some, strangely or frighteningly easy -- to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected. This is the ecological thought. And the more we consider it, the more our world opens up.

A balance between sustainable ecology and sustainable human life, on the one hand, and the unfettered drive for profit, on the other, is just an oxymoron.

Globalization is a form of artificial intelligence.

A river doesn't just carry water, it carries life.

The ecological crisis in the world had become so obviously serious that Pope John Paul II felt the need to rebuke the wealthy classes of the industrialized nations for creating that crisis: “Today, the dramatic threat of ecological breakdown is teaching us the extent to which greed and selfishness, both individual and collective, are contrary to the order of creation.

Animism is the way humanity has been deeply connected to the land and its seasonal cycles for millennia, in rapport and conversation with the animals, plants, elements, Ancestors and earth spirits. The opposite of animism is the “cult of the individual” so celebrated in modern society, and the loss of the animist worldview is at the root of our spiritual disconnect and looming ecological crisis. Human beings are just one strand woven into the complex systems of Earth Community, and the animistic perspective is fundamental to the paradigm shift, and the recovery of our own ancestral wisdom.

Fungi are veteran survivors of ecological disruption. Their ability to cling on—and often flourish—through periods of catastrophic change is one of their defining characteristics. They are inventive, flexible, and collaborative. With much of life on Earth threatened by human activity, are there ways we can partner with fungi to help us adapt? These may sound like the delirious musings of someone buried up to their neck in decomposing wood chips, but a growing number of radical mycologists think exactly this. Many symbioses have formed in times of crisis. The algal partner in a lichen can’t make a living on bare rock without striking up a relationship with a fungus. Might it be that we can’t adjust to life on a damaged planet without cultivating new fungal relationships

Above the podium stood a decorated board showing the agenda for the day. The first item of business was the world urban crisis, the second—the ecology crisis, the third—the air pollution crisis, the fourth—the energy crisis, the fifth—the food crisis. Then adjournment.

I once asked Bill McKibben, after an energising speech to a capacity crowd, when – given that the situation is as urgent as he portrayed it and we all know it is – we escalate. He was visibly ill at ease. The first part of his response presented what we might call the objection from asymmetry: as soon as a social movement engages in violent acts, it moves onto the terrain favoured by the enemy, who is overwhelmingly superior in military capabilities. The state loves a fight of arms; it knows it will win. Our strength is in numbers. This is a pet argument for strategic pacifists, but it is disingenuous. Violence is not the sole field where asymmetry prevails. The enemy has overwhelmingly superior capabilities in virtually all fields, including media propaganda, institutional coordination, logistical resources, political legitimacy and, above all, money. If the movement should shun uphill battles, a divestment campaign seems like the worst possible choice: trying to sap fossil capital by means of capital.

Each of these three problems—nuclear war, ecological collapse, and technological disruption—is enough to threaten the future of human civilization. But taken together, they add up to an unprecedented existential crisis, especially because they are likely to reinforce and compound one another.

THE PREVALENCE OF the word “New” in maps of the Americas and Australia points to one of the most important aspects of European expansion: ecological and topographic transformation.

resolve and commitment. As a feminist, I wish the pope had addressed the ways that patriarchy, power-over relationships, and the church’s history of misogyny have all contributed to our ecological crisis. We have

All those “why” questions are rooted in culture, which is to say, in ethical beliefs. I emphasize the point not to denigrate the achievements of scientists, but only to remind that natural science cannot by itself fathom the sources of the crisis it has identified, for the sources lie not in the nature that scientists study but in the human nature and, especially, in the human culture that historians and other humanists have made their study.

What has Capitalism resolved? It has solved no problems. It has looted the world. It has left us with all this poverty. It has created lifestyles and models of consumerism that are incompatible with reality. It has poisoned the waterways. Oceans, Rivers, Lakes, Seas, the Atmosphere, the Earth. It has produced an incredible waste of resources. I always cite one example; imagine every person in China owned a Car, or aspired to own a Car. Everyone of the 1.1 Billion people in China, or that everyone of the 800 million people in India wished to own a Car, this method, this lifestyle, and Africa did the same, and nearly 450 million Latin Americans did the same. How long would Oil last? How long would Natural Gas last? How long would natural resources last? What would be left of the Ozone layer? What would be left of Oxygen on Earth? What would happen with Carbon Dioxide? And all these phenomenon that are changing the ecology of our world, they are changing Earth, they are making life on our Planet more and more difficult all the time. What model has Capitalism given the world to follow? An example for societies to emulate? Shouldn’t we focus on more rational things, like the education of the whole population? Nutrition, health, a respectable lodging, an elevated culture? Would you say capitalism, with it’s blind laws, it’s selfishness as a fundamental principle, has given us something to emulate? Has it shown us a path forward? Is humanity going to travel on the course charted thus far? There may be talk of a crisis in socialism, but, today, there is an even greater crises in capitalism, with no end in sight.

It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time. Today is no different. Are we out of the global economic crisis, or is the worst still to come? Will China continue growing until it becomes the leading superpower? Will the United States lose its hegemony? Is the upsurge of monotheistic fundamentalism the wave of the future or a local whirlpool of little long-term significance? Are we heading towards ecological disaster or technological paradise? There are good arguments to be made for all of these outcomes, but no way of knowing for sure. In a few decades, people will look back and think that the answers to all of these questions were obvious. It

But liberalism has no obvious answers to the biggest problems we face: ecological collapse and technological disruption. Liberalism traditionally relied on economic growth to magically solve difficult social and political conflicts. Liberalism reconciled the proletariat with the bourgeoisie, the faithful with atheists, natives with immigrants, and Europeans with Asians by promising everybody a larger slice of the pie. With a constantly growing pie, that was possible. However, economic growth will not save the global ecosystem; just the opposite, in fact, for economic growth is the cause of the ecological crisis. And economic growth will not solve technological disruption, for it is predicated on the invention of more and more disruptive technologies.

Climate change may be far beyond the concerns of people in the midst of a life-and-death emergency, but it might eventually make the Mumbai slums uninhabitable, send enormous new waves of refugees across the Mediterranean, and lead to a worldwide crisis in healthcare.

Shortly after Bush took office, a government scientist prepared testimony for a Congressional committee on the dangerous effects of industrial uses of coal and other fossil fuels in contributing to “global warming,” a depletion of the earth’s protective ozone layer. The White House changed the testimony, over the scientist’s objections, to minimize the danger (Boston Globe, October 29, 1990). Again, business worries about regulation seemed to override the safety of the public. The ecological crisis in the world had become so obviously serious that Pope John Paul II felt the need to rebuke the wealthy classes of the industrialized nations for creating that crisis: “Today, the dramatic threat of ecological breakdown is teaching us the extent to which greed and selfishness, both individual and collective, are contrary to the order of creation.

Modern life has fewer circumstances where panic is a bonus. Most of our perceived dangers (cancer, the ecological crisis du jour, international bad guy of the month) give us more than enough time to gather information and make conscious choices. But the Monkey sometimes finds panic far more satisfying.

From this vantage point, Christianity has nothing—absolutely nothing—to teach Indigenous people about how to live in a good way on this land. In fact, Christians have only demonstrated that there is something profoundly wrong with the cosmology and worldview behind more than five centuries of carnage—carnage that has yet to even slow down. Christians have so much negative history and dogma to overcome within their own tradition, I do not believe the religion is even salvageable. The world is deep in the throes of an ecological crisis based in Western economies of hyper-exploitation. The planet will not survive another 500 years of Christian domination.

REVIEW: Like a master artisan, Weisberger weaves together threads of anthropology, botany, ecology and psychology in an inspiring tapestry of ideas sure to keep discerning readers warm and hopeful in these cold and desolate times.Unlike other texts, which ordinarily prescribe structural (ie. social, political, economic) solutions to the global crisis of environmental destruction, Rainforest Medicine hones in on the root cause of Western schizophrenia: spiritual poverty, and the resultant alienation of the individual from his environment. This incisive perception is married to a message of hope: that the keys to the door leading to promising new human vistas are held in the humblest of hands; those of the spiritual masters of the Amazon and the traditional cultures from which they hail. By illumining the ancient practices of authentic indigenous Amazonian shamanism, Weisberger supplies us with a manual for conservation of both the rainforest and the soul. And frankly, it could not have arrived at a better time.

Faced with an ecological crisis whose roots lie in this disengagement, in the separation of human agency and social responsibility from the sphere of our direct involvement with the non-human environment, it surely behoves us to reverse this order of priority. I began with the point that while both humans and animals have histories of their mutual relations, only humans narrate such histories. But to construct a narrative, one must already dwell in the world and, in the dwelling, enter into relationships with its constituents, both human and non-human. I am suggesting that we rewrite the history of human-animal relations, taking this condition of active engagement, of being-in-the-world, as our starting point. We might speak of it as a history of human concern with animals, insofar as this notion conveys a caring, attentive regard, a 'being with'. And I am suggesting that those of us who are 'with' animals in their day-to-day lives, most notably hunters and herdsmen, can offer us some of the best possible indications of how we might proceed.

The ecological crisis is only an externalizationf an inner malaise and cannot be solved without a spiritual rebirth of Western man […] It is still our hope that as the crisis created by man's forgetfulness of who he really is grows and that as the idols of his own making crumble one by one before his eyes, he will begin a true reform of himself, which always means a spiritual rebirtn and throughis rebirth attain a new harmony with the world of nature around him. Otherwise, it is hopeless to expect to live in harmony with that grand theophany which is virgin nature, while remaining oblivious and indifferent to the Source of that theophany both beyond nature and at the centre of man's being. (p. 9)

Ecologically, bourgeois exploitation and manipulation are undermining the very capacity of the earth to sustain advanced forms of life. The crisis is being heightened by massive increases in air and water pollution; by a mounting accumulation of nondegradable wastes, lead residues, pesticide residues and toxic additives in food; by the expansion of cities into vast urban belts; by increasing stresses due to congestion, noise and mass living; and by the wanton scarring of the earth as a result of mining operations, lumbering, and real estate speculation. As a result, the earth has been despoiled in a few decades on a scale that is unprecedented in the entire history of human habitation of the planet.

Are we out of the global economic crisis, or is the worst still to come? Will China continue growing until it becomes the leading superpower? Will the United States lose its hegemony? Is the upsurge of monotheistic fundamentalism the wave of the future or a local whirlpool of little long-term significance? Are we heading towards ecological disaster or technological paradise?

Liberalism reconciled the proletariat with the bourgeoisie, the faithful with atheists, natives with immigrants, and Europeans with Asians by promising everybody a larger slice of the pie. With a constantly growing pie, that was possible. However, economic growth will not save the global ecosystem; just the opposite, in fact, for economic growth is the cause of the ecological crisis.

Far from being just part of the problem, the people of the South are leading the global fight against ecological destruction. They are our allies, not our enemies, and if we are serious about working with them, then no part of our work should involve efforts to turn immigrants from their countries away at our borders. Support for immigration controls strengthens the most regressive forces in our societies and weakens our ability to deal with the real causes of environmental problems. It gives conservative governments and politicians an easy way out, allowing them to pose as friends of the environment by restricting immigration, while continuing with business as usual. It hands a weapon to reactionaries, allowing them to portray environmentalists as hostile to the legitimate aspirations of the poorest and most oppressed people in the world.

It is modern narrow-mindedness to relate the church only to the world of human beings; it has always been cosmos-orientated too, and is so still. If the church sees itself as the beginning and germ of the new creation, then the present ecological crisis is not just a crisis of modern civilization. It is the church’s crisis in this civilization as well. The suffering of weaker creatures is the church’s suffering too. ‘If one member suffers, all suffer together.’ What suffers is not just ‘our natural environment’; it is God’s environment as well. The modern nihilistic destruction of nature is nothing other than practised atheism. The perpetrators are excommunicating themselves from the community of creation. In the face of this danger, a new cosmic spirituality is developing in many groups and churches today, a spirituality in which we reverence God’s hidden presence in all living things and hope for their future in the kingdom of God.

This may sound overambitious, but Homo sapiens cannot wait. Philosophy, religion and science are all running out of time. People have debated the meaning of life for thousands of years. We cannot continue this debate indefinitely. The looming ecological crisis, the growing threat of weapons of mass destruction, and the rise of new disruptive technologies will not allow it. Perhaps most importantly, artificial intelligence and biotechnology are giving humanity the power to reshape and re-engineer life.

We need to respond to our present ecological crisis practically, by making appropriate social, political, economic, and technological changes. We need to look at the attitudes that have led to such devastation of the earth and to find a more harmonious way of living. And those of us who believe in the power of prayer need to pray for forgiveness and guidance. If a wiser and juster human order comes about, if a new harmony develops between humanity and the living world, this would indeed seem like an answer to prayer.

There is a way to face the current ecological crisis with our eyes open, with stringent scientific knowledge, with honest sorrow over the state of life on earth, with spiritual insight, and with practical commitment. Finding such a way is more essential now than it has ever been in the history of the human species. But such work does not have to be dour (no matter how difficult) or accomplished only out of moral imperative (however real the obligation) or fear (though the reasons to fear are well founded). Our actions can rise instead from a sense of rootedness, connectedness, creativity, and delight.

It must never be forgotten that for non-modern man - whether he be ancient or contemporary - the very stuff of the Universe has a sacred aspect. The cosmos speaks to man and all of its phenomena contain meaning. They are symbols of a higher degree of reality which the cosmic domain at once veils and reveals. The very structure of the cosmos contains a spiritual message for man and is thereby a revelation coming from the same source as religion itself. Both are the manifestations of the Universal Intellect, the Logos, and the cosmos itself is an integral part of that total Universe of meaning in which man lives and dies.

In times of crisis you either deepen democracy, or you go to the other extreme and become totalitarian. Our struggles for democracy have taught us some important and valuable lessons. Over a million citizen activists of all ethnic groups, mostly young people, made history by going door to door, urging voters to go to the polls and send Barack Obama to the White House in 2008. We did this because we believed and hoped that this charismatic black man could bring about the transformational changes we urgently need at this time on the clock of the world, when the U.S. empire is unraveling and the American pursuit of unlimited economic growth has reached its social and ecological limits. We have since witnessed the election of our first black president stir increasingly dangerous counterrevolutionary resentments in a white middle class uncertain of its future in a country that is losing two wars and eliminating well-paying union jobs. We have watched our elected officials in DC bail out the banks while wheeling and dealing with insurance company lobbyists to deliver a contorted version of health care reform. We have been stunned by the audacity of the Supreme Court as it reaffirmed the premise that corporations are persons and validated corporate financing of elections in its Citizens United decision.

Philosophers of freedom were mainly, and understandably, concerned with how humans would escape the injustice, oppression, inequality, or even uniformity foisted on them by other humans or human-made systems. Geological time and the chronology of human histories remained unrelated. This distance between the two calendars, as we have seen, is what climate scientists now claim has collapsed. The period I have mentioned, from 1750 to now, is also the time when human beings switched from wood and other renewable fuels to large-scale use of fossil fuel—first coal and then oil and gas. The mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use.

The great majority of those who, like Frankl, were liberated from Nazi concentration camps chose to leave for other countries rather than return to their former homes, where far too many neighbors had turned murderous. But Viktor Frankl chose to stay in his native Vienna after being freed and became head of neurology at a main hospital in Vienna. The Austrians he lived among often perplexed Frankl by saying they did not know a thing about the horrors of the camps he had barely survived. For Frankl, though, this alibi seemed flimsy. These people, he felt, had chosen not to know. Another survivor of the Nazis, the social psychologist Ervin Staub, was saved from a certain death by Raoul Wallenberg, the diplomat who made Swedish passports for thousands of desperate Hungarians, keeping them safe from the Nazis. Staub studied cruelty and hatred, and he found one of the roots of such evil to be the turning away, choosing not to see or know, of bystanders. That not-knowing was read by perpetrators as a tacit approval. But if instead witnesses spoke up in protest of evil, Staub saw, it made such acts more difficult for the evildoers. For Frankl, the “not-knowing” he encountered in postwar Vienna was regarding the Nazi death camps scattered throughout that short-lived empire, and the obliviousness of Viennese citizens to the fate of their own neighbors who were imprisoned and died in those camps. The underlying motive for not-knowing, he points out, is to escape any sense of responsibility or guilt for those crimes. People in general, he saw, had been encouraged by their authoritarian rulers not to know—a fact of life today as well. That same plea of innocence, I had no idea, has contemporary resonance in the emergence of an intergenerational tension. Young people around the world are angry at older generations for leaving as a legacy to them a ruined planet, one where the momentum of environmental destruction will go on for decades, if not centuries. This environmental not-knowing has gone on for centuries, since the Industrial Revolution. Since then we have seen the invention of countless manufacturing platforms and processes, most all of which came to be in an era when we had no idea of their ecological impacts. Advances in science and technology are making ecological impacts more transparent, and so creating options that address the climate crisis and, hopefully, will be pursued across the globe and over generations. Such disruptive, truly “green” alternatives are one way to lessen the bleakness of Earth 2.0—the planet in future decades—a compelling fact of life for today’s young. Were Frankl with us today (he died in 1997), he would no doubt be pleased that so many of today’s younger people are choosing to know and are finding purpose and meaning in surfacing environmental facts and acting on them.

Fundamentally, the task is to articulate not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis - embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, and cooperation rather than hierarchy. This is required not only to create a political context to dramatically lower emissions, but also to help us cope with the disasters we can no longer avoid. Because in the hot and stormy future we have already made inevitable through our past emissions, an unshakable belief in the equal rights of all people and a capacity for deep compassion will be the only things standing between civilization and barbarism.

It seems like an indulgence to take the time to cultivate mindfulness when so much is being lost. But this is the tension - to find a considered way of acting not based on reaction. Building a different kind of sanity requires a stable base for careful action. It means being willing to know all the dimensions of the reality of destruction, being willing to breathe with the tension of emotional response, being willing to cultivate tolerance for unresolved conflict. This nonverbal form of ethical deliberation depends on the careful work of paying attention to the whole thing. Meditating, walking slowly, calming the mind by centering on the breath - these painstaking, deliberate practices increase the odds for acting intelligently in the midst of crisis.

The earlier Aryan invaders of the Gangetic Plain presided over feasts of cattle, horses, goats, buffalo, and sheep. By later Vedic and early Hindu times, during the first millenium B.C., the feasts came to be managed by the priestly caste of Brahmans, who erected rituals of sacrifice around the killing of animals and distributed the meat in the name of the Aryan chiefs and war lords. After 600 B.C., when populations grew denser and domestic animals became proportionately scarcer, the eating of meat was progressively restricted until it became a monopoly of the Brahmans and their sponsors. Ordinary people struggled to conserve enough livestock to meet their own desperate requirements for milk, dung used as fuel, and transport. During this period of crisis, reformist religions arose, most prominently Buddhism and Jainism, that attempted to abolish castes and hereditary priesthoods and to outlaw the killing of animals. The masses embraced the new sects, and in the end their powerful support reclassified the cow into a sacred animal. So it appears that some of the most baffling of religious practices in history might have an ancestry passing in a straight line back to the ancient carnivorous habits of humankind. Cultural anthropologists like to stress that the evolution of religion proceeds down multiple, branching pathways. But these pathways are not infinite in number; they may not even be very numerous. It is even possible that with a more secure knowledge of human nature and ecology, the pathways can be enumerated and the directions of religious evolution in individual cultures explained with a high level of confidence.

This makes us, however unintuitively, the most powerful people that have ever lived…Nothing has threatened our ecologies more than the extraction and burning of fossil fuels and the affluent consumer culture…But we have also been granted an astonishingly beautiful gift that has never before been given to humans: the chance to shepherd human and animal life into the coming centuries and millennia, when we know that much of it would otherwise disappear. That’s a power that should make us very humble and a privilege that can motivate us profoundly. In a way, our darkness- the knowledge that without our great effort, many or most of Earth’s creatures will vanish- is what reveals the light within, the seed of life and possibility that we share with all of Earth’s life, the one that we can carry forward. For better and for worse, we are the ones at the intersection of knowledge and agency. LOVING A VANISHING WORLD by Emily N. Johnston

Make no mistake, they are connected, these disease outbreaks coming one after another. And they are not simply happening to us; they represent the unintended results of things we are doing. They reflect the convergence of two forms of crisis on our planet. The first crisis is ecological, the second is medical. As the two intersect, their joint consequences appear as a pattern of weird and terrible new diseases, emerging from unexpected sources and raising deep concern, deep foreboding, among the scientists who study them. How do such diseases leap from nonhuman animals into people, and why do they seem to be leaping more frequently in recent years? To put the matter in its starkest form: Human-caused ecological pressures and disruptions are bringing animal pathogens ever more into contact with human populations, while human technology and behavior are spreading those pathogens ever more widely and quickly. There are three elements to the situation.

From its foundation and by its very nature, the church is cosmos-orientated. It was a modern and a dangerous contraction when the church came to be narrowed down to the human world. But if the church is cosmos-orientated, then the ecological crisis of earthly creation is the church's own crisis, for through this destruction of the earth - `bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh' - the church is destroyed. When the weaker creatures die, the whole community of creation suffers. If the church sees itself as creation's representative, then this suffering on the part of the weaker creatures will turn into its own conscious pain, and it will have to cry out this pain in public protest. It is not just our human environment that is suffering; it is the creation which is designed and destined to be `God's environment'. Every intervention in creation which can never be made good again is sacrilege. Its consequence is the self-excommunication of the perpetrators. The nihilistic destruction of nature is practised atheism.

Those who nowadays see inconveniences to living in this laboratory often come up against the incomprehension and disapproval of their peers. They are accused of opposing the technological society on which they are nonetheless dependent and the comforts of which they enjoy—even if this argument is losing credence as the effects of the ecological crisis become ever more direct and flagrant. This logic follows the same pattern as attempts to silence patients criticizing the medical system on the pretext that their health and sometimes their lives depend on it. We are thus to be neutralized by guilt and condemned to submission and resignation. Can we be held responsible for the society into which we were born and in relation to which our room for maneuver is inevitably limited? To use this as grounds to ban all critique of our society amounts to tying our hands in the face of disaster, hamstringing thought and, more broadly, stifling imagination, desire and the capacity to recall that things are not doomed to be as they currently are.

Drafting conscript workers was one thing. But unless they were adequately fed they were useless. There was no industry in the 1940s in which the correlation between labour productivity and calorific input was more direct than in mining.91 But after 1939 the food supply in Western Europe was no less constrained than the supply of coal.92 As was true of Germany, the high-intensity dairy farms of France, the Netherlands and Denmark were dependent on imported animal feed. Grain imports in the late 1930s had run at the rate of more than 7 million tons per annum mostly from Argentina and Canada. These sources of supply were closed off by the British blockade. In addition Western Europe had imported more than 700,000 tons of oil seed.93 Of course, France was a major producer of grain in its own right. But French grain yields depended, as they did in Germany, on large quantities of nitrogen-based fertilizer, which could be supplied only at the expense of the production of explosives. And like German agriculture, the farms of Western Europe depended on huge herds of draught animals and on the daily labour of millions of farm workers. The removal of horses, manpower, fertilizer and animal feed that followed the outbreak of war set off a disastrous chain reaction in the delicate ecology of European peasant farming. By the summer of 1940, Germany was facing a Europe-wide agricultural crisis.

Nor do piecemeal steps however well intended, even partially resolve problems that have reached a universal, global and catastrophic Character. If anything, partial `solutions’ serve merely as cosmetics to conceal the deep seated nature of the ecological crisis. They thereby deflect public attention and theoretical insight from an adequate understanding of the depth and scope of the necessary changes.

New Age environmentalism and conventional environmentalism that place limits on serious, in-depth ecological thinking have been increasingly replaced by social ecology that explores the economic and institutional factors that enter into the environmental crisis.

The media have indeed informed the public about threats to our air, water and food. Ever since 1962, when Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, more and more information has been made available. And the public has responded. About fifteen years ago, public interest in the environment reached its height. In 1988, George Bush Senior promised that, if elected, he would be an environmental president. In the same year, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was re-elected, and to indicate his ecological concern he moved the minister of the environment into the inner Cabinet. Newly created environment departments around the world were poised to cut back on fossil-fuel use, monitor the effects of acid rain and other pollutants, clean up toxic wastes, and protect plant and animal species. Information about our troubled environment had reached a large number of people, and that information, as expected, led to civic and political action. In 1992, it all reached its apex as the largest-ever gathering of heads of state in human history met at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. “Sustainable development” was the rallying cry, and politicians and business leaders promised to take a new path. Henceforth, they said, the environment would be weighed in every political, social and economic decision. Yet only two weeks after all the fine statements of purpose and government commitments were signed in Rio, the Group of Seven industrialized nations met in Munich and not a word was mentioned about the environment. The main topic was the global economy. The environment, it was said, had fallen off the list of public concerns, and environmentalism had been relegated to the status of a transitory fad.

Yet what is inescapably different about today is that never in the history of human life have so many people been so threatened by the changes our planet is undergoing; never have some of the planetary changes we are witnessing occurred so quickly, with so little time for adaptation; and never before has one species (us) been identified as the primary cause of such rapid, large-scale changes. It is this recognition of our vulnerability and our culpability, along with the fear that things are on the verge of getting much, much worse and there is little we can do about it, that lies behind the despair so prevalent in this age. We increasingly observe the temptation to such despair among scientists, environmentalists, those who work for development and aid agencies, and even portions of the general public. In our own work and ministry—and, indeed, as we did research for the science portions of this book—we have occasionally wrestled with such despair ourselves.

What is certain is that there will be increasing numbers of refugees if rapid climate change continues. People have to live somewhere. High-income countries such as in North America and Europe may in fact initially feel the effects of climate change most strongly in pressures from refugees wanting to immigrate. This will present a real moral challenge: since it is the high-income countries historically who have been largely responsible for causing rapid climate change, how can they refuse to help those from low-income areas such as sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia who will suffer the consequences most?

[A] group of leading academics argue that humanity must stay within defined boundaries for a range of essential Earth-system processes to avoid catastrophic environmental change. . . . They propose that for three of these—the nitrogen cycle, the rate of loss of species and anthropogenic climate change—the maximum acceptable limit has already been transgressed. In addition, they say that humanity is fast approaching the boundaries for freshwater use, for converting forests and other natural ecosystems to cropland and urban areas, and for acidification of the oceans. Crossing even one of these planetary boundaries would risk triggering abrupt or irreversible environmental changes that would be very damaging or even catastrophic for society.

both nutritionally and ecologically. The resolution of this crisis is so fundamental to our personal health and the health of our planet that we must look more closely at water than we look at any other nutrient. What is happening to our water is simple: it is Drying Up, Getting Diverted, and Becoming Toxic.

The climate justice fight here in the U.S. and around the world is not just a fight against the [biggest] ecological crisis of all time,” Miya Yoshitani, executive director of the Oakland-based Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), explains. “It is the fight for a new economy, a new energy system, a new democracy, a new relationship to the planet and to each other, for land, water, and food sovereignty, for Indigenous rights, for human rights and dignity for all people. When climate justice wins we win the world that we want. We can’t sit this one out, not because we have too much to lose but because we have too much to gain. . . . We are bound together in this battle, not just for a reduction in the parts per million of CO2, but to transform our economies and rebuild a world that we want today.

O God, enlarge within us the sense of fellowship with all living things, our brothers the animals to whom Thou gavest the earth as their home in common with us. We remember with shame that in the past we have exercised the high dominion of man with ruthless cruelty so that the voice of the earth, which should have gone up to Thee in song has been a groan of travail. May we realize that they live not for us alone, but for themselves and for Thee and that they love the sweetness of life even as we, and serve Thee better in their place than we in ours. For those, O Lord, the humble beasts, that bear with us the burden and heat of day … and for the wild creatures, whom Thou hast made wise, strong, and beautiful, we supplicate for them Thy great tenderness of heart, for Thou hast promised to save both man and beast, and great is Thy loving kindness, O Master, Saviour of the world.36

We are part of the natural world and evolved within its embrace. This understanding is perhaps as ancient as humanity itself. Giving children the gift of knowing nature as their home, of feeling themselves as part of the web of life is an invaluable life resource for exploring their inner self and for developing their ability to act in this world and on its behalf. It is perhaps our culture’s break with nature, the viewing of our planet as nothing more than a collection of things to be exploited and discarded, that has brought us to this time of crisis. And perhaps more than anything else, this time of turmoil and transformation calls for a rediscovery of humanity’s place within the earth community. This revisioning of our relationship with life on earth, rooted in indigenous wisdom and shaped for contemporary times, is perhaps the cornerstone of the human initiation and evolution being called for today. For children to discover their place within the natural world, to grow their connection with it, has everything to do with their ability to remain grounded in turbulent times, everything to do with their being able to grow their vision and play their part in this upcoming transition.

Specifically, I want to bring these songs and texts to bear on the ecological crisis. It seems to me that the environmental crisis is, at heart, a failure and a perversion of the human imagination. Our imaginations have been taken captive by an ecocidal ideology of economic growth that invariably will render us homeless in a world unfit for habitation. If imagination is the issue, then a redirection of our lives toward creation care will not emerge out of statistics of ecological despoliation, as important as those statistics might be. What we need is liberated imagination, imagination set free to envision an alternative life, an ecological imagination that engenders a life of restorative homemaking in our creational home. Cockburn’s art, especially when interpreted in dialogue with biblical visions, is a rich resource for funding such an imagination.[206]

Human activity is destroying the natural systems that we depend upon for our survival. Our most basic instinct as humans is to survive; yet we continue to destroy our life-support machine. Connected humans understand this terrible contradiction; disconnected humans are not able to. Not all humans are responsible: just those who are part of Industrial Civilization. Industrial Civilization depends on economic growth and the unsustainable use of natural resources, so it has developed a complex set of tools for keeping people disconnected from the real world and living a life that keeps civilization running. Humans have been manipulated in order to be part of a destructive system. The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization.

To maintain, in this new situation, the old missionary attitude is not merely inexcusable but positively dangerous. In a world threatened with nuclear war, a world facing a global ecological crisis, a world more and more closely bound together in its cultural and economic life, the paramount need is for unity, and an aggressive claim on the part of one of the world’s religions to have the truth for all can only be regarded as treason against the human race.

Being responsible front of the other. (part1) We live in a historical period which, without too many difficulties, can be defined as a transition period. In many respects, in fact, the world as it appeared a few decades ago has almost completely disappeared. In its place, however, no paradigm that can be said to be truly new has yet materialized. The era to come, which always seems to be on the verge of a future driven by perhaps too naively acclaimed technological development, is as if it were slowed down by ideas, visions and practices that still belong to the past. Take for example the urgent need to convert industrial production, but also individual consumption, through sustainable, ecological, greener and more aware practices. It is our own planet that requires us to make a change in this sense: climate change is there for all to see, but the political institutions that should deal with the issue are unable to be decided and united to stem the problem. We know that the resources we have are limited but we continue to exploit them even though there are already alternatives, so we squander what nature can offer us in a year well before this year is over because we still believe in the mad and blind race of progress. We also take the incredible technological development that information technology has made possible. We can store an incredible amount of information in devices that we can put in our pockets, we have at our fingertips practically much of all the knowledge that humanity has produced throughout its history, but ignorance continues to spread like a river in full. The areas in which it is possible to recognize that much the current historical period is a period of transition are still many others, from the political one, with the crisis of representative democracies but also with the absence of a real alternative, to the economic one, social, with the giants of the web that increasingly impoverish small businesses, thus contributing to widening the gap, now almost unbridgeable, between the few who have too much and the many who have less and less. Or with the appearance of a new precious commodity: our personal data that is exchanged too lightly, as if they were a traditional market product. In this framework, already quite unstable in itself, the Covid-19 pandemic, directly or indirectly, is also radically changing our sociality. In fact, the spread of the virus has highlighted not only the fragility of the world economic-social system, in which if you break a link in the chain it is the whole chain that breaks, but it has also made clear, by difference, how much the our way of relating to others, even the most banal, even the most everyday. Especially in a country like ours, which has made conviviality its distinctive feature. What seemed natural to us, like hugging and greeting each other with a kiss with an acquaintance or going to a concert piled on top of each other, now that we are discouraged - if not forbidden - takes on even more value. Probably a value that we didn't even know, so obvious and taken for granted, was there before. In other words: we only discover what our social freedom was worth now that it is being restricted to us. And we discover it, precisely, by difference, by comparing what we could have done before with what we must do now. In this regard, I would like to ask a question: why should all of us accept that our way of life, our daily habits and our social freedom are limited? The question is deliberately provocative. His answer, quite obvious. In some cases, however, even the question whose answer seems obvious and obvious must still be formulated. It must be formulated in order to attempt to review the question posed in a clearer and more profound way, that is, to better understand the underlying reasons. Therefore, although the answer is evident as well as common sense, I believe that asking this question can help to better understand some intrinsic reasons.

First is the recognition that the world’s major problems are all interconnected. The global crisis is not neatly divided into separate problems, some social and some environmental. As Pope Francis notes, we have “one complex crisis which is both social and environmental.”2 To focus on environmental issues without considering the social, or the social without the environmental, is a failure to grasp the true nature of the crisis.

Right now, humanity as a species needs to develop myths that support the development of maturity, wisdom and agency to face into causes and effects of climate disruption and ecological collapse. Without this, our lives and planet will become wastelands, literally and metaphorically.

Humanity cannot keep expanding in numbers and relentless destruction and still expect everything to be ‘ok’. We moved far beyond ‘ok’ a very long time ago, the world is in crisis because of us. To believe otherwise is dangerous and delusional. In this finite world we have only two choices - to change ourselves to fit within it or die out.

Such forms of what we might term 'carewashing' join a rich array of corporations trying to increase their legitimacy by presenting themselves as socially responsible 'citizens', while really contributing to inequality and ecological destruction. They go further by trying to capitalise on the very care crisis they have helped to create.

The ecological crisis is only an externalization of an inner malaise and cannot be solved without a spiritual rebirth of Western man […] It is still our hope that as the crisis created by man's forgetfulness of who he really is grows and that as the idols of his own making crumble one by one before his eyes, he will begin a true reform of himself, which always means a spiritual rebirth and through his rebirth attain a new harmony with the world of nature around him. Otherwise, it is hopeless to expect to live in harmony with that grand theophany which is virgin nature, while remaining oblivious and indifferent to the Source of that theophany both beyond nature and at the centre of man's being […] Few are willing to look reality in the face and accept the fact that there is no peace possible in human society as long as the attitude toward nature and the whole natural environment is one based on aggression and war. Furthermore, perhaps not all realize that in order to gain this peace with nature there must be peace with the spiritual order. To be at peace with the Earth one must be at peace with Heaven.

It proved no more possible to really turn everyone in the world into micro-corporations or to “democratize credit” in such a way that every family that wanted to could have a house (And if you think about it, if we have the means to build them, why shouldn’t they? Are there families who don’t “deserve” houses?) than it had been to allow all wage laborers to have unions, pensions, and health benefits. Capitalism doesn’t work that way. It is ultimately a system of power and exclusion, and when it reaches the breaking point, the symptoms recur, just as they had in the 1970s: food riots, oil shock, financial crisis, the sudden startled realization that the current course was ecologically unsustainable, and attendant apocalyptic scenarios of every sort.

Make no mistake, they are connected, these disease outbreaks coming one after another. And they are not simply happening to us; they represent the unintended results of things we are doing. They reflect the convergence of two forms of crisis on our planet. The first crisis is ecological, the second is medical. As the two intersect, their joint consequences appear as a pattern of weird and terrible new diseases, emerging from unexpected sources and raising deep concern, deep foreboding, among the scientists who study them. How do such diseases leap from nonhuman animals into people, and why do they seem to be leaping more frequently in recent years?

The recent history of human population dynamics resembles the ‘boom-bust’ cycle of any other species introduced to a new habitat with abundant resources and no predators, therefore little negative feedback. [...] The population expands rapidly (exponentially), until it depletes essential resources and pollutes its habitat. Negative feedback (overcrowding, disease, starvation, resource scarcity/competition/conflict) then reasserts itself and the population crashes to a level at or below theoretical carrying capacity (it may go locally extinct). Some species populations, in simple habitats, cycle repeatedly through boom and bust phases. The height of the boom is called the ‘plague phase’ of such cycles. Hypothesis: Homo sapiens are currently approaching the peak of the plague phase of a one-off global population cycle and will crash because of depleted resources, habitat deterioration and psycho-social feedback, including possible war over remaining ‘assets,’ sometime in this century. (“But wait,” I hear you protest. “Humans are not just any other species. We’re smarter; we can plan ahead; we just won’t let this happen!” Perhaps, but what is the evidence so far that our leaders even recognize the problem?) [...] climate change is not the only existential threat confronting modern society. Indeed, we could initiate any number of conversations that end with the self-induced implosion of civilization and the loss of 50 per cent or even 90 per cent of humanity. And that places the global community in a particularly embarrassing predicament. Homo sapiens, that self-proclaimed most-intelligent-of-species, is facing a genuine, unprecedented, hydra-like ecological crisis, yet its political leaders, economic elites and sundry other messiahs of hope will not countenance a serious conversation about of any of its ghoulish heads. Climate change is perhaps the most aggressively visible head, yet despite decades of high-level talks — 33 in al — and several international agreements to turn things around, atmospheric CO2 and other GHG concentrations have more than doubled to over 37 billion tonnes and, with other GHG concentrations, are still rising at record rates.

the task is to articulate not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis—embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, and cooperation rather than hierarchy.

Climate crisis presents nearly unfathomable urgency because of what scientists call “tipping points” – climate tripwires, so to speak. These thresholds, caused by human carbon pollution, trigger dangerous feedbacks capable of unraveling the planet’s climate system. Once triggered, these viscous cycles continue despite any subsequent carbon reductions achieved by humanity. Such tipping points loom near. Some may be underway.

Issues such as universal freedom of migration, international security, terrorism, internet policing, climate crisis, ecological sustainability, stabilizing international finance and banking, global poverty, basic material security, basic income, labor rights, human and animal rights all share one fundamental trait: they are transnational by nature.

The fact that the countries with the highest birth rates generally have the lowest standard of living and produce the least pollution fatally undermines such claims - if the poorest 3 billion people on the planet somehow disappeared tomorrow, there would be virtually no reduction in ongoing environmental destruction.

In the background, given my commitment to the outer ecology of environmentalism, I replaced all the company cars with diesels, which used less crude oil and lasted longer than gasoline engines. The diesel cars did pay off briefly during the Second Energy Crisis of 1979, but they gave us a lot of trouble in the long run because the diesel-powered Oldsmobile station wagons that General Motors rushed into production had nothing but a beefed-up gasoline engine (internal pressures are much greater in a diesel) and they were in the shop more often than on the road. We aggressively redesigned the stores to conserve energy. To this day, Trader Joe’s stores don’t have very many windows, and all panes of glass are very small, an idea that had an accidental payoff in every subsequent earthquake and riot. As the young lady said back there in the God of Fair Beginnings chapter, I did the right thing for the wrong reasons.

Today few can doubt that the system has crossed critical thresholds of ecological sustainability, raising questions about the vulnerability of the entire planet.

We have increased our population to the level of 7 billion and beyond. We are well on our way toward 9 billion before our growth trend is likely to flatten. We live at high densities in many cities. We have penetrated, and we continue to penetrate, the last great forests and other wild ecosystems of the planet, disrupting the physical structures and the ecological communities of such places. We cut our way through the Congo. We cut our way through the Amazon. We cut our way through Borneo. We cut our way through Madagascar. We cut our way through New Guinea and northeastern Australia. We shake the trees, figuratively and literally, and things fall out. We kill and butcher and eat many of the wild animals found there. We settle in those places, creating villages, work camps, towns, extractive industries, new cities. We bring in our domesticated animals, replacing the wild herbivores with livestock. We multiply our livestock as we've multiplied ourselves, operating huge factory-scale operations involving thousands of cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, sheep, and goats, not to mention hundreds of bamboo rats and palm civets, all confined en masse within pens and corrals, under conditions that allow those domestics and semidomestics to acquire infectious pathogens from external sources (such as bats roosting over the pig pens), to share those infections with one another, and to provide abundant opportunities for the pathogens to evolve new forms, some of which are capable of infecting a human as well as a cow or a duck. We treat many of those stock animals with prophylactic doses of antibiotics and other drugs, intended not to cure them but to foster their weight gain and maintain their health just sufficiently for profitable sale and slaughter, and in doing that we encourage the evolution of resistant bacteria. We export and import livestock across great distances and at high speeds. We export and import other live animals, especially primates, for medical research. We export and import wild animals as exotic pets. We export and import animal skins, contraband bushmeat, and plants, some of which carry secret microbial passengers. We travel, moving between cities and continents even more quickly than our transported livestock. We stay in hotels where strangers sneeze and vomit. We eat in restaurants where the cook may have butchered a porcupine before working on our scallops. We visit monkey temples in Asia, live markets in India, picturesque villages in South America, dusty archeological sites in New Mexico, dairy towns in the Netherlands, bat caves in East Africa, racetracks in Australia – breathing the air, feeding the animals, touching things, shaking hands with the friendly locals – and then we jump on our planes and fly home. We get bitten by mosquitoes and ticks. We alter the global climate with our carbon emissions, which may in turn alter the latitudinal ranges within which those mosquitoes and ticks live. We provide an irresistible opportunity for enterprising microbes by the ubiquity and abundance of our human bodies. Everything I’ve just mentioned is encompassed within this rubric: the ecology and evolutionary biology of zoonotic diseases. Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.

We might want to consider instead the new opportunities and affinities that are opened up through coming together to fight the environmental crisis. Ecological justice groups like Extinction Rebellion are calling for citizens’ assemblies—innovative institutions that can allow people, communities, even entire countries, to make important decisions in ways that may be more just and fairer than party politics. Similar to jury service, members are randomly selected from across the country. The process is designed to ensure that assemblies reflect the population in regard to characteristics like gender, age, ethnicity, education level, and geography. Assembly members hear from experts and those most affected by an issue. Members then come together in small groups with professional facilitators and together work through their differences and draft and vote on recommendations.69

a true great reset. It is no secret what needs to be done—Greta Thunberg has made it clear. First, we should finally recognize the pandemic crisis for what it is: part of a global crisis of our entire way of life, from ecology to new social tensions. Second, we should establish social control and regulation over the economy. Third, we should rely on science, but without simply accepting it as the agent of decision-making. Why not? Let’s return to Habermas, with whom we began: our predicament is that we are compelled to act while knowing that we don’t know the full coordinates of the situation we are in, and non-acting would itself function as an act. But is this not the basic situation of every action? Our great advantage is that we know how much we don’t know, and this knowing about our not-knowing opens up a space of freedom. We act when we don’t know the whole situation, but this is not simply our limitation. What gives us freedom is that the situation—in our social sphere, at least—is in itself open, not fully (pre)determined.

If we want to have any future, we must not put our differences aside but do precisely the opposite. We must focus on the divisions and antagonisms which traverse US society—not the “uncivil war” between the liberal establishment and Trump followers, but the actual class antagonism and all its implications (racism, sexism, and the ecological crisis).

We're writing at a juncture of crisis - of longstanding roots and rapid progression, deeply embedded in economy and ecology and palpably felt at the level of everyday life.

in the middle of the Covid-19 crisis, I looked around us... This was, I realised the only time in my life the world had truly slowed down. A terrible tragedy had forced us to do it - but there was also, for many of us, a hint of relief. It was the first time in centuries that the world chose, together, to stop racing, and pause. We decided as a society to value something other than speed and growth. We literally looked up and saw the trees. I suspect that, in the long run, it will be ultimately not be possible to rescue attention and focus in a world that is dominated by the belief that we need to keep growing and speeding up every year. ...we will, sooner or later, have to take on this very deep issue: the growth machine itself. But we will have to do this in any event - for another reason. The growth machine has pushed humans beyond the limits of our minds - but is also pushing the planet beyond its ecological limits. And these two crises, I was coming to believe are intertwined.

There’s even a group called “birth strikers,” women who refuse to have children due to the severity of the ecological crisis. (Or at least, that’s what they tell their disappointed Jewish mothers.)

Caring for God's creation is not a "green movement", it is a prophetic response to our ecological crisis: ...our ministry of reconciliation is a matter of great joy and hope and we would care for creation even if it were not in crisis. We are faced with a crisis that is pressing, urgent... We can no longer afford complacency and endless debate. Love for God, our neighbours, and the wider creation, as well as our passion for justice, compel us to "urgent and prophetic ecological responsibility".

The way we pay for the present by liquidating the future truly fits the definition of a Ponzi scheme. Any other forms of Ponzi schemes are outlawed, only the ecological one we seem to ignore or even encourage.

Caring for God's creation is not a "green movement", it is a prophetic response to our ecological crisis: ...our ministry of reconciliation is a matter of great joy and hope and we would care for creation even if it were not in crisis. We are faced with a crisis that is pressing, urgent... We can no longer afford complacency and endless debate. Love for God, our neighbours, and the wider creation, as well as our passion for justice, compel us to "urgent and prophetic ecological responsibility

In a time of ecological crisis, Anglo-Saxon poems which recognize how fundamentally we are connected to the rhythms of nature - how dependent we are on the well-being of the earth, how grateful we should be for its gifts and its beauties - speak truths we still need to hear.

Yet it has to be recognized that these checklists conform to managerial norms of measuring sustainability because they are made up of easily quantifiable items: more solar roofs, less airborne particulates; more transit riders, less water use per capital; more housing density, less golf courses. Greening the world, from this standpoint, suggests that the ecological crisis can be fixed by making slight technical adjustments to people's habits and interactions with their daily environments. When sustainability is defined by a set of metrics, it reflects a purely physical understanding of how societies strive to be ecologically resilient. By contrast, there are no indexes for measuring environmental justice, no indicators for judging equity of access to the green life, and no technical quantum for assessing the social sustainability of a population. The vogue for green governance by the numbers is a recipe for managing, rather than correcting, inequality.

We had had a few beers, and while we hadn’t touched our tiny stash of azzies, we had smoked a little pot. Stamets dilated on the idea of psilocybin as a chemical messenger sent from Earth, and how we had been elected, by virtue of the gift of consciousness and language, to hear its call and act before it’s too late. “Plants and mushrooms have intelligence, and they want us to take care of the environment, and so they communicate that to us in a way we can understand.” Why us? “We humans are the most populous bipedal organisms walking around, so some plants and fungi are especially interested in enlisting our support. I think they have a consciousness and are constantly trying to direct our evolution by speaking out to us biochemically. We just need to be better listeners.” These were riffs I’d heard Stamets deliver in countless talks and interviews. “Mushrooms have taught me the interconnectedness of all life-forms and the molecular matrix that we share,” he explains in another one. “I no longer feel that I am in this envelope of a human life called Paul Stamets. I am part of the stream of molecules that are flowing through nature. I am given a voice, given consciousness for a time, but I feel that I am part of this continuum of stardust into which I am born and to which I will return at the end of this life.” Stamets sounded very much like the volunteers I met at Hopkins who had had full-blown mystical experiences, people whose sense of themselves as individuals had been subsumed into a larger whole—a form of “unitive consciousness,” which, in Stamets’s case, had folded him into the web of nature, as its not so humble servant. “I think Psilocybes have given me new insights that may allow me to help steer and speed fungal evolution so that we can find solutions to our problems.” Especially in a time of ecological crisis, he suggests, we can’t afford to wait for evolution, unfolding at its normal pace, to put forth these solutions in time. Let the depatterning begin. As

This could come as disheartening news to ecological campaigners who believe that positive and optimistic messages of a better future are far more effective than visions of apocalypse in rousing people to action. While that may be true for motivating action among the general public, it is less obviously the case for the privileged and powerful, who are more likely to respond to crisis and even fear. The chances are that they will only take radical action if they feel they have something to lose.

the threat today is not western religions, but psychology and consumerism. is the Dharma becoming another psychotherapy, another commodity to be bought and sold? will western Buddhism become all too compatible with our individualistic consumption patterns, with expensive retreats and initiations, catering to overstressed converts, eager to pursue their own enlightenment? let’s hope not, because Buddhism and the west need each other. despite its economic and technologic dynamism, western civilisation and its globalisation are in trouble, which means all of us are in trouble. the most obvious example is our inability to respond to accelerating climate change, as seriously as it requires. if humanity is to survive and thrive over the next few centuries, there is no need to go on at length here about the other social and ecological crisis that confront us now, which are increasingly difficult to ignore [many of those are considered in the following chapters]. it’s also becoming harder to overlook the fact that the political and economic systems we’re so proud of seem unable to address these problems. one must ask, is that because they themselves are the problem? part of the problem is leadership, or the lack of it, but we can’t simply blame our rulers. it’s not only the lack of a moral core of those who rise to the top, or the institutional defamations that massage their rise, economical and political elites, and there’s not much difference between them anymore. like the rest of us, they are in need of a new vision of possibility, what it means to be human, why we tend to get into trouble, and how we can get out go it, those who benefit the most from the present social arrangements may think of themselves as hardheaded realists, but as self-conscious human beings, we remain motivated by some such vision, weather we’re aware of it or not, as why we love war, points out. even secular modernity is based on a spiritual worldview, unfortunately a deficient one, from a Buddhist perspective.

walking in the Cambrian Desert, it sometimes seems impossible to imagine trees returning there, the emptiness stands as an incontestable fact, as if it were a matter of geology, not ecology