Friday, April 19, 2024
News and Views from the Global South
Opinion
THE LONG EXILE FROM MOTHER EARTH
This column is available for visitors to the IPS website only for reading. Reproduction in print or electronic media is prohibited. Media interested in republishing may contact romacol@ips.org.
- Today there are two fundamentally different ways in which people consider the Earth. For many it is simply a vast material object lacking spirit and bequeathed to the human race to exploit as it wills. For others, it is our home, a self-regulating superorganism with a unique community of life.
The respective consequences of these two visions are also radically different: with the latter, cooperation and respect; with the former, aggression and domination.
Humanity has always considered the Earth as a great mother who inspires fear, veneration, and respect. Only more recently, since the rise of modern science at the beginning of the 16th century and the work of Rene Descartes, Galileo Galilei, and Francis Bacon, did the Earth come to be considered as an object, "res extensa", that could be subjected to human -and violent- intervention to extract all possible benefits from it.
This was the project of dominium mundi, or world domination. It created marvels, from machines to antibiotics; it put men on the moon and into outer space. While it would be ignorant to deny the merits of this system, it is also essential to remember that analytic and applied reason -if not accompanied by emotional reason, sensitivity and kindness, which are fundamental to the world of values- has created a machinery of death that is capable of destroying the human species in 25 different ways with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.
Our generation is the first in the history of mankind that has transformed itself into a force of geophysical destruction. There is a growing understanding across the world that if humanity continues on its current path, it cannot endure. The current forms of production and consumption transform everything into a business, including the most sacred realities, like life, our organs, and our genes.
Every year 3500 species of living beings disappear forever from the face of the Earth as a consequence of man’s systematic aggression against nature. The wheel of global warming has begun to turn and cannot be stopped. All we can do now is slow it down and minimise its catastrophic effects. It can devastate many ecosystems, taking millions of people with it, forced to either move or simply die.
And so we will have to change to survive. If we initiate "a new and sustainable way of life" like that formulated in the Earth Charter, there will be a promise of future life. It is urgent that we change our system of exploiting the Earth and its resources and correct our form of social relations, introducing greater inclusion, more equality, and a way of living in harmony with the universe.
It is absolutely indispensable that we adopt an ethic of care, respect, responsibility, solidarity, and cooperation and, last but not least, compassion towards all those who suffer in humanity and nature.
Today we know not only that the Earth holds life in its atmosphere, thus creating the biosphere, but also that she is herself living and produces all forms of life. The moderns call her Gaia, the name in Greek mythology for the living Earth.
In this critical context, we must return to the concept of the earth as mother. We must unite the two poles: the more ancestral notion of the Earth as mother of our original peoples and the more contemporary approach of the new astrophysics and biology that sees Earth as Gaia, a living superorganism.
What Saint Francis of Assisi more than 800 years ago contemplated in his cosmic mysticism -he chanted to the sun as father and brother and to the earth as mother and sister and addressed all beings with the sweet words brother and sister- today we know as a fact verified by molecular and biological genetics.
All living beings, from the bacteria that emerged 3.8 billion years ago to the dinosaur, the horse, the hummingbird, and the human, share the same genetic alphabet built of the same 20 amino acids and the same four phosphate bases (adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine). It is only the different combinations of the chemical letters of this alphabet that produce the differences we see in the great biodiversity.
We are therefore all brothers and sisters and members of the great community of life. In this sense, there is no environment as a separate entity; the environment contains us all. We human beings are not outside of or above nature or Mother Earth. We are inside of her as a part of her reality. We are the conscious and intelligent part of the Earth.
In the last few centuries we have exiled ourselves from the Earth. We must return to our common home and take care of it because its balance and its future are being threatened. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)
(*) Leonardo Boff is a Brazilian theologian and writer.
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Opinion
THE LONG EXILE FROM MOTHER EARTH
This column is available for visitors to the IPS website only for reading. Reproduction in print or electronic media is prohibited. Media interested in republishing may contact romacol@ips.org.
- Today there are two fundamentally different ways in which people consider the Earth. For many it is simply a vast material object lacking spirit and bequeathed to the human race to exploit as it wills. For others, it is our home, a self-regulating superorganism with a unique community of life.
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