One Way – A Familiar Sign
Sustainability and Advancement – Nature Is Calling for Love: Part 2
To establish a sustainable society and begin a less painful advance toward our objective we must understand and observe certain social principles that work much like a large family:
- each member receives their needs from society,
- each member provides for the well-being of that society through their work.
As good parents we all want our children and grandchildren to have a better life than we did. That desire represents the essence of a sustainable society. According to Fritjof Capra, PhD (physics), “a sustainable society is one that is able to fulfill its needs without diminishing the chances for future generations”. For the perfect example of a sustainable society we need only to look at nature, whose ecosystems represent sustainable communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms. The Center for Ecoliteracy has identified six of Mr. Capra’s principles for a sustainable community as core ecological concepts, which are:
- Networks – All living things in an ecosystem are interconnected through networks of relationship. They depend on this web of life to survive. For example, in a garden, a network of pollinators promotes genetic diversity; plants, in turn, provide nectar and pollen to the pollinators.
- Nested systems – Nature is made up of systems that are nested within systems. Each individual system is an integrated whole and, at the same time, part of larger systems. Changes within one can affect the sustainability of the others that are nested within it, as well as the larger systems in which it exists. For example, cells are nested within organs within organisms within ecosystems.
- Cycles – Members of an ecological community depend on the exchange of resources in continual cycles. Cycles within an ecosystem intersect with larger regional and global cycles. For example, water cycles through a garden and is also part of the global water cycle.
- Flows – Each organism needs a continual flow of energy to stay alive. The constant flow of energy from the sun to Earth sustains life and drives most ecological cycles. For example, energy flows through a food web when a plant converts the sun’s energy through photosynthesis; a mouse eats the plant; a snake eats the mouse, and a hawk eats the snake. In each transfer, some energy is lost as heat, which requires an ongoing energy flow into the system.
- Development – All life, from individual organisms to species and ecosystems, changes over time. Individuals develop and learn, species adapt and evolve, and organisms in ecosystems co-evolve. For example: Hummingbirds and honeysuckle flowers have developed in ways that benefit each other; the hummingbird’s color vision and slender bill coincide with the colors and shapes of the flowers.
- Dynamic Balance – Ecological communities act as feedback loops, so that the community maintains a relatively steady state that also has continual fluctuations. This dynamic balance provides resiliency in the face of ecosystem change. For example, ladybugs in a garden eat aphids. When the aphid population falls, some ladybugs die off, which permits the aphid population to rise again, which supports more ladybugs. The populations of the individual species rise and fall, but balance within the system allows them to thrive together.
By its own definition a sustainable community and an ecosystem share the same structure. Therefore, what causes one to flourish or perish will have the identical effect on the other. Taking all of this into consideration, it is evident that we must act more responsibly as stewards of the family resources if we sincerely want a world left for our offspring.
By Angela Moore Duck
Teamwork
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCNi2i46IQE
Nature Is Calling For Love
Millennia from now, will we be just another figure on the evolutionary chart? Looking back, will our future generations know that at this point in time humanity became aware of its integral relationship with nature and each other? Right now, it appears the answer is ‘no’. If we continue on our present trajectory, there will be a mushroom cloud marking our place in the biological process.
We have insulated ourselves from nature so well in this age; our predicament comes from a conviction that we are beyond the laws of nature and its rules do not apply to us. Patrick Henry, one of America’s founding fathers confirms, “It is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts… For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth, to know the worst, and to provide for it”. Apparently, mankind has been utilizing the ostrich approach for a very long time…
Instead of inventing our own rules as we go along, we should study the laws of nature and learn to work within them. Knowing the rules was essential when our ancestors shared living area and hunting grounds with saber-toothed tigers and mammoths. The difference between surviving and becoming a quick snack depended upon their knowledge of the system and the ability to work within it. Failure meant a swift and merciless end. Even up until the 20th century, our forefathers wouldn’t have imagined themselves living outside this system.
Presently the majority of people still don’t realize that we operate under nature’s laws and these laws, unlike man’s, don’t change and can’t be manipulated without consequences. To avoid the mushroom cloud on the horizon, we must pull our heads out of the sand and learn the ground rules.
The law of development has been in operation since the beginning of time and works to ensure that our evolution unfolds properly. Our progress wasn’t left to blind chance or coincidence. There is an over-arching plan in the natural world and humanity is an integral part of it, not separate from and independent of it. Little by little, we are beginning to understand that countless negative circumstances occur because we don’t realize our role in this system correctly. Therefore, it benefits us to study these learn how to advance within them.
It is nature’s law of development that defined us as social animals. Hence, nature compels us to interact with each other and our natural environment. We cannot live or grow in isolation; science and history both support this truth. Being the willful animals we are, we continue to ignore the obvious and try to insulate ourselves from the very environment that our existence depends upon. This obstinacy is why the steps on our evolutionary ladder are often experienced as suffering.
By Angela Moore Duck
Photography: Marc Hollembeak
Continue to part 2: Sustainability and Advancement
Declaration of Interdependence
directed by @tiffanyshlain, music by Moby
A DECLARATION OF INTERDEPENDENCE is a crowdsourced short film by the filmmakers behind the feature film Connected (in theaters now, http://www.connectedthefilm.com).
It premiered simultaneously at Interdependence Day Sept 12, 2011 in New York near Ground Zero and as a featured video on YouTube’s homepage.
Considering Ourselves From An Angle
The Global Revolution of Love
“Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.”
Martin Luther King Jr
We have been through crises at other times in history, although they were not as tragic or radical to justify calling them a “birth.” We regard them as developmental phases in the history of humankind. However, our current state differs from all the previous ones. Thus far, we have striven to achieve new goals. Changes happened as a result of new breakthroughs: the discovery of new lands, inventions of innovative weapons, and implementation of new technologies such as the Internet that unveiled a totally new level of connection between us.
Nevertheless, those innovations were not global upheavals that addressed all levels of human life in all its spheres. They did not extend to all of mankind, to all countries and continents, to every family and every person, so that today they are universal. Now, we are approaching this new birth and cannot state with confidence whether it is happening already or not, although we do see that we are coming closer to it. The crisis we are going through is similar to the one that precedes delivery. It presses us more and more with each passing day, both individually and collectively.
We see that people cannot live in peace within their families any longer, get divorced, avoid getting married, do not get along with each other, have hard time raising children and don’t know how to avoid unemployment and poverty. In all aspects of our existence, we suffer from absence of understanding and lack of organization. We can call this situation a total revolution, a universal re-birth of humankind rather than an appearance in one separate state or community because this is happening on a global, integral scale and concerns everybody. This situation has never emerged before. The worst is that we don’t sense the future.
Before, upcoming social and economic structures seemed more advanced than the previous ones. For example, when slavery ended, it was followed by a more highly developed society. Although we have to admit that drastic changes triggered new revolutions, religious and civil wars, at the same time, people still anticipated a brighter future to come. Some societies agreed with what they faced in the future, and some did not. Some countries went through transformations, but others did not. Presently, we all are going through a global process that has never occurred before.
Moreover, at this time, we all are witnessing comprehensive climate and ecological changes. Previously, dramatic climatic changes always caused vast changes in humankind. Global cooling once led northern nations, like those in southern Siberia and Asia to migrate to Europe. In the past, all revolutions occurred due to climate changes, new technologies, or countries that could no longer tolerate their heads of state.
At this time, all changes are happening simultaneously: environmental, ecological, and with the inner nature of man who is not able to be at peace with anything, people no longer can reconcile with the world. Even the systems which we are totally dependent on are dysfunctional: the food industry, job market, families, education, and security, essentially everything that man needs in order to sustain life from generation to generation. We have arrived at a general state of affairs in all spheres of our life where nothing works properly. And most importantly, we do not see in what form or how to proceed.
Is it possible to view our new stage and move towards it with understanding and awareness? Can we act as foresighted people? Are we able to look ahead and make sure that the path we have chosen is correct? Can we calculate our future beforehand? If the answer is yes, then we can facilitate our advancement and avoid wandering in blindness; otherwise, we will be making mistakes and triggering new troubles.
If we continue acting blindly making global mistakes, things eventually will turn out terribly. We simply cannot continue sightless attempts and continue making errors any longer. And this is why we need global, integrative education!
The Need For A Contemporary Understanding Of The World
Such education is necessary due to the fact that the crisis in the relations between crisis and society is growing, and the social demand for education, which is far beyond the narrow professionalism, is increasing as well.
A modern person must see the world in its entirety. Only the understanding of a general logic of the development of the world in which we live will help overcome the disastrous consequences of the relentlessly approaching crisis and perhaps even avoid it!
Such a course should precede the studying of social sciences and philosophy, for which it is a necessary introduction. It is particularly necessary to the future experts in the humanities and social sciences, for whom the natural sciences and ecology are on the periphery of their interests.
Future engineers and physicists also need it because the natural sciences and engineering departments lack the general knowledge about the processes of development of the contemporary world and the processes of cognition, although these professionals will have to solve many problems of modern ecology, politics, and ethics. But the foundation for such new education should be love, love as a selfless act.
Sense Of Self
If our interconnected universe is continually expanding, shouldn’t our identity do the same? In this short, entertaining video, we look at the dynamics that promote and inhibit our expanding sense of self.
Created by Global MindShift and Kenji Williams.
The Green Beautiful
The crisis is occurring in the family called humanity. By repairing our relationship, we would resolve all problems life is presenting us with. There are some amazing studies, which assert that if people were to start treating each other like family then even nature, climate, and other natural phenomena would also normalize.
Today many scientists are already discovering a connection between human society and other levels of nature: the still, vegetative, and animate. We need to explain to ourselves that we have no choice; we must come to negotiations and mutual understanding on a global scale. This is the first thing we must do.
There are also laws of inner, human nature: a person’s psychology, the psychology of the society and the family, relationships between parents and children, and relationships between children. It is necessary to know the psychology of all human relations, human animal nature: the small and the big, parents and children, the old and the young, all the human layers, in all directions. If I know human nature and the way to fix the relationships between us, I will be able to build a human society where everyone will be comfortable and happy.
Everyone will have to compromise. After all,everyone wants to be respected and admired. On the other hand, if we were to educate a person that one benefits and gains respect, support, and assistance when he is on equal terms with others, then he would gladly accept this. A person will see that in a system where everyone depends on each other things cannot be any other way.
It is clear that the human ego will constantly try to fight it and will wish to rule over others. To balance it, there is such a powerful instrument as public opinion. After all, it is the society who influences and educates us. Public opinion and the influence of society are the dominant and binding factors in forming a human being.
A One-Sided Struggle
