Life's Natural Solutions

Foreword

This book has been written from a concern, a concern about what we are doing to ourselves, the environment and the planet as a whole, as a result of the western worldview that we live and participate in. Through a journey that has taken over 14 years, I came to the conclusion that we needed a paradigm shift, a shift in worldviews, for our crisis is a perceptual one, how we perceive and relate with one another and the environment.

Fritjof Capra identifies this perceptual crisis in his book The Web of Life, where he outlines the massive problems that humanity is facing: poverty and starvation, increasing population levels, extinction of plant and animal species, environmental degradation, ethnic and tribal violence, just to mention a few. He acknowledges that: "Ultimately, these problems must be seen as just different facets of one single crisis, which is largely a crisis of perception. It derives from the fact that most of us...subscribe to an outdated worldview, a perception of reality inadequate for dealing with our overpopulated, globally interconnected world." (1) This perceptual crisis cannot be underestimated.

This crisis is an existential one because we are radically changing the environment through our actions, our consumptive and materialistic lifestyles. Environmentally, the toxins and pollutants that we produce impact not only ourselves, but also the other living systems that we share this planet with. So not only are we polluting and killing ourselves in the process, we are also destroying living and ecological systems that all life forms, including human beings, depend on for their survival and existence.

This is why The Circularity of Life has been written, to wake us up to the reality of our existence or rather our mutual co-existence both socially and environmentally. We need to distinguish the consequences of our worldview and actions as they impact on large and small scales.

Circularity is the core of our mutual co-existence on planet Earth. We live in a circular flow of systemic interconnectedness and mutual interdependency. This is of course obscured by the prevailing predominant western paradigm of cause and effect, linear and dualistic thinking that is based on separation. This perceived separation stems from denial, the suppression of our natural biological emotionings ( emotions, moods and states), where everything is perceived as being external and independent from us. What we need to see is that we are not separate, rather we are systemically interconnected and mutually interdependent with the web of life. What we do to the environment, the biosphere and other living systems, we do to ourselves.

Often in our culture we put the sustainability of human life at the core of environmental change. This, however, is not the answer. Rather it is, as I see it, we must put the sustainability and viability of the web of life at the core, because without that nothing else would exist. We are part of the bigger picture, yes, but the bigger picture is not just about us. It is about life in general, the mutual co-existence of all living systems in the web of life. In sustaining the web of life, we sustain ourselves. This is a necessary perceptual shift for humanity to live sustainably on the planet.

This book provides the necessary understandings of how we can do that through understanding the circularity of life and our biology, how we do what we do as biological living systems, how we construct worlds, realities and experiences in language according to our emotioning ( emotions, moods, states). This provides an understanding of not only of what we have constructed and are presently living as our present worldview, but also how we can construct another kind of social reality that is sustainable.

Table of Contents