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Green Paradise Lost

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The green paradise that was Earth has given way to the needs of over six billion humans. Collectively, we use 40% of the planet's Net Primary Productivity (biological output). We are the protoplasm champs: our total mass is greater than for any other species. And we have terraformed a large fraction of the Earth, leaving precious little space for those other species. The resulting habitat loss has triggered the sixth extinction crisis, which is occurring so rapidly that it makes the prehistoric ones look anemic. If we are to save what's left, we must somehow learn to reduce our numbers. The population movement has long advocated the use of humane and compassionate methods to slow growth rates. Their main tools are education and empowerment, and they work. As long as they do, the movement will focus on them. At the same time, however, it would help to understand how we got here in the first place. Unless we do, we run the clear risk of having it happen all over again. As George Santayana famously said, "Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it."

Elizabeth Dodson Gray, in her book "Green Paradise Lost", suggests that much of the reason has to do with our hierarchical model for the spiritual and physical world. She draws a pyramid depicting the following categories, in descending order: God, men, women, children, animals, plants, and nature. Each category has dominion over the ones below.

Whether we realize it or not, most of us are still operating by this worldview. We fail to recognize that it is outmoded, dangerous, and fundamentally incorrect. Men continue to exploit women, expecting unlimited fertility and obedience. Men also continue to treat their children as personal property, to be used for whatever ends fit their desires. Men raise animals for food under unspeakably inhumane conditions, and nonchalantly murder their wild cousins in the name of sport. Men have even learned to manipulate plants, first by hybridization and monoculture, and now with biotechnology. Nature itself forms the ignominious base of this pyramid: the most contemptible and defenseless of all.

We need to understand that we are all parts of a whole, and all interconnected. Everything depends in a literal and immediate way on everything else. Nothing is inherently "above" or "below"; the hierarchical ordering is an artificial intellectual construct. Any hierarchies exist only in limited contexts. For any given hierarchy, a countervailing context can be found in which the order is different, and perhaps even reversed.

Gray claims that the fall from grace related in Genesis has no textual basis in the original Hebrew. To quote from the book (page 157), "Bruce Birch has commented to me in private conversation that 'Never have we hung such a large doctrine on such a slender thread of biblical material.'" She theorizes that Original Sin allows us to treat Eden as an unattainable Utopia that we can never return to. Therefore we no longer need to worry about stewardship (or even the consequences of our actions in the world), and our real salvation lies only in the Hereafter.

Rev. Gray makes a strong argument for the case that it's we males who have really made a mess of things. There are several reasons for this, she says: 1) men lack the biological connection to the earth that women have through menstruation and childbearing, 2.) we are born of and nurtured by women, who are our first source of comfort and identity -- but in creating a male identity we must subordinate or reject all that is female, and 3) we are culturally conditioned to compete and dominate, while ignoring feelings of emotion or pain. The result is that we see ourselves as superior, enlightened beings who live in an abstract, intellectual world. Women are perceived as inferior and 'other': present only in the dark, mystical world of intuition and nature. We are civilized; they are not.

In reality, it's the reverse. Our analytical, logical view of the world is extremely limited in scope. We only see the linear relations, the simple mappings, the direct correspondences. Women, in contrast, are much better at 'feeling' the connections between all things. These connections are extremely complicated, interdependent, and dynamic. It is for all intents impossible to comprehend them logically. Only the intuitive approach (actually a highly sophisticated but non-analytic form of logic) can grok the totality of it.

"Green Paradise Lost" is a profound book. It deserves to be read by anyone who cares about the natural world and their continued existence in it.