The upshot is that the destruction of this Earth continues to
far outstrip the attempts of ecologists and concerned citizens to bring the
calamity to a halt. Consensus reality seems hell bent on a planetary suicide
trip. Why? What is “consensus reality” as an Ecological phenomenon? Where is
current World culture as a spiritual, socio economic and political condition
that it is killing the Earth and is unable to stop?
In order to look into these urgent questions, we have to see
our development as a social species of beings and understand how we got here. We
tend to think that we have only recently, as history goes, started to get into a
troubled and destructive relationship with the Earth.
Older cultures and stages of civilized development are thought
to have had a more appropriate and viable survivalist relationship with the
Earth. If we could find a way to model our current society along the lines of
these older cultures we could find the way out of our ecological dilemma. Apart
from the fact that this view strikes us as hopelessly naive, with a projected
World population of over ten billion within the next century, there is also the
question of what sacred nature actually means as a historical reality. Are we
being blinded here by words when we assume that what earlier phases of culture
meant by the word “sacred” is the same thing that we mean or would like to mean?
What can the “re-sacralization of nature” possibly mean now in real terms?
The first day a man put a yoke upon
an animal and turned it into a beast
of burden
was the beginning of the end of
sacred nature.
An essentially technological and non-spiritual culture has
been slowly developing ever since the transition from hunting and gathering to
agricultural, membership societies. The gradual clearing of the great
continental forests to make room for farming and grazing land, which had become
a steady trend in organized cultures thousands of years ago, was the actual
beginning of a non-sacred relationship with Nature.
The sacred festivals of the farming seasons and full moons,
propitiate and thank deal making transcendental gods for the abundance of the
Earth. If the deity is pleased, then abundance, if angry then famine. A
metaphysical economics emerges, those who are pleasing to the God/ess prosper
and grow rich. The inversion of this metaphysical economics appears as the
conviction that material riches prove the favor of the God-ess.
The ancient magical cycle of abundance - famine continues on
in the boom and bust cycles of global capitalism. Neither praying farm folk,
capitalist resource ecologists or Goddess feminists are able to actually
establish a mutual survival balance with the Earth. Humanity has been getting it
wrong with the Earth for so long now that it has become an invisible habit.
The whole Earth is littered with the ruins of dead agrarian civilizations. With
very few exceptions, the pattern is everywhere the same, a nomadic tribe
settles in a place with water, fertile land, good hunting and fishing. Soon the
wild life is depleted and more wilderness land is cleared and turned over to
grain and root crops. The tribe prospers and instead of fighting with all other
surrounding tribes they invite compatible tribes to join them. They are united
by the active worship of a sacred way of life guided by shamans or priests
and a divine King. This united multitribal society carries out trade in distant
places and is able to mount a fighting force capable of protecting it from all
perceived enemies.
The population explodes, and soon food shortages cause
social chaos. The frightened population, under the influence of priests, make
human and animal sacrifices, to the God/ess who remains unappeased. Malnutrition
and diseases wipe out most of the population. The civilization collapses in
ruins.
next page
