Center for Ecozoic Studies

By Herman F. Greene

This issue of The Ecozoic Reader completes our four part series on:

If we are moving into an ecological age

. . . Where are we?

. . . How did we get here?

. . . Where are we going?

. . . How do we get there?

Each of these questions is important. The questions themselves are a large part of “how to get there.” If where one is, is on railroad tracks in front of an oncoming freight train, then what one must do becomes very clear. If one is ten feet from the tracks, one has a different answer and if one is on the beach on a pleasant sunny day, no action at all might be suggested. When we think about the environmental situation, we must answer first, “Where are we?” If we conclude environmental disaster is imminent, we will take a certain stance, if we believe there may be environmental problems, we will take another stance. Some environmentalists argue forcefully we are on railroad tracks with a freight train coming at us. But, where should we jump when the freight train is the whole Earth?

Few of us reading this journal, as conscious as we are of the environmental situation, I would dare say, are ready to conclude that we and Earth are so imperiled that we must drop everything and attend only to the environmental problems, for example, by drastically reducing our lifestyle. Why is that? Where do we think we are?

Most of us know the story of Henny Penny and how something dropped on her head one day as she was eating corn and she went off to tell the king “the sky’s a-falling.” In her case, many animals joined her on the way to tell this to the king until the fox lured the group into his cave and ate most of them for lunch. Henny Penny got away, but never told the king. It would have behooved Henny Penny to have more accurately assessed where she was when the object fell on her head and whether the object really did indicate the sky was falling. It would certainly have behooved Henny Penny and the animals who joined her to have had a better understanding of where they were going and how to get there so the fox could not have persuaded them they were lost and lured them into his cave.

Will we with our alarum be as feckless as Henny Penny? Who among us blindly follows? And who is the fox and where is his den?

The concerns that bring us to the ecozoic are not so clear and imminent as an oncoming freight train, and our response is not as clear as getting off the tracks. I must admit that I can find no intellectually or emotionally satisfying answers to these questions of where are we, how did we get here, where are we going and how do we get there that tell me exactly what I must do . . . not even what I must do when I choose what I will eat for lunch. It is winter in North Carolina and today it will be in the mid-70s Fahrenheit. Is global warming occurring now in its catastrophic phase, or is this just a warm cycle?

Finding myself in such uncertainty, I don’t know what to do except to find answers that are consistent with my own reactions, trust myself and the historical processes (geo-biological-human-and-divine) at work, do the best I can, and be as present as I can be to the wonder, beauty, intimacy and truth offered to me each day. (Can we make any sense of things if we are saying one thing but doing another?) So what I have to say about how to get there is rather personal.

When I think about how to get to the ecozoic, I begin with this understanding from an earlier article I wrote on Thomas Berry’s Great Work:

The Great Work into which we and our children are born, [Berry] says, comes in response to the devastation of the planet caused by human activity. We are facing a breakdown in the life systems that can only be understood by comparison with events that marked the great transitions in the geo-biological eras of Earth’s history, such as the extinction of the dinosaurs and countless other species when the Mesozoic Era ended and our present Cenozoic Era began (p. 3).1 Our task is to move from our modern industrial civilization with its devastating impact to that of benign presence. It is an arduous and overwhelming task, one exceeding in its complexity that ever offered to humans, for it is not simply one of adjustment to disturbance of human life patterns, as, for example, that occasioned by the Great Depression or the recent World Wars, but one of dealing with the disruption and termination of the geo-biological system that has governed the functioning of the planet in the 67-million year reign of the Cenozoic Era in the history of the planet Earth.

The Great Work before us is to move from the terminating Cenozoic Era into an emerging “Ecozoic Era” when humans will be present to the Earth in a mutually enhancing way and become functional participants in the compre-hensive Earth community. To do this involves “reinventing the human,” because we have a task and role emerging from our modern capacities and dimensions that has never been conceived in the human venture. From the earliest times in human history we have been acculturated into a microphase awareness of our place in the Earth system, yet we find ourselves now at a place where humans as a whole have a macrophase impact. Microphase refers to our individual survival, achievements, freedoms, and aspirations; macrophase refers to our place as a collective human community within the Earth system.

To accomplish this transition requires a fundamental reassessment of our role as humans, and it must be done as might be said in computer talk, in “real-time.” We have no reprieve from being participants in the destructive impacts of our present modes of civilizational presence, yet from our places as active participants in the current system, we are called to bring about a transition to a mutually enhancing mode of presence.

The complexity of this task, as compared with other Great Works, can be understood when we realize there can be no frontal attack on our adversary in this crusade. There is no “we” and “they,” there is no “here” and “there,” there is no frontier to cross, and no externalities that can be ignored in the name of one great cause. No, everything is in the midst; we are both on the side of this cause and against it. The transformation that is called for is both inner and outer, regional and global, national and international, economic and social, individual and collective, family and sect, and—for the first time in human history with self-conscious awareness—human and other-than human nature.2

There is a lot of historical analysis in this statement, but it is not this analysis to which I wish to draw attention here. It is such phrases as “[the work we are called to exceeds] in its complexity that ever offered to humans.” It is even more complex than dealing with a depression or a world war because these are just disturbances in human history, but what we are dealing with is “the disruption and termination of the geo-biological system that has governed the functioning of the planet in the 67-million year reign of the Cenozoic Era in the history of the planet Earth.” Can you imagine that? What we are dealing with is more difficult to deal with than a world war or a global depression.

I also wish to draw attention to the phrase “there can be no frontal attack on our adversary in this cru-sade. There is no ‘we’ and ‘they,’ there is no ‘here’ and ‘there,’ there is no frontier to cross, and no externalities that can be ignored in the name of one great cause. No, everything is in the midst; we are both on the side of this cause and against it.”

I bought a lawn mower last summer. I know that because it (like almost all available power mowers) lacks pollution controls, my lawn mower in an hour emits pollution equivalent to hundreds of miles of driving in a car.3 I fill the small gas tank on my mower . . . oh bother, the gas spills over again onto the mower deck, causing still more pollution . . . and what do I do with the spilled gas? . . . “we are both on the side of this cause and against it.” Guess, I’m the problem, after all . . . but wait, I’m also “on the side of this cause.” That’s true: I’m very much on the side of this great cause and if you are reading this article, so are you.

And to make matters worse “[t] he transformation that is called for is “both inner and outer, regional and global, national and international, economic and social, individual and collective, family and sect, and—for the first time in human history with self-conscious awareness—human and other-than human nature.” Or, doesn’t this make things better? Most anything I do and anyplace I am, I can be about the Great Work. It is everywhere and all the time.

So you can see, what we are dealing with is something very different than any social cause we might have been involved in before, or that any human has ever been involved in before. This doesn’t, howeveç mean we can’t learn from and apply our experience. It just means we can’t predict this future—the ecozoic future—from the past, and we can’t “solve” this problem of how to get to an ecological age the way we have solved past problems.

If we break this problem down, we can find solutions to the broken down problem. The problem is that every solution presents other problems. Take the problem of carbon-based energy and the proposed alternative energy solution of biofuels—biofuels cause competition between grain used for fuels and grain used for human and animal food, and growing grain for biofuels results in increased cropland, habitat loss and destruction of rain forest4. Or consider solar and wind—they provide less than 1 % of energy production, installation and maintenance of solar and wind equipment produces pollution, and they may not be able to exist other than as an auxiliary to an oil economy5. The alternative energy sources of hydrogen poweç nuclear poweç hydropower and other sources, also, have serious drawbacks.6

But the real problem with breaking how to get to an “ecological age” into discrete problems is everything is an interconnected web and we can’t solve moving into the ecozoic in pieces. For example, we already have hybrid cars that would reduce miles per gallon, but is an automobile-based society viable even if everyone were to use fuel efficient cars? If not, how are we going to change having an automobile-based society in “real time”? I can write about it, but I will get in my car to go to work, go to the store, and even to go to play tennis. We would have to change our whole life to move away from an automobile-based society . . . and I guess that’s just the point, it’s that big.

So what are we to do? How are we to get to an ecozoic age? Here’s the way I think of this: What we are doing is something like moving from the medieval age to the modern age. People lived differently and thought differently in the medieval age than in the modern age. In the medieval period cities had walls around them for protection and everything was clustered. Who would think about building a city that looks like a medieval city today? We could also think about it like moving from pre-industrial society to industrial society. The industrial revolution which began in the late 18th century changed everything. Historians Will and Ariel Durant called the industrial revolution the only real revolution in human history. We could also think about it like moving from agrarian society to urban society. Up until the 20th century most people lived on farms or in rural villages. Now, in the advanced industrial societies, only a relative few people live on farms and most of the activity is in sprawling urban areas. In American urban areas, if one looks around almost everything one sees was built in the last 100 years and mostly in the last 50. Levittown on Long Island in New York, built between 1947 and 1951, was the first mass-production suburban community.7 Look at such suburbs now.

Our world is changing faster and faster and in general is moving in the direction of more stuff, more industry, more cities, and more human impact. It is kind of like there is a GREAT BIG FREIGHT TRAIN moving across the whole Earth. What are we to do to get out of the way? The answer is something like disassemble and reassemble the freight train before it hits us and change the crew . . . and we are the crew.

In many ways this is happening. The contemporary environmental movement only began in the 1960s and now environmental consciousness is widespread. Global climate change, once widely ignored, is acknowledged as a scientific fact and at some level is a part of the agenda of governments and businesses around the world. Already great measures have been taken to increase resource efficiency in production. Care for Earth has become a concern of the world’s religions.

Still, we know if an ecological age means human activity is in balance with nature, we are far away. Let’s go back to the idea that what we need to do is kind of like moving from the medieval period to the modern period and just add in that it’s bigger because what we need to do is not just another period in civilization, we need a new civilization. In human history, there was a period of millions of years in which the capacities of the human came into being, especially important were those years from 60,000 to 10,000 BCE when art, religion, speech, advanced tool making and sociality developed. About ten thousand years ago our present “Civilization” began when humans settled in agrarian villages. Sometime around 3,000 years ago the classical expressions of Civilization arose and in the Axial Age, the millennium before the Common Era, Plato, Aristotle, the Hebrew prophets, Confucius, Lao Tzu, the Buddha and others gave birth to the great cultural and religious understandings that have guided Civilization. Later the medieval/feudal period came into being and continued for a thousand years. Around 500 years ago, the modern period began and in the last 200 years the advanced industrial period. This has now spread around Earth in what is called the globalized society.

While there have been many dimensions in the development of Civilization, a central thread has been efforts to better human conditions by increasing production of goods and services and this has depended on the invention and application of new technologies and the adaptation of social structure for the maximal use of these technologies. This has especially been true in the late phase of Civilization, the modern period. Karl Marx had a point when he analyzed the history of Civilization in terms of the development of the means of production. Marx thought humans sought to meet their needs by transforming nature and as the means of production changed society changed.8 At first this occurred through the introduction of agriculture, and later through architecture, engineering, military science, biology, chemistry, physics and now the very science of life. It is one-sided to see social change, as Marx did, only through historical materialism, but this lens addresses a crucial feature of our world today. We are in a period of the growth of immense technologies. It is almost as if whatever humans can do through technology, they will do, and this is changing not only human society, but Earth itself.

The great fallacy of Civilization, only exposed in the late-modern phase, is that humanity can prosper, without regard to the dynamics of the supporting community of life. Post-modern civilization, which is to say the “New Civilization,” or the ecozoic, is coming home to Earth as community. The hallmark of the New Civilization is the move away from historical materialism, concentration on increased productivity without regard to the supporting community of life, to co-production as full participants in the ecological community. In an ecological age, everything we can do technologically, we will not do. We will, as Thomas Berry says, become self-limiting.9 This is not to move away from prosperity, but so that we may understand that prosperity depends on the health of the whole and of each part within the whole. It is a move to inclusion.

We need an image for what the move to an ecologically based civilization means and it is Gaia as organism. Gaia as organism means Earth as body . . . Earth as our body, as animals’ and plants’ body, and as rivers’, soils’ and all other Earthly beings’ body. We of Earth are one body. In the New Civilization we need to move from historical materialism to historical organism.

How would this affect our thinking? When we think of our own bodies, we aren’t conscious on a daily basis of all the parts, but when something goes wrong, we want to attend to it. Who is willing to say, when his or her body isn’t working, “Oh, it’s just a kidney,” or “It’s just my little toe”? And when something becomes too large for its place in the body, whether it’s our stomach from eating too much or a cancerous growth of our liveç who would say, “Just let it grow”? And who would throw trash into his or her own body or put toxins in it or breathe poisonous gasses, and say “I don’t care”? Or who would have a fever and do nothing? Moreover, and especially, who would not attend to the health of the body of the whole so that each member might prosper? We would think of Earth this way if we understood it as body.

Another thing about imaging the Earth as body is that we realize it is not just a bunch of dead matter, neither is it a bunch of 1’s and zero’s, a globally wired computer/brain. It’s a psycho-spiritual reality. It’s affected by feelings, thoughts, relationships, awarenesses. One can’t have a healthy body with an unhealthy mind, an unhealthy affective capability, or an unresponsive awareness, or a diminished capacity for creativity and insight.

I have found when I write I haven’t found a way around distinguishing “humans” and “nature” for some purposes, but for in the most important purpose, that of understanding our place in the Earth community, we have to get beyond this. There is neither “the human on the one hand and nature on the other,” nor “nature on the one hand and the human on the other.” We must at the highest level of our consciousness, like the first peoples, live without this distinction. We can no more go out into nature, than we can go out into our bodies.

The French paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin, wrote about an amazing concept, that of the “noos-phere.”10 He said first there was the geosphere, the aqua-sphere, the biosphere and the atmosphere, and then with humans there was the noosphere.11 Humans like animals existed at the level of the biosphere, but there was something more that came into being with humans, it was self-conscious awareness and this resulted in a band of stored knowledge, or consciousness, that surrounded and permeated Earth much like the atmosphere. Changes in the noosphere changed Earth, just like changes in the other spheres did. In other words changes in human knowledge and understanding changed each of the geosphere, aquasphere, biosphere and atmosphere. We see this everyday, don’t we?

Every time we change our own consciousness or awareness, we change the noosphere, and we change Earth, because in an organic sense, our minds are connected to each other and to Earth in the same way they are to our own bodies. We are that close.

This being the case, I think the most important thing we can do in this most complex situation of moving into the New Civilization is to change the noosphere and we do that by changing our own consciousness. There are many learning aspects of this, such as Earth literacy (learning about biology, ecology, geology, and geography, and about one’s own bioregion12), learning the story of the evolutionary development of the universe and of our place in the universe, and becoming aware of our inner connections with all members of the Earth community. When we learn these things we are learning the language of the Earth.

As we learn this language, we will open to what I will call an ecological imagination, and on this the New Civilization will be built. We need to go into our inner self into something like a dream state and begin imagining a new world that is as different from our contemporary modern world as the medieval world was from the world we know today. Then we need to begin naming that world and claiming it as something that is meaningful and possible and even necessary. Finally, we need to act as if we are in that world so our dreams will become reality.

That new world is one where Earth is understood as organism and as our own body. On the following page is an image we used in our first Ecozoic Reader:

Perhaps an image like this will spark your imagination.13

I become impatient when people begin talking about recycling bottles, or other limited changes, as the path to a “sustainable society.” There is, of course, the risk that I avoid the limited possible changes we can be making for those that are unattainable, but I’ll take the risk. Let us speak of an ecozoic society, rather than a sustainable society. Let us speak of ecozoic development ratheç than sustainable development. Some think the term “ecozoic” is too scientific or technical sounding, but for me it simply means “house of life” based on the Greek words from which it is derived.14 Let the New Civilization be a society of life, so that all life may flourish.

What then blocks life from flourishing on Earth? Asked this way, the obstacles are clear. Use your ecological, or ecozoic, imagination to remove them. Such an imagination doesn’t stop at limited objectives. It imagines Earth as a dynamic organism with life bursting out all over. It is the dream of the Earth and it knows no limits other than that we live on Earth in organic unity and must live within its gracious and generous means.

In my dream of the New Civilization, my ecological imagination, there is work for everyone. Cities once considered concrete and asphalt jungles are now garden cities. This took a lot of work. Landscapes once covered and broken by urban sprawl are now clustered villages connected by maglev trains. Walking and bicycling along with public transportation have become the most common ways of moving about in cities and villages and electric-motor-assisted, pedal-trikes are used for everyday deliveries. Farms are near cities to supply the bulk of their food and much food is grown in the city itself. There are harmonious relations among the humans and wildlife in city, village and agrarian areas and wildlands large enough for the preservation of biodiversity and top predators are set aside. The bioregion has become the primary governmental unit. Seas, rivers and lakes are teaming with fish. Though human nature has not funda-mentally changed, the New Civilization is based on a higher human consciousness, one of an integral world. Technologies, though just as numerous and ever-changing, are benign. Where limits were once set by coercive poweç they are now primarily set by voluntary restraint, a restraint that comes from education, spirituality, custom and ritual. There is a global, federal government.

The economy is no longer the dominant sector of society. We live on solar income and have discovered that, in an ecological age, the excesses of wealth are more a problem than poverty. War is a historical relic, an unaffordable luxury of a bygone day . . . and prisons too. There is so much work to do.

My dream may seem fanciful, ephemeral. I say it is grounded, realistic. If in classical Greek philosophy man became the measure of all things, in the New Civilization Earth becomes the measure of all things, and Earth is known to humans aesthetically, affectively, intuitively, scientifically and practically in its geo-biological dynamics and cosmologically within its setting in a processual universe.

The emergence of the New Civilization is already occurring, it is occurring in a million hearts and a million manifestations. The question is only whether it will prevail. If it does, people looking back 100 years from now will see that it didn’t happen all at once any more than the spread of suburbs happened all at once, but they will see that it happened with equal rapidity as the spread of suburbs and with even more profound effects and differences. They will see that its birth, like a human birth, was one of immense effort and, at times, of suffering. Nevertheless, they will also see that this night of immense effort and suffering was as nothing compared to the joy that came in the morning.

And people will ask, “How did we get there?” and the answer will be ecological imagination and . . . good old common sense. There was no grand plan, we all just muddled through.

1 All page numbers cited refer to the hardcover first edition of Thomas Berry’s The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future (New York: Bell Towe; 1999).

2 Herman Greene, “Thomas Berry’s Great Work,” The Ecozoic Reader 1, no. 1 (2000): 7-8.

3 “One old gas powered lawn mower running for an hour emits as much pollution as driving 650 miles in a 1992 model automobile.” “Grass Cutting Beats Driving in Making Air Pollution,” available at http://www.mindfully.org/Air/Lawn-Mower-Pollution.htm; Internet; accessed December 31, 2006.

4 Brian Toka; “The Real Scoop On Biofuels: ‘Green Energy’ Panacea or Just the Latest Hype?” Rachel’s Democracy & Health News #887 (December 28, 2006)

5 See James Howard Kunstle; The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005), 123. and generally 123-130.

6 See chapter on “Beyond Oil: Why Alternative Fuels Won’t Rescue us,” ibid., 100-46.

7 “Levittown gets its name from its builder, the firm of Levitt & Sons, Inc., which built it as a planned community between 1947 and 1951. Levittown was the first truly mass-produced suburb and is widely regarded as the archetype for postwar suburbs throughout the country.” “Levittown, New York, Wikipedia, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_New_York, Internet; accessed December 31, 2006.

8 In The German Ideology Marx and Engels . . . start, they say, from ‘real human beings’, emphasizing that human beings are essentially productive, in that they must produce their means of subsistence in order to satisfy their material needs. The satisfaction of needs engen-ders new needs of both a material and social kind, and forms of society arise corresponding to the state of development of human produc-tive forces. Material life determines, or at least ‘conditions’ social life, and so the primary direction of social explanation is from material production to social forms, and thence to forms of consciousness. “Karl Marx,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, available at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/#4; Internet, accessed December 31, 2006.

9 This is not specifically a move away from technology. Rather, it is because our technology, if properly applied and further developed will allow us to meet human needs without destroying nature, this transi-tion to the ecozoic is possible. The changes that are needed are in human culture and social structure to control and moderate these technologies and enable their benefits to be shared equitably among humans while protecting ecosystems.

10 The term itself was coined by Vladimir Vernadsky.

The noosphere can be seen as the “sphere of human thought” being derived from the Greek íïõò (“nous”) meaning “mind” in the style of “atmosphere” and “biosphere”. In the original theory of Vernadsky, the noosphere is the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere. In contrast to the conceptions of the Gaia theorists, or the promoters of cyberspace, Vernadsky’s noosphere emerges at the point where humankind, through the mastery of nuclear processes, begins to create resources through the transmutation of elements.

The word is also sometimes used to refer to a transhuman conscious-ness emerging from the interactions of human minds. This is the view proposed by the theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who added that the noosphere is evolving towards an ever greater integration, cul-minating in the Omega Point—which he saw as the ultimate goal of history.

“Noosphere,” Wikipedia, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere; Internet, Accessed December 31, 2006.

11 A more proper understanding of the noosphere, especially in light of what we are coming to understand, for example, about animal con-sciousness, is that the noosphere has always been one of Earth’s spheres, but it became activated in a special way when the human came into being with self-conscious, reflective awareness.

12 A “bioregion” is a naturally occurring geographic division of Earth that contains an interacting community of life functioning as a relative-ly self-supporting system within the ever-renewing processes of nature.

13 The drawing is by Lynette Roesch. Some thought the image was wrong because it should have shown the human growing out of Earth rather than the other way around. Isn’t it, however, exactly the point of the ecozoic that in the future humans will be involved in everything and how we imagine and make the Earth is how it will grow? While this is the main point, it is true, in the ecozoic the opposite image is needed as well, that of how Earth gave birth to, and continues to give birth to, the human.

14 Ecozoic is based on two Greek words—oikos meaning house, and zoikos meaning of animals (zoikos is based on the Greek word zoion meaning living being). More simply said, ecozoic is based on eco meaning house and zoic meaning life. Put together it means “House of Life.”