Explanatory Statement

„Probably the most accurate indicator of our Planet’s health is the number of the existing biological species. In the course of evolution the number of plant and animal species was gradually increasing... Today we are witnessing the biggest ever extinction of plant and animal life in the last 65 millions years.“
Brown, Lester R.

The 21st century offers us, for the first time, the possibility of closing an epoch of blind anti-natural expansion of Culture – or civilization as more commonly understood.

This is the first and probably also the last time that the human species will have had the opportunity to stop its undeclared war of planetary Culture against the Earth. It is high time to end the existential conflict that threatens our human future, and which the current predatory-oriented Culture cannot win. The adoption of a Constitution for the Earth will be a necessary step of Culture’s turning towards the Earth, an objective need legally to acknowledge and to ensure that the scope and form of global Culture are in harmony with Nature. It is essential to amend our current list of human rights and liberties with a recognition of the obligation of the global Culture to avoid the destruction of all natural existence and to co-operate with its own host system. The adoption of this Constitution is therefore in the primary public interest of humankind in this epoch of an environmentally threatened future.

No people from any nation, state or wider community can be moral, legal or political sovereigns without a fundamental biophile (life-supportive) reversal of Culture. They will be condemned to compete with each other for soil, unpolluted water and healthy food and to wage wars for sources of energy and for raw materials. They will live in misery and then die out on a poisoned and overheated planet due to their own folly. Human rights, liberties and sovereignty are conditioned by a healthy and unpolluted Earth.

The people of this planet can once again become a subject, in the philosophical sense, of their own species-specific existence only when they manage to adapt Culture to the Earth and overcome the nonsensical concentration of power and capital in the hands of a shallow layer of non-elected individuals. Our contemporary capitalism seems to be the last evolutionary stage in the development of anti-natural Culture.

Based on our biological knowledge of the complex molecular structures of all animate and inanimate systems we can finally see that, from the viewpoint of naturally-ordered Nature, our proud human Culture is a mere shack quickly built from the ruins of a gradually-demolished temple of Nature. We know today that this ‘shack’ is no more than a rushed do-it-yourself transformation of the subtle process-based architecture of the internally perfectly harmonized and dynamically balanced Earth. We can already discern that this is a selfish species-oriented temporary transformation which will not be preserved after the demise of humans, in contrast to the previously destroyed natural structures.

We promote the rights and rules of a natural renewal of the Planet Earth in reaction to the rapid technical expansion of the most developed part of mankind, the very part that fails to adapt the artificial system of Culture to our planet. Even though the activity of the human species has been controlled by an inborn aggressive adaptive strategy from the outset, nevertheless throughout most of our species’ existence this has been corrected by an equally inbred human humility and respect for the Earth.

This humility and respect for the Earth, which have been preserved in the remnants of primitive cultures, are, however, in our contemporary consumer society, hidden by the purposefully deformed power of science, technology and capital. Unfortunately, humility of a new type based on the recognition of the destructive force of the artificial technologies upon the fragile living systems cannot originate in the predatory spiritual paradigm.

Why Do We Need A Constitution For The Earth?

Modern Constitutions of national states, based on the spirit of Enlightenment optimism and the final defeat of the feudal system, fail to mention any rights of the Earth. All such traditional anthropocentric Constitutions invert the real order of values: they consider Nature to be ontically passive, value-neutral and legally insignificant. They consider Nature to be a world of human beings devised for the benefit of human beings. And human beings, in conformity with their natural character, instinctively appropriate such a world, subdue it and endow it with their own meanings and purposes. In such a world human beings establish and emancipate themselves and implement their own intentions in accordance with the anthropocentric laws. They are controlled by the aggressive adaptive strategy of Culture, which is a deployment of a part of their biological predisposition, and transform the world to their own immediate benefit. Boosted by the development of their limited rational powers, humans feel no respect or humility when facing the fact that they are merely a tiny branch of the tree of life; a tiny branch that cannot live independently and towards which both the stem of the tree, the planet Earth, and all the other spatial structures are utterly indifferent. In accordance with the European spiritual traditions, human beings do not recognise in Nature an older and wider subjectivity that the more limited human subjectivity must inevitably be subordinated to.

In adopting this Constitution for the Earth the Law will finally recognize both Nature and the biological potential of human beings. Through the acknowledgement of the superiority of the Earth to Culture and human subordination to the Earth, the law – anthropocentric since the time of ancient Greece – will clearly demonstrate to human beings that the time has come for a new biophile, life-supporting economics, politics and ways of life. It publicly declares that although human beings are not the rulers of all living things and our Culture is not more significant, important or complex than the world of living Nature, humans are still exceptional. Humans, who themselves created a notably developed anti-natural Culture, have come to realize their guilt in ravaging Nature and have found the courage to start a period of cultural evolution that will be sustainable, biophile and symbiotic with Nature.

Since this proposal for the Constitution for the Earth is understood to be a document superior to all the current anthropocentric Constitutions, the validity of these Constitutions will be preserved only with regard to obligations laid upon citizens, states and their bodies, and also with regard to the integrity of inhabited territories and as a part of international conventions and agreements. The newly-adopted Constitutions, which will be the foundations of biophile lawmaking, must respect the rights, creativity and results of the natural evolution of the Earth.

Ernst Haeckel, philosopher, biologist, and artist, known as German Darwin, was one of the first who already in 1860-1904 worked hard to prove that nature was a place of order, balance, and beauty – here an illustration from his book Art Forms of Nature.

Human Culture, quantitatively growing and prosperous, has become a dangerous non-biological tumour for the Earth due to the major differences in its structure and orientation. Even though it cannot eventually destroy the planetary organism of the Earth, it destroys its orderliness, disturbing the physical, chemical and biological balances that had come into existence in the course of natural evolution of the human biological species.

The undesirable growth of our technological and consumer culture, which has been uncontrollably spreading all over the Earth, is, unfortunately, understood by most contemporary people, politicians and the law only positively as a means of growth in wealth, freedom and improvement in human living conditions. Without the aid of an evolutionary ontological theory the public can hardly understand the fact that the blind expansion of Culture results in the declining natural orderliness of the Earth and risks destroying its habitability.

The legal system must therefore publicly declare that under conditions in which the whole of the Universe is governed by the law of mass and energy preservation but not by a law of orderliness (information) preservation, the terrestrial sophisticated cultural structures can originate only by means of transforming (breaking up) the older natural structures.

The ‘Subjectivity’ Of The Earth

As mentioned above, contemporary legal systems acknowledge ethnic, state and transnational artificial cultural ‘subjectivity’ as well as entrepreneurial, financial and military ‘subjectivity’. This fact itself confirms the theoretically established fact that subjectivity is the ability of open non-linear systems to produce and maintain their highly organized structures. In the case of Nature, this means that the terrestrial life systems are active and open to mass, energy and information. They perceive their environment, they have their own evolution and memory, they assert themselves and they are self-creating and self-regulating. Acknowledgement of legal ‘subjectivity’ for the Earth does not involve the assumption that the Earth has a conscience or that it acts morally, legally or politically. It is sufficient to recognize that the Earth gave birth to both the biosphere and human beings, that it feeds and reproduces human beings and that today – due to having been damaged by Culture – it also threatens those very same human beings. Another sufficient reason to acknowledge the subjectivity of Earth is that our partial and temporary human and cultural subjectivity is derived from the Earth’s subjectivity. But as with the impersonal cultural subjects, so too the legal subjectivity of Earth can only be defended by her speech-endowed representatives.

It is true that ‘subjectivity’ is not determined by human decisions but by reality itself. Every subjectivity is demonstrated outwards by means of a measurable ability of the ontical creativity. And if the temporarily existing globalized Culture is a demonstration of human and cultural subjectivity then the long-present biosphere is an analogous demonstration of the superior subjectivity of the Earth. A live and highly-organized system is therefore an indisputable manifestation of the Earth’s subjectivity, which includes human beings as a biological species endowed with their own limited and temporary subjectivity.

A legal guarantee for the subjectivity of the Earth is simultaneously both a direct and an indirect rejection of the currently harmful anthropocentrism. It shows that the conflict between Nature and Culture, the escalation of which would obviously never have occurred without the predatory orientation of intellectual culture, is reliable proof of the inadequacy of all forms of attempted human superiority. The currently prevailing anthropocentric vision of the world is incorrect, not only in its details and in its specific arguments, but also in its deepest underlying principles, in its entirety. And that is true even when it surrenders to give a definition of an explicit concept of reality. Anthropocentrism, in fact, contrary to the understanding of most philosophers, lawyers and policy-makers, does not need any explicit concept of reality. It imposes itself through the force of its own biological foundation in the conservative human constitution – in the human genome.

In the past lawmakers, beginning with Jefferson in 1776, have declared the people of their respective countries to be the final sovereign, not subject to anyone or anything else, without taking into account the absolute biological subordination of the human species to the Earth. Even though the liberating effects of statements, such as the American Declaration of Indepen-dence, are apparent – these statements were meant to prevent the return of medieval monarchies – we have to point out their historical limitations. A concept claiming that a people is the highest sovereign of a particular culture could have applied only in a period before humanity had created the anti-natural global economy and technosphere and before these artificial cultural ‘subjectivities’ started to threaten the natural balance and renewal of the planet Earth.

If we can attribute subjectivity, i.e. activity, cognition, decision-making and ontical creativity to individuals or social institutions, how can we deny it to a system that spontaneously created life, humans and the prerequisites for human subjectivity in the first place? How can we deny it to a system which is more autonomous and powerful than global Culture and which will eventually decide its destiny? And if we agree that the contemporary globalized Culture and technosphere are objective external manifestations of the human species’ subjectivity, what prevents us from accepting the idea outlined above that the biosphere, including human beings, is an analogous external manifestation of the Earth’s subjectivity? The expediency characterizing Culture is not positioned higher than spontaneity, which also characterizes Culture and which has reliably controlled and managed natural evolution. The very spontaneity, which reliably controls the natural evolution, can optimize Culture, too, if Culture is preset in a spiritually-biophile way.

Modification Of The Predatory Paradigm

The conservative human genome is not the only cause of the contemporary predatory orientation of Culture. The socio-cultural cause of this setting, a cause that we can change – unlike the human genome – is the once adopted intellectual predatory paradigm. This paradigm is to be thought of as an ideological mixture of geometrical, mathematical and philosophical abstractions that Greek philosophy and science once successfully used to replace existence with thinking: this prevented them from recognizing the hardly distinguishable character and unity of life with inanimate entities and resulted in their failure to understand the creativity, balance and orderliness of terrestrial existence. Learning about the Earth has subsequently been, for many centuries, subjected to the infectious magic of technological terms in theoretical language, which still perplex the pupils and students of most schools and other educational institutions.

Even though the foundations of this hidden spiritual paradigm of Culture occurred as early as the era of Ancient Greece, it is only today – 2,500 years later – that we have finally come to realize the scope of the mental illusion arising from the substitution of the ontically-creative and subtly-ordered Nature with the conceptual ideals of classical science. And this very error, which was once certainly understandable, is bringing our highly-sophisticated technical Culture to the brink of its own destruction. It turns out that Nature does not need even the contemporary state-of-the-art expertise of natural science, that it is self-sustaining and independent of human knowledge. It is Culture that will need, for its own preservation, an adequate scientific interpretation relieved of the misrepresenting optics of the predatory paradigm.

The predatory intellectual paradigm, developed and supported by modern Galilean-Newtonian science, has become the ideological support of the contemporary anthropocentric Constitutions, a general framework for what we may call ‘predatory legislation’. Until now this intellectual paradigm has controlled politics, entrepreneurship, the media and even the education systems in two ways. First, in the form of an artificial cultural reality it causes the destruction of the evolution-created animate and inanimate systems of the Earth. Second, in education and the media it asserts itself exactly like any other ideology – it presents people with an anthropocentrically distorted interpretation of Nature. Not only schools, but especially the mass media – nowadays controlled by large corporations – insinuate to the people in a rather sophisticated way that they should see timber instead of a forest, mineral and energy resources instead of inanimate nature and agricultural and industrial production of a globalized Culture instead of the creative Earth.

The hidden predatory foundations of Culture, which used to be a prerequisite for its expansion, are driving it nowadays towards its own destruction. If we want to preserve the human species on the Earth while also preserving the other biological species and inanimate structures essential to its existence, we will have to leave behind the aggressive strategy and give free passage to the unique creativity of the Earth.

Seemingly contrary to the tenets of contemporary technical progress we find that we depend on a healthy, unpolluted Earth with every breath we take in, every drop of water we drink and every morsel of food we eat. Because of this, we have to rehabilitate the Earth; we have to make it sacred again, indeed we have to return to worship of it, as the ancients did. Our belief in supernatural existence should return to identifying itself once again with belief in natural existence, to the now-overlooked subjectivity of the Earth, which exceeds limited human and cultural subjectivity and which we therefore have no right to regulate and dominate in the way we do.

The Earth

  1. The Earth is the only possible host system for both human beings and human Culture. The Earth, in other words, is not merely a construction material or a source of energy or a territory or a food source. Nor is it a warehouse for Culture’s technological waste. The Earth is a complex form of activity oriented in a biophile manner; it is the oldest, widest and most powerful form of planetary subjectivity. It houses human beings and not only makes possible the temporary and species-limited human subjectivity but is also able sustainably to tolerate an appropriately large cultural subjectivity that is unthreatening to both humans and the Earth.
  2. Livfe systems on the Earth contain large amounts of natural information inscribed in the language of nucleic acids. The dying-out of biological species and the depletion of ores, precious soils and fossil fuels caused by Culture are therefore not only an irreversible loss to Nature’s evolutionary orderliness but also an irreplaceable loss to Culture’s information. Culture, which has come into existence through human activity and which is based only on incomplete and purposeful epigenetic (sensory-neuronal) human information read from the surfaces of natural structures, masters the objectified and written natural information only with great difficulty. It strives, however, to decipher and understand it ever better using natural sciences.
  3. The cosmic substance (the elements of the periodic table), from which gravitation once baked the hot Earth, is contained not only in our outer environment: it is in every one of us as well. The chemical elements of this substance, structurally built into our bodies, come from extinct stars and after our death we shall return them back to the planet, exactly like all other life systems. On the one hand we are one of the many species of the planet Earth which originated through evolution and are environmentally well-harmonized. On the other hand we are an exceptional species, the only one ever to have created a Culture; humans, in accordance with the predispositions of their own genome based on different neuronal information, have ignited another evolution – Cultural evolution opposing Nature.
  4. Natural evolution also tests the success of the biological evolutionary construction of humans. This test is mainly an indirect one, however; it is performed by means of testing the compatibility of human creations (both the impersonal body and the Cultural functions) with Nature. A Cultural system that exceeds a notional limit of admissible stress exerted on the Earth and humans as the natural systems, a Cultural system that is too extensive and fatally damaging to Nature, will inevitably cease to exist, together with the humans themselves, notwithstanding their level of technical and information development.
  5. At an ideological level, too, we have to return to the Earth what modern science, in developing the predatory paradigm, has taken away from it: superiority, creativity, memory and subjectivity. Even though the Earth cannot be either the reason for the existence of the Universe or the target of its divergent evolution, we have to acknowledge its uniqueness. This uniqueness is not based on an elusive location at the centre of the Universe but on something we as a species have been overlooking: the achieved level of life’s natural development, a delicate molecular orderliness and a balance between inanimate and animate systems.
  6. The Earth, the highest creative subjectivity, the true mother or ‘wise evolutionary mother’ of all life systems, has its own irreversible history in time. As a part of the Universe, the evolution of which is not in doubt, the Nature of the Earth is unique in the sense that its spatially insignificant position has been connected with the precariously narrow band of conditions that have made possible the origins of life and its sufficiently long, never quite interrupted, evolution. This development is now being interrupted in an unprecedented way by the expansion of the anti-natural technical Culture.
  7. The biosphere of the Earth is a natural continuation of the abiotic cosmic evolution; it has developed along with it because the Universe represents its wider evolutionary framework. It is a large dissipative structure with subjectivity as one of its characteristics, and the structure is nurtured by solar energy. This energy, together with unique physical conditions and the presence of suitable abiotic elements made it possible for life on the Earth to develop from its initial forms (bacteria) all the way to the current level of development – human beings and the biosphere of the Quaternary period. The biosphere of our planet structurally enriches the terrestrial abiotic environment and as a result the Earth as a whole is an ingeniously arranged organism with internal constitutive information.
  8. Life on the Earth is, we may say, a long-term experiment of universal evolution realized in a laboratory called Earth. It is therefore rather bold of us that in less than half the time of this experiment’s duration our predatory Culture has disturbingly interfered with the process: using its anti-natural orientation, which as we argue will now have to be modified, and without any restraints, it is destroying its most complex products and has seriously disturbed the integrity of the planetary ecosystem. It is astoundingly impertinent, too, if we remember that the evolutionary period of the biosphere is counted in billions of years while the average period of existence for a biological species, including the human species, does not exceed a few million years. What is more, we do not even know what stage of the ‘life path’ of our species our contemporary anti-natural Culture has now reached.
  1. The splendid, admirably arranged and exquisitely balanced system of terrestrial life must not be further damaged, for two main reasons. Firstly, Culture – the product and means of expansion of a single biological species – did not create the natural structures; people simply do not understand either their orderliness or their functions within the evolutionary process of the biosphere. Secondly, Culture existentially depends on a long-term balance between the animate and inanimate environments of the Earth. Only by means of the natural biological reproduction of humans and only as a result of human non-biological activities can Culture, for a certain period, exist as a temporary, differently-designed sub-system of the planet, as its notional artificial tumour, as it were.
  2. Since solar radiation has been the primary energy source for the existence, reproduction and development of terrestrial animate systems, their organizational and functional complexity has grown gradually as a result of the sufficiently long exposure of the Earth to sunshine. It has grown at a rate which could probably not have been higher because it was related, on the one hand, to the limited magnitude of the supply of radiation energy and the high reliability of the transfer of genetic information and, on the other hand, to the organizational structure achieved by life systems.
  3. For this reason, today’s life organisms are an important record of the development of the whole biosphere. As open systems with internal information they are both indirect and direct records of the spontaneous constitutive function of natural activity and time. In this way time and activity have not only became objectified, they have also engraved the information into their specific structures. The evolutionary value of life organisms is therefore directly proportional to the impossibility of repeating the elapsed time. This inexpressible value is closely linked with the fact that it came into existence spontaneously, under conditions that do not exist any more and that, if we destroy it, will never be created again either by natural or by cultural evolution.
  4. Acknowledgement of the Earth’s uniqueness and its subjectivity completely independent of human beings implies the need for new civil and political approaches. This same acknowledgement obliges us to use our knowledge about the irreplaceable value of the Earth in order to save not only the currently existing forms of life but also human beings and their Culture. It obliges us, in fact, to strive for a biophile transformation of our contemporary unsustainable predatory Culture. Our anthropocentric rationality, which prided itself first on the ontological superiority of humans and later on their individual freedoms, rights of ownership and other ‘inalienable rights’, will be forced to admit that it has been unaware of the fact that it is life that is actually the inalienable thing, whose destiny is interconnected with human freedom, rights of ownership and other human ‘rights’. And ‘human rights’, as we can see today, are limited too by a new obligation of Culture towards Nature: the imperative need to preserve the Earth’s habitability.

Culture

  1. Culture is a human creation in its entirety. It is a process and a result of human non-biological activity. Natural evolution, which has created terrestrial nature including humans, neither created Culture nor included it organically into its own system. This is because Culture is an artificial system with a different constitutive information (memory) than the one used by Nature.
  2. The memory content of Culture does not consist of human, phylogenetically-originated, genetic information, which integrates human beings into the system of the biosphere at the molecular level. The collective Cultural memory consists of sensory-neuronal information of our own biological species, the contents of which are mostly macroscopic, and which conceptually integrate Culture approximately at the phenotype level.
  3. Culture has been shaped in a highly naturally-ordered world; it has been developed through the activity of a single biological species, which does not know or appreciate either the order or the evolutionary wisdom of Nature. Inappropriately socio-culturally focused and over-extended human activity can have dangerous consequences not only for Culture but also for human beings themselves. The system of Culture is forever increasing its relative independence, asserting its anti-natural orientation, and due to its exploitation of additional energy it even steals environmental niches from other life systems, exterminating them and dangerously violating the natural order.
  4. A natural order had preceded human beings in time just as it preceded any Cultural order. Culture, as a differently ontically-ordered reality, cannot restructure the naturally ordered surface of the Earth without destroying the natural ecosystems, without damaging the rare evolutionary-created formations. The system of Culture, of which the intellectual culture encoded by ethnic languages is an information sub-system, is unable to utilize the structurally highly objective genetic information of human beings, which is constitutive only from a species-biological viewpoint and which is unable to register the relatively short residence of humans within their Culture.
  5. From its very inception Culture has had to build on its own socio-cultural information, which is alien to Nature both due to its principle and to its means of encoding. The socio-cultural information may be constituted through modification of human sensory-neuronal cognition, but since it originated only within Culture, it is pre-set not only biologically but also socio-culturally and it can therefore become a bearer of the impersonal expansive interests of the artificial Cultural system. In comparison to the subtle and highly objective phylogenetic cognition, the human ontogenetic cognition is not only more superficial, coarser and more approximate but also purposeful and species-selfish. This is one of the reasons why material culture, including technology, has been constituted as an artificial system built up from the broken-down structures of the Earth, as a foreign body with an anti-natural structure, orientation and regime.
  6. In comparison to the biosphere the orderliness of Culture is not only structurally different and non-biotically oriented. It is also noticeably unified: it tends readily to objectify the available socio-cultural information and to expand its own environmental niche. Even though Culture grows from a single phylogenetic line of (human) biotic evolution, it ‘builds’ from materials coming from almost all the natural structures of the Earth. Since Culture objectifies different information about the outside world, it creates a different kind of orderliness. In particular, the high input of supplementary energy from fossil fuels and the strong economic integration decrease its ability to adapt both to the animate and to the inanimate environments of the Earth; they inhibit its ability of continual optimization by means of negative feedback from the surroundings. Culture has also disrupted the natural dynamic disequilibrium between animate and inanimate structures since the Industrial Revolution, due to the fact that it has been growing many times faster than the biosphere, and that it has been unable to reach its climax. The rate at which bio-diversity has been shrinking has therefore reached the highest level since the natural disaster at the end of the Mesozoic period, which wiped out the dinosaurs and ushered in the age of mammals.
  7. One piece of poetic justice involving the expansion of Culture consists in the fact that even humans, who have themselves caused this ‘allergic reaction’ of the biosphere, are subject to the uncompromising logic of preservation of its own integrity. Humans have become the endangered species. It is the first time in their history that human beings (and their Culture) are endangered at a global level by the very environment that once made their appearance on the Earth possible. It is to be hoped that the politicians, currently preoccupied mainly with the preservation of power, economic growth and entrepreneurial or consumer freedoms, will soon be forced to respect the value and the rights of the Earth and to make decisions under the pressure of a threatened human future.
  8. The process of overcoming the current opposition between Culture and Nature cannot leave aside the question of what the relationship is between the character of contemporary Culture on one hand and human beings and their genetic determination on the other, nor what the relationship is between Culture and the contents of the social-cultural information and the predatory spiritual paradigm that was once adopted and later developed by European culture. It is evident that the direct link to humans as a biological species is determined by the special structure of the human body and the human psyche, by the inborn aggressive adaptive strategy used by humans as a species. The biological non-specialization of human beings, which is the cause of the universality of human interests, makes their external environment not only the focus of satisfying their vital needs, cognition and assessment but also the focus of ownership and consumption. Human beings as a species have never perceived their environment as simply something to enjoy. They have used it to exploit the world, to adapt aggressively to their environment and to build their external non-biological body – Culture.
  1. Since Culture is a system with its own internal information, the conflict between Culture and Nature is causally related to the contents and the role of intellectual Culture. It is this intellectual Culture which, as the internal information of the Cultural system – its notional cultural genome – is reproducing the form of our contemporary anti-natural Culture. A change in its hidden predatory pre-setting, a biophile change in the ‘cultural genome’, is therefore necessarily the key element in the mitigation and resolution of the present crisis. If we want to change a system containing internal information (memory), we have to change its information, its memory – simply because the old pre-setting and the old constitutive information have the ability to undo even our intentional phenotype-based modifications of the system.
  2. The Cultural system, on the one hand, includes a strictly information-prescribed orderliness (techniques, structures, consumer objects, and so on) but as an aggregate that has been developing through blind evolution it cannot itself be a strictly information-prescribed system. Despite the fact that it, too, originated by means of succession, it significantly differs from natural ecosystems. Natural ecosystems that originate from populations of strictly information-ordered animate systems are integrated by the biophile setting of natural terrestrial evolution, not by any special ecosystem information. The artificial system of Culture which, humans and some other organisms apart, includes the strictly information-prescribed elements of our technical and material culture must also be integrated – by means of human activity, of course – by the free constitutive information, the dispersed intellectual culture. And this dispersed spiritual culture, as a spiritual guarantor of our biological species’ interests and as a subsystem open to information changes, represents a hope that our contemporary anti-natural Culture can be transformed in a biophile way – that it can be naturalized.
  3. The cognitive component of the human psyche, which has been the fastest-developing part of human beings within the evolution of our species and which we rely upon to continue enhancing our objective store of knowledge about the world, has never been and is still not self-reliant. Despite the fact that originally it was only an executive organ of the human body and psyche, it has become an analogous organ of the anti-natural demands of Culture. It has been governed by the hidden predatory spiritual pre-setting of Culture for many centuries. This is the reason why we keep finding out that our interpretations, values and regulations are coloured by our interests: not only by individual and group interests, as is generally acknowledged, but also by more generally human and species-selfish hidden interests that are never spoken about.
  4. Scientific conceptual cognition, which nowadays strictly describes the elements of the highly-sophisticated technology and social material culture, fails to appreciate Nature in its fascinating orderliness, ontical creativity and complexity. Its prejudices have been pre-set, not only by the above-mentioned predatory spiritual paradigm but also, much earlier, in the pre-scientific understanding of the world, by common language and cognition. As hominids and as the first people, as hunters and gatherers, we had to learn, encode meanings by language and interpret the world in a species-coloured way in order to be able to survive with our special biological endowment. This world was, for us, what our conservative biological constitution was able to transmit to us at that particular period of time, and what we were able to understand of the world thanks to the culture of that period. And since we were a priori evolutionarily adapted to external reality by means of our organism and genome, we never in the past needed to know what Nature and life were like, what Culture was like and what the place of Culture was within Nature. Such knowledge, a theoretical model of the artificial purposeful ‘subjectivity’ of Culture and of the wider natural subjectivity of Nature, is needed only today.
  5. The anti-natural system of Culture originated in the essence of the human constitution; it originated spontaneously and its hidden spiritual base has crystallized and solidified by selecting out partial cultures. The predatory intellectual paradigm has therefore not only become internally objectified, but has also become reflected in the field of law and politics, resulting in the deformation of human ontogenesis, upbringing and education. For this reason the current system of Culture is able ‘actively to defend’ itself against the acceptance of an environmentally-positive information change. Its resistance to the biophile socio-cultural orientation resembles an inter-species information barrier or the immunity system of an organism. Since the contemporary system of Culture did not originate by means of the biophile Cultural information objectification, its human, organizational and material components ignore it. Humans, who uncritically accept the anti-natural Culture, refuse to listen to the arguments for a biophile change: they do not understand its meaning for the future, its ethos and capacity for self-preservation.
  6. Hence the planetary solution to this crisis, which cannot grow out of the human constitution alone but must also grow from a philosophical recognition of its hidden spiritual roots, has first to be prepared by means of high-level theory. A positive environmental transformation of the existentially-threatened Culture by means of its biophile paradigm, and by means of the law as a guarantor of the biophile constitutive information, represents a historically unprecedented attempt on the part of humanity to end the unrestrained period of the anti-natural evolution of Culture. Hope in the success of this attempt can be based partly on the fact that the conditions for environmental change have in fact spontaneously developed due to the devastating growth of our contemporary anti-natural Culture. Unfortunately, this crisis has to deepen even further and the habitability of the Earth has to become threatened in yet more complicated ways for the top-level political powers to accept the need for such decisive change the need for which is already dimly perceived by ordinary people as a kind of vague disappointment or as a non-specific threat.

Human Beings

  1. Human beings, as a biological species creating Culture, are not the immediate systemic cause of the current crisis of civilization. It is the human-generated and, later, the Culture-itself-shaped process of Cultural evolution. The systemic cause of our present environmental crisis consists in the fundamental conflict between the Cultural system and the Earth – the host system of Culture. The core of their conflict resides in the spontaneous predatory expansion of Culture resulting in the decline and destruction of natural existence.
  2. The human body, independently of the level of Culture’s development, remains biologically stable and homogeneous in its achieved level of natural terrestrial evolution in the part of the world where it originated. Humans left their native Africa and occupied the other continents as a species already fully formed by Nature. For this reason, when searching for the aetiology of, diagnosis of and suitable therapy for the Culture-damaged ecosystem of the Earth, it is the law that should not only protect the interests of the human species but also, crucially, promote the preservation of an older and more fundamental natural existence, the neglected integrity of the planet. So it would be no paradox if our law, while defending human interests, took care of the interests of terrestrial Nature, quite contrary to the anthropocentric tradition. Like a physician at the bed of a sick person, the law, in this critical situation of the Earth, has to take care of the destiny of natural existence; it has, in short, to prevent its unnecessary and catastrophic destruction.
  3. All biological research has confirmed that anatomically modern humans – Cro-Magnon man – are a standard zoological species, originating by chance. Humans are large vertebrates belonging to the mammal class, the primate order and the hominidae family. Yet they are a young species, which, when measured by geological time, has appeared only in the last seconds of the imaginary clock depicting the whole period of life’s existence on Earth – a period which is estimated to be rather more than three and a half billion years. For the first three billion years the Earth was inhabited only by bacteria and therefore, if the Earth belongs to anyone, it belongs to bacteria. Contemporary humans should know that their healthy bodies are actually biomes, each containing more bacterial cells then their own somatic cells (approximately 14).
  4. Human beings are therefore a very late product of natural biotic evolution, along with many other animals. And since the existence their species is similarly biologically limited, humans are mortal in two senses of the word – as individuals and as a species. This is because species in the biosphere originate spontaneously (and in contrast to the lengths of their existence also rather quickly) and after a period of species prosperity they also spontaneously (and also quite quickly) disappear. Species do not significantly evolve in the course of their species existence. There currently exists, therefore, only a small proportion of biological species that have been created by the biosphere in the course of its evolution. The ratio between those that still exist and those that have become extinct is about 1:1,000.
  5. Human beings are a part of the biosphere and they are linked to it through many functional relationships – including those of substance, energy and information. They are a special biological species not only due to their morphology and physiology but, more especially, due to their psyche – their behaviour. The human psyche, which controls the behaviour of humans, is not merely a biological supplement to the human body. The system of Culture which humans have succeeded in creating has become a new developmental impulse for the human psyche. Nowadays, therefore, the average psyche exceeds the narrow needs of the human organism and relative to those needs it is hypertrophied, widely extended and even partly distorted by Culture.
  6. Our erect stature, our multi-colour stereoscopic vision and our hands, freed from walking, play an exceptionally important role in the uniqueness of humans as a species. The tops of trees in African tropical forests were the natural homes of our human ancestors and humans failed to find such a home in the bushy savannahs after their retreat from the tropical forests. They were forced to build and protect their rudimentary homes and their children from beasts of prey on the bare soil; they had to build fences and search for ever-more-sophisticated means of sustenance. Their large and powerful brains developed as an adaptation to this forced way of life. The human psyche, in general, is shaped not only in the early phases of human ontogenesis, the so-called ‘sensitive period’, but also continuously by the influence of specific cultures. Apart from its plasticity, which applies to the evolutionary youngest cognitive processes and which makes it possible for people to continue learning for almost all of their lives, the human psyche demonstrates a high level of structural conservativeness. It is characterized by the stability of some of its types of response and emotional functions, which are located in the brain stem.
  7. The Law can also contribute to an appropriate formative shaping of human beings. The relationship between humans and the world can no longer be understood only intellectually and morally, in other words without understanding the unity between human beings as animals and the entire abiotic and biotic environments of the Earth. Even the functional integration of human beings into Nature, however, cannot begin to explain the entire truth about human nature. The life manifestations and motivations of humans are mostly characterized by Culture, the impersonal external body, which they have created through their activities, which determines them and which they still insist upon using for their excessively aggressive ‘adaptation’ to the natural environment. It does not appear, though, that any rules for this Cultural way of life are stored in the conservative human genome. The biologically-determined human nature is a conservative one.
  1. The fact that humans create an artificial and temporarily-existing Culture, which is a reality ontically lower than Nature, purposefully organized and therefore locally stronger and more destructive towards the biosphere, need not be perceived altogether negatively. On the contrary – this phenomenon gives social scientists, the lawyers and politicians an opportunity to warn the public of the potential danger. Only if we do nothing, only if we surrender our gift of critical philosophical rationality which allows us to condemn and reject the predatory paradigm, only if we surrender the need to transform the global anti-natural Culture in a biophile way, then will we simply have nothing left to do but to wait for the coming end of both human beings and Culture.
  2. With regard to an acknowledgement of the superior legal subjectivity of the Earth, it is possible intelligibly to define what many people intuitively feel and what is also in compliance with specialist scientific knowledge. Firstly, we live in a cold, vast and (towards the Earth) entirely indifferent Universe, and we may create our temporary Culture only owing to the flawless biological reproduction of the somatic and mental structures of human beings – this, to repeat and underline the point, is effectively owing to the integrity, diversity and functional unity of the biosphere. Secondly, the slow evolutionary modifications of the human organism (once harmonized with the slow evolution of the biosphere) significantly lag behind the fast cultural modifications of the external environment. The rapid evolution of the human brain (neo-cortex) during anthropogenesis evidently created favourable conditions for its plasticity during ontogenesis, too (within the process of an individual’s formation by Culture), but the same does not apply to the other biological structures of the human body: all other structures of our organism lack this plasticity.
  3. Legal regulation of human activities at a global level must be anticipative of their destructive potential. The law has never had to deal with this kind of issue in a complex way, and can no longer limit itself only to questions such as ‘What is an abstractly-conceived human being and what is his/her relationship with ownership, liberty, other people and other ethnic groups?’ For the first time in history, the law has to examine also what sort of ontical entities the Earth, Culture and the human species are. It must focus on the following question: ‘What ontic structure should Culture have and to what extent could it grow in order to be able to reproduce and protect humans and simultaneously not to harm the life, the activities and the high level of diversity (bio-diversity) on which humans existentially depend?’.
  4. Any deeper understanding of human rights, liberty and subjectivity is bound up with a vision of an ontological image of the world without humans. The world originated and was spontaneously ontically creative long before the appearance of humans. Human beings, products of the Earth, its temporarily live branch, have remained, as has their Culture, subordinate to the Earth. Any true image of humans, though, is also bound up with an adequate understanding of the world with humans in it. It is bound up with a recognition of the fact that our biological species creates Culture, the expansion of which irreversibly destroys the Nature that humans did not create. And it is this destructive ontical process that human beings are responsible for as a species in a – so far – undefined way. As a species, humans are not responsible for the Nature they have not created and which they are fully subordinated to: humans are responsible for Culture, their own creation, which they use to destroy the Earth irreversible.
  5. Even if we take into account the fact that social and economic sub-systems also acquire their own artificial ‘subjectivities’, that they spontaneously structure and assert themselves, it might seem that within the predatory intellectual paradigm – and the growing ‘subjectivity’ of global capital is a good example – they cannot assert any prospective human-species interests. More likely, however, it is the other way round. These economic sub-systems increasingly represent the interests of their owners and top management teams while only pretending to the general human interest. These ‘subjectivities’ have been content, so far, to place emphasis upon the abstractly-defined ‘human rights’ but not upon any specifically-defined ‘rights of the Earth’ or upon the need for global Culture to subordinate itself to the planet.
  6. Since it is only human beings who create Culture, its artificial system lives and dies with human existence, with human non-biological activity. Yet humans are not mortal only as individuals or as a species. The human-species creation – Culture – is also mortal, it dies without the presence of humans. And the very mortality of Culture is the most convincing evidence of the falseness of the opinion that Culture is a mere continuation of natural evolution through other means. And since Culture has its own intrinsic integrity, its own anti-entropic barrier (the intellectual culture) it is independent both of humans and of Nature; on the other hand, however, it is also partly independent, relatively ontically independent. This relative independence of Culture does not mean, though, that humans are defined and dragged along by Culture, that they are slavishly dependent upon it. On the contrary, helped by the contributions of Philosophy, Law and Politics humans can change the once-entered-upon predatory intellectual orientation of Culture. Human beings can put up strong resistance to the once successful, but nowadays demonstrably self-destructive, strategy of their Culture.