International Mother Earth Day: How the overview effect and a change of narrative can lead us towards a future of wellbeing

“Once a photograph of the Earth taken from outside, is available…a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.”

— Fred Hoyle, 1948

During the last 50 years, the International Day of Mother Earth has been celebrated on April 22 in many countries. The story behind the proclamation of this day by the UN (United Nations) has several interesting episodes about its origin in 1970 and its subsequent development. A flag has even been designed, that, from a symbolic point of view, unites all the inhabitants of this planet regardless of their identity and/or nationality.

These two articles propose proportionate clues about possible ways of transcending this day. In my opinion, the ultimate goal of April 22nd is its disappearance from the international calendar of the United Nations. This could happen, either because global awareness has been achieved among the entire population about the importance of the planet in our lives or because the 365 days of the year are all “Mother Earth days”. The last one is an initiative that we can learn from indigenous people because many indigenous knowledge systems have embedded it in their cosmology and cultural traditions.

As background information, in the design of a normative model based on the paradigm of sustainability, it was concluded that the current sustainability model was focused on solving environmental problems primarily and almost exclusively on the external elements of the model; the technology, the policies, the regulations, the market…This is not a bad approach but it is not enough. It is needed to complement it with the internal elements, i.e., the psychological, experiential, and cultural points of view. This will be my proposal, a balance between the interior, the cognitive, participatory, and responsible part of people, and the cultural, educational, and conscious part of our global society. I think that the “Overview effect” and a new cultural and cosmological narrative or story can let emerge some creative elements to move towards our wellbeing in the future. In this first post, I will focus on the “Overview Effect” and in a second one, I will write about our cultural narrative, as well as the conclusions and interactions of both approaches.

The Overview effect

“I was flying cross-country, from the East coast to the West coast in the 1970s, and I was looking out the window. And as I was looking down at the planet, the thought came to me: anyone living in a space settlement, or living on the moon, would always have an overview. They would see things that we know, but we don’t experience. That the Earth is one system, and we’re all part of that system. And that there is a certain unity and coherence to it all. And I immediately called it the ‘Overview Effect’.”

— Frank White

The “Overview effect” could be defined as “a cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from the outer space.”

I will take several of the quotations from this impressive documentary “The Overview Effect” which collects visually and narratively the experiences of various astronauts observing the Earth from outer space.

My recommendation is to watch the 19-minute documentary. What I have written here are some experiences and opinions about the Earth directed towards some systems thinking that resonated with me when I was watching the documentary. When you watch it, it will resonate with you in some personal experiences of change that have happened to you during your life. Unless you are an astronaut among the readers, the experiences that resonates with you are second-hand and perhaps you cannot even imagine or experience in a virtual reality simulator the real “Overview effect”. That is why the use of the documentary “Overview Effect” is a broader metaphor that is directed towards the concepts that surround our own life experiences that produce cognitive changes that are reflected in behavioural changes. We have critical experiences during our life that transform us, for example, during our adolescence, the crisis of the 40s, the empty nest syndrome, critical moments when one retires, or just the last moments when we could feel that we are finishing our visit to this planet. Other moments have more to do with circumstances, a car accident, some illness like cancer, the death of the couple or a child, economic problems… or even some global events like the Covid-19 pandemic. All those junctures are our “overview effects”. Those are the circumstances that if we transcend them, i.e., we start to have a vision of the whole and not only the parts, make us expand our experience of reality in this life.

Although the above examples are personal critical moments in the span of our lives, we are also experiencing collective critical circumstances, not only locally but globally, on the Planet Earth, and those affect humans as a species. From the loss of diversity to environmental pollution, from climate crisis to the destruction of ecosystems, all of this is included in a new era, the era of Anthropocene, where humans have taken the role of the main actor in all these changes.

“We have this connection to Earth, I mean, it is our home. And I don’t know how you can come back and in some way be changed.”

— Nicole Stott, astronaut

However, in the present moment, humans mostly live quite fragmented. If we are like more than half of the world’s population and live in cities, we are losing our connection with the Earth, with the food that gives us the energy to live. These usually come to us through the supermarket and the main question is that we sometimes do not know how they have been cultivated both from a social and an environmental point of view. If we really connected, our consciousness would create new habits.

“We’ve been evolving from the beginning of civilizations to a larger and larger perspective of life on the Earth, but the next natural evolution is to understand the life in space. That is the fact that the Earth as Buckminster Fuller used to famously say: ‘It is a spaceship, the spaceship Earth’. We are in space already. It’s just that we haven’t brought that into our perspective as we live here on Earth. The “overview effect” is simply the suddenly recognition that we live on a planet and all the implications that it brings to life on Earth. “

— David Beaver, co-founder of the Overview Institute

We are also losing the connection mentally. We have mostly forgotten our connection with the past and the history of our ancestors, and we are starting to lose the connection with our descendants and their possible story in the future. As an example of this loss of connection, some indigenous peoples can give us great lessons because in their decisions they always took into account the seventh future generation to ensure that those who come later do not find a world worse than ours.

“After I came back and tried to understand what this experience was all about, I could find nothing in the science literature about it and nothing in the religious literature that I looked at. So I turned to the local university and asked them to help me with what I saw, and when they came back to me a few weeks later and said ‘well, in the ancient literature we found a description called ‘Savikalpa Samadhi’ and they said that means that you see things as you see with your eyes, but you experience them emotionally and viscerally, as it was ecstasy and a sense of total unity and oneness,” and I said, ‘Well, that’s exactly what the experience was.’ And so, it’s rather clear to me as I study this but wasn’t anything new, but it was something that be very important to the way we humans put together.”

— Edgar Mitchel, astronaut

“Within the Western tradition, I think, it’s quite new and quite shocking because there’s been much more of a sense of separation but if you look at other, non-Western cultures, especially in Asia, the emphasis on those has always been on a realization that the ‘self’ and the World are not separate from each other, but they are really interconnected; that the individual self and the species a whole is a manifestation of the larger whole.”

— David Loy, philosopher

People who live immersed in western culture are very often surprised by the wisdom of ancestral people. If in some way most of the human problems of our time were already included in the Greek classics, then I could suggest that part of the solutions is already included in the culture of different indigenous peoples. Modern solutions have been found through biomimicry thanks to recognizing our humility toward Nature with its hundreds of millions of years of experience. Similarly, we need to be humble towards accepting what other cultures can tell us about living or trying to live harmoniously with the environment. For example, in Latin America, the culture of Good Living (Sumak Kawsay) could give us some cultural clues for our modern challenges.

“This view of the Earth from space, the whole Earth perspective, I think it is the true symbol of this age, and I believe what is going to happen is that there is going to be a greater and greater interest in communicating this idea because, after all, it’s key to our survival. We have to start acting as one species with one destiny. We are not going to survive if we don’t do that.

— Frank White, author of “The Overview Effect”

Unfortunately, the stress and busy, fast life we lead in our modern society mean that our response to problems is largely corrective, rather than adopting a preventive model. Daniel Kahneman in his book “Thinking, fast and slow” points to the different cognitive biases and fallacies that humans follow. In a simplified way, he specifies two models of brain functioning; system 1 (fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic, unconscious…) and system 2 (slow, effortful, infrequent, logical, calculating, conscious…). I think that the models and stories that we carry embedded in our culture (this would be the next post) are the source of living our daily race rat, full of stress and where time is money, instead of a narrative where time is life. In the end, the response of our thinking model to the present way of life is biased, so most of our decisions go through system 1, which makes us more “homo emotionalis” than homo sapiens. We maybe need “responsible thinking” as a new way of thinking in the 21st century.

“There is this very poetic concept that a lot of people expressed that there are no boundaries from space; and I have heard many of my astronaut colleagues say that unfortunately it’s not true. You do see boundaries they’re mostly the result of human impact. You can see erosion, clear-cutting of forest, and you know is a long litany of environmental impact that we’ve had on our planet … and that’s something which, when you see it from the cosmic perspective makes you really appreciate the concept of “Spaceship Earth” and that we’re all here together. ”

—Jeff Hoffman, astronaut

As Kahneman says, our brain is what it is, and it comes standard with those two systems that limit us. System 1 usually takes the reins because it requires little energy, effort and critical thinking while System 2 requires more energy and works for the long term. So, the question that arises in the face of the environmental problems that threaten human life on Earth is: how can we transcend these barriers?

“We’re seeing very clearly that if the Earth becomes sick, then we become sick, if the Earth dies, then we’re going to die. People sense that something is wrong, but they’re still struggling to go back and find out what the real roots of the problem are. And I think what we need to come to is the realization that it’s not just fixing an economic or political system, but it is a basic worldview, a basic understanding of who we are and that’s at stake.”

— David Loy, philosopher

“We humans are responsible for ourselves, and if we are endangering our future, then we’ve got to learn how to do it differently and to go forward into a sustainable period. And right now, that seems very difficult; very difficult to see how it’s going to be but we’ve got to work in it.”

— Edgar Mitchell, astronaut

We have spoken of our emotional part, we have spoken of our cognitive part and we have a third one from the triad (head, heart, hands), that is, we have the action part. We not only feel the problems or solve them mentally, but we need to deal with them physically, we need to work on them, and the best way is playfulness and collaboration where it is given that the synergistic sums of 1 +1 equal 3 or more.

“I don’t think any of us had any expectations about how it would give us such a different perspective. I think the focus had been… we’re going to the stars, we’re going to the planets, and suddenly, we look back in ourselves and it seems to imply a new kind of self-awareness.”

— David Loy, philosopher

“When I was above on the space station, looking down at the space station, looking down against the Earth, and seeing this amazing accomplishment and I was thinking “wow” there was 15 nations that worked together to build this amazing complex in space. And if we can take these 15 nations and do this amazing accomplishment achievement, imagine what we can do by working together, by setting aside our differences for a common goal, to overcome some of the challenges facing our planet.”

— Ron Garan, astronaut.

The ego or the idea of the self is at the centre of our cultural model. The transcendence of the ego, as Otto Scharmer proposes at the Presencing Institute, is to lead from the future as it emerges, from ego-systems to eco-systems economies. The interrelationship of person-society occurs in both directions. Culture in a society shapes the individual. On the other side, some individuals can leave that frame and propose new initiatives with new perspectives. These start to be accepted by some followers and can transform the whole culture when it is adopted by a great majority. Among those people who led the future was Morton Hilbert, a professor of Public Health in the United States. He was an environmentalist and co-founder of Earth day. In 1968, Hilbert and the U.S. Public Health Service organized the Human Ecology Symposium where different scientists gave lectures to students about the effects of environmental degradation on human health. That was the antecedent of Earth day. Then, he and his students planned the first Earth Day. Gaylord Nelson, environmentalist and Senator picked up the baton and sponsored the federal proclamation of Earth Day on April 22, 1970. This movement became very popular in more and more countries. In my childhood, I remember one of these days at school when I planted my first tree. In 2009, U.N. General assembly proclaimed 22 April “International Mother Earth Day”, adopted by consensus a Bolivia led-resolution.

In this year 2020, the main theme is “climate action”. Finally, in line with this theme, I end it with an important action proposed by Yuri Gagarin (the first human being to travel to outer space in 1961) that I hope will nudge the bodies of the readers to take action aimed to preserve it and not destroy it.

For the second part of this article, I propose this heading by Edgar Mitchell, an astronaut of the Apollo 14,

“And part of that is to come up with a new story, a new picture, a new way to approach this, and to shift our behaviors in such a way that it leads to a sustainable approach to our civilization, as opposed to a destructive approach.”

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Twitter: @ResWellbeing @BienestarRespon

*Author: Jesús Martín. Transdisciplinary researcher. He usually writes some posts for “Autonomía y Bienvivir” and https://medium.com/@responsiblewellbeing. This is an adaptation and translation into English of his post, “22 de abril, día internacional de la Madre Tierra: como el efecto perspectiva (Overview effect) y un cambio de narrativa pueden encaminarnos hacia un futuro en el bienvivir.” (21/4/2016)