“Is everybody in?  The ceremony is about to begin.” – Jim Morrison

And begin it shall.  Picture for a moment a planet hurdling through space.  See the planet spinning and rotating.  The blues, greys, oranges, tans, blacks, greens, whites, and all of the other colors are merging and moving together, in harmony, like a carefully coregraphed and supremely colorful laser light display.  We can see heat radiating from the planet as well as ice in places that appear to be uninhabitable.  

If we were able to put a stethoscope up to the planet, we would hear an infinite amount of different sounds ranging from the rustling of foliage by a mighty and stealthy hunting animal to the movement of a mosquito as it plunges a tiny needle from its minuscule proboscis into the flesh of a beautiful baby elephant.  We might hear rain and wind, water running in rivers and streams, fish and other sea animals swimming and playing, dogs barking, babies crying, people laughing, fine and masterful human-created music, and on and on and on.

A microscope would reveal an equally infinite array of visual phenomenon.  Maybe we would zoom in too far and only see the basic atoms with their empty nuclei and their electrons spinning around bumping into one another and interacting with one another.  Zooming back out a bit, we might see the cells and their interactions.  And then, zooming even further out, we would begin to see the familiar sights of life on Earth, the humans, animals, plants, and minerals.

Putting away our tools for a moment, we might reflect on the beauty and magnificance of such a place.  We might imagine all of the parts working together in harmony in order to keep the planet healthy and ensure the planet’s survival.  We would think that there must be strong social-psychological and physiological connections between all of the parts of the planet that work to keep everything running smoothly.  And for that moment, we would be in a state of awe.

But then, imagine as we’re breathing in the full experience of this planet, we notice what appears to be smoke billowing from the land into the sky.  After careful inspection, we learn that it’s a forest fire blazing through a small forest somewhere in what we learn later to be Africa.  But then, while we’re analyzing the smoke, we feel the shaking of the ground.  Analysis of this shaking reveals the tectonic plates beneath the surface shifting and causing earthquakes.  And just as we learn about that, the wind picks up and the rain falls hard, turning into white cold snow, lightning and thunder one moment, ice and snow the next.  Plants die.  Animals die.  Humans die.

Our feeling of awe is now shaken up into a feeling of awe mixed with a little bit of fear.  We now know that we would need to be cautious on this planet as there are many natural ways to be hurt and extinguished.  Writing this down in our journal, the natural peacefulness in conflict with the natural destruction of the planet, we see what looks like a giant hole opening up.  The mushroom-like cloud rising above this hole is beautiful from space.  Could this be another amazing part of this planet?

Looking closer, it’s clear that the destruction and devastation left behind from this mushroom cloud hole is severe, wide-ranging, and long lasting.  What could’ve caused this type of destruction.  And that’s when we notice the cars, busses, airplanes, and trains.  We notice the tall buildings trying to scrape the lower edge of the atmosphere.  We hear the loud grinding and pounding of production machines and the rivers of liquid waste streaming from them.  We see the miles and miles and miles of garbage piles filled with waste from all kinds of plastics and metal.  What is all this?  How does this fit into the natural rhythms of this planet?

But before we can answer, we see rockets bursting into space, almost hitting us.  We notice the satellites surrounding the planet from the oustide.  We see humans driving tanks and fighter jets, launching projectiles at one another, killing one another and the plants and animals around them by the thousands.  How can this be?  How can such a beautiful and potentially harmonious planet allow such behavior?

The ceremony is almost over.  The image painted above is but one of many.  But this image can help us understand where we, as humans, fit in.  Do we fit in?  We definitely have the potential to fit into the natural rhythms of this planet, but we also have the potential to disrupt these rhythms.  And since we’ve clearly chosen the disruptive path, the question is, how do we turn the ship around and start going on the path towards harmony?  The following two tips will serve as a guide.

1. Recognize and Openly Admit the Problem

   The overly competitive nature of capitalist-based economies is what causes people to be alienated both from themselves and from others, or the planet we live on.  Economy is not only about money and business.  Rather, economy is the way in which a society distributes the materials needed for survival.  In the U.S. and other westernized economies, a capitalist mode of production prevails where those with capital have the materials they need for survival.  Luckily, most people have capital, it’s just that most people’s capital is themselves (the idea that we have to sell our labor) while some people own the means of production as their capital (they buy the labor).  This is the problem.  The oppression, exploitation, and domination encouraged through our economy (capitalism) is the problem.  The first step to moving down a path to harmonious living with our planet is to recognize that capitalism and competition are the problems and openly admit this.

2. Organize

   Once we recognize and admit this as the main problem, we must work together in order to find solutions to this problem.  Karl Marx, among others, talked about the natural evolution of human social and economic systems.  He pointed out that the human-created capitalist economic system will evolve just as every other human-created economic system has done in the past.  Coming together with others who realize capitalism is the problem, we can look for signs of this ongoing evolution, the dialectic or the unfolding historical materialism as Marx might have written.  Marx represents ideas regarding one possible solution to the problem, that of the dialectic.  But, what about other solutions?  We must come together in groups both large and small in order to discuss and find these solutions.  Let us create our own councils (to replace city councils) that are based on finding solutions rather than creating capital for our city in order to fit into this problematic capitalist economy.

These two tips only serve as the starting point for the needed turn-around.  They’re really nothing new to those of us who have been reading and learning about social and economic change.  But for those of us who do not have time to sift through the mountains of reading material because we’re busy recuperating from the sale of our own labor, these two tips will be sufficient for defending ourselves against the most harmful species on the planet … humans.