In his latest book, The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking claims that the concept of God is not needed to explain the existence of the universe. The answer, according to him, is spontaneous creation: the universe created itself, by itself, spontaneously. Spontaneous auto-creation doesn’t call for a creator.

In saying this Hawking doesn’t speak like a scientist: he speaks like a (speculative) philosopher.  Scientists cannot say whether we “need” a God to explain the way the world is; all they can say is that science (and here mostly they mean physics) can (although so far it hasn’t) find equations that account for all the laws of nature. Such a “theory of everything” would account not only for all the laws of nature, but for all the things that are governed by the laws of nature, that is, for the way all things are in space and time. And even for spacetime itself. This would be equivalent (Einstein said) to reading the mind of God.  Only Hawking now says that God is not involved: as Laplace said before him, it’s a hypothesis for which we no longer have any need.

But this is an old story—an old fallacy. Hawking claims that the universe created itself by “spontaneous creation.” But how come that the universe—our particular universe—created itself just the way it is? Was that “spontaneous creation” a lucky fluke? Pure serendipity? Could it not be that the universe has been created so it would create itself the way it is?  Scientists know that our universe is a most unlikely place; statistically, it’s entirely improbable. According to quantum string theory, there could be about 10 to the 500^th power possible universes (this is the number 1 followed by 500 zeros). Only a handful among this staggering number of possible universes could bring forth life, not to mention so-called higher forms of life where beings who consider themselves intelligent claim they and their world came about by serendipity.

To answer “why” our universe “created itself” the way it did is beyond science. To say that it did so spontaneously is not an answer: it’s an excuse for an answer. When Hawking says that the spontaneous self-creation of the universe “out of nothing” is evidence that a creator was not involved, he is not speaking as a scientist. He is not making a scientific statement. His statement is pure theology—of the negative kind typical of atheists.

To deny the existence of a transcendental creator is just as much an act of faith as to affirm it. Of course, we can speculate on this question, and we should speculate: who says that the limits of science must be the limits of human inquiry? But we should not claim that when we speculate we speak as scientists… even if we happen to be the author of the mind-boggling equations that account for the behavior and ultimate end of black holes.

In a recent post, Why the Religious Fear—and Fight—Science…and Why It’s a Sad Mistake, I said that the religious have no reason to fear science, and I stand by that.  I should point out, however, that I meant “science,” and not—and certainly not all—“scientists.”

Where there is no vision, the people perish
Proverbs 29:18

One can’t solve a problem with the same level
of consciousness at which the problem arose
Albert Einstein

The final statements of the June 2010 Canada meetings of the G-8 and the G-20 make for impressive reading (G-8 Muskoka Declaration – Recovery and New Beginnings, 25-26 June, and The G-20 Toronto Summit Declaration, June 26-27). They contain a long list of marvelous commitments through which the leaders of the advanced world decide to join forces to ensure a better future for all.

All is well then?  Hardly. A closer look reveals major problems.

First of all, the flawless harmony communicated in the Declarations was not mirrored in the actual debates. There was little agreement on how to move forward, with the U.S. insisting on additional public spending to re-launch recovery, and the UK and the other European nations opting for budgetary cutbacks as the way to move forward. The proposals of the member states also had a tacit “beggar-thy-neighbor” dimension: if implemented they would serve the given nation’s economy, without much regard for the sacrifices incurred by the others.

But the real problem is not the attempt to hide or smooth over internal disagreements—that’s normal procedure for international bodies. The problem is that the objectives espoused by the G-8, and the larger G-20 that incorporates the G-8, are one-sided, as if only money matters and economic growth of the kind we have known in the past can solve all problems. This suggests a vision that’s terminally out of date.

In the G-20 vision the world is made up of nation-states and groups of nation-states, with national governments in charge of ensuring the national interest. Except for some frills and half-hearted regulations, the national interest is business-as-usual economic interest. The governments are to bring about “recovery,” “renewed stability” and “balanced growth” in their national economies, and international cooperation is intended to rebalance the economic and financial system that the crises of the recent past has unbalanced.

The G-8 and G-20 leaders do not seem to realize that recovering and re-establishing the economic-financial order of the past is to re-create a system that’s structurally unstable and no longer sustainable. They do not seem to entertain the possibility that what the world needs is not more of the same, but something radically different. A thorough transformation.

In a world where a third of the people live in abject poverty, as many if not more face critical water shortages, and where the atmosphere heats up, the climate changes, sea levels rise, and the processes enabling the regeneration of vital biological resources are seriously impaired, a classical economic focus is not just inadequate, it’s obsolete. We have seen what reliance on the open market produces: abject poverty for billions, and inequality of the kind where the wealth of a few hundred billionaires equals the income on which half the world’s population has to subsist. With this classical vision, the people, at least the poorer and less powerful elements of the people, will perish.

Obviously, putting more money into humanitarian projects, such as reducing infant and under-five morality, is good and necessary. But “recovery”—in the sense of recovering the kind of system and the kind of growth that characterized the last several decades—is not. As hardly any serious economist would contest any longer, this will only lead to more and bigger crises, and ultimately to breakdown.

Can we expect the recognition of the need for urgent and deep-seated transformation to dawn in the mind of the leaders of the world’s most powerful nation-states? Evidently not. A thorough transformation would—or is very likely to—place in question the legitimacy of the very order that brought them to power and maintains them in power.

Re-launching the kind of growth that the world experienced in the late 20^th century is not the way to go in the 21^st century. The dilemma is not whether to let states and peoples undergo imminent crises, or attempt to postpone the onset of these crises; here the choice is clear. The real dilemma is whether to lead the transformation to a more sustainable system, or to be overwhelmed by the collapse of the existing one. Leading the transformation offers an opportunity for sustained leadership to those who can still steer the present system, whereas a failure here would surely lead to their demise.

The crux of the matter is that initiating the processes that would lead us to the needed transformation calls for a kind of vision the G-20 doesn’t now possess. Einstein said that we can’t solve a problem at the same level of consciousness that produced the problem. A kind of vision that could solve today’s problems demands a new level of consciousness—a consciousness that inspires and motivates cooperation not only by national governments, and not only in the economic and financial domain, but also in the domains of ecology, technology, education, public information, cultural contact and communication. A consciousness that in today’s world the basic precondition of peace and sustainability, and even of enduring prosperity, is wide-ranging cooperation based on a solidarity that embraces transformation. A consciousness, in the last count, of the interdependence and oneness of all the people on this spaceship Earth, and the oneness of our shared destiny.

The “games” the G-20 should be playing are not inter-national games where either I win and you lose, or you win and I lose. They must be trans-national games where everyone wins. Because unless all the people win, all the people will lose. Sooner and more dramatically than the G-20 seems to believe.

When someone asked Gandhi what he thought of Western civilization, he replied he thought it was a good idea. It is indeed a good idea because it’s not entirely a reality. Western civilization—more exactly, the Western mind that creates the civilization—has a serious disease. It’s a “dis-ease” that affects all of us of in the West. And now we can have a better idea of what’s behind it.

Take merely these characteristics of the Western mind:

• it sees things as separate, each thing on its own, connected merely by mechanistic relations of cause and effect;
• it’s competitive: each individual is on his or her own, making his or her way in an impersonal and indifferent world;
• it disconnects the mind from the body: the mind only “drives” or “manages” the body as it would a car or an organization;
• it best understands the things it has itself creates: artificial, synthetic things, that can be readily and unambiguously manipulated;
• it disconnects the human from the natural; nature itself becomes the “environment” that humans can manage and manipulate to serve their interests;
• it categorizes, schematizes people and things, viewing them as abstract entities rather than as existing, living realities;
• it deals with the representations of people and things rather than with our living experience people and things;
• and it views all things, nature included, as mechanistic kinds of systems, put together from their parts and capable of being manipulated by acting on their parts.

These traits add up to a dis-ease; to the long-discussed malaise of civilization—of Western civilization. Other civilizations have their own problems and failings, but the above traits are typically those of the Western mind: of the civilization created by the Western mind.

Are these traits purely accidental, just the way the typical Western mind happens to work?

A historical analysis can furnish an explanation why this particular mindset came to dominate the West. The main reason appears to be the separation of the world of values, feelings and spirit from the world of fact and reason at the dawn of the modern age. Following the famous trial of Giordano Bruno, the Church claimed for itself authority over the world of value, feeling and spirit, and allowed science and scientists to investigate the world of fact through reasoning based on observation and experiment.

The original covenant between science and church, concluded on the part of science by Galileo, was reinforced and made into an unquestioned precept by the radical separation of the two worlds by René Descartes. According to Cartesian philosophy there is a complete disjunction between the physical world “outside” the mind (the world of “extended substance” res extensa) from the thinking, feeling world “within” (the thinking substance, res cogitans). Science made great progress by dissecting the outside world into parts and manipulating the parts: this became the basis of modern technology. And the West fell in love with technology, more exactly, with the powers over people and nature conferred by technology. It relegated the felt “inside” world of value, feeling and spirit to religion and spirituality, to be celebrated on Sundays and holidays. It made the manipulation of the “outside” world its true concern: the woof and wharf of modern economics and politics, the way relations between people, and between people and nature are decided and conducted.

This historical backdrop might explain how it is that the West ended up with an impersonal, mechanical, atomized world as its “real” world. But it doesn’t say how the Western mind actually operates; why it sees the world as an impersonal, mechanical aggregate of atomistic parts. But cognitive neuroscience can tell us more.

Roger Sperry, Michael Gazzaniga, and the other pioneers of split-brain research founded the discipline of cognitive neuroscience. They discovered that we have two brains and not just one. We have the right brain and the left brain, more exactly, the right and the left hemisphere of the neocortex. The two brains are different in their functioning, and even in their anatomy. The right hemisphere is wider, longer, larger and heavier than the left. It’s also different in its sensitivity to neurotransmitters and neurohormones, and has a different neuronal structure and organization. It’s differently “tuned“ to our experience.

It’s important to realize that the world is not given in experience in its pristine purity, “just the way it is.” Our input from the senses is organized, interpreted by our brain, with the result that the same sensory stimulus can give rise to very different experiences, very different interpretations. (Think of the famous drawing used by psychologists, where you can see either an elegant young woman, or an old hag.) Our two brains “see” the world each in its own way, and these ways are different. The reason that we have something like a single world-picture is because one of the two brains is dominant. In the West, the left brain is dominant. And here is the clue to the “dis-ease” of the Western mind.

In his seminal book The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist asked, what would it look like if our left brain were the sole purveyor of reality? The whole world would be a heap of bits and pieces; its only meaning would come through its capacity to be used. Our attention would be narrowly focused on the individual bits and pieces, with increasing specialization bringing more and more familiarity with less and less. Information and information-gathering would be substituted for knowledge gained by actual experience. And the kind of knowledge we would gain would be rooted in representations of reality, by abstract cognitive schemes that would seem more “real” than the things we actually experience.

Does this world seem familiar? That shouldn’t surprise you: the left-hemisphere’s view of the world is by and large the Western mind’s view of the world. There are people and things in this world, but there is no “betweenness”—they are connected only by relations of cause and effect, by how one thing affects another, by what one person “does” to another. This world is centered on, and is best when it deals with, the things we ourselves have created. It’s a competitive world, where everyone is separate, and everyone is out for him- or herself. And it’s an impersonal and uncaring world, where to think that there is meaning feeling, and purpose is merely to project one’s own subjective feelings into an impersonal “objective” reality.

The world of the right brain would be a very different world. While having only the right brain available to us we couldn’t analyze things and express them in language, our experience would be filled with many positive things. We would be making connections between things, seeing the world around us as a whole in which people and things are organic parts. We would be attending directly to our experience, seeing people and things in their presented uniqueness. We would be living in our body, feeling ourselves one with it and the world that surrounds and embeds it. The sense of time, the “flow” of things, would be primary, and we would enjoy experiences where this flow is evident, such as narration, theatre, dance, and music. Because of the betweenness connecting us to the world, we would be more empathetic, tuned to compassion and fellow-feeling, and concern with all things in nature. And our empathies would get a powerful boost by our being aware of our intuitions, of our subtle communication with the world beyond the range of our bodily senses. This perception is within the compass of the nonlocal quantum-receptivity of the sub-neuronal networks of our brain, but is repressed by the narrow rationality of our left hemisphere.

This right-brain world would seem more familiar to traditional people than to most of us in Western civilization. But to many of us it might seem more like regress rather than progress, for it would mean giving up much of our technical prowess and manipulative skills. However, this would not be necessary: we could also combine the world of our right brain with the world of the left. We could hand the things and events presented to our world-tuned right brain to the left for analysis, formulation, and communication, and then allow our right brain to place it in context, so we could reach an integral assessment, and a balanced way of responding. We would see the forest, and still find our way among the trees.

The dis-ease of the Western mind is a product of historical circumstance. But it’s not fated; we could overcome our one-sided heritage of the past. The key to it is using our brain more fully. This would give us a consciousness where the broad, holistic world of the right brain is linked with the pragmatic, skillful world of the left. This “broadband” consciousness without loss of acuity is the hallmark of what I called Quantum Consciousness.  QC could be the next step in the evolution of the human mind, and it could be our salvation. Moving toward it by balancing your own approach to reality would be a good beginning toward curing the dis-ease of the Western mind.

Published at Huffington Post

The debate among conservative Christians, Muslims, and Jews (the “creationists”) and natural scientists and the science-minded public (the “evolutionists”) centers on biological evolution. But on a deeper look, it concerns the universe in which life has evolved—or in which it was created. And, as I will argue, on this level there is no contradiction between design and evolution: both are equally needed to explain the facts.

At first glance, the scientific community—and anyone who believes that science can tell us something about the nature of reality—is compelled to reject the hypothesis that all organisms are the way they are because they were designed to be that way. But the creationists question that the stupendously varied panoply of life arose from mutations in the genome occurring by chance with the resulting organisms fitting by chance into environments where they can reproduce better than their predecessors.  Such a chance-mutation and lucky-environmental-fit process is surely too “hit or miss” to have created the complex web of life in the biosphere. The theory that affirms it is bound to be false.

However, at the cutting edge of science the theory of evolution doesn’t rely on random serendipity.  That view marks the classical Darwinist position, still championed by a few (though always fewer) mainline biologists. Richard Dawkins, for example, insists that the living world is the result of processes of piecemeal trial and error, without deeper meaning and significance. Evolution happens, but there is no purpose and meaning to it.

Take cheetahs, said Dawkins. They give every indication of being superbly designed to kill antelopes. The teeth, claws, eyes, nose, leg muscles, backbone, and brain of a cheetah are all precisely what we should expect if God’s purpose in creating cheetahs was to maximize deaths among antelopes. At the same time, antelopes are fast, agile, and watchful, apparently designed so they can escape cheetahs. Yet neither the one nor the other feature implies creation by design: this is just the way nature is. Cheetahs have a “utility function” to kill antelopes, and antelopes have a utility function to escape cheetahs. Nature itself is indifferent to this game. This is a world of blind physical forces and genetic replication where some get hurt and others flourish. It has precisely the properties we would expect it to have if there were no design, no purpose, and no evil and no good in the world, only blind indifference.

If a Designer is responsible for the way the living world works, He/She would have to be at best indifferent to what comes about in that world, or at worst a sadist who enjoys blood sports. It’s more reasonable, according to Dawkins, to hold that the world just is, without reason and purpose. The way it is results from random processes played out within limits set by fundamental physical laws. The idea of design is superfluous. Classical Darwinists echo French mathematician Pierre Laplace, who is reputed to have said to Napoleon that God is a hypothesis for which there is no longer any need.

Confronted with the classical theory, creationists are justified in pointing out that it’s extremely improbable that all we see in the world of life, ourselves included, should be the result of chance processes governed by impersonal laws. The idea that everything evolved by blind chance out of common and simple origins is just theory, they say. The world is more than a random assembly of disjoined elements; it exhibits meaning and purpose. This implies design.

The creationist position would be the logical choice if—but only if—scientists would persist in claiming that the evolution of living species is a product of two-fold serendipity. But at the cutting edge, scientists no longer claim this. Post-Darwinian biologists recognize that the evolution of species is far more than the chance processes classical Darwinists say it is. It must be more, because the time that was available for evolution would not have been sufficient to generate the complex web of life on this planet merely by trial and error. Mathematical physicist Sir Fred Hoyle calculated the probabilities and came to the conclusion that they are about the same as the probability that a hurricane blowing through a scrap-yard assembles a working airplane.

Leading-edge scientists realize that the evolution of organic species is an orderly, highly coordinated process, even if it’s not mechanistic and deterministic. The evolution of the living world is part of the great wave that created particles from the underlying virtual-energy and information field misleadingly called ”vacuum” (and is better called unified field, nuether, or Akashic field). The wave unfolded in the cosmos by structuring particles into atoms, atoms into molecules, molecules into macromolecules and cells, cells into organisms, and organisms and populations of organisms into local, regional, and continental ecologies.

The wave of evolution could only have unfolded in a universe where the fundamental laws and constants are finely tuned to permit the emergence of complexity. Ours is such a universe. Physicists know that even a minute difference in these laws and constants would have foreclosed the possibility of life forever.

Our universe is staggeringly fine-tuned to the creation of systems of higher and higher orders of complexity, differentiation, and integration. That such a universe would have come about by chance is astronomically improbable. According to quantum cosmology, some 10⁵⁰⁰ (1 followed by five hundred zeros) universes could exist physically, but only a handful could give rise to life. That our life-supporting universe would have come about by a random selection from this enormous set of possible universes is a zillion times more improbable than that living species would have come about by random mutations.  The great wave of evolution requires highly harmonized and coordinated processes in all its domains.

In the final count the evolution of life presupposes intelligent design. But the design it presupposes is not the design of the products of evolution; it’s the design of its preconditions. Given the right preconditions, nature comes up with the products on her own.

The debate between creationists and evolutionists would be better focused on the origins of the universe than on the origins of life. Could it be that our universe has been purposefully designed so it could give rise to the evolution of life? For creationists, this would be the logical assumption. Evolutionists could not object: evolution, being an irreversible process, must have had a beginning, and that beginning must be accounted for. And our fine-tuned universe is entirely unlikely to have come about by chance.

So the creationist/evolutionist controversy really is pointless. Design is a necessary assumption, because chance doesn’t explain the facts. But evolution is likewise a necessary assumption, for given the way this universe works, the evolution of complexity is a logical and by now well-documented consequence. Therefore the rational conclusion is not design or evolution. It’s design for evolution.

Then why the controversy?

Published at Huffington Post

In the first post of this series I promised to explore the wider implications of our having a quantum computer in our head. What does this revolutionary understanding of the capacities of the human brain mean for our life and our future?

Here I call “quantum consciousness” the consciousness we access when we use the potentials of our quantum-computer brain. Our brain is a macroscopic quantum system, yet we use it as if it were exclusively a classical biochemical system. With its quantum-system functions, our brain can receive information not only from our eyes and ears, but directly from the wider world with which we are “entangled”—nonlocally connected. Insightful people throughout history, whether shamans or scientists, poets or prophets, have extensively used this capacity, innate to all human beings. Today it is widely neglected. This impoverishes our world picture, and causes a nagging sense that we are separate from the world around us.

I believe that quantum consciousness could be the next stage in the evolution of our consciousness—and that this evolution could be our salvation. Let me explain.

The first thing I ask you to note is that human consciousness is not static, fixed once and for all. It’s the product of a long evolutionary development, and is capable of further development. In the thirty- or fifty-thousand-year history of the species we proudly call homo sapiens the human body didn’t change significantly, but human consciousness did. And it can change again.

In a variety of “alternative cultures” a new consciousness is already emerging. The members of these cultures—the green movement, the peace movement, the sustainable living movement, the movement of cultural creatives, and others—share similar social values and are open and interactive with the larger society; they don’t seek isolation or indulge in promiscuous sex. They aim to rethink accepted beliefs and values, and adopt a more responsible style of living. They shift from matter- and energy-wasteful ostentation toward voluntary simplicity and the search for sustainability and harmony with nature.

A new consciousness is now struggling to be born. Does this mean that the consciousness of humanity itself is evolving? Some famous thinkers have said so. The Indian sage Sri Aurobindo spoke of the emergence of superconsciousness in ever more people, and this, he said, is the harbinger of the next evolution of human consciousness. In a similar vein the Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser spoke of the coming of four-dimensional integral consciousness, rising from the prior stages of archaic, magical, and mythical consciousness. The American mystic Richard Bucke called the new consciousness “cosmic,” and in the colorful spiral dynamics developed by Chris Cowan and Don Beck it’s the turquoise stage of collective individualism, cosmic spirituality, and Earth changes. For philosopher Ken Wilber these developments signify an evolutionary transition from the mental consciousness characteristic of both animals and humans, to subtle consciousness, which is archetypal, transindividual, and intuitive, to causal consciousness, and then ultimately to “consciousness as such.” Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof summed up the characteristics of the emerging consciousness as “transpersonal.”

There is remarkable agreement among these visionary concepts.  Superconsciousness, integral consciousness, cosmic consciousness, turquoise-stage consciousness, and consciousness as such are all forms of consciousness that transcend the divide between you and me, the individual and the world, the human being and nature. If these thinkers are right, this kind of consciousness will be the next stage in the evolution of the consciousness of our species.

Quantum consciousness—QC—could perhaps be the next stage in the evolution of the mind of humanity, but why would it be our salvation?

The answer is simple commonsense: because QC is a consciousness of directly intuited, felt connection to the world. It inspires empathy with people and with nature; it brings an experience of oneness and belonging. Quantum consciousness makes us realize that, being one with others and with nature, what we do to them we do to ourselves.

Not only will QC make us behave more responsibly toward other people and the planet, it will also encourage us to join together to cope with the problems we face.

Most of us cooperate with members of our own family and community. But cooperation has now become vitally necessary on the global level: it’s in all our best interest to cooperate with our fellows in the global community. Without such cooperation we’ll be hard put to overcome the global threats and problems that face us. Without cooperation we risk joining the countless species that became extinct because they couldn’t adjust to changed circumstances.

With dedicated and purposeful cooperation we can meet the challenges of human survival: we can have seven billion or more people living peacefully and sustainably on the planet. We have the technologies, the skills, and the necessary financial and human resources. Abject forms of poverty can be eliminated, energy- and resource-efficient technologies can be made widely available, water can be recycled and seawater desalinized, and sustainable forms of agriculture adopted. We can be more efficient and effective in harvesting the vast stream of energy that flows from the sun to our planet. And to finance these projects we would only need a small part of the enormous sums of money that we now commit to speculative, self-serving, or downright destructive ends.

Cooperation on the global level is a new requirement in the history of our civilization, and we are not prepared for it. Our institutions and organizations were designed to protect their own interests in competition with others; the need for them to join together in the shared interest has been limited to territorial aspirations and defense, and to economic gain in selected domains. The will to cooperate in globally cooperative projects that subordinate immediate self-interest to the vital interests of a wider community is still lacking in the political as well as in the economic domains.

When all is said and done, the fundamental need of our time, the precondition of creating a peaceful and sustainable world, is the spread of a new and more evolutionarily adaptive consciousness—the quantum consciousness of oneness and belonging.

Forms and intimations of the new consciousness are already emerging in the world, but they haven’t yet reached the mainstream. When QC becomes mainstream, humanity will have reached a higher stage of maturity. It will have become a species that has not only the technologies and the skills, but also the wisdom and the will, to survive in the world it has itself created.

Published at Huffington Post

The unsustainable condition of the human and the humanly impaired natural world constitutes a global emergency, and it calls for global-level cooperation to avert a global-level breakdown.

Global-level cooperation is a new requirement in the history of humanity, and it’s not surprising that we are not prepared for it. Our institutions and organizations were designed to protect their own interests in competition with others; the need for them to join together in the shared interest has been limited to territorial aspirations and defense, and to economic gain in selected domains. Preparedness for globally cooperative action that subordinates immediate self-interests to the vital interests of the community is lacking both in contemporary nation-states, and in business enterprises.

Globally coordinated emergency action could produce positive results. The world lacks neither the financial nor the human resources for effective emergency action. Abject forms of poverty could be eliminated, energy- and resource-efficient technologies could be made widely available, water could be recycled and seawater desalinized, and sustainable forms of agriculture could be adopted. We could muster the energies to implement such action, and we have the technologies. Even a modest increment in the effective use of the solar radiation reaching the planet could supply the necessary energies, and the reassignment of but a fraction of the funds currently devoted to destructive purposes could finance the principal projects. The reason for the lack of globally coordinated effective action doesn’t lie in the condition of humanity relative to the condition of the planet, but in the lack of will and preparedness of the people and institutions of the human world to ensure their survival on the planet.

A number of persistent beliefs and assumptions prevent the bulk of humanity from perceiving the current condition of global emergency and acting on it.  For example:

It’s still widely held (although now less and less voiced) that the planetary environment is practically infinite. It’s an inexhaustible source of resources and an inexhaustible sink of wastes. This tacit belief obstructs the recognition that we are vastly overusing the planet’s resources and overloading nature’s regenerative capacites.

Another dominant belief is that matter is passive and inert, and can be engineered to suit our wishes. The belief that with our sophisticated technologies we can manipulate the world around us to respond to our personal, national, and economic objectives produces a plethora of unforeseen side-effects, such as the destruction of ecological balances and the massive extinction of living species.

It’s also widely held that life is a struggle where only the fittest survive. This arbitrary application of Darwin’s theory of natural selection to human society justifies no-holds barred competition and creates a growing gap between an ever shrinking group of economic and political power-elites and the marginalized mainstream of the people.

The still dominant economic wisdom is that competition is good, for the free market (governed by what Adam Smith called the “invisible hand”) distributes wealth. When one does do well for oneself, one also does well for one’s fellows in the community. Yet the penury of nearly half of the world’s population offers clear testimony that this tenet doesn’t hold in today’s world, where the skewed distribution of power and wealth distorts the operations of the market.

Numerous personal values and beliefs hamper the will to engage in globally cooperative emergency action. The ethos that characterizes the modern world puts the individual on a pedestal, holding him or her to be unique and above nature. In the words of Francis Bacon, the superior status of modern man justifies “wrenching nature’s secrets from her bosom” for his own benefit.

Last but not least there is a persistent belief that the selfishness and egocentricity that characterizes modern people are unalterable expressions of human nature; they cannot and therefore will not change. People were always pursuing their own interests and always will, mitigated at the most by the interests of their immediate family, enterprise, or ethnic or national community.

Given the persistence of such beliefs, the failure of both nation-states and business enterprises to join together in global projects is by no means surprising.

The silver lining on these ominous clouds is the growing openness of young and sensitive people toward adopting new and more responsible ways of thinking and acting. The “alternative cultures” are growing rapidly, but they are yet to produce the globally coordinated action needed to cope with the global emergency. Bringing them together to form a critical mass that has sufficient economic and political weight to implement the “worldshift” that would transform the structures and operations of society and re-stabilize the cycles and balances of nature is conceivably the most urgent and important project of our time.

Emergency is an unstable and ultimately unsustainable condition in a system that calls for effective action to avert breakdown. A global emergency means that the human and natural systems of the planet have become unstable and unsustainable, and that globally coordinate action is required if the global system is not to crash. Global emergency involves both human societies and their planetary environments. In the latter, balances and cycles have been perturbed and are now unstable. Unless re-stabilized, the biosphere will evolve toward different balances and cycles, and the new conditions may be less favorable for supporting human life than those at present. Re-establishing dynamic stability in the biosphere is in the most fundamental and immediate interest of human life and persistence.

Ecological unsustainability. To survive, human beings need an adequate supply of clean water and nourishing food, as well as breathable, adequately clean air. Water, food and air are natural resources, produced by the ecological systems of the planet. We have a global emergency today partly because these resources are overexploited, and their supply is diminishing. The production of oil, fish, lumber, and water has already peaked. Forty percent of the world’s coral reefs are gone, and about 23 million acres of forest are lost each year.

The situation is especially critical in regard to the availability of water. In 1950 there was a potential global reserve of nearly 17,000 m³ of freshwater for every person then living. Since then the rate of water withdrawal has been more than double the rate of population growth, in 1999 the per capita world water reserves decreased to 7,300 m³. Today about one-third of the world’s population doesn’t have access to adequate supplies of clean water, and by 2025 two-thirds of the population will live under conditions of critical water scarcity. By then globally there may only be 4,800 m³ of water reserves per person.

The situation is also critical regarding the availability of productive land. The Food and Agriculture Organization estimated that there are 7,490 million acres of high quality cropland available on the planet, seventy-one percent of it in the developing world. This quantity is decreasing: worldwide 12 to 17 million acres are lost per year due to soil erosion, destructuring, compaction, impoverishment, excessive desiccation, accumulation of toxic salts, leaching of nutritious elements, and inorganic and organic pollution through urban and industrial wastes. At this rate 741 million acres will be lost by mid-century, leaving 6.67 billion acres to support 8 to 9 billion people. Even if optimally managed and distributed, the remaining 0.74 acres of productive land could only produce subsistence level of food for the entire human population.

Changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere constitute another critical trend. Since the middle of the nineteenth century oxygen has decreased mainly due to the burning of coal; it now dips to nineteen percent of total volume over impacted areas and twelve to seventeen percent over major cities. At six or seven percent of oxygen per total volume, human life can no longer be sustained.

At the same time the atmosphere’s share of greenhouse gases is growing. Two hundred years of burning fossil fuels and cutting down large tracts of forest has increased its carbon dioxide content from about 280 ppm (parts per million) to over 350 ppm. During the 20th century industrial activity and human consumption had injected a full terraton of this gas into the atmosphere, and presently another terraton is being injected in less than twenty years.

The rapid accumulation of carbon dioxide makes it impossible for the planet’s ecosystems to maintain their cycles and balances. In the oceans, the explosive growth of CO₂ at the surface makes the water too acid for the survival of shell-forming organisms, the basis of the chain of life in the sea. On land, CO₂ absorption is reduced by the destruction of the ecosystems that had previously sustained a stable climate: as much as 40 percent of the world’s forest cover has disappeared due to acid rain, urban sprawl, and the injection of toxins into the soil.

Global warming is an indisputable fact: in recent years the average global temperature has risen significantly, and the warming trend is accelerating. Open to question is only whether warming is due to human activity or to natural causes, or possibly to both. While there were other warming and cooling periods in the history of the Earth—”hot-houses” and “ice-houses”—the current warming trend is likely to have an anthropogenic component. The CO₂, methane, and other hot-house gases emitted by human activity create a shield in the upper atmosphere that heats up the air as it prevents heat generated at the surface from escaping into space.

But regardless of whether global warming is produced by human activity, by cycles in the Sun, or by both, it creates unsustainable conditions: drought and harvest failure, water shortages, the spread of diseases, and the die-out of vast tracts of forest. It melts polar ice, and as great masses of ice slide from the Antarctic continental shelf into the sea, it raises sea-levels worldwide.  Flooding threatens the lands and habitations of nearly a fifth of the human population.

A continuation of present trends would reduce the chances of survival of large segments of the world community. The nearly seven billion humans now on Earth live close to the resource-limits of the planet, and any further reduction in available resources would deprive the poorest and most affected segments from the minimum level required to ensure physical subsistence. Given the interdependence of contemporary societies, and their dependence on the availability of the basic resources of life, the plight of any significant segment of the population will affect, and hence is of serious concern to, the whole of the world community.