Paradigm of the living

The paradigm shift needed is to a "paradigm of the living".

Life on earth consists of continuous exchange and interaction between its billions of inhabitants, be they plants, animals or humans. Each one of them shows individual characteristics that were developed over millions of years. Each one of them is embedded in a broader environment of correlations and feedback loops on which it depends for survival and wellbeing. Together, this web of diversity is a precious and fragile heritage that we need to respect and develop carefully. It is the fountain of potential and creativity for future life on our planet, the source of resilience for our societies that form an integral part of it.

Yet, our current development path has ignored the fundamental rules for continued diversity and resilience: we are destroying the living conditions of other species and force them into extinction, we are using up limited resources like oil and coal too quickly and destabilize the atmospheric recycling course, and we are exploiting renewable resources like forests and marine life with the maximum capacity that our technology allows – ignoring the time span that earth needs to reproduce them. Equally, we are destroying living conditions of many indigenous cultures and small-scale subsistence communities, forcing them into migration and refuge, we are following maximum production and profit dogmas and sacrifice diversity of business, production and exchange solutions, and we are obeying one monetary measure of progress, Gross Domestic Product – ignoring that this does not tell us anything about individual wellbeing or levels of fairness.

We need to restrict our interventions in the circle of life and diversity to a moderate level and pace, aligning them with ecosystems and human needs.

Read Councillor Hans-Peter Dürr on the paradigm of the living here.