Friday, February 1

The Antropocene


A feature which distinguishes us from the animal world is our innate ability to tell stories about ourselves. 
But it is only over the past 20 years we have realised the extent of the severe climatic instability and uncertainty that underpinned our evolutionary journey over the past few million years. What we can say with a high degree of certainty, is we prospered due to an extraordinary ability to alter the landscape and adapt.
In turn, that shaped us in our evolving identity, in the sacred practices, values and expressions of what it is to be human. That is; ‘the sense of self’. 
So here we are in the Age of Humans, known as the Anthropocene, a new era with attendant greater risk for sustainability requiring another narrative.        
The questions we need to ask of ourselves is as empathy requires imagination, does our biological evolution make it hard for us to have empathy and to identify with those outside the tribe?    
What is it that can lead us to a new moral sense of meaning in this new world?
Is there a link between culture and our survival and if so what is it? Does our moral sense of empathy need to change?
If it is essential we develop new values away from the old tribal values, to ensure we might engage in a meaningful way? Ultimately that comes down to politics and behaviours because the Anthropocene is of our making. We have, in the past, changed ourselves, in tandem with adaptions to the new environment, so in this age that needs to be repeated with a greater sense of urgency.             
 

2 comments:

Tom said...

I like this, Lindsay. If I can put this post side-by-side with my most recent post, I would say we have a need for radical re-thinking about the world, the environment, and our place in them. We can no longer take the view that this-is-how-it-is simply because we choose to think that way. Thinking it doesn't turn the thought into fact. Unfortunately, too many of us are still addicted to old, outworn ways of thinking that prevent us from facing reality.

Did you read the recent comment by one world leader who said that we could do with more global warming to offset the Arctic Vortex? From anyone else, that might have been amusing, just about. From him? Oh no.

Lindsay Byrnes said...

Hi Tom,
Well said.
I did read the recent comment, and another by press secretary Sarah Sanders who told a religious television network that God "wanted Trump to become president".
Best wishes