Given that human beings are the equivalent of bacteria on the skin of our Mother Earth, our use of our Mother’s body fat to fuel the growth of our societies has resulted in our behaving much like a spreading bacterial infection. The exponential growth of the human population, powered by the use of fossil fuels, has led us to act and appear much like a rash, overtaking and altering much of the land area of our planet1.
In order to heal our infection, we must fundamentally change the form of our species2. Specifically, we must stop behaving as a bacterial infection does, spreading at the expense of its host, and start behaving as a loving, responsible adult does, caring for a dear, ill mother. This requires that we change form from being a species guided by fear to being a species guided by love, embracing the truth that we are a living extension of our living world.
For humanity to live as an industrial society, consuming fossil fuels to facilitate economic growth to enable population growth at the expense of other forms of life on Earth, is simply unsustainable. Nonetheless, industrial society is the currently predominant form of our species. So, either the currently predominant form of our species will come to an end or our species itself will come to an end, as we gradually kill our Mother along with ourselves. This fact is why global restabilization is so essential.
As individuals, communities, and societies, we must learn to thrive in love rather than merely attempting to survive in fear. Physically speaking, this starts by changing how we use energy. This is because energy can be neither physically created nor physically destroyed, whereas forms of energy (such as living beings and natural resources) can be both created as well as destroyed.
When our relationship with our Mother Earth is extractive, we take more than we give. When our relationship with our Mother Earth is supportive, we give at least as much as we take3. Global restabilization thus requires that we change our relationship with our Mother to be supportive rather than extractive in order to compensate for the deficits we have caused her to experience, deficits both of resources and of living beings.
All living beings function on the basis of dynamic equilibrium.
What this means is that living beings function by maintaining a balance of opposing forces (equilibrium) that is continuously changing (dynamic). Examples of this include inhaling and exhaling, drinking and urinating, eating and excreting, daytime and nighttime, high tide and low tide, growing leaves and shedding leaves, and much, much more. The process by which living beings change the form of energy for the purpose of maintaining their dynamic equilibrium is known as “metabolism”.
Understanding how life functions reveals that the global destabilization we have initiated, by creating global illness, is due to the destabilization of our Mother’s metabolism, resulting in the destabilization of her dynamic equilibrium. In other words, we have been making our Mother ill by disrupting the processes through which she utilizes energy. Consequently, global restabilization requires us to heal our world of metabolic imbalance.
→ 2.3 Healing Metabolic Imbalance
The following image is a composite of a nighttime photo of the southern United States, sourced from NASA, and a photo of a shingles rash, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.
Given the current form of humanity, failing to heal our infection would force our Mother to destroy much of our species in order to heal herself.
Certainly, Mother Earth has given more to us than she has taken from us.
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