Talk : Thurs 20 of April - 7 PM
Earth Day 2023: Symposium on Nature, the Sacred and Progressive Thinking
In Support of International Earth Day
Every year on April 22, Earth Day is celebrated to inspire awareness of and appreciation for our environment. It started 1970 in the USA and became designated as International Mother Earth Day by the UN in 2009. In New Acropolis we decided to commemorate this day internationally in 2021.
As the environmental crisis becomes more serious with every year, each Earth Day takes on a greater significance. Only a few weeks ago, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published yet another “final warning” from scientists in their report. Are we ever going to change our destructive behaviour? And why does it take us so long?
This evening will offer two talks that look at possible causes and solutions to this crisis.
Technology and Sustainability
In 1972 the ‘Club of Rome’ identified the problem of what it called the Limits to Growth: if we continue to grow in the way we have been doing – in population, industrialisation, resource use and pollution – the life of humanity on Earth will become unsustainable. 50 years later we have reached those limits, so we urgently need to find solutions. The problems may appear huge, but there is hope, although the solutions are not to be found in technology fixes alone. As the authors of the 30th anniversary of the publication of the Limits to Growth (in 2002) stated, it is the human factors above all which need to change, and these changes will then be followed by changes on the material level.
This presentation by electrical engineer Florimond Krins will examine these questions from different angles – technical and ethical, amongst others – and will consider what tools we need to use to build a better future for the Earth and humanity together.
Is the Ecological Crisis a Spiritual Crisis?
James Gustave Speth (a former dean at Yale university, environmental lawyer and U.S. Advisor on climate change) has been widely attributed with saying: “I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy. And he went on to say that “to deal with these issues we need a cultural and spiritual transformation – and we scientists do not know how to do that.”
This talk, presented by Sabine Leitner, director of New Acropolis in the UK, will highlight the moral, philosophical and spiritual dimensions of our environmental crisis and suggest ways in which we can all help to bring about the necessary paradigm shift.
Location: 19 Compton Terrace N1 2UN, next door to Union Chapel.
