While the influence of linear perspective on Renaissance architecture and European cities is well understood and obvious, its influence on Western science and how we see ourselves in relationship to the natural world is less known but deep.
Providing more services to an increasing population can only be met if those with enough voluntarily decide to give what they really don’t need to support the many who have too little.
The Earth is typically thought of as nothing but stuff -- an idea so commonplace that it’s hard to imagine it having any kind of history at all. It's “just the way the world is.”
If the natural sciences adopt a more inclusive worldview -- one that does not deny the role of values and meaning in the world and that can do justice to more of the scientific evidence -- we will be in a much better position to respond wisely to our crises.
Jesus called for a fundamental shift from the service of money to the service of God. “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” I translate Jesus’s message into “Seize an Alternative: An Ecological Civilization Is Possible.”
The conference should be of keen interest to those teachers who have been concerned that in a time of desperate crisis, the vast majority of so-called “education” proceeds as if the only matter of importance was the production of value-free scholarship and proper credentialing for service to the economy that is destroying the ecosystem.
The entire conference is about ethics in the broad sense. It is seeking to define what we should be working for and how this can be done in many contexts and areas of life.
“Seizing an Alternative” means a society that prizes life more than money and lives in integration with the whole, that is, as a responsible part of the natural system.
"When I worked at the World Bank," Daly writes, "I often heard the statement, 'There is no conflict between economics and ecology. I still hear that a lot today. Is it true? Is it possible?"