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Walter Truett Anderson
The Making of a New Biophilia: Evolutionary Governance and the Modern Creation Myth


Abstract

Two powerful tendencies running through our time are: (1) our increasing impacts on all of Earth’s life systems, and (2) our growing capability – thanks to advances in such fields as rocketry, remote sensing, and modeling – to detect these impacts.  Both contribute to the emergence of de facto evolutionary governance.    This is not governance of evolution but governance in evolution: we are a part of the evolutionary process and of the biosphere.  Governance is not control.  We cannot control the behavior of complex systems, but we can and do intervene in them in many ways.  In fact, we really have no idea of how to cease intervening -- even our efforts at ecological preservation and protection are interventions.  It’s often said that we need ethics commensurate to our power, and that is quite true.  It’s often said that we need  a better-informed public, and that is equally true.  But we also need love -- biophilia, defined by Erich Fromm as the love of life and living systems; advocated more narrowly by E. O. Wilson as a love for natural diversity and endangered species.  Biophilia in its simpler forms is everywhere:  people walking their dogs, stroking their cats, kneeling in their gardens; children’s love of animals, their affection even for reasonable replicas of living things such as teddy bears and rubber ducks.  Wilson’s belief that biophilia has genetic origins is partly correct, but the various forms it takes in human societies -- romantic love, patriotism, the veneration of ancestors -- also show the force of social invention.  We choose and create our objects of love.  There are signs of a new biophilia emerging today – actually several competing varieties of it – amid our growing concern for the future of all life on Earth.  The deepest split is between misanthropic back-to-nature  movements that oppose all technological progress, and on the other hand exuberantly optimistic affirmations of a “transhumanist” future.  A broader synthesizing viewpoint is emerging in the “big history” movement and the related “modern creation myth” that place the evolution of life and consciousness on Earth in the context of cosmic evolution – a perspective of great beauty, grandeur and mystery, open to many future possibilities.   Also relevant to the exploration of a new biophilia are scientific findings concerning the ability of Buddhist meditators to train compassion, and the work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Michael Gazzaniga who reveal the central role of emotion in human cognition.  A new and deeply-felt sense of our place in the living universe is taking shape in many dialogues, being created out of many acts of love and will.  This development echoes the words of Rollo May, who wrote: “in every act of love and will – and in the long run they are both present in each genuine act – we mold ourselves and our world simultaneously.  This is what it means to embrace the future.”

Biography

Walter Truett Anderson is an independent scholar, writer, lecturer, and author of nonfiction books including The Next Enlightenment, All Connected Now, Reality Isn’t What It Used To Be, and To Govern Evolution.  He has also written magazine and journal articles, and newspaper features and op-ed columns.  He is on the editorial boards of Futures:  The Journal of Policy, Planning and Futures Studies, The Journal of Futures Studies, and The Journal of Humanistic Psychology.

He served for eight years as president of the World Academy of Art and Science, and is now president emeritus, working with a network of colleagues to develop a project to investigate the ethical, ecological, psychological and political dimensions of Geo-Engineering – specifically, the prospect of large-scale interventions (such as the infusion of sulfur into the upper atmosphere) as emergency measures to control climate change

He is at work on a new book, tentatively titled The Bionic Garden, on themes relevant to those in the attached proposal.

His academic training is in political science and social psychology (Ph.D., University of Southern California; and B.A. University of California, Berkeley.)



 

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