Introduction
This essay explores our severance from the natural world and its consequences for our mindsets and cultures. The essential idea is that, due to the rupture of our lives from the Earth, a traumatized state is not merely the domain of the Vietnam veteran or survivor of childhood abuse; it is the underlying condition of our modern, domesticated psyche.
Older vs. Younger Cultures
Thom Hartmann shares the following stories:
The "elder brothers" of the Kogi tribe in the Andes mountains have essentially lived in harmony with the world for thousands of years. Even their architecture did not damage the ecosystems but has helped guarantee their survival over millennia. They are farmers, yet leave behind land that is unscathed, whereas the farmer settlers of much of Europe, Africa and Asia have created much damage.
Hartmann came upon the insight of "older and younger cultures."
Younger cultures tend to view themselves as separate from the earth, with dominion over it, and see the earth's resources only as things to be used and then discarded. Nature is often regarded as an "enemy" and not as a mother, father, brother or sister. Such cultures tend to live out their lives without ever questioning their assumptions about humankind's place in the universe.
On the other hand, it is not unusual for older cultures to pray for the soul of the animal they kill for food, as they thank the Great Spirit with a sense of reverence for the life provided to them.
Hartmann was told to "warn the world" by the Apaches, and received a similar message from Columbia. In resonance, tribal elders in Africa stated that the famine he was seeing in Uganda in 1980 would one day be worldwide, the fate of the white man as well. Was it a coincidence that the same message would come from these disparate peoples, who have no conventional way of communicating with each other?
For those of us who have eyes to see, it is evident that the widespread death, famine, suffering of children, warfare and extermination in today's world is a function of the immaturity of younger cultures.
The lifestyle of younger cultures consistently reveals arrogance, greed, limited vision, and ultimately, the possibility of extinction of life on our planet.
How Things May Unfold
Social scientist and futurist Duane Elgin predicts that in the next decades the world will become like a super-heated pressure cooker in which there is nowhere to escape. These pressures are predicted to be unrelenting, such that the world will either descend into chaos or ascend in a process of global transformation with a unified intent to come together and generate a world that works for all people and the Biosphere.
He states that if humanity is unwilling to work for the advance of all, the world will likely collapse into constant conflict based on the need for resources and conflicting political and/or ethnic agendas.
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