By Michael Beck

I was quite impressed last week by the two superb responses I received to “Mother Nature Wants You!” Both likened the stress of consumerism on the biosphere to the stress of disease on the human body and both delivered a caveat we ignore at our peril. Fred Adler remarked in part, “The human body when fighting the effects of toxins… responds with unpleasant reactions like inflammation, fever and a variety of diseases. Perhaps Gaia, attacked by the many effects of … commercialism, such as loss of rain forests and marsh lands, the pollution of rivers, oceans and the air, responds with similarly unpleasant reactions.” Alise Richel responded, “Assuming the Earth is a living organism, we do not know … what [immunity] devices it has to ensure its survival. Whatever it does to correct its imbalances brought about by humans, we do know the Earth will survive. We may not.”

A whole bevy of renowned earth scientists has weighed in – massively weighed in – to observe that the biosphere’s immune response has already responded with global warming, ocean acidification, and increased extreme weather events. Common speculation naturally drifts towards the apocalyptic, the demise of our species for instance. But we need nothing remotely so horrific to give us serious pause. Forget human extinction, forget even the collapse of civilization. Humanity has a track record of surviving extreme challenges. Experts on the human genome have discovered a calamitous die off 70,000 years ago that reduced our entire species to 10,000 people or less. Imagine, for every person that survived then, there are now – 70 millennia later – one million of us. Extinction is not in the cards.

But as I remarked in my last post, virtually every earth scientist on the planet agrees that continued unfettered consumerism – business as usual – gravely threatens the global environment. But think – even a global die-off of half of everyone on Earth (which is exactly what we’ve already inflicted on thousands of other species) would still leave billions of people to rebuild civilization. But who in their right mind would even want to survive into a future based on such a psychic horror? Technology, to say nothing of the species, is resilient. Far less resilient, and what I do not believe would survive, is the kind of participatory democracy and individual freedom that Americans treasure.

My work with Postconsumers assumes, however, that the symptoms of the Earth’s immune response, the rising fever of global warming, will drive enough people to respond soon enough so that our species succeeds in replacing mindless consumerism with mindful practicality. Even without catastrophe, an implacably grave world crisis faces us. But our work, represented by our website, blog, and interactive handbook, contains seeds of a successful response since it focuses on the exact spot where the action will take place. That action will happen in millions of individual minds, each unique, each perceiving the psychic consequences of an ailing environment.

When we view the biosphere as an organism, with humanity inseparable from it, we understand that as the ecology sickens, so must our societies. Imbalance is imbalance, whether we look at crazy weather, levels of toxins, and scarred landscapes – or we look at insane levels of stress, runaway insecurity, and generalized rage. This landscape of the human mind must be addressed psychologically, from the inside, before we can heal our surroundings, either environmentally or socially.

In my next post, I will dwell on some of the positive tools that we, one person at a time, can use to begin to cure the fundamental imbalances that underlie the symptoms I’ve spoken of. Furthermore, continuing in the interactive mode, I welcome all comments, either below or on facebook.