Profound Disconnection

US plan on global warming: learn to live with it

opinion by Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D.

The US Environmental Protection Agency released a report recently acknowledging not only that global warming exists, but that it will lead to disaster. The agency's solution: Get used to it. How is it possible for so many individuals to exist without any concern for the Earth's life support systems and our very future?

Why is there such a profound disconnection from the natural world, the cycles of life and the rhythms of nature? Once people were more aware and more connected to nature. Morris Berman said in his book The Reenchantment of the Earth, "The cosmos, in short, was a place of belonging. A member of this cosmos was not an alienated observer of it but a direct participant in its drama."

Many scholars believe that we ceased being direct participants in the drama of nature as long as 7000 to 10,000 years ago, when humans stopped their nomadic existence and began settling in large groups and, eventually, in cities. Many mindsets were formed during this period, and a new relationship with nature became firmly entrenched in our culture. Nature became the provider of resources, the wild land to be tamed, and the prize to be owned.

A long time ago, nearly all people fed themselves mainly by subsistence farming, growing only enough to feed their families. The size of the population was kept down by high infant mortality and a natural spacing of births caused by the suppression of ovulation during the three to four years women would breastfeed their children.

Around 5000 BC, the invention of the metal plow literally changed the face of the Earth for all time. Crop productivity increased, irrigation-assisted agriculture began and families began producing more food than they needed. The excess food had to be stored and sold. The population began to increase. People cleared increasingly larger areas of land and began to control and shape the surface of the Earth to suit their needs. Author Chellis Glendinning says that the relationship with the natural world changed from one of "respect for and participation in its elliptical wholeness to one of detachment, management, control and finally domination." She feels that the domestication of animals and the transformation of our earthly neighbors into food resources created a condition where the human psyche maintains itself in a constant "state of chronic traumatic stress."

Forests were cut down and grasslands were plowed to provide vast areas of cropland and grazing land to feed the growing populations. The land clearing altered many habitats and hastened many species to their extinction. Machines that could harness energy by burning fossil fuels increased the average energy resource use per person. The number of people needed to produce food was decreased, and our connection to the land through the growing of food was steadily eliminated. Our eating habits, our living habits, the way we treat animals and the way we let technology into our lives dramatically affects our connection to the planet and to ourselves.

We have many obstacles to overcome if we are to reestablish ourselves as dynamic participants in the natural world. But it can and must be done. It is unacceptable, as the EPA recommends, to just live with the environmental disasters we are creating. Lack of action means death to our planet and our souls.