By Mike Abkin
The signs are everywhere and increasingly difficult to ignore or explain away as mere screechings of the Chicken Littles of the world. You can read about them almost daily in the newspapers, or watch them unfold on TV. From Three-Mile Island to Chernobyl. From scientific and meteorological confirmations that there is indeed global warming taking place, to evidence that ozone holes are creeping northward and popping up in new places. From rates of species extinction unheard of in the time humans have walked the earth, to an alarming rise of human infertility in certain regions of the world. From massive disappearance of the rain forests to global climatic shifts disrupting agricultural patterns and migrations of species (including human).
What's going on here? What are we human beings doing wrong? I tend to be a positive, optimistic kind of guy, one who looks at problems not as evidence of impending doom, but as things needing solution.
Dr. John B. Cobb Jr., professor emeritus at the Claremont School of Theology, spoke in May at the Foundation for Global Community in Palo Alto. In his talk, he provided a chronology of the last 1,500 years or so of Western civilization, the roots of our culture. Cobb identifies three periods of Western cultural evolution during this time, each ending in a major human disaster that brought on the successor period. The Thirty Years War in the mid-17th century brought to a catastrophic end the thousand-year reign of Christianity and launched the age of Nationalism, which itself came to its own logical and almost inevitable conclusion with the bloody wars, great and small, of our own century. Economism, born in the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, arose from Nationalism's wreckage to become the motivating focus of Western culture, and in a mere 50 years has sown the seeds of its own demise.
The question now is how imminent is Economism's terminal disaster, how bad will it be, and can it be avoided? Cobb talks of the coming age of "Earthism."
He defines Earthism as human culture whose motivating focus is a recognition of itself as an integral part of and intimately dependent on the earth's ecosystem as a whole. Although his analysis is admittedly limited to the Western world, Cobb's concept of Earthism has obvious global implications and relevance and offers the hope that the human catastrophes that marked earlier transitions can be avoided this time.
You might be wondering, as have I, "But what can I do--beyond possibly examining, questioning and modifying my own behavior--to help bring about cultural change? And what kind of change are we talking about, anyway? Change to what?"
Well, those are certainly the $64 questions, aren't they? Change to what? I think we each have to answer that for ourselves; talk about it with family, friends, churches, community; serve as a personal model; and perhaps a group consciousness will emerge.
Just as a starter, though, here are a few personal favorites, principles that I think would be characteristic of a sustainable culture:
* Gaia. Humanity is a species among species, a part of, not apart from, the living, global ecosystem, Gaia. The natural environment is not a resource for human systems to tap. The environment is the system, and we are in it.
* Other-Orientation. The welfare of the individual is more effectively preserved, promoted and enhanced through other-oriented values, attitudes and actions than self-oriented ones.
* Reciprocity. The Golden Rule rules.
* Responsibility/Accountability. Each individual is responsible for the consequences of his or her own actions and inactions
* Universal Imperative. Decisions regarding individual behavior are based on the acceptability of the consequences if everyone were to behave in the same manner.
Pie in the sky, you say? Maybe. But, rather than dismissing such notions out of hand, why not ask ourselves how each of us, in every walk of life, can make them happen?
It's a challenge well worth taking. Perhaps we could even mount a community dialog on the subject of "a sustainable culture for our children and grandchildren in the 21st century." Any takers?
Los Gatan Mike Abkin is active on several boards and committees in the community; he also serves on the town's Planning Commission.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, October 2, 1996.
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