Originally written in 2021, in the aftermath of extreme weather events in British Columbia and the COP26 summit.
Like many Canadians, my heart sinks when I hear about what B.C. has been going through—extreme heat and uncontrolled wildfires in the summer, and now historic rainfall, unprecedented flooding, and dangerous mudslides. Alarmingly, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The pattern of global warming and climate change could hardly be more apparent: glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising, and rain and snow patterns are changing, with increasing drought, famine, and natural disasters. Catastrophes and widespread suffering—from lives lost in conflicts to displacement and refugee crises—are seen in every corner of the world. The lack of real breakthroughs at the COP26 summit only makes matters worse.
Distressingly, it is not just about climate change; our entire biosphere is at stake. You have likely heard of the gigantic garbage patch floating in the Pacific Ocean that is twice the size of Texas. Not only that, scientists have found that, on the ocean floor, each square meter of the seafloor is covered by 1.9 million microplastic particles, posing a serious threat to the entire marine ecosystem. What does all this point to? It points to the sobering fact that the ultimate consequence of the ecological crisis is extinction, as we seem to be heading straight into the Earth’s sixth mass extinction, which scientists often call the Holocene extinction. As the renowned Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson calculated, if the current rate of human disruption of the biosphere continues, more than half of Earth’s advanced life forms will be extinct by 2100. The scale of potential species loss within this century is enormous.
How did we, as a civilization, get to this point? Could it be the result of seeing ourselves as separate from the natural world, seeing everything as a resource to be exploited for our endless consumption? Historically, this has not always been the case. If we look at ancient societies, such as the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians, the Mayans, or societies in ancient China, they tended to believe that humans were built into the cosmos in a unique way, a sort of natural order, which gave them a sense of social security. For them, the purposes of their lives were built into their local ecosystem, their culture, and their religion. However, our social structures and beliefs have changed radically in the past centuries. Empirical rationality, secularism, and individualism have replaced these premodern worldviews. The rise of science has led us to discover that our planet is not the centre of the universe. We have learned that Homo sapiens is the result of evolution that does not require a creator God. We have come to believe that we are products of accidental genetic mutations or random chance occurrences, and conclude that we are of no particular significance to the universe.
Although we enjoy much freedom in modern societies, the irony is that we have also lost a sense of responsibility for the natural world and our role in the cosmos. The price of freedom, then, is the loss of the kind of security blanket that earlier humans enjoyed, a basic psychological ease that comes from appreciating our place in society and the universe. In other words, the other side of freedom is a kind of unease, an increasing angst about who we are and what our role is in the natural world.
How have we been responding individually to this anxiety, this sense of lack? Well, we try to fill this emptiness inside ourselves by grasping at things—money, power, or fame—whatever makes us feel more real. What is the collective equivalent of that? It is our obsession with consumerism that drives our relentless pursuit of economic expansion and technological development, which, in turn, stimulates even more consumerism. To satisfy our insatiable thirst, we attempt to conquer nature and convert everything into a resource for us to consume, exploit, and remould according to the whim of our will, with callous indifference to our impact on the natural world.
Unfortunately, our thirst is unquenchable. Economic growth and technological progress will never be enough. Why? Because economic development and technology by themselves cannot resolve this fundamental collective problem about what it means to be human. The ecological crisis, therefore, requires more than an economic or technological response. Of course, we need to find ways to decrease carbon emissions, develop renewable energy sources, and so forth. Still, technological solutions alone are not going to solve, and may even further aggravate, the fundamental problem—a problem arising from our belief that we are separate from the natural world.
The solution, therefore, must include a spiritual dimension. Why? Because the root problem is our uncertainty about our role and place on Earth. Spirituality refers to the way we seek and express meaning and purpose, and the way we experience our connectedness to the moment, to self, to others, to nature, and to the significant or sacred. It does not necessarily have to do with religious beliefs in a creator God, supernatural phenomena or rituals, or some transcendent realms such as heaven or an afterlife.
What does a spiritual solution look like? It must involve the realization that we are an integral part of the natural world. We are not only part of nature; we are nature itself. Nature and we are not two. Just think about our bodies. We are made up of the same elements as the oceans, the mountains, and the trees. Our bodies are largely made up of water, and the minerals and salts within us also come from the Earth. We are in a dynamic reciprocal relationship with nature, literally with every breath—we breathe in oxygen produced through photosynthesis, while plants, in turn, take in the carbon dioxide we breathe out. Humans have always had an intimate relationship with the Earth. We are Earth itself and have never been separate from it.
If we are part of the Earth, or more precisely if we are the Earth, can we go further by saying that our consciousness has emerged through evolution? In that case, is it logical to consider ourselves a species in transition that is evolving, perhaps not only biologically but also culturally, as a civilization? If we are the way the Earth becomes conscious, is the ecological crisis a way for our Mother Earth to tell us: wake up now or continue our untenable trajectory at our peril? Can we see that the Earth is not here for us to exploit, manipulate, or subjugate solely for human purposes? Instead, can we live in harmony with her and listen to what Mother Earth has to teach us? Can we evolve, as a civilization, to see that we are here as stewards who look after, cherish, and love the Earth? Can we begin by healing the wounds and abuses we have inflicted upon it, with the realization that ultimately, we are expressions and manifestations of the essential mysteriousness of the universe?
The welfare of Mother Earth is inseparable from ours. We must now embrace our responsibility for the well-being of the whole planet and take bold and immediate steps if we want to survive as a species.
