Page 115 - ECOlogic Book

won’t control your own population, so we will!” Of course, we know that
lowered sperm-counts are not anything the Earth is doing. It’s what we are
doing or failing to do that is imperiling future generations.

From the standpoint of the elements, there might be a certain poetic justice
in the way we are interfering with our own procreation. Eagles are lucky.
They don’t use plastics by choice. Eagles are coming back. We may be
going away.

But while procreation, the deepest expression of our creativity, given to us
for the continuation of our species, appears to be on the decline - (Sperm
counts are down 50% worldwide from 50 years ago), there may be hope in
the awakening of a deeper human creativity; one which recognizes its
interdependence with the natural world.

By now our misguided creativity in the form of industrial materialism has
gone so far that it’s unlikely that simply stopping what we’re doing wrong
will be enough. The destructive forces we humans have set in motion will
continue to bring down the natural systems on which we and other
earthlings depend, unless we reach deeper into the fifth element, or
creativity, than we have ever done before.

I believe we are genetically coded to do this, and to meet the challenges we
have set before ourselves: global warming, hormone disruptors, species
extinction and the like. Meeting them will, I believe, take us to the next
evolutionary stage of our development. We’ve begun to meet the challenges
of acid rain and ozone depletion. Initiatives such as the Montreal Protocol,
(Update, Dec. 09) while still incomplete, give us a model for these newer
challenges, they show us what can be done when the will exists to make the
necessary corrections in our own behavior.

In 1995 the Berlin Mandate acknowledged the need to strengthen the
International Climate Change Treaty. A new round of negotiations has been
launched, aimed at reaching agreement by late 1977, with binding
commitments by the U.S. and other industrialized countries to reduce their
emissions of heat-trapping gasses. 139 Last August in Geneva, the United
States said it would sign and urged other industrialized nations to sign such
a protocol.

139 Meyer, Alden, “In search of Solutions,” Spring, 1996, Nucleus.

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