"Our first responses to environmental degradations in the 1970s were legal and technical, but we have found them wanting. Although perhaps necessary, they are not sufficient. The earth's ecological deterioration is at heart a matter of human attitudes toward the earth and life in general. An ethical response is vital. And the needed ethical response must be rich and full, touching every level of our being, one that addresses what we consider to be of ultimate importance in our lives and how we think we ought to live, one that reflects morally on how we understand and relate to nature." - Calvin B. DeWitt ["A Contemporary Evangelical Perspective". In Carroll et al., "The Greening of Faith", p. 88].
"Never has it been more important for humans to realize that we hold the future in our hands and that we have a choice about what kind of future it will be. The choice is in how we see the world and envision the future, for that worldview and vision will shape the reality to come, This has always been true, but the understanding of this truth has only begun to dawn on us. We must take back the power we have projected onto external authorities (God, government, corporations, parents, bosses, etc.), and assume the responsibility that is truly ours for our current and future reality." - Suzanne Duarte
Humanity now demands more from Earth's ecosystems than Earth can supply. We are finally waking up to the fact that our human impact on Earth cannot be sustained. This book describes a multi-faceted grassroots movement that promotes change both from a global consumer culture to a sustainable Earth community and from an anthropocentric world-view to an ecocentric world-view. Paul Hawken calls it "the movement without a name". Joanna Macy calls it The Great Turning. I call it "Ecoshift" because the change in world-view involves a paradigm shift in the relation of humanity to Earth, our home.
This book, "ECOSHIFT", describes the breadth and depth of the movement, partly from my personal point of view. My goals are to help you to joyfully modify the way you live, to make you feel that you are not alone in your practices, concerns, and beliefs, and to help reduce human impact on Earth and on all the beings that live on it.
A great debate is beginning about the kind of future humanity wants for Earth. Great debates about the future of civilizations are nothing new, as witness texts from the world's major religions. But for the first time in Earth's history the debate has become global. Human industry has become globalized by international corporations that apparently aim to control everything and everyone on Earth. That same human industry is causing rapid global climate change that will affect everyone and everything.
We are living in a time of both great fear and great hope. Fear of accidents, terrorism, murder, child molestation, and war dominate our television and printed news. Concern is intensifying about the world-wide consequences of running out of oil and of global warming. Poverty and population continue to increase while food supplies are beset with questions about impoverished soils, pesticides, and genetic modification. Some people see globalization of the consumer culture as the solution, while others see it as a great threat. Unfortunately it is easier to become immune to bad news than to be concerned about it, and easier to complain than to do anything.
On the other hand, more and more of us are becoming aware that major changes must be made, and made soon, in the relationship of humanity to Earth. We are realizing that our current human activities are not sustainable. We are beginning to recognize that we depend completely on the continued functioning of a natural system, which we had absolutely nothing to do with producing, but which we are continually messing around with and messing up.
There is a movement afoot that rarely makes the evening news. This movement is being led by individuals and small groups, not by governments or corporations. It is a multi-faceted movement that seeks to define, describe, and promote changes in both human behavior and in human beliefs and ethics. Participants in the movement, which has no generally accepted name, realize that our technologies, our food production, our global economy, our consumer life style, and our huge population are all based on exploitation of poor people and countries and on rapid consumption/destruction of living systems and Earth's minerals. They realize we are destroying other species of life at an unprecedented rate, without understanding how we and other life forms may depend on those species and the ecosystems in which they function. They realize that global corporations are intent on exporting our unsustainable culture to the rest of the world. And these people are beginning to realize that their personal choices, their own decisions, can and do make a difference.
The movement occurs on many levels. Individuals frequently come into the movement through some particular special interest, such as recycling, peace and justice work, or protection of land or species. With increasing awareness of links among the many aspects of the movement, individuals begin to make choices to consume less, to live more simply, and to not join in the corporate money game. As awareness deepens, these individuals come to realize that they and the movement need some kind of psychological, intellectual, and spiritual faith in order to sustain their participation. Joanna Macy [1997. "The Great Turning". Earth Matters (newsletter of the Northwest Earth Institute 4(4):1-2] describes The Great Turning as "the epochal shift from an industrial growth society, depending on accelerating consumption of resources, to a sustainable or life-sustaining society." Success of The Great Turning apparently requires fundamental changes in the world-view of individuals and of society. I and many others believe that the change needs to be a paradigm shift from an anthropocentric worldview of humanity dominating and controlling nature to an ecocentric worldview of humans as one component of Earth's ecosystems.
Since humanity learned agriculture about 10,000 years ago, the dominant paradigm in human societies has been anthropocentric. Anthropocentrism puts humans at the top of a pyramid of all Earth's beings and non-beings. Anthropocentrism believes that Earth consists of "natural resources" for humans to use as they see fit, and of ecosystems that humans can modify in any desired way. Anthropocentrism has created a culture of dominance and suppression, a culture that believes that power and control are the most desirable goals in life, and a culture with egocentrism and intolerance as its focus. The dominance and cultural control formerly exerted by kings, their military, and their state religion are now in the hands of huge global corporations (and the military of the governments they control). This culture springs from an optimistic, humanistic belief in the power of human reason and knowledge.
In science or society a fundamental change of belief structure or world-view is called a paradigm shift. The paradigm shift of The Great Turning is a shift from a capitalist culture controlled by the power of money to a culture based on concepts of cooperation and sufficiency within an Earth community. However, if that is all it is, a new paradigm could continue to be anthropocentric. In other words, human individuals and culture could remain as the primary focus, even as humans are learning to live "sustainably" within Earth's systems. Many proponents of the movement believe that the paradigm shift must be deeper, that it must be ecocentric. Ecocentrism states that Earth and its systems are not here for humans to do with as they will. Ecocentrism removes humans from the pinnacle as the final result of Creation, and re-places them back into the incredibly complex Earth system in which they evolved. Ecocentrism states that humans must learn to live within a stable, sustainable, self-renewing ecosphere, and that humans are just one component of an ongoing process of Creation on Earth. Ecocentrism teaches respect for all components of Earth and for the Universe that gave us life. The "Manifesto for Earth" on the Ecospheric Ethics web site provides a good overall statement of ecocentrism. Aidan Rankin, in "The Jain Path" [p.52], sees even more deeply that "thoughtful Western men and women are seeking a change of consciousness, a 'paradigm shift' as it is sometimes called, in which pure reason is balanced by intuition, giving it new depths, or to return to the neurological metaphor, the direct and linear left side of the brain is reconciled with the vague but more rounded right."
I propose the term "Ecoshift" to describe this paradigm shift and the movement that is leading toward it. I will also coin the word "ecoshifter" for someone who believes in the practices of and the need for Ecoshift and is in the process of "ecoshifting". In this book, ECOSHIFT, I will describe the many aspects of Ecoshift and why they are all linked together. Hopefully ECOSHIFT will help individuals to see that they and their choices are part of a larger movement that may in the future change the direction of human development and evolution.
It is important at the outset to realize several things:
Humanity has always had its dreamer philosophers, its spiritual prophets, its visionaries, who look beyond the "what is" to the "what could be". They are the pioneers, the vanguard, who show the way. Ecoshift outlines a dream for the future, an old and renewed desire for a mutually-enhancing rather than a destructive relationship between humanity and the natural world. Each of us has a choice to be a dreamer and lead the way to a new, happier, life, or to be a follower and chronically complain about the way things are going.
The need persists for a more comprehensive book that both incorporates all components of the movement and speaks from a personal point of view. At a conference called "The Go(o)d in Nature and Humanity" held at Yale University in 2000, several participants wondered who would write "The Book" that covered the whole movement that was the purview of the conference. That discussion provided my primary incentive for writing this book.
ECOSHIFT views the movement from the ground up rather than the top down. It tries to cast a lot of different hooks in order to catch a lot of different people and get them interested and involved. It suggests a lot of different ways to encourage individual change, because without individual change there can be no societal change. It emphasizes that the nature of a society is the consequence of many small decisions made by millions of individuals each day, that society is what you and I make it by our daily life. And it describes a personal odyssey and set of beliefs as well as personal actions and change.
I freely admit at the outset that I am not a wordsmith. My mind is bent toward science, toward facts, toward information sources, toward rationality, and the left side of my brain. You will have to read some of the many other writings I mention in ECOSHIFT to find the poetic, the romantic, the intuitive, and the eloquent ways to express ecocentrism.
I also freely admit that the subject area of this book is vast and is changing rapidly. There is no way I can claim to be comprehensive, and informed readers will certainly find significant thoughts and deeds that I have omitted or overlooked. ECOSHIFT is but one person's view and one person's project. This is not a book about all the specific actions you could take to become greener; I can't cover them all and my purpose is deeper. Ecoshift concerns fundamental thinking, not just personal behavior.
ECOSHIFT is divided into four sections. Part 1, "The Current Rule of Global Capitalism", briefly discusses the current situation. There are many other books that thoroughly describe the problems of humanity and its impact on Earth systems so this part is limited to comments and facts that are not yet widely recognized. The remaining three parts of the book describe changes that are currently being made or hopefully will be made in the future. Each part roughly corresponds to a different level of social and personal action. Part 2, "Changing Personal Lifestyles" describes various efforts by individuals and communities to change their living practices. Part 3, "Changing Human Culture", includes broader social actions to modify human-human and human-nature relationships. Part 4, "Changing Human Spirituality" includes philosophical, ethical, spiritual, and religious bases for altering the relation of individual humans and all humanity to Earth. Recognition and acceptance of an ecocentric belief system is the core and the motivator for personal and societal change.
Mark Meisner ["Key Words of Conservation and Environmental Discourse", Wild Earth, Winter 1993/94, p. 75-81] discusses the meanings of "conservation", "preservation", "protection", "environment", "ecology", "nature", "wilderness", and "wild". Many of these words have so many different interpretations that they have become almost meaningless. I will use "conservation" in a very general sense to mean some kind of concern for both natural and wild beings and ecosystems without necessarily implying "for human use". I use "preservation" in a sense of keeping or maintaining in a wild state, that is, essentially free from human activity. "Protection" implies some specific human activity or human-imposed restrictions in order to maintain specific species or systems.
"Environment" means the physical, chemical, and biological properties and processes that surround and affect an organism or group of organisms. It is a relative term; it has no meaning without specifying the object(s) to which it applies. When "environment" is used implicitly with respect to "humanity" it implies a separation of humanity from its non-human surroundings and is thus an anthropocentric term. "Environmentalism" then implies concern for all the physical, chemical, and biologic surroundings of humanity; it too is an anthropocentric term that suggests that we can control and dominate our surroundings, but just need to do a better job of not destroying them.
There should be little disagreement about what constitutes "humanity" and what is "human". Separation of humanity from "nature" is inherent in an anthropocentric world-view. After some thinking about this I will retain the convenient separation of humanity and "nature", such that "nature" is the part of the biosphere that is non-human. Consistency then demands that "natural" be defined as "non-human" or "other-than-human" in general, and not with the more limited sense of "free from human influence". An agricultural field thus could be considered as "natural" and a part of "nature". For the alternative implication of relative freedom from human influence, I will specifically use "wild". I will try to use "wilderness" to refer only to areas so designated by governments.
My old Webster's New International Dictionary, 2nd ed. [1959], defines "wild" as "living in a state of nature, inhabiting natural haunts, not tamed or domesticated", and "growing, produced, or prepared, without the aid and care of man". It lists synonyms as "savage; untilled, uninhabited; barbarous, barbarian; tumultuous, riotous; unruly, obstreperous, uncontrollable; chimerical, irrational; uncertain, aberrant". Antonyms are "tame, domesticated; cultivated; peopled, settled; civilized, cultured; calm, orderly, restrained; sensible, practical, reasonable, pragmatic; direct, controlled". I cannot imagine a better example of the imperious anthropocentrism of the mid-20th century!
An ecocentrist, and Ecoshift, would like to put humans back into nature. In English we use the noun "ecosphere" to connote the combination of the human world and the natural world, of humanity and nature, and the prefix "eco-" for the same concept. "Eco-" comes from the Greek oikos meaning "house", so "ecology" is the study of relationships between organisms and the environment, or the "house", that they live in. "Ecology" is the name of a science, not a synonym for "environment" or "ecosystem", so the oft-used term "the ecology" makes no sense.
Depending on context "we" and "us" will mean either humans in general (humanity) or humans with moderate to high annual income, especially in the United States.
My Personal BackgroundI grew up in a family that spent a lot of time outdoors: hiking, camping, gardening, skiing, and cutting wood and trails. My parents taught me about birds and stars and took my sister and me on business trips that always included National Parks and Forests. In high school I decided to study forestry. In college I narrowed my interest to forest soil and water, and then spent my career as a scientist with the U.S. Forest Service. For more on my science see my personal home page at www.ecoshift.net. I was raised by my parents as an atheist and since college have been associated with Unitarian-Universalist churches. In the 1960s I realized the necessity for radical action in order to promote social change. By Earth Day 1970 I was involved with speaking and writing about population growth, but my energy was gradually drained by years of anti-progressive government.Just after retirement in 1995 I audited a University of New Hampshire seminar titled "Ecofeminism and Deep Ecology". I learned that my beliefs about the relationship of humans and nature were not unique and individual. I subsequently discovered the study courses of the Northwest Earth Institute, and began considerable reading about the Ecoshift movement. I organized a small conference called "Toward an Ecocentric Humanity" held June 28-July 5, 1998 at the Ferry Beach Park Association in Saco, Maine. I developed a web site called "TF's Ecocentric Pages" in response to requests by friends for more information. That now dead web site has developed into ECOSHIFT. |
To the next chapter - Wher We Are Now
ECOSHIFT: Introduction - by Tony Federer