What Will It Take To Sustain Humanity?
Many people everywhere, troubled and confused by the world we’ve created, seek global remedies. There is widespread and growing agreement that our civilization is approaching an ominous rendezvous. How do we arrest and reverse our destructive and unsustainable momentum, end our needless suffering, prosper together, find peaceful solutions, sustain humanity, and advance our civilization?
What is the definition of sustainability?
It’s to leave this planet as we found it or improve it so those who follow us have the same opportunities that we have had. We haven’t been doing that for all of our existence, mostly because of ignorance. We live in era in which our misdeeds have caught up with us.
Houston Smith, in his book The World’s Religions, writes of the two issues most religions have in common. They all advise adherence to some form of the Golden Rule and avoidance of self-centeredness. Generally, we do neither one. Self-centered and shameless, we do to each other and our environment whatever we can get away with.
We get by with this behavior in the short term but over time find that we are victims of our own exploitation for the way of life, the architecture of life, reveals an exquisite intimacy among all phenomenon. Life also broadcasts a riveting truth from which there is no escape. I call it the reverse side of the Golden Rule. Where the Golden Rule suggests that we do to others as we would have others do to us, the reverse side does not suggest anything. It warns that what we do to others, we do to ourselves. In an interconnected world, all exploitation and oppression inevitably returns to its source.
This is a reality we must understand and from this understanding make the critical mind shift required of us if we are to sustain humanity and advance our civilization.
How Do We Sustain Humanity That Is Bursting At the Seams?
Sustainability is an awesome challenge given that we add about 80 million people a year to our very small and troubled planet. That means that each week, we add in excess of a million and a half people to our existing global overpopulation. That’s a million and a half more people every seven days that we must feed, clothe, house, educate, employ, transport, govern, protect and keep healthy. The key to sustainability is to take the word apart – sustainability – and make two words of it: sustain ability, i.e., our ability to sustain. Our ability to sustain what? Our ability to sustain our health in all its dimensions: mental, physical and emotional. Our ability to sustain our relationships with other people and other nation states. Our ability to sustain our environment, ecological systems and biosphere (we live in a very narrow and fragile band in our solar system that allows life to exist at all).
How do we accomplish all of this?
We do this by understanding our responsibilities. So often in life the questions are asked, “What is the purpose or the meaning of life?” These are questions that send us in circles. The appropriate question is, “What are the responsibilities of life?” The answer is to take the word “responsibility” apart. Make two words of it: response ability, i.e., our ability to respond. Our ability to respond to life’s challenges and stimuli to optimize and sustain our health, our relationships with each other, and our relationship with our environment.
We need to be healthy, be kind, and respect the environment. Only when we – each one of us – does these simple things, will we sustain humanity.
Filed under: sustainability
