Excerpt #8 from my book, Interconnected, Interrelated & Interdependent, Like It or Not:
A WORLD OUT OF BALANCE
Figuratively speaking, our world has grown smaller while we have expanded ourselves in every way imaginable.
Unfortunately, part of our expansion includes our forever more sophisticated armaments and our life-threatening capabilities to totally annihilate ourselves.
Then, too, our growing population and consumption patterns have us depleting our resources such as forests, fisheries, range lands, croplands, and plant and animal species.
In fact, we are destroying the biological diversity on which evolution thrives.
The 6th Great Extinction, now ongoing, is the first caused by other than a natural event like an asteroid striking the planet or climate change.
It’s caused by us, humanity.
Climate change, incidentally, caused four out of the five great extinctions.
The list of environmentally-related problems include, but is not limited to, the draining of aquifers and the lowering of water tables; the pollution of our air, water, and soil, and consequently our food chain (we have microplastic contaminants in our food and water from dumping 14 million tons of plastic garbage into our oceans annually); depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer that protects us from ultraviolet radiation; and the many symptoms of climate change such as heat waves, devastating droughts, destruction of croplands, dying forests, accelerated species extinction, destruction of coral reefs, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, more frequent and intense storms, coastal flooding, more rapid spread of disease, acidification and poisoning of the oceans, famine and starvation, human migration, heat deaths, economic collapse, social conflict, and potential wars.
The above is far from an exhaustive list of environmentally related problems.
And further, problems of these magnitudes interact with each other to cause ominous, unpredictable, and unprecedented problems termed multi-hazards.
Life is fragile, up and down like a seesaw on which we are sitting.
While humans have always altered the natural environment, the scale of disruptions is now unprecedented.
The collective actions — behavior not aligned with how natural systems function — of our world population is the cause.
As self-described nation states, “super powers” in particular, no longer do we find ourselves isolated in time and space unaffected by or unaffecting other parts of the world.
We have discovered that our interrelatedness and interdependence are obvious and inescapable, like it or not.
Short-sighted self-interest decision making, however tempting and unfortunately very normal, has proven to be counterproductive, both individually and collectively.
Where once our over-abundance of resources counterbalanced our shortage of vision, today we find ourselves in a new arena where the limitations of our resources must be compensated for by an expansion of our vision.
Similarly, we find that we can no longer engage ourselves in our primitive form of conflict resolution, warfare, lest we tempt our very existence.
In short, we have neither the resources nor the space to repeat the mistakes of our past.
To do so would be to exhibit an archaic mentality likely to return a few survivors to an archaic time.
It is further becoming apparent that we each, as individuals, are like a living cell of the body Earth.
The health and well-being of each of us personally as individuals, and collectively as organizations, institutions, and nation-states, is what determines the vitality of our civilization and of our planet.
We can be neither more nor less than what we make of ourselves.
“The world is not a mere container but is ourselves reflecting at every stage our inner state of order or disorder . . . order can never be legislated; it can grow, just as a flower grows from its seed or a crystal from its nucleus.” (Guenther)