Old Paradigm to New Paradigm

 The old paradigm is very familiar to you.  You grew up with it expressed all around you in thousands of ways: literature, movies, news stories, products, advertising, mythology...essentially from all venues that program your brain.  It is the belief that humans are the dominant species on the earth.  That we are superior to all other species and that we are hear to have "dominion" over the earth and all the fruits of the earth.  As Riane Eisler said decades ago in the Chalice and the Blade, it is the dominator model.  It runs throughout the Old and New Testament but also all of Western History.  It's foundations were well rooted in the original Decartian error: the idea that the body is separate from the spirit. The breaking down of our world into parts rather than seeing it a complex interdependent whole.  This dominator model also underlies the origins of empire and racism and classism and sexism and all other isms.  This model always divides: into "good" and "bad" but fundamentally into oppressor and oppressed. 

This old paradigm also inevitably resulted in climate change.   Because how could we not, if we believe we are the dominate species, here to rule earth, not think it was therefore ok to take from earth, to mine and to plunder, and to pollute and to throw away and to desecrate earth?  When one really exams our climate crisis it is very, very clear we do not have 1 crisis.  We do not have a crisis simply of a globe that is warming, or of GHG that has somehow magically increased.  Even when you grant without contest that humans are responsible for the crisis, that fails to cover the magnitude.   No when you look closely enough you begin to realize that it is knit into how we produce energy, how we construct buildings, how we transport ourselves, how we farm, how we mine resources, how we manufacture goods....basically how we do everything that we do.  And this because we are operating off of the old paradigm.  This paradigm has always created without consideration for how we impact earth or other living beings around us.  As my native friends say:  "It took you only 300 short years to ruin paradise".

We will not stop climate change by stopping fossil fuel extraction (although that would be a good start).  We will not stop climate disaster by stopping our GHG emissions, nor will end the chaos by banning together in treaties or making mitigation plans.   All are necessary and good, but we will not be able to do any of those things unless we achieve a radical deep complete, worldwide paradigm shift.  We will not be able to plan our own salvation until we can think differently about the very problem and recognize accurately how we got here.

In the new paradigm, first and foremost we will have to give up the notion of human exceptionalism.  We will have to give up the idea of having dominion over the earth or other sentient beings.  We will need to notice and embrace on the deepest level possible that we are part, a very small part, of a whole system.  We will have to see the rest of the Life on this planet as our brothers and sisters, to whom we are bound in a complex and interdependent system.  We will have to understand whole systems and the rules of whole systems.   We will need to get out of the way of Earth's own corrective mechanisms.  We will have to realign with life systems rather than trying to control or manipulate or engineer those systems.   We will have to have the humility to admit the huge disastrous mistakes we have made trying to play God with our ecosystem.  We will need to pay attention and start learning from and about our ecosystem.  We will have to learn awe and gratitude for its original perfection.  We will have to come back into alignment with life.