Wendell Krossa ist ein christlicher Autor aus Kanada der sehr viel Weises und Nachdenkliches zum Thema Umwelt-, Natur und Apokalypsenangst schreibt. Heute habe ich einen kleinen Essay von ihm in meinem CCNet veröffentlicht (http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/CCNet-homepage.htm). Da ich viele seiner Gedanken teile, stelle ich den kurzen Text hier vor. Ein Blick auf Wendell’s Webseite lohnt sich übrigens für alle Öko-Optimisten.

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Dear Benny,

There is almost an element of insanity to this endless alarmism and fear-mongering. And it is the height of irresponsibility for people to keep dumping this fear into the public arena to darken public consciousness. I recall, just off the cuff, some scares that all of us have been through over the past few decades- global cooling, mass starvation, DDT horrors, Alar poisoning our apples (remember Meryl Streep before Congress on that one), Y2K hysteria with planes falling out of the air, Avian Flu killing hordes of us (a local TV news reporter intoned that 50,000 Canadians would die in an outbreak), and now Chinese toys threatening our children with new fears. What next? And yes, all of these issues ought to concern us but the manner in which they are presented too often distorts a more rational consideration of such issues.

Julian Simon was right that it only takes one comment in public to start a new alarm and then years of research and millions of dollars to try to clear it up, if anyone is still listening.

Whenever a new alarm arises, and they will before the old ones even die down, I think of the human outlook that repeatedly engages this hysteria of alarmism. What mindset looks again and again for the worst to happen despite so much evidence to the contrary that the major trends in life have been improving for centuries? (Paul Ehrlich comes to mind here). James Breech in The Silence of Jesus speaks brilliantly to this issue of basic human orientation (denying or affirming life) as do others from differing approaches (e.g. David Altheide in Creating Fear).

I have a suggestion to offer your readers: It appears that our basic belief system shapes our general outlook on life and humanity. Some (e.g. Bruce Lipton in Biology of Belief) note that our basic beliefs are developed from the earliest age and become part of our subconscious which forms the main part of our mental life. We are powerfully influenced by these beliefs even though not always consciously aware of their presence in our subconscious.

In response, it would be helpful if there were more public emphasis on fundamental points that challenge and counter the influence of too many anti-life and anti-human beliefs that float around the public arena. A helpful set of life-affirming and humanity-affirming beliefs might include the following:

1. Life is a rising trajectory toward something better, not a declining trajectory toward something worse. Life is ever growing, developing, advancing, and progressing upward. It rises toward more order and organization not toward more disfunction. While the trend toward disorder (entropy) does operate at some level in life, it is not the governing force behind life (Stephen Hawking, while reversing his position on this at times, once said that entropy was “trivial”, The Ultimate Resource, p.79-80). I believe that the overall trajectory of the universe, and life within the universe, reveals the dominant trend to be the movement toward increasing order and organization. The universe began in a chaotic fireball and then cooled toward the formation of basic matter, galaxies, stars, planets, and then biological life on Earth (as far as we know). The organized biology of life then spread over the Earth and since its beginning it has progressed toward more complex or more organized forms.

2. Life is exceedingly durable and resilient, not fragile. Life has endured the harshest blows from comets, natural disasters, and repeated massive changes in climate (often sudden) and yet life has always found new creative ways to adapt and re-emerge even stronger and more complex than before the disasters assaulted it. Harold Bloom speaks of this amazing creative adaptability at the level of species like bacteria (http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/2/2227/1.html). The problems that life faces seem to inspire a creative response that promotes the growth of life to something that is even more durable and diverse than before. This durable adaptability was evident during past climate changes where species migrated up and down mountain slopes or north and south across continents in response to rapidly changing conditions. The “fragility of ecosystems” is an environmental myth that views any change in an ecosystem as evidence of its fragility. This mythology is based on the distorting view that ecosystems are static or unchanging and hence any change is viewed as detrimental and reveals the fragility of the changing system. But ecosystems have constantly changed over history and there has been no single state that can be considered natural or original. Alston Chase notes this in his book In a Dark Wood and Playing God in Yellowstone. Craig Easterbrook covers similar material in A Moment on the Earth.

3. Life is scandalously generous and not stingy. The universe is by its very nature an outpouring of energy that is “wasted” to create order and organization. Suggested reading here: Huber and Mill’s Bottomless Well and Hard Green, Beckerman’s A Poverty of Reason, and Julian Simon’s Ultimate Resource, among others.

4. Life mediates a fundamental goodness and not darkness, maliciousness, or lack of care (this can get metaphysical so I will spare your more materialist readers any pain, but I think the evidence is also overwhelming in the natural realm).

5. Life is advanced by fundamentally creative forces not destructive forces. This is again evident in the historical trend of life to develop from the simple to the more complex or to progress from the less developed to the more organized. Human civilization is the supreme evidence here of conscious life’s creativity as people have learned to improve their living conditions, their health and life-spans, and to expand their store of order in civilization’s infrastructure and to live together more harmoniously and peacefully over time. It could also be noted here that there has been a notable shift from viewing life as driven primarily by competition to viewing it as shaped more by cooperation (see, for instance, Lynn Margulis’ Acquiring Genomes). Other suggested reading: Julian Simon’s Ultimate Resource and Its Getting Better All The Time, Indur Goklany’s The Improving State of the World, and Bjorn Lomberg’s Skeptical Environmentalist.

6. Life has become progressively more humane over its history (this is to say that humanity is fundamentally good and not evil). This is evident in the wonder of developing human consciousness and human civilization and the trends toward increasing democracy and respect for human rights and human freedom. While there have been setbacks, downturns, and historical aberrations along the way, none of these aberrations defines the core trend of human life which is to seek something better or more humane. The humanizing impulse appears to be the fundamental impulse of conscious life. It appears that we exist to humanize life and the universe (my version of the anthropic principle). Suggested reading: James Payne’s A History of Force, Manuel Eisner’s research on homicide rates in Western societies from 1300 AD to the present (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/CJ/039104.pdf), and Paul Seabright’s In The Company of Strangers.

There is more but I won’t take up any more of your time. I have included more detail on these at http://www.thehumanspirit.net in essays such as ‘Shaping Human Outlook’.

In my own thinking I am considering that one helpful way to deal with all this fear-mongering is to go to the root of what defines basic human outlook and beliefs and to counter alarmism there.

Regards,
Wendell Krossa
http://www.thehumanspirit.net/