By LEONARDO BOFF*
The modern way of seeing the Earth has transformed scientific knowledge into a technical operation, a process of domination of all spheres of nature and life.
The awareness that the Earth is alive has the highest ancestry. It was called Great Mother, of Nana, Pachamama, Tonanzin and currently Gaia, a superorganism that systemically articulates all the physical-chemical and energetic elements that allow and sustain life. On April 22, 2009, the UN unanimously made the name Mother Earth official, recognizing that she is a living entity, bearer of rights, which we must treat with the same predicates with which we treat our mothers: with respect, with care and with veneration.
Later, the expression “common home” was made official, involving human beings and all of nature. This was made clear in Earth Charter of the year 2000 in which it was stated: “The Earth, our home, is alive with a unique community of life” (Preamble). Pope Francis in the encyclical Laudato Sì: On Caring for Our Common Home (2015) by adopting this expression – Common House – contributed to its universalization.
Because it is a living reality, the Earth is continually in action and re-action. It sends us events that are messages to be heard and deciphered. Human beings, by feeling part of nature – and even more so, that part of the Earth that had reached a high degree of complexity to the point of beginning to feel, think, want, care and venerate – had all the conditions to capture the messages and the capacity to decipher them.
In more pedestrian terms: humans understood the signs of the atmosphere and knew whether it was going to rain or be fine; by looking at trees, their leaves and flowers, they knew what fruits they could produce. And so on in so many other cases. This listening to the Earth and nature and the deciphering of their signs is still present today among the native peoples who master the code for reading the surrounding and cosmic world.
It turns out that in modern times a major shift has occurred, especially with the founding fathers of our current paradigm, based on the will to power and domination. They treated the Earth as a mere res extensive, a reality without purpose, a kind of treasure chest of natural resources at the disposal of human pleasure. Listening to the voices of the Earth, its groans and whispers, “listening to the stars”, it was said, is something for poets or a tributary of ancient animism.
The modern way of seeing the Earth has transformed scientific knowledge into a technical operation (“knowledge is power”, according to Francis Bacon), a process of domination of all spheres of nature and life. But it has operated without due care as someone who listens attentively to messages. On the contrary, it has turned a deaf ear, exploiting practically all the potentialities of the biomes, degrading them. The demands of Great Mother remained imperceptible, because why listen to them? He does not appear as their owner and lord (maître et possesseur by René Descartes)? Thus the code for reading the world was lost.
This is the prevailing situation in our world, transformed by technoscience. We hear a thousand voices and noises produced by our technical-scientific culture. We pay no attention to the voices of nature and the Earth. These current voices are the groans and cries of a wounded and crucified life. To our centuries-old aggressions, tearing everything from it, without considering the dangerous and even harmful side effects, it has retaliated with messages in the form of tsunamis, earthquakes, typhoons, tornadoes, devastating floods, blizzards never seen before, in a word, with extreme events.
Since we did not listen to the messages contained in such events, it sent us other powerful signals that directly affected our lives: the immense range of bacteria and viruses, from the simple flu, HIV, Ebola, and culminating in the Coronavirus. This only affected human beings and spared other living organisms. Everyone mobilized to find an antidote, the different vaccines. Few asked where Covid-19 came from. It came from nature, in which our utilitarian intervention destroyed the habitat of these microorganisms. These sought another, coming to settle in our cells. Invisible, it brought all the militaristic powers, their nuclear and chemical bombs, to their knees and rendered powerless.
Why do I say this? Because we have not learned anything from the lesson that the Earth and nature wanted to teach us through Covid-19. The social isolation that it imposed should serve as an opportunity for us to think about what we have done so far with the life system and what kind of world we want to inhabit. The fact is that once the great collective threat has passed, we have furiously returned to the old normal, continuing with the depredation of nature and thus the destruction of habitats of microorganisms. We are inaugurating a new era, the Anthropocene.
The events that occurred in 2023 and 2024, such as the great floods throughout the world and in the south of our country, the devastating fires in many countries, the highly lethal wars (since Earth and humanity form a single and complex entity, observed by astronauts – the Overview Effect), the perverse social inequalities on a global level and the great alarm, a true meteor, the unstoppable global warming, among other signs, represent messages that the Earth and nature are sending us. Very few people listen to and interpret them. Denialism, collective deafness and conscious ignorance predominate because they hinder unbridled accumulation at the expense of human lives and nature.
If we do not stop and humbly listen to and read the messages sent by nature and Mother Earth and collectively change course, what Pope Francis in the encyclical Fratelli tutti (2020) prophetically warned: “we are in the same boat, either we all save ourselves, or no one is saved.” This time there is no Noah’s Ark that preserves representatives of the living world and lets the rest perish. We may all be, unconsciously and irresponsibly, approaching the abyss into which we may fall.
It will be a sinister outcome for not having opened our ears and neglected to interpret the signs that nature and Mother Earth have been shouting at us, begging for a radical ecological conversion and the definition of another civilizing path. The current one is leading us irrevocably to a tragic end. And so we would join the thousands of living organisms that, unable to adapt to the changes, ended up disappearing. The Earth, however, would continue, but without us.
Since the unthinkable and the unexpected are part of history, everything can be different. As a pre-Socratic philosopher said: if we do not expect the unexpected, and it may happen, then we will all be lost. So let us be attentive to the unexpected. In our hope, it may happen.
*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). [https://amzn.to/3zR83dw]
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