Survival of humans

Recent letters by Steve Foster, Greg Stanford and Judy Kittler address a topic that will engage us all in the future. How do we make sense of a world we’ve never inhabited before? Societies generate a number of conceptual universes to choose from, whose primary purpose is to sustain group survival by offering rewards or punishments for behavior leading to that end. But do any of those that exist today assure group survival on a planet experiencing unchecked global warming, ecological implosion and species extinction? We’ve been warned! Nearly 60 years ago, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring raised the alarm that human activity is throwing the delicate natural order out of balance. Twenty-six years ago Laurie Garrett documented one such result in The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance.

Considering today’s often-employed conceptual universes, what help in addressing contemporary issues do we get from those conceived around the world millennia ago that express being in a spiritual idiom? What help from political philosophies conceived when the world’s population was 1 billion, rather than today’s approaching 8 billion? Or economic philosophies urging all to commodify the planet and its resources even further for personal aggrandizement?

A common feature of previous conceptual universes is that they address a specific group and seek to assure its existence irrespective of—if not in spite of—“others.” If humankind is to survive into the future, I’d guess the notion of “other” (human, animal or plant) will have to go.

DAVID SIXBEY

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