The Path to an Ecological Future for Humanity (Parts 1,2,3,4)
This essay includes 4 parts. Each part is available separately. Read Part 1 to decide whether to commit to reading the whole piece.
Part 1. The Path to an Ecological Future for Humanity
As Yogi Berra observed, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” We chuckle, but as systems fail all around us, if we are not able to envision a path to a sustainable future, our young species will not become successful ancestors. As for the emergence of an ecological culture? We are living the question. We are co-creating the future from the bottom up.
Collective Consciousness Meets the Collective Unconscious
We have witnessed two overarching trends over the past 150 years that now characterize the emergence of two influential subcultures within societies around the world. They function as agents of change and appear to represent opposite and sometimes opposing ends of the spectrum of human consciousness.
First, the emergence of what Marshall McLuhan dubbed the Global Village, made possible by breakthrough electronic technologies and communication systems that detribalized traditional cultures and nation states by opening our minds to the awareness of “others.” Teilhard de Chardin coined the term “noosphere” to describe the collective consciousness created by participation in global communications media. Buckminster Fuller called it “our airway of knowing nowness.” First the telegraph, then the mass media of radio and television, now the Internet and social media have all amplified and personalized our collective awareness of others and the environment. Wherever you live, there are groups of people of varying sizes and interests who actively participate and network in the global village. They are keenly aware of new opportunities and the need for change in the status quo.
Second, the emergence of spiritually based subcultures, made possible by the discovery of the Unconscious Mind. Freud and Jung opened our awareness to the shadow side of consciousness — dreams, feelings, emotions and their roots in the collective unconscious. Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth brought this deeper understanding of our human consciousness to a wide audience. The attraction and prevalence of practices designed to heal and integrate our relationship to our physical body, to be mindful, to live more authentically in community, to reconnect with nature, to simplify, etc. exemplify this trend.
It’s in that convergence of spiritual people becoming active and active people becoming spiritual that the hope of humanity now rests. ~ Van Jones
The quote from Van Jones succinctly frames this hope for a path to the future. It’s conditioned by the convergence of activists, informed I believe by the Collective Consciousness, and spiritual people, inspired by revelations embedded in the Collective Unconscious.
This essay argues that these agents of change are coming together to create a new ecological culture. The evolution is emerging locally as it creates the conditions and infrastructure for reinventing our food system, our economy, our governance, our legal system, and indeed every aspect of the global consumer culture. Most of you reading this already participate in what thought leaders call the “Great Transition.”
Culture Vs. Consciousness
Speaking of the Great Transition we face, here is a narrative that distills the essence of transition communities over thousands of years.
I was surfing the Net researching the origins of the coronavirus when I stumbled upon the work of husband and wife team, Bret Weinstein, a philosophical evolutionary biologist, and Heather Heying, also an evolutionary biologist with a deep background in anthropology and social systems behavior. I stayed up way too late fascinated by their Zoom presentation and conversation with Princeton professor Robert George. Titled “Culture Vs. Consciousness: A Core Human Tension,” they argue that biological evolution and cultural evolution operate by the same principles.
Watch it here. The first 30 minutes covers their formal presentation with slides.
In biological evolution and ecological systems creatures evolve by adapting to the environment and finding a niche in a web of mutually supporting relationships. But cultural evolution? We humans have adapted to the process of transition between environments without settling into any particular niche. Weinstein and Heying offer an impressive case study to illustrate their thesis.
Their presentation details the journey of the Beringians, a tribe of ancient people who were forced to move when the waters of the Bering Strait separated Alaska from Asia. The professors recognize this as an astounding experiment in the evolution of human cultures. The Beringians adapted their original culture from Alaska through North, Central, and South America, from coast to coast, in hundreds of cultures that reinvented agriculture multiple times, invented writing, astronomy, built cities, pyramids, and much more.
This amazing story frames their model that pits culture — the creation of stable traditions — always in tension with consciousness, that imagines new opportunities for change. Not shy about generalizing an analogy, the authors label those who adhere to cultural traditions as Conservative and those who seek change as Progressives.
Fast forward to today, Heying and Weinstein see the existential crises we face in the 21st century as either a dead end for humanity, or a gateway to something not yet known.
By incorporating “consciousness” into a model of cultural evolution and adaptation, their work can be seen as complementing other big picture thinkers who have explored the elusive nature and evolution of consciousness. I will offer examples, and make a case that human cultures around the world are already evolving, adapting and actually reinventing our human futures. Often in response to the vapid, soulless materialism of the global consumer culture, artists, scientists, environmentalists, political activists, religious leaders (even the Pope), and “cultural creatives” are creating tension with their traditional cultures. Polarization and conflicts oscillate between authoritarian resistance to change and progressive desires for democracy, social justice, reconnecting with nature, and the creation of diverse, local, ecological cultures.
Cultural Creatives
Another husband and wife team, sociologist Paul Ray and psychologist Sherry Ruth Anderson, wrote a prescient book in the year 2000 called The Cultural Creatives: How 50 million people are changing the world. The authors describe the majority of Americans as either “traditionalists” who identify as politically conservative, religious, and resistant to change, and “modernists” who tend to be success oriented, secular, materialistic, and pragmatic. The “cultural creatives” represent a gradual evolution of people who no longer fit into these categories . The authors characterize them as “open to change, like to travel, see nature as sacred, identify with green values, and view relationships as important.”
In 2000, the authors observed that this new demographic of 50 million adults had emerged since 1985 and were being largely ignored by the mainstream culture. They offered a thought experiment: what if 50 million people with the values of the cultural creatives were all suddenly located in a half dozen midwestern states? The mainstream press, they suggested, would be in a frenzy interviewing the inhabitants to understand their values and what it means for the future.
Two decades into the 21st century, we can see the continued evolution of those who identify as environmentalists, support feminism, recognize racism and white privilege, tend to be spiritual but not necessarily religious, are more financially secure, interested in personal growth and are often activists who support reform movements.
A Third Force
Cultural creatives have not yet coalesced into a unified force with a clear agenda for the future, but they are emerging as what Kalle Lasn, founder of Adbusters and the Media Foundation, recently identified as a Third Force. As the traditionalists age and become increasingly irrelevant, and modernists realize that business as usual (neoliberal economics) is causing income inequality and the climate crisis, a third force with a post political, new economy, eco-aware consciousness could be the foundation for a new culture, an evolutionary leap that supplants our unsustainable consumer societies.
To succeed in reinventing our human future(s), the disparate approaches embedded within such a third force, already present and emerging, will likely need to come together in what David Bohm called Coherence; i.e., a new culture of shared meanings that bind societies together. If this occurs before the existential crises result in a “dead end for humanity,” the cultural creatives could be the bridge that supports a “gateway to something new.”
The divisive status quo today represents the dead end for humanity. The Ayn Rand inspired, anti-government ideology of Republicans in the US has counterparts in other countries, as does the Democratic Party’s commitment to Center Left policies overseen by corporate interests and reliance upon public private partnerships delivering government services. Both approaches are not only ineffective, but unable to address the needs of the majority of people, signaling the need for systemic, structural changes that reclaim democratic institutions freed from corporate influence.
Today, poll after poll documents that the progressive agenda is supported by “we the people” and by wide margins. Further, the collective consciousness already knows how to address climate change, income inequality, how to regulate monopolies, get money out of our electoral system, how to transform the industrial food system, etc. Yet we remain stuck. If cultural creatives are to succeed in becoming a unifying Third Force offering a gateway to something new, the dragon that must be slain is the global consumer culture. Part 2 probes more deeply into the underlying assumptions or worldview — the Consciousness — that characterizes the global consumer culture.
Part 2. The Path to an Ecological Future for Humanity
Literacy, Traditional Science, and the Separation of Mind from Nature
The global consumer culture may sound abstract but that is because we are so accustomed, so acculturated if you will, that imagining alternatives is like fish leaping for air — short lived. Amphibians did of course, transition to land, and we too must untangle the wildly successful web we have weaved that brings us our food, our work, our cars, our lights, our heat, our life indoors/safely free from nature. We must understand the foundations, the assumptions, that support the power of corporate systems that have supplanted all previous empires and now serve as the ruling Goliath of planet earth.
How might our thousand bottom up slingshots fell this giant and create a new path to ecological health? Economic globalization appears to be invincible, but it has an Achilles heal. It is built upon flawed assumptions about the nature of reality. We must grasp the depth of the problems we have created in our love affair with traditional western sciences. Without this understanding, we may fail to see the necessity of changing course, or to recognize the challenge of making structural changes that can halt and reverse the worst effects of the Anthropocene era we have created.
Satish Kumar, Founder, Schumacher College. Ecologist, activist.
All the big problems of the world today are rooted in the philosophy of separateness and dualism. ~ Satish Kumar
Satish Kumar’s quote invites us to explore more deeply to understand how dualism and separation are at the root of our consumer culture.
Literacy
Literacy, and speech itself, are remarkable achievements of our species. That said, the deeper, and more troubling implications of literacy are largely ignored in our society.
Learning to read by decoding an alphabetic or hieroglyphic script, in combination with counting and measurement systems, form the foundation of all civilizations and fosters the sense of separation from nature. Literacy is a kind of “super power” that allows us to control, master, and use natural resources for our human purposes. This gave rise to the great agricultural civilizations that conquered, destroyed, and consolidated many indigenous cultures and brought them under their control.
Indigenous cultures experience nature with what the anthropologist Levi-Strauss called “participation mystique,” sensing and feeling their relations with nature directly, mediated by oral story telling traditions that reinforce a more intimate and wholistic relationship with the natural world.
Daniel Quinn’s novel, Ishmael, contrasts the way of civilized people as “takers” with indigenous people that Quinn calls “leavers.” If we are separate from nature, we are free to take from nature whatever we desire. If we are part of nature, we take only what we need and leave.
Traditional Science
Science is an outgrowth of literacy, and incorporated its assumption of separating our thoughts and ideas from the natural world, effectively implementing an implicit philosophy of dualism. As civilizations accumulated knowledge from written texts and mathematics, sciences emerged to catalog and organize observations about how the natural world works. Importantly, scientific “laws” of nature were generalized to predict outcomes. The industrial revolution(s) and successive technological innovations supercharged our capacity to exploit nature for human purposes.
Science and its technological handmaidens have been successful in providing material comforts to millions of people. Its assumption of separation or dualism of mind and matter is now deeply ingrained in all of us, with the significant exception of indigenous peoples. For most readers, we see ourselves as separate individuals. We each have a mind that is aware of the world outside us. Rene Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” enshrined dualism as the philosophy underlying the modern world.
We place great value on literacy and science, as well we should. Yet at this point in our evolution as a species, the dualism and separation from nature it affords must be seen in a larger context. We are living in the Anthropocene, largely because we have used our symbolic superpowers to change the climate, pollute the oceans, cause nuclear meltdowns, etc. It’s time to reassess and acknowledge the downside of separating from nature.
By separating mind from nature, Cartesian dualism and the mechanistic, clockwork universe of Newton’s universal laws of nature ignored the role of emotions, feelings, and subjective experiences. If the entire universe can be reduced to matter, then a materialistic philosophy is a natural outcome. Indeed, scientists have only recently begun to study “consciousness” and then with most of the focus on the brain and how to identify areas of the brain correlated with feelings and sensations. Even today, most scientists accept the view that consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon resulting from the evolution of complexity in life forms. If subjective experiences are ignored as by-products of evolution, then the universe is essentially dead, or at least, not “alive.”
We have adopted the methods of science to create a seemingly infinite array of technologies designed to feed, clothe, house, decorate, amuse, energize, power, and communicate to improve our material standards of living. In this view our awareness, our conscious awareness, simply offers a means to the various ends we desire.
Consumer Culture and Society by Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy.
Book cover on Amazon.com
The Oxford English Dictionary actually defines “Nature” as a noun, describing it as “the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations.” Most of us share this intuitive sense of separation from nature and the universe as a whole.
Empires rise and fall, but civilizations now find themselves in competition for what they consider scarce resources. To defend themselves, armed and dangerous nation states capable of unimaginable destruction with nuclear technologies, have become the norm. A fragile balance of nuclear peace and traditional wars is maintained within and between 200+/- nation states claiming sovereignty and membership in the United Nations. This precarious reality threatens to cut short the evolutionary experiment that is our human species.
Part 3 will examine an emerging, alternative worldview and explain why and how a new culture rooted in a dynamic, relational universe is emerging. Charlene Spretnak calls this Relational Shift the foundation for a new culture that integrates our collective consciousness and the evolution of what Jean Houston called the Possible Human. Charles Eisenstein builds on this vision with his recent book, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible.
Part 3. The Path to an Ecological Future for Humanity
New Sciences Support a Radical New View of the Universe
The universe has about 100 billion galaxies, and each human brain contains about the same number of neurons and cells. This reality diverges radically from our ordinary picture of ourselves as being a tiny spec in a vast universe “out there.”
Many physicists and philosophers have challenged the traditional view of western science and have openly speculated that consciousness was somehow integral with the creation of the universe. Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics (1975) was one of the first popular books that connected science with spirituality, and today there are dozens of books, media, and even research institutions that believe consciousness is primary, even present “all the way down” to the origins of the Big Bang. Cosmologist Brian Swimme puts it this way: “Our ancestry stretches back through the life forms and into the stars, back into the beginnings of the primeval fireball. This universe is a single multiform energetic unfolding of matter, mind, intelligence and life.”
This new view of consciousness, still a minority view, offers a critique of materialism and the separation of our conscious awareness from an external world outside our mental awareness. Any introduction to philosophy course will explain idealism as a theory that sees the Mind or God as the source of the material world. There are many variations of this 2500 year old discussion of how we know the world. The significance now is that the underlying scientific assumptions have changed. The new sciences of quantum physics, space-time and relativity theory, evolution of self organizing systems, chaos theory, fractal geometry and mathematics, cell biology, immunology, the microbiome, epigenetics, etc. all challenge the story of separation and are giving rise to a holistic, relational, collaborative view of our human awareness and consciousness that is integral to the universe itself.
My intention is not to solve the “hard problem of consciousness” but rather to examine the pragmatic implications of two very different worldviews. The assumptions of scientific materialism are now so deeply embedded in our culture that the emergence of a new view of consciousness faces deep resistance from the status quo. This is not an abstract philosophical debate. Every cultural institution: education, medicine, law, economics, politics and the social sciences, even psychology, the humanities, and the arts struggle with the transition to a new view of consciousness that is free from the old assumptions and paradigms.
This dramatically new view of “reality” is gradually supplanting the traditional scientific view of separation and division between mind and the material world. The dynamic, relational, universe of quantum physics opens up an entirely new world of possibilities, all the more so if consciousness is bound up in how we understand our relationship with nature, and with each other. Suddenly the vast universe “out there” is inside us, an integral experience that opens the door to spirituality and William James’ radical empiricism, a science that accepts the reality of subjective experience and altered states of consciousness. James famously cataloged them in his book, Varieties of Religious Experience, available as a free ebook here.
Image accompanying an article about a dialogue between a Buddhist scholar and a physicist.
The differences between the traditional view of science and the new sciences are on vivid display in a 2017 debate titled, The Nature of Reality: A Dialogue Between a Buddhist Scholar and a Theoretical Physicist. Alan Wallace, a world-renowned author and Buddhist scholar trained by the Dalai Lama, and Sean Carroll, a world-renowned theoretical physicist and best-selling author, discuss the nature of reality from spiritual and scientific viewpoints. Most of interest here is Wallace’s citation of physicists and philosophers that he argues support the incorporation of consciousness in ways that are compatible with Buddhist principles, as well as indigenous spiritual practices. The debate is available on YouTube here.
Ecology as Bridge to a New Story of Evolution
It’s not just physicists and philosophers who have opened the door to explore and speculate about the meaning and implications of consciousness. Thought leaders and mavericks in academia are confronting the relationships between our thoughts/consciousness and “external reality” now that we understand the universe includes us.
Ecology is now the bridge metaphor that implies the integral relationships informing interdisciplinary work, not just in the hard sciences (biochemistry, e.g.) but the social sciences and even the humanities.
The Biological Dictionary offers numerous examples of how ecology is now used in diverse disciplines — molecular ecology, organismal ecology, cognitive ecology, population ecology, community ecology, ecosystems ecology, and now extends to human ecology, urban ecology, rural ecology, landscape ecology, media ecology, historical ecology, and there is a program on Art and Ecology at the University of New Mexico. You get the idea.
Media Ecology and Cultural Evolution
There is a new discipline with a rich history of interdisciplinary thinkers who follow the deservedly famous aphorism of Marshall McLuhan: The medium is the message. The radical implication of this dictum is to redirect our attention to the social cultural contexts and implications of our languages, technologies, and communications media. We are now free to ask: what are the effects of the “medium” of agriculture on cultures and civilizations? the effects of the Clock on our sense of time? of literacy, especially the phonetic alphabet, on right and left hemisphere dominance? of social media on suburban teenagers? i.e., the effects of media on our consciousness.
It’s no accident that media ecologists trace their roots to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French priest and geologist who authored The Phenomenon of Man, an essay that introduced the idea that evolution is a process that leads to increasing complexity, culminating in the “unification of consciousness.” Teilhard (and Vladimir Vernadsky) coined the term “noosphere” to capture the idea that rational thought and our communications media are the next phase of biological evolution. McLuhan’s popular phrase describing the earth as a “global village” resonates and extends the noosphere that now surrounds the earth. Wired magazine recognizes McLuhan as the patron saint of their mission to understand how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics.
The significance of this approach lies in the proliferation of researchers who are now populating academia: Communications, of course, but also Languages and Linguistics, Sociology and Anthropology, and Cultural Studies, where the deconstruction work in Black Studies, Women’s Studies, Oral and Folk Traditions, Indigenous Cultures, Colonialization, et al. have had a profound impact in reassessing the implicit cultural biases of western civilization.
Two examples of thought leaders grounded in media ecology are Leonard Shlain (The Alphabet and the Goddess: the Conflict between the Word and Image) and Robert K Logan (The Sixth Language: Learning a Living in the Internet Age). Both Shlain and Logan delve into the effects of language and technologies on the cultural evolution of consciousness.
Ken Wilber’s long career explicitly explores the evolution and development of consciousness through his Integral Theory. This brief description from Wikipedia indicates the comprehensive scope of Wilber’s work:
Integral theory is Ken Wilber’s attempt to place a wide diversity of theories and thinkers into one single framework.[1] It is portrayed as a “theory of everything” (“the living Totality of matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit”),[2] trying “to draw together an already existing number of separate paradigms into an interrelated network of approaches that are mutually enriching.”[1]
His many books detail the changes in consciousness as human cultures and civilizations evolved. Here is a graphic that I borrowed from a recent Medium article by Jules Evans that I include to show the breadth of Wilber’s vision. Read it from the bottom up.
Wilber has inspired followers who have written many books and articles related to Integral Theory. Frederic LaLoux’s Reinventing Organizations is an excellent example of how Integral Theory can be applied to the evolution of organizational structures (Tribal, Warlords, Military, Catholic Church, Corporations, et al) that follow Wilber’s hierarchy, including the color coding.
What if these explorers on the edge of conventional, consensus thinking are correct that consciousness is evolving, that our culture (and those of us reading this) is evolving in response to the failure of the global, corporate consumer culture? Like the Beringians, and all cultures facing challenges to their traditions (including extinction), are we about to morph into something new?
Consider that the past couple of centuries have given us a rich history of scientists, artists, philosophers, and cultural creatives who challenged the Age of Discovery, Colonial Imperialism, the Industrial Revolution, and more recently the Corporate-Economic-Technological inevitability of Western Institutions. Leonardo, Goethe, Spinoza, Emerson, Bergson, Marx, Freud, Jung, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Bateson, Fritjof Capra, Lovelock and Margulis, Bruce Lipton, Candace Pert, David Korten, Jermy Rifkin, Brian Swimme, Thomas Berry, Charlene Spretnak, Richard Tarnas, Charles Eisenstein, Duane Elgin, Jaron Lanier, Douglas Rushkoff and readers could name many more who have planted the seeds of a new culture rooted in ecological consciousness. The point of dropping so many names is to underscore that the emergence of a new culture, if one were to succeed in replacing the dominant consumer culture, has very deep roots.
What are the odds?
As Paul Hawken says, if you look at the data, you have to be pessimistic about the future, but if you look at the tens of thousands of groups around the world working for social and environmental justice, you have to be an optimist. Jared Diamond, author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, reports that when he teaches university students they are invariably surprised that the leaders of failed cultures could not see what is so obvious in retrospect — the environment was over exploited, resources were depleted, etc. Tellingly, his students most often failed to see the evidence of collapse in our culture.
I don’t know the odds of finding a path to a livable future, in part because evolution is ongoing and we are participating in the transition.
Let me sharpen the focus (and yes, oversimplify) to highlight two overarching themes within the Third Force of cultural creatives that I believe are beginning to meld in the ways suggested by Van Jones at the beginning of this essay: activists are becoming spiritual, and spiritual people are becoming active.
The 1960s as Harbinger of Ecological Culture
Indulge a brief digression to share my experience of the 1960s. Like Fritjof Capra, and countless others caught up in the spirit of those times, I developed a heightened awareness of social issues during my formative years at Antioch College in Ohio. Suffice to say I/we were activists, demonstrating, questioning authorities responsible for institutional racism, poverty, the Vietnam War, etc. While this was an intense cultural awakening of global consciousness, there was another influence of equal importance in the realm of inner spiritual awareness. The Age of Aquarius was both a leap in conscious awareness of the global village, and also a deep dive into the unconscious and practices to integrate the body-mind-spirit in a new age.
Buckminster Fuller inspired artists as well as scientists and technologists with his big picture thinking. The entire universe is comprised of 98 regenerative chemical elements and Fuller told us we can use them to design and model a new future instead of resisting business as usual. McLuhan and Ted Carpenter collaborated playfully to show us the Medium Is the Massage, that society in the “mass age” was changing our consciousness in ways that freed us to imagine alternative ways to organize society. Anything seemed possible.
While we were thinking globally and acting locally to change the world we were also inspired by the inner trips described by Alan Watts’ Psychotherapy East and West, the musician John Cage’s subtle Zen of deconstructing and reinventing the arts for a new society, and Timothy Leary’s crusade to change our minds with LSD. I mention these three because they all knew each other as well as McLuhan and Fuller, signaling that C.P. Snow’s famous lecture on the split between the sciences and humanities, The Two Cultures, were beginning to find common ground in the future these visionaries were creating.
It’s fair to say that the 1960s did not usher in a Golden Age of Aquarius. That said, they did identify the need for systemic changes in the global society and the formation of movements to challenge the status quo: Civil rights and integration in a multi-racial society; women’s rights, feminism, patriarchy; the environment, pollution, protections and regulations; and anti-war, anti-nuclear, and anti-establishment/question authority practices. These movements continue to inspire activists working today on these same issues and the challenges of climate change, income inequality, divestment from fossil fuels, worker rights and unions, international trade agreements, and more.
As Bill Maher likes to say about the 1960s, “At least we won the culture wars.” Marijuana legalization, of course, and today the return of research on psychedelics and experimentation with psychoactive plants and mushrooms, now called entheogens. Further, the counterculture has been institutionalized. Music is now open to multiple genres from rock to country, hip hop and world music. Organic foods are the fastest segment of mainstream grocery stores. Yoga studios are everywhere and online as well. Health spas feature massage, Reiki, saunas, et al. Drug stores carry herbal medicines. Bookstores include a New Age section with all manner of books and media for self-help, meditation, esoteric and mystical traditions, all manner of diets and cookbooks, homesteading, permaculture design, and alternative cancer treatments.
Cultural creatives are leading both the activists and the spiritual entrepreneurs and creating the conditions for an emerging new culture that is increasingly untethered from the status quo. Paul Ray, referenced in Part 1, has continued his research into the cultural creatives for the past 25 years in search of a positive vision for the future that he calls a wisdom culture. His website at culuralcreatives.org includes this assessment.
The Cultural Creatives are the carrier population for the emerging wisdom culture… Across the planet, they are innovators for the culture, not so much in technologies as in beliefs, worldviews, values and ways of life. They are the opinion leaders, and the participants in all the new social movements of the past 60 years who have time and again shaped others’ views, practices and adoptions of these new ways. Their Green values and lifestyles and their values of inner development both psychological and spiritual are the key to the emerging new culture. New Cultural Creatives surveys in Europe, Japan and the US all show the same trends.”
Estimates by experts vary on the percentage of people who have adopted practices and promoted policies that could plausibly lead to an evolutionary leap to a new ecological culture for humanity. Estimates are typically 5–10% who currently comprise a third force, a “carrier” population capable of co-creating and shaping a new culture. Those numbers are considered to be about half the numbers needed — i.e., 10–20% — to reach a tipping point and become the new dominant cultural paradigm. These estimates are encouraging in that they suggest, perhaps counter intuitively, that a majority of cultural creatives in any society will not be necessary for the emergence of a new transformative culture grounded in ecological values.
Part 4. The Path to an Ecological Future for Humanity
Transition to Sustainable Earth Communities
Cultural historian Thomas Berry called it the Great Transition and his most comprehensive book, The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future, argued the necessity to “reinvent humanity,” and offered a framework for telling a New Story of Evolution that will transform our traditional institutions to align with ecological values: economics, politics, education, law, religion, etc.
This vision for a new culture might sound, well, visionary in the sense that it is not likely, practical, etc. But recall that we are hearing essentially the same message from Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, from Jeremy Rifkin’s Third Industrial Revolution and The Empathic Civilization, from Charles Eisenstein’s The Ascent of Humanity and Sacred Economics, from David Korten’s Change the Story, Change the Future, from Fritjof Capra’s The Systems View of Life: A Framework for Integrating Art + Science. and many others. These authors have explored practical strategies to achieve what may seem to be an improbable goal of guiding our species into a livable future.
Berry’s Great Transition starts with life in The Cenozoic Age, the name for earth’s current geological era. It is characterized by the dominance of mammals, birds and flowering plants. Our traditional sciences and their technologies now threaten the stability of the past 66 million years as we enter the Sixth Mass Extinction of life on earth. The Anthropocene is a new term invented to draw attention to humanity’s role in causing the disruption of our planet’s climate and the destruction of critical air, water and life supporting ecosystems.
Berry envisioned two broadly defined evolutionary paths to the future that are yet to be determined. The first path he called the Technozoic Era, which he described as an extension of our industrial, materialistic consumer culture that relies on traditional sciences and technologies.
Center for Ecozoic Studies. “Ecozoic” means “House of Life.” “Ecozoic societies” are “Societies of Life.” Life is what makes earth special
The alternative path he labeled the Ecozoic Era, an age that will enact new ecological cultures that embody the principle that the the universe is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects. “Existence itself is derived from and sustained by this intimacy of each being with every other being of the universe,” according to Berry. His vision reflects the opportunity to co-create a future rooted in a living earth, Gaia, using our new sciences, a deep spiritual consciousness, together in a new story of evolution.
The significance of all this visionary work hinges on the evolutionary role of consciousness. If we humans and our relationships with each other and the natural world are indeed evolving, there must be evidence that we are leaving the old mechanistic, industrial, global corporate consumer culture behind. I will be posting future articles that describe the emergence of a new ecological, holistic culture that is regenerative, resilient, rooted in local, bioregional communities, and internetworked via diverse, cosmopolitan communications.
The future will undoubtedly be fraught with all the disruptions we experience now from global warming, from failed states, refugee crises, authoritarian regimes, nuclear accidents, plastic pollution, deforestation, pandemics, and whatever else you wish to add; and yes, it will be televised, and discussed on social media. Our mental and physical health will worsen, even more so for people of color, those who are homeless or living in poverty. The global south and island nations will be disproportionately impacted and dependent on the wealthier nations to share resources.
Many if not most people will lack the mental and emotional space to deal with this transition. Cynicism in the face of such a daunting future will also impact those who are aware of the problems we face, but whose livelihoods depend on continuation of the status quo. The absurdity of billionaires defending monopoly capitalism and stock markets that fund their wealth, while overseeing and profiting from systems that are effectively committing planetary ecocide, will demoralize many in the process of waking up.
But just as physical evolution has not come to an end, neither has cultural evolution. Helena Norberg Hodge, a leading visionary and critic of economic globalization, argues that those of us now in the minority must understand the big picture outlined in this essay in order to actively challenge the very human systems we have created and design new systems that will revitalize our local economies, cultures, and democratic values. Examples of how such new systems already being developed can be brought to scale and support a new ecological future include:
> Modern Monetary Theory and Progressive Agenda
> Public Banking and Local Investment Strategies
> Community Solar (Institute for Local Self Reliance)
> Regenerative Farming and Permaculture Design
> Rights of Nature (Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund)
> Organic Food Movement (Organic Consumers Association)
> Electrification of Transit (Solutionary Rail)
> Project Drawdown to Reverse Global Warming (Paul Hawken)
> Transition Town Movement (Rob Hopkins)
> EcoChallenge.Org and Earth Institute Discussion Courses
> Nonviolent Communications (NVC, Marshall Rosenberg)
> Waking Up (Mindfulness and Sam Harris)
> Alternative Medicine and Health (Dr. Zach Bush)
> Entheogenic Plants/Mushrooms (Paul Stamets)
> Parapsychology Research (Institute for Noetic Sciences)
> Fusion Politics (Rev. Dr. William Barber)
> Move To Amend (Constitutional Amendment to get money out of politics)
> Democracy Movement (David Orr)
There is much to be done but there is much emerging that invites our engagement. Your comments are encouraged and suggestions for topics relevant to The Path to an Ecological Future for Humanity are very welcome.
