"Mind Pollution" Wreaks Havoc on Environment

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Published on ShanghaiDaily.com (http://www.shanghaidaily.com/) [bad link] http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sp/article/2010/201006/20100614/article_440044.htm

‘Mind pollution’ wreaks havoc on environment

Created: 2010-6-14

Author: David B. Sutton, Ph.D.

I am a child of the 60s — that was the time of the birth and flowering of the environmental movement in the United States.

After receiving the encouragement of my environmental elders to carry on what they had begun, I decided to devote my life’s work to more sustainable living on this beautiful planet.

It was during the first Earth Day (1970) that I was asked to name our most serious environmental problem. At that time the concerns in the press and the public mind were air pollution, the poisoning of our food and water, and the loss of forests and biodiversity.

Few were talking about global warming, although knowledge of it had been around for a hundred years. So you can imagine the questioner’s shock when I singled out “mind pollution” as the most dangerous environmental problem.

Simply defined: mind pollution is the contamination of thought by outmoded, myopic, selfish, and ultimately suicidal ideas about our relation to our environment and to one another. Mind pollution was and remains the ultimate cause of all other environmental problems.

I went on to attribute the origins of this mental contamination to curious religious beliefs that confer human dominion over all on earth, to success in conquering one frontier after another and to the increasing power of technology over nature.

Mind pollution is about forgetting that we are members, not the masters, of the intricate skein of living and non-living things we call the environment and that human welfare depends on the welfare of the whole. As the famous naturalist Aldo Leopold put it over 60 years ago: “Civilization has so cluttered elemental man-earth relation with gadgets and middlemen that awareness of it is growing dim. We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.”

Technology may give us the tools to more effectively interact with natural processes but brute force technology forced upon the living landscape is not wise “scientific development” and certainly not sustainable.

All of this, of course, is second nature to the Taoists who know in their bones that we are inextricably connected to Nature’s ebb and flow.

In China, the indigenous natural philosophy was replaced by the human contrivance of a Confucian heavenly order. In the West, it was the fictitious conventions of Divine Providence and the market’s “invisible hand” that supposedly orchestrates things for the common good.

Flawed view

The simple fact is (and should be blatantly obvious now with the present global economic meltdown) that we are in the grip of the flawed surreal economic world view, in which everything is commodity and human greed and device have no limit.

Human industrial and economic systems are not sustainable. In a finite world the one-way industrial processes of extraction, manufacture, use and disposal must end. There is a limit to resources available as well as the capacity for the earth’s life-support systems to absorb the impact.

Sustainable development is not about technology and economics; it is about a state-of-mind. It is about having a mind clear of mind pollution. Sustainable living is mindful living – being conscious of how we are involved with, how we affect and are totally dependent upon our planet’s life-support systems.

I have spent some time with an indigenous people of the high Andes mountains in Peru. There is no doubt in their mind that they are absolutely dependent on the earth’s bounty for their continued existence – and they show it daily in rituals and ceremonies giving thanks for the gifts of life. They are illiterate and unschooled but THEY KNOW, like the Taoists, they know it in their bones.

So I want to suggest that we are all born with most of what we really need to know and the rest, as educator Robert Fulghum has so wonderfully written, we learned in kindergarten. Wisdom is not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sandbox at nursery school.

But this clarity and insight is soon lost. It is only a matter of time before this instinctual wisdom (that we are all born with) is educated out of us. It pains me to have to say that much of the education of our youth has become a major source of mind pollution.

Case in point – “economics” and advancement into an MBA program have become the most sought-after education for our best and brightest. The study of economics provides little if any insight into humans’ place in the natural world. It has only been recently that notions of environmental limits and impact as well as social equity and community responsibility are being included and then only superficially.

It is my opinion that an almost exclusive, obsessive preoccupation with an economic world view is the major source of present-day mind pollution. Stewart Udall, secretary of interior under President John F. Kennedy, said: “For life on this planet, it is the ecologists, and not the bookkeepers of business, who are the ultimate accountants.”

(The author is an ecologist who has lived and worked in Shanghai for the past eight years. Shanghai Daily condensed the article presented on June 1 for International Children’s Day at the UN Pavilion at the World Expo.)