Earth and Humanity: a community of destiny  

 We must start the year with hope, because we need urgently to deal with the atmosphere of commotion and frustration that was the COP-15 of Copenhagen. Certainly, global warming carries grave consequences. However, from a more philosophical perspective, it would not necessarily destroy the human planetary project, but would force it to achieve a higher state, in order to be truly planetary. It is urgent that we move from the local to the global, and from the national to the planetary.

If we look back at the anthropogenetic process, we see that the present crisis, like previous ones, will not lead us to extermination, but to a necessary integration of the Earth and Humanity. It would be the geo-society.  In that case, we then would be looking at a rising sun, not a sunset.

In this objective fact inheres a subjective one: the rise of a planetary consciousness, with a perception that we constitute one single species that occupies a single common home, with which we form a community of destiny. This has never before occurred: it is what is new in the present historic phase.

It is undeniable that there is already a process that has been going on for thousands of millions of years: the ascent towards consciousness. Starting with the geosphere (Earth) appeared the hydrosphere (water), followed by the lithosphere (continents), later on, the biosphere (life), the anthroposphere (human beings) and for the Christians, the Christosphere (Christ). We may be now at the brink of another evolutionary leap: the irruption of the noosphere, that implies the encounter of all the peoples in one single place, planet Earth, and with a common planetary consciousness. Noosphere, as the word suggests (nous in Greek means mind, intelligence), suggests the convergence of minds and hearts, giving birth to a higher and more complex unity.

What we lack, at the moment, is a Universal Declaration of the Common Good of the Earth and Humanity, that coordinates consciences and forces a convergence of the different politics. Until now, we have limited ourselves to thinking of the common good in terms of individual countries. We broadened the horizon when we proposed a Human Rights Charter. That was the great cultural struggle of the XX Century. But now arises the concern for Humanity as a whole, and for the Earth, understood not as something inert, but as a living super-organism of which we humans are her conscious expression. How can we guarantee the rights of the Earth together with the rights of Humanity? The Earth Charter that came about at the start of the XXI Century attempts to respond to this demand.

The global crisis demands of us a global government that coordinates global solutions with global problems. Let us hope that totalitarian centers of power do not appear, but rather, a network of multi-dimensional centers of observation, of analysis, of thought and direction, whose objective is the general well being.

It is only the beginning of a new historical stage; the age of the Earth united with Humanity (the conscious expression of the Earth).  Or it is the epoch of Humanity (part of the Earth) united with the Earth, forming a single entity, unitary and diverse, called Gaia, or Great Mother.

We are now living in the iron age of the noosphere, full of contradictions, even though we believe that all the forces of the universe conspire to affirm it. Our solar system is marching towards it, who knows if the whole galaxy, and even this type of universe, because according to string theory, there may be other, parallel universes. It is fragile and vulnerable, but it is charged with new energies, capable of molding a new future. Perhaps the noospehere is at this moment just a flickering flame, but it represents what should be. And what should be has strength. It tends to materialize.

 

Free translation from the Spanish sent by
Melina Alfaro, alfaro_melina@yahoo.com.ar,
done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU