Exploring the philosophical implications of the statement ‘The Earth does not belong to us; we belong to the Earth.’

1. Introduction

The statement “The Earth does not belong to us; we belong to the Earth” suggests a radical shift in the philosophico-political perception of the relation of man to the world. It demolishes the myths of absolute freedom and chaos. It takes us back to the roots of humanness as being of the Earth. It necessitates the reconciliation of the relations between men taking care of the Earth. This perspective asks for an integral twisting of the image of plausibility of projecting humanity into the cosmos as humanity of own and desire.

At the beginning, the focus is on the wisest people on this planet, like the Red Indians or the American Indians. Whatever the advice is, it directs to worldwide peace, unequivocal acknowledgment of the old states on this Earth, in the first place the appertaining of the world of there originated. “The Earth does not belong to us; we belong to the Earth” – A philosophical statement about nowadays worldwide problems and threatens. Why is it so difficult for these wiser ones to transfer their knowledge which could secure the harmonious balance of the human being with Others and Not-ours? Or is enjoying this harmony possible only in silence?

It is also possible to state observations or comments concerning the own philosophical journey through and about there on this planet. The very fascination finds its root in the cosmos, in the stance on the Moon. “The Earth does not belong to us; we belong to the Earth” radically changes the consideration ending there on. To be a humble passenger on the spaceship saucer, enjoying a wondrous view of the sun setting above the horizon like a golden globe. To be a swooping confirmation of Esso’s slogans “the whole world is yours.” “The Earth does not belong to us; we belong to the Earth” radically changes the stance underestimating the day by day hastiness and carelessness. Blossoms of the turn of the seasons, rainbow of the autumn paints and frozen arts of Dear Frost preserve the perpetual beauty inspiring a wonder about the perfumery miracle of life blossoming in the strict harmony with the Cosmos.

1.1. Background of the Statement

In the early 1990s, the Brazilian and Guaraní native Elder J. T. M. wrote: “We are not owners, forget it! The Earth has its people, its territories, its laws, its freedoms and it is not you that determines these.” The statement became well known, sometimes paraphrased or abbreviated. In the early 2000s, it was popularized by its use as a caption for photographs or simple images of nature in the social networks of personal relationships. Its intriguing nature has led many to contemplate its meaning, promote discussions, or even adopt it. On the more philosophical side, there is a tendency to explore its multiple layers of meaning. However, in the face of these multiple layers, the literal sense of a phrase is not always clear. An expression potentially conveys a wide variety of meanings beyond what seems embedded in the words or sentences. Words have determinate meanings, but phrases, regardless of their elaboration via grammar, are always the result of an interpretation process. Human language generates countless expressions that illustrate the intricacies of each particular language and the languages as a whole.

In this respect, philosophical explorations often start from a literal interpretation of a statement. When it comes to a Brazilian statement written in Portuguese, there is still the historical dimension to consider, since the phrase (or a version of it) has to be oriented within a different cultural environment with its own historical inflections. Therefore, wherever there is an intention of a more philosophical exploration of the statement, it is important to address first its historical background. The philosophy of language or linguistic aspect of philosophy is here put aside. Such investigations generally focus on metaphysical or epistemological background, consequences, inference, or consistency. Nevertheless, a few preliminary considerations on the literal meaning of the statement—attending to the subtleties of words or the discrepancies between its ingredient structures and the embedding syntactic structure—will also be undertaken.

2. Philosophical Perspectives on Ownership

Warnings regarding an impending ecological crisis have periodically circulated for some twenty-five centuries. Nevertheless, a new intensity has emerged over the past fifty years. While the scientific consensus on climate change has solidified, a more global and species-pervasive catastrophe has begun to unfold. Massive loss of biodiversity, ocean acidification, depletion of the ozone layer, and aforestification of the planet are, among others, both consequence and cause of dramatic social upheaval and desertification that characterizes the Anthropocene (Boonen & Brando, 2016). Such comprehensiveness demands a critical reassessment of how societies have related, and relate, to the natural world at large. It raises the most basic of all questions: Does the Earth belong to us or do we belong to the Earth? Philosophically, the crux of the matter concerns the question of ownership. Ideas regarding ownership comprise a diverse collection of intuitions and beliefs, and necessarily so. This diversity is at odds with a common lens to explore such plural and heterogeneous perspectives and is compounded by the growing mistrust of the more historically “global” and “universalist” approaches to ownership (Connell-Szasz, 2018). Ownership can therefore be profitably approached by distinguishing a number of geographic poles from which ideas regarding ownership unfold. Each of these poles offers a specific conceptual lens through which to examine temporally and spatially contingent ideas of ownership. Of course, ideas regarding ownership are not tied one-to-one with particular geographic areas. Overlap, interaction, and appropriation between them are central to both the exploration of the statement as well as the broader divergence of present-day ideas (or lack of ’em) regarding ownership. This section will first briefly examine Western and Indigenous ideas regarding ownership, the two geographic poles engaged with the statement. Then it will broadly outline Eastern and Nomadic ideas of ownership, the two poles most often neglected. In advancing this comparative analysis, the hope is to identify different philosophical “filters” through which the statement can be cogently explored and to thus set out a foundation from which its philosophical implications can be examined across diverse philosophical traditions.

2.1. Western Philosophical Traditions

Philosophy, one of mankind’s oldest fields of inquiry, examines fundamental questions about existence and the nature of life. It delineates between those things that are: Being, Truth, Reality and those things that cannot be. The Western philosophical tradition is fallible, myopic, and anthropocentric. For many millennia, western European thinkers translated the thoughts of the ancients stretching back over four thousand years, from the Sumerians/Falasha to the Romans and Greeks, and began to theorize of the “Human,” a perceiver capable of reason, language, experimentation, and memory. With the idea of the “Human” came arguments used to counter the ancient Earth-centered cosmological model (Connell-Szasz, 2018) built upon the authority of ancient observations.

Like any cosmological model, the modern cosmological model rests upon many assumptions, some with scientific merit. However, the dispassionate need for suspicion in all things causations has been overtly abandoned for the belief in invisible, rational, and aggregate forces upon which existence and order depend. From the philosophizing of Cartesian duality arose notions of independence and ownership. The former is a blasphemy to the stoics, Spinoza, those of the Middle Ages, and thinkers of the far East. No independent thing has ever been credibly presented. In the context of the Earth, she cannot be owned; such ownership is impossible and independent Earth would have to be censured.

2.2. Eastern Philosophical Traditions

The Earth does not belong to us; we belong to the Earth. The stinging rhetoric of this quote has entered infamy. But what are the philosophical implications? How does existence itself become ownership? Or, where possession is often followed by a feeling of loss, how do we analyze belonging? How do we deal with those circumstances when possession and belonging capacity are undermined? These queries will be explored with respect to our relationship to the Earth. Before answering these questions, it is important to introduce two areas regarding them. When turning to the East philosophically, it seems at first that answers to the above-stated queries exist. Indigenous thinking and eastern philosophical traditions are rich in thought regarding these matters (Connell-Szasz, 2018). When considered briefly, it becomes apparent that both thought trends endorse a profoundly different picture of the position of humanity vis-à-vis the Earth than common western ideologies. Herein lies an interest complication, life-style-wise so to speak those ideas from the East have more than been met when brought to the West, and in earlier or later forms have shaped western life-styles, yet on a deeper and more philosophical level, those same points, especially the ownership as in ‘The Earth does not belong to us,’ have been taken on the hand of common western thought. With the misconceptions of Asian philosophized Religion and other commonly held misunderstandings of those philosophies, the apparent parsing of non-ownership, as in the above statement, belonging to the Earth, Earthly-centered thought meanings philosophical incapacity unto earthly life, or alienation from earthly life, thus non-believably viewing each parsing capacity for meaning earthly thought as all.

3. Environmental Ethics and Responsibilities

Human responsibilities towards the environment chiefly stem from the ethical considerations arising from the belief that “the Earth does not belong to us; we belong to the Earth.” Biocentrism endorses this belief, positing that all living creatures related to the earth, and perhaps even the earth itself, would be better off without people (Wade Berryhill, 2003). Here, humanity’s stark departure from anthropocentrism is once viewed philosophically, and the direction and implications of that departure are assessed ecocentrically. In brief, anthropocentrism is the school of thought holding that all ethical and moral considerations revolve around and are measured solely in relation to human welfare and benefit. Biocentrism counter-argues that humanity’s reliance on (its own) distinctiveness (i.e., the negation of some element common in all living beings) is in fact the root of its situation (Chatterjee, 2016). That is, solely anthropocentric interests and gains are in conflict with continued planetary viability (horizontal biocentric nexus). Such earthly conditions can only prevail through the “re-wilding” of humanity, a radical shift in perception and piloting of its psycho-bio-cultural ecology along syntrophic lines of continuity with Earth and all its creatures (vertical biocentric nexus).

Contingently, philosophy could follow this co-evolutionary path, becoming gradually yoga-philosophy and quasi-Edenic co-narrative. Cosmology is inevitably woven into the cloth of ethics. The philosophical muse knots the genesis-telenomic story of Earth’s becoming and its animating “eternal intelligibility” (i.e., the Muqaddimah, Yoga-veda, and mutakallimun approaches) with reasoning toward systemic thriving (i.e., the Syrah, Khaldunian, and secular humanist views). Philosophy has the option of re-articulating/undramatizing metaphysics or its cosmographic counterpart to accompany this shift and illuminate the coevolutionary potentials therein. The rhythms are the basis of a geophilosophy of humankind, Earth, and Cosmos (grand planetary experiment). The flourishing of life on earth, human or non-human, entails the continual coupling of parts within larger integrated whole systems. The gradual curvature of the earth’s life-support system towards complexity, diversity, and generated excitement ensures continued ecology’s viability (Gaia hypothesis).

3.1. Anthropocentrism vs. Biocentrism

The statement “The earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth” could be understood in various ways, but a good interpretation to start with is by examining its underlying philosophical implications. An obvious aspect of the quote is that it evokes a particular stance on life and the relationship of human beings with their environment. More specifically, it addresses the age-old philosophical problem regarding the relationship between human beings and the landscape which surrounds them. Tracing the evolution of philosophical thought on the matter reveals a subject which is rather trivial at first glance, but later proves to be much more complicated than initially anticipated.

Broadly speaking, all philosophical ideas regarding the proper relationship of human beings to the land may be divided into two categories: anthropocentric (meaning the perspective of “anthropos” or human beings) and biocentric (the perspective of “bios” or life-centred). Thoughts which fall under the anthropocentric category assign the lofty position of the most valued beings on earth to human beings. Thus, the entire ecosystem is valued solely with regards to what it may provide for men. Such anthropocentric thoughts are deeply rooted in Western culture, being first explored by the ancient Greeks, whom, in search of the proper life, began to contemplate the nature and the role of reason in man, introducing the distinction between the rational and the irrational, or the sentient. The hierarchy thus established (rational creatures on top, irrational animals and nature below) was later consolidated by Judeo-Christian culture, which, interpreting the creation stories of the Bible, proclaimed the divine precept for life on earth, empowering human beings to exercise absolute dominion over all “creeping things (that) creepeth on the earth” (R Horrow, 2007) and the like.

Biocentric thoughts, on the other hand, search for the most all-encompassing natural understanding of such a relationship, not excluding any life forms. Curiously, the first biocentric ideas concerning the landscape were conceived by ancient Indians in the obscurity of prehistory. On a par with the Greeks, Indians were the first to extensively study the intuitive and rider-like aspect of the mind, proposing thus a distinction between the knower (I) and what is known. However, the striking difference between these two forms of philosophical thought lies in what was considered to be the most fundamental. While for the Greeks and their progeny “I think therefore I am” was crucial to understanding the nature of all existence, ancient Indians viewed knowing as a mere perception (J. Hoffman, 2004). Subsequently, they further contemplated the nature of a perceptive, intuition-based, and passive mind, proposing that all phenomenal experience is, in fact, perquisite of a vast ocean of consciousness, or being, from which everything springs temporarily and into which everything eventually returns. Accordingly, the same being is the common foundation of the knowing mind (I), as well as all life in general, without exclusion.

4. Interconnectedness and Interdependence

On Earth, a political unity composed of interconnected and interdependent local ecosystems sustains all terrestrial earthly life. The Earth is capable of sustaining only as many individuals as can be supported by the natural productive capacity of its local ecosystems. That capacity is not only limited but also unequally distributed: it varies with time according to the geometry of the ongoing evolution of each system.

The dispersed, unevenly distributed local ecosystems and their biology, chemistry, and geology react upon one another, gradually coalescing in larger and more complicated systems (Rowe, 2003). The result is the nearer infinity of local ecosystems interacting in entirely different manners; in a sense, a multidimensional, interactive history of the political Chaos of the Universe. Within such Arena, the discrete, political, and interacting local systems, a planet-bound Earth invites unity in diversity, viability in incommensurability.

Local ecosystems not only send and receive environmental signals to and from one another but also react upon one another by movement of matter, i.e. destroy groundwaters, velocity of rivers, Soil erosion, and the biogeochemical cycles transferred by creatures migrating from one system to another. Thus, there has always been an evolution of life on Earth — a development in cyberspace, a continuation of ongoing diversity of species and local systems. However, all this is limited and regulated by Planetary Imagery: Outer space, a Polar Foil of constraint, stability, and security. Within the Poles and their Terracotta domains, bound systemic Allo-cycle.

5. Conclusion and Reflections

The statement “The Earth does not belong to us; we belong to the Earth” evokes a rich array of philosophical implications, touching upon issues of ownership, belonging, kinship, and consciousness. As we become aware of the domination and destruction of nature by human beings in numerous ways, we ponder whether the Earth and life on it belong to us at all. In the anthropocentric perspective that prevails in Western thought, nature is viewed as the external “other,” hence its domination and destruction. In contrast, the kinship perspective rehumanizes the Earth and life on it, revering the Earth as womb, and trees, animals, humans, and all elements and forces of the Earth as children, siblings, and kin. In this perspective, the Earth and all of life belong to each other.

The view of nature as “other” evolved in early civilizations of Western culture, and then the philosophical understanding of it took roots especially in the history of Christianity. Since modern science took dominion over such thoughts, nature has been regarded as a lifeless mechanism and mere raw material to be exploited to expand human dominion. In contrast, the kinship perspective of nature embraced by Indigenous peoples and Eastern philosophies provides a sense of life-reverence and care towards the Earth and all of its life, which are regarded as wombs of humans and other human beings. Moreover, it reveals the consciousness of the web of kinship and the cosmos, as well as its rhythms and cadences of being and changing, dying and being reborn.

Nevertheless, neither of such philosophical perspectives can be blindly embraced in addressing today’s global crises. The anthropocentric perspective has engendered a self-destructive socio-ecological disenfranchisement where human life has been treated as worthless and nature as devoid of meaning. As the fate of the Earth is shared by human beings and nature alike, everything must be done to honor what is revered to take place on the Earth. In line with the call of its life-reverence, the kinship perspective must come alive in human bone and in the flesh.

References:

• Boonen, C. & Brando, N., 2016. Revisiting the Common Ownership of the Earth: A Democratic Critique of Global Distributive Justice Theories. [PDF]
• Connell-Szasz, M., 2018. Whose North America is it? “Nobody owns it. It owns itself.”. [PDF]
• Wade Berryhill, W., 2003. Creation, Liberation, and Property: Virtues and Values Toward a Theocentric Earth Ethic. [PDF]
• Chatterjee, M., 2016. A Critical Inquiry into Ecological Visions of Ancient India Versus, Modern West. [PDF]
• R Horrow, A., 2007. When Nature Holds the Mastery : The Development of Biocentric Thought in Industrial America. [PDF]
• J. Hoffman, A., 2004. Getting Right with Nature: Anthropocentrism, Ecocentrism and Theocentrism. [PDF]
• Rowe, S., 2003. The Living Earth and Its Ethical Priority. [PDF]