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In July of 1969 the Apollo 11 spacecraft emerged from the dark side of the moon and the on-board camera panned through the vast emptiness of outer space. Against the backdrop of interstellar night hung the great ball of earth, with the intense blue of its oceans and the delicate ochres of its landmasses shimmering beneath the vibrant and translucent layer of its atmosphere. In the shock of this visual moment, distances between us contracted; boundaries and borders ceased to exist. But the impression that sent the adrenaline flowing through my veins was that the teeming billions of organisms writhing about under the protective layer of the atmosphere were not separate—they were interdependent, fluid, and interactive aspects of the one organic dance of the planet’s life. The preceding paragraph, an entry form my diary written a few days after images of the whole earth first appeared on television, cannot be classed as scientific analysis. But it is entirely consistent with what the new story of science has revealed about the relationship between human and environmental systems in biological reality. The large problem here is that the political and economic narratives that now serve as the basis for coordinating global human activities are premised on scientifically outmoded assumptions about this relationship in the old story of classical physics. And this problem is further complicated by the fact that the view of this relationship that is still widely viewed as scientific in Darwin’s theory of evolution is also premised on these scientifically outmoded assumptions. Darwin went public with his theory for the first time in a paper presented to the Linnean Society in 1848. This paper begins with the following sentence: “All nature is at war, one organism with another, or with external nature.” In The Origins of Species , Darwin is more specific about the character of this war: “There must be in every case a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life.”

When members of a society coordinate their activities based on a broadly disseminated and reinforced set of dogmatic beliefs in their mythological or religious traditions, anthropologists refer to these beliefs as useful myths. The aim of this chapter is to reveal that the dogmatic beliefs associated with the construct of the sovereign nation-state are useful myths that can no longer be viewed as useful because they are effectively undermining efforts to resolve the environmental crisis. This situation is greatly complicated by the fact that the sovereign nation-state is a normative construct, or a construct that is assumed to be a taken-for-granted and indelible aspect of geopolitical reality. The large problem here is that this normative construct constitutes one of the greatest conceptual barriers to resolving the environment crisis. This brief account of the origins and transformations of the construct of the sovereign nation-state is intended to accomplish four objectives. The first is to demonstrate that the construct of the sovereign nation-state emerged in Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries in a series of narratives that transferred the God-given power and authority of sovereign monarchs to the states governed by these monarchs. The second is to reveal that the narratives about nationalism and national identity that emerged during and after the Protestant Reformation abused the truths of religion in an effort to convince core populations living within the borders of particular nation-states that they were a chosen people possessing superior cultural values and personal qualities. The third is to show that the dogmatic beliefs legitimated and perpetuated by these narratives eventually resulted in the creation of churches of state with sacred symbols, rites, and rituals similar to those in Protestant and Catholic churches. And the fourth objective is to provide a basis for understanding how these dogmatic beliefs eventually became foundational to a system of international government, the United Nations, predicated on the construct of the sovereign nation-state. The history of this construct is much more complex and far more detailed than the brief account in this chapter suggests.