In her book, A Safe and Sustainable World, the promise of ecological design., Nancy Jack Todd asks this question. She says “People often ask why , if the knowledge, skills, and technologies for a sustainable world pioneered by New Alchemy and Ocean Arks offer so many solutions to the problems that beset us, they are not more widely applied. It is a tough question. And there are many answers. I sometimes feel boxed into a corner comparable to that of Jungian analyst James Hillman when he wrote his book We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the Word’ Getting Worse. We have been on our quest for alternative to current destructive practices for more than a generation. And the world is getting worse.
In terms of recent history this can be partly explained by the fact that until the early 1990s the reach of the corporate stranglehold on the world economy was somewhat masked by the cold war. When that event so unexpectedly and quickly ended, some of us allowed ourselves to hope that the so-called peace dividend could be redirected toward areas of real need. But the corporations were too adept for us. Already positioned to exploit and despoil in the name of protecting the world from communism, they segued into corporate-managed globalism without losing a beat. Sweeping up politicians and governments in their rising tide, they consolidated their position. Officially sanctioning their power through treaties such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas
So the 1990s swept over us in an all-engulfing wave of economic expansion, free trade, and corporate takeover. Events moved swiftly, and often beyond public scrutiny. It was not until the end of the decade that widespread resistance became sufficiently organized to confront the emergent reality. Anticipating this dynamic, Theodore Roszak, in his book Person/Planet, had asked, “What then does the Earth do? She begins to speak to something in us –an ideal of life, a sense of identity-that has until now been harbored within only an eccentric and marginal few. And the cry of pain which that generation utters is the planet’s own personal cry for rescue, her protest against the bigness of things becoming ours.”
Beyond the machinations of national and corporate agendas and the abyss that terrorism has opened in our collective life, one truth remains nonnegotiable: The destiny of everyone is irrevocably interdependent, interconnected, and interwoven with that of Earth and its innumerable and irreplaceable life-forms. The way we live now is predicted on an outmoded understanding of the world. A shift form our inherited Newtonian/Cartesian acceptance of the nature world as mechanistic and malleable at will to human manipulation to a Gaian cosmology is a vast leap of mind-and heart. This constitutes a change of min-set-of worldview –as profound as any in the past. Yet, as Einstein once pointed out, only when we change the way we think will change the way we behave.
One analogy often cited for the phase we have now entered is that of an ocean liner moving at full speed. Should a change of course be required, the first step is to reduce momentum. Such a slowdown could well be under way. The world economy is uncertain at best. The Enron and subsequent scandals exposed the underbelly of corporate ruthlessness and government compliance. Living in a world of escalating terrorism has revealed the vulnerability of our sprawling global and national life-support systems in terms of food, energy, transportation, and distribution networks. The strongest hope for not only a sustainable but a more secure world argues for what Theodore Roszak called “alternatives to person-and-planet colossalism”. Regional and community levels of food and energy production and local industries provide few targets of much interest to those who would harm us.
Environmental, economic, and now security factors argue for the inherent good sense of more sustainable practices. This transition need not be overwhelmingly difficult. Many of the components to facilitate it are well in place, serving as signposts to guide us. In the conflict-ridden area of religion, ecologist and theologian Thomas Berry maintains that scientific/poetic awe of the forces that brought the world and the universe into being cold serve as a universal and unifying template upon which people and cultures can graft their traditional spiritual beliefs. A Gaian worldview holds all life to be a sacred ecology in which humankind serves as a steward.
The mechanistic view is rapidly losing ground within contemporary Western science. An organic revolution is sweeping across the disciplines from the quantum physics to the ecology of complexity and molecular genetics, according to Wade Green.
Sometimes it takes a shock as profound as the environmental crisis we now face to jolt us into understanding what we stand to lose. Our heart-stoppingly beautiful home planet, suspended and palpably alive in the vast darkness of space, is, as far as we know, unique. And if a handful of people who called themselves New Alchemist and Ocean Arkers could learn what has to be done to protect and restore Earth, it does not take an enormous leap of faith to imagine that could happed in communities, states, countries, and international alliances were to dedicate themselves to working on behalf of the life of the planet.
Summarized and quoted from Nancy Jack Todd, A Safe and Sustainable World, the promise of ecological design, p. 187-92
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