The Color of Virtue
The story begins with the emergence of humans as a distinct species about 200,000 years ago. For nearly all of the millennia that followed our arrival, humans survived as hunter/gatherers living in caver clans, taking what they needed from nature to survive.
Imagine What Caver Life Was Like
Our common ancestors lived in small family groups. The evidence suggests it was matriarchal; the sons stayed with their mothers for life. They survived by cooperating as family members, more or less in gender equal fashion.
Growing up, sharing a campfire at night to stay warm and safe, cavers looked out for each other. Daytime was about scavenging for food. Nighttime was about staying warm and fighting off predators.
Agriculture, Patriarchy, and Tribalism
Around 12,000 years ago, a new cultural era emerged with humans living tribally in larger groups in permanent settlements, growing edible plants and raising livestock animals to feed themselves.
Gender roles changed. Male humans became dominant. Women were marginalized; reduced to birthing children and feeding and caring for family. History ever since has been shaped by men engaged in violent turf wars, resulting in much suffering, and death.
The human agriculture era was defined by the evolution of mythology into religion. The doctrine that defines Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all reflect the male dominant cultural perspective. Men ruled on all cultural levels.
Where nature is concerned, religion also reinforced the human sense of entitlement. The assumption was that humans are above and superior to all other lifeforms on Earth; that humans have a right to take whatever they want from nature, whenever they choose to take it.
Dominance in the Industrial Era
The cultural course began to shift again around the year 1850 A.D., when humans began to migrate away from agriculture to jobs as urban industrial laborers.
In the urbanized, industrial 19th century, life for many American women was living in slums, raising children, and working to exhaustion in sweat shops.
The Emergence of Gender Equality
A growing number of women in the late 19th century were fed up with having their fertility controlled and their human rights oppressed by men. In Europe and North America, suffrage for women became a force. There was plenty of resistance from the established order, some of it violent, but the suffragettes persisted. In 1920, they prevailed in the US. The 19th Amendment to the Constitution gave women the right to vote.
Historians have already concluded that women getting the vote was the beginning of the end for male cultural dominance.
The Planetary-Scale Reckoning at Hand
So, where does that leave us now, early in the 21st century? A few undeniable facts tell the story. In the past 100 years, the human population has quadrupled from about two billion to more than eight billion. That’s eight billion humans taking ever more from an Earth that hasn’t gotten any larger.
Human demands are putting our planet’s living systems under extreme duress. Our oceans, our forests, our arable lands and soils are being plundered relentlessly. Just in the past fifty years, wild animal numbers on Earth have dropped by 73%. Our planet’s irreplaceable biodiversity is collapsing. The modern industrial way we produce food is entirely unsustainable. That is a simple, undeniable fact. Humans are entirely responsible for the unprecedented threats that are ravaging our Earth’s living systems.
Our human cultural challenges are planetary in scale. They can only be resolved with whole Earth sized solutions.
Reasons for Optimism
Women are claiming their equal rights as never before. In much of the developed world, women are finding their places as cultural leaders at all levels of society. In the coming era, shaped by gender quality, women will lead in rejecting the corrosive human attitude of entitlement over nature in favor of responsible planetary stewardship.
The other very big thing we humans have going for us is the way we are now connected globally in real time by the social media. The world’s people are already sharing the same life-affirming messaging. More often than not, good messages rise above the old guard’s deceit and disinformation. What this leads to is akin to a cross-cultural brand of human consciousness.
The Nature, Definition, and Color of Virtue
In a dictionary, Virtue is generally characterized as ‘behavior reflecting high moral standards’.
On a planetary-scale, Virtue is exactly what we humans must find within ourselves, if we are to come together cooperatively and prevail over climate change, extreme weather, food insecurity, loss of biodiversity, unsustainable resource consumption, and other, global-scale, existential challenges, all of which humans are entirely responsible for as Earth’s most consequential species. Correcting the human course starts with a common commitment to a high moral standard; in a word, Virtue.
When applied to the health and biodiversity of our planet, the color of Virtue is the color most associated with a healthy, flourishing environment. That color comes in many vibrant shades, all of them green, all of them energized by human commitment.
The women and men of planet Earth will come together, cooperating as gender-equals. The colors of that human planetary partnership will come in many rich and life-affirming variations, all of them shades of green.
For life on Earth, the color of Virtue is green.