What is required for human society when the belief that climate change can be stopped evaporates?

The environment is a spiritual question, not a scientific one.

The 'environment' is a human creation. We have created our own artificial, limited logic using Nature. Unfortunately, we now look at Nature the same way we regard the human environment, namely civilization, a concept to describe human society.

We are confused in our terms. Nature is alive. Civilization is about humans relating to each other in society. Everything else outside of humans is the equivalent of inert matter. It may have some sentimental value, but nothing is as important as a human.

This is something that Al Gore stresses in his documentary: 'An Inconvenient Truth.' Save the planet for your kids. Save it for humans. All we need to do is put the fixes into place, and we will save ourselves.

The film speaks to where the majority of people's heads 'are' right now. Its simple, straightforward, convincing, scientific, obvious and controllable. It is very well done, even the 'lone prophet' walking the lonely airports.

It's about self-preservation, the 'I'm going to die' fear. A worthy goal of self-interest. Didn't one of the early economists point out that is the primary motivation of individuals? So the population can relate to that. Al Gore just about lost his six year old son in a car accident. Think about how precious your love is for your children.

The lazy river is a nice opening shot, but modern urban dwellers have such a limited relationship with Nature, that it seems the only true emotional chord we can strike is giving our children a better life than we have, is the most compelling argument.

I admire this movie and Gore's journey from revelation of global warming in college to his activities in Washington to act on it. He is acting wisely in a world that runs on little of it. That gives him intergrity.

But it is disconcerting to realize that most North Americans look at the Earth as a survival system, real estate, simply the place where humans eke out a living. Its about preserving stability in the environment to preserve human life. We are the most important thing on the planet. Since we are destroying the Earth, I guess flattering us with our own importance might grease our willingness to help stop the destruction.

But it is sad that we cannot relate to the world as alive, with as much 'worth' as human life. Instead, it is a system, a car engine we can fix, something we have control over.

No one really cares about the wildlife that is going extinct, the rainforests that are being chopped down, or the fish that are disappearing. To get society to act in its artificial, urban cuccoon, takes a threat to its survival. The status quo.

For this reason, stopping climate change will fail even if we do all the right things now technologically. The problem is too big and 'whole' to really be able to manage in time to slow down the enveloping horror. The civilized are good at controlling small components, layering and integrating the artificial systems that build into our economy. But like Nature, once we start to tinker with this delicate capitalist survival system based on an ecosystem of numbers, we do not know what kind of destruction of people's jobs could happen. And without a paycheck, people starve.

The amount of coordination on a global scale to stop climate change would be enormous. The West likes to think that it is a simple, controllable exercise of technology reducing our greenhouse gases, but we are not in control of booming China and India. Power, like all life, wants to grow. And security comes from more power, not less.

It could be done globally, as the Kyoto Accord is attempting, but the timelines and the targets are wholly inadequate, and the ecological processes are well underway to produce carbon dioxide that dwarfs anything industrial humans can produce.

The permafrost in the Canadian and Siberian arctic are melting faster than ever thought possible, increasing CO2 'emissions' in gargantuan scale that cannot be turned off by simply switching to driving hybrid cars. The polar ice caps are well underway in their meltdown, affecting the ocean currents and temperatures that will alter the weather. This year's pollution, scientists say, will not take its effect for twenty years. That means the greenhouse gases affecting us now were put into the air when Ronald Reagan was president. Odd that Kyoto is targeting CO2 levels for 1990, after Reagan left office.

There is the belief that we can slow climate change. But science is constantly shocked at how quickly global warming is occurring, much faster than ever predicted. It is accelerating, with a 20-year bank account of human emmissions that it can draw upon, and more deposits to be made over next number of years until governments decide to act and take effect. We like to think we are in control and still have time. We don't, and the current trend in world politics does not bode well.

As the Earth starts to affect us, will we suddenly be aware of Nature again; its power and how small we really are. Right now we ignore it, concerned about the numbers in our bank account and the lifestyle that we live. Nature has little to do with the food on our tables. The food chain is now the chemical fertilizers in the field, the trucks, factories and grocery stores that keep us alive. Food is packaged, not grown. That is our practical reality.

We have to start considering the step beyond thinking we can stop global warming and controlling Nature on a global scale. What will the world be like as the support system for our artificial cultures starts to fly apart. What can we learn from the cultures that we have destroyed that used to live 'with' the Earth instead of dominating it?

Africa is the prime example, but we can look to all the indigenous peoples around the world and start mining their understanding of humans' relationship with the Earth as a mode of living. This thinking needs to be in place, so that when society collapses bit-by-bit, there will be something to replace it.

The distinguishing thing about indigenous cultures is that they are wisdom cultures based on a spirituality that is completely foreign to the mind-and-knowledge-dominated mindset of civilization.

How do we make a shift to a society that is based on wisdom instead of negotiation? Doing what is right, instead of mediating power relationships? Regarding the Earth as something alive, spiritual, that is equal in life as humans, and much more powerful?

We would have to re-awaken a spirituality in humans that has been caged in the over-intellectual, abstract concepts of religion, that limits and controls what we are allowed to consider spiritually. Spiritual experience needs to be allowed to breathe, to create a public conversation that makes it a 'norm,' instead of a quaint lifestyle option, or a left-over control mechanism of the Church.

This means re-aligning human beings' psyche. Right now, our daily reality relates to the world as being only (God), humans and inert matter. Animals and plants fall into this latter category. It is only humans that we keep alive at all costs, even if they're vegetables. There is no other life on the planet, meaning there is no other life that is equal to and held with the same reverence as the human. That's a tall order, that requires a massive shift in the common experience of life.

Right now, religion is totally incapable of providing this. They are human-centered, just like civilizaton, and they are exclusive clubs, nation-states that have foreign relations with other religions. They are stuck in their own swamp of spiritual understanding, unwilling to merge with sister religions to form a new world spirituality.

Their heads are in the sand, rolling in the wealth of spirituality that they have found. No real need to challenge and change fundamentally. Everyone needs to come to them, they believe.

Christians, for example, want to fit in with the technological fix of climate change to save the inert matter of God's 'Creation,' to keep humans from suffering, as Christ commanded. They're in 'domination mode' still. Because spirituality is limited to God's wisdom for human beings alone, living in a universe of natural laws, they do not have the spiritual groundwork to go beyond this. Its history creates a taboo to alter the psychic conditions that has led us to creating climate change and threatening human existence. Now there's a paradox.

For those interested in exploring what will become of us, the 'environment' needs to be defined for what it is: civilized, artificial human society. It is based on concepts. Nature is not a concept, it is alive. Spiritually, it is called 'Creation.' Specifically, our reality exists within one other spirit, Mother Earth. We have to discover Her, which is a tall order, since we are still debating the existence of God and one human being, Jesus. Shifting reality from being inert matter to being spirit in our thinking will be a massive change. We took 12,000 years of civilization to get out of it. Our learning curve must be a lot quicker if our species is going to survive.