As I have said in the above posting, I’ll draw heavily on the perspective of the environmental history, in my attempt to figure out the status quo in the 21st century. This is an academic stance to understand the human history in terms of the interaction with the environment.
Historical researches dealing with environmental factors has been here and there all the time, but those historical research efforts that consciously focuses on the history of the environment has been activated since the publication of Clive Ponting’s A Green History of the World in 1994. Coming into this century, it is regarded as one of the legitimate branches in the field of history, with several of the academic circles formed on international level.
Why should we introduce environmental factors in talking about ‘spirituality’?
I think the factor of the environment has much to do with the ways human intelligence, emotion, or even spirituality is realized through, or rather is recognized by a human being. More basically, environment is one of the most important factors to determine the way of existence for every living organism including human being.
For example, the birth of mankind was facilitated by a big change in the environment. About 8 million years ago, there came to be large scale diastrophism in the middle of the sub-Saharan Africa, to form a rift zone vertically dividing the lower part of the continent. A range of highland running from north to south blocked up the humid west wind, sending only dry winds to the eastern Africa. Thick tropical forest was turned into savanna grasses and bushes.
Monkeys who used to dwell in the trees of that once thick forests were doomed to diverging destiny: either perish in extinction or adapt to the drastic environmental change. Individuals more successful in survival were changed into a new type of anthropoid. More standing and walking erectly, more omnivorous, and with bigger brain, they gradually became Homo Sapience.
This is just one example telling how influential the environment is to the beings living in it.
In the recent past, during the modern days, emphasis on the factor ‘environment’ would evoke an instant criticism denouncing it as a version of determinism: if the environment determines the way humans exist, where is the space for the human will to work?
My response to such criticism would be: environmental change is influencing the way living organisms including humans live on this planet, but the destiny of each individual, and the consequent sum of the destiny of the mankind, varies greatly depending on how it responds to that change. Such a perspective allows us to view the environment, not as a passive and inferior object of being protected or destroyed, but as an active and equal subject of interaction to transform the way we live and to be transformed by it.
This is the point distinguishing my contention from the mainstream environmental discourses, which focus mostly on the effect of human action unto the environment, be it in positive or in negative sense.
There is another point that distinguishes the following postings from the environmental discourses to date, this time including the environmental history. It will attempt to view the way we live, not only in the context of our interaction with the global environment, but also in the context of higher levels of interaction with cosmic environment that interacts with the global environment.
No little part of the environmental discourses, including the environmental historical research on the climate change in the ‘Little Ice Age’, has dealt with the influence from higher level of cosmic environment like solar energy. But apart from scientific researches with narrowly focused aims, most of such discourses have dealt it only partially.
Postings to come in this category will try to understand, from the onset, environmental state of the earth in much larger context of the environmental change in the universe. I think this is required to understand ‘spirituality’, a notion of higher level than that of ordinary consciousness in daily life on earth. Such is an attempt made possible, thanks to recent research outcomes being poured out, on the interaction of the global environment and the cosmic environment.
Thus understood, we are now ready for time travel in search of the answer to the question: What is spirituality to us, living on this earth in the 21st century?
Changing Earth and People- Gina Lee's Archive on Global Change 