This map, Stargazers and Gravediggers, traces the story of our pilgrimage through time, along the widening chasm between people and the natural world. It’s about the need to look beyond your own truth, to celebrate our bond with this living planet, and in so doing, to restore a relationship with the earth.
On the left-hand side of the map, we see nature depicted, and on the right, human culture. We look first at nature, the truth or origin of all living and non-living things, from atoms and energy to earthly organisms like plants, animals, and people. But of course everything is nature in the end, as much as it may seem that people and planet are growing farther and farther apart.
The right side of the map depicts culture – what people create and what humanity chooses to honor: the paradigms, institutions, symbols, and constructs that profess the nature and meaning of life and our purpose here. Over time, they form a kaleidoscope of perspectives on the nature, life, or truth found on the other side. The facades of the towers show cultural differences in findings and interpretation, driven by religion, philosophy, science, or economics.
The map is also a timeline. We start with the origins of our species, on the map’s distant horizon. For a long time, there was no distinction between people and nature. The world was still free of symbols and interpretations; nothing meant more or less than itself. As soon as we started to tell each other stories, all natural phenomena – the trees, the animals, the wind, the moon – got a soul and a voice. Into these stories, our ancestors wove their deep familiarity with their world.
But once people settled in great numbers on the fertile land between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, everything changed. We went from hunter-gatherers to organized farmers. We developed new stories to help hold these larger communities together. These stories were recorded in symbols and text, made manifest in vast architectures, codified in law, and imposed by force.
In these new stories, people became the main characters and nature lost its voice. Nature was now set in opposition to humankind and flattened into a lifeless backdrop, obscured into a mystery to solve, or reduced to raw materials for meeting human needs.
What you see always depends on your vantage point. As we move through time, toward the foreground of the map, humanity acquires one new insight after another and gains greater perspective on reality. In the distance, we can make out three towers. The oldest is the tower of Judaism, where light from the other side casts a six-pointed shadow onto the facade. The next tower symbolizes Christianity, where light makes the sign of the cross, visible through a recess high on the wall. The third tower represents Islam, where believers don’t look to symbols, but gaze directly into the light.
The cultural creations that people erect often mirror the natural world. There are arches and whole floor plans that follow the golden ratio, and cathedrals that stretch to the heavens, like ancient trees of the forest. As institutions grow, gaining more followers and hence more power, they manifest as even taller constructions. The need for new and ever-higher builds requires more and more materials. Stone quarries chisel the first permanent scars into the earth, and the first deforestation soon follows.
Moving further forward in time, we see the prominent tower of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers applied reason so they wouldn’t have to fall back on religious accounts passed down as dogma. The Enlightenment tower doesn’t look to the light, but casts light back out, illuminating the surrounding world. It works like a spotlight, that we might map out the details of the big picture. The periodic table of the elements forms the tower’s exterior. Behind this facade we hear the Babylonian Tower of Modernity whirring away, using the results of all this research to boost efficiency and squeeze more
profits out of the world. Once the loot is in hand, the taxing consequences of all this activity are simply passed along – to nature, to other countries, to other classes of people.
At the front of the map, we come to contemporary society. Big Data and the promise of freedom-by- internet is one of the most recent manifestations of culture. The web promised to be a great equalizing space where everyone could meet, where all knowledge could be shared, and opportunities were there for the taking. Turns out it’s more of a panoptic labyrinth – here in the right-hand corner – where a handful of people can move the walls of the maze undetected. And so the rest of us end up disoriented, trapped in echo chambers of the like-minded. The powerful, meanwhile, are at the heart of the web, manipulating our perceptions and desires. Hidden away behind mirrored glass panels, in their designer chairs and playroom-like offices, they possess all the data they need to oversee us. We feel their eyes and behave as the surveilled do everywhere. To surf has become to serve. Surfing the sea of knowledge got perverted into serving the data gods – and offering up our very selves in the process.
The tower of the web’s power is a concealed tower. It descends deep underground. We don’t see the cloud where all data resides, but it’s gouged an enormous crater in the earth. Cracks and crevices in the natural world, across the way, are repaired with superficial patches of parkland. The patches are like bandages, keeping the wounds of climate mutation out of sight. Air pollution and light pollution mean a growing number of city dwellers never see the stars at night, except perhaps on billboards for a Star Light or a Milky Way, which mark the edge of the digital labyrinth.
The increasing inequality and rifts in the natural environment are slowly driving a wedge through society, splitting us apart. The debate about which road to take toward the future is all too often still marked by ideological differences and diverging standpoints, each looking out from its own tower and pointing at the others – other cultures, religions, nationalities, or other social classes. Time and again, a splintered human race fails to bridge that critical chasm affecting us all: the rift between the left and right side of the map, the rift between nature and culture.
That deep rift keeps us from seeing nature – the planet, ourselves, and all living things – as one, as a single entity that demands our full, collective attention. We don’t seem to get that our Earth is the very basis for life, the soil from which all things grow. And while we still don’t know precisely how life began, we could still manage to annihilate it.
How can we envisage the prospect of a healthy earth? To truly recognize how wondrous and fragile life on earth is, we need an outside vantage point. This shift of consciousness is already happening in many places – in the most literal sense among astronauts, who call it the overview effect. They spend days at the windows of the International Space Station, hypnotized by the sight of our living and breathing globe: a lone ball against the ink-black backdrop of a vast and empty universe. They come back down to earth as fighters for life, transcending cultural and political differences.
All the way at the front of the map, in our own time, we see how a group of people break free from the existing paths of the labyrinth and set up scaffolding to construct something new. They’re building an observatory, with a number of telescopes and lookouts, right along the central axis of the map.
We can’t send everyone to the space station. But by looking up at the stars, we can feel a little more like earthlings, bound to this earth, our shared home and so far the only planet in the universe that supports life. Old stories and sayings were filled with awe and respect for our soulful, living world. But that wonder has given way to tales of man’s greatness.
Stargazing, even in cities, could form the next destination in the great pilgrimage of humankind. It could be the place where – no matter what vastly different worlds we’re from – the walls between us fall away, as we all look out into space and experience our common earthliness. It could be a place for new stories and fresh vantage points – bright lights which the earth and its people can bend toward.