To:    Guardian CiF
Re:    The "Sustainability Problem" - in a nutshell!
Date: Thursday 15 February 07

In response to the Guardian article, "All together now" by Jeremy Seabrook on those responsible for global warming.

Link to article and thread at The Guardian.
 

We need to face up properly (instead of just paying lip service) to what Charles Darwin taught us about human origins. Then, our situation, how we got into it and how we can get out of it, becomes a lot clearer.

We are ANIMALS ("prime apes", in fact, Earth's "Greatest Ape", if you will excuse the puns), doing what animals do: struggling for survival and advantage in our environment.

Only, with the advent of civilisation, this blind Darwinian struggle transferred to an artificial, "socio-economic environment", where - greatly facilitated by the development of free-market capitalism - it continues as the driving force of most (particularly economic) human activity.

But now it is driving us towards disaster, because, as things stand at the moment, we cannot help but give priority to economics (the household of man in the artificial, "socio-economic environment"), instead of to ecology (the household of our planet in the natural environment), despite it being obvious (were we not blinded by familiarity and dependency) that human survival urgently demands the opposite.

This is the ROOT CAUSE of the "Sustainability Problem" and it has to be recognized, before there can be any prospect of us finding a solution.

My homepage: http://www.spaceship-earth.org