What came first and the wisdom from the world

I hope to tie together a few threads of thought with this post today. I mentioned in a couple of posts (here and here) the fallacies and deficiencies of the current framework of "sustainability" thinking. What the dominant framework does is the following - it puts "economic" sustainability on the same footing as "social" sustainability and "environmental" sustainability. The global North, i.e. the agenda-setter and dominant rhetorical force, has successfully morphed the concept of "sustainability" to mean "sustainable development," the foundation of which are these deeply ingrained notions of what "economy" means (and you can read about that in those posts I've linked). At the very heart of this "economy" is the notion of technology, and the new. The new has come thick and fast in our world, and not a month goes by without us being bombarded with advertisements and images of what other people think is "good" for us. New knowledge is being successfully marketed and turned into products so that people can make money. In fact, it is this notion of new knowledge that the global North, and increasingly the large nations in the global South, thinks will get us out of this "sustainability" bind. But, with this new knowledge has come constantly increasing environmental degradation and biodiversity loss.


This world existed long before humans arrived on it. Epochs and eons have passed, species have gone extinct, and new forms of life have constantly evolved and appeared. A tree is the outcome of millions of years of slow and steady and constant evolution. A tree is a beautiful example of the outcome of a dynamic equilibrium; the tree has responded to changes happening so slowly that you cannot see them in happening now. These responses are delicately balanced, guaranteeing the survival of the tree. Such is the wisdom of from world. This wisdom stems from the dynamism of population and the unforgiving forces of air, land and water, driven by the sun. This is the wisdom that has led to the adaptation and evolution of rivers, lemurs, bats and snow leopards. With this wisdom, we realise that how these creatures have behaved and evolved has allowed them to fill a role and fill a place, just perfectly. This has inspired the greatest human thinking. Countless people have wondered about nature, and I hope we all have. The wisdom from the world has imprinted on Onwas and the Hadza, who have survived successfully for thousands of years, and are in tune with place and time. Yet with our definition of "economy," we have moved away from this natural wisdom, and are now desperately hoping we can get it back. But this wisdom exists, and is lying dormant. Our "economy" we feel is the best driver of human action, and is the only raison d'etre for human life. Some hope that the "economy," based on new knowledge, can lead to "sustainability." In effect, we have tried to, in a couple thousand years, tried to accomplish what it has taken everything else on Earth much longer to come to - a dynamic equilibrium, constantly evolving, yet inherently sustainable.

Why not trash Yellowstone?

It is fair to say that most of us think that trash is worthless; trash is indiscriminately thrown “away” and banished. It is rare to see someone adorn spaces with trash, the objects in our lives we choose to discard. Landfills are located in remote areas (both geographically and from those with the most power - instead they are located closest to people who are treated as worthless). Our society have become desensitised to the existence of trash, and have condoned its production for the sole aim of “moving forward.” Fully extending this line of thought, however, leads us down paths our society refuses to consider. When we say trash is worthless to us, that means that the places that the trash ends up are also worthless to us. This means that land, air and water are worthless to us, or can be minimally respected, as long as they can continue to provide services to us unimpeded, or through human intervention and “ingenuity.” A second thought will not be given to a piece of land, any piece of land, as long as industrial agriculture can produce monocultures of crops that can provide people with “food.” As long as it continues to rain, we are fine with trash ending up in our oceans. As long as we can breathe, incinerators can continue to spew toxic chemicals into our air. 

Trash continues to flow as a fluid, down paths of least resistance, ending up degrading the sources of our existence – land, air and water. Let us focus on trash and the land and landfills. Trash continues to fill landfills unabated, with complex politics and policies now surrounding their operation. But what is forgotten, or not considered in these politics and behaviour, is that a landfill is actually a piece of land. This land, unfortunately, has been so "undervalue" that people have chosen to take some of our most "worthless" objects, our trash, and store it there. Some may say that the land we use as landfills wouldn’t have been used any other way. That land would be a "waste" of space; indeed, given our ethic of man over nature, this space must be used to take full advantage of what we as humans have been granted by nature – ample space to spread our influence. Such a space, desolate and uninhabitable in some cases, now can bear scars of our humanity, and become a place that is no longer left untouched. Yet, just because a tract of land is not being used by man, or cannot be used by man does not mean that it is of no value. Now one might ask, "What is the difference between this land, converted to a landfill, and another tract of land, say Yellowstone National Park?" I would say there is no difference in their values as pieces of land that make up this Earth. Each is mystical, each cannot be comprehended fully through science, numbers and technocratic, money-minded thought. The only difference is the difference in human perception through the assigning of monetary value to something purely aesthetic to human senses – we have monetarily valued one piece of land to be much greater than the other. Some may argue that, actually, Yellowstone is invaluable culturally and represents the pinnacle of human conservation of nature, that it represents the grandiosity of nature, its rugged, uncompromising terrain, and the complexity of ecosystems and the geological activity the Earth can support. (Yet this thought has not stopped people from blowing up the tops of beautiful mountains to reach coal laying below the surface; land is "valued" monetarily. If rare earth elements were to be discovered below Yellowstone, Krishna/Allah/Buddha/Science forbid, I am positive the mining industry would line up outside a Congressman’s office seeking approval for mining plans.) But I argue that this land being used as a landfill is as valuable as any other space on Earth, including Yellowstone. A landfill is a piece of land that is made of Earth. It is a piece of land that has been exposed to the weathering elements of rain and wind, that supports complex ecosystems of organisms and the magnificent creations of nature that we barely comprehend. Each piece of land is unlike any other piece of land on Earth, and has been exposed to the forces of nature in a different way than any other place on Earth. 

Now we have two vastly differently valued pieces of land before us - a storied national park, where people from all over the world come to see, to experience and to feel connected to nature, and a landfill, a place valued by humanity so insignificantly that we have no qualms with sending what we value the least, the trash of our culture, to sit there. But if we were to value the uniqueness of each piece of land (as well as each square mile of ocean, each parcel of air), there is no reason that we should send our trash many miles away. Indeed, if we were to produce trash anyway, why not trash Yellowstone, or our backyard?

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Here is a post about experiencing nature, and the trash borne of it.
Also, here are two links (1, 2) that Arnab shared with me regarding the trashing of Mt. Everest.

A natural course

While I was sitting in the lobby of a La Quinta Hotel in Canton, Ohio, last week, a debate between candidates running for a Senate seat in Florida was being broadcast on CNN. Marco Rubio, one of the candidates said, "The natural (emphasis added) state of the economy is to grow. If it is not growing, there is something hindering its growth, and we need to find out what that is and fix it."

This is in stark contradiction to what Professor Princen, in a panel discussion at the Law School last year, talked about. He laid out the idea of sufficiency. He gave the example of human growth and viewing the Earth from space. He said that humans only grow (generally) to a certain size, and over time, we go from being small children to fully grown adults. Our growth stops (maybe not girth); we are fully developed, maybe mentally and physically definitely. When we look at the Earth from space, what we see is not an overflowing, unbound teeming of life, but the finiteness of the space in which all life as we know exists - the thin layer of atmosphere, the brown of the land and the blue of oceans. Yet for some reason we think that within the finiteness of our Earth, we can grow, materially and monetarily, unboundedly.

A comment from my post On definitions and development said,

"Your comment on the meaning we put in the word "development" made me think of human development, as in a baby developing into a child, teenager, and then adult. That kind of development is following a line of growth that is already put into place, natural, and essential for that human to be able to explore and manifest all of his or her individual gifts, traits, and qualities. If only we thought of the world this way - development is not to get all we can out of it, but rather to cultivate it along the lines of what it is naturally made to be - and in so doing experience all the wonders it can produce - just as, I assume, a parent experiences when seeing a child enjoy and excel in one of his or her natural talents."

Is there a natural course of our existence, with all that we have invested in "humanity?"