actors, we have a small number of huge organizations that now dominate many parts of our economic activity. And, in all we do, we load the atmosphere with those gases that build up a kind of insulating blanket around the Earth, so-called ‘greenhouse’ gases which accumulate in entirely unnatural quantities which then makes the world ever warmer, thus disturbing the balance that the Earth seeks to maintain. We carry on doing this as if we are immune to the consequences – as if somehow we have isolated ourselves from the inevitable checks that in the end govern all life on Earth.
When I began pointing all this out in those early years when there was not quite so much scientific evidence to back up what my intuition was telling me, it proved a particularly unrewarding occupation. I am relieved to say that now the story is a little different. For one thing, I no longer have to theorize. Now I can point, not only to a vast body of evidence that describes the consequences of our behaviour, but also to an array of successful practical examples of how better to approach matters. These examples, relating to everything from farming to town-planning, are healthier, more beautiful, more human-centred and much more ‘sustainable’ – although I prefer the word ‘durable’. It is these that I plan to explain.
Having also travelled widely in those years and been fortunate to meet and discuss these issues with a large number of people, many of them leading experts in their field, from whose wisdom and knowledge I have benefitted, I also want to share the achievements I have witnessed. We will discover great work being done all over the world, from the UK and the United States to Australia and China, and my hope is that in so many vivid ways it will become clear just what goes wrong if we abandon traditional knowledge and practices and turn away from how Nature behaves.
Knowledge is power’ is a dictum behind much science and experimentation, but is there value in widening the scope of science teaching so that it seeks a deeper understanding of the wholeness of Nature?
The contrast between the way these more harmonious approaches work and the way things are done in the mainstream will, I hope, reveal the many deep cracks in the veneer of our Age of Convenience. These are already becoming more obvious, exposing just how flimsy its foundations really are. We may still enjoy plenty of convenience for now and, of course, it would be marvellous if we could somehow maintain the whole edifice without suffering the eventual consequences of deliberately excluding Nature from the equation in every field known to humankind, but the costs to both the natural world and our own inner world are very severe. We are beginning to recognize the outline of what we have really engineered for ourselves. Not an age of limitless convenience after all, but a much more disturbing ‘Age of Disconnection’. That is to say, we have systematically severed ourselves from Nature and the importance to us, as to everything else on Earth, of her processes and cyclical economy. As a result, we are beginning to fall seriously out of joint with the natural order. And there is order. Whether we choose to be part of the process or not, everything in truth depends upon everything else. Whether it is the bee to the flower, the bird to the fruit tree, or the man to the soil, we depend upon them all – and we neglect this simple principle at our peril. It stands to reason: take away the bee and there can be no flower; without the bird there will be less fruit; deplete the soil and very soon people will begin to starve.
Such obvious relationships are taught in these simple terms to small children in primary schools and yet, by the time they reach adulthood, a strange transformation appears to have taken place. It is almost as if they have gone through a subtle brainwashing that encourages them to follow the rest of the merry throng and dance without question to the Pied Piper’s tune. Like everyone else they become persuaded to think that we can do without everything else and that we can ignore the essential rhythms and patterns of Nature; that, indeed, nothing is sacred any more, not even that mysterious ordered harmony which ultimately sustains us.
There is little question in my mind now that this is a dangerous course. And that we no longer have a choice. If we could exist independently of Nature and her underlying principles, that would be splendid, but we can’t – certainly not if we retain a modicum of interest in our children’s and grandchildren’s future on this threatened planet. The thought of them has been, for me, the main driving force for this book, regardless of how it may be greeted, and if it moves others to reflection, then let this book be a means of exploring what has caused us to think that we can abandon Nature’s rhythmic patterns. We have done so, not just in the mechanized processes we use to grow our food and treat our farm animals, or the way in which we design and build our homes, towns and cities, or the way in which we deny the crucial relationship between mind, body and spirit in healthcare. We have also done so in the way we fail in our systems of economics to measure and put a proper value on Nature’s vital services, and even in the manner we teach out a proper whole-istic understanding of the fact that we are a part of Nature not apart from Her when it comes to our children’s education. For they all follow an approach to life that places the greatest value on a mechanistic way of thinking and a linear kind of logic. But carrying on in this way as if, fundamentally, it is ‘business as usual’ is no longer an option. We cannot solve the problems of the twenty-first century with the world view of the twentieth century.
Terms used in this book
Before we begin our journey there are a number of key words and terms that I will use throughout that I feel I should explain. One of these terms is ‘mechanistic thinking’. This stems from what happened in Western thought from the seventeenth century onwards, after the great pioneers of empirical discovery like Descartes and Francis Bacon laid down the principles of the Scientific Revolution. Nature began to be understood in the more clinical terms of its mechanics, as we shall see. This is because, in the main, our science has been based on a ‘reductionist’ approach. Organisms are broken down and their separate parts are studied in mechanical terms. Hence in schools today children are generally taught to see the human heart as nothing more than a pump, the lungs as a set of bellows, and the brain as some sort of very clever computer with the human mind conveniently explained away as the product of an electromagnetic effect of brain function. Despite the incredible leaps that Quantum Mechanics and Particle Physics and the lessons on the interconnectivity of matter they so readily offer us, it still appears odd that many people seem not to have a knowledge of these things. Is this, perhaps, why things start to get a bit fuzzy in the schoolroom when it comes to defining consciousness in mechanistic terms or, for that matter, the imagination. Quite where the resonance we feel for the beauty of things or, ultimately, love is anybody’s guess. The consequence of this outlook is that we have amassed an extensive database of how the world works that has enabled us to increase the speed and adaptability of many elements of the natural world, but in doing so we have lost a valuable and ancient perspective.
RIGHT: Animals kept in crates, reared all their lives in sheds and fed on a diet of corn and growth hormones disconnects even the creatures we rely upon for our food from the natural world. Factory farming is said to be the only way to feed the world, but this ignores the massive hidden costs and the need to give back to Nature as much as we take. There are better ways to produce food than this.
The eighteenth–century agenda of the Enlightenment, based predominantly on the pursuit of progress through science and technology, is so much a part of the furniture today that we do not even question it as an ideology. And yet it is as if we peer at the world through a letterbox, believing that what our science reveals to us is the whole picture even though science does not itself deal with the meaning of things, nor does it encourage a very joined-up way of working. As a result, time and again one problem is solved, but in its wake many others are created, often far worse than the one we set out to resolve.
To see this in action we only have to consider the way water companies in the UK have to spend around £100 million a year removing pesticides and other chemicals from the water supply. These chemicals are the fallout of a supposedly efficient form of industrialized agriculture – an agriculture that works according to mechanistic thinking. The same mechanistic response is applied in the US,