Will Liz See Green Once The King Has Had His Say?

Dear Reader,

"While we have faced challenges before, this one is different. This time we join with all nations across the globe in a common endeavour. Using the great advances of science and our instinctive compassion to heal, we will succeed, and that success will belong to every one of us."

(The above statement was made by Queen Elzabeth II in 2020, in the first year of COVID-19. However, it is a statement that can equally apply to the issues of Climate Change and of how to obtain unity throughout the world.)

We are still experiencing in the UK and the Commonwealth the aftermath of the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, and also the beginning of the reign of her successor, Charles III. What has been astonishing, however, is the degree of warmth towards the late Queen and even an unexpected degree of welcome for the new King. The idea of the UK becoming a republic looks remote just at this moment.

What is quite astonishing for us in the UK is that the new King's entry is entwined almost in the same breath as the installation of Liz Truss as the new Prime Minister. Potentially, the two might seem to be on a collision course as the King is environmentally conscious while the PM is, well, conservative. 

However, the King has made it known that he will keep to the rule of the monarchy being constitutional in nature, meaning that he will not publicly state his own views on political issues. As head of state, he has the chance, though, of 'having a go' at the PM when they have their weekly private meetings! Those meetings could be very interesting. I would like to be a fly on that wall!

Whether the new Prime Minister will take the hint from any of the King's remarks we shall know only if she changes direction, but I rather think that she is a stubborn enough person to continue to think in terms of her own brand of quantitative politics. What is surely needed, however, is a move to policies based on qualitative science, even though they may not initially be popular.

The UN, however, is already raging that the world's powers are not doing enough to make a change toward ecologically-minded policies. The UN chief has recently said that the Earth is heading into an “uncharted territory of destruction”.

These warnings have long been made known and the voice of protest from those who know has got increasingly louder as the decades have passed. Yet here we are, at the 11th hour, still debating whether to re-open coal mines and whether to invest in fracking, combined with little attempt to change the consciousness of the public at large. Fracking companies are asking for a relaxation of the rules, and in a comparatively small and densely-populated country like the UK, that could mean trouble for anyone living close to a fracking site.

Politicians are famously known to be short-sighted but we appear, here, to be going backwards with the departure of Boris Johnson who, despite his faults, has a depth of intelligence that surpasses most of his political colleagues.

Let they (and us) be reminded by the content of this well-presented video, which is a fascinating talk by the well-known Austrian-born physicist and ecologist Fritjof Capra. He describes his immense understanding of sustainable policies through the eyes of modern science based on the four interconnected dimensions of life in Systems Theory: Biological, Cognitive, Social and Ecological. He emphasises, in particular, the new conception of the nature of mind and consciousness, which is one of the most radical philosophical implications of the systemic understanding of life. 

He goes on to describe the urgency of this new understanding for dealing with our global ecological crisis and protecting the continuation and flourishing of life on Earth. 

Dismissing the excessive importance attributed to the quantitive aspects of everyday politics such as GDP, he emphasises the qualitative for humanity to help itself and the environment to evolve into what is a new time, a time of finally emerging from the Cartesian Age. As he sums it up at the end of the video, "What we need now is political will and leadership". I would add "including the full cooperation of educational institutions".

Perhaps the key attribute of this comparatively new science is its recognition of the interconnectedness of everything in the universe. What it does not do is examine the origin of this unitarian field; it rather examines its unitarian truth only to support our approach on how we practically deal with the world's problems as they are today. It has not yet occurred to science that to achieve real success we need to acknowledge the Creator's presence and involvement in all this. After all, it was His idea!

The problems that exist were largely caused by a blunt understanding of Cartesian thought. Perhaps this was combined in the earlier stages with another error: man's interpretation of the Biblical notion of man having stewardship of the Earth as meaning to control its resources and extract from it without intelligent rhyme or reason, and certainly not love.

Man is now generally moving from such lower instincts to higher awareness or consciousness, and this evolution is what life is really all about.

The next step of science will be to acknowledge that Capra's four interconnected dimensions of life are essentially entwined with the Creator of the universe, the Source of all. All is One.

The outcome of this expansion in consciousness will - in the not too distant future - express itself in every human becoming fully aware that everyone and anything on and in this Earth comes from one source and is therefore interrelated. As far as human beings are concerned, all are brothers and sisters, and it will not be long before we truly wake up to that fact, not by just paying lip service to it or by loving those who we just happen to like or agree with.

Perhaps the passing of the Queen and the sense of unity of regard for her may be a big step towards that eventuality in that the coming together in the grief of so many will trigger greater empathy and the "instinctive compassion to heal" that the Queen referred to in 2020. And not just towards other humans but towards all life.

Thank you for reading this.