Human caused social and environmental problems come from false or invented separations that cause conflicts. Conflicts arise because humans cannot agree on why or how to separate themselves, keep themselves separate, protect and empower themselves in separateness from other humans and from the Earth, the so-called non-human world.

Conflicts find expression as wasteful and destructive competitions, fights and wars between humans who are trying to protect and empower themselves in separateness from other humans and from the non-human world.

Humans use competitions, fights and wars to separate money, power, land, resources and commodities unto themselves to protect and empower themselves in separateness. Competitions, fights and wars produce inequalities: winners and loser, the richer and the poorer.

This further exacerbates conflicts and reinforces feelings of separation from each other and from the Earth. Humans, as individuals and as groups, are made to feel that they are on their own.

Examples of false separations include forms of egoism, racism, sexism, classism, nationalism, corporatism, and species-ism. These -isms can occur singly or, more often, in various combinations.

They are based on things that seem as if they can be separated and kept separate, things like skin color, gender identity, sexual orientation, socio-economic class and lifestyle, state or country, a multinational corporation, humanity itself. Sometimes these separations are dualistically opposed like masculine and feminine, black and white.

But races are not really separate because members of different races can have children and no race possesses superior beauty or intelligence. Socially constructed gender identities are not really separate because we are all recombinations of male and female, not entirely one or the other. Maleness is not superior to femaleness and vice versa.

Upper classes may seek to separate themselves from lower classes with money, power and privilege, but these are artificial separations. Rivers and shorelines may be seen by astronauts in orbit, but not the lines on maps that “separate” states and nations. All plants and animals share the same DNA bases and most depend on the sun as well as the Earth’s soil, atmosphere, bodies of water.

Humans mistakenly seek to separate themselves unto something exclusively human and/or super-human in order to separate themselves from the non-human, the less-than-human world. The human-centered things that humans separate and try to keep separate cause conflicts because those things are actually interconnected or have commonalities that relate them.