Six Degrees to Disaster

Since the dawn of agriculture and individual property, society has always been controlled by a priestly elite standing over the masses. The Gaia system has been evolving far longer than us, and we have evolved as a function of that system. When our ideologies split, and the Western industrial society spawned to life, and swept in its own spiralling evolution, unprecedented side-effects did occur, we saw ourselves seperate from the system of life that we came from, able to conquer nature and consistently take and produce from materials of the Earth, blind to the causes it will have in the future. Though this change in our natural way of life may seem like degradation, in truth it was a necessary step in our evolution as human beings. Western society has created the capabilities of harnassing a global culture that is aimed at sustaining our home, the Earth, not the ambitions of juvenile man that is clinging to a train of thought that is fastly becoming archaic in the eyes of the world.

"The Earth has not evolved solely for our benefit, and any changes we make to it are at our own risk. This way of thinking makes clear that we have no special human rights; we are merely one of the partner species in the great enterprise of Gaia. We are creatures of Darwinian evolution, a transient species with a limited lifespan, as were all our numerous distant ancestors. But, unlike almost everything before we emerged on the planet, we are also intelligent, social animals with the possibility of evolving to become a wiser and more intelligent animal, one that might have a greater potential as a partner for the rest of life on Earth" (Lovelock 9:2009; The Vanishing Face of Gaia).

The spiritual crisis we face, and the rapid propulsion caused by the 60's, is due to our consumerism of the Earth, and with thinking that we have no harmful effects on that system. We are learning this, and being shepherd to this by a large system of consciousness that we evolved as a part. Our functions in a greater role with the system that governs us as natural products of the Earth, are not the artificial systems of man and will exceed beyond those insuffiecient constructs. 

Societies large and small have become devesated throughout time by stripping the Earth bare and not responding to make the necessary adjustments to their behavior. One can read numerous examples of this in Jared Diamond's Collapse, through the vanished culture of Easter Island to the Greenland Norse, and how "for the first time in history, we face the risk of a global decline...globilization makes it impossible for modern societies to collapse in isolation" (Diamond 23: 2005). Whether you like it or not, this problem effects every human being, and denying it as a problem out of fear of a "New World Order" will only allow our fears from our past to govern our present. Elite control has always been a problem, and through the control of information. But now information, via the internet, is globally accessible, and near impossible to truly hide from the masses, which also stresses the importance of not putting prohibitions on the internet. But this digresses from the point I am trying to make. 

The problem around climate information is that it is coming from separate specialists from isolated regions in the field of science. When dealing with an intricate issue such as "climate change," or our impact of our consumer culture on an organic being, must be looked at from every possible angle, making a consensus extremely hard to reach. The problems we face are a complete cause-and-effect from every possible angle, and stems from our Western ideology, which has corroded our behavior with the Earth. 

"Every culture tends to reinforce different patterns of egoic processing. Our culture seems to have inflated 'distinction making' until it dominates not only Ego but our entire consciousness as well. Thus we could say that our consciousness is split from Mind and that the conscious experience of this phenomenon is one of separation, though in fact we continue to be immersed in nature! The experience of separation is an essential context for domination; domination is the root of exploitation. And thus we destroy our habitat, the versy basis of our survival as a species" (Robert Greenway 131:1995; Ecopsychology: The Wilderness Effect and Ecopsychology)

As human beings, I believe a great many of us have learned that we are apart of an intricate system of consciousness, and we have been thirstly absorbing information from indiginous ideologies that stress a harmonious balance with the Earth, in which we were created. The bottom line is we have to strive to better ourselves, to evolve our stale ideology and prove that we can be the stewards of the Earth, putting aside our political allegiances to our creator, the Gaian Concsiousness.