Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern Economy
How to Harmonize Economy and Ecology
The National Geographic’s Genographic Project proved that 99.9% of human DNA across the globe is identical. We all share the same genetic endowment.* However, civilizations invest their genetic endowment in different ways, which manifests very different forms of genius.
The West poured its energy into developing rational thought and mastering the natural world. In the process, the Western world excommunicated nature, produced astonishing technological achievements, and pushed ecosystems to the brink of collapse.
As the West specialized in rationality, our somatic and intuitive capabilities atrophied and the mind-body-spirit connection dissolved. As the West exalted humanity, the unity of humanity-nature-divinity disintegrated as did the mind-body-spirit trinity. Albert Einstein, who was profoundly spiritual as well as marvelously analytical, noted that “the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and have forgotten the gift.”*
Human ancestors around the world invested that same genetic endowment in harmony with the cosmos, communion with nature, and development of suprarational intelligence. This form of genius – ancient wisdom – teaches us that we are part of an animated, inter-species community, that all flourishing is mutual, and that we are bound to each other by gratitude and reciprocity.
Luckily for humanity, there are many cultures around the world that still practice the old ways. They model principles for how humanity can live and thrive in partnership with the natural world. Integrated with the global economy, ancient wisdom can balance the extremes of capitalist culture and systemically address the plundering of the planet catalyzing the collapse of ecosystems.
Ancient Beliefs
Animism
“Every element of nature is imbued with higher significance, such that even the most modest of creatures can be seen as a teacher, and the smallest grain of sand is a mirror of the universe.”
Whether you call it God, higher power, divinity, spirit, or life force, it animates us and everything around us. Humanity becomes part of an inter-species neighborhood populated with our extended family, friends, and allies, rather than an isolated species on a floating space rock surrounded by evil and danger. As Thomas Berry puts it, “the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.”**
Geographical points, mountains, trees, bears, and frogs become persons and peers. A pile of rock becomes a mountain spirit protecting local towns. A lumber farm becomes a living forest community with thousands of inhabitants. All species are addressed by the same words as your human family.¹
Common practices in the capitalist economy become untenable in an animist belief system. How could you cut the head off of a protective ally to burn its body for fuel, as we do with mountaintop coal removal? How could you torture your neighbor with a toxic chemical to heighten the taste of their flesh, as we do with sugar cane?
The biosphere is more than just our extended family – the entire natural world becomes an extension of human consciousness, eminently knowable through intuition and somatic experience. This is not just metaphor or superstition. It is true felt experience. In ancestral lifeways, shamanism emerged to heal, through ritual, the rupture from the natural world caused by human consciousness.*²
With consciousness integrated with the natural world, we access new libraries of knowledge and intelligence. 500 years before Columbus’ voyages, Polynesians settled virtually the entire Pacific Ocean. Polynesian navigators feel the rhythms of waves on the canoe, evaluate the character of clouds, observe wildlife behavior, and memorize the location of 220 stars to precisely calculate location in open water. Aboriginal Australians know “every ecological, climatic, geographic detail, the pulse of every sentient creature, the rhythm of every breath of wind, the patterns of every season” by instinct. The Mazatecs of Oaxaca communicated across vast distances by mimicking the whistling of the wind in their language. Buddhists diagnosed the causes of human suffering and developed a protocol to transform the human heart.*
¹ In Potawatomi and many other indigenous languages. See Robin Wall Kimmerer, Learning the Grammar of Animacy.
² Human consciousness only superficially separates us from nature. Homo sapiens date back 300,000 years while the Cambrian Period with its explosion of complex life forms began 500,000,000 years ago. We share 40% of our DNA with bananas let alone the 99% shared with chimpanzees.
Interdependence
Not only are we surrounded by life, but all flourishing of life is mutual. We separate ourselves from nature at our own peril.
The Mayan creation story in the Popol Vuh teaches us how humans came to build sustainable civilizations. The gods made the first humans out of mud, but the mud people were clumsy and flimsy. The earth needed humans that could nurture her so the gods tried humans made from wood. The wood humans were clever and beautiful, but they lacked gratitude for the gifts of the earth and compassion for their neighbors, and so endangered all life. The gods then sent floods, earthquakes, and unleashed all other species to retaliate against the abuse of the wood humans. The gods then made humans out of sunlight. The sunlight humans were amazingly beautiful and intelligent, but lacked respect, gratitude, and humility. They even believed themselves to rival the gods in power and prowess. The gods understood the danger to all life that such humans represented, and again destroyed them. Then, the gods made humans out of corn. The corn humans were compassionate, intelligent, and, finally, grateful. The corn people were wise enough to respect and honor the earth that sustained them and, thus, they were sustained on the earth.**
The corn people understood that humanity relies upon healthy ecosystems for every cell in our bodies and every breath we take. Every creature has an indispensable role to play in sustaining all life. Plants combine sunlight with carbon dioxide and water to create oxygen and carbohydrates so that other creatures can breathe and harness the energy of the sun. Animals combine oxygen and carbohydrates to create carbon dioxide and water for the plants. Buffalo grazing the grasslands de-compact soil with their hooves, re-hydrate the earth with their urine, and fertilize life with their dung to facilitate the growth of more plants. They even have enzymes in their saliva that trigger grass to grow back faster and thicker.
The scientific community is beginning to validate the essential mosaic of inter-species relationships that indigenous peoples have always known.
The Hype Cycle of Capitalism
³ The Popol Vuh, and many ancient myths from around the world, warn us of the existential risk and personal suffering of over-consumption. The ancient Mayas themselves are believed to have collapsed due to a combination of environmental exploitation and prolonged drought. The Windigo monster of the Anishinaabe warns us that over-consumption creates a burning dissatisfaction that can never be salved. Hungry ghosts in Buddhism teach a similar concept. Forewarnings from ancient wisdom now play out globally. Extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and scorching temperatures threaten civilizations. Orcas are attacking boats.
Reciprocity
Thus arises a duty of reciprocity: “sustain the ones who sustain you and the earth will last forever.”** Reciprocity means acknowledging our dependence on the miraculous gifts of our plant, animal, and geological neighbors for our own life, and accepting the responsibility to provide our uniquely human gifts.
In economic terms, we label these gifts as “ecosystem services.” What is the ecosystem service of humanity?
Although we are not separate or independent, we are distinguished. No other species has our level of consciousness. We are uniquely capable of understanding and appreciating the magic of the natural world, the mechanical how of life. For the Tairona in Colombia, “it is only through the human heart and imagination that the Great Mother may become manifest.”* In other words, only humans have the capacity for gratitude, compassion, visioning, and intention.
Capitalist culture has employed the human gift of visioning and intention for incredible technological achievements. To an extent, we also honor the teachings of other life forms. Biomimicry permeates many of our technological innovations like the airplane, aerodynamics, or camouflage.
However, we sorely lack gratitude and compassion for the rest of the biosphere. We have reduced the natural world to commodities, stripped non-humans of any significance, and abdicated any responsibility to nurture the earth. Capitalist culture is filled with wood people and light people.
Ancient wisdom teaches us to apply our immense intellectual faculties in service to the ecosystem, for all life, not just ourselves.
Ancient Wisdom in the Modern Economy
How can we integrate the ancient principles of indigenous stewardship into the economy? Robin Wall Kimmerer speaks of the idea of “naturalization.” Indigenous wisdom requires generations of “soul-deep fusion with the land”.** However, we can become naturalized in our lifetimes.
To become naturalized means treating the land as if we plan to stay here. To become naturalized means to care for the land and all its life forms. To become naturalized means to respect and honor the teachings of communities that maintain indigenous wisdom. To become naturalized is to embrace the responsibility to give our gifts in service to the world.
We need to re-build political economies, brick by brick, into systems that align the prosperity of humans with that of entire ecosystems.
What could a Naturalized Economy look like?
Economy would mimic ecology. Healthy ecosystems sustain themselves through the capture of renewable energy and circulation and recycling of resources. Plants photosynthesize sunlight to provide usable energy for the entire ecosystem. Plants and animals balance the oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. All organisms play a role in cycling nutrients between plant matter, animal tissue, and soil composition. Water cycles from the atmosphere to the soil into the water table and back again. Organisms in sustainable ecosystems take what is given, use everything they take, and take in a way that maintains ecosystem balance perpetually.* Our ancestors encoded these principles in creation myths as core to our civilizations’ survival, such as the corn people of the Maya’s Popol Vuh.
Business models and value chains must too be designed for renewability and circularity. Energy systems based on solar, wind, wave, and geothermal sources are renewable, assuming the rare earth minerals used to build the technologies can be harvested sustainably. So are holistically-managed agricultural systems that support biodiverse ecosystems and healthy nutrient cycling with few or no exogenous inputs. Initiatives in the circular economy also embody these principles.
Renewable, circular business practices return humans as a contributing organism in a healthy ecosystem.
The natural world would have strong rights and legal protection. The capitalist economy relies upon strong private property rights and a well-defined legal system to liberate assets as fungible capital. Commensurate rights enshrine nature’s personhood in law and unlock economic recognition of ecosystems. For example, New Zealand granted full legal personhood, under guardianship of indigenous communities and local government, to Mount Taranaki and the Whanganui river.
Ecosystem services would be explicitly valued. The destruction of natural capital goes completely unpriced in the modern economy, which enables shortsighted exploitation of the natural world. If income statements priced the value of ecosystems, investment decisions would tilt into ecological restoration and away from exploitation.
Valuation of ecosystem services smells like commodification, and we will never fully capture the significance of nature with concepts of value. However, we need to somehow convert her into economic terms to influence economic behavior. Ultimately, we want ecological sustainability to be economically rational so that even Mr. Burns would do it. Carbon and biodiversity credit markets are a promising starting point.
We would maximize all-stakeholder profits and incentivize long-term profits. We have a system that prioritizes shareholder profits at the expense of all others and incentivizes quarterly financial performance. A Naturalized Economy incorporates the profits of all stakeholders, including shareholders, customers, communities, non-human life, and ecosystems.
Myopic focus on short-term profits ignores that the natural world lives in decades (or longer), not quarters. Plus, it may be better for shareholder returns anyways. For Firms of Endearment, Raj Sisodia and his researchers tracked a basket of companies that operate according to all-stakeholder principles and found that these companies outperformed the S&P 500 by 10.5x over a 15-year period.
Eric Ries’ Long-Term Stock Exchange is another interesting initiative.
We would localize land ownership and food production as much as possible. Earth stewardship only works if land ownership and management is decentralized with the people that know it best. Polynesians are such incredible navigators because they know their seas. The San are such great hunters because they know every plant and animal in their ecosystem.
In the modern economy, production and consumption are disconnected in the name of efficiency. Economic benefits and costs are disconnected, often by thousands of miles. This system enables massive unpriced externalities and ignorance of the consequences of our actions. Localized land use and food production re-connect us to our impact on ecosystems, re-vitalize communities, and return land to the people most incentivized to care for it.
⁴ For further reading: Kimmerer, The Honorable Harvest.
Final Thoughts
For 99% of human history*, we all lived and breathed the unity of humanity, nature, and divinity, the interdependence of all life, and our responsibility as earth stewards. Only in the last 1%, a few thousand years, did we separate humanity. The Industrial Revolution began less than 300 years ago. In human history, the commodification of nature is an anomaly.
Ancient wisdom amalgamates the 99% of our species’ library of knowledge. It’s our heritage. In the modern economy, not only do we live out of harmony with the natural world but with ourselves.
Individuals hold tremendous power. Every day we have the opportunity to vote with our dollars and act in accordance with naturalized values. We all can take responsibility for our actions and consciously change how we relate to the world, whether or not institutions take the lead.
⁵ The earliest known member of the Homo genus, homo habilis LD 350-1, dates back 2.8 million years.
Source Material
* The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, Wade Davis, Season of the Brown Hyena, Sacred Geography.
** Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Learning the Grammar of Animacy, People of Corn People of Light, In the Footsteps of Nanabozho.
