John Seed and the Council of All Beings Part III
(Page 9 of 10)
May/June 1989
By Pat Stone
It would still be an earth that's impoverished. We've already lost a lot of species, and many that remain are what biologist Daniel Janzen called the living dead: They are no longer part of breeding populations in any long-term sense. There're only 400 mountain gorillas, for instance, so genetic drift will almost certainly take care of them.
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Finally, humans, I, Rock,speak to you.I ask you to wake upWake up, humans,wake up!and-pledgeyour allegiance to life. Even though others maylook upon you as traitors,speak on our behalf inall human meetingsand councils.Speak with strength and courageand power because yourep resent a 11 of us who ,in the normal course of events, haveno voice.We ask you to give voiceon our behalf
But if we wake up in the next 10 or 15 years, I feel that an incredible future may still exist for us and other complex life on this planet. If we don't wake up by then, I don't see it. Either we're going to get it together, you and I, now, in our lifetimes, or we can forget the whole thing. After all, look at the graphs of destruction rates. They're all steeply rising J curves-whether you look at the carbon dioxide cycle, ozone layer, gene pools in species, or pollution. And when you look at the combination of these things-and I've looked at nothing else for 10 years-you'll see that there is no hope within the dominant cultural paradigm. There's no hope that a bit more national park here or pollution control there is going to do the slightest good. Nothing our action groups have done in the last 10 years to preserve the rain forest is even noticeable on its J curve. The acceleration of its destruction is still continuing.
MOTHER: You don't make the future sound very promising.
Seed: Not unless there's an incredible spiritual revolution, a new wave of consciousness that more or less sweeps through humanity in our generation. That may sound impossible, but it could happen. It would require nothing more miraculous than the miracle of us emerging from the sea or of reptiles turning into birds. I know these things took place over long periods of time, but what we're talking about isn't a physical evolution but a spiritual one-so it could be almost instantaneous.
Even the theory of evolution suggests this might happen, because it indicates that environmental pressure causes evolution. Most species have been repeatedly pushed around by ice ages and such.
Environmental pressure is the invitation to change, and the threat of extinction is the ultimate environmental pressure. If we really face that threat, not hiding in myths or denial, and really pray and work for a spiritual evolutionary change, that may be enough for it to take place. Evolution often seems to happen in surges-the theorists call it punctuated equilibrium-so maybe that will happen with us.
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