A Contemporary Ecological Renaissance

CONTEMPORARY LIFE has yet to catch up with its own new view of the universe, one that no other culture throughout human emergence and development has ever had.  It is a renascent view that challenges and transforms our understanding of human nature.

It is a view that literally sees Earth as a small dot that is lost within infinites of smallness and largeness.  And it is a view that revisions wildness and civility from mutually exclusive events to complementary events that are facets of a whole.

Human success has resulted in the “peopling of the Earth.”  And that success is also transforming our actions in a renascent way.  The peopling of the Earth has shifted human migration toward cities rather than outward from the cities, with urbanization now the predominant human habitat.   Post-industrial cities are rapidly becoming residencies rather than global resource extraction management centers.  This is provoking a radical shift from a longstanding, natural strategy of exploitive pioneering that has been successful in an Earth ecosystem with vast stored resources to one of integrative residency in an Earth ecosystem with no vast physical frontiers. 

Our most rational measures suggest that global urbanization continues to diminish the health of both uninhabited and settled landscapes.  However, increasing global urbanization is driving the emergence of human actions that are adaptive and move toward integration with the larger Earth ecosystem.  Most of these adaptive actions to date are secondary intuitive responses rather than primary intentional ones.  But they are important responses such as, for example, reducing the rate of population growth that our intentional efforts have been unable to accomplish. 

In these intuitive adaptations, there is a renascent leap in our understanding of cities and human nature that is beginning to occur.  From both our most rational scientific measures and our actions, there is a new sense of post-modern cities and human life as continuing to be natural, even in its domesticity, and even more startling, a sense of human life as not only natural but also as wild.  And this is not an esoteric discovery, but rather a practical, deeply economic one in a now-peopled Earth.

Ecology is still a very new word, and eco-literacy, still in its genesis.  And it has really not included human life.  The peopling of the Earth, global urbanization and scientific inquiry have created a threshold where we cross over to a less superstitious perception of deep inclusion in vast wildness and a sense of being young in the life of the Earth.