Our younger leaders are pushing me to help prepare them to carry Peace and Reconciliation (PAR) Principles, our contextual application of a peace theology, into the emerging realities of the 21st century. So, I’m exploring the ideas of Jeremy Rifkin who challenges humanity to “enter into a new world of biosphere politics, with new forms of governance emerging to accompany our new biosphere awareness.”
Geopolitical Thinking
Geopolitics. It’s about geography and how it affects human relations. It’s about political boundaries between tribes or ethno-linguistic groups and between nation-states. Geopolitics is about international relations and how each nation would behave based on their respective national interests.
In geopolitical thinking, the focus is on political power in relation to geographical boundaries — land, waters, air space, and underground resources — and their history. Most conflicts between nation-states are borne out of their agression against, or in defense of, these boundaries.
In other words, geopolitical thinking looks at Planet Earth through imagined lines or political boundaries. War and peace are decided mostly based on geopolitical interests of nation-states arising from the placement of these boundaries.
War and peace are decided mostly based on geopolitical interests of nation-states arising from the placement or displacement of these boundaries.
Biosphere Consciousness
According to Jeremy Rifkin, the biosphere is “the narrow band that extends some forty miles from the ocean floor to outer space where living creatures and the Earth’s geochemical processes interact to sustain each other.” In most of his presentations, he explains that the biosphere “functions like an indivisible organism.” All life on Planet Earth are inherently inter-connected because we are all in this “continuous symbiotic relationships between every living creature and between living creatures and the geochemical processes that ensure the survival of the planetary organism and the individual species that live within its biospheric envelope.”
The biosphere is “the narrow band that extends some forty miles from the ocean floor to outer space where living creatures and the Earth’s geochemical processes interact to sustain each other.”
Rifkin calls individuals, neighborhoods, and communities to look at our shared planetary home as one biospheric system. In this sphere, “every human life, the species as a whole, and all other life-forms are entwined with one another and with the geochemistry of the planet in a rich and complex choreography that sustains life itself,” Rifkin said. He further continues: “We are all dependent on and responsible for the health of the whole organism.”
We need to renounce the old notion of geopolitical thinking — “the detached, self-interested and utilitarian philosophical assumptions that accompanied national markets and nation state governance.”
Finally, Rifkin challenges us to “harness our empathic sensibility to establish a new global ethic that recognizes and acts to harmonize the many relationships that make up the life-sustaining forces of the planet.” We need to renounce the old notion of geopolitical thinking, which he describes as “the detached, self-interested and utilitarian philosophical assumptions that accompanied national markets and nation state governance.”
Entering a new era of biosphere consciousness is beyond urgent. This means we have to get into “a new world of biosphere politics, with new forms of governance emerging to accompany our new biosphere awareness” right now!
We have to get into “a new world of biosphere politics, with new forms of governance emerging to accompany our new biosphere awareness” right now!
The ideas and advocacies of Jeremy Rifkin, shared mostly through his books, are being applied by governments and corporations through his consultancy activities.
This two-hour video lecture by Rifkin encapsulates most of his ideas.
