Opaque matter—it’s not opaque. It’s a luminous reality. It’s a luminous, all-organizing, energetic process that has in it the capacity to produce such a stupendous universe.
In the ecological age we need to see the universe as a community—and particularly the planet Earth, particularly in the biosphere. We need to encompass the Earth.
The planet Earth as we have it is a result of a vast range of experimentation over billions of years. Over billions of years. And things have been fitted together so intimately that, once we enter into it and start tearing apart things that have been adjusted through a long period of development, then we have to be enormously sensitive how we deal with these things.
The changes that we have to bring about are going to require an awesome amount of human energy. We have to be intensely devoted to the natural world in order to save the life systems that are now threatened. Everything is to be done, all the professions have to be readjusted. And we have to begin by what I would identify as thinking of the human as species, and we have to find our role as species among species, and to ask not what kind of world we want, but what kind of a world does the natural world want to be? What does the Earth want to be? And how do we help fulfill that role? Because we fit into that, rather than the world fitting into our plans.
If we’re going to poison the air, poison the water, poison the soil, then it’s not a mutually enhancing relationship. And, in fact, if we talk about progress, it must be progress in the life-giving qualities of the water and the life-giving qualities of the air as well as progress in the human. Because if these things do not progress, the human is not progressing. If the trees are not happy, we can’t be happy. If the birds are not happy, we can’t be happy, and we are not progressing. So it must either be total progress or no progress. The progress brought about by humans plundering the planet is no good.
Ecology is not a part of economics, economics is a part of ecology.
If we make ourselves unfit for the community of life, then the community of life is going to reject us.
