EARTH AND NATURE

by Hugh M. Lewis

It is the earth that will adapt humankind to her needs, and not we who will adapt the earth to our needs. In our transformations of the world, we have become transformed by the world. Neither we nor the world can go back to our original separate states of nature.

Because of humankind’s predations, the evolution of life on earth has once again entered upon a contraction phase. In every concrete crack and crevice of our civilization, nature is struggling for survival and return. We must not underestimate the recuperative and regenerative power of the natural earth.

The never ending forces of erosion work steadily away on the edges of our grand civilization. They work so slowly and gradually that they are imperceptible to our great vision. It is the great and certain patience of Nature’s ways that will eventually conquer over the insolent impetuousness of our own human progress. Human Greatness and Evil, vice and virtue, will make no difference when lying side by side in the grave of the earth, covered over by the sands of time, buried beneath the regenerative soils if decomposing life.

Archaeologists and paleontologists of the distant future, if there are any, will dig beneath the earth’s soils to discover a layer of irradiated concrete rubble and piles of broken and shattered bones. They will have discovered a worldwide base line for early human civilization, and wonder what forgotten historical events caused this massive level of destruction. They will discover the ages old lessons of human nature and human history that has been learned the hard way in one age only to become forgotten in the new age. Hopefully our remote heirs of humankind will have learned these lessons by then well enough not to repeat the same old mistakes. This will be evidence of humankind’s real progress.

Nature has a sense of order, and a mysterious mind of its own. Our involvement in the processes of nature can only interrupt and interfere with these patternings and their products in a dissonant and destructive way. The best we can hope for is a neutral relationship between our civilization and the natural world upon which it depends.

What a curse upon the earth it has been that the spirit of humankind should remain perpetually insatiable, and its soul always searching for salvation in the world.

How is it that one species among all the forms of life on earth has come to so dominate the earth and destroy most of the other forms of life in its quest for power and security from the forces of nature?

We cannot escape in anything we do the ecological imperative of our earthbound age, that the human destruction of the world’s natural habitats and ecosystems are the most consequential problematic of survival which has ever confronted humankind except our earliest era of evolutionary adaptation and struggle for survival against the forces of nature. Could it be that humankind learned its first evolutionary lessons too well, and adapted too much?

Could it be that the needs of humankind’s own destruction are too deeply rooted in the first evolutionary steps of human nature? Historical civilization may have been humankind’s elaborate way of postponing the inevitable—a sophisticated way of usurping nature’s control over our destiny because we are maladapted from the start to fit into the scheme of things.

Humankind evolved as a phylogenetic freak of nature, and human civilization has developed as an infection upon the living tissues on the earth’s skin. The few brief millennia which this disease is playing itself out is but a momentary episode in the natural life span of the earth—an episode that is nonetheless producing catastrophic consequences.

Destruction is always a faster, simpler, and easier process than construction. Creation takes time, patience, trial and error. It is a sign of our earthbound age that despite all our rapid developments of world technological civilization, we are accomplishing in a few brief moments of mad destructiveness what required many millions of years for nature to achieve. We are taking away so much from nature after she has given so much to us.

Our war making tendencies, violent and aggressive capacities and our basic destructiveness towards nature can only be taken as a sign that as a biological species, we are like children who have not yet grown into place in the natural scheme of things. A fully-grown species does not destroy its environments because such ecocide leads to destruction of the species as maladapted. A more mature species has incorporated into its nerves and veins the organic experience and evolutionary wisdom of natural karma, and has found and seeks to maintain a fragile balance of power in its relation with the natural order of things. The development of our civilization has been but a premature precociousness—as a species we are trying to grow up too fast, and cannot feel at ease in our childlike condition.

It is possible that nature itself is yet young on earth—that in its evolutionary exploration of its own possibilities and limitations, in the dinosaurs, in the great mammals, in humankind, it is slowly and steadily trying out and figuring out the most suitable arrangement and patterning for its myriad diverse elements. When it hits upon a correct answer—like cockroaches, sharks or other primordial species--then it stops and moves on to the solution to other elements of its grand design. If it frequently makes mistakes, it does not hesitate to tear things back down and start all over again. If this is true, then we must begin to see our own presence and purpose upon the earth as constrained by perhaps ultimately controlled by the designs of nature. Our existential being upon earth may well prove to be extremely tenuous.

Death is meaningless to nature except as a natural process in the representation of life. It is inevitable because it is necessary and so natural. To humankind, death has come to mean everything, as the ultimate thing we cannot avoid no matter how hard we may try. On this basic difference rests all the problems and paradoxes of the human condition on earth and of the natural condition of an increasingly, exclusively human world.

Time has purely been a human construction in the natural world. Nature has its rhythms and cycles of birth, regeneration and death, which have been happening time immemorial, but it knows little of the timing, which we ascribe to her. It has its schedules and its seasons, but it has always been a never ending, continuously changing moment of the present. Nature remembers little of its own past, and thinks nothing of its own future, except, as these become organically incorporated and consequential to the development of its own being on earth. Otherwise the pathways and trajectories of past and future have no meaning that they have to us. Perhaps we measure time so carefully and exactly because we are so aware of our mortality and ephemeral presence upon earth.

We must not underestimate the delicacy of the balances, which have evolved in nature. Minor causes regularly lead, however indirect and extenuated the chain of linkages, to major and long lasting consequences. The complexity of nature’s interconnections, webs of relations and pathways of change is so great and so random as to be unpredictable by our science. There is no telling exactly what or how our actions of today will reverberate and resonated upon the earth and rebound upon us tomorrow. We can only be sure in our understanding that consequences will come.

When the earth shakes, the wind blows, the waves rise, and the rains fall, there is little humankind can do to stop it. It is in these moments that we are most reminded of our own beingness in nature and of our own natural helplessness before the forces and elements of nature. It is in these moments that we are reminded of the real power that moves the world and all things in it.

To see our sui generis origins in the earth itself is to remind ourselves of the primordial volcanism and fundamental electromagnetism of our bodies and beingness. It is possible that our bodies, as all life on earth, has a kind of force field or natural aura of life which all life is sensitive and remotely aware of. The common hysterias of our uncontrolled aggression, violent perversion, and crowd madness has its roots in the mesmeric power of these autochthonous of life. In our transformation into civilized human beings, we must deny and tune out this kind of hypnotic spell of nature, which becomes cast, over our beingness. It is a power, charismatic and violent political leaders have learned to master.

Earthboundness is a modern condition of existential awareness of and in the human world. It is a collective consciousness of our own ecology of being upon the universal earth. It is a way of discovering ourselves in our environment.

Earthboundness is a human state of being which has become increasingly bound by the earth. It is a paradox that earthboundness did not really rise in our collective conscience until after humankind first escaped the imprisoning pull of the earth’s gravitational field. The view from space offered humankind a conception of the earth as a lonely and solitary, but living planet in the vast depths of space. As long as we had our feet firmly planted upon the ground, we took the boundaries of the earth’s horizons for granted.

Like being culture bound, earthboundness has come to mean dialectically its own contradiction upon earth—the previous geo-centrism of our imaginations and our conscience in which we say the earth exclusively in our own terms—put there for the sake of our own development and aggrandizement, has given way to an enlightened appreciation of the importance, and limitations, of the earth as an entity itself, in its own right. The paradox of earthboundness has come to ultimately usurp and relativize our own anthropocentric world view and value orientation towards all life on earth. We are no longer the dominant species, the apex of the hierarchical pyramid or the top link of the Great Chain of Being. We are becoming better able to appreciate the point of view and intrinsic importance of all other life forms on earth, especially when our civilization has plotted their destruction and extinction. Other plants and animals have their own separate evolutionary purpose and reason for being on earth which is separate and not subordinate to our own narrow human purposes and designs, and because the water and force of life which flows through all the veins and channels of the earth also flow through our own veins, the loss of any and all life on earth, is our loss as well.

The wind blow for our own being, and the waves roll and crash upon the rocks with the vitality, which flow through our veins. The distant, strange sounds hidden in the conch shell are the echoes of our own beginning on earth. The yelps and howls of the coyotes in the moonlit night are the beckoning and calling of our own primordial nature. The owl that hoots in the darkness of nights shadow talks of our own darkness and our own destiny. The silent beauty of a flower and the rolling landscape is the silence of our own death. In everything, Nature calls us back to our own being and our own beginning.

Humankind has become earthbound as never before—the existential uncertainty of our own condition upon earth is the direct consequence of the development of our civilization running head long upon a collision course with our own earthboundness. We may speak of our earthbound karma and our earthbound dharma, our earthbound imperative and our earthbound ecology and ethos, in a relevant way that would have made less sense even a decade ago, and utter nonsense a century ago. But now earthboundness is coming to increasingly shape and define our own identity upon the earth and to have an increasing influence upon many elements of our everyday lives. Nothing we do anymore does not have some kind of indirect effect upon our world in long chains of relation which we barely comprehend, and we can no longer afford to ignore these indirect kinds of consequences of our daily activities and involvements, as they will eventually come back to us in unexpected ways. The circularity of the earth’s surface and the seasonality of life has become our own circularity and our own seasonality.

Earthbound enlightenment is the dawning of a new consciousness in the human world. It is an awareness of our environments and of the dependency of the human conditions upon these environments in new and revolutionary ways, ways which our own being and becoming upon earth, in terms of human development, has hardly caught up with. The most valuable resource we now have is the human resource, and the most critical constraint we have upon this resource is the limitation of time. If we can learn to just slow down the pace of our changes in everything we do, then we can give to ourselves, our children and our world the extra edge of time that is most needed in order for us to resolve our earthbound predicament.

In our earthbound age, less is more, small is beautiful, and the slower the better. There is no need to do today what we can safely put off until tomorrow, or the day after.

No one really knows what the carrying capacity of the earth really is, or what the long term promise and potential of our scientific progress will really prove to be. It is too son to tell. But it is certain that the most pressing problem and predicament of our earthbound age is that of global over population and the corresponding depopulation of the earth of other forms of life. In bringing evolution on earth to a standstill, is stopping nature’s clockwork, and in continuing to reproduce our own kind at an exponentially uncontrolled rate, we are creating for ourselves a global crisis and climax of unprecedented proportions. The prospects of our world cannot be bright if we continue along our way as blindly as we have so far been. It is perhaps too late to reverse the wheels of history or to prevent the impending holocaust, but no one has the bottom line on this either.

We are upon the verge of a new era, the dawn of a new epoch, the birth of a new age on earth. In the twilight of our earthbound awakening, we do nit yet know if we are at the dawn of a new day or at the dusk of a new night. We can no longer afford our old values and worldviews in the same naïve and innocent way as before. We have become bound by the ecological horizons of a round earth. In its roundness, we have always implicitly understood that the earth was a finite resource, even with the infinite progress of our science. Our earthbound awakening is upon us, and it influences everything we think and do in our common world. It has come to increasingly frame the external contexts of our everyday life, constraining our beliefs and behaviors in ways, which were rarely understood before now.

Earthboundness is the only bottom line of our modern moment and our contemporary human condition. Earthboundness is the key conceptual metaphor of our moment, our nature, our world, the earth and our condition upon it. We might be able to escape the gravitational pull of the earth, but we cannot escape the prospects of our own earthboundness.

It is not ourselves or our father figures, leaders, commanders, statesmen, capitalists, and parental authorities who will inherit the earth ad all the problems of our human world. It will be our children and our grandchildren who will inherit the future earth and who will hold the key to the future of all life on earth. If we cannot instill in them a new respect for all life on earth, including human life, and teach them the lessons we ourselves have learned the hard way. Our failure will become their failure, and we can only blame ourselves.