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CHANGING ECOLOGICAL PRACTICES
Many people are afraid that ecological practices will put our economy into jeopardy. They feel that jobs will be sacrificed for the sake of saving species and for preventing the irrevocable destruction of life supporting resources. We have become accustomed to the competitive win/lose economic philosophy of our globalized industrial culture. We do not yet understand the economics of ecology that we must adopt if we expect to survive in health. The principle of sustainability must be applied in order to shift to a win/win economy that would benefit all humanity as well as the other species on which human life depends; an informed cooperative, mutually beneficial approach to nature rather than a blind exploitive, plundering, destructive activity.
Recycling for survival: It would be wise for us to reconsider the whole notion of pollution and cleanup. Nature is fundamentally and necessarily based on recycling. We need to recycle our human products, lest they choke us out of existence. The natural world is not divided into producers and recyclers; all species are both. In a mature and balanced ecosystem there is no waste, no pollution. Mutual consistency suggests that a healthy species ensures its survival by producing products useful to others. It is becoming increasingly evident that adding more technology to clean up ever increasing wastes is a losing battle and cannot lead us to sustainability. We must go back to the drawing boards and redesign our products so that they are either completely consumable or fully recyclable. There is no in between.
Sustainability: The human species threaten their own and other species' extinction by way of resource depletion, destruction, and pollution. Species living now can exist only because the earth spent billions of years burying atmospheric carbon in forests and underground. Cutting, digging up, and burning forests and fossil fuels at a rapid rate reverses the planet's system for keeping atmospheric conditions and climate at a level conducive to the health of all its species. Our current way of life is now recognized as non-sustainable in the long term. It is the way of an immature species that gobbles up all available resources. Mature ecosystems can clean up considerable human pollution, if they remain healthy and are enlisted in cooperative ways. But the rapid destruction of forests, seashores, water tables, arable land, oceans, the ozone layer, etc., make it nearly impossible for the Earth to perform that cleanup. We have gained considerable understanding of living systems and their dynamic ecological balance. It is now up to us to work with life, for life, eliminating waste as a concept and a reality. Eliminating waste is about reducing our impact on the planet by giving up the wasteful consumer lifestyle in which we define ourselves by totally unnecessary accumulations of obsolete, disposable goods.
Human Economics
By accepting the notion of a living Earth, and the body of humanity as an integral part of it, then we have no choice but to implement a sustainable world; a balance economy of equal partners between humans and nature rather than an economy in which some nations or corporations gain at the expense of others. Historian Arnold Toynbee observed after studying twenty-one collapsed civilizations, that what they had in common was inflexibility--refusal to change their established percepts when under stress--and the concentration of wealth and its accompanying power into few hands. The most fundamental political-economic question of our time is what picture of reality shall guide our lives and our society, and who shall control that picture?
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