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VANCOUVER: Public awareness of environmental issues has increased tremendously in the past few years, and it's clear Canadians want to act in an environmentally responsible way.
It's a good beginning, but we are a long way from making the big changes: redirecting business to protect air, water, soil and biological diversity above all else; relieving the Third World debt load; reallocating global resources; preserving wilderness; reducing pollution; changed patterns of transportation and energy use, and so on.
Such a massive transformation will only take place when we change our own attitudes, values and beliefs.
With this idea in mind, a few scientists with impeccable professional credentials are beginning to use words like spiritual, religious, love, and God: terms once unthinkable in a scientific discourse.
They believe we must develop a new vision of our place in the natural world, a view that goes beyond merely treating nature carefully to ensure our own survival.
One of the greatest authorities on biological diversity, especially in tropical rain forests, is Harvard University's Edward O. Wilson. When I asked in an interview two years ago what is needed to change our destructive ways, he replied: "We have to get to know our kin -- the other animals and plants that share the planet with us. We are related to them through our evolutionary history and our DNA. To get to know our relatives is to come to love and cherish them."
Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich has long suggested that destruction of the global biosphere will only stop when there has been a quasi-religious change. One of Ehrlich's early career inspirations was Australian scientist Charles Birch.
Birch's classic book, The Distribution and Abundance of Animals, co-authored with J.G. Andrewartha, was published in 1954. It brought a new way of looking at the intricate connectedness of species in natural ecosystems, the ways the number and impact of each kind of organism are regulated, and the hazards of uncontrolled growth in a finite environment.
Birch was this year's co-winner of the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, a prestigious award worth more than half a million dollars that has in the past gone to such people as Mother Teresa and Billy Graham.
If it seems odd for a scientist to win a religious award, consider Birch's current reflections: "There's something wrong about the way we're operating in the world : industrialization is despoiling the planet. When you ask what is wrong, it comes down to there's something wrong about our values."
In Birch's opinion, the problems began with the rise of the modern scientific way of looking at the world. "Ever since the rise of science in the 17th century, the mode of the universe people have tended to support is a very materialistic, mechanical model."
In the last century "Vitalism" --a belief that living organisms possess a kind of "vital force" -- was discredited. Since then, biologists have accepted that, like machines, organisms are completely explicable simply as aggregates of their atomic and molecular components.
In Birch's opinion, this is a flawed belief that misses a fundamental element.
"There's something mental in existence--in life, which we let slip through our fingers in the past. From protons to people, you have to look at them more as subjects than objects. Then you can see much more easily the relationship of God, not just to human beings, but to all of creation.
"That is because God can be incarnate in life, but God cannot be incarnate in machinery."
Birch sees all life, not just us, as possessing intrinsic value. "I want people to be concerned for animals, whether or not they're useful to us. They are subjects, not just objects."
But how does Birch think of this God he speaks of? He defines God as "persuasive love. Love that persuades creation to become what it can be. But the paradox is, there's power in love. And in the end, the only power that matters is love."
The objectification of the animate and inanimate through science distances us from our surroundings. It creates an apparent separation between us and the rest of the world, thereby deluding us into believing we can do with it as we wish.
Our reimmersion in, and reconnection with, the natural world changes the notion that we end at our skin, and inserts us as part of a greater whole. We may call it love that binds this web of life together.
These ideas of Wilson, Birch and other thoughtful scholars are taking us into the territory of value and belief systems that scientists have traditionally declared off limits.
In trying to resolve the global crisis, they identify the spiritual dimension as the key place to begin the personal revolution that will trigger the needed transformations in our social and economic systems.
David Suzuki is a writer, TV and radio host and a world-renowned geneticist. He is also a leading authority on social and environmental issues.
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