Participant: Rex Weyler
Affiliation: Cofounder of Greenpeace International and writer of the Deep Green blog on the gp website.
Format: Plenary Speech
Themes:

Human growth has overshot our habitat’s capacity. A growing community calls out for “sustainability,” but struggles to identify genuine solutions. We will discover in this examination that we must learn, as Gregory Bateson warned, to align the way we think with the way nature behaves. Nature appears as co-evolving systems, persistently coming into being through interactions and feedbacks. The survival unit in nature is not a “species,” but a “species-in-a-habitat,” a relationship. It is the relationship that must change. Humanity is a subsystem within a dynamic matrix of biophysical systems. Genuine solutions to the human predicament will design for pattern and changeability within these ecological systems upon which we rely.

We will discover genuine solutions by apprenticing ourselves to nature, not by attempting to reshape nature to fulfill our desires. This apprenticeship starts with a commitment to place, to a living ecosystem, learning to harvest its bounty without destroying it. Thus, part of the answer we seek is in localization, not globalization; and in simplification, not complexity. These changes imply a new human economics based on dynamic homeostasis, not on endless growth, a path articulated by observers such as Bateson, Alice Hamilton, Dana Meadows, Herman Daly, Howard Odum, and others. We can live richer, more rewarding lives, with less stuff. We can discover the Real Wealth of this world in Nature, Family, Community, and Creativity.

We may experience trauma as we witness the destruction of nature. We live in an abusive relationship, a Batesonian “double bind.” We either go insane, or we go creative. Art, metaphor, and poetry may help provide the necessary language of relationship. Finally, we might understand Bateson’s emphasis on “sacrament,” a celebration and manifestation of the inherent mystery experienced in relationship with larger systems that we do not control.