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  • It’s Time to Get Serious About Saving the Planet from Destruction
  • Michael Lerner (bio)

Ever since earth day 1970 there has been growing awareness of the impending doom that is threatening human, animal, and perhaps all forms of life on this planet: climate change. Environmental science confirms the realness of this threat, and our daily observations do as well. Crisis is imminent unless humanity charts a new direction.

Sadly, the more people learn about the environment, the more frozen most of us are in despair and depression. To some extent this may be a product of our being embedded in the psycho-spiritual despair that the planet itself, long understood to be a living organism, may be experiencing. In other words, as embodied beings made of matter and spirit, we are inevitably connected to the energy and pulse of the planet, and as it suffers, we experience that suffering ourselves.

But to a greater extent our despair results from being part of a class society in which the powerful 1 percent is not willing to sacrifice its extreme wealth in order to make the drastic economic and political changes necessary to address the urgency of the problem. Our despair also stems from the fragmentation of the environmental movement, which has become torn between liberal accommodationists, whose organizations are funded by the 1 percent and who focus on minor environmental advances, and radical localists, who have given up on fundamental social transformation and are instead trying to build local projects in which people live more fully in harmony with nature. We feel despair when we realize that even the few hyper-local projects that succeed in reducing local communities’ reliance on global markets have little chance of challenging the fundamentals of the big picture that is threatening the life support system of the planet.

Tikkun’s focus, by way of contrast, is to recognize that the destruction of the planet’s life support system is the consequence of our economic system’s dependence on an ever-expanding consumer market fueled by goods produced by unceasing exploitation of the planet’s resources. We recognize environmental destruction as the direct result of a market system that teaches people they must compete with each other to become successful and that they must distrust anyone who believes that love and kindness are as significant a source of human motivation as power and greed. And we see the planetary crisis as an outgrowth of the widely held belief that fulfillment in life can come from financial success and the ownership or consumption of ever more things, gadgets, and electronics. In many ways, environmental destruction is made possible by our culture’s belief that frenetic work is morally righteous and that we should feel proud if we are constantly too busy to reflect on the big picture. In such a culture, far too few people find time to actually relax into celebrating the universe.

The task of saving the environment, then, requires a non-violent revolution. We need to replace the current system with one based on love, kindness, generosity. We need to recognize that fulfillment can come through living in a society that supports loving relationships, ethical and environmentally sustainable behavior, and a renunciation of increasing production and consumption of material goods, in favor of a deep and shared sense of “enough.” We need to embrace lives of graceful simplicity and harmony with the earth, finding fulfillment by surrounding ourselves with people who genuinely care for each other and who know that their own well-being is intrinsically tied to the well-being of everyone else on the planet. We need to recognize that to craft lives of love and care for ourselves, we must show love and care for all people and beings, even those whom we perceive as our enemies. And we need to reshape our economy to give priority to cooperation, caring for the earth, reducing levels of consumption, and increasing our capacity to experience joy from what we already have, once our needs for food, clothing, shelter, health care, child care, elder care, energy, and basic comforts have been satisfied.

To achieve this kind of a world, I propose the...

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