ABSTRACT
Over the last four hundred years, the West has developed an assemblage of social systems of production, consumption, law, government, military, and education that is socially and ecologically unsustainable and self-destructive. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and thousands of scientific studies track the growth of the crisis and suggest responses. National and international meetings and agreements take place every year. The vicious social systems that are the cause of the crises of sustainability are not automatons, as the doomsayers claim. This chapter discusses the vicious social systems that cause the crisis and generate this fatal illusion of independence from the ecosphere on which all life depends. It examines the three phases of the life systems that sustain life on earth, yet that we misperceive from within our current social systems. The chapter applies Gaia’s teachings to the roles that the practice of law can play in transforming the unsustainable social systems into sustainable, conciliatory ecosocial systems.
