The global environmental crisis is creating a paradigm shift in human consciousness that will change the moral tenor of everything we think and do for the foreseeable future—not just for decades, but for centuries as we become the de facto regulators of our planet’s climate. As the media guru Marshall McLuhan noted, “There are no passengers on spaceship Earth—everyone is crew.”
Continue reading The Quadra Project: Eco-MoralityCategory Archives: Opinion
Agriculture in Canada
What is being written is a push pull of personal experiences and readings over the past 5 decades. Most recent impressions come from an 80 day road trip across Canada, currently stopping throughout Nova Scotia, since mid-May 2022.
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The Quadra Project: losing our minds
Just when we need our entire minds, we seem to be losing them. This is the considered opinion of Johann Hari, a British-Swiss writer and journalist, writing in a Guardian Weekly feature, “Focus (If You Still Can)” (Jan. 7, 2022).
It’s not that we’re losing all our minds, just about 20%, according to studies. This is a critical amount considering that we’re confronting some of the most serious threats to our survival in the history of human civilization, and the capabilities we need to make crucially important decisions are precisely the ones being compromised.
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The Quadra Project: Being us
Our environmental problems are the result of a fundamental disconnection between our understanding of reality and what it seems to be. In other words, we are discovering that the world doesn’t work the way we have thought it works, and that we now have to make major adjustments in how we individually and collectively behave.
Of course, we have always been doing this, both as individuals and as cultures. Our personal experiences, registered through consciousness, adjust our basic sense of reality, and cultures are always undergoing similar changes. Fundamentally new understandings totally remake us. As the media guru, Marshall McLuhan, said in one his intriguingly aphoristic reversals, “If I hadn’t believed it, I wouldn’t have seen it.” Consider history.
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The Quadra Project: Neuroplasticity
Neuroplasticity is the ability of the human brain to adapt to new kinds of learning, a subject studied by David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University. In an interview with Clare Wilson in New Scientist magazine (15 May 2021), he makes the passing comment that, “Mother Nature is taking a sort of gamble with humans, in that she drops our brains into the world half-baked and lets experience take over and shape them. Our babies have much less well-developed brains than other animals do at birth. All in all, this has been a successful strategy. We’ve taken over every corner of the planet, invented the internet—even gotten off the planet to the moon.”
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