The Ecological and Climate Crisis: The Role of Worldview

My work is predicated on an understanding of the nature and function of worldview in how we understand and function in the world.

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Hello friends. Yesterday afternoon, I finished reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2014 book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Wow! No wonder it won a Pulitzer Prize: this journalist has taken complex science about vast aspects of the Earth community and it turned it into a readable narrative about where the Earth has been and where it is going. And it is funny! More than once I found myself laughing out loud, then finding my husband to read him passages.

I am working on an essay in which I reflect theologically on what we know about evolution and extinction, and the implications for us as we face the climate crisis. Integral to understanding how we got to this point of global heating that is happening at warp speed in geological terms, is understanding what worldview is and how it functions in our lives as human beings. For today, I offer you an essay I published on my previous blog more than a year ago.

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The Ecological and Climate Crisis: The Role of Worldview

How did we get into this mess? The question of how we have gotten to this state of ecological and climate crisis that has caused irrevocable change and is shutting down the very life systems of the planet is a very complex question without simple answers. People in every possible field of research, as well as in governments and grassroots, are seeking to understand how we got to where we are, in order to figure out how to move forward in ways that are Earth healing, instead of Earth destroying.

One of the things that we need to examine in trying to understand how we got here is the question of worldview. The bottom line is this: We are in an ecological crisis of our own making because of a destructive, anthropocentric worldview that has been operative throughout the Western world for around 500 years. It is a worldview whereby humans see themselves as separate from and superior to the rest of the natural world, and act accordingly. How did this worldview come to be, and what new vision of Earth-human relations can function as a more ecological, healing worldview for both humans and the planet?

Defining Worldview

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