Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [15]
Observing this rule has counterbalanced the doomsday negatives in my life with positives. It helps to ward off the gray waves of despair when they sweep in. If I have learned what is wrong with the world, I am grateful also to have learned what is right. I can live with that.
Ben Gadd, born in 1946, is one of Canada’s better-known naturalists and Rockies-area writers. Author of the groundbreaking Handbook of the Canadian Rockies, Ben has written eight other books and contributed to several more. He has appeared in many television items and several film documentaries on the Rockies. His Web site is www.bengadd.com.
* From An Essay on the Principle of Population, chapter 10.
* This is work by Marc Imhoff and Lahouari Bounoua. Read it at www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/environment/0624_hanpp.html. Their figures do not include the oceans. Recent research by Boris Worm, of Dalhousie University, has shown that populations of all marine species we use as food, anywhere in the world, will have collapsed—shrunk to less than 10 percent of historical numbers—by 2048 (Science, November 3, 2006).
* The list is too long to include here. It’s on my Web site, www.bengadd.com.
Humanity’s Rite of Passage: Oil as an Adolescent Growth Hormone
ANODEA JUDITH
Sooner or later, we all have to grow up. We’ve heard this a thousand times, as if it were a fact as certain as death and taxes. Continue to put one foot in front of the other and you will eventually get there, wherever “there” might happen to be. Definitions of maturity vary widely, but most people assume that it will just happen by itself, like ripening fruit, with time as the only necessity.
Humanity is in the throes of an adolescent identity crisis. Birthed from the primal world of nature, billions of years in gestation, we have risen out of Stone Age infancy, crawled across the land in teeming toddlerhood, and fought our way through five thousand years of sibling rivalry, to emerge in the present time as teenagers headed for a collective initiation. If we survive it, a glorious adulthood awaits us, with discoveries and capacities beyond our wildest dreams. But if we fail to transform, many humans and well over a million additional species will die.
No authority figures are going to get us out of this one. Our problems cannot be solved by science, nor politics, nor religion alone. With the Mother Goddess having long been denied, and the Big Daddy in charge dangerously lacking in moral conscience, we are being asked both as individuals and as a culture to grow up and become our own authority, networking and collaborating amongst ourselves to find the best answers. This maturation forms a new organizing principle and is simultaneously psychological, ecological, spiritual, political, economic, scientific, and mythic. With so many fronts on the verge of profound change, navigating this shift can be dizzying. Especially when we are coursing with adolescent growth hormones that have their own agenda.
As a child enters adolescence, he or she experiences a rapid growth spurt, which stops when the adolescent reaches adult size. That growth is brought on by a change in hormones that makes the adolescent, well, a little crazy, as any parent would attest. It is accompanied by intense self-absorption and fueled by consuming everything in sight with little regard for the consequences. Is it any wonder that the media refers to us as “consumers” and encourages us to preen ourselves for some imagined popularity contest? Powerful but reckless, we are struggling with the lure and taboo of repressed libido, and just beginning to form equal relationships with the opposite gender—in the workplace, in politics, in the churches and the home. You could even say we have suicidal tendencies—and the means to carry them out.
Once the hormones settle down and the physical growth stops, emotions settle down as well. Intellectual and spiritual growth take precedence. We become