I recently went back and found something Geoff Lawton said talking to Jack Spirko on the Survival Podcast a few months ago:

“Never before has humanity put itself in this intentional position to repair the world with creative design thinking that benefits the abundance of biology. This is a first, it’s a new neural pathway. This is like when humanity started to read and write it’s own description of the environment – we actually started to think in new ways. This is a new way of thinking, this is actually an evolution.”

What made me think back to this was a program I was recently watching on some ideas found in science fiction. The particular segment was on something called terraforming.

(From Wikipedia) Terraforming (literally, “Earth-shaping”) of a planet, moon, or other body is the theoretical process of deliberately modifying its atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology to be similar to the biosphere of Earth to make it habitable by humans.

The sci-fi version most popularly focuses on Mars and in many cases suggests the possibility of a mass human migration as the Earth becomes unsuitable for human habitation. At this point in time such a scenario doesn’t require a significant stretch of the imagination. But as science fiction paints pictures of the possible future of human evolution by anticipating the further progress of current evolutionary pathways, so may they take new forms as new pathways emerge.

As humanity evolves so does it’s role on the planet. Just a few thousand years ago our role within the natural systems on Earth was not very different from than that of the other animals – eat and be eaten, multiply and try our best to survive. Our religions and philosophies were rooted in this balanced cycle of nature and the interconnectivity of forms.

But as we developed the curiosity that enticed us from our natural habitat and we began to explore, our relationship to nature began to transform. We no longer saw ourselves as animals. Our minds opened up to new intellectual possibilities and we became the masters of animals and then the masters of other men. The Earth became a temporary stage. Since the dawn of civilization until the present day this has been the dominant worldview.

Now you could take a futuristic concept like terraforming and apply it to this worldview – the Earth as merely Act 1 in the dramatic epic of humanity. However, what Geoff Lawton seems to be talking about here is an emerging evolutionary worldview – a role for humanity that has never before existed.

With respect to the previous definition of terraforming and its emphasis on modifying another system to resemble that found on Earth, it’s rather ironic that the same concept must now be used here on Earth to reverse the adverse effects of our technological progress. It’s more like terra reformation.

We are evolving into beings that take part in the creative forces of the universe on a scale we have never seen. We now have the technology and the power – and with that the responsibility – to heal these systems as designers and as creators. Like Lawton says, “design thinking that benefits the abundance of biology.”

Geoff Lawton’s optimism is contagious and his knowledge of how to go about doing this is humbling. He is the director of the Permaculture Research Institute in Australia, and also has his own website here.