“Spaceship Earth” was first penned by Henry George and popularized by R Buckminster Fuller. The Earth is a self-regulating system that provides our life-support as nursed by the sun’s energy, and it is comprised of everything we have available to sustain all life for the next 4.5 billion years. Our desires as individuals, families, corporations, nations, and as a species, must be tempered by this fact. All concerns and solutions are global in nature, as they always have been and will be.

 

We are co-stewards of the Garden-Planet to be shared as a Commonwealth Of Birthright. Humanity does not have the right to sell or own a piece of it. We do not have the right to poison it. We do not have the right to deplete it. We do not have the right to obliterate it. We do not have the right to abuse other living things, and we do not have the right to abuse each other. Violation of these limits is equivalent to lashing out against one’s own flesh. It is an assault of the highest order upon the single Divine Organism that gives us all life, Ourself. Without reverence for the gift of human consciousness and its Mother, there is only selfishness, greed, and ultimate doom.

 

Humankind is not an isolated biological miracle. Human biology is the result of the coevolution characterized by the emergence of life forms simultaneously in collective support of one another. Our biology cannot be separated from the planet-organism and all its processes. To think we can live independently is a patently false belief that needs to be corrected swiftly. Our biological wellbeing is directly linked to the web of life in a healthy biosphere. Some people have called this the Religion Of Earth.

 

To describe the relationship of man to Earth Sénégalese people say Niokobok: One shares mutually: We are together: This is ours together.

 

University studies conclude a sustainable global population is roughly 1.8-2 billion people. By that estimate we are over sustainable population by approximately 60 percent and counting higher. World population in 1776 was 800 million, and increased to 2.52 billion by the year 1950. We are currently using resources at a rate equal to 2.5 Earths, with some higher projections, so we are obliged to change as an issue of survival. We have an immediate obligation to reduce overpopulation consistently until sustainable numbers are reached. This is the single most effective way to reduce pressure on limited resources.

 

The target for human expansion is zero growth in equilibrium with all earthly resources and species, -/+ 10%.

 

The economy of Nature is life. The economy of humanity is based upon exploitation. This is a collision between the totalitarian-economic-system and the basis of our general health. Instead of the current economy that wages war upon the biosphere, we need to replace selfish aspects of un-free-enterprise to a system harmonious with conservation of nature. It would be even healthier to eliminate artificial-economy completely. Industrial scale activity cannot be justified if it is not necessary or grossly polluting, and restoration of wild spaces should be a requirement of license to extract raw materials contractually. If one takes a tree, one should plant two more. The world is not a private bank. It belongs to all resident shareholders in perpetuity.

 

Any system invented to govern humanity, no matter what it is labeled, can only succeed within the context of conserving a fixed set of global resources indefinitely. Since we invented artificial ways of living outside natural constraints wild animals must adhere to, we must willfully control population, restrict land use, and ration the resources necessary to support our species without degrading planetary ecologies. Each nation is responsible for cultivating and maintaining its resources in the absence of global agreements for restricted use. Many countries now rely on imports to care for their citizens, which is signifies that they cannot take care of themselves with indigenous resources alone. This is a dangerous status that places citizens at risk for any breakdown of supply chains. Appropriate leadership response is to lower demand and increase development of self-reliant production techniques. This would also reduce energy and pollution from excessive shipping practices. It is easy to extrapolate that we no longer have the luxury of using resources to produce things that are not necessities, until we are efficient enough to provide a clean environment, food, shelter and healthcare to the existing population on a sustainable basis.

 

Current architectural and zoning practices of cities isolate people from the environment by displacing Nature and establishing the illusion of physical separation from the wild. This generates a spiritual disconnection from the rest of Ourself. Mental and physical illness is largely due to the aberrant human design of processes, habitats, and lifestyles that conflict with healthy biology. Living in such sterile places prevents the observation of Nature first hand, and without witness to these splendors, one cannot understand, revere, or protect them. Cities do offer some efficiency in their compactness, but they are unsustainable constructs in current form. All major cities in the world today are not self-sustaining. They require vast reservations of foreign lands and long supply chains to meet their consumption rates.

 

What is the purpose of building places that people want to vacation away from? There is no reason why our cities cannot be built as resorts, places to hold pride in. Living and working places can be integrated with indigenous Nature respectfully, without paving over every inch of ground. Creating a higher percentage of natural space in proportion to buildings would be advantageous to a sense of spiritual wellbeing, and learning a firsthand experience of Nature. These public spaces might include orchards and habitats large enough to support a myriad of species that have been displaced. Vertical gardens and agritecture can provide food reliance and renewed interest in horticulture. Just as we have a goal to balance population and natural spaces worldwide, the same objective holds true for the acreage of core city settlements.

 

Our verdant world is a dynamic thing influenced by many forces we cannot sense directly. We placed undo trust in relatively consistent performance of environmental conditions through the industrial era, but we have not planned for environmental cycles of change that take place over the course of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years. When frozen ice-sheets and glaciers reached their maximum size during the last ice age approximately 20,000 years ago, sea level was 120 meters below the current measure. There was also far less arable and habitable land not covered in ice. Coastal communities are now threatened by gradually rising seas world wide, and people are already evacuating some of the lowest islands in the pacific. As the warming trend continues more communities will be at risk. The majority of our cities and populations live in coastal zones defined as land ten meters or less above sea level. There is no way to predict how high or how fast seas will rise, but we are not prepared nor equipped to handle even modest ocean level increases in the next 100-200 years. The same is true for changing weather patterns that grow our food and supply drinking water. There is no reason to assume that nature will keep providing as she did in the past, particularly when humanity is harming the biosphere at an accelerating rate. A redesign of our settlements is in order. It is now necessary to redefine how human occupation of the planet should be engineered and what it should look like. The design intention for healthy places requires making shelter while sharing responsibility for the integrity of that space, because it cannot be accomplished by independent purchase.

 

Reducing carbon emissions is only one part of the equation for returning to health. The human pollution-footprint is the actual subject category we should understand and correct. As Annie Leonard pointed out in her Story Of Stuff, for every activity there is an environmental cost. We must be consumers to stay alive, yet we must become responsible consumers to reduce our individual role in polluting processes. This is not so difficult to achieve when we think about the things we actually need on a daily basis. However, commercial advertising would have everyone buy at least one of everything in the nonessentials category. Corporations are now forcing us to consume mediocre, disposable products repeatedly and unnecessarily for profit alone. This kind of thing must end and we should not continue supporting this trend with our dollars.

 

Closed loop production methods are the most sensible. Once raw materials are extracted and refined in manufacture processes, they enter a continuous cycle of use and reuse so the initial investment is not lost in a product that becomes useless waste. Most human trash is generated in the form of containers and packaging that is not designed to be recycled, so our pollution footprint can be greatly reduced by eliminating the mass-production of commercial waste, and engineering green production loops.

 

Designer William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart released their book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things in 2002. Their text details a new approach to sustainable industrial manufacturing design that minimizes toxicity, while intentionally creating materials that are either “biological nutrients” or “technical nutrients” with a predetermined path. In 2005 they established the Cradle To Cradle Certified Program provide eco-labels for responsibly manufactured products. McDonough and Braungart released their second book, The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability–Designing for Abundance, on Earth Day 2013, advocating the chemistry of manufacture to generate a beneficial footprint, where mere efficiency is insufficient. Their goal is to aim higher than efficiency and adequacy so that humanity might add to planetary richness instead of subtracting from it.

 

Even with cutting edge manufacturing technology we cannot continue scarring the land endlessly, making dead-zones, or taking away from it without giving back. We have discovered that Natural processes are models of manufacture that can solve most human design challenges and so begins the age of biomimicry. Emulating these processes will wean us from engaging in activity that has caused so much damage in the past. Just as every gardener knows that cultivation requires a caring investment in order to produce more life, we should respect these principle planetary limitations. Care is not an option to success in maintaining a healthy planet upon which our personal health is interdependent.