Guest Opinion: We’ve Been Climbing the Wrong Wall

— by Joe Symons —

When I recently wrote to a colleague “if America is really going to face the future, it will require of its citizens knowledge of conservation ecology, mythology and story telling/ creating, imagination and something on transformation economics (from growth to steady state). Science is a diversion from the depth of the transformation required / it hints at salvation thru cleverness. We are already too clever. We need maturity. Hubris has run its course.”

He replied: “The view you present of things is very black-and-white.”

I responded: “I don’t think my view is black and white. Indeed, I think the prevailing view is black and white. That is, white is humans, black is nature. We’re the good guys and own the planet; everything else (including other humans we choose to not like or respect) wear black hats and should be consumed, destroyed or manipulated (with science as appropriate) to our unique view point.

There’s no wiggle room here, no compromise, no conversation. it’s white v black and white should always prevail. This is the pair of opposites; mythologically this is an immature (tho common) view of the world. If we are all one, there are no opposites. At the deepest level, mythologically and now reinforced by quantum physics, we indeed are all one, but our white/black immaturity doesn’t want to go there.

Yet.

Science in service of maturity is one thing; science in service of hubris is another. Right now there is very very little science in service of wisdom, one-ness, and balance. Most of it is driven by the same hubric energy that Mickey Mouse portrayed in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

The whole idea that animals and plants co-evolved to create and maintain topsoil and an unbelievably complex chain of moving molecules from the ocean to the land and back to support complex life forms is really very very new. Climate Change is just the tip of the iceberg; for the past many years I thought it was most of the iceberg.

Thus, to answer your question “how long do we have?” well, the big answer is forever. That answer of course begs the question of who is “we”.

And to answer your question “What can we do about it?” we can do a lot, but what we choose to do has to be informed by the right mythology. We’ve imagined a wall, let’s call it progress, and we’ve put our ladder on it, and we’ve spent lifetimes climbing it, and now we are very rapidly discovering that we imagined the wrong wall in the first place. Holy Shiitake Batman! We’ve dragged the whole human population up this ladder, which is now leaning against a wall that is disintegrating.