Seen from about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles), Earth appears as a tiny the blueish-white dot within deep space.
Yesterday evening, I attended a screening of the film “The Empathy Project”, which stirred my emotions deeply, and has left me in a pondersome mood. Then, this morning, I saw this report, posted on Linkedin. The title alone is scary, “Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security”, and all the more so, since it is from a UK government intelligence committee, and warns of an increasingly likely collapse of essential natural systems, ushering in mass migration, food shortages, increased prices, and disorder on a global scale.
The report identifies that some vital ecosystems could face collapse within just 5 years, endangering the UK’s national security, which is a chilling change of lens through which to view the matter. I can see parallels with the recent National Emergency Briefing, certainly in identifying the major and possibly imminent threats to life in these islands, and elsewhere, but which similarly has yet to receive its necessary due prominence in media coverage.
Further compounded by a UN report that we are in “an era of water bankruptcy”, I am left with a visceral sense of unease, of a broken global system that hyperconsumes… nature, animals, people – driven by money, and which is unfixable within the present paradigms.
It has been presented that collapse is an inevitable fate for an extractive system on a finite planet, and indeed, I wonder if this may be the only force powerful enough to drive change, to an ultimate state of “one planet living”. In which case, mitigation alone (“carbon tunnel vision”) is insufficient, and we must also adapt to the shocks that will come.
We are, of course, animals (like those in the film), and our actions are urged by primitive drives (the 4 Fs): feeding, fighting, fleeing and procreation. Arguably, we are driven to do all of these by fear… of not surviving. Pleasure too, particularly in the first and fourth – I doubt anyone really enjoys the third, perhaps only once one has fled, and is now out of danger.
Beyond its immediate content, the film ricochets out echoes and ripples, negotiating both structures and surfaces: tracing the lines of a whole, out of kilter, system of interconnected, interdependent components that needs realignment, and “empathy” is probably the best way forward.
However, empathy does not square well with a “growth” mindset, which is one of acquisition and conquest (i.e. the 4 Fs). Is “empathetic growth” even possible, or another oxymoron, such as “green growth”, “sustainable agriculture”, let alone “friendly fire”?
We are well into ecological overshoot for the human species, set to hit using “2 Earths” worth of resources by 2030, and we have just the one. The most emphatic, visual, identification of this reality is “The Pale Blue Dot”, a photograph taken by the Voyager 1 space probe in 1990. Thus, as seen from a distance of about 6 billion kilometers, Earth appears as a tiny dot, set against the infinite darkness of deep space: it is the blueish-white speck [in the image above] almost halfway up the rightmost band of light.
As Carl Sagan noted:
“There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. It underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot. The only home we’ve ever known.”
Still so early into the New Year of 2026, I am also reminded of the lines from Charles Dickens’ play “A Christmas Carol”:
“Christmas [is] the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.” – Stave One.
To achieve what is necessary, this must extend to all living creatures, as in Charles Eisenstein’s concept of “Interbeing”; an antidote to our treatment of other species, other humans as, indeed, “other”, being different from ourselves and less deserving of our humanity, compassion, and care. Indeed, fragmentation from other peoples, and disconnection from nature, more broadly, categorises all kinds of mistreatment, abuse, and degradation.
It is only though healing this false sense, either a fault of cause or carelessness, that empathy is allowed to be admitted, as a revelation of light into otherwise endless darkness.
