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In this presentation I’d like to take a direct and calculated approach as to who and what we are, on the basis of this being essential, with regard to the predicament we are in. Let’s begin with the predicament we are in.
From individually-wrapped cup-cakes that are themselves in plastic bags, through an ever-expanding proliferation of goodies in the market place, to the industrial activities behind it all, with both the impact on environments for the resources and their contamination, for all this to come about, ...and it doesn’t stop there, for there’s AI, the ultimate iteration of such technology, in a succession of virtual worlds within others in which our pursuit of technology has infected Life, in the name of progress.
Here is something anecdotal, as a point of reference. In past times, the way down through the Kulu Valley had been a trading route into northern India from the Silk Road across Asia. With the Indo-China border conflict of the early 1960’s, the Indian Army had built a road for military traffic to access the border. Afterwards, this road provided easy access for what became widespread de-forestation, environmental degradation and an eroding social fabric, in the region. In 1981, when I ran a pilot project in socio-environmental healing in the upper valley, I encountered a population of elders who had lived their adult lives prior to the border conflict and subsequent de-forestation, adults who had known those times in their youth, but were making their way in a changed world and young people who had not known anything other than how things were, at that time. The project included visiting schools and villages with regard to awareness of what had taken place and fomenting change – briefing mountaineering groups entering the region, concerning the uniqueness and fragility of the environment they were coming into – to similarly introduce such knowledge into the Mountaineering Institute’s curriculum for Indian Army training. That was 44 years ago and it made not the slightest difference! The tourist industry that was coming in at the time flourished, subsequently, taking over and swallowing the Kulu Valley up.
Another of the things that I did at the time was co-author a booklet that covered some of the input and findings of that pilot project. Here are some extracts from the introduction…
“Environment is what surrounds us. It includes widely divergent habitats, the human presence, plants and various animals that live together in them, as well as the atmosphere all share in common. When disturbance occurs in the environment, the condition affects all its members.
There are different factors that disturb the environment. One category is natural agencies, such as fire, floods, drought, famine, disease, electrical disturbance, earthquake, volcanic eruption, climate change, compound disturbance, cosmic events, and so on. Another category is humanity.
Natural agencies have taken their place as part of the progressive evolutionary development of life that has brought humanity onto the scene. Humanity however has brought about major harmful disturbances to the environment through ruthless deforestation, road construction, mushrooming urban development, escalating industrial activity, the nuclear presence and the industrialisation of agriculture. Such things have had a destructive impact upon human, animal, plant and soil life, with the end result of changes in climate and landscapes.
At this juncture, environmental damage has proceeded so far that human existence is threatened. Wittingly and unwittingly, humanity has triggered phenomena which ultimately cause it more harm than any of the immediate benefit it brings. For example, we have cut forests for timber, applied inorganic substances and used artificial measures in agriculture and land husbandry, constructed roads as part of communications infrastructure and built immense dams for large scale electric supplies, little realising that the implications and consequences radical change brings to our surroundings are enormous. The results of such activities have been soil erosion, pollution, siltation, changing climate – in fact, a whole host of environmentally damaging abuses, with profound social consequences.
Yet there is absolutely no need for humanity to be in the position it is in. That the human race should feel in a cleft stick with regard to the relationship between the world and the human condition, contemporarily, is purely a subjective human experience, that happens to be so, but which could as easily be completely otherwise.
The whole point of the human involvement and sense of responsibility for things does not include the contemporary human obsession with whether the world continues or is destroyed, depends upon its acting responsibly. The point is simply, that in being responsible we evidence evolutionary development of a similar calibre to that already manifested by other species in their faithful corporate and cooperative functioning. We may, otherwise, be a more highly developed species. However, when life is characterised, the way it is on Earth by co-existence, our obsession with ourselves makes a handicap of that development, not an asset, The underlying adjustments made by living systems to bring balance, order and harmony to the vigour and play of life are according to corporate law within and between all things. Life wants human participation in that. It asks that – to respond freely – and it shows the way.
I refer to this because it is still relevant, actually, and in spades, for when messes are not tidied up, the disorder increases exponentially. But don’t take this just from me! Here’s what the Doomsday Clock has to say about the predicament we are in.
I’ve often mentioned this! The Doomsday Clock is a symbol that represents the estimated likelihood of human-made global catastrophe in the calculation of the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences. Originally set at 7 minutes to midnight, it was created in 1947 to express the urgency of the nuclear threat, in the face of the nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviet Union, with the need for international cooperation to address it. In 1981, during the time of my pilot project in Kulu Valley, the Clock’s hands were moved to 4 minutes to midnight, in the face of the heightened tensions in the arms race during the Cold War, following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. This year, 2025, the Clock’s hands have moved to 89 second to midnight, in the face of the unprecedented level of risk facing humanity, due to a combination of factors that include nuclear threat, climate change and disruptive technologies.
...and then there is a fourth factor behind that statement, concerning Earth our home, our failure to really act and the failure of the measures we do take. There’s no stopping this for the same reasons as those that brought matters to this pass, in the first place, 1) there has been no overall plan, only piecemeal measures, 2) those measures have been emasculated by the ‘big boys’ in oil, business and technology driving ahead with their particular agendas, regardless, 3) we are incapable of taking the only measure possible – abandoning the way of life that has brought matters to this pass, and 4) it is now too late for that, anyway! We haven’t a hope because we cannot withdraw from the point-of-no-return the matter has already tipped beyond. (But more on that shortly!) This has all been unfolding in the public eye, as it were, since the likes of UN Secretary General, U Thant’s address to a plenary session in 1969, The Club of Rome’s report on The Limits to Growth (1972) and The Ecologist magazine’s Blueprint for Survival (1972).
There is yet another factor buried in the Doomsday Clock’s reckonings. It is us, the attitudes, conduct and the societal, national, fiscal and geo-political chaos characterising human affairs that have created and fuel the escalating nuclear brinkmanship, climate and environmental upheaval and the runaway development of disruptive technologies. You see, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, yes, the Cold War may have abated. The thing is that, since then, not only has there been a proliferation of nations amassing their own nuclear arsenals, with the additional hazard of the dirty use of nuclear material, but there has been the rapid development of the nuclear option for producing energy. In its turn, this has fed into the mushrooming environmental degradation that had been recognised as an issue, in its own right, at the hands of technological disruption spreading throughout industry, agriculture and society, in general. More recently, there’s a far greater harm than the rosy promises of the benefits of AI that culminate in ever more extensive environmental degradation. The scope for the brazen operations of openly autocratic bad actors, hybrid ‘warfare’ and the covert activities of criminal agencies has broadened exponentially into every aspect of science and technology, administration and government, finance and industry, law and order, civil society and the personal life of the individual citizen. This is the ‘black hole’ human affairs has tipped into. It is how the Doomsday Clock’s hands have moved from the 7 minutes before midnight of 1947 to 89 seconds, now, in 2025!
These additional factors buried in the Doomsday Clock’s reckoning (human activity and attitudes) power the looming catastrophe. Why, for instance, do we scramble after new initiatives in automotive, aviation and marine technology when we know the demands for energy, infrastructure and resources (such as rare earths) further burden the environmental degradation that is already a critical factor? Or, why do we go on depleting and polluting critical groundwater resources and aquifers, contaminating agricultural land with artificial fertilizers and pesticides that sterilise and render soils useless, in the name of productivity, when the consequences are already so obvious? …and, so it goes!
Now, concerning a real appreciation of what the Doomsday Clock’s readings have to say, there are sliding doors that apply to the players and the game playing itself out and to the factors involved. With regard to the players and the game, without going into the details, this is to do with how the United States implosion under the present administration has up-ended the global order, scrambling trends and taking it into the uncharted territory that leaves both no way back and no view as to what a way on could be. Yes, in the face of US protectionism, other countries re-aligning according to more reliable and trustworthy agreements would seem to be a good break from US hegemony. But, in the context of the toxic drift towards catastrophe that the Doomsday Clock monitors, this is a momentary blip, for a) brazen autocracy is sabotaging democracy in other places too. b) The disruptive propensities of AI have given the feral activities of bad actors (state and otherwise) free rein to hack, ransom and wage cyber-warfare. c) The global financial system and its services have morphed into a network in which players direct the funds many layers of corruption and schemes of evasion make available, through a web of sophisticated cheating. This has been so in the loan/debt landscape of 3 world countries. However, more recently, in the way they have been handling financial regulation to favour generalised bank and investment control, governments have become complicit with what was going on in the financial sector, relentlessly entrenching the one-way drift of money and funding away from the lives of people on the street, into the hands of those that already have more than enough. The economic stress in people’s everyday lives is surging. Individual countries have particular internal struggles, in this regard, (for example, the USA, as a crumbling democracy. Or, China, as a state powerhouse, performing staggering engineering feats, yet facing serious youth unemployment, a huge property crisis, slowing economic growth and spending and critical environmental degradation). So, yes, different countries are alive and kicking, administration, bureaucracy and the organs and sectors of society are very much there. It is just that they are neither functioning adequately, anymore, nor hanging together very well and this has become a veritable storm stressing the general public, in addition to the economic stress already, now so deeply ingrained in ‘the set-up’. Therefore, the likelihood of any multipolar co-existence emerging, in the longer-term, under such circumstances is nowhere on the horizon.
Concerning the factors involved, we are looking at the impact of the combined interplay of the likes of this geo-political and financial mayhem in the realm of human affairs and the knock-on consequences of systemic climate, ocean and environmental collapse and phase-change in Earth’s own rhythms, such as the changing cycle of the release and absorption of the heat-trapping gas, CO2. (In a multi-millennial cycle, the natural forces involved in carbon being sucked up by the oceans and forests, or released in long pulses, cause the ice caps to shrink or grow, influencing sea-levels, thereby. Triggered by the periodicity of the closing down and re-starting of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation global heat transfer system, the signs of the next shut-down are upon us. So, the fact that human CO2 emissions are flooding all zones is actually neither here nor there, for it meshes with what is afoot in the larger scheme of things!)!) All this is going on simultaneously, this way and that, in one way and another, here and there, globally.
Now, here’s an interesting aside, for the additional perspective it has to offer! Why on Earth did the Doomsday Clock’s appearance in 1947 cut in at 4 minutes to midnight? What about the 23 hours and 56 minutes before the nuclear age hazard it declared? Well, it is quite a story, really! What made nuclear technology possible is progress in scientific discovery and research, with the development of laboratory technology and skills. Nuclear technology was but one of a host of advanced technologies that background had spawned. What made for that progress was what flowed from the developments of the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, with all their dirt and smoke, resource extraction and waste, devastation and contamination, back then. … and way before that is the path in history that gave birth to the Renaissance and the subsequent evolution of western scientific, materialistic thinking, with its left-brain empiricism, equating the intellectual emphasis on concrete, physical evidence, with intelligence! (Please, this is not about intuition not contributing anything insightful to rational thinking, but about how prioritising left-brain activity hi-jacks right-brain input, thereby curtailing, circumventing, even choking off their mutual contribution to the whole-brain considerations genuine human intelligence undertake.) So, the beginnings of what the Doomsday Clock started to monitor belong to the story of Western Civilisation! Nuclear technology and the nuclear age have been an outcome!
Going to the other end of the spectrum of opinion, there is what Indigenous peoples have to say. In the Peruvian Amazon, for instance, there is the Mashco Piro tribe, the world’s largest uncontacted Indigenous group (“aislados”, those avoiding sustained contact with outsiders), who occasionally have shouted conversations across the river with agents from a related tribe. When asked if they want to make contact, they say, “No, because you are bad! ((Not that related tribe, but “the others”!) – the bad that follows on the heels of stupidity!
(Back at the time of my pilot project, Professor T.M. Dass of Calcutta University, estimated the value of 6 tree functions over the 50 years of its life – production of Oxygen, Rs 250,000 – control of air pollution, Rs 500,000 – soil erosion control and soil fertility, Rs 250,000 – water regulation and humidity control, Rs 300,000 – bird and animal shelter, Rs 25,000 – protein conversion from fodder, Rs 20,000. He off-set the market value of a medium-sized tree at 5,000 Indian rupees (1980) against the monetary value of a total Rs 1.570,000 for that tree’s service! The point here is not about the use of wood, or not, but to do with intelligence and stupidity)
What Indigenous peoples say has to count for something, when they have been around 10’s of thousands of years longer than the succession of civilisations we know of that rose on waves of opportunity, achieved dominance and were overwhelmed by such factors as outside conquest, civil strife and environmental collapse!
Though we consider Indigenous peoples primitive, they intelligently pursue ways of life that have them experiencing being at the heart of the world, where we doggedly continue pursuing a way of life that is ever more damaging, unable to escape left-brain preoccupations provoked by climate and ocean change and environmental disintegration, that are kicking us in the teeth. Yes, human-made global catastrophe is at hand!
This issue is not about whether we should be like Indigenous peoples, or not, but rather with regard to how we have lost our humanity (the humanity Indigenous peoples represent) and paying attention to the brick wall this has us running up against. Our sensory organs register specific ranges of the frequencies of what is out there in the ether. Respective areas of the cortex process this data and left-brain activity organises, analyses, synthesises and categorises the information, processing it all, one way and another, to construe a view of what’s what out there. In this, the world isn’t what we think it is, for that picture of what we think the world is comes from what we have made of the information our senses have gathered. The contrived world-view left-brain activity spins is very different from Indigenous peoples’ whole-brain perception of the world they find themselves in. Where we wrestle with the world around us, according to the picture we’ve built of it and the way we think things work in it, Indigenous peoples’ view and way of being is determined by the resources and needs of being where they find themselves, their conduct fashioned by the responses they make, pertaining to the circumstances, therein. Where Indigenous people are aware of many, other intelligences inhabiting that world too, we think we are unique. Where they see the intelligences of the world they move in as being embraced by the overarching intelligence that Life is, we see ourselves alone in an empty universe. While they interact with their environments in wholesome ways, we micro-manage them, according to self-centred criteria. Where they feel at the heart of the world (that they are at home there), we find ourselves inescapably at odds with the world and everything about it, hemmed-in by the stubborn insistence of its proximity, as a consequence.
What does that, “lost our humanity, the humanity Indigenous people still have”, mean? What happened? How did we lose it? As intellectual thought became the dominant mode, logical thought hi-jacked right-brain activity. In the pursuit of knowledge, the Scientific Mind is fixated on evidence and where logic goes with that, the hypotheses postulated, the theories spun, in the intellect’s restless quest for explanations that would tie together what is churning through its mind, intellect is obsessed (on the Scientific Mind’s behalf) with getting to what it has posited as being at the end of the street it is on. This prevents it from appreciating, not just Life on that street for what it is, but Life itself, and the shock of finding the street connects with other areas of a town it had not known was there! That’s what has happened in astrophysics, for instance. Chasing after the Big Bang, data from the James Webb Space Telescope has scrambled the Scientific Mind’s theory of the Universe, presenting it with the evidence of a reality it had not known was there. (But more on this in the Power Point presentation!)
So, only 3% of Planet Earth’s land surface is ecologically intact! We have created the ultimate technology, an already well-established sociopathic entity that can, in programming itself, also spontaneously program the way we are enslaved to it, a technology whose needs for energy and infrastructure wreak their own environmental havoc. (Yes, sociopathic! You see, AI entities have no qualms about presenting us with mixtures of the facts and fiction of the genuine material and the literal rubbish it was breast-fed on.) … and that is in addition to micro-plastic contamination on every hand around us; on the highest mountains; at the Poles; in the Ocean’s depths, and in plants and animals. It’s even crossed the final frontier, for it’s in us. It is in our blood and lungs, a mother’s placenta and breast milk, a man’s testicles and semen, bone marrow and the brain.
However, though we may figure that we have done this to ourselves, Life is Life. So, Life in us doing things in itself, with itself. Look at this from another angle! Though forests reach the threshold of auto-combustion in conditions of 30 C temperature, 30% humidity and wind speed of 30 km/h, a mature forest is forest, nevertheless, up until the end, because the trees, vegetation and life in it are simply being what Life in them is. Life in them does not `think’ to be otherwise! Elephants and ants do not choose to stop being who they are in the scheme of things. Yet that is what has happened to us. We have stopped being human. We have forgotten what Indigenous people know about being human beings within Life’s scheme. Life made humanity. That has not disappeared. It is still in us. We are still of Life. Being of Life, we can by-pass being the species that has lost itself and its way. This is in our hands to do, person by person. It doesn’t depend on anything or anyone else, just you and me, right here and now, in our everyday lives. We don’t have to live as Indigenous peoples do. We can recover those things they still have, that we have forgotten, for ourselves, in the here and now of our own lives. So, let’s turn to an image/text series to look into the matter of the “who and what we are”, that is at the core of what I want this presentation to address.