VIII. Earth Earns: An Open Participatory Earthropocene to Astropocene CoCreativity

5. An Earthropocene Future: Planetary Patriots/Matriots Achieve an Organic Ecovillage Gaia Viability

Norberg, Jon and Graeme Cumming, eds. Complexity Theory for a Sustainable Future. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. A Stockholm University systems ecologist and University of Cape Town conservation biologist, inspired by the nonlinear thinking of C. S. Holling and Simon Levin, edit a collection that attempts to reevaluate ecosystem maintenance in terms of its intrinsic complex adaptive system attributes. By avail of this perspective, especial notice can be made of natural resilience, diversity, nested networks, information processes, structural modularity, and so on. As a result, insights may be further gained into a human social mindfulness of our environmental milieu. All this is fine, but the necessary step to connect and root such ubiquitous properties as a manifestation of an appropriately conducive genesis universe, to even ask the question, is not yet imagined.

Nordhaus, W. and E. Kikkelenberg, eds. Nature’s Numbers. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999. To properly include the biospheric context, it is imperative to expand accounting beyond the Gross National Product to include environmental effects, resource depletion, pollution levels, and so on.

Norton, Bryan. Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. The Georgia Institute of Technology environmental philosopher writes a large, careful work on achieving an informed, agreed, non-invasive governance and facilitation of healthy human-earth viabilities. Much said about values – ethical, community, future generations – but the discussions proceed without guidance from an encompassing natural creation.

Orr, David. The Nature of Design. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. A professor of Environmental Design at Oberlin College offers insights into a more humane, ecologically sane world aligned with a self-sustaining natural wisdom and how this approach can influence architecture and education. Orr often writes for the journal Conservation Biology.

Oxford, Rebecca and Jing Lin, eds. Transformative Eco-Education for Human and Planetary Survival. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2011. University of Alabama and University of Maryland educators gather a copious, richly expansive array of wisdom and practice in this edited volume. Six main sections are: I. Natural Disasters and Emergencies and Sustainability Education; II. Practical, Classroom-Based, Curriculum Approaches; III. Integrating Sustainability into College Teaching and Teacher Education; IV. Creative Programs and Sustainability Education in Higher Education and Community; V. Indigenous Perspectives on Eco-Education; and VI. Toward a Spiritual, Healing, and Interconnected Future.

To give an idea of its unique local, global, feminine, indigenous empathy, here are papers from Part V. (S)he Who Will Transform the Universe: Ecological Lessons in Community Education from the Indigenous Americas, Elizabeth Sumida Huaman; Caring for Ourselves, Others, and the Environment: Applying an Indigenous Paradigm in Early Childhood Education in Aotearoa, New Zealand, by Jenny Ritchie; Critical Neurophilosophy, Indigenous Wisdom and the CAT-FAWN Connection, by Four Arrows; and Indigenous Knowledge, Environment, and Education in Africa, Simon Thuranira Taaliu.

Transformative eco-education is environmental education that is literally needed to transform and save our planet, especially during the global ecological crises of our present century. Such education demands inner transformation of many deeply rooted ideas, such as the following: the Earth exists merely to provide for human comfort; the extinction or reduction of other species does not matter; we are free to consume or destroy natural resources at will but are safe from destruction ourselves; and the Earth will continue to sustain us, even if we do not sustain the Earth. (Publisher)

The chapters in this book provide key principles, of which the following are just a few. First, educators can and should prepare students for natural disasters. Second, stories, case studies, the arts, and hands-on environmental experience, all enriched by reflection and discussion, can offer profound learning about ecology. Third, education at all levels can benefit from a true ecological emphasis. Fourth, teachers must receive preparation in how to employ transformative eco-education. Fifth, Indigenous wisdom can offer important, holistic, spiritual paths to understanding and caring for nature, and other spiritual traditions also provide valid ways of comprehending humans as part of the universal web of existence. Sixth, transformative eco-education can be an antidote to not only to environmental breakdown, but also to materialistic overconsumption and moral confusion. Seventh, we can only heal the Earth by also healing ourselves. (Publisher)

Pimentel, David, et al, eds. Ecological Integrity. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2000. An emphatic report of the Integrity Project, whose members include senior ecologists and philosophers such as William Rees and Laura Westra, on the critical state of Earth’s environment due an unmitigated human impact. They conclude that only a fundamental change in our individual and national patterns of destructive behavior will suffice.

Prescott, Susan and Alan Logan. Larger Than Life: Injecting Hope into the Planetary Health Paradigm. Challenges. 9/1, 2018. The coauthors are global activists whose vitas merit a record below. As the Abstract says, a relative physiosphere health and welfare is an initial imperative for any societal, environmental remediation and sustainability. While an apocalyptic despair seems to beset western and middle-east lands, spreading further afield, in the Australasia span, positive futurity of persons in community motivated toward a better world is alive and well. Indeed peoples deeply require some sense of an abiding purpose and worthy destiny if life and love is to proceed and prevail. The paper is part of a collection "The Emerging Concept of Planetary Health: Connecting People, Place, Purpose and Planet," search journal. See also the 2018 Oxford Handbook of Hope, edited by Matthew Galagher and Shane Lopez, and visit the InVIVO Global Initiative for Planetary Health website.

The term planetary health, popularized in the 1980s and 1990s and born out of necessity, was consistently used to underscore that human health is coupled to the health of natural systems within the Earth’s biosphere. The interrelated challenges of climate change, massive biodiversity losses, environmental degradation, grotesque socioeconomic inequalities, conflicts, and non-communicable diseases are, mildly stated, daunting. Despite ‘doomsday’ scenarios, there is plenty of room for hope and optimism in planetary health. All over planet Earth, humans are making efforts at the macro, meso and micro scales to promote the health of civilization. Viewing the Earth as a superorganism, with humans as the collective ‘nervous system’, may help with an understanding of the ways in which experience and emotions lead to behavioral responses that may, or may not be, in the best interest of planetary health. We argue that the success of planetary health solutions is predicated on a more sophisticated understanding of the psychology of prevention and intervention at all scales. (Abstract excerpts)

Prof. Dr. Susan Prescott: Founding Director of the inVIVO Global Initiative for Planetary Health; Director of The ORIGINS Project, Telethon Kids Institute; Professor of Paediatrics, School of Medicine at University of Western Australia; Paediatric Immunologist, Perth Children's Hospital Interests: planetary health; ecological and social justice; immunology and inflammation; microbiome science; nutrition; life-course wellness.

Dr. Alan C. Logan: InVIVO Global Initiative for Planetary Health, Group of the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) Interests: planetary health; natural environments; nature relatedness; mind–body medicine; nutrition; social and ecological justice; placebo; microbiota; history of medicine; philosophy of biology.

Prescott, Susan and Alan Logan. Larger Than Life: Injecting Hope into the Planetary Health Paradigm. Challenges. 9/1, 2018. Reviewed more in A Viable Gaia, along with a physiosphere health and welfare which is imperative for any societal, environmental remediation and sustainability, peoples a need an ingrained sense it is all worthwhile, that a better day can actually be achieved.

Pretty, Jules. Agricultural Sustainability: Concepts, Principles and Evidence. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 363/1491 & 1492, 2008. An article from a double theme issue on a truly systemic, intentional, biodynamic, permaculture-based, green revolution.

Primavesi, Anne. Sacred Gaia: Holistic Theology and Earth System Science. London: Routledge, 2000. A theologian who focuses on ecological issues, Dr. Primavesi is a Fellow of the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Religion at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her innovative theme is to engage an autopoietic natural cosmos which innately makes itself. She applies this recursive initiative to both person and planet with the message we are responsible locally and globally for our own future fate.

Rammel, Christian, et al. Managing Complex Adaptive systems: A Co-Evolutionary Perspective on Natural Resource Management. Ecological Economics. 63/1, 2007. A collaboration from the Universities of Vienna, and Sussex, UK, proposes to extend the newly realized complex, dynamical ways (see also Graham Harris) by which ecosystems organize and scale themselves to the realm of participatory human nurturance.

Instead sustainable development is an open evolutionary process of improving the management of social-ecological systems, through better understanding and knowledge. Therefore, natural resource management systems need to be able to deal with different temporal, spatial and social scales, nested hierarchies, irreducible uncertainty, multidimensional interactions and emergent properties. (9) There is an increasing awareness in natural and social sciences that ecological, physical as well as socio-economic systems share the characteristics of CAS. Characterized by self-organization and co-evolutionary dynamics, they express large macroscopic patterns which emerge out of local, small-scale interactions. (10) Natural resource management systems as complex adaptive systems are characterized by their dynamic interdepencence across various scales and are driven by mutual interactions between institutional, ecological, technological and socio-economic domains. (12)

Rhoads, Daniel, et al. A Sustainable Strategy for Open Streets in (Post) Pandemic Cities. Communications Physics. 4/183, 2021. We cite this paper by Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona and UC Berkeley (Marta Gonzalez) system geographers for its timely, appropriate content, and as an example a momentary turning from past to future, so to begin anew, by way of such intentional applications of nature’s organic principles and patterns. In another view, our path going forward can be guided by these “geonome” (urbanomic) code endowments. See also Spatial-Temporal Patterns of Self-Organization: A Dynamic 4D Modle for Redeveloping the Post-Zoning City by Daphna Levine, et al in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science. (August, 2021).

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