We live in times of great – and mostly self-inflicted – turmoil.
Violent conflicts and outright war. Constant revelations of gross injustice – social, economic, racial, gender-based – stretching back over decades, centuries or even millennia. Political leaders who noisily promise much and quietly deliver little. Corporate leaders who relentlessly parrot the idea that their sole loyalty is to their shareholders.
Overarching this is a growing mountain of evidence that humans have radically disrupted the Earth’s systems – each others’ lives – especially in the industrial world. While seeking our own individual goals we have ignored or dismissed, until recent decades, the harms we have been inflicting on our planetary home and on one another.
Now, those harms are coming back to bite us: extreme weather events, unbearable heat, all-pervasive pollution, disappearing plants and animals, displaced and destroyed human lives and entire communities.
We face, therefore, an imperative for transformational change – change much more than a shift in fashion or political loyalties or a move to a new job or community. We now must see ourselves not as a dominant or superior life form on Planet Earth, but as beings embedded in, and utterly dependent on, a vast collection of other living communities.
We must accept our over-riding responsibility to co-create a good home for all people and all life forms, not just for ourselves.
Indigenous peoples everywhere have been trying to tell us this for a very long time; they have been at the forefront of the Rights of Nature and social justice movements in Canada and around the world, while we non-Indigenous have been busy obliterating plants and animals for our own power, pleasure and profit.
Western science itself gives us ample grounds for humility, revealing that the Earth, formed 4.6 billion years ago, rotates around one star among the estimated 200 billion that form our galaxy, which we call the Milky Way, in a universe formed 13.8 billion years ago, containing 20 billion trillion stars and measuring 94 billion light years across.
We live on a planet that is simply a tiny, beneficent school for the expansion of our real-time moral and ethical consciousness.
What I hope to share in this column is evidence for a fundamental notion: that everything we do in our lives must be based on sharing with one another and with all the living things around us.
Planet Earth will survive us, if we fail to change our ways. Gaia will move on. But descendants will bear the painful burdens of our failure, and will look back on our unwitting narcissism with anger and despair.
On the other hand, if we embrace our critical responsibility, and follow both Western science and the paths laid out for us by our Indigenous ancestors around the world, then I believe we will be honoured as the wise generation that woke up in time, and led humanity away from the dangerous cliff of our own making.
And then there will be rejoicing, for one and all, down through the ages.
Warren Bell is a long-time family physician in Salmon Arm with a consuming interest and involvement in community and global affairs.
