Letter to Decimillennial
Australia:
a
voice to the nation
The already established Anthropocene Mass
Extinction, the 6th major extinction, for which the
dominant world civilization is responsible, is now leading us in
the direction of exponential global warming and civilization
collapse, or even worse.
We need help, the world needs help, and the
urgent need for long-term global sustainability seems to point to
First Peoples, and particularly the Australian indigenous
civilization, as among the few who hold the keys to the future.
The very long term continuous and highly successful nature of
Australian culture and land management over multiple tens of
thousands of years means “Decimillennial Australia” needs to
establish a “voice to the nation”, to advise on the best way to
transform the totality of our civilization so as to assure that
there can be a future.
There is a continuum from homo sapiens
sapiens to homo stupidens stupidens which englobes whole cultures,
entire continents, over centuries and millennia. Ours, the
so-called ‘western civilisation’, in many key respects is at the
homo stupidens stupidens end of the spectrum. The Australian
decimillennial culture in its historical dimension is undoubtedly
at the homo sapiens sapiens end.
I am inviting those in the indigenous
community with ‘access’, to reach back beyond 1788, beyond the two
centuries of destruction and belittlement, back into the depths of
that culture, and bring forth the knowledge, the wisdom, the
essence of 100,000 years of an ever-developing culture, community
and responsibility for the earth. Today, this century, that
knowledge may well be the key to the future, the key to there
being a future.
The new Australian culture of two centuries,
along with that of much of the present world, is destroying our
planet. That’s the meaning of the term, ‘the Anthropocene mass
extinction’, which has its origins with the industrial revolution
– about the time the doctrine of Terra Nullius arrived on
Australian shores. We don’t realise what we have done, and don’t
know how to change. But our problem is now the problem of all
peoples, those who have caused the present situation, as well as
those who have always worked to contain the damage and respect the
planet.
It is to be hoped that the most ancient of
those wisdom cultures, perhaps the most peaceful and the most
responsible, can now become the guide that can advise our leaders
and our people – and find ways to lead them to listen and be
informed.
Looking at the world today, much of the
planet has been adversely affected by the brutality of the Western
search for domination and conquest - ever perfected by today’s
corporatocracy, financeocracy and oligarchy. The Earth herself is
now looking to you, to the people who have tended the earth for
100,000 years, spanning geological catastrophes that today we seek
to ignore, while closing our eyes to similar ecological
catastrophes we have already created in ‘our’ epoch of the
Anthropocene.
The 10 millennia that has seen the
development of what is now the ‘western civilisation’ that
dominates, destroys and is slowly reducing to detritus the major
part of the entire world population and its natural diversity
evidently do not carry the seeds of wisdom we are desperately in
need of today. On the contrary, the 10 decimillennia of Australian
civilisation, the peoples who eschewed the deceptive riches of
quantity for the wealth of quality, can present the essential
understanding that can lead this country, and the entire planet,
to a new world, a world of people and planet, rather than a world
of profit and power for the few.
We need your assistance to avoid a
futurecide that could be worse than the Permian Mass Extinction.
The dominant world culture does not have the answer. Any attempt
to avoid the risk of exponential warming while using the same
technologies and structures that caused it is doomed to failure.
We need something new, something ancient, the wisdom and expert
knowledge that guided the most successful and sustainable culture
and land management of all time, with its respect for life, for
community, for country, for planet. There we may find a guarantee
of a long-term future for our grandchildren and their
grandchildren, and beyond.
This process of creating a new world, a world
with its origins in so many and varied traditions of
sustainable agriculture and supportive communities around the
world, would certainly make judicious use of the multitude of
non-impactual aspects of the present world; much of our science
and technology and culture can be compatible with a ‘planet with a
future’. We also need to sustain a deep confidence in the
evolutionary direction of the living planet over 4 billion years
of dynamic homeostasis, despite the 5 major extinction events to
date. We have now initiated the 6th, the first ever where a single
species is uniquely responsible. But because we have caused it,
through a species-wide reevaluation of our role in the ecosphere,
we can initiate a process of fundamental and radical change that
can make the world a much better place to live in, for all, and at
the same time guarantee a future, for all.
The threat of global warming can dissipate
by quickly - very quickly - eliminating the causes of the
Anthropocene extinction: the excessive human footprint and the
carbon overload as well as the massive exploitation of both
planetary and human resources. To do this we certainly need to
reevaluate the type of society and economy, the type of
leadership, that have developed over centuries, if not longer. The
important work of identifying and promulgating the values and the
ways-of-being that can help us to draw back from the brink is the
most urgent challenge our species has faced.
It seems this type of world that can
guarantee that there will be a future has already existed, perhaps
in many parts of the world, but on a very long-term continuous
basis it has flourished most importantly in Australia. Today such
a world desperately needs to be imagined, guided and nurtured into
existence by those who have access in the not so distant past to a
living culture that can inform our world today. Perhaps exceptional leadership can be expected to emerge from the exceptional civilisation, to create the stories by which each person across the nation can participate in a renewal of a civilisation for people and planet. By itself, our
world seems incapable of achieving this.
An integral part of such a process of renewal would necessarily involve the active participation of multiple individuals across the whole spectrum of life, work and governance, functioning not as part of an organisation, but attentive to the needs of human and planetary survival. Individual Insight, attentive to planetary Earthsight, may assure that there is a future. See: www.earthsight.org > New Articles > “Earthsight Discussion”.
Regards,
William
Plain
Email: plain@earthsight.org
www.creativediscussion.org
& www.earthsight.org