I am non-human phenomena meeting as a human being. I am rooted, but my roots are on the inside.

The Language of Separations and Conflicts: Humans will Fight Anything and Everything

Most, if not all, human-caused social and environmental problems can be understood in terms of separations and conflicts. The language of separations and conflicts can be expressed through sports, business, and military metaphors which are often used interchangeably.

This is the language of the oppressor that can be found throughout the Bible, in both Old and New Testaments. Fights and wars make humans see enemies or feel like enemies who must be defeated, disempowered, impoverished, or destroyed.

Wars, like economic competitions, produce inequalities: winners and losers, the richer and the poorer. Humans will talk about fighting racism and waging war on drugs, but there cannot be a fight to end fighting or a war to end wars. Human-caused social and environmental problems cannot be fought or warred against because they come from fighting and warring.

The language of separations and conflicts used to define and organize humans as individuals and groups must be simply abandoned.

The Organizational Dynamics of Keeping Separations Separate Causes Conflicts

Humans have a tendency to separate themselves unto that which is exclusively human and/or superhuman. Humans separate themselves unto an ancestor or god, a race or sex, a nation or class and then endeavor to keep themselves separate, pure, unrelated, disconnected.

Humans cannot agree on who or what to separate themselves unto – or how to make that separation – and so conflicts arise. Conflicts in the form of competitions, fights and wars arise when humans seek to protect and empower themselves in separateness from other humans and in separateness from the Earth and its living communities.

Humans compete, fight and war against humans in order to separate by winning more and more money, power, land, resources and commodities unto themselves in order to protect and empower themselves in separateness from those who are trying to do the same. War, like any other economic competition, produces inequalities: winners and losers, richer and poorer.

Economic competitions are used to make humans think, feel, believe, speak and act as if every individual is separate, on his or her own, expendable. Thus, humans come to regard one another as separate because that is the way they are treated in dominant societies defined and organized by various kinds of separations and conflicts.

False Economics

Hermann Hesse said, “Money and power are inventions of distrust” (Reflections 1974, p. 38). Humans are the only species on Earth who use money. Humans cannot trust humans who are competitively trying to outdo them or do them in, who are selfishly trying to win again and again by causing losing, impoverishment, disempowerment.

Humans have invented human-centered, poverty-causing, money-based economic systems that are separate from and in conflict with the Earth’s living economic systems. Both capitalism and communism leave the Earth out. On massive, industrial scales exacerbated by the ever-worsening crisis of human overpopulation, this causes environmental problems such as pollution – from oil spills to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – as well as deforestation, desertification, extinctions, and climate change.

Abandon money. Trust in paying it forward, passing it around. Stop competitively and greedily taking too much, using too much, doing too much, wasting too much in order to win and get richer and richer. Cooperate with the Earth first and then with other humans. Live simply and sustainably.

Rooted

All differences and differentiations cannot exist without the things that connect them, relate them, integrate them. All separations are illusions. Many just exist in the way humans use language.

I have come to realize that I am a human rooted to the non-human world and my roots are on the inside. The Earth completes individual human bodies. It completes my body. There is no life on Earth without the sun although it is 90 million miles away. And there is no me without the Earth.

The branching, tree-like bronchi of my lungs root me to the Earth’s atmosphere and to organisms that conduct photosynthesis. My circulatory system roots me to the Earth’s bodies of water; I am at least 50% water. My digestive system roots me to the Earth’s plants and animals – and to everything upon which they depend for life. Neural pathways in my brain form through my interactions with the Earth’s diverse environments and my interactions with other human beings. The four basic nucleotides of my DNA relate me to all of the Earth’s animals and plants.

I have unique differentiations. But all of my differentiations are dependent on what relates them, connects them to everything else. Underlying my differentiations are integrating commonalities. As the Lakota Sioux say, “Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ.” All Are Related.