Why we must change our dominant focus from climate to life and why diversity matters to life.

“How can one pause for thought or dreams when mid-summer beckons from stream and hill? There are days when the sheer beauty of the sky is enough to prove the fourth dimension or the doctrine of relativity, when the lapping of lake-water washes away not only human sins but human theories. The ecstasy of mere existence, on such days, may thrill even paltry souls; and those who are keen-winged for joy rise to intuition of the infinite”.

——Harriet Monroe, Nature the Source, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse Vol XX No. V, August 1922, via Poetry Foundation

THE STORY:

Sunday, May 22 was Biodiversity Day. It was a good reminder of how important biological diversity is to us as humans.

Biodiversity is, simply, essential. It reflects our being, it is how life is expressed, materialized, and expanded in our world. It expresses the whole and the parts of life in spacetime.

Alas, in one of its most recent reports, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), a science-anchored body of the UN Convention on Biological Biodiversity, shared data showing that life on earth is reducing at alarming rates and speed. Well, a gentle reminder that life on earth is us too. We human beings are one of the life species under threat.

The language we use matters. Sustainability discourse has been dominated by climate concerns as if everything else, including life itself, was at the service of a certain desired climate and not the other way around. According to PBS, even the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres (may have) said in 2018 that “climate change is the most important issue we face”.

Those who follow sustainability news will I am sure agree that climate is the dominant buzz, and it has been so for decades. I painfully remember when, after the economic crisis in 2008, most international institutions and traditional donors gradually decided to “concentrate” on investing in solutions to climate issues, some organizations completely abandoning their biodiversity programs, even after over a decade of research and innovation. It was regarded as a good business decision. It may have been – depending on how one defines business. For example, if business is solely a means to make short-term monetary gains. I remember leaders in these institutions lamenting that biodiversity was “too complicated” a concept and did not lend itself to be “commoditized” – as CO2 can be – and internalized in economic systems. Ha! The mother of all assets can’t be an asset?

Unfortunately, the fixation on climate is in the way of a logical course of action to achieve global sustainability. In our dominantly patriarchal world, we underestimate the mother. Worse: we abuse her.

Let us be clear: there is no scientific proof that one or another factor in the system is more important than another in sustaining life, or in what we, humanity, have to face. That is probably why the UN has defined 17 sustainability goals, and not just one. Better indeed to risk some overlap than to miss something. But the discourse of our leaders, media, and social platforms can often become inundated and obsessed with certain dominant opinions. Don’t we love a single, simple, dominant opinion to numb our fear of complexity?

How does life expand? Have you noticed that no leaf, tree, finger, or beetle is like another, even of its kind? Life expands and multiplies in time and space by creating more different and unique individuals. Whilst we can observe replication of the same within one individual, as this individual grows and develops (such as with their DNA), life otherwise expands by creating different individuals and increasing the diversity of its forms.

The process of life expansion combines repetition and diversification ad infinitum. We are the same and different. We need both. Least ‘difference’, we die. That is why restoring and promoting biodiversity is vital.

Among others, the level of biological diversity is an indicator of healthy, balanced expansion of universe on and around earth, at any scale. A diverse team is a better, happier, and overall, more efficient team. An abundant and balanced microbiome in our bodies maintains us alive and thriving.

If love is what makes us need and serve each other, biodiversity serves love.

Each natural entity adapts to change by changing too, constantly creating new evolved forms of its kind or disappearing and creating space for other more adapted entities to emerge. The level of specialization, skill, and collaboration in a highly diverse ecosystem is extraordinary. Solutions that respect and harness nature’s quintessential wisdom have always been more efficient, more elegant, and less costly than any other so-called solutions invented by mono-fixated human beings. And we, human beings, in fact, do not have to do much. The rest of nature does most of it.

 

THE PROBLEM:

Focusing on the wrong end goal – here a certain climate – does not by itself lead to what we are really after, which is to live as abundantly and happily as possible. But even if a certain climate was the goal, we are not addressing adequately all the factors that influence climate, particularly human behavior and activity.

Human behavior is directly informed and fed by thinking and feeling. How often do we hear climate folks speak of feelings?

We tend to rush to conclusions and accept half-baked analyses. We tend to not question ourselves enough. And we act poorly as a consequence. We are prompted to quote Einstein (sometimes on things he never said) and yet forget one of his main teachings: the crucial importance of taking enough reflection time before acting.

One result of this is oversimplifying nature in general, in all its elements. Things are much more complex, intertwined, and interrelated than we think. In fact, everything is related to everything.

We have also mostly excluded mankind and all its creations from nature (see Part 1 of this series: Technology for Technology in that regard). When, in fact, there is nothing else but nature, and nature includes everything.

We have also mostly been allocating more value to certain elements over others based largely on subjective opinions and prejudice, making insufficient use of rigorous, dispassionate, comprehensive, logical frameworks (facts, goals, problem tree and analysis, criteria, etc.). In the same way, we have been allocating more value to replication, cookie-cutter approaches, and standardization – especially in economic systems – than to the ever blossoming of diverse unique approaches.

We tend to think and report wrongly on facts and words because we interpret and distort them with our own shrinking, subjective filter, confusing reality with what we think of it – our thinking being itself influenced by our feelings in a way that we mostly do not master. As Daniel Kahneman points out, “we can be blind to the obvious” and “we are blind to our blindness” (Thinking Fast and Slow, 2013).

In a collective open editorial titled Call for Emergency Action to Limit Global Temperature Increases, Restore Biodiversity, and Protect Health, published in September 2021, editors of leading health journals worldwide lamented that “the greatest threat to global public health is the continued failure of world leaders to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5° C and to restore nature.”

I agree with that editorial to a great extent. First because they put good human health as the main goal – and that is a good proxy to putting happy life as the goal. With a good health (of mind and body), we can understand and use our feelings correctly, and we can think, organize, and act intelligently – that is sustainably, to live good, expansive, loving lives.

Second, the editorial mentions the restoration of nature as an important area of action together with maintaining global temperature. To me, the latter is a part of the former, but let’s accept the redundancy here.

Third, they correctly point to “the continued failure of world leaders …”  as the main threat. I agree again. If indeed we reflect and draw a more accurate problem tree, bad world leadership is a core cause issue. Deregulated climate is a consequence, along with the loss of biodiversity and a number of other issues, all interrelated too in two directional ways.

Leaders lead. They are hence responsible. And we must be collectively a lot more demanding and firmer with our leaders than we have up until now. Our life depends on it.

 

THE SUSTAINABLE SOLUTION:

What is the difference between being alive or being dead? Probably, when I am alive, I can sense with my senses, I can feel the being in my flesh and bones. Feeling matters to life.

As neuroscientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor points out, “at the level of the brain anatomy, we are feeling creatures who think, not thinking creatures who feel” (Interview of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor by Marianne Williamson – YouTube April 11, 2022).

All the carbon sinks in the world, stopping all use of fossil fuels, albeit useful endeavors, will not, alone, give us our health, sanity, and life back.

Of course, climate is important! But it is not an end. The main goal that humanity must achieve is not a certain temperature or percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere. The main goal of humanity is a better version of itself, in a better version of its world. In fact, no better world can be without a better humanity (even only as we are the only ones to judge).

Some could object that there is no goal, that we must just accept and go with the flow. I see this as also true from a certain limited perspective. Yet in spacetime, precisely, we can take a snapshot of an object or situation – such as humanity itself, in a given space, at a given time. And we can decide if we want this object or situation to be different at a future time, and we can describe how so, with detail and precision.

What does a better humanity look like, sound like, and feel like in 2030, for example?

This must be defined as clearly and precisely as possible, or we will never achieve it. In my first blog post on this site, Dear Sustainability Leader: What Is Your Vision?, I offer a contribution to this definition. At its core, a better humanity is able to maintain and expand life on earth – particularly human life.

What are the life-expanding activities that we can engage in right now?

For starters, if we want to better understand, support, and expand life, we must (re)learn how to sense and feel. Einstein, like most good scientists, would spend time observing nature. Observation nourishes thinking. The more we observe, the more we learn, the better our decision-making and action. Observation is a life-expanding activity. Let us integrate the observation of our inner realities – such as sensations and feelings, to that of our outer realities.

Among other facts in nature, we can observe that living creatures and systems alternate between stress and rest. Excessive activity leads to exhaustion and death. In the current situation, humanity is excessively stressed. Let us reduce stressful activity and rest more.

For this year’s Biodiversity Day, on May 22, The UN Convention on Biological Diversity exhorted all of us to take 22 actions.

I suggest that instead of filling our agendas with frantic, often ill-researched activity, we remove all to-dos from our lives that over-stress us and replace them with rest, nature observation, contemplation, and calm, spacious, reflection. We’d observe not just what’s outside of us, but also what’s inside. Let us understand more fully how we, human beings in flesh and bones, really live and expand life through more diversity. Let us make life more powerful.

When do you feel powerfully alive? What experiences do your own unique body and mind enjoy the most? What makes you a different and unique participant in the whole life system?

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