Toward a Science and Spirituality

of Abundance

Bill Vitek, PhD

Clarkson University and

The Land Institute

November 2017

The Challenge • Abundance, not Surplus

• Dealing with the Invention of Agriculture and

the Surplus Mind

• Dealing with Ontologies and Epistemologies of Surplus

• The Axial Age and Modernism: Monotheism and Humanism: Contributors to the Surplus Mind

• Nature excluded, subdued, ignored.

• Transitioning to an ecospheric agriculture, science and spirituality

The Good News!

• Natural Systems Agriculture

• Evolutionary Biology and Quantum Physics

• Process Philosophy and Theology

• Rediscovering an emergent, creative universe

• New ontologies and epistemologies of emergence, co-creativity, and ignorance.

• A new science and spirituality of Abundance on the horizon.

The Story of Surplus • The invention of agriculture.

• The invention of script and mathematics to keep track of the surplus.

• The invention of complex, high-energy societies to consume the surplus and require more of it.

• The invention of socio-cultural systems to manage and protect surplus: military, religions, slavery, philosophy, hierarchy, economics, politics.

The Challenge of Our Time • There has never been an ecological

civilization/culture/society fed by agriculture

• Civilizations (complex, hierarchical cultural systems) depend on surplus calories of annual agriculture.

• Agriculture is one of the least ecological activities on the planet because it depends on annual disruption of soil and plant communities .

• .

I hope this doesn’t increase

soil erosion

I hope this doesn’t increase

soil erosion

The 10,000 year problem of agriculture

I hope this doesn’t

increase soil erosion

I hope this doesn’t

increase soil erosion

I hope this doesn’t cause

nitrate leaching

I hope this doesn’t cause

nitrate leaching

I hope weed populations don’t

explode

I hope weed populations don’t

explode

The 10,000 year problem of agriculture

I hope this doesn’t

increase soil erosion

I hope this doesn’t

increase soil erosion

I hope this doesn’t cause

nitrate leaching

I hope this doesn’t cause

nitrate leaching

I hope weed populations

don’t explode

I hope weed populations

don’t explode

The 10,000 year problem of agriculture

“I talk about an intensive tillage event as the combination of a tornado, a hurricane, an earth- quake, a tsunami.” —Don Reicosky, retired Department of Agriculture soil scientist

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-grain-that-tastes-like-wheat-but-grows-like-a-prairie-grass/

The 5 E’s of Surplus • Extraction of carbon from the five carbon pools

(soils, forests, coal, oil, natural gas).

• Eviction of human, plant and animal communities as extraction leads to exhaustion, and surplus grows and expands.

• Enslavement of humans, plants (crops) and animals (livestock).

• Extermination of weeds, predators and humans who interfere with surplus-driven expansion.

• Empires of surplus, hierarchy, justification, superiority.

A Species Out of Context • Agriculture 10-12,000 years ago

• Farmers divide the natural world into crop and weed, livestock and predator.

• Agriculture is the first dualism.

• Socio-Cultural systems give shape

and justification to these arrangements.

• Success brought increases in population and the need to feed more people.

• Success brought a sense of pride and hubris.

The Original Great Transformation • Axial Age

– War and violence – Teachers and

philosophers – Social change

• Axis of change – Divided “earlier

peoples” from modern humans

– Psychological shift in consciousness

“What is new about this age...is that man becomes conscious of Being as a whole, of himself and his limitations…He asks radical questions. Face to face with the void he strives for liberation and redemption. By consciously recognizing his limits he sets himself the highest goals.” Karl Jaspers

The Two Great Isms

• Monotheism

– Judaism

– Christianity

– Islam

• Humanism

– Greek and Hellenistic philosophy

– Buddhism

– Confucianism

A Great Transformation

• In consciousness

• In being: God, Humans, Nature

• In values: Justice is central

• In customs, rules, practices, social systems

• Fed by surplus agriculture and defended by the surplus mind

• Nature excluded

• Inequalities accepted, defended

Second Great Transformation

• Modernism: 1619-????

• Three revolutions:

–Scientific

–Political

–Economic

• The Age of Reason: “Dare to Know”

Modernist Assumptions

• Nature is a Boundless Source and Sink

• Human Mind/Knowledge is Sufficient

• Human Concerns are First and Foremost

• Transgression of Limits is a Right and a Duty • Science

• Economics

• Ethics

• Nature is a supermarket, laboratory, playground and dump

Axial Age and Modernism

• Both contribute to the Surplus Mind

• Religion and Science continue to influence worldviews and global policies.

• Both depend on growth and extraction.

• Both are products of the agricultural revolution.

A Wounded World of Surplus

• Climate Change: Agriculture is #2 cause

• Species Extinction: Agriculture is #1 or 2 cause

• Half of all the plants in the USA are classified as noxious weeds

• Backbreaking work for farmers and food producers

• Consumerism, debt, depression, exhaustion

• Acceptance of horrible treatment of people and animals

The Surplus Mind at Work

Sustainability and Social Justice as Half Measures

• The best one can do inside a system dependent on the 5 E’s and the presumption of human superiority.

• Lifeboats, not lifeboat destinations.

• Trapped by food and social systems fed by annual ecological destruction.

• Trapped by socio-cultural systems that accept, defend or try to soften the destruction.

Science and Spirituality Cul de Sacs

• Reductive Materialism

• Logical Positivism

• Anti-Religious

• Too often feeding the surplus mind

• Scriptural Fundamentalism

• Anti-Scientific

• Too often defending the surplus mind

• Both seem stuck in worldviews no longer

The Age of Ecology 1851 - ????

• Emerson-Thoreau: Transcendentalism

• Charles Darwin: Evolutionary Biology

• Ernst Haeckel: Ecology

• John Muir: Nature as Cathedral

• Aldo Leopold: The Land Ethic

• James Lovelock: Gaia

• Wes Jackson: Natural Systems Agriculture

Ecology’s Assumptions

• Nature has agency

• Whole not equal to the sum of the parts

• All life is interdependent

• Living systems are complex, emergent, diverse, self-organizing.

• There is no “environment” or “downstream”

• Nature’s rules rule

• Human’s are more ignorant than knowledgeable

The Emergence of Ecosystems and the Ecosphere

• As conceptual tools

• As units of value

• As laboratories of collaboration

• As new metaphors

• As places of interaction between science and religion

• As a source of inspiration for transforming agriculture and culture

Solving the 10,000 Year Problem of Agriculture

Healing the Surplus Mind

THE LAND INSTITUTE Salina, Kansas, USA

K A N S A S

Salina

38° 49’ 27” N 97° 36’ 26” W Elevation: 373 m

Wes Jackson

• “The history of Earth-abuse through agriculture has been horrendous. Essentially, all of nature’s ecosystems are perennial polycultures. Agriculture reversed that. Consequently, soil erosion became a problem. The wilderness has to become a standard against which we judge our agricultural and cultural practices.”

Natural Systems Agriculture

• Based on an educational premise: people can, and do, learn from wild plants and places

• Mimicking natural systems

• Systems are social-ecological, naturecultures

Illustration by Sebastien Thibault, http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/plant-memory-hidden-vernalization

Three Categories of Research at The Land Institute

• Breeding of perennial grain crops (wheat,

sorghum, Silphium oilseed, “KernzaTM” (wheatgrass), legume

• Agroecology of perennial grain cropping systems

• Evaluation of ecological and social benefits of perennial agriculture

Global partners in perennial grain agriculture research

Ag. Res. Cent., S. Africa Ag. U. Sweden (SLU) Cornell U. Charles Sturt, Australia ICRISAT, Mali Jimma U. Ethiopia Kansas State U. Lund U., Sweden Makerere U. Uganda Max Planck Inst., Germany Michigan State U. NARC, Nepal NSW Dept. Primary Ind., Aust. NW Ag. For. U., China Lethbridge Res. Centre, Canada U. Copenhagen, Denmark U. Georgia U. Illinois U. Kansas U. Manitoba, Canada U. Minnesota U. Reading, UK U. De la Republica, Uruguay Utah State U. Texas A&M Washington State U. Yunnan U., China

We also need a

coordinating ecospheric

philosophy along with a

natural systems

agriculture.

Earth Alive!

• J. Stan Rowe, Canadian Ecologist

• Integration of atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere = the ecosphere, the creative, living globe that is our home

• In other words, the so-called “non-living” world is interrelated with the “living” world

• Human communities are nestled within and dependent on ecosystems within the larger ecosphere

Process Philosophy/Theology

• Alfred North Whitehead

• Nature Alive

• Actual Occasions of Experience

• Mutual Immanence

• Prehension

• The Creative Advance

Process Philosophy/Theology • “It is as true to say that

• God is permanent and the World fluent, as that the World is permanent and God is fluent.

• God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God many.

• the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World.

• God transcends the World, as that the World transcends God.

• God creates the World, as that the World creates God. (A.N. Whitehead).”

• http://www.anthonyflood.com/whiteheadgodandtheworld.htm

Process Philosophy/Theology

• “……(t)he universe exhibits a creativity with infinite freedom, and realm of forms with infinite possibilities; but that this creativity and these forms are together impotent to achieve actuality apart from the completed ideal harmony, which is God.” (A.N. Whitehead)

Process Science

Process Science • Ascendency • Top-Down Causation • An Ecological Metaphysic: “Let us define ecology

as the study of the universe.” G. Evelyn Hutchinson

• An Ignorance-Based Epistemology • A partially lawless universe • Agency all the way up and all the way down • God is the natural creativity of the universe

(Stuart Kauffman)

An Opportunity for Dialogue

• Science must remain open to a partially lawless universe and a creativity that is unpredictable.

• Religion must remain open to concepts of the divine that are open to creativity and freedom. The Creator can be surprised by the Creation!

From Eco-logical to Ecosphere • Not fully knowable

• Not fully determined or fixed

• A sphere is a better metaphor for the work ahead: multi-dimensional, continuous, full of community

• God/The Creative Power of the Universe is a sphere/center in which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere (Empedocles paraphrase)

From Surplus to Abundance

• The Perennial Imagination • Immanent and Transcendent • The capacity to make beauty, order,

consciousness • Transitioning to an Ecospheric Agriculture is

the first step • Transitioning to an Ecospheric Theology,

Science, Philosophy, Politics, etc. must follow • It is now possible!

Toward a Perennial Philosophy/Science/Theology of

Abundance • Roots: What is below is just as important as

what is above.

• Relationships: The Cosmos is relational at

its core, its origins, and in its emergence.

• Regions: Roots and Relationships prosper in

communities.

Changing Our Mindscapes

• Renewed respect for boundaries

• Creating concepts of abundance and prosperity within limits in preparation for an ecospheric culture of food and thought leading to action and right living.

• Spiritual and Secular: “both and,” not “either or”

“Change the story and you change perception; change perception and you change the world.”

Jean Houston A Passion for the Possible

Pope Francis

• “Our insistence that each human being is an image of God should not make us overlook the fact that each creature has its own purpose. None is superfluous. The entire material universe speaks of God’s love, his boundless affection for us. Soil, water, mountains: everything is, as it were, a caress of God.”

Pope Francis

• ……The gravity of the ecological crisis demands that we all look to the common good, embarking on a path of dialogue which demands patience, self-discipline and generosity, always keeping in mind that “realities are greater than ideas”.

• Many things have to change course, but it is we human beings above all who need to change. ….. A great cultural, spiritual and educational challenge stands before us, and it will demand that we set out on the long path of renewal.

Imagine a Perennial Culture............ Then Make it Happen

• Earth Agriculture

• Earth Philosophy, Science and History

• Earth Religion

• Earth Economics

• Earth Medicine

• Earth Education

• Earth Technology

• Earth Transportation

• Earth Art, Music, Poetry Literature