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To heal our world, we must love our world.

To heal our world, we must love our world. And, to fully love our world, we must create wellness, happiness, and prosperity for all. When we fail to do so, our actions result in illness, misery, and poverty, all of which harm the health of our world.

Fortunately, creating wellness, happiness, and prosperity for all is much simpler than it may at first appear — and it all starts by getting a few things straight.

1. Our world is alive.

2. Our world requires healing and regrowth, not repair.

3. Healing and regrowth require changing harmful behaviors.

4. Changing harmful behaviors requires that we change our beliefs.

5. Changing our beliefs about our world requires us to re-know it.

What it means for our world to be alive is that our world, like every other living being, changes form through conception, growth, diminishment, and death. The reason we consider life to be alive is that life maintains itself through a process of constant transformation, literally changing the form of energy rather than creating or destroying energy.

The choices we make in each moment, whether or not we are aware of them, result in changes to life’s ability to function. When we decrease life’s ability to function, we create illness. When we increase life’s ability to function, we create wellness. By becoming conscious of our choices and the effects of those choices, it becomes possible to consistently create wellness in place of illness, increasing the ability of everyone and everything to function.

Because happiness and prosperity facilitate and are facilitated by wellness, just as misery and poverty facilitate and are facilitated by illness, both our happiness and our prosperity are intertwined with our wellness.

Currently our world requires healing and regrowth because we have been choosing to decrease its ability to function; we have been choosing to make it ill. From the founding of Earth Day in 1970 to the year 2022, a 69% decline in the populations of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish has been observed¹, while the human population has more than doubled from 3.7 billion² to 8 billion people³. Prior to 1970, our species caused even more harm to our world. Yet, it is difficult to discern just how much harm we caused, because we simply weren’t bothering to keep track of the damage. It was only after it became glaringly apparent that polluting the land, waters, and skies was harmful to human beings that our species began to be more attentive to our harmful behaviors.

Healing and regrowth require changing harmful behaviors because it is not possible to keep causing harm while continuing to rely on a nurturing Mother Nature to make it all better. As a species, we have grown too big for that. While it took 18 centuries for the human population to roughly quadruple in size to 1 billion people by 1800 CE, it took just 175 more years to quadruple again and less than 50 more years to double⁴. Just like a growing child, at some point we must learn to be responsible for our behavior as a species.

Changing harmful behaviors requires that we change our beliefs, because our beliefs drive our behaviors. If you believe that a given behavior is beneficial, acceptable, or necessary, you are more likely to engage in it. If you believe that a given behavior is harmful, unacceptable, or unnecessary, you are less likely to engage in it. The obvious question then becomes, what are we to believe?

If we believe the same things that we used to believe then we will inevitably continue to engage in the same sorts of behaviors that led our world to require healing and regrowth. Therefore, we must re-know our world. Specifically, we must re-know our world as it really is — and re-know ourselves in the process.

It is only by more accurately re-knowing what we are and what our world is that we can update the beliefs we have about our world to be more accurate. It is only by updating our beliefs to be more accurate, which is to say more aligned with reality, that we can then create wellness in place of illness in our real world. It is only by creating wellness in place of illness in our real world that we can then help our world to heal and regrow. And, it is only by helping our world to heal and regrow that we can create wellness, happiness, and prosperity for all.

1. Reference: World Wildlife Federation

2. Reference: Population Pyramid

3. Reference: United Nations

4. Reference: Wikipedia