ABSTRACT
This chapter is a plea to include human ‘social ecology’ in the dialogue between ecologists and economists in their efforts to rescue humanity from its current self-destructive path. Over the past 200 or so millennia – a brief moment in evolutionary time – our Homo ancestors migrated in waves of close-knit groups from Africa to all the diverse habitats on our planet. Unlike every other species, they did not require eons of genetic adaptation in order to adapt as they went. They survived because their big brains made them both inventive and able to share and pass along acquired knowledge across generations. Those big brains functioned by organizing that information into meaningful stories – often called ‘religions’ – that explained ‘how’ group life should proceed in a particular way, and ‘why’. Thus were our many diverse cultures born. Because of their enormous survival value, these stories became ‘sacred’ to each group, protected by a deep emotional commitment that made them highly resistant to modification. Whenever the conditions of life changed, it thus became necessary to change the group’s techniques for surviving. A change in conditions also demanded the deep psychological work of modifying the sacred story – not only about the proper patterns of daily life, but sometimes even about the very meaning of existence. Evolution has endowed us with brains potentially capable of carrying out both of these adaptive tasks, but technical adaptation is emotionally far easier than is changing our deepest metaphysical understandings. That requires a much deeper ‘rewiring’ of our brains – of our accepted precepts about how social life ought to be lived.
