The World is in Conflict

The World is in Conflict as demonstrated in the book, The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era, A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry. It was published in 1992 and it is more relevant today than ever before.The back cover adequately describes the book:

From the big bang to the present and into the next millennium, The Universe Story unites science and the humanities in a dramatic exploration of the unfolding of the universe, humanity’s evolving place in the cosmos, and the boundless possibilities for our future.

The book is about the coming together of the mystical and the scientific views of our lives here on earth. Somehow, the mystical and the reverence for all life forms has been lost to the rape of our planet’s resources.

We live in a time of drastic degradation of our home planet. Human life experience is not what it should be with a tiny percent of the population owning the majority of the wealth. Our effect on the Earth has been to cause massive species extinctions at the rate of about 20,000 per year. In addition, the rainforests that provide us with the oxygen we need to survive are being cut down in massive quantities. Wildlife seems to be vanishing faster than it can be replenished.

This in not to mention the drastic effects we humans have had on the atmosphere, the oceans, the forests, the arable land, and the glaciers. The carbon dioxide and methane levels are so high that it is doubtful that we will survive as a species past 2050.

The oceans are so polluted that marine life is threatened. Tons of fish are caught up in human debris and killed by the fishing industry. Many species are unable to regenerate their populations due to over fishing in many parts of the world. The 20 trillion tons of human waste continue to float around endlessly in vast whirlpools of plastic trash. Small particles break off and enter the food chain through the fish that don’t even know they are eating it.

The forests are being cut down at the rate that we are losing rainforests the size of the state of Ohio every day. And for what? To raise beef for the small percentage of people who can afford to buy it? Or, actually, for those people too poor to afford anything but McDonald’s hamburgers? Who are we kidding here? The hidden costs of doing this are staggering and when you consider the loss of the rainforests, we certainly killing our children.

The arable land is being taken over by deserts because of high temperatures, lack of rain, and mono-agriculture. Genetically modified organism are playing havoc with our health and that of the animals we slaughter for food.

The glaciers are melting so fast that now that nations are rushing to take their stake of the oil reserves below the Arctic Ocean. How much more of this are we going to take?

It seems that nothing will stop the greed of of the commercial-industrial complex. Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry summed this all up in The Universe Story

From this it is clear that a mystique counter to the commercial-industrial mystique must be evoked if the Ecozoic era is to come into being. The future can be described in terms of the tension between these two forces. If the dominant political-social issue of the twentieth century has been  between the capitalist and the communist worlds, between democratic freedoms and socialist responsibility, the dominant issue of the immediate
future will clearly be the tension between the Entrepreneur and the Ecologist, between those who would continue their plundering, and those who
would truly preserve the natural world, between the mechanistic and the organic, between the world as a collection of objects and the world as a
communion of subjects, between the anthropocentric and the biocentric norms of reality and value.

The World is in conflict between technological evolution and ecological evolution, between what Swimme and Berry call the Technozoic era  and the Ecozoic era. Right now, the Technozoic is winning. This is no surprise to me.

We need to recognize that we are all in this together – that we are the universe and we are evolving with it. We need to work together to replenish Mother Earth and conserve existing life forms. We must realize the insight of interbeing – the interconnectedness of all things, of all life on earth, not just humans. The situation is dire in my opinion. Unless we do something very soon, our children and our children’s children will not be able to survive.

What is wrong our commercial-industrial complex that they can’t see the wisdom of the interbeing of all things? What is so important about keeping all the multinational corporations rolling in money and people starving everywhere?

Books by Brian Swimme

The Universe Story : From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era–A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos by Brian Swimme From the big bang to the present and into the next millenium, The Universe Story unites science and the humanities in a dramatic exploration of the unfolding of the universe, humanity’s evolving place in the cosmos, and the boundless possibilities for our future. … [Read More…]