NATURE'S SOCIAL UNION

Editorial by Marilyn Hempel

I'm truly sorry Man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies th' ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-bound companion
An' fellow-mortal!
. . .
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men
Gang aft a-gley. [often go awry]
-To a Mouse by Robert Burns

What's in the news today? Painful gas price hikes. Economic recession. Climate change. Food riots in a number of developing countries. And closely related to every one of these: the sudden rise in grain prices, caused by a Malthusian convergence of dwindling oil supplies ("Peak Oil"), overpopulation, a new class of consumers in China, India and the U.S., and weather disasters affecting places such as Bangladesh. Tipping points that grab our attention.

Some people will undoubtedly respond by trying harder to do what we do now, squeeze more resources out of the land and hope for new, bigger technological fixes. But some of us agree with Albert Einstein, when he said, "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." We're looking for deeper understanding and more lasting solutions.

This issue of the Population Press presents some radical ideas that challenge the way we view the Earth, and how we think about the future. It looks at concerns about food production, melting glaciers, emerging disease vectors, and family planning-all of them connected by the question of how humans relate to nonhuman Nature.

Ward McAfee asks us to rethink our role in the natural world. Learning from Native American religions, instead of dominators or stewards, we could be "part of the ongoing dynamic of earthly creation."

Peter Salonius challenges the idea that soil is just a medium for us to grow crops. This demotion of soil in our minds has allowed the practice of "industrial food production that treats the earth as a substrate to stand plants up in." He dares us to consider the earth/soil/dirt as a complex living entity upon which we depend, integrally woven into the web of life.

Can we become a sustainable society without changing our basic attitude about ourselves as dominators of the Earth? Or of the Earth as a mere staging-ground for promises of Heaven?

In the words of Bill McKibben, "Human beings-any one of us, and our species as a whole-are not all-important, not at the center of the world. That is the one essential piece of information, the one great secret, offered by any encounter with the woods or the mountains or the ocean or any wilderness or chunk of nature or patch of the night sky."

This Spring, let us all go outside and just BE, just spend time enjoying nature's social union on this beautiful blue planet we are so privileged to call home.