An Overview

Human caused social and environmental problems are the results of false or invented separations which cause conflicts in the form of competitions, fights and wars which are unnecessary, wasteful, destructive, and deadly.

False or invented separations are at the root of racism, sexism, genderism, classism, nationalism, corporatism, and speciesism. When humans try to keep false or invented separations separate, protected and empowered, by separating more and more money and power, human and natural resources unto themselves, then conflicts arise in the form of competitions, fights and wars which are wasteful and destructive to relationships between humans and relationships between humans and the Earth.

Humans cannot agree with and, consequently, find themselves in conflict with the way that humans, as individuals or as groups, separate themselves from other humans (unto something exclusively human and/or super-human) and then make efforts to separate money, power, and resources unto themselves in separateness from other humans, in order to protect and empower themselves and their false or invented separations in separateness from other humans. They make everyone feel as if they are on their own in competing, fighting and warring to satisfy their selfish self-interests.

Conflicts caused by false and invented separations, conflicts caused by the efforts to protect and empower those separations (or to keep those separations separate) produce competitions, fights and wars which in turn produce inequalities: winners and losers, the richer and poorer, the more powerful and the more powerless, the wealthy and the impoverished. The richer winners just keep getting better and better at winning more and more often. The poor get poorer and suffer more and more because of it.

Not only do competitions, fights and wars produce inequalities, they produce all of the side-effects of those inequalities including poverty and all of the side-effects of poverty, pollution and all of the side-effects of pollution, extinctions of entire species, and global climate change. Careless human overpopulation makes these problems worse.

But no human caused social or environmental problem is a problem to fight, combat, battle, or war against. Competitions make humans see separate competitors, enemies to be out done or done in. Fights and wars make humans see enemies who are separate from and in conflict with themselves when those enemies may just be operating under incomplete knowledge, may have been miseducated, may have incomplete understandings of what it really is to be a human being, may be in need of compassion. Human caused social and environmental problems based on false or invented separations have false or invented separations that need to be abandoned into disuse, abandoned as defining and organizing principles for individuals and groups.

I cannot be in conflict with that from which I am not separate. I am an Earthling who belongs to the Earth and has the Earth and its living economic systems in common with all Earthlings. I am an Earthling and do not have to separate myself unto anything, especially unto anything exclusively human or super-human, because I am already it, a meeting of non-human phenomena.

As the Lakota Sioux say, "Mitakuye Oyasin." I am all of my relations, I am all of my relationships. Cooperating with the Earth first helps me to cooperate with other humans.