D2_Agraria_Journal_21_OPT

6 AGRARIA JOURNAL 2021 As we enter a new decade, the ground beneath our feet continues to shift as the natural and human systems that sustain us are increasingly imperiled. Yet our greatest challenge may be the collapse of the narratives that have guided us—narratives about our future, about “progress” and technology, about our relationships with each other and the natural world. Some of the proffered descriptions of our present—that we are in a time of civilizational and ecological collapse, a great reset, a great turning, and a long emergency — provide helpful framing. But there are longer scientific and historical arcs that illuminate a broader context for our predicament and provide new mindsets for developing on-the-ground solutions to our systemic crises. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, first published in 1962, is a history of scientific discovery that lays out a thesis that science, rather than progressing from insight to insight in measured steps through experimentation, actually takes its biggest leaps through new theories that arise outside the bounds of the accepted science—think the Copernican Revolution. In this narrative, “normal” science starts to become stressed when anomalies show up in laboratories that cannot be explained by the current understanding of how reality is constructed. When anomalies proliferate, science enters a crisis period that is resolved when a new paradigm arises that shifts understanding and practices. It's clear to me that we are in this crisis space between a world organized by materialist science, conceptualized by Newton and Descartes, and an arising quantum paradigm, as understood by Einstein and Bohm. The tenets of Scientific Materialism (also known as scientism) include the hypothesis that the natural world is without consciousness. An extreme version of this is seeing all living things as nothing more than machines set loose in a random universe. Rene Descartes famously operated on his wife’s dog when it was awake to show that animals did not have a soul. Materialist science assumes that wholes can be cut into parts without fundamentally altering their nature. Many of our most pressing problems have at their root materialist thinking. Climate change, ecological overshoot, rampant degenerative diseases, hunger, and inequity share a basic premise that we are fundamentally separate from each The Field of the Future “The answers you get depend on the questions you ask.” -Thomas Kuhn DIRECTOR’S NOTE BY SUSAN JENNINGS AMY HARPER Fall colors along Mary's Way, the bike trail connecting Agraria with Yellow Springs.