The Earth has Become the Garden of Mankind

Abstract

The environmental crisis challenges our faith in humanity. Building on deep ecology and recent insights in evolutionary psychology, this article elaborates evolutionary peculiarities of our species, in order to develop foothold for new perspectives on the relation between man and earth. Premodern cultures managed to interact with their environments by establishing bio-cultural interfaces, thereby maintaining sustainable resource use. Homo sapiens has not generally been 'a plague of the earth', but rather a species that enhanced local biodiversity. In addition to genetical information, humans share a reservoir of cultural meaning. This reservoir has been coined 'the noosphere' and probably make up the last stage in a series of major evolutionary transitions since the Precambrian. Through the noosphere, the earth has become the garden of mankind. Such perspectives may open for re-establishing faith in man and in his ability to develop flowering relations to his environment.