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Sometimes we need to break a bad habit. Smoking tobacco is a habit a lot of us managed to break. People told us it was not good for us, and at some point, we quit. We did not form a new behavioral habit; we broke away from an old one. “Not smoking” is not a habit. On the other hand, sometimes we need to form a good habit. Bringing bits and pieces of raw nature into our personal space is a good habit, for their pres- ence reminds us that we share this world with many things. Rehabilitation is often a matter of breaking bad habits and forming good ones, not merely replacing one with the other, but in changing overall behavioral patterns.
Here’s the bottom line: rehabilitated people will act to create a more satisfying new world. It will not be the earth as we have known it, but it could be a planet where other forms of life are valued, even though greatly diminished. That’s where we should place our hope for the future.
REORGANIZATION
~ arranging something in a new orderly way
~ reforming a group association for a new purpose
We have hundreds of organizations for dealing with the “pieces” of life: Birds. Bats. Barnacles. You name it. From aardvarks to zebras, there is probably an organization somewhere devoted to saving them. And the “places” of life are equally well-represented in collective action. Most every kind of natural community has a group somewhere devoted to preserving it. The problem is, there has been no organized group that focused on the essential “processes” of life, those basic ecological systems of the planet: the flow of energy, the cycling of matter, and the interrelating webs and communities of life that support all those pieces and places, including us.
We made two planet-changing mistakes long ago in what we did here, and then we put our energies into enumerating and saving the remaining pieces and places, while the processes that support them were being messed up for centuries to come.
First, we developed political decision-making systems that are fundamentally flawed, because they are human-centric rather than bio-centric. We have no ecological touchstone against which to measure our actions. In the US, we take great pride in our constitution and its “Bill of Rights,” but there are no explicit rights in that document for the other life that shares the planet with us. It is about human life, not human life
as an integral part of all life.
Imagine arriving here from another galaxy and discovering what the human species has done to this marvelous oasis of life in the immensity of the universe. Would we not conclude that humans are an invasive species that need to be controlled? Ironically, thousands of volunteers spend countless hours each year “rooting out” invasive species in various places, never thinking that they might be the primary invasive species of the planet itself.
Second, we developed an economic system that does not mesh well with the planet’s ecosystem, and thus have changed its natural dynamics. In short, how we make decisions has not worked for the success of the other life here, and now even our own. Can we find a better way for the planet? Some Native Americans seemed to have had a better feel for this need than European Americans. The
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