Opinion Sur
This moment is a step forward in the process of geo-genesis. We cannot retreat or enclose within our national boundaries with a diminished conscience.
At present there is a strong confrontation with the globalization process, exacerbated by Donald Trump, who has strongly reinforced “America first”, or rather, “United States alone.” He promotes a war against globalized corporations in favor of corporations in the United States.
It is important to understand that this is a fight against the great economic and financial conglomerates that control much of the world’s wealth that is in the hands of a small number of people. According to J. Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics, we have 1% of billionaires against 99% of dependent and impoverished people.
This kind of globalization is economic-financial, from the dinosaurs, as Edgar Morin would say, the iron phase of globalization. But globalization is more than the economy. It is an irreversible process, a new stage in Earth’s evolution since the moment when we discovered it just by looking at it from the outside, as was reported by the astronauts from their spacecrafts. Thus, it became clear that Earth and Humanity form a single complex entity.
The testimony of US astronaut John W. Young, during the fifth trip to the moon on April 16, 1972, is shocking: “Below is the Earth, the blue-white, beautiful, shining planet, our human homeland. From here I can put the moon inside the palm of my hand. From this perspective there are no blacks or whites in it, no divisions between East and West, communists and capitalists, north and south. We are all one Earth. We must learn to love this planet of which we are part.”
From this experience the words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in 1933 become prophetic and provocative: “The age of nations has passed. If we do not want to die, it’s time to shake off old prejudices and build the earth. Earth will not be aware of itself by any other means but by a crisis of conversion and transformation.” This crisis has been installed in our minds: we are now responsible for the only Common Home we have. And we have invented the means for our own self-destruction, which further increases our responsibility over the entire planet.
If we look closely, this awareness burst in the early sixteenth century, precisely in 1521 when Magellan travelled around the terrestrial globe for the first time, proving empirically that the Earth is round, and that we can reach it from any point we are.
Initially, globalization took place in the form of Westernization of the world. Europe began the colonial and imperialist adventure of conquest and domination of all discovered and undiscovered lands, put at the service of European interests embodied in the desire for power that may well be translated as the will of unlimited enrichment, imposition of white culture, its political ways and its Christian religion.
From the victims of this process, this adventure was made under great violence, with genocides, ethnocide and ecocide. For most peoples, it implied trauma and tragedy whose consequences are felt to this day, even among us who have been colonized, introduced to slavery, and surrendered to the great imperialist powers.
Today we have to rescue the positive and essential sense of the word planetization, a much better word than globalization, because of its economic connotation. On April 22nd, 2009 the United Nations formalized the nomenclature Mother Earth to give it a sense of something alive that must be respected and revered as we do with our mothers. Pope Francisco reported the expression Common House to show the profound unity of the human species inhabiting the same common space.
This time is a step forward in the process of geo-genesis. We cannot go back and shut us down, as Trump intends, in our national boundaries with diminished consciousness. We have to adapt to this new step that the Earth has taken, this living super-organism, according to the Gaia thesis. We are at the moment of awareness and understanding of Earth. That is why we are the Earth that feels, thinks, loves, cares and venerates. We are the only beings of nature whose ethical mission is to take care of this sacred heritage, to make it a habitable home for us and for the whole living community.
We are not returning this call made by the Earth itself. Therefore, we must wake up and take this noble mission to build planetization.
