13. Life Sustains Life 2: The Ways of Reengagement with the Living Earth

Abstract

It is a ‘vicious’ system in the technical sense that the regular feedback loops within the social system and between the social system and the ecosystems in which it is embedded reproduce and intensify the destructive effects of the system on the social sphere and ecosphere. These effects include such things as: global warming, climate change, pollution and the diseases it causes, acidification of the oceans, desertification of once arable land and the re-colonization of Africa, melting of the polar icecap and the release of methane, the depletion of non-renewable recourses and the military conflicts over what’s left, the use of renewable resources and aquifers beyond their cyclical rate of renewal, millions of climate change refugees, global inequalities in life chances, petro-states, a planet of slums and gated enclaves, the domination of democracy by concentrations of private, media and military power, the concentration of the means of production in a handful of multinational companies, and counter-violences to the system’s overt and structural violence that trigger counter-insurgencies and feed an ever-increasing arms race and arms trade, and so on.