While reading the October issue of Scientific American I came upon an interesting quote from the author of the book, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis by Amitav Ghosh. Ghosh used what happened when the Dutch East India Company occupied the nutmeg plantations on the Banda Islands in Indonesia as an illustration of, “the unre-strainable excess that lies hidden at the heart of the vision of the world-as-resource – an excess that leads ultimately not just to genocide but to an even greater violence, an impulse that can only be called ‘omni-cide’, the desire to destroy everything.”

My reaction to this observation was along the lines of “Holly Cow!!! He nailed it.” All of the excesses that seem to be plaguing the world are rooted in this idea that we can, and should, take as much of everything as we can; rather than a vision that of the world-as-home. If the world is “home” then there is no benefit to taking from it, no benefit in destroying it, no benefit in grabbing as much as possible as soon as possible – because it is all right here right now.

The issues all seem to ultimately (and often directly) lead to many (or most) of the problems in the world hinge on the vision that it is necessary and important to take as much out of the “commons” (the shared resources of the world) as possible, otherwise someone else might get it and I will lose out.

The reason that this hit me so hard is that first off it seems obviously true. Just look in any direction and there it is, we call the drive to take as much as possible “greed” but in reality it is much closer to the vision that the world-as-resource to be taken and used. But… this is just a vision. Visions are just thoughts, dreams, made-up mental models – they have no actual substance, no mass, and require no actual energy (no ergs are required) to sustain or change. You don’t have to fire up a bunch of big generators to change a view or a point of view, it can just happen – no resources required. Perhaps this is the direction that people such as Greta Thunberg are pointing to. She, and others like her, are pointing the a new world where we don’t find a need to only take – they are pointing to a world where we can share, manage and protect. Why not? This seems reasonable to me. The sun and earth provide more than we (people, animals, plants, everybody) needs if we just back off trying to grab as much as we can – as if we could somehow gather it all up and take it to another planet (or with us when we die). We can’t, it is here and that is great.