Windows on the world.

• Author: Gardner, Gary
• Position: GROUNDWORK - Ecology

A survey by the National Science Foundation and the European Commission in 2001 found that a quarter of Americans and a third of Europeans believed that the Sun revolves around the Earth. Galileo must have been apoplectic, given the price he paid--house arrest and condemnation in his final days--for advancing his view that the Sun is the center of our solar system. His assertion was not a mere detail of astronomy, of course, but challenged the established understanding of humanity's place in the cosmos.

Changing a worldview, it seems, is no inconsequential affair. This may turn out to be as true in the effort to build sustainable societies as it was for Galileo. Sustainable development requires changes on so many levels--from the way we eat and transport ourselves to the energy we use and the way we view nature--that it can be understood only with a fundamentally new window on reality. Worldviews encompass our basic assumptions about reality: how the world works, what matters and what does not, what is more and less important. They are powerful determinants of political and lifestyle choices. No major societal shift--including the shift to sustainable societies--takes place without a corresponding evolution in people's worldviews.

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Worldviews have shaped the way people address what historian of religions Huston Smith calls the three enduring human challenges: obtaining food and shelter (the nature problem); getting along with each other (the social problem), and relating to the total scheme of things (the religious problem). These challenges are present in every age, but their relative importance changes over time. The ancients gave primary attention to understanding their place in the cosmos--witness the temples and ceremonial sites that were the chief building projects of ancient civilizations. Modern societies have focused on mastering nature for human wellbeing, as construction of dams, airports, powerplants, and myriad other engineering projects attests. And emerging postmodern societies seem to value interconnectedness, as seen in the advance of everything from the extension of civil rights to women and racial minorities to networking technologies.

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In this schematic, sustainable development might be understood as a postmodern idea. It does not reject the modern era outright, but takes a critical stance toward the scientific worldview that emerged from the European Enlightenment. The...