Viewpoint by Fritjof Capra and Hazel Henderson*
This article was originally published on Other News, a vehicle for “voices against the tide” and is being reproduced with thanks.
Berkeley | JACKSONVILLE (IDN) – Imagine, it is the year 2050 and we are looking back to the origin and evolution of the coronavirus pandemic over the last three decades. Extrapolating from recent events, we offer the following scenario for such a view from the future.
As we move into the second half of our twenty-first century, we can finally make sense of the origin and impact of the coronavirus that struck the world in 2020 from an evolutionary systemic perspective. Today, in 2050, looking back on the past 40 turbulent years on our home planet, it seems obvious that the Earth had taken charge of teaching our human family.
Our planet taught us the primacy of understanding of our situation in terms of whole systems, identified by some far-sighted thinkers as far back as the mid-nineteenth century. This widening human awareness revealed how the planet actually functions, its living biosphere systemically powered by the daily flow of photons from our mother star, the Sun.
Eventually, this expanded awareness overcame the cognitive limitations and incorrect assumptions and ideologies that had created the crises of the twentieth century. False theories of human development and progress, measured myopically by prices and money-based metrics, such as GDP, culminated in rising social and environmental losses: pollution of air, water and land; destruction of biological diversity; loss of ecosystem services, all exacerbated by global heating, rising sea levels, and massive climate disruptions.
These myopic policies had also driven social breakdowns, inequality, poverty, mental and physical illness, addiction, loss of trust in institutions – including media, academia, and science itself – as well as loss of community solidarity. They had also led to the pandemics of the 21st century, SARS, MERS, AIDS, influenza, and the various coronaviruses that emerged back in 2020.
During the last decades of the 20th century, humanity had exceeded the Earth’s carrying capacity. The human family had grown to 7.6 billion by 2020 and had continued its obsession with economic, corporate, and technological growth that had caused the rising existential crises threating humanity’s very survival. By driving this excessive growth with fossil fuels, humans had heated the atmosphere to such an extent that the United Nations’ climate science consortium, IPCC, noted in its 2020 update that humanity had only ten years left to turn this crisis situation around.
As far back as 2000, all the means were already at hand: we had the know-how and had designed efficient renewable technologies and circular economic systems, based on nature’s ecological principles. By 2000, patriarchal societies were losing control over their female populations, due to the forces of urbanisation and education. Women themselves had begun to take control of their bodies and fertility rates began to tumble even before the turn of the twenty-first century. Widespread revolts against the top-down narrow economic model of globalisation and its male-dominated elites led to disruptions of the unsustainable paths of development driven by fossil fuels, nuclear power, militarism, profit, greed, and egocentric leadership.
Military budgets which had starved health and education needs for human development, gradually shifted from tanks and battleships to less expensive, less violent information warfare. By the early 21st century, international competition for power focused more on social propaganda, persuasion technologies, infiltration and control of the global internet.
In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic‘s priorities in medical facilities competed with victims in emergency rooms, whether those wounded by gun violence or patients with other life-threatening conditions. In 2019, the nationwide US movement of schoolchildren had joined with the medical profession in challenging gun violence as a public health crisis. Strict gun laws gradually followed, along with rejection of gun manufacturers in pension funds’ assets crippling the gun lobby and, in many countries, guns were purchased back by governments from gun owners and destroyed, as Australia had done in the 20th century.
This greatly reduced global arms sales, together with international laws requiring expensive annual licenses and insurance, while global taxation reduced the wasteful arms races of previous centuries. Conflicts between nations are now largely governed by international treaties and transparency. Now in 2050, conflicts rarely involve military means, shifting to internet propaganda, spying and cyber warfare.
By 2020, these revolts exhibited all the fault lines in human societies: from racism and ignorance, conspiracy theories, xenophobia and scapegoating of “the other“ to various cognitive biases – technological determinism, theory-induced blindness, and the fatal, widespread misunderstanding that confused money with actual wealth.
Money, as we all know today, was a useful invention: all currencies are simply social protocols (physical or virtual tokens of trust), operating on social platforms with network effects, their prices fluctuating to the extent that their various users trust and use them. Yet, countries and elites all over the world became enthralled with money and with gambling in the “global financial casino”, further encouraging the seven deadly sins over traditional values of cooperation, sharing, mutual aid, and the Golden Rule.
Scientists and environmental activists had warned of the dire consequences of these unsustainable societies and retrogressive value systems for decades, but until the 2020 pandemic corporate and political leaders, and other elites, stubbornly resisted these warnings. Previously unable to break their intoxication with financial profits and political power, their own citizens forced the re-focus on the well-being and survival of humanity and the community of life. Incumbent fossilised industries fought to retain their tax breaks and subsidies in all countries as gas and oil prices collapsed.
But they were less able to buy political favours and support of their privileges. It took the global reactions of millions of young people, “grassroots globalists”, and indigenous peoples, who understood the systemic processes of our planet Gaia – a self-organising, self-regulating biosphere which for billions of years had managed all planetary evolution without interference from cognitively-challenged humans.
In the first years of our twenty-first century, Gaia responded in an unexpected way, as it had so often during the long history of evolution. Humans’ clear-cutting large areas of tropical rainforests and massive intrusions into other ecosystems around the world, had fragmented these self-regulating ecosystems and fractured the web of life. One of the many consequences of these destructive actions was that some viruses, which had lived in symbiosis with certain animal species, jumped from those species to others and to humans, where they were highly toxic or deadly.
People in many countries and regions, marginalised by the narrow profit-oriented economic globalisation, assuaged their hunger by seeking “bushmeat” in these newly exposed wild areas, killing monkeys, civets, pangolins, rodents and bats, as additional protein sources. These wild species, carrying a variety of viruses were also sold live in “wet markets”, further exposing ever more urban populations to these new viruses.
Back in the 1960s, for example, an obscure virus jumped from a rare species of monkeys killed as “bush meat” and eaten by humans in West Africa. From there it spread to the United States where it was identified as the HIV virus and caused the AIDS epidemic. Over four decades, they caused the deaths of an estimated 39 million people worldwide, about half a percent of the world population.
Four decades later, the impact of the coronavirus was swift and dramatic. In 2020, the virus jumped from a species of bats to humans in China, and from there it rapidly spread around the world, decimating world population by an estimated 50 million in just one decade.
From the vantage point of our year 2050, we can look back at the sequence of these viruses: SARS, MERS, and the global impact of the various coronavirus mutations which began back in 2020. Eventually such pandemics were stabilised, partly by the outright bans on “wet markets” all over China in 2020. Such bans spread to other countries and global markets, cutting the trading of wild animals and reducing vectors, along with better public health systems, preventive care and the development of effective vaccines and drugs.
The basic lessons for humans in our tragic 50 years of self-inflicted global crises – the afflictions of pandemics, flooded cities, burned forestlands, droughts and other increasingly violent climate disasters – were simple, many based on the discoveries of Charles Darwin and other biologists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:
- We humans are one species with very little variation in our basic DNA.
- We evolved with other species in the planet’s biosphere by natural selection, responding to changes and stresses in our various habitats and environments.
- We are a global species, having migrated out of the African continent to all others, competing with other species, causing various extinctions.
- Our planetary colonisation and success, in this Anthropocene Age of our twenty-first century, was largely due to our abilities to bond, cooperate, share and evolve in ever larger populations and organisations.
Humanity grew from roving bands of nomads to live in settled agricultural villages, to towns, and the mega-cities of the twentieth century, where over 50 percent of our populations lived. Until the climate crises and those of the pandemics in the first years of our 21st century, all forecasts predicted that these mega-cities would keep growing and that human populations would reach 10 billion by today, in 2050.
Now we know why human populations topped out at the 7.6 billion in 2030, as expected in the most hopeful scenario of the IPCC, as well as in the global urban surveys by social scientists documenting the decline of fertility in Empty Planet (2019). The newly aware “grassroots globalists”, the armies of school children, global environmentalists and empowered women joined with green, more ethical investors and entrepreneurs in localising markets.
Millions were served by microgrid cooperatives, powered by renewable electricity, adding to the world’s cooperative enterprises, which even by 2012 employed more people worldwide than all the for-profit companies combined. They no longer used the false money metrics of GDP, but in 2015 switched to steering their societies by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), their 17 goals of sustainability and restoration of all ecosystems and human health.
These new social goals and metrics all focused on cooperation, sharing and knowledge-richer forms of human development, using renewable resources and maximising efficiency. This long-term sustainability, equitably distributed, benefits all members of the human family within the tolerance of other species in our living biosphere. Competition and creativity flourish with good ideas driving out less useful ones, along with science-based ethical standards and deepening information in self-reliant and more connected societies at all levels from local to global. [IDN-InDepthNews – 07 May 2020]
* Fritjof Capra, Ph.D., physicist and systems theorist, is the author of several international bestsellers, including The Tao of Physics (1975) and The Web of Life (1996). He is co-author, with Pier Luigi Luisi, of the multidisciplinary textbook, The Systems View of Life. Hazel Henderson, D.Sc.Hon., FRSA, futurist, systems, and science-policy analyst, is author of The Politics of the Solar Age (1981, 1986) and other books, including Mapping the Global Transition to the Solar Age (2014). Henderson is CEO of Ethical Markets, publishers of the Green Transition Scoreboard®, and the forthcoming textbook and global TV series ’Transforming Finance’.
Image sources: Pixabay and my-mooc
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