Cummins, Paul F.

The Trumpeter - Journal of Ecosophy (Athabasca University)

Trumpeter (1996)ISSN: 0832-6193A New Cosmology: ’Honoring The Blue Planet’Paul F. CumminsTrumpeterA New Cosmology: ’Honoring The Blue Planet’ 2”This we know. The earth does not belong to man; man belongs tothe earth. This we know. All things are connected like the bloodwhich unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befallsthe earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the webof life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, hedoes to himself.”Chief Seattle, 1954.”It’s all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because wedo not have a good story. We are in between stories.”Thomas Berry, 1988.”Poetry is just the universe talking to itselfin a way that human beings can understand.”Peter Levitt‘My God - it’s blue. It’s beautiful.’ Perhaps the most startling pho-tograph in the history of humankind was the photo of the Earthfrom outer space. It was truly a revelation - the Earth, all could seeclearly, was - is - unique. It is an inter-connected system of water-ways, shinning like a gem in the cosmos. Somehow, this photographconfirmed what only a supposed ‘lunatic fringe’ had been arguing:that the Earth is a precious jewel, utterly special, distinct, and in-terrelated. It is, we could now see, a tiny organism covered with athin gorgeous blue membrane. Water. ‘The Blue Planet’.Physicists, astronomers, geologists and others have now discovered and uncov-ered much of the story of how this blue planet came to be. It is a magnificentand mysterious story - the creation of the universe and the subsequent evolutionof the Earth with its systems of life. An amateur rendering of this story goessomething like this:Somewhere between 8 and 20 billion years ago the universe sprang into beingwith what is now commonly agreed upon as The Big Bang, an instant ”which settime, space, matter - everything - in play.”1 This theory holds ”that everythingin the universe, including time, was once contained in a point of infinite density- a ‘singularity’ - that suddenly expanded [exploded] outward uniformly in alldirections. At the age of one second, scientists calculate, the universe was aCopyright 1999 TrumpeterA New Cosmology: ’Honoring The Blue Planet’ 3featureless fireball of uncertain size, a million times hotter than the surface ofthe sun and a thousand times denser than lead.2 At this point - of the Big Bang- there was only hydrogen for about seven seconds and then helium and carbonunfolded through the formation of galaxies, explosions of supernovas, and theuniverse continued to unfold with a growing capacity for greater and greatercomplexity. Then about five billion years ago, our sun, our solar system, andour planet came into being. And only just a blink ago human beings evolved.When did all this occur? Scientists are still arguing and with the arrival of newdata from the Hubble telescope, new yet controversial estimates have rangedfrom as early as 8 billion years old to in the neighborhood of 12 billion - bothdownward revisions from previous and still respectable estimates of 15+ billion.Further, it is estimated that the particle known as the Earth cooled and beganits present orbit somewhere around 5 billion years ago. If, as Sister MiriamMcGillis has charted, we compress that 5 billion years into a 12 month cycle,then we can see the following time line unfolding.During the first eight months, we find molten gases (still burning in the coreof the Earth), the evaporation of gases and formation of the oceans and theEarth’s crust, the shaping of continents and finally the appearance of aminoacids and proteins and conditions which allowed life to form.Four months ago (in our 5 billion years compressed into 12 months schemata),the Earth begins to show signs of life and we find the Earth expressing itself inbreathing, seeing, hearing; we find it learning to reproduce, nourish, and evenheal itself; we find the Earth becoming more and more complicated.In the last 4 months, we see the development of highly complex creatures withcentral nervous systems.If we take the last month and look at these 30 days, we see that the humanbeing came upon the scene only in the last day. Then, if we look at only thelast 24 hours, we see that 23.5 hours were pre-ancient history, tribal days of theawakening of consciousness, the beginnings of language and social structures.The last 30 seconds is the period of the ”great” civilizations. Thus modernhistory becomes just a few seconds. Yet, in these 2-3 seconds of the 5 billionyear process, we humans have acquired the capacity to knock the whole processawry.Thus, the human is not only a relative new comer to the cosmos and to Earth,but the human armed with technology and industry is a newborn - havingpossessed vast transformative skills for about 2-3 seconds in the scheme of things.And yet - as staggering a reality as it is - in those 2-3 seconds, humans havetaken a 5 billion year evolutionary process and knocked it off its natural course.As McGillis puts it: ”we have taken evolution off automatic pilot and put it onmanual.”3 We simply lack the maturity to do such a cataclysmic thing. We aredestroying this blue planet. What has taken billions of years to evolve is beingCopyright 1999 TrumpeterA New Cosmology: ’Honoring The Blue Planet’ 4extinguished in this century in but a wink. Why?Why we have taken our current course of destructive actions has many explana-tions. One, I believe, is the most comprehensive and must - if we are to survive -be studied by educators and transmitted to the young. This explanation comeslargely from the works of Thomas Berry. Berry is a Catholic priest, cosmologist,ecologist and former president of the Teilhard Society. He has published manypapers from his now disbanded Riverdale Press, and he published his superband major work, The Dream of the Earth in 1988 through the Sierra Club Press.He recently won a 1995 Lannan Award for his writing. Much of what has led tothis point and which follows in this chapter is indebted to the work of ThomasBerry.Every culture, every nation has its myths, its stories which give meaning to lifeitself and which provide the assumptions and values which in turn dictate howwe live our lives. Most people, most teachers and students do not criticallyexamine these myths and their underlying assumptions and guidelines. Theyare considered ‘givens’. The function of schools - all too often - is simply toinculcate these givens. Thus, from elementary schools through to graduateschools, while in increasingly complicated presentations, certain basic mythsare taught, re-taught, ingrained, solidified, and celebrated. The possibility thatthese very myths could be dangerous and based upon faulty premises is rarelyeven considered. So we are currently driving down a road leading to a precipiceof annihilation and our education systems continue to talk about how well-pavedthe road is, all the while oblivious to the precipice.Let us look at a few of these myths. First, we begin with our cosmology, our storyof creation. The Judeo-Christian story deeply ingrained in our culture is thatGod created the Earth, that God is transcendent to the Earth, that heaven is ‘upthere’, ‘out there’, ‘somewhere over the rainbow’, somewhere else. According tothe myth, we humans are here for a brief time and then are transported elsewhereto our eternal after-life. The Earth becomes, in this myth, a temporary visitingplace and we humans are for a time either its caretakers or its exploiters, butwe are not co-participants in the evolutionary process. Thomas Berry arguesthat humans are not just a stage in the evolution of the Earth; we are of theEarth. We are 70Berry observes that an outgrowth of the Judeo-Christian transcendence myth is”an intense preoccupation with the personality of the savior, with the interiorspiritual life of the faithful, and with the salvific community,”5 rather than withanything having to do with the natural world. ”The essential thing is redemptionout of the world through a personal savior relationship that transcends all suchconcerns.”6 As humans have lost any mythic, visionary or symbolic connectionsto the Earth, the Earth has come to be seen merely as matter to be used andexploited. ”Because of this loss, we made our terrifying assault upon the Earthwith an irrationality that is stunning in enormity.”7Copyright 1999 TrumpeterA New Cosmology: ’Honoring The Blue Planet’ 5A second myth we have come to accept as ‘a given’ is the myth of progress (seeChapter III). The myth dates back to the 16th and 17th centuries which intro-duced the idea that we can improve life by harnessing nature through scientificdiscovery. The myth has sometimes even been expressed as ‘man conqueringnature’. The scientific method led quickly to the industrial revolution and thetechnological age we now live in. As Berry points out, ”whatever their dif-ferences, both liberal capitalism and Marxian socialism committed themselvestotally to this vision of industrial progress which more than any other singlecause has brought about the disintegration that is taking place throughout theentire planet. By a supreme irony, this closing down of the basic life systemsof the Earth (pollution of the water, soil, trees, and air) has resulted from acommitment to...progress.”8In our schools, we must re-examine these two myths: the myth of transcendenceand the myth of progress. The African-American activist, Stokely Carmichael,once said, ”you are either part of the problem or part of the solution.” Per-petuating these two myths is the problem, for both are leading humanity toself-destruction. If schools do not at least consider this possibility, then schoolsthemselves are also part of the problem. It all goes back to an old argument - doschools exist to inculcate the young into the existing culture or to foster genuinecritical thinking and self-examination and cultural re-evaluation? Most schoolswould argue they favor the latter while unwittingly supporting the former. It iscrucial that we re-examine these myths and the role they play in encouragingour rape of the planet. For example, at present time (1995-96) most educatedcitizens would argue that we have an ecological crisis. They might even agreethat it was brought on by industry-technology, but they will then argue thatour salvation lies in new and more technology and new and more industries.Somehow they believe that a heavier dose of the poison being used to kill thepatient will save the patient. It is pathological but we are so immersed in themythology we cannot see our way out. An old proverb states that you cannotsolve a problem at the level of the problem. Yet, this is exactly what we areattempting to do. This, of course, is assuming that ”we” are trying to solve ourecological problems.Clearly, when any issue of saving the environment comes to the surface, a veryreal and complex issue also surfaces - jobs. When we seek to save forests, fam-ilies who depend on the income from the lumber industry are, quite naturally,distraught and frightened. As more and more jobs disappear through technol-ogy, robotics and ”downsizing,” then environmentalism seems but yet anotherthreat to the economy. There are many ways to respond to this concern. Cer-tainly the cost of saving the planet should not be to ruin the economic livesof families. Transitional-guaranteed incomes along with job-retraining until re-placement jobs are secured is one way to assist families. No family should berendered destitute by legislation to protect the environment. What is crucial,however, is that government leaders from the President of the United Statesto local representatives provide the citizenry with the enlightened leadershipCopyright 1999 TrumpeterA New Cosmology: ’Honoring The Blue Planet’ 6the times require. We cannot keep depleting finite resources forever. This is atruism. At some point, one generation of leaders and citizens must break thecycle of depletion, depletion, depletion. Parents must be educated to see that itis not good national parenting to destroy your child’s heritage. Finally, jobs wemistakenly save today will make all our tomorrow’s a blight. This is not only‘not-good’ parenting; it is also lousy economics.As Berry points out, ”we are eliminating species at a rate never before knownin historic time and in a manner never known in biologic time [that is at a rateunprecedented in 5 billion years.] Destruction of the tropical rain forests of theplanet will involve destroying the habitat of perhaps half the living species ofEarth.” The elitist few who are profiteering as a result of cataclysmic corpo-rate power understand economics. They understand assets and deficits. They,however, miss a key point: ”an exhausted planet is an exhausted economy.”9There is a deficit which will ultimately cause great harm to our children and ourchildren’s children which contemporary profiteers do not factor in their balancesheets - it is the Earth deficit. This deficit, the elimination of Earth resourcesfor human profit and utility, is a direct result of our view of the world - wedo not see ourselves as part of a community of interrelated species utterly de-pendent upon each other - not only for survival but also for joyful witness andcelebration.Our cosmology, our understanding - of the origins and structure of the universe- is simply not adequate to meet the demands of our time. As Robinson Jefferswrites: ”Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beautyof the universe. Love that, not man apart from that.” Nevertheless, we haverapidly moved from economic development to ecological devastation. Somehowwe need to marry the majesty and sophistication and mystery of the Big Bangstory with the Native American understanding of our filial relationship to theland and its creatures. We need to traverse beyond nations and the UnitedNations to the United Species; we need to travel beyond capitalism and socialismto a planetary universalism; we need a new story and a new way of organizingand sharing the Earth’s resources. Capitalism - Nationalism - Corporationismdo not meet the needs of the planet. These needs of the planet are our needs.These are the issues our schools and teachers must at least discuss and bring toconsciousness.There is indeed a crisis. It must be met with awareness. We must be educatedto know what is being done to us and our 5 billion year heritage. We mustlearn that species are being forever eliminated, trees decimated, lakes and seaspolluted, and that our lives are being diminished by profiteers - all in the nameof ”progress.” If schools neglect to teach these lessons, another generation ofapathetic, passive citizens will become the profiteers who will further plunderthe Earth. Already the Blue Planet is changing its color. As I was writing thisparagraph (September 1995), scientists and local residents were complainingthat the beautiful blue Lake Tahoe in California is turning green. Blue skiesCopyright 1999 TrumpeterA New Cosmology: ’Honoring The Blue Planet’ 7we all know are turning gray and brown with layers of pollutants, and brownswaths of clear cut forest graveyards are visible from satellite photographs. TheBlue Planet is under deadly assault. Education is our first and most crucial lineof defense.NOTES1. Kathy Sawyer, ”Universal Truths,” The Washington Post National WeeklyEdition, September 11-17, 1995, p. 6.2. Ibid., p. 7.3. Miriam McGillis, ”Fate of the Earth,” Genesis Farms, Blairstown, N.J.4. Teilhard de Chardin, as quoted in Pablo Neruda Sky Stones, translated byPeter Levitt. Printed by William Dailey, Los Angeles, 1990.5. Berry, Thomas. The Dream of the Earth, p. 126.6. Ibid., p. 129.7. Ibid., p. 135.8. Ibid., p. xii.9. Ibid., p. 73-74.The History of the Earth4.6 Billion YearsCharted on a single year calendar. Each day represents 12 million years.*****************************************************************************• January 1-12:01-12:03 A.M. - The origin of the Earth (”big bang”)• February-The first form of life - a simple bacterium• March-• April-Increasingly complex life forms• May-• November 20 -The first fish• December 10 -Arrival of the dinosaursCopyright 1999 Trumpeter• December 25 -Disappearance of the dinosaurs• December 31 -??Allan, the following order of events does not make sense• (afternoon) - The first pre-human ancestors• 11:45 A.M. - Homo Sapiens• 11:59 P.M. - All of recorded history.• * This chart is drawn from Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich, New WorldNew Mind, p. 7, 1989.Citation FormatCummins, Paul F. (1996) A New Cosmology: ’Honoring The Blue Planet’ Trumpeter: 13, 4.http://www.icaap.org/iuicode?6.13.4.1Document generated from IXML by ICAAP conversion macros.See the ICAAP web site or software repository for details

A New Cosmology: 'Honoring The Blue Planet'

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A New Cosmology: 'Honoring The Blue Planet'

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The Trumpeter - Journal of Ecosophy (Athabasca University)