WorldViews?
WorldViews are comprised of collections of images and stories that people use to help make sense of the complex world around them (Marten, 2001). In other words, WorldViews are ontological in that they refer to a way of being and knowing about the world. In this case, the word ‘world’ is not used in a geographical sense, but rather to refer to the entire perceptual content of an individual (Aerts et al., 1994).
Our WorldView is personal, though it is conceptualized by social, cultural, and environmental interactions. These interactions dictate to a large degree what we value and how we view the world around us. In this case, the world we view is the totality of our lives, including all to which we relate from our spiritual, physical, affective or emotional, intellectual or cognitive, and social areas of life. On a practical level, having a WorldView increases our understanding of our place and relationship to everyone and everything within our sphere, and therefore can offer us security and comfort. Given that humans live in groups, we tend to share a paradigm (some groups of people call this a story) or a collection of paradigms (stories) which can be seen as a collective WorldView that we use to explain life, the world, and how we should be in the world. These shared views become dominant WorldViews. Paradigms or WorldViews are held for particular areas, such as religion, philosophy, science, political movements, and how we perceive our connection with nature. These societal WorldViews shape behavior, politics, relationships, institutions, and the totality of our perceptions, and therefore how we act as a group. As different WorldViews become dominant they influence so much of our thought or perspective about a subject that this influences the overall direction of development of that area. For example, large-scale archeological evidence of warfare dates back to less than 7000 years ago, but a dominant paradigm today is that defense and warfare are inevitable and part of human life (and death). The rest of this chapter focuses on the development of dominant WorldViews as they pertain to the natural environment and, consequently, how they impact our relationship to the natural world.
Even with dominant WorldViews, there are people within that society and people and groups outside the dominant culture who have had and have WorldViews differing from the predominant paradigm. Sometimes within a culture there are clashes with WorldViews, as displayed in the 2012 US elections concerning control over women’s reproductive rights. Throughout history we can identify dominant WorldViews about nature as well as alternative WorldViews that have been present. As we present the various collective WorldViews in this chapter, remember to think about the voices and therefore alternative perspectives of WorldViews not often talked about in history or in the present, or even known about by many other people. Also remember that WorldViews do not have to be fixed. Given our cognitive abilities as human beings, we can consciously work toward a WorldView that provides sustainability for the human species.
The History of WorldViews/Evolving WorldViews about Nature
Perceptions of nature are driven by WorldViews and impacted by both culture and environment, and have varied depending on the historical time period. While throughout history there have been multiple WorldViews circulating at the same time, humans seem to have established periods where dominant WorldViews can be identified. The moral philosopher Denis Kenny (2001, in Eckersley, 2004) found that over human history there have been four substantially different cosmological stories. These include: (i) the enchanted universe in which the world is alive with forces, powers, and influences, often personified as gods; (ii) the sacred universe of Abrahamic religions in which the world is created by an all powerful, singular God; (iii) the mechanical universe of Newtonian physics, embodying a world that runs like clockwork according to a set of physical laws; and (iv) the organic universe of Einstein, relativity, and quantum physics in which the distinction between the material and spiritual no longer holds. As we examine major shifts in dominant WorldViews these four stories and others will be referenced.
For the purpose of this book, six major historical shifts have occurred in dominant society’s perceptions of nature or the collective stories about humans’ relationship to nature. These include: (i) first humans; (ii) sacred cycles; (iii) agricultural; (iv) early modernity; (v) industrial; and (vi) technological. During both the first humans and the sacred cycles stages, humans were primarily hunters and gatherers, shifting to an agrarian society about 10,000 years ago. The last four major shifts have occurred relatively recently compared with the notion that humans have been on Earth beginning sometime between 400,000 and 250,000 years ago, with each shift coming significantly faster than the previous shift (see Table 2.1). These stages are referenced with other geologic and archeological time periods. Different fields of study name time periods in regard to their particular frame of reference, which is confusing because the start and ending times vary, and even within disciplines there is often disagreement about start and ending times. Therefore, readers are encouraged to learn the relationships between the time periods and to place less emphasis on the exact dates.
First humans stage
The first human stage dates from the early Homo sapiens to about 50,000 years ago and overlaps with parts of the Stone Age and parts of the Early and Middle Paleolithic. Referred to as prehistory because there is no written record, archeologists primarily identify activity through their cultural artifacts of stone tools. The use of the technology of the period to describe the culture continues to the present in part because these artifacts are durable through time and thus preserved. Over time more archeological evidence continues to be found, causing updates in our perceptions of past cultures (see Box 2.1). The current dominant paradigm of equating more technology to more civilized or advanced cultures is, however, overlain on history and continues in the next stages. Because signs of warfare do not show up until later, these people were thought to be hunters and gatherers who lived in small equalitarian societies. They lived in the natural environment and possibly did not differentiate between the earth and the cosmos. Without electric lights the stars appeared closer and the stars were used in the cycles of their lives.
Little to nothing is known about the WorldView of pre-modernity humans; however, our understanding of brain evolution helps us construct theories. We know that in this first 250,000 years of human development our brains evolved in close contact with nature. Humans were part of ecosystems, developing with the other flora and fauna in a mutualistic manner. They may have relied on instinct and intuition along with vision, smell, hearing, and touch; they were connected in every sense to the natural world. On most days humans walked about 12 miles and our brains have developed to work better with exercise rather than being sedentary. The outdoor environments by their nature have a certain amount of instability and unpredictability, thus humans evolved to be problem solvers through exploration and while we are in motion. Because the size of the human birth canal is limited, children are born needing years of parental care. Brains remember and encode what we pay attention to (Medina, 2008). Humans, especially females, had to fully pay attention to childbirth and rearing, which likely helped human brains strengthen neural networks for love and care. Humans have mirror neurons and babies, young children, and adults have the ability to mimic behavior. Mirror neurons might have helped early humans take cues from animals. For example, Sheldrake (2005) wrote about villagers in Thailand who followed stampeding buffalo up a hill, not seemingly sure why they did. Their lives were saved from the tsunami.
Table 2.1. Six major shifts have occurred in the known history of humanity each with its dominant WorldView as gleaned through artifacts and written history.
Box 2.1. Understanding WorldViews of the past
