Environment • June 7, 2022 • Joan Benach
On July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 manned space mission landed on our moon, and a few hours later Neil Armstrong made his first steps on the lunar surface, filling the world with amazement and admiration. With this achievement comes the deep emotion of the feeling of intimate union with the Earth, which motivates us to love and protect it, the home of all people we have known and will probably know.
Four years earlier, Alexei Leonov, the Russian astronaut, took the first spacewalk in history, saying that the Earth was “our home, small, blue and touchingly lonely,” a point lost in the enveloping cosmic darkness.
The preparation, implementation and follow-up of the first voyage to the moon was a long, expensive and difficult process, full of achievements but also many difficulties. “One small step for man, one giant leap for humanity,” Armstrong said as he stepped on the moon, symbolizing great human achievement. But another phrase often used as a joke when faced with failure has become even more popular: “Houston, we have a problem.”
Earth dawn. [Photo: William Anders, December 24, 1968.]
The earth has a problem
Today, not Apollo, but the Earth has a big problem. Of course, humanity is facing many problems: growing social inequality, the danger of nuclear war, the movement towards an authoritarian and plutocratic society subject to strict global techno-digital control, the rise of neo-fascism, the emergence of pandemics, massive social control and surveillance, new collective dependencies, global geopolitical risks stemming from the decline of the North American Empire and the rise of China, and many more.
Today, this blue balloon hanging in an endless and dark space has an even bigger problem, if possible, the biggest challenge we have ever had to face, a challenge that is knocking on our door: the socio-environmental crisis . No, it is not just about cleaning our rivers, planting trees, caring for forests, recycling products or promoting the use of renewable energy sources, all of which are essential and urgent initiatives. Nor do I mean the crucial fact that we are facing a climate emergency that is already having dire consequences. Our problem is more complicated; this is something else.
The earth is our home. Our planet is the only world in which we know for sure that the matter of the cosmos has become alive and conscious, although it is not necessarily the only one that can be inhabited. The first time humanity has thought about “our smallness” happened on Christmas Eve 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission, when a photograph blew the mind of our species.
On this day the poet Archibald McLeish writes:
To see the Earth as it really is, small, blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, means to see ourselves as riders of the Earth together, brothers of this bright beauty in the eternal cold – brothers who now know that they are truly brothers. ”
In his books and television programs, astronomer and great popularizer of science Carl Sagan recalls that we are a legacy of 15,000 million years of cosmic evolution and that we have the pleasure of living on a planet where we evolved to be able to breathe air, drink water and love the nature that surrounds us. Our cells are forged in the heart of the stars. “We are stardust,” he said. Today we are facing an entirely new circumstance, unprecedented in human history. We have created a civilization in which we have made enormous social progress and technological progress, but where, willingly or unwillingly, we have profoundly (and rapidly) changed the global environment and life on our planet. We no longer understand that we are part of nature and this puts us in danger for all life on Earth, including ourselves. Chilean poet Nicanor Para warned that we have made the mistake of “believing that the Earth is ours when the truth is that we belong on Earth” and that we continue to have an anthropocentric, scientific, technological and narcissistic way of thinking based on ” ego-consciousness ”instead of“ eco-consciousness ”.
We tend to be blind, to mitigate what threatens us, to silence what is harmful or negative, not to look at what we do not like. Although it is before our eyes every day, we do not see, do not feel, do not understand; we do not want to be fully aware of the brutal socio-environmental crisis in which we are immersed. It’s hard for us to believe the constant and terrifying warnings that scientists keep throwing at us. It is worth noting that we find many reasons to ignore voices and that many people, social groups and institutions are doing their best to keep us from hearing. However, it is extremely important to understand that it is not enough to enjoy the benefits, resources and well-being that nature gives us; we also need to understand and understand each other. This realization must come from a pure human view, which is at once scientific, ethical-political and spiritual. It is not enough to enjoy electric light, said Brazilian Dominican monk Frey Beto; one must understand how and why it is produced: “[O]Only those who have been trained as electricians know how to look at it with different eyes, because they understand how light reaches the room … it is a political consciousness: seeing the threads, knowing what is going on behind the scenes. ” The first thing is to know. In a well-known essay, the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant recalls an old slogan coined by Horace (1st century BC): Sapere Aude. He said, “He who has begun has already done half: dare to know, begin.
Small and fragile habitat
For a long time our planet seemed huge, the only world we studied. For a million years, humanity has believed that we are the center of the world, that there is no place other than Earth. Today the Earth has become very small. In the last stage of life of our species on the planet, we realized that we live in a small and fragile world, lost in immensity and eternity, floating in a vast cosmic ocean.
On February 14, 1990, the Voyager 1 spacecraft photographed the Earth from a distance of six billion kilometers. It was an almost imperceptible point of light.
Earth at a distance of six billion km from Earth from Voyager 1 in 1990.
Carl Sagan expressed his feelings dramatically when he saw this photo:
“Look at this point again. It’s here. This is at home. This is us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve heard of, every human being that has ever been, has lived its life. The totality of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and seeker, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, every child with hope, inventor and researcher, every moral teacher, every corrupt politician, every “superstar”, every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species have lived there – on a piece of dust hanging in the sun. The earth is a very small stage in a huge space arena … Our postures, our imaginary self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are caused by this point of dim light. ”
Human beings live in an environment that we shape and that shapes us at the same time. We inhabit a natural world created over billions of years by the processes of physics, chemistry and biology. We are just one of the species.
We are able to build comfortable houses to care for our elderly, as well as huge highways with 26 lanes. We invent books or the global internet, and we also create deadly nuclear weapons. We can explore the Poles and visit the moon or Mars, create musical beauty and develop elegant and powerful scientific theories and high-performance technologies. We rework nature to suit us … we are a species capable of almost anything. We are not just another species.
We live in two worlds that are constantly interacting: the ecosphere or the natural biosphere – the thin global skin made up of air, water, earth and the plants and animals that live in it – and the man-made technosphere, with all its gadgets and products. which we managed to invent. Two worlds at war, as the great biologist and ecologist Barry Comenter reminded us.
The current human capacity to have enough power to intervene decisively over nature dates back to the capitalist industrial revolution that began in the late 18th century. The last century has seen the expansion of irresistible fossil fuel capitalism, and the last five decades the economic and ideological triumph of neoliberal and cognitive capitalism, capable of creating exponential growth and great technology, but also destroying social ties and deep salts. , promoting mass consumption and empty entertainment as a way of life and personal “realization”. The triumph of neoliberal capitalism is enormous and very deep, at all levels, everywhere.
Today, the capitalist system does not seem to be able to create a “state of prosperity” for all mankind, even as the long-remembered Spanish urban planner and conservationist Ramon Fernandez Duran called “simulations of prosperity.” Capitalism is an all-encompassing materiality that destroys, builds and consumes. Commodification extends from the microcosm to the macrocosm, covering all areas of life and things: health, education, nature, knowledge, culture, art, sports, the body … The body is analyzed, fragmented, commercialized and finally sold as another commodity. Genetically modified genes, bacteria, seeds, …
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