[pf] God's Last Offer [No.5 of David's selections; 1 more after this]

[More from Ed Ayres.  D.]

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God's Last Offer - Ed Ayres, 1999; ISBN 1-56858-125-4

p. 295 - 299 :-

    The deepening footprint of humanity is starting to feel too much like
quicksand.  Yet despite our collective confusion and still-widespread
obliviousness, it would be far from the truth to say that no one is moving
hard to get us out.  ... The concern now is not whether we have the
technology and the intelligence to continue; it's about whether we're
putting it all together fast enough.  If we're on track to complete the
building of an ark in a month, but the flood will be here in an hour, the
ark won't help.
    ... for every Model-T car that makes history, there are thousands of
inventions, dreams, or experiments that fail or are suppressed.  Ideas are
like acorns; in an acre of forest, thousands of them may be scattered
about, from which scores of saplings may start up and grow fast, but only
one may survive to become a great oak.

    Our challenge is to put ourselves in the position of that one acorn.
And, though the odds seem small, it's well to recall that mathematically,
it's already something of a miracle that we're here.  One of the most
significant ways in which science and religion converge is in the
recognition that miracles are not random.  Whether they occur because of
natural laws or divine plans, most of those who believe that we humans bear
some responsibility for our fates would agree that momentous choices lie
ahead for us.  If it took a miracle to get us where we are, it will take
another to move us forward on our evolutionary path.  That path has become
extremely treacherous, and we're going to have to pick our way with extreme
care.

    It will take not just a great multiplication of the small efforts that
have put solar roofs on huts in Nigeria, or treadle pumps (giving peasant
farmers access to groundwater) on fields in Bangladesh; it will take a
coalescing of these efforts so that instead of viewing them as admirable
but isolated projects, we begin to see them as part of a new transcendent
pattern that affects all of our thinking.  We need to reform our vision so
that we are able to lead the way for our descendents, not blunder forward
with our heads turned to fight a rear-guard battle against our ancestors,
most of whom may have been completely unaware of where they were leading us.

    By recognising what has blocked our vision until now, we can identify
some general rules for forming the kinds of policies and practices that
will make this miracle happen.

  - *See the scale of things.*  The booms in solar and wind energy are
seeds that have sprung up in fertile soil.  But they could be killed
easily.  Every conscious human decision involving energy and its uses --
whether in transportation, urban design, or resource extraction -- needs to
take into account this ultimate goal of nurturing the seedlings of the
major industries of the future.  A climate treaty that promises to reduce
CO2 emissions to 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2010 will be worthless if
it is not quickly revised to 60 or 80 percent.  Laws that save a few
hundred endangered species will do little to save the planet's life as a
whole, if not supported by changes in human culture that can turn those few
hundred rescues to millions.  "Without perspective, we are lost," says
writer Tom Athanasiou.  "Good news, most of it from the United States and
other rich regions, does not automatically scale to the planetary level."

  - *Look at the connections, as closely as at the things connected.*  In
our view of the world, conditioned by centuries of habit, even though we
know things are in constant motion, we tend to think it is the things that
are the reality, rather than the motion.  Fro example, we own cars, but we
don't think of owning (or assuming responsibility for) the motion of the
car, or the processes (consumption, combustion, emission, invasion) the car
is a part of.  This traditional view comes from the fact that things are
visible, processes are not.  But as we learn more about the ecology of the
earth, we begin to understand that the processes are as real, as fragile,
as vulnerable to damage or distortion, as the palpable things.  In fact,
some scientists tae this observation further and point out that on a
subcellular or subatomic level, even the things are made up only of
processes.  But this rule isn't just theoretical; it has impoportant
implications for action.  Among the most important: in education and
research, we need to make connections our main focus.  Children in
elementary science, for example, need to be taught about water not simply
in terms of its chemical makeup and physical behaviour, but in terms of the
hydrological cycle that could make or break the human future.

  - *Take into account other communities, cultures, generations and
species.*  Just as it would be foolish to allow long-term planning to rest
entirely in the hands of particular agencies or administrations of
government, it would be foolhardy to ignore our relationships with the
other dimensions of life -- whether geographical, temporal or genetic.  If
we kill them, we kill us.  As environmental scientist Jesse H. Ausubel
advises, "we must take seriously the Copernican insight about Earth's
position in the cosmos and not simply replace geocentrism with
anthropocentrism."

  - *Know the sources of our information and our beliefs* and do reality
checks on how much we rely on mediated ideas.  We shouldn't be afraid to
use technologies like computers or TV as multipliers of our powers, but
should be wary of whose powers are being multiplied, and to what purpose.
We need to find ways of preventing the control of public beliefs from
falling into private hands, whether for rogue ideological purposes or for
concentration of wealth.  Ultimately this requires a clear separation of
the funding for science and education from the largess of industry.  From
McDonalds franchises in public schools to Genentech grants to the
university biology research programs to Mobil Oil supporting public radio
reporting on climate change, it's a slippery slide to just sit back and let
our knowledge be packaged and paid for.  In the long run, our survival
depends on our insistence that the findings of science -- and the
accumulated knowledge that is the legacy of real civilization -- both be
paid for by public taxes and remain accessible to all humanity.  Meanwhile
we need always to keep in touch with core sources of primary information
that we know to be trustworthy.  To be trustworthy is not necessarily to be
right, of course; our parents can be (and often are) wrong, and our senses
can fool us.  But those sources are not systematically aligned to exploit
or manipulate us.

  - *Beware of living too heavily in a world of fictional experience and
entertainment.*  Beware of drifting into heavy reliance, for stimulation
and companionship in the adventure of life, on technologically mediated
surrogate parents, friends, companions, or elders.  As communities and as
individuals, if we lose touch with direct experience and direct contact --
both with other people we trust and with a physical environment we
understand and trust -- we will lose our lives.

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sent on by David.
(David MacClement) davd@ihug.co.nz 
www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/3142/Pg1-AD11.html
 or better: http://www.emucities.com.au/member/davd/
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