Civilizations unify and organize around worldviews, which provide meanings and symbolic tools for the ordering of social institutions. These in turn regulate individual and collective behaviours and lifestyles. In addition, prominent authors such as Donella Meadows and Gregory Bateson pointed out a change of paradigms or worldviews as one of the quickest and most effective ways of transforming a social system. This idea would be especially pressing today in view of the urgent need to mitigate the climate and extinction crisis we are facing. It is clear, therefore, that the transition from an industrial civilization to an ecological civilization would require, to a large extent, a powerful educational impulse for shifting worldviews within so big social system. But how to implement such a huge ecopedagogical project? What would be the easiest way to bring about a collective worldview shift in our civilization? One of the most effective answers could be found in those educational tools that, for millennia, passed on the worldviews of their respective societies to both children and adults: myths, legends, and traditional tales selected specifically to foster the new worldview. This line of thinking gives rise to a global initiative for the transition from the worldview of Modernity—which, according to Bruno Latour, has brought about the current climate and extinction crisis—to a complex-systems, ecocentric, organicist, consciousness-based worldview, the same worldview that underlies the Earth Charter.

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The Earth Stories Collection: Building an Ecological Civilization Through Selected Myths, Legends, and Folktales

  • Grian A. Cutanda

摘要

Civilizations unify and organize around worldviews, which provide meanings and symbolic tools for the ordering of social institutions. These in turn regulate individual and collective behaviours and lifestyles. In addition, prominent authors such as Donella Meadows and Gregory Bateson pointed out a change of paradigms or worldviews as one of the quickest and most effective ways of transforming a social system. This idea would be especially pressing today in view of the urgent need to mitigate the climate and extinction crisis we are facing. It is clear, therefore, that the transition from an industrial civilization to an ecological civilization would require, to a large extent, a powerful educational impulse for shifting worldviews within so big social system. But how to implement such a huge ecopedagogical project? What would be the easiest way to bring about a collective worldview shift in our civilization? One of the most effective answers could be found in those educational tools that, for millennia, passed on the worldviews of their respective societies to both children and adults: myths, legends, and traditional tales selected specifically to foster the new worldview. This line of thinking gives rise to a global initiative for the transition from the worldview of Modernity—which, according to Bruno Latour, has brought about the current climate and extinction crisis—to a complex-systems, ecocentric, organicist, consciousness-based worldview, the same worldview that underlies the Earth Charter.