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I am scientist enough to remind myself to add that I am not suggesting that different ways of thinking with one or the other brain hemisphere explains why we have changed. But it helps me think about the difference between two very different kinds of being-in-the-world, using left brain/right brain as a metaphor. And, who knows, there might be a physical something that made us change. Let's say, humans have changed to thinking primarily with their left brain "because" we eat only muscle meat. All other meat eaters eat everything: organs, bones, skin, and parts we cannot even mention!
It could be something as simple as that. I don't know. But I do know that we have changed, we have changed our thinking, and not for the better.
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The path our left brain chose is leading to the meltdown of not just our financial/economic system but our civilization. The world we have constructed on top of and ignoring the planetary ecology is not viable.
Empires rise and fall. Why worry about the slide of this one? Because this empire, this civilization, reaches into all the last corners of this planet. If we continue to erase a thousand species a day the time is not far in the future that the planetary ecology will be so diminished that it cannot function. The collapse of an economic system (based on nothing but fantasies about illusions) is dreaded by all. The collapse of the planetary ecology is a truly unthinkable disaster.
An economic and cultural system based on growth, MORE, is obviously impossible. There is never unlimited more. Our exploration and subsequent plunder of the planet--our only home--has brought us global warming, now manifesting as climate change. Scientists who measure things are telling us that the changes brought by global warming are happening much faster than originally thought. When we thought we had a century to worry about a changing earth few people worried. When it seemed more likely that it was perhaps half a century, some people began to think about cutting down our poisoning of the atmosphere. The latest figures do not even talk half a century any more, but ten to twenty years.
There is brave talk about draconic reduction of burning coal and oil by burning alternative fuels. Our previous president promoted ethanol. Suddenly everybody grew corn, until the corn market crashed. Ethanol is an alcohol, it evaporates. My miles per gallon have gone down by ten or more percent. Here we have no choice, because all gasoline is mixed with at least 10% ethanol. Another alternative fuel proposed is palm oil. The rush to make palm oil plantations has already destroyed most of the rain forests of Malaysia and Indonesia's large islands. But we seem unable to consider not burning to make energy, or even not needing as much energy as we use now.
Whatever we can think of in left brain mode, seems to make things worse, not better.
We don't think much about the survival of our species; we take for granted that somehow, someone, science probably, will assure that we, the most important species, will survive, and that in the end we will design a world for us alone.
It is very important that we rediscover our right brain to make us aware of the excesses left-brain-only thinking has made us do to Life, to the planet. As long as we see ourselves apart from the planetary ecology, we will destroy it. Man can survive on this planet only if something like right brain thinking redresses our extreme divorce from nature that is a construct of left brain thinking.
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