{"id":129048,"date":"2019-03-11T12:00:42","date_gmt":"2019-03-11T12:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=129048"},"modified":"2019-03-07T14:46:43","modified_gmt":"2019-03-07T14:46:43","slug":"re-inhabiting-planet-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/03\/re-inhabiting-planet-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-Inhabiting Planet Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>6 Mar 2019 – <\/em>\u201cI believe that for a moment I thought the explosion might set fire to the atmosphere and thus finish the Earth, even though I knew that this was not possible.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These words of Manhattan Project physicist Emilio Segre<\/a>, quoted by Richard Rhodes in his book The Making of the Atomic Bomb<\/em>, refer to the Trinity blast on July 16, 1945, at Alamogordo, N.M., the first atomic explosion in history and, so it appears, a turning point for all life on this planet.<\/p>\n

The atmosphere didn\u2019t catch fire at 5:30 that morning, but Segre\u2019s words remain relevant, sort of like radioactive fallout. They encapsulate what may be history\u2019s ultimate moment of human arrogance: the belief in a sense of separateness from and superiority to nature so thorough that we have, with our monstrous intelligence, the ability and therefore the right to play Bad God and make the whole planet go poof.<\/p>\n

Turns out the Trinity test set into motion something even more profound than the nuclear era. The bomb didn\u2019t just \u201cdefeat\u201d Japan and define the Cold War, with its suicidal nuclear arms race. It is also, at least symbolically, marks the beginning of what has come to be known as the Anthropocene: an era of profound climate and \u201cEarth system\u201d destabilization caused by human activity and therefore, like it or not, establishing humans as co-equal participants in activity of the natural world.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s more<\/a> to this \u201cco-equal\u201d status than nuclear weapons, of course. They may be the tip of our arrogance, but we\u2019ve been exploiting and rearranging the planet for nearly 12,000 years, since the beginning of the era we are now leaving, the Holocene, an era of climate stability in which human civilization and all written history emerged. From the development of agriculture to the industrial revolution \u2013 the plundering of the Earth for oil and coal, the spewing of infinitesimal plastic nurdles across the planet, the creation of continent-sized trash mounds afloat in the oceans, the replacement of biodiversity with monoculture, the poisoning of the air and water and, yes, nuclear testing and the spread of radioactive fallout \u2013 humanity, or at least a small portion of it, has exercised an intelligence with a serious moral void.<\/p>\n

And now the chickens are coming home to roost. Or as David Korten<\/a> put it: \u201cHumans might be the first species to knowingly choose self-extinction.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s crucial about all this goes well beyond the dangers of climate change and the need for techno-fixes to our socioeconomic structures. History professor Julia Adeney Thomas<\/a> puts it this way: \u201cThe Anthropocene\u2019s interrelated systematicity presents not a problem, but a multidimensional predicament. A problem might be solved, often with a single technological tool produced by experts in a single field, but a predicament presents a challenging condition requiring resources and ideas of many kinds. We don\u2019t solve predicaments; instead, we navigate through them.\u201d<\/p>\n

She adds: \u201c. . . the hardest challenges will be about how to alter our political and economic systems.\u201d<\/p>\n

These aren\u2019t just technical problems for \u201cexperts\u201d to solve while the rest of look on (or go shopping). What\u2019s emerging from all this for me is that humanity has to evolve for its own survival, and evolution is going to take all of us \u2013 or at least all of us who can think beyond the structures of thought in which we grew up, in which we came of age. The first premise for navigating the Anthropocene may be this: We\u2019re all in it together.<\/p>\n

Simple as this sounds, the implications of such a statement, if it is true, begin mushrooming into unfathomable complexity, especially when \u201call\u201d refers not simply to all 7.4 billion human beings out there but all of life: the biosphere, the planet. We have to rethink who we are in a way that has, quite likely, never before happened.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the Anthropocene the old simplicities are gone,\u201d writes Mark Garavan<\/a>. \u201cWe are no longer human subjects acting upon an objective nature \u2018outside\u2019 us. Nature and human are now bound together. Free nature is over. Free humanity is over. They are relics of the Holocene. In our new age, Earth and Human are entangled irrevocably together. Welcome to the era of Earth-bound responsibility! The assumptions, the myths, the illusions of the Holocene no longer apply.\u201d<\/p>\n

And any institution founded on such myths and illusions \u2013 that the planet is ours to exploit, that some people matter more than others, that national borders are real, that dehumanizing and killing one another (a little activity called war) keeps us safe, that money equals God \u2013 cannot and will not survive the Anthropocene, and the \u201csolutions\u201d that emerge from such institutions, e.g., solving the climate crisis, are rooted in failure. \u201cThe challenge,\u201d says Garavan, \u201cis to re-think and re-inhabit our planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is to say, we have to start over.<\/p>\n

And I think that\u2019s what\u2019s happening. New values are percolating. So are old values \u2013 the values human beings once embraced as they claimed the right to occupy Planet Earth. These values include interdependence and cooperation, and profound reverence for the planet. Rupert Ross<\/a>, in his book Returning to the Teachings<\/em>, points out, for instance: \u201cThe Lakotah had no language for insulting other orders of existence: \u201cpest . . . waste . . . weed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indigenous understanding is not \u201cprimitive.\u201d It includes cooperation and compassion in its grasp of how things work, of what it means to live within the circle of life. The indigenous peoples of the planet have remained its protectors.<\/p>\n

As Jade Begay and Ay\u015fe G\u00fcrs\u00f6z point out at EcoWatch<\/a>: \u201cEven the seemingly groundbreaking Paris agreement neither includes human rights in its text nor acknowledges Indigenous rights \u2014 even though lands and waters stewarded by Indigenous communities make up 80 percent of the world\u2019s biodiversity. What we need is for climate policy and the overall climate movement to address problems of inequality, because climate change is just as much a social issue as it is an environmental issue.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, biodiversity and social diversity are both precious. Knowing this means re-inhabiting the planet, not setting it on fire.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, <\/em>Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is still available. Contact him <\/em>at koehlercw@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 <\/em>commonwonders.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

6 Mar 2019 – The atmosphere didn\u2019t catch fire at 5:30 that morning, but Segre\u2019s words remain relevant, sort of like radioactive fallout. They encapsulate what may be history\u2019s ultimate moment of human arrogance: the belief in a sense of separateness from and superiority to nature so thorough that we have, with our monstrous intelligence, the ability and therefore the right to play Bad God and make the whole planet go poof.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":77939,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tms-peace-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129048"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129048\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}