ABSTRACT
The chapter “Deep Sustainability: Really Addressing Our Endangered Future” argues that the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are wholly inadequate to the task of creating a sustainable future for humankind. It reviews some of the fundamental principles that science has revealed about our planetary biosphere, the multidimensional interrelatedness of all living things. Ecology here is consistent with the holistic paradigm discovered throughout the sciences during the 20th century, replacing the early-modern Newtonian paradigm. The essay examines some of the features of the SDGs and shows that these goals presuppose the fragmented and anachronistic political and economic assumptions that we inherited from four centuries ago when the world operated according to a different paradigm. It gives examples of how both the fragmented system of so-called sovereign nation-states and the global economic system necessarily defeat the creation of a sustainable civilization. Finally, the essay examines some features of the Constitution for the Federation of Earth, founded on holistic principles. This constitution treats human political and economic affairs with the same holism that operates within our planetary biosphere. The chapter argues that holism under the Earth Constitution will give us the “deep sustainability” that can make a real future possible for humankind.
