![]() ![]() Whales bring nutrients up from the deep ocean to nourish plankton. Forests generate a “biotic pump” of persistent low pressure that brings rain to continental interiors and maintains atmospheric flow patterns. Megafauna transport nitrogen and phosphorus across continents and oceans to maintain the carbon cycle. Vegetation produces volatile compounds that promote the formation of clouds that reflect sunlight. That is because it is life that maintains the conditions for life, through dimly understood processes as complex as any living physiology. If we continue degrading and destroying them, then even if we cut emissions to zero overnight, Earth would still die a death of a million cuts. These comprise the forests, the soil, the wetlands, the coral reefs, the fish, the whales, the elephants, the seagrass meadows, the mangrove swamps, and all the rest of Earth’s systems and species. Rather, a living Earth can only be healthy – can only stay living in fact – if its organs and tissues are vital. In my last essay, I argued that the climate crisis will not be solved by adjusting levels of atmospheric gases, as if we were tinkering with the air-fuel mixture of a diesel engine. It is not a mere “problem” that we can solve from the currently dominant worldview and its solution-set but asks us to inhabit a new Story of the People and a new (and ancient) relationship to the rest of life.Ī key element of this transformation is from a geomechanical worldview to a Living Planet worldview. That is what climate change poses to the present global civilization. Societies can also pass through an initiation. From the rubble of the ensuing collapse, a new self is born into a new world. By that, I mean a crisis that defies what you knew and what you were. Most people have passed through some kind of initiation in life. You can also read this article en Francais. There is a French translation of this essay. ![]()
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