THE TRUTH ABOUT NATURE: HOW TO SAVE THE WORLD

Five years ago, at the age of 48, I decided it was time to stop complaining and being depressed about the state of the world, and start doing something about it. I began to read voraciously, an average of two books a week, and gradually put together a picture in my own mind of the current state of the world, how we got here, and what we needed to do about it. In February of last year I started a weblog, in part because I wanted to share what I had learned, and in part to discuss it with others and find out if they felt the same way that I did. At that time I wrote an essay that described my learning journey to that point. Since then, I have read a great deal more, and engaged a lot of very bright and perceptive people in discussion of these issues. I intended to update the essay, but I have come to realize that the sequential story of discovering the unprecedented crisis this world is in today is essentially what the 'environmental philosophy' category of my weblog tells already. What is needed now instead is a recapitulation, much shorter and not necessarily in the order in which I learned it, of what I have learned and what I believe we need to do to stave off ecological catastrophe. That is what this essay is about. It is my way of 'signing on' to the 1992 World Scientists' Warning to Humanity signed by 1600 senior scientists from 71 countries, which stated: "Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished. A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated." At the root of my environmental philosophy is a growing belief that just having everyone 'do their best' to make the world a better place will not be enough. In other words, we need to bring about a dramatic change in our world in this century, a much greater and faster change than any culture can achieve organically. A change this drastic and this sudden has occurred four times before in human history: about 30,000 years ago, with the invention of the axe, the flint arrowhead and the spear about 10,000 years ago, with the invention of catastrophic agriculture and animal domestication during the Renaissance, with the invention of modern science during the industrial revolution, with the invention of automation Each of these revolutionary inventions utterly changed the way humans lived. None of them, I think importantly, came about because of political or social actions or revolutions -- they were all (in the broad sense of the term) technology-based. What we need urgently today is another such revolution, every bit as radical as these four. We need to find, and rapidly implement, a better, sustainable way to live. This essay is organized around ten 'arguments'. I am not smart enough to be able to distill the entire logic supporting these arguments into this essay, but I will refer the reader to sources that do. The Bibliography at the end of this essay contains the full list of these sources. Some of the books and articles in this Bibliography contradict each other in places. I freely admit to being selective in what I've taken from each. I trust my instincts in that selection. My purpose is not to persuade you, dear reader, but merely to show you what persuaded me. The essay also contains a systems chart of 'How Nature Works' and another of 'Why Civilization Doesn't'. These charts are my attempt to capture the interrelationship of the forces that allowed the world to function as a self-managed system so effectively for millions of years, including the first three million years after the appearance of man, and the forces that have largely replaced these natural forces since the dawn of civilization, driven largely by the changes wrought by the four human revolutions noted above. Here are the ten Arguments: The Truth About Nature: What We Have Forgotten Man is not Special, not the Crown of Creation, or a Species Apart, but rather a fairly minor evolutionary adaptation to one ordinary branch of the tree of life on Earth. The impact and 'success' of this species is no more an indication of greater importance, predestination or divine will than is the impact and success of the mosquito, HIV, bacteria, cancer cells or the Plague. Our planet is a single self-managing organism. All life on Earth exists to sustain, nourish and support all other life on Earth. As with a human body or any other organism, that is only possible when each component of the organism does its part, in balance and harmony with the rest. In that sense the Earth is sacred, it demands and earns respect and obedience to its 'laws' because that is essential to the survival of all life. The Earth is full of sentient, intelligent, communicative, emotional creatures. Most human moralities and religions seem to hold that creatures with these attributes deserve freedom from harrassment, suffering and enslavement, and the right to exist. Therefore much human activity, which deprives all non-humans of these rights and freedoms, is an atrocity no less despicable than human genocide, holocaust, torture and slavery, and must be stopped. Small is beautiful, and place gives us identity: The community as the basic political unit and Natural Enterprise as the basic economic unit work best because they can be self-selecting and self-managing, and are extremely adaptive. In nature, the community teaches you what you need to live, it defines you and gives you purpose, it anchors and connects you. And though we are all part of a web, a mosaic, and we all travel, ultimately we have our own place, our 'home'. If you're not totally connected with everything and every creature that is part of your place, then it isn't your place. If you don't have a place, then you don't yet really exist. It is your community, your ecosystem, all of it, that is your place -- not the isolated, nuclear-family, locked house on 'private' property. Larger political units (states) and economic units (corporations) are inherently unwieldy, inflexible and less democratic. Because of their sheer size they are detached, remote, and cannot possibly understand or respond to our needs. Forged from both idealism and cynical greed for power, these abominations serve no useful purpose except to protect us from other large political and economic units (and they do that poorly). We learn what we're shown, not what we're told. Our senses provide us what we need to learn, to really understand, to be happy. When we live in our minds, we close ourselves off from so much. Formal education is futile. To bring about change we need to show people something that works better, and reconnect them with their senses, their imagination, the Earth. The Truth About Civilization: The Problem and Its Root Cause Civilization was a well-intentioned response to a sudden drastic shortage of human food (possibly arising from overhunting of large game and/or the last ice age). But it was not an instinctive way to live, and needed a lot of artificial constructs and controls to work. Our civilization systematically brainwashes us into staggering cultural homogeneity and imaginative poverty, and to believe ours is the only way to live -- that there is no other human way. To do so it must get us to forget or deny the 5 truths above, and teach us these great myths: That our instincts are unreliable (what nature 'tells' us to do), and logic and morality are infallible (what human codes tell us to do); That life is a struggle of 'good vs. evil', and that we are inherently weak, selfish and lazy; That it's good to be 'normal' and to be like other people, and that we're all part of society and not ultimately, terribly alone; That we must be unconditionally obedient to our 'superiors', their hierarchy and their laws, or society and order will collapse; That our well-being is appropriately measured by our material possessions and our ability to acquire more; That disparity of wealth, health and dignity is necessary and inevitable and that with hard work 'have-nots' can become 'haves'; That we must all work long, hard hours at unsatisfying jobs or we will all suffer and starve; That humans have an inherent right to all the land and all the resources of Earth (and even beyond); That history began with civilization, before which life was short, fearful, nasty and brutish (and in nature and tribal cultures, it still is). We are instinctively responsive to, and responsible for, everything we have control over. In nature that is the immediate community -- what goes on outside is not one's business. But now that we, as a 'global community' control the whole world we cannot respond, cannot bear the commensurate responsibility. This conflict between our instincts and reality, along with the stress of overpopulation and separation from nature, has made us all mentally ill. This illness manifests itself in violence and war, hatred, abuse, greed, jealousy, and fear. We are helpless to do what we 'know' we must. It is like facing 'Sophie's choice' (being asked by the Gestapo to decide which of your children to spare from the gas chamber) over and over and over. We cannot bear to know, so we turn off, we hide inside, we distract ourselves. It is only when we don't know, and cannot even imagine, that we can go on, and tolerate the world we have created. This makes it easier for us to accept the brainwashing that ours is the only way to live, to tolerate the abuses and outrages that weknow are going on behind closed doors, and to accept the arguments of skeptics and apologists and holocaust denyers that it's not really that bad, or perhaps it's even good, or at least it's divine will so it's beyond our control, there's nothing we can do about it, we're not really responsible As a consequence, we are poised, by the end of this century, to create a world that contains one billion Americans and fourteen billion people, and uses eight Earths worth of resources (at current regeneration rates) just to meet human needs. A world that will, as a direct consequence of this overcrowding and unsustainable consumption, be preoccupied with catastrophic famines, epidemic (new) human diseases, crop failures, cannibalism, crop failures, nuclear and biological wars, water rationing and desertification, economic depression, catastrophic terrorism, cascading weather disasters, and the decline of democracy, constitutional liberalism, and the rule of law. A world, arguably, not worth living in. Forward Not Back: The Solution Process Solutions are needed that either directly address overpopulation and unsustainable consumption, or address the causes of these problems (see the Why Civilization Doesn't Work chart). Or, alternatively, we could resign ourselves to the inevitable crash of this horrible world (probably as a result of a new catastrophic disease or nuclear or biological holocaust), and start designing a post-apocalypse world that will allow the survivors to carry on and perhaps learn from our mistakes. Solutions, throughout history, have come in four 'flavours': innovative (new technologies), social (changing people's minds), commercial (changing the economy) and political (changing laws and regulations). Innovations have been, throughout human history, by far the most effective and enduring. Revolutionary change requires radical solutions -- solutions that undermine, replace and ultimately destroy existing systems, technologies, ideas and beliefs. But they must represent bold steps forward, not nostalgic steps back to a pre-civilization world that is no longer possible or desirable. If we hope to impose change on a world unready and unable to save itself, enough of us must be informed, aware of the consequences of our actions, skeptical, willing and able to learn from nature, fully committed, confident we can do it, passionate in our search for radical solutions and courageous in following through on them. Reframing History: Understanding How Man Lived in Harmony With Nature for Three Million Years To appreciate the truth about nature you need to look at it from outside the frame, the filter through you've been taught to look at everything. In other words, you need to unlearn, or at least forget, what you've learned, been told, and come to understand about nature and about the entire world in which we live. We need to give you a kind of cultural amnesia for awhile. If you're willing, let's see if we can do that. Most people have a picture of humans at the top of a long, complex evolutionary tree, an inevitability, a pinnacle, a culmination. In fact the late palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, in his book Full House, teaches us that homo sapiens is in evolutionary terms a small, recent and ordinary evolution, a small part of a small and undistinguished (if you study variations in our DNA) branch of the tree of life. He also teaches us that evolution is not about 'up' at all, but rather a constant series of experiments, variations, random walks from what has succeeded, as nature's method of ensuring the resiliency of life on Earth by checking to see if this minor variation might be a bit hardier in this ecosystem, that minor variation in that ecosystem etc. Most of these variations fail, but quite a few succeed, so to the outside observer all life on Earth, and perhaps on every planet, appears to be a single living organism that takes root, flowers, grows to occupy as much space as the climate will permit, and then continues to change in a balance, an equilibrium, responding to climate change and introducing new random variations in an eternal quest to find forms that are best suited to survive in the little place in space where it happened to land. Gould's lessons are: Darwinian selection, this 'random walk' of evolution in which new variations are constantly introduced and tried out to see if they're better suited to the local ecosystem, tends to favour, for short periods, new species that are bigger, fiercer, and smarter than those currently prevailing. By 'fiercer' Gould means species that have the ability and tendency to catch and eat a lot of prey. By 'smarter' he means species that can discover how to use tools to supplement the natural tools evolution endowed them with. For brief periods, these bigger, fiercer, smarter creatures squeeze out the rest, decreasing biodiversity and biocomplexity. The result is temporary fragility of the ecosystem to the point the dominant creatures begin to destroy the system's ability to support other life, including its own prey. The dominant creatures then find themselves overcrowded, short of food, and/or vulnerable to opportunistic diseases, as shown in the chart above. The consequent decline in numbers of the dominant species removes the stress so ecological equilibrium is gradually restored, biodiversity and biocomplexity again explode, and the system thrives in ever-shifting balance until the next big, fierce, smart creature evolves. These cycles of evolutionary change and re-balance occur constantly at the local level, and sometimes, when the re-balancing forces take longer to emerge, at a regional or global level. So natural selection paradoxically favours short-term prosperity of creatures that, in the longer run, could be detrimental or even catastrophic to the ecosystem as a whole. In any laboratory with trillions of experiments going on constantly, some of them will get temporarily out of control. In these cases, nature has to bring in the big fire extinguishers -- epidemic disease, cannibalism and war -- to restore the balance quickly, and the result, which fortunately is rare, is called an Extinction Event. These events, which punctuate the history of our planet, are described in Michael Boulter's book Extinction. In some cases, drastic changes in the ecosystem can also precipitate Extinction Events. Most scientists believe that the last two major Extinction Events were caused by massive volcanic eruptions and by a meteor impact. Both occurrences blocked out the sun with dust particles and prevented photosynthesis, and the latter of these caused the premature extinction of the dinosaurs. Much more recently, another meteor impact may have caused Earth to wobble on its axis, producing drastic and sudden climate change and the Ice Ages and causing a series of lesser Extinction Events. The resultant loss of prey may have led to the decision of homo sapiens, up until then a hunter-gatherer for three million years, to try out an agricultural culture, the culture which currently dominates the planet and ironically threatens to bring about the next Extinction Event prematurely. After the next major Extinction Event, whenever it occurs, Gould argues that the new evolutionary cycle will produce species that are so different from us as to be unimaginable: The probability of vertebrates (which most larger Earth creatures and all Sci-Fi aliens improbably are) emerging from any primordial soup is infinitesimally small. But whatever it looks like (if it's even 'visible' or otherwise discernible by our species), if it's big, fierce and smart it is likely to exterminate itself before it visits us in UFOs, or vice versa. So hoping for aliens to rescue us from our cloddishness, or hoping to find a new habitable world before our time runs out, or hoping to find answers in SETI, are all just foolish wastes of time and energy. We're in this all alone, and there's no deus in this machina, no matter how much we pray for one. Gould's theories have earned him the enmity not only of creationists and the religious right (for obvious reasons) but also of other evolutionists who would like to believe evolution and the dominance of the human species is a progression with perhaps some deeper purpose, result or guiding hand. This view of all life on Earth as a single, self-regulating organism is called the Gaia Hypothesis, so named by James Lovelock. Unlike the previously prevailing view of most scientists, and historians, that life on Earth is a constant, violent, competitive struggle, this hypothesis sees life on Earth as a cooperative undertaking for mutual advantage. Earth as a single organism, Lovelock argues, is analogous to the human body -- the constituent parts work together to make the whole successful, rather than constantly warring with each other for dominance and space. In fact prehistoric man's life was not, as we have been led to believe, "short, nasty and brutish", but idyllic and leisurely, for three million years, argue revisionist economist-historians Peter Jay, in his book The Wealth of Man, and Marshall Sahlins, in his book Original Affluence. Jay's timeline parallels that of Gould: When, 60 million years ago a meteorite plunged the planet into darkness and exterminated the dinosaurs, smaller species got the chance to evolve and thrive, spawning on Earth an enormous and interconnected diversity of life in dynamic equilibrium. That amazing, Utopian heterogeneity continued until about 30,000 years ago (an infinitesimally small flicker of time before now) when the population of homo sapiens suddenly exploded. Until that time, according to Jay, early humans probably lived an Eden-like existence, easily preying on large, slow and abundant fellow mammals in all corners of Earth, and 'working' only a few hours per week. As these species became extinct (aided perhaps by the Ice Ages and by the increasing sophistication of our hunting tools), we turned to new technologies, most notably agriculture and animal herding, to feed our exploding numbers, which rose from 6 million ten thousand years ago to 60 million three thousand years ago to 600 million five hundred years ago and to 6 billion today. Each ten-fold increase from our 'natural' six million population (which prevailed for the first 99% of human history on Earth) increased the effort each individual had to make to sustain his family, competition for land and resources, and in turn cycles of war, famine and epidemic disease. In the process, our resourcefulness led us to industrialize and urbanize to improve productivity, and, more recently, to so horribly foul our environment that its ability to support non-human life is quickly vanishing, due to stress from global warming, exhaustion of arable land, fisheries and forests, desertification, overpopulation, shrinking of the water table, and a host of other man-made threats. Jay is a pessimist about the competitiveness that our civilization has inspired, believing that we are unlikely to ever put the collective interest of all life on Earth ahead of our individual interests in the face of ever-exploding population and growing scarcity. So we live now on a world where two systems coexist uncomfortably with each other: The 600 million year old natural system of biodiversity, experimental evolution, and continuous re-balancing, punctuated by Extinction Events, and the 30 thousand year old man-made system of continuous growth, expansion, internal competition, and innovative technologies. We'll look at the man-made system later. For now, let's go back and try to understand the natural system. How Nature Works Imagine that you, and a small group of other people, were to wake up tomorrow with absolutely no memories of your past or even of the language you spoke, in the middle of a forest in a tropical wilderness. Even if none of you had ever spent a moment away from the shelter of civilization in your life, you would not awake and be filled with dread and fear. You think you might because in the 'real' world you have been conditioned to fear nature, to see it as savage, violent, a struggle to survive. You have been taught, brainwashed, to distrust and ignore your instincts. But now you would awaken with no such prejudgements. You would become, in many ways, as children, and your whole group would awake full of wonder, and greet each other awkwardly, and then, probably, until hunger and thirst and sexual desire started to command your attention, you would probably play with your new 'friends', exploring and discovering, as children do, and as the newborn of all species in nature do. Imagine, too, that there is an unseen force that, for a while, protects you -- pulls you away before you can touch plants that are poisonous, guides you to safe, comfortable places to sleep, eat, drink and play, and repels predators, until you have learned from this force -- let's say you call it ma -- how to survive without its intervention, at which point ma leaves you to your own devices. Your group becomes, in fact, a hunter-gatherer tribe, completely unaware of any of the precepts of civilization -- language, science, reason, morality. Your initial state is one of astonishing joy, wonder, health, well-being, self-sufficiency, peace, security, community, learning, alertness, awareness, cooperation, imagination, love and respect for nature, and, to the extent needed, creativity -- all the elements of natural systems shown in the diagram above. You will instinctively hunt together and gather and share food, and you will recognize in each other specialized talents for doing one thing or another, and learn from your expert peers. There will be a 'pecking order' of sorts, based on consensus of, and respect for, those whose talents are most valuable -- keen senses, physical strength, creativity -- but the tribe will be egalitarian. There will be no hoarding or inequitable distribution of food or other resources. Since there is no scarcity, sharing will be according to need. Sex will be consensual and non-exclusive. Some members of the tribe will be eaten by predators, and others will contract diseases and go off by themselves to die, but these deaths will not cause the members of the tribe to become fearful, paranoid, selfish, greedy or violent. They will simply be accepted as the way life is. Your tribe of amnesiacs will know of no other way to respond. You will respect and flee from predators, and be alert for them and protect your young from them, but you will not fear them. That is how nature works. Each creature strives to live and to bring more of their kind into the world not because they fear death, but because life is wonderful. When you see tiny birds scrounging at your bird-feeder or shivering in a tree in winter, don't feel sorry for them. They are not helpless and struggling and cowed. They shiver because instinctively they know it keeps their body temperature up. They have amazing (at least to us, who lack them) instinctive survival talents -- they need a lot of food in winter to keep warm, and they find it easily, enjoyably, and if they can't, they simply hibernate, and if they even suspect they won't be able to, they'll migrate. They can fly, and I envy them, I wish I were one of them. Although lots of birds are eaten by predators, few freeze or starve to death -- famine is a modern human invention, due to our huge numbers and loss of natural adaptability. If you see a dead bird, it almost certainly succumbed to one of three human-caused injuries: Collision with a window, or an automobile, or a domestic cat that no longer needed or wanted to eat what it killed. The people in your amnesiac tribe, and all the creatures in the wild, know what David Abram calls the Spell of the Sensuous. Many animals have senses that are much more acute than ours, and we have lost much of our sensory acuity and openness, largely because we live most of our lives in cities and indoors, areas of great sensory homogeneity, poverty and concealment. We no longer have either rich sensory environments to experience, or practice exercising our senses, opportunities to open ourselves up to the richness of sounds, sights, smells, tastes and feelings in nature, so that even in those rare times when we are in natural environments we are unaware, insensitive, closed, disinterested in their magic, their meaning, their knowledge. Our ignorance of nature, combined with our collective arrogance (because of our unquestioned evolutionary success), leads us to believe that we are the only sentient, emotional, intelligent creatures on the planet, and to tell ourselves that all other life couldn't possibly have done so well for so many millions of years because they're smart, sensitive and creative, so it must be because they're automatons just doing what they've been 'programmed' to do. But just as economists and historians are tearing apart our myths about prehistoric man, scientists are systematically deconstructing the anthropocentric myths of our emotional and intellectual uniqueness and superiority. Although our incompetence at deciphering animal language and communications has so far made it conveniently impossible to prove conclusively, there is very compelling evidence that many animals exhibit extraordinary intelligence, great awareness of their own existence, and profound emotion. Jeff Masson's work on the emotional life of animals, most notably a book called When Elephants Weep, supports this theory. As an environmentalist, and a caretaker and observer of cats and dogs throughout my life, I had always believed that other animals were almost as sentient as humans, and that our bigger brains had led us to be different in degree from other animals, but not unique or fundamentally different. Until I read Masson I was a bit embarrassed about, and unsure of, this belief, since it seemed romantic and impossible to substantiate. Masson's extremely scientific, thorough and well-substantiated work not only dispelled my embarrassment, it hardened my position against those who, as apologists for animal testing and pathetically weak animal-cruelty laws, label animal rights as being anthropomorphic and hence absurd. They do so in total, convenient and deliberate denial of overwhelming scientific evidence that animals are sentient, intelligent and capable of deep emotion, long-lasting memory and astute reasoning. I have since read other works that ascribe similar intelligence and emotional sensitivity to primates learning sign language, wolves, whales and dolphins, ravens and other corvid birds (Bernd Heinrich's book Mind of the Raven is especially persuasive and hugely entertaining). At this point I do not know to what to ascribe continuing human ignorance and inaction to improve the lot of our fellow animal creatures on this planet. When I hear arguments that "we need to solve the problems of humans first" or that "you can't equate the life of an animal with a human life" I am incredulous -- such thinking is beyond ignorance and to me represents a deep-seated fear and hatred of all things natural (which to me, since we are part of 'all things natural' is a form of self-loathing). Or it represents a blind acceptance of religious dogma. Whichever it is, I can't fathom such a position. I know that, like all species, we are slow to change our thinking and beliefs, but I can only hope that, with people like Masson and Heinrich systematically debunking the myths about our fellow creatures in solid scientific ways, we will at least move to reduce animal cruelty and begin to try to understand what other animals have to teach us, and to say to us. In fact given some new evidence that emotion is principally a response to sensory stimulus, and knowledge that some animals have greater sensitivity to many sensory stimuli than humans, it's quite possible that many animals lead much richer emotional lives than we do, that they are more 'sensitive' in every sense of the word than we are, that they 'feel' more, and more deeply, than we could ever hope to. Why then don't they articulate this, so that we understand? Perhaps they do -- maybe we are just so numb to all language other than our limited and clumsy human ones that we don't 'hear' them. Or perhaps it's just that they don't have to -- maybe we developed 'sophisticated' abstract language not because we were uniquely able to, but because it was necessary to convey precise instructions about man-made processes (like harvesting crops) in our strange new unnatural hierarchical culture, whereas other animals always survived just fine without such artificial constructs. How sophisticated a language do you need to say "danger", "food", "yes", "no", and "I love you", and ultimately what else is really important to say? I'm being facetious of course -- humans now need our language and our technology to live comfortable lives. But most other animals know a better way to live, and don't need sophisticated language or technology to do so. What We've Lost, and Forgotten Another truth about nature is the importance of community and of place. Civilization has supplanted our sense of community -- the essential unit of social life for all other creatures and cultures on Earth -- with constructs that allow greater command and control over all civilized humans and all human endeavour: The family, the corporation, the religious order and the state. The family is a small, nuclear social unit that is undemocratic (the power is unequally distributed) and helpless (it can't survive without interacting with larger social groups). The corporation, the religious order and the state are large, hierarchical social units that are undemocratic (the power is unequally distributed) and omnipotent. By giving the adult (usually the father) the power in the family unit, corporations, religious orders and states are able to lower social resistance to keeping the real power for themselves, which is essential to maintaining order in a world of six billion people who intuitively want to self-govern. The community competes for allegiance and authority with the family on one side, and with the corporation, the religious order, and the state on the other, so it has been systematically attacked and subverted from both sides. When we say we live in a 'community' today, it doesn't mean a group of people with whom we have special kinship (unless we are exceptionally lucky), it means the homogeneous yet unintegrated collection of nuclear family homes that is part of a larger, powerful state. This community has no real power, no real authority, and no real organization, and commands no allegiance from those who live in it, who cannot even really be called 'members'. We are, however, members of a family, and members as well of a state (citizens), religious order and corporation (employees). The place in which we live usually bears no signs of its natural heritage (trees are cut down and non-native trees and flowers planted in their place, and all houses look much like houses everywhere else in the civilized world, and block the view of everything except the neighbouring houses). And many of us live transient lives -- we move often to other, identical-looking places far away, and during the day we commute from our 'homes' on identical-looking highways to identical-looking office buildings and plants. So we have no sense of community, no sense of place, and no loyalty to either. In the natural world, community and place are paramount. The community is democratic, self-managing and self-selecting: Even if you are born into it, either you have to pass a rite of passage to stay (with the approval of other community members) or you are expected to leave and find another community (or form your own). You belong to a community -- a much stronger bond than mere membership. The community (like the amnesiac tribe described earlier) teaches you what you need to live, defines you and gives you purpose. It anchors and connects you. And though we are all part of a web, a mosaic, and we all travel, ultimately we have our own place, our 'home'. If you're not totally connected with everything and every creature that is part of your place, then it isn't your place. If you don't have a place, then you don't yet really exist. It is your community, your ecosystem, all of it, that is your place -- not the isolated, nuclear-family, locked house on 'private' property. A house is not a home. And even though most humans live largely inside their own minds, a mind is not a home either, it is not a real place. Very few of us in the civilized world really belong to a community, or have found our true place, a natural home. In nature, by contrast, every creature either belongs to a community and to a place, or is in a lifelong quest for them. It is instinctive to belong to a community and to a place because in Darwinian terms that is what works best. Even we humans, newcomers to the Earth, have three million years of programming in our DNA driving us to seek community and find our place. And because it works so well it is not surprising that most creatures, human and otherwise, who have found where they belong and found their place are quite passionate about it -- they will defend it from all outsiders of their species, even to the death if necessary (which it rarely is, because except for civilized man, most creatures profoundly respect the communities and places of others, and unless welcomed in will go back or move on). And they will share their space with communities of all other species that also call that place home, because they instinctively understand the reverence of place and community, appreciate the value of diversity, and that all life on Earth is sacred. The love that you have for your place and your community, and the other and diverse lives with which you share it, is what gives your life meaning. There is no 'Tragedy of the Commons' in nature, because of the profound understanding that every place is somebody's home, a part of somebody's community, and must be respected. Land is not merely property to be owned or fenced off by one individual of one species. It is sacred, holy, part of life itself. It 'belongs' to no one. We belong to the land, to the web of life of which it, and we, are all a part. Now I know how David Abram must have felt writing The Spell of the Sensuous. It's all too hard, maybe impossible, to explain the truth about nature in words and charts and pretty pictures. It's like trying to describe life outside to someone who has lived their whole life in a prison. A prison with no bars or locks but which, astonishingly, no one walks away from. I can't tell you, but nature can show you her truth. But you need to let her. If you live most of your life indoors, in a car, in a city, inside your own mind, it will be hard, like learning a new language when you're old. To understand you will have to: Spend time with her, in wilderness (not just a park or a cottage or a summer camp) Open your senses, and re-learn to really see, hear, smell, taste and feel again Re-learn to trust your instincts: For three million years they showed man the way to live Find a real community and a place in nature to which, even if only for awhile, you can belong Silence the noise in your head Re-learn to imagine what is real, what is really going on that you can't see, and what is possible Learn to think critically and profoundly beneath the issues and distractions of the day to what really matters Find the courage to challenge a culture that doesn't make sense to you, to be different, to be fearless, to be genuine, to be yourself, and not like everyone else (rational and moral and superficial and passive) You don't have to do all these things. If you do a few, even a couple, the others will probably happen naturally. I don't expect many people to understand or buy any of this. The idea that six billion of us are needlessly and voluntarily living profoundly destructive, counter-intuitive, unhappy, unhealthy, unnatural, hard, self-limiting, self-sacrificing, deprived lives, and that all we need to do is learn the lessons of nature, change our minds, walk away from civilization and create an stunningly better, joyful life, and save the world in the process, is just too radical, too insane an idea for most people to accept. Who are we to throw away 30 millennia of civilization and try to build something new based on a three million year old idea? There must be a good reason why the world is the way it is. We're humans, we're the Crown of Creation, if there was a better way to live we'd have found it. We can't change it anyway, we don't have the power, it's not our place. And we're too busy just doing our jobs, just trying to get by. Don't bother us. It's too hard. You're asking too much of us. Go bug someone else. OK. So don't listen to me. Listen to the quiet, nagging voice inside you. The voice that resonates with your three million year old DNA, that's telling you that something is very wrong, that life should be better, happier, less of a struggle than this.The truth about nature is that she is inside us, all around us, just waiting for us to ask her what to do. And waiting to welcome us all home. Why Civilization Doesn't Work, and Why We Invented It I have previously explained what we lost when, thirty thousand years ago, in response to a sudden shortage of big game, we gave up our hunter-gatherer cultures, started the tedious and back-breaking work of agriculture, invented civilization and tried to convince everyone that this strange and unintuitive new society was a good and necessary way to live. Although the 'history' we are taught in school starts with the birth of civilization, and treats everything before that as a non-event, books like Daniel's Quinn's Ishmael and Story of B, Richard Manning's Against the Grain, Derrick Jensen's A Truth Older Than Words and the essays of Jared Diamond have started to develop a credible, broader picture of human history, explaining that the transition of three-million-year-old homo sapiens from hunter-gatherer to farmer-settler was a traumatic one, and led inadvertently to consequences of great suffering and misery and ecological stresses that today imperil the survival of all life on the planet. This picture looks something like this: We learned that for civilization to work, we had to live closer together, and to work in a coordinated way in new and difficult jobs. To do so we needed to evolve new, abstract, technical languages and create hierarchies of command and control. The crowding, the coercion, and the development of very successful agricultural technologies had three immediate consequences: High levels of physical and emotional stress (nature's way of signalling and dealing with overcrowding), excess food (which in turn led to exploding population, and even more crowding), and, paradoxically, recurring and catastrophic shortages, as the new monoculture crops occasionally and spectacularly failed. Thus the vicious cycle shown in the chart above began. With more and more people crammed into civilization's new 'cities', opportunistic diseases that required proximity quickly evolved and blossomed into epidemics. The human forms of poxviruses, nature's ubiquitous species-specific population regulator, became endemic and killed over a billion of the first few billion humans born into civilization. The crowding and the loss of community and purpose and place led to mental illness, to new physical ailments (like tooth decay and heart disease) connected to the loss of variety in our diet, and to addictions, which are now so common and widespread that we have come to think of them as normal, and only notice them in the descendants of tribal cultures most recently conquered and forced to adapt to civilization's ways, where their symptoms are most tragic and most obvious. The crowding also produced continuous violence and war, as fighting broke out over increasingly scarce land and resources, and the ethic that had held for three million years that land was sacred, and belonged to the community that was already there, was replaced by an ethic of acquisition, of justifiable genocide of uncivilized cultures, and of manifest destiny to conquer and seize every acre of land to meet civilization's insatiable needs. Catastrophic crop failures led to famines, previously unknown on the planet, and the 'fear of not having enough' caused everyone to try to hoard surpluses, and prompted those higher in the new hierarchies to demand more than their share, and to use their power to establish and preserve a staggering new inequality of health and wealth. Social order, which for three million years had been egalitarian and instinctive and built around the tribal community, started to break down as the new larger social structures did not work on the same principles. New social principles therefore had to be developed: New religions taught that suffering was normal and divine will; New laws and punishments and prisons were introduced to enforce obedience to the rules set by those at the top of the hierarchy; New educational and moral codes taught that war is honourable and inevitable, that some people deserve more wealth and security than others, and that conformity and other qualities that keep order and discipline are 'virtues'; The nuclear family unit was conceived to promote patriarchy and hierarchy as the natural human order, and to replace the loss of the tribal community. And all of these new systems portrayed nature as dangerous, brutal, something that had to be conquered and subdued in the interest of man, and portrayed man as divine, above and apart from all other life, so that man was absolved from the guilt, the responsibility and the intuitive distress over destroying nature and enslaving the tribal peoples and animals that got in the way of global dominion by 'civilized' man, in his insatiable need for more land, more resources and more slave labour to feed the ever-increasing masses. And man, social, adaptable, gullible creature that he is, bought it all. He learned to forget his true nature, to distrust his instinct, and to believe that civilization, despite its vicious cycle, was the only way to live. It's only in the last century that the wisdom of this new civilization ethos has been seriously questioned by more than a few eccentric individuals. This century has seen the worst wars, the worst famines, the worst epidemics, the greatest suffering of any century in civilization's brief 300-century history, and the lack of progress has started to lead many to a sense that something is terribly wrong. In The Axemaker's Gift, Burke & Ornstein reveal that human innovativeness, which originally helped man adapt and live better, is now used as a tool to entrench authority and concentrate power. In The Unconscious Civilization John Ralston Saul explains that the political and economic and corporate systems we built to make our lives better have now enslaved us, and are out of our control. In Ockham's Razor, Wade Rowland argues that civilization has dehumanized humans, and that science and technology have accelerated rather than slowed this process in the last millennium. In People Before Profit, Charles Derber recounts the cautionary tale of the 18th century robber barons and warns that corporatism is once again driving much human activity, in ways that benefit only a tiny elite and impoverish all other life on Earth. In When Corporations Rule the World, David Korten shows how corporations, which we invented to try to improve the production and distribution of resources, have lost sight of their purpose and now control us, while producing ever-greater inequality of wealth. The Worldwatch Institute, in its annual State of the World reports, dispassionately identify the measures of growing ecological collapse. And in The New Rulers of the World, Jon Pilger shows how much control now resides in a tiny number of people -- fewer than a million -- with a vested interest in perpetuating the vicious cycle above. Richard Manning's Against the Grain explains how grain surpluses were the first human currency, used to bribe some people into beating down others to establish the first human hierarchies, and describes the incredible vulnerability of monoculture agriculture to catastrophic failures that has led to soul-destroying famines, wars, unimaginable suffering, and even cannibalism -- and ultimately to the political systems that perpetrate these disasters and lead to overpopulation, modern concentration-camp style factory farms, and staggering inequality of power and wealth. As these and other authors paint a disturbing picture of civilization's well-intentioned social, political and economic folly, other writers describe civilization's devastating impact on our psyches. Edward Hall, in The Hidden Dimension, explains the psychological impact of overcrowding as a natural stress reaction common to all animal species. The purpose of this reaction is to induce in creatures that have overpopulated a series of hormonal changes that reduce fertility, increase aggressiveness (to spread them out), and increase susceptibility