Sustainable systems R us
if we want it...
It’s hard to read the news these days, even the headlines, without wanting to get off the planet (and go where?). Elon, hurry up with those one-way tickets to Mars. It’s not just wars and rumors of wars, it’s not just wanton carelessness and destruction of the natural environment, it’s all the lying, cheating, double-dealing grifters rending the social fabric in business, government and elsewhere that make me wonder how I can endure the stupidocolypse.
There are days when I feel that we are doomed as a species—that the planet will be well rid of parasites too dimwitted to see that sucking the life out of their host is not a sustainable system.
And there are other days when I breathe deeply, in and out, from the top of my head to the tip of my toes. I feel energy flow through my body, and on those days I see clearly that my work is not to prophesy doom; it is to express my vision of a natural wisdom obeyed by the observable universe that we too can access, if we can just get out of our own way.Â
The future doesn’t have to be a bleak landscape of inadequate resources, environmental disaster, violence and destruction; it could be rich with intelligence, awareness, connectivity, and creativity. It all depends on whether we (the human species) can get our priorities straight.
What is required, above all, is a critical mass of self-awareness. We are the problem, and unless we solve that problem, the problem will be solved without us, literally. We are desperately in need of a morality based not on an intimidating boss, or self-serving delusions, or fear of the dark, but on a recognition of natural law.Â
If we don’t wake up to seeing reality as dynamic interconnected systems in which there is looping and spiraling cause and effect, we will continue to cause and affect systems upon which we are dependent — of which we are a part — without knowing what we are doing.
Humanity’s great challenge is to replace the good/evil dichotomy, which is a naive view of how to stay safe and out of trouble while getting what you want, with a more mature vision in which what is good is what is sustainable — and what is not good is what is not sustainable.Â
In this way of seeing, there is no authority other than a reality that functions outside of human narrative.
Except that it doesn’t. We are part of reality. Our desires, fears, and imagination drive our actions, often over cliffs (fiscal and otherwise). Until we have the wisdom to take ourselves into account — our nature: what is given, what is possible — we will have a hard time seeing cause and effect.
And here’s what I want say: I don’t think we can see ourselves well or clearly, as individuals, or as a group, without seeing ourselves as part of a wholeness — a holiness. Without having faith that sanity and love are real. Without having faith in ourselves as capable of sanity and love. Without loving. We are children of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars.
The way forward requires us to merge practical and transcendent need into sustainable systems.Â
Sustainable systems are sustainable because they recognize and understand cause and effect.
Sustainable systems are sustainable because they don’t forget to invite the bad fairy to the christening, so she can’t show up later and curse the proceedings.
Sustainable systems are sustainable because they take the big picture and the details into account at the same time. Ditto for art.
A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty... We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
~Albert Einstein