Getting Beyond Dysfunction
The Way Forward From Human Overreach
‘People Protect What They Love.’ – Jacques Yves Cousteau, Ocean Explorer
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Loving women, loving nature: two ideas that should be truly inextricable. The world we live in is in very deep trouble, because we have failed to love either sufficiently.
Consider how we got here. Think about the human journey the past three or four thousand years. Boil it down to simple terms: men have been in charge, women have long been muzzled and marginalized, while at the same time nature has been plundered rapaciously and relentlessly. History has been shaped by men. It is a litany of stories of men in bloody, violent confrontation and conquest.
It’s codified in the Bible. The ‘Old Testament’ declares that men are in charge, women are property, and nature is a commodity made to be exploited by men.
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‘Man enjoys the great advantage of having a god endorse the code he writes; and since man exercises a sovereign authority over women it is especially fortunate that this authority has been vested in him by the supreme being. For the Jews, Mohammedans and Christians among others, man is a master by divine right; the fear of god will therefore repress any impulse towards revolt in the downtrodden female.’ Simone de Beauvior, The Second Sex, 1949
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For all of recorded history, human societies have been hierarchical. Men have been on top. Men have made the rules. Women have had no voice.
Humans have long operated under the assumption they are separate and superior to nature rather than a part of it. That has encouraged a brand of mindless cultural overreach that now threatens the destruction of life on Earth. Our world is in very big trouble. No one did it to us. Humans are entirely responsible.
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‘It is our collective and individual responsibility….to preserve and tend to the world in which we all live.’ – Dalai Lama
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The Big Picture
As we move through the year 2024, we find our Earth’s living biosphere is under full on assault by humanity. The biology of our oceans is collapsing. It’s been said that by the year 2050, there may be more plastic waste in the oceans than fish. We’re cutting down our forests like there’s no tomorrow. Our massively industrialized agriculture is squandering our precious topsoil and sucking the life out of our planet’s critical freshwater aquifers. We’re flooding our environment with toxic chemicals. Plant species are going extinct, and wild animal numbers are in freefall across the planet. The latest World Wildlife Fund study reports that wild animal populations on Earth have fallen by about 73% just in the past 50 years.
It’s no mystery why life on Earth is in such big trouble. Just 50 years ago, the human population was about 3.8 billion. Since then, that number of us humans has more than doubled to over 8 billion, on the way to 10 billion or more within decades. Bottom line: the Earth has only so much to give. Humans are taking every resource, every scrap for themselves. Is it any wonder, wild animal numbers are collapsing.
The issue getting the most attention early in the 21st century is climate change, driven by our insatiable energy demands. Pollution directly caused by humans is saturating our atmosphere with carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and other heat trapping gases. The volume of CO2 pollution alone is about 30 billion tons annually. As a consequence, glaciers are disappearing, ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and we’re seeing every kind of climate-driven weather extreme like those that recently ravaged much of Florida and the Southeast. Weather-driven wildfire like we’ve seen in just the past year in Australia, the American West, and the Amazon. I’m also talking about extreme flooding and massive storm systems linked to overheated skies and elevated ocean temperatures. Freakishly powerful storm systems that were once thought to be seen every thousand years, are now becoming part of the annual lexicon.
On top of all the existential environmental stress, we’ve had a COVID pandemic that has infected well over fifty million people around the world and killed more than a million in the US alone. On a crowded planet, new disease vectors can take hold and become pandemics almost overnight.
The big picture for humanity at this moment in time is not pretty. We are on a very dark course. It will continue to get worse, unless we wake up, step up, and embrace a new paradigm defined by a commitment to dignity for all and a commitment by all to responsible planetary stewardship.
Turning Back from the Abyss
Continuing ‘business as usual’ is a dead end for humanity. There is no future in regression to some idealized fantasy of the past. Tribalism and self-interest as cultural institutions need to go away. The sooner, the better.
The way forward requires a course correction at the most fundamental cultural levels. It starts with the understanding that all humans are created equal. In a fair and just world, people of all gender identities are entitled to be equal in all ways.
The distinguished social-scientist, Riane Eisler, offers this understanding…
‘What we need is a new way of thinking that goes beyond secular vs. religious, left vs. right, Eastern vs. Western, socialist vs. capitalist, and so on. Old social categories ignore the impact of childhood and gender relations on how our brains – and hence our beliefs and behaviors – develop. Nor do any of them provide the new economics, narratives, and language to meet the challenges facing our world. The real struggle for our future is between the domination configuration and the partnership configuration worldwide. Once we understand this, we can build a solid foundation for a more sustainable, equitable, and caring partnership-oriented world.’ – Riane Eisler, author, The Chalice and the Blade
The Partnership Way
As a young seeker, this writer read The Chalice and the Blade. It forced me to rethink the assumptions I had been taught to believe as a child about gender and equality. Riane Eisler’s book remains the gold standard for understanding where humans have come from and where we need to go.
Here is another nugget of Riane Eisler wisdom…
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“This notion that man can, and should, have absolute dominion over the “chaotic” powers of nature and woman…is what ultimately lies behind man’s famous “conquest of nature” – a conquest that is today puncturing holes in the earth’s ozone layer, destroying our forests, polluting our air and water, and increasingly threatening the welfare, and even survival, of thousands of living species, including our own.” – Riane Eisler
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Riane Eisler is one of my greatest teachers. From her, and other gifted communicators like Carl Sagan and Jane Goodall, I learned to see my place in nature and the universe, and to recognize the very dark course we are on. I am terrified by what humans are doing to our Earth. We are behaving blindly, not unlike a frenzy of maggots feasting on a caress. There is no future in business as usual.
Up until recent decades, there weren’t enough humans on Earth to inflict fatal damage. How things have changed.
Human numbers have expanded from 4 billion to 8 billion in just the past fifty years. It’s frightening to witness the dysfunction that goes with 8 billion humans making ever greater demands on our planet’s shrinking store of resources. It’s a simple fact. Humans are consuming the life out of the only Earth we have.
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“We humans are wired for empathy by evolution, but when children grow up in dominator families they internalize this male over female template for relations early on. They then automatically apply it to other differences, whether based on race, religion, sexual orientation, and so forth.” Riane Eisler, The Partnership Way
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There is an elegantly simple first step to fixing our vast cultural overreach. It has emerged from Riane Eisler’s lifetime of work. She calls it, The Partnership Way. It’s a reassuring vision of a world that has transitioned away from hierarchy and dominance and replaced it with a living paradigm built on cooperation and shared gender responsibility… In its grandest sense, the partnership way is a worthy prescription for our collective planetary consciousness. A gender equal partnership, that’s how we transcend together as the best version of the planet Earth’s human family we can be.
This writer believes we can and will get past our worst human instincts. Emerging trends suggest we are on track to becoming the next transformative version of ourselves, and that this transcendent version of humanity will be defined by common purpose on a global scale.
‘The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least not in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.’ – Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
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Women’s Voices Will be the Difference
Women have been trapped voiceless, in servitude through the annals of history. In the US, females had no vote until a century ago. So much has changed in recent decades. In Europe, North America, and other parts of the world, women have struggled, and substantially they have prevailed. They have found their power through activism. In so many ways, female humans are seizing the reins.
In the US, at least as many women are enrolled in medical schools and law schools as men. Women are rapidly populating their professions of choice. In politics, women are getting elected at every level.
The US workforce is now slightly more than half women. In a fair and equal world, women will soon have at least half of the best jobs.
We should all be heartened by that reality. I find it reassuring, because I believe that women, perhaps more than men, are hardwired to care for what they love. When women are active participants, they bring out the best in their male collaborators. As that happens, we will see ever more women on duty in the planetary pilot house, steering the human culture away from feckless self-destruction. When women are in their rightful equal place at the levers of power, they will choose stewardship over power and profiteering.
Young People Are Being the Change
I am thrilled by the level of commitment by people under age 30 to the idea of achieving a transformative world built on gender equality, economic fairness, and taking proper care of the planet. A lot of people are concerned about the future. That is particularly true of young people and women. A 2021 Pew Research survey reported that 76% of US 18-29 year old’s surveyed – are deeply concerned about climate change. People increasingly recognize that life on Earth is in big trouble.
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‘Many young people are hungry for new thinking. So, I invite them to use the tools and other resources we have developed to accelerate the shift from domination to partnership.’ – Riane Eisler
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Here’s what we can say about the prevalent, social-media-driven brand of activism. It is powered by at least as many women as men. Women are the primary force behind a lot of it.
There are also a lot of good men engaged side-by-side with those energized women. They are male humans, who already love their mothers, their sisters, aunts, wives, and daughters. Good men want the best for other humans, no matter gender-identity. All humans should define themselves by their commitment to a gender-equal partnership way of being.
Around the world, ever more young activist women and men have chosen to stand up together for a healthy and resilient environment. They value life. They value each other. At the deepest level, young people are concerned about survival. They don’t want to suffer on a ravaged and depleted planet. But the foundation of their commitment flows from their shared compassion for nature and all of humanity. That makes this writer hopeful.
‘Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference.’ – Jane Goodall
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