By LEONARDO BOFF*
Our responsibility to safeguard the planet so that it does not succumb to the inferno of fire, but ensures its biocapacity to provide us with everything we need to live
With the outbreak of the Pyrocene (the Earth under fire) appearing on all continents with fires that frighten us due to their scale, the question arises: what is our responsibility in the face of this emergency? This question is valid because most of the fires, especially in Brazil, were caused by human beings. Our responsibility, however, is to care for and protect the ecosystems and the living planet, Gaia, Mother Earth. But we appear as an exterminating angel of the Apocalypse.
To overcome our feelings of desolation and fear of the end of the species resulting from the Earth boiling, we are forced to do some serious reflection to better understand our responsibility for such devastating events.
The Earth and nature are not a clock that appears assembled once and for all. They derive from a very long evolutionary and cosmic process that has been going on for 13,7 billion years. The “clock” was assembled slowly, and beings appeared from the simplest to the increasingly complex. All the factors that go into the constitution of each ecosystem with its beings and organisms have their ancestry, their latency and then their emergence. They all have their own irreversible history, specific to historical time. The cosmogenic principle is permanently active.
Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize winner in 1977, showed that open systems such as the Earth, nature and the universe challenge the classical concept of linear time, postulated by classical physics. Time is no longer a mere parameter of movement, but the measure of the internal developments of a world in a permanent process of change, of passage from imbalance to higher levels of equilibrium. This is cosmogenesis.[1]
Nature presents itself as a process of self-transcendence; as it evolves, it surpasses itself by creating new orders. The cosmogenic principle (the creative energy) is always at work within it, through which beings emerge and, as their complexity increases, they also overcome the inexorability of entropy, which is typical of closed systems. This self-transcendence of evolving beings can point to what religions and spiritual traditions have always called God, absolute transcendence or that future that is no longer “heat death”; on the contrary, it is the supreme culmination of order, harmony and life.[2]
This observation shows how unrealistic is the rigid separation between nature and history, between the world and human beings, a separation that has legitimized and consolidated so many other dualisms. All are part of a single, immense movement: cosmogenesis. Like all beings, human beings, with their rationality, capacity for communication and love, are also the result of this cosmic process.
The energies and all the elements that matured inside the great red stars billions of years ago are part of its constitution. It has the same ancestry as the universe. There is a solidarity of origin and destiny with all other beings in the universe. It cannot be seen outside the cosmogenic principle, as an erratic being, sent to Earth by some creative Divinity. If we accept this Divinity, we must say that everyone is sent by It, not just human beings.
This inclusion of the human being in the group of beings and as a result of a cosmogenic process prevents the persistence of anthropocentrism (which is specifically an androcentrism, centered on men to the exclusion of women). This reveals a narrow vision, detached from other beings. It states that the only meaning of evolution and the existence of others would consist in the production of human beings, men and women.
Of course, the entire universe was an accomplice in the gestation of the human being. But not only of the human being, but of other beings as well. We are all interconnected and depend on the stars. They are the ones that convert hydrogen into helium and from the combination of both, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium are produced, without which there would be no amino acids or proteins essential to life. Without the stellar radiation released in this cosmic process, millions of stars would cool down, the sun would possibly not even exist and without it, there would be no life and we would not be here writing about these things.
Without the pre-existence of the set of factors conducive to life that have been developed over billions of years and, from life in general and as a subchapter, human life, the personal individual that we each are would never have emerged. We belong to each other: the primordial elements of the universe, the energies that have been active since the beginning of time. Big Bang, the other constituent factors of the cosmos and ourselves as a species that emerged when 99,98% of the Earth was ready. From this point on, we must think cosmocentrically and act ecocentrically.
It is therefore important to leave behind as illusory and arrogant all anthropocentrism and androcentrism. We should not, however, confuse anthropocentrism with the anthropic principle (formulated in 974 by Brandon Carter).[3] By this we mean the following: we can only make the reflections we are making because we are bearers of consciousness, sensitivity and intelligence. It is not amoebas, nor thrushes or horses that have this faculty. We received such faculties from evolution precisely to talk about all this and to enable the Earth, through us, to contemplate its brothers, the planets and the other stars, and we, being able to live and celebrate our life.
That is why we say that we are Earth that feels, thinks and loves. That is why we exist among other beings with whom we feel connected. This uniqueness of ours does not lead us to break away from them, because we include them in the whole that we see.
As we are beings of consciousness, sensitivity and intelligence, an ethical imperative arises for us: it is up to us to take care of Mother Earth, to ensure all the conditions that allow her to continue to live and give life.
We are currently facing perhaps the greatest challenge of our existence on Earth: not allowing it to end under fire, as the Deeds Christians. And if it will end, it is because of our irresponsibility and lack of care. We have inaugurated the Anthropocene era. That is, we, and not some meteorite, are threatening life on Earth. At this moment, the culmination, perhaps the end of the Anthropocene, is the Pyrocene, the era of fire. Fire has taken over the Earth. Until recently, we controlled fire. Now it is fire that controls us. It can boil the planet and make it uninhabitable.
Hence our responsibility to safeguard the planet so that it does not succumb to the inferno of fire, but rather ensures its biocapacity to provide us with everything we need to live and sustain our civilization, which must change radically. It depends on us whether we will have a future or whether we will be incinerated by fire.
*Leonardo Boff is an ecologist, philosopher and writer. Author, among other books, of Caring for our Common Home: clues to delay the end of the world (Vozes).
Notes
[1] Ilya Prigogine. Between time and eternity. São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 1992.
[2] Peacoke, AR, Creation in the World of Science, Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford l979; Pannenberg, W., Toward a Theology of Nature. Essays on Science and Faith, John Knox Press, 1993.
[3] cf. Alonso, JM, Introduction to the anthropic principle. Madrid, Encuentro Ediciones, l989.
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