Get the latest tech news

Is the Logic of Our "Younger Culture" Harmful to Our Planet

If we were to adopt the Older Culture view of all things having value and a sacred right to live on this planet, then the odds of our unwittingly taking planet-scorching actions plummet...

I pointed out to him that even if his assumption (that the world is only here for humans) was true, such massive tinkering as wiping out hundreds of thousands of species and altering the chemistry of the atmosphere might still create unintended results that would end up making the planet inhospitable to our “master species.” And, in fact, there’s plenty of evidence that that’s exactly what’s happening, documented in this book and many others. When it was finally accepted that our planet wasn’t the pivot-point of all creation, we simply shifted our language to accommodate a fundamentally unchanged worldview: it is now the assumption of almost every “religious” citizen of any “civilized society” that we are at the spiritual center of the universe. Younger Cultures are built on a foundation that is psychologically and spiritually ill: Freud’s “shrunken residue” of the true and historic beauty of human life lived in intimate connection with the natural world.

Get the Android app