"Sé que sería posible construír un mundo justo. Por eso vuelvo a empezar sin tregua a partir de la página en blanco. Éste es mi oficio de poeta para la reconstrucción del mundo" Sophia de Mello
Je déclare l'état de bonheur permanent Et le droit de chacun à tous les privilèges. Je dis que la souffrance est chose sacrilège Quand il y a pour tous des roses et du pain blanc.
Je conteste la légitimité des guerres, La justice qui tue et la mort qui punit, Les consciences qui dorment au fond de leur lit, La civilisation au bras des mercenaires.
Anthropology, neuroscience, and psychology increasingly recognize that human beings are “soft-wired” for profoundly social behavior, says the author. This puts a better world within reach.
Humans see the world through largely unconscious frames that determine what we believe our nature to be and therefore what we believe to be possible. To address our biggest global challenges, we can shed this non-ecological mental map—what the author calls “scarcity-mind”—based in lack and fear. Locked in scarcity-mind, we remain blind to our own power and end up creating together a world that none of us, as individuals, would choose. But humans can actually change how we see, moving from a frame of lack and limits to one of alignment with nature. Based on research in neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology, this article explores a world seen with the emergent “eco-mind” in which possibility is all around us. Thinking like an ecosystem, no one is bereft of power.
Humans see the world through culturally formed filters that determine what we can and cannot see and what we believe to be possible.
Based on core assumptions of separateness, stasis, and scarcity, we see ourselves in perpetual competition with other selfish creatures.
These assumptions drive a political and economic system characterized by concentrated power, a lack of transparency, and a culture of blame.
Based on assumption of connection, continuous change, and co-creation, we can move away from this toward Living Democracy, which is positively aligned with our nature via the continuous dispersion of power, transparency in human relations, and cultures of mutual accountability.
It’s the GDP-obsessed growth model, many reformers argue, that’s leading us to perdition. They decry the irresponsibility of a relatively few taking more than their share, who are profligate with the earth’s dwindling resources. Certainly this “we’ve hit the limits” framing rings true, for, inarguably, human societies have exceeded the limits of destruction, depletion, and disruption our planet can sustain without massive human and nonhuman loss and suffering.
But is there a more effective way of understanding the roots of our predicament?
Water in the Anthropocene is a 3-minute film charting the global impact of humans on the water cycle.
Evidence is growing that our global footprint is now so significant we have driven Earth into a new geological epoch — the Anthropocene.
Human activities such as damming and agriculture are changing the global water cycle in significant ways.
The data visualisation was commissioned by the Global Water Systems Project for a major international conference (Water in the Anthropocene, Bonn, Germany, 21-24 May, 2013). http://conference2013.gwsp.org
As datasets build upon one another, the film charts Earth's changing global water cycle, why it is changing, and what this means for the future. The vertical spikes that appear in the film represent the 48,000 large dams that have been built.
The film was produced by Globaïa and the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme.
http://globaia.org // http://igbp.net
The film is part of the first website on the concept of humans as a geological force, http://anthropocene.info
For more than four decades, astronauts from many cultures and backgrounds have been telling us that, from the perspective of Earth orbit and the Moon, they have gained such a vision. The overview effect is a cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts and cosmonauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from orbit or from the lunar surface. It refers to the experience of seeing firsthand the reality of the Earth in space, which is immediately understood to be a tiny, fragile ball of life, hanging in the void.
