Significance of Domain Name (URL)
of the University of Earth
- / -
The web address of this site (the URL) is designed to challenge easy assumptions about this initiative. Use of the prefix "un-" (www.un-terra.org) may therefore be variously understood as:
- stressing the value of a contrarian approach by also implying the merit of a "negative capability", in contrast to uncritical contemporary emphasis on "positive" approaches -- thereby raising the question of the insights and learnings to be "unearthed" from what may appear to be "unearthly" (as with ecospirituality or indigenous "dreaming")
- highlighting the widespread challenge of strategies that are destructive of the Earth (as with many contemporary development programmes) and those that are in some importance sense "ungrounded"
- emphasizing the challenge, suggested by biomimicry, that a key to behavioural patterns of sustainability may lie in "introversion", detecting the Earth "within" -- rather than unconsciously projecting psychological processes and challenges onto an externalized nature
- introducing a healthy degree of self-mockery as a corrective to unfruitful presumption
- provocatively implying that the initiative is in some way related to those of the United Nations -- whether or not a United Nations of the fututre should indeed be specifically associated with some such approach to learning with and through the Earth
- favouring understandings of union as characterized by continuing emergence from a dynamic process, a fundamental characteristic of relating fruitfully to the ecosystem -- rather than implying a conventional static form of "union"
Alternative URLs (www.u-terra.org; www.u-earth.org), associated with this site, make the point that in a very important sense it is through the individual's understanding of how he or she is of the Earth, an expression of that insight, and grounds that understanding, that a balanced sustainable use of resources will become evident -- rather than through collective programmes of sustainable development, as is so widely assumed. This is an appropriate understanding of the issue of "hearts and minds", so counterproductively framed as a "battle" of binary logic.
