Love Thy Nature

My name is Sapiens,

Homo Sapiens.

I'm about 200 thousand years old.

And this is my life today.

I'm searching for something

but I'm not sure what I'm searching for.

On those rare occasions when I look up at the sky,

I see all those stars.

And as far as I know,

only our planet has life.

Among all the species here on Earth,

I think of myself as the most intelligent,

self-reflective,

and wise.

But am I?

The United Nations reported

that the world is in serious trouble.

The media are reporting on it.

The world of scientists are showing data.

The folks that have the ability to make change

know that we're in trouble.

So there's fear.

There has not been this kind of destruction

on the planet since the time of the dinosaurs,

65 million years ago.

I saw this progress.

And progress has its price.

Over thousands of years,

we've been progressively empowering ourselves,

becoming more differentiated, more identified

as unique human beings.

But in the process, step by step pulling back

from the natural world.

That process has gone so far now

that we're running into a wall,

an evolutionary wall.

An evolutionary wall?

Is this the end of my life?

The only way we'll ever make it as a species

on this planet is if we reconnect with nature.

Nature?

Isn't that what I've been trying to evolve away from?

Not to be dependent on nature?

Not to be at the mercy of nature's wrath?

For the last 35 thousand years,

even as awakening hunter-gatherers,

we've been pulling back from nature.

And then about 10 thousand years ago,

we woke up to nature's seasons, nature's cycles,

and in that process we saw the possibility

of becoming farmers.

And that's been a process of empowering ourselves

and taking control of our own lives,

our own destiny.

And about 300 years ago, we saw not only

could we farm nature, we could manipulate matter.

And we pulled back further from nature.

Oh.

Technically our species name is Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

And to be sapient means to be wise.

So to be Homo Sapiens Sapiens means

to be doubly wise.

It's not only do we know,

we know that we know.

Sapiens sapiens,

yes, that's me.

And because I know that I know,

I've made up many stories of my dance

and fight with nature.

In the Bible, there's a key passage

that encourages us to have dominion over the earth.

That's means we would be in a controlling position

relative to other life forms,

other creatures on the earth,

and they were in a position of serving us

in our own evolution.

The story that science tells us very basically

is that we live in a universe that's meaningless,

purposeless, just simply an accidental material evolution.

We thought of Earth as just stuff,

and it led to an orientation of use.

So Earth is here for us to use.

And I think we've now come to the end of that track,

and it's no longer serving us.

And we see, instead of dominion,

we're really participants in the natural world.

And that's coming really much more into alignment

with some of the Eastern traditions

as well as some of the indigenous traditions

in spirituality.

Buddhism talks about the inter dependent co-origination

of all things in nature.

All things in life arise and co-exist together.

And it means we're not in a privileged position.

We're not in a place of dominion.

We're in a place of participation.

A similar theme arises with the indigenous

American Indian traditions:

the aliveness of nature,

that our aliveness connects with that aliveness.

In Christianity, and to some extent

in Islam and Judaism,

the sense of dominion is now shifting

towards a feeling of stewardship and trusteeship.

So rather than having power over,

we're in a respectful and responsible relationship

to the natural world.

So the last 3.8 billion years that life

has been on this planet,

all of these individual species

kind of started working together.

By virtue of being in the same habitats

and the same ecosystems, they begin

to leverage those relationships

in order to create conditions conducive to life.

If you could imagine that

sort of emergent property scaling up,

it could actually explain some of the planetary phenomena

that we see today.

So, we're getting away from this idea

that nature is all machinery

and looking into the Earth as a single living system.

That idea had a mystical name,

Gaia.

Imagine: A scientific hypothesis in the 1970s

named after a Greek goddess?

No wonder so many people didn't buy it.

But now, scientists seem to be finding

that Earth can really self-regulate

like any single living organism.

Earth is alive.

Scientists thought for a long time,

it's only because Earth is

the exact right distance from the sun.

Because you see, our molecules,

if they get too cold, they freeze up

and the organism dies.

If they get too hot,

they unfold and the organism dies.

We have to be in a certain range of temperature,

and that's where Earth is.

But over four billion years,

this is what we've learned in the 20th century,

the sun was 25% cooler.

So it sent its rays to Earth,

and Earth had all of these heat-trapping gases

to keep the sunlight in and warm up the planet

to the temperature for life.

But over four billion years,

the sun got hotter and hotter.

As it got hotter, Earth drew carbon dioxide out

of the atmosphere so it wouldn't get too hot for life.

Earth has regulated itself

by changing its atmosphere,

by drawing down carbon dioxide

while the sun heated up.

So you see, if we, in industrial civilization,

are now reversing that trend,

we're actually going against the intelligence,

the ordering that brought forth life.

There's evidence that suggests that the organisms,

the biosphere, plays a very, very significant role

into how the planetary systems work.

And you add in the layers of the geosphere

and the atmosphere, and it becomes

an incredibly complex system.

But that interactive system ultimately means

that everything is interconnected

and interdependent.

We're completely nature.

We breathe the same air that every other animal breathes.

There is no separation.

This understanding

of the self-regulating nature of Earth,

we didn't know about this.

For 400 years in science, we just didn't.

But now we're realizing we're destroying billions

of years of creativity that enabled

all of this vitality to exist.

But we're awakening to that mistake,

and now we see, instead of thinking of Earth

as something to exploit and use,

we're beginning to realize it is a community

that we are to join and enhance.

That's the big shift.

If I had to dominate nature,

animals were no exception.

After all, they don't have feelings like I do.

Or do they?

Where did we get this strange idea

that animals don't have feelings?

It actually goes back to one of the founders

of the modern world, René Descartes.

So he, back there with Newton and Galileo,

they were giving birth to a new world.

And Descartes, as the philosopher,

was asking himself the question,

"Do animals have feelings?"

And at first he thought, "Maybe they do."

And so he was starting off with animals close to humans,