This is a Scottish frond of the Zeitgeist shift that will restore peace with nature.

A 600-year storm is gathering

In 1418, the Age of Discovery kicked off six centuries of exploitation, the European Onslaught. This largely targeted indigenous peoples and their homeland ecosystems. The new global powers and their successor states perfected systems of trade, industry, land use and control that seemed to promise the creation of infinite wealth in an infinite frontier. Habits of thought to justify all this became deeply entrenched, along with attitudes that saw nature as a mere resource and indigenous people as contemptible. Now the frontier is exhausted, Earth systems are heat-stressed and approaching their tipping points, and millions of our companion species are committed to extinction. For those who know, the dashboard is lit up red, alarms are shrilling, and there’s a smell of smoke. The words ‘climate and nature emergency’ barely cover it, and we seem paralysed by 600 year’s worth of bad habits.

But the Zeitgeist is shifting

People everywhere sense that a certain kind of change is needed. Millions are paying more attention to nature, doing things to protect and restore her, and demanding that the powerful help rather than hinder their efforts. This is a shift in the global Zeitgeist, and Scotland is right on the wave-front with its activist communities and progressive policies. Our goal now is a free society at peace with nature. Such a society is one that lives within the safe boundaries of ecological sustainability. Its members have a wise and respectful relationship with nature. They pay attention to detail in their own environments, seeking to know what the boundaries are, and to understand how nature works.

Self-discipline, artistry and love

People who live in free societies at peace with nature must be self-disciplined. If they have been careless in the past, then a lot of self-discipline is needed until safe boundaries to protect people and nature are restored. After that, a little self-discipline is needed every day, to maintain and protect those boundaries. The motivation to restore peace with nature flows in part from recognising that we have carelessly violated key rules and relationships, that we understand and dread the consequences, and that we must now discipline ourselves to make things different. But love of beauty, health, vitality and cooperation with nature and with each other is just as important, along with spiritual and artistic expressions of that love.

Giving up bad habits

A willingness to give up bad habits offers us a life-line to a better and more viable future. But habits must be replaced with something else, and we do not need to look far to find new ones. For as explained in the section on deep background, all of us have two templates inside our heads and we can use one as easily as the other. I call them ‘GRAB it all first’ and ‘KEEP it all safe’, or GRAB and KEEP for short. For over a hundred millennia, we’ve switched back and forth between these equal strands of human nature as we walked, waded and rafted our way across the world in fits and starts during the late Pleistocene. Owing to the European Onslaught, GRAB has been dominant for the last 600 years and is what drives cosmopolitan thoughts, values and actions. But KEEP is what we use to settle down and live sustainably in newly-occupied territories, when the frontier runs out. KEEP is what we need now, and we feel it rising like springtime sap within us.

Hope and purpose

This site is dedicated to the task at hand, which is to activate the KEEP midset and by doing so to accelerate and consolidate the Zeitgeist shift through which peace with nature will be restored. It does not dwell on the consequences of failure, but it does stress certain things that need to be done urgently to buy us time for the Zeitgeist shift to work its magic. These include taking evasive action on specificl threats, like Arctic methane and weaknesses in how we go about decarbonising our economies. But the focus here is on the Zeitgeist shift itself, which will make these and many other things much easier to do as it progresses.

Seven action areas for restoring peace with nature

Zeitgeist shifts are unconscious collective processes, somewhat mysterious and hard to plan for. But we do want to speed this one up if we can, and at least we know that universal bottom-up self-organisation is the surest way forward.

• Personal commitment. A good place for anyone to start involves making a pledge: to cherish, respect, learn about and protect nature; to strive to understand nature through experience, experiment, study and contemplation; never to betray nature by thought, word or action, or by inaction if harm is threatened by others; and to live consistently with this commitment. This promise brings with it a new identity as a secret agent of nature, with duties that include raising ecological understanding among everyone, being creative in living within the laws of nature, and compassionately enabling others to do the same.
• Community action. Encouraging solidarity between people and nature involves studying wildlife and local ecology, environmental education and networking, citizen-science ecology projects, and ecosystem restoration activities, among many other things. For example, this web-site is accented by a community-designed fabric – Cowal Tweed from Dunoon Burgh Hall Trust, a project funded by Awards for All, led by artist Sandi Kiehlmann, inspired by the colours and landscape of Cowal (a rugged peninsula in Argyll and Bute on the west coast of Scotland) and woven in her weave-shed on Harris by Rebecca Hutton.
• Teaching ecology. Ecology is the science of living systems, and we should aim to ensure that it’s a mandatory topic through primary and secondary education. This is reasonable, since we and our entire world are living systems, and all the main threats to them are imbalances that people have caused through neglect of ecology. Also, we can only correct them through attention to ecology, but this requires ecology to be widely understood, by the powerful if they are to make wise decisions, and by everyone else to keep the powerful honest.
• Mainstreaming precaution. Precaution must be mainstreamed – that is, built into the standard procedures of an institution so it cannot be neglected – so that ecological risks are always considered and no decision made until harmful or irreversible consequences have been ruled out. In other words, institutions must no longer be allowed to dice with death. This is fair, considering the appalling harm to collective well-being that institutions have done in the absence of a precautionary corporate culture.
• Denying power to ecological illiterates. Even where voting rights are assured, the press is free, counting is honest, and results are respected, voting for wise leaders rests on public understanding of the issues at stake and on public trust of the candidates. Both can be helped by people having the knowledge and confidence to ask candidates challenging questions in public, so that ecological illiterates are never elected.
• Prohibiting and policing ecocide. Ecocide is the destruction of an ecosystem, for example from the introduction of new crops, domestic animals, pests and diseases, felling of native forests, pollution of rivers, draining of wetlands, massacre of native wildlife, etc. It should be recognises as a crime under national laws and the Rome Statute (with International Criminal Court jurisdiction) to deter the further destruction of ecosystems and harm to the web of life, violating planetary boundaries, or ravaging natural ecosystems.
• Constitutional protections for nature. Written constitutions exist to express the basic values of a society and the key principles of how it is supposed to operate. Our problems with some of the other peace with nature actions include that mass education is slow, that candidates will lie for votes, that institutions can be bought by special interests, and that laws are only human, impermanent and often weakly enforced. In a race to survive, more reliable means are needed to speed up progress and ensure that it cannot be reversed. This calls for constitutional protection, but almost all previous constitutions were written during the European Onslaught and are infused with GRAB values. So a Peace with Nature Constitution would need to put in place new protections to accelerate and consolidate the Zeitgeist shift from GRAB to KEEP: (1) that the principles of ecological sustainability exist at a higher level than human law; (2) that those principles must have priority where the two conflict in a major way; and (3) that there must be an accessible and effective way to resolve discord between them. The first is simply true; the second is precautionary; and the third requires an environmental judiciary with the ability to select necessary cases, the knowledge to form correct judgements, and the power to strike down offending laws.

Julian Caldecott