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Can we realign the cultural and economic systems of modern humanity with the natural systems of the universe?
Source: Nasa
Our cosmos has evolved over approximately 13.8 billion years to host intricate celestial systems, including the lives of our primordial ancestor, homo sapien, and modern humanity. Humans emerged around 150,000 years ago and have since evolved advanced cognition and intelligence. From our brains and relations, entire economic, cultural, and social systems were forged, with highly intricate patterns and vast consequences. For millennia, we have adapted with nature to survive and thrive as a species. However, recently, our systems have begun to dominate and decimate others, leading to unsustainable resource extraction, biodiversity loss, and positive feedback loops that are destabilising the conditions that made our life on earth possible.
Modern humanity is at a pivotal point in its history. But how different are we to our distant relatives? How much do we differ from our human ancestors who aided the extinction of flora and fauna, including other human species, through their extractive hunter-gatherer and violent domination practices? Are humans innately destructive, hosting a proclivity to stifle the evolution of nature? How much do our behaviours diverge from those of other natural systems? Well, compared to some of the earliest systems in the universe, perhaps not so much.
Our nature does not differ from that of our extractive sun, which consumed vast amounts of high-quality concentrated matter and energy to form the convection zone that lies at its centre only to discard low-quality energy, in the form of dispersed photons. Eight minutes after these photons are discarded by our sun, they begin to support miraculous advances in evolution on the surface of our Earth. Once we zoom out and observe our selfish sun from the perspective of other systems in the cosmos, we begin to appreciate that it may be an altruistic system, playing an essential role in the story of evolution. As an intrinsic part of nature and the cosmos, we are simply behaving much like other natural systems. The only difference is that we host the most complex biological system in the universe between our ears, enabling us to grow and extract and behave, albeit naturally, well beyond the systemic limitations imposed on us by nature’s immutable laws.
If planetary ecological breakdown is an existential problem this is because the issue is more than ecological and cannot be reduced to single issues such as carbon overabundance.
Given the radical shifts that are engulfing our planet, many methods are being taken up to deal with the incoming crises of greenhouse gas emissions, resource depletion, crumbling agricultural and food systems, ubiquitous waste, and socio-economic inequity. These are colossal challenges that require a re-thinking of our world, and while they stand as problems in themselves, we believe they are all a manifestation of humanity’s maladaptation to the earth system, which is rooted in our cultural norms and human logic. So, it is our proposition that in order to tackle the systemic issues that challenge our world, we must begin with and be rooted in a transvaluation of our cultural norms and human logic to break from the status quo that risks replicating the same issues that have brought us to this impasse.
A World of Dualisms
A distinction we must address on this journey is the separation between nature and culture. When we envision nature, we often recall the wild, deep forests and lakes that are mostly free from human interference, and megafauna. Conversely, when we envision culture, we tend to call up vast metropolises and hubs of intense commerce and human activity. This separation between that which is human and that which is natural places us aside from and often above the complex systems we depend on, as such our position becomes one of master or guardian.
However, when we think with the deep history of our species, we realise that this seemingly natural distinction was in fact, created. Its roots lie in the mind-body dualism made prominent by René Descartes which then developed into the culture-nature dualism cemented in the Industrial Revolution, where nature becomes a resource that could be appropriated at scale. This human exceptionalism displaced the delicate balance between humans, flora, and fauna and diminished the agency of more-than-human actors to act on and change the world.
We live and think in the legacy of this dichotomy so how might we begin, amidst all ends, to think differently? If planetary ecological breakdown is an existential problem this is because the issue is more than ecological and cannot be reduced to single issues such as carbon overabundance. If ecological breakdown has thrown our world into disarray, this is because it puts our entire systems of being into question. Everything, from our linear economies to food systems, how we define and enact wellness, how we move through the world and build our homes, have enormous capacity to both destroy and regenerate our world. When we remember that we are components of this vast ecosystem, the cosmos, every action becomes imbued with radical potential that can shift the course of the world.
Can we realign our stories with our home? Can we realign the cultural and economic systems of modern humanity with the natural systems of the universe?
This leads us to rethink what nature means. Rather than holding nature to be ‘a thing out there,’ we envision that nature is the whole universe, as it is the place, the source, and the result of material phenomena. This includes humans, human culture, human artefacts, and the results of human activities. So, when we speak of nature, we refer to the infinite relations that have been crafted in 13.8 billion years of evolution. Not only are we one of nature’s most recent innovations, but we are also, as far as we know, the first one to enter the ‘thinking strata’, representing a pivotal moment in the cosmos’ evolution. It is this entrance into the realm of cognition that has us creating memes and stories that drive our cultures and norms. It also allows us to assign them with values dictated by their usefulness to us, or at least to some of us. With our anthropocentrically self-proclaimed position at the pinnacle of evolution and intelligence, we have then turned our back on nature, assigning significantly higher valuations to such stories than to the irrefutable natural laws that govern the cosmos. The result is becoming a natural system that is highly adapted to tales and fables at the cost of cosmic maladaptation.
Can we realign our stories with our home? Can we realign the cultural and economic systems of modern humanity with the natural systems of the universe? We can take a leaf out of our distant ancestors’ codex and remember that we are one with the cosmos by falling back in love with nature and make her our inspiration, our model, our measure, and our mentor. More than being ‘nature-inspired,’ we anchor our rethinking in biomimicry (or biomimetics) which we take to mean the holistic and systemic emulation of the multitudinous hierarchical systems in nature (the whole universe) to create intelligent human systems or solutions that are glocally situated, socially connected, and sensitive to the cybernetics and energetics of their environment.
The microbes, critters, plants, animals, and systems with whom we share our world have developed in harmony to thrive and make a home for themselves in the cosmos. Every individual’s survival strategy has the potential to create life for others and serves as an endless source of inspiration for how to innovate. It is from these relations that our world has evolved. Humans exist on earth today thanks to this harmonious and ancient dance and our continued flourishing depends on our biosynergistic reintegration in the multitudinous systems of nature.
Why think at all?
Source: Brent Leimenstoll
When so much has been lost, when we are told that we have no time to avert complete disaster, when the seas have already risen, why indulge in such a frivolous thing as thinking? Our rising levels of urgency have brought about improved legislation, world treaties, global temperature agreements, increased consciousness about personal carbon footprints and the need for better choices. Out of this urgency some of the most environmentally taxing industries have made pledges to decarbonise. And yet, even given this global effort and urgency, effective solutions remain elusive.
So long as our thinking continues to be rooted in the maladaptive cycle that has brought us to our position in the first place, we risk reproducing issues we are trying to fix. As such, we need new teachers, new methods for change and collaboration, new allies, human and non-human, to think and experiment with so that we can forge relations and breakthroughs beyond our existing methods.
We turn to our primordial teacher, the nature within and around us, to forge new ways of living that are attentive to the urgent demands that our earth is making of us. With Biohm's Contemplations we invite you to think with us and imagine new systems and relations out of old models. To do this we will tackle questions related to our human logic, earth’s cycles, holistic flourishing, and regenerative economies to rewild our imaginations and radically change what it means to live, think, work, play, and create in the future of home, the future of our planet.
Author: Dr Ehab Sayed | Editor: Marina Ionita