Thread by @SteB777

I want to briefly support and explain this statement.

All indigenous cultures I'm aware of, see people as being sustained by Mother Earth, their term for the collective natural processes we call nature.

Modern Western culture appears to see the natural environment, as just a random collection of commodities for humans to exploit for profit. With no connection, and little connection to us, unless we are exploiting them for profit. It is a very anti-systems view of the world, with no interconnection, and no interdependence.

It is possible for a person from modern Western culture, to through science, and intellectually, see the world as interconnected ecosystems. However, this understanding has only really come about in the last hundred years, and then only by a few. This understanding didn't come about all of a sudden and the modern understanding of ecosystems is quite recent, and is not widely understood.

The scientific ecosystem understanding of life on Earth, really is quite apart from the general cultural world view of modern Western culture, and there is a very large proportion, of the population, perhaps the majority, who have the old Western view, of nature, as something detached from humanity, and not necessary for our survival.

In fact, even in the scientifically literate proportion of the public, which is no more than about 15% of the population, only a very small proportion of them, are ecologically literate. The degree of insight varies, but I would guess it is not more than 2% of the total population, and most of them have quite a shallow understanding.

I think it would be fair to sum it up, by saying 99% of the population i.e. the public, don't have much insight into how natural ecosystems and biodiversity sustain us. Of course, the proportion who would accept we are sustained by natural systems is much larger than this. But if you were to ask those people, to explain how natural ecosystems sustain us, most would be struggling.

This is why I contend, that there is so little understanding of how biodiversity loss, and ecosystem collapse, is such a direct threat to us.
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https://x.com/SteB777/status/2018757684980301848

It is highly likely that when climate change was first explained to Margaret Thatcher, most probably by Sir Crispin Tickell, that Thatcher failed to understand what climate even was, even though she was a trained scientist (chemistry). The way weather patterns over time, have an average collective presence, we call climate, is a very hard concept for people to understand, unless they are well versed in system theory and how systems operate.

But this is the thing, if climate is a very difficult concept to grasp, for even those with extensive scientific training, then ecosystems are vastly harder to understand, as they have a demonstrable complexity, that is many orders of magnitude, more complex than climate and weather, which is quite simple compared to ecosystem dynamics.

This is why the intelligence services report, into the threat that biodiversity loss, and ecological collapse, poses to the UK, and to the whole world, which @GreenRupertRead has been highlighting, just flies right over the top of most people's heads. If you have no innate concept that we're entirely sustained by natural systems, you certainly won't be able to get your head around how biodiversity and natural ecosystems are collapsing, and what relevance this is, to us.
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