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Charles Eisenstein

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Initiation into a Living Planet

September 10, 2018 by Charles Eisenstein

September 2018
There is a French translation of this essay.  You can also read this article en Francais.


Most people have passed through some kind of initiation in life. By that, I mean a crisis that defies what you knew and what you were. From the rubble of the ensuing collapse, a new self is born into a new world.

Societies can also pass through an initiation. That is what climate change poses to the present global civilization. It is not a mere “problem” that we can solve from the currently dominant worldview and its solution-set but asks us to inhabit a new Story of the People and a new (and ancient) relationship to the rest of life.

A key element of this transformation is from a geomechanical worldview to a Living Planet worldview. In my last essay, I argued that the climate crisis will not be solved by adjusting levels of atmospheric gases, as if we were tinkering with the air-fuel mixture of a diesel engine. Rather, a living Earth can only be healthy – can only stay living in fact – if its organs and tissues are vital. These comprise the forests, the soil, the wetlands, the coral reefs, the fish, the whales, the elephants, the seagrass meadows, the mangrove swamps, and all the rest of Earth’s systems and species. If we continue degrading and destroying them, then even if we cut emissions to zero overnight, Earth would still die a death of a million cuts.

That is because it is life that maintains the conditions for life, through dimly understood processes as complex as any living physiology. Vegetation produces volatile compounds that promote the formation of clouds that reflect sunlight. Megafauna transport nitrogen and phosphorus across continents and oceans to maintain the carbon cycle. Forests generate a “biotic pump” of persistent low pressure that brings rain to continental interiors and maintains atmospheric flow patterns. Whales bring nutrients up from the deep ocean to nourish plankton. Wolves control deer populations so that forest understory remains viable, allowing rainfall absorption and preventing droughts and fires. Beavers slow the progress of water from land to sea, buffering floods and modulating silt discharge into coastal waters so that life there can thrive. Mycelial mats tie vast areas together in a neural network exceeding the human brain in its complexity. And all of these processes interlock with each other.

In my book Climate – A New Story I make the case that much of the climate derangement that we blame on greenhouse gases actually comes from direct disruption of ecosystems. It has been happening for millennia: drought and desertification has followed wherever humans have cut down forests and exposed soil to erosion.

The phrase “disruption of ecosystems” sounds scientific compared to “harming and killing living beings.” But from the Living Planet view, it is the latter that is more accurate. A forest is not just a collection of living trees – it is itself alive. The soil is not just a medium in which life grows; the soil is alive. So is a river, a reef, and a sea. Just as it is a lot easier to degrade, to exploit, and to kill a person when one sees the victim as less than human, so too it is easier to kill Earth’s beings when we see them as unliving and unconscious already. The clearcuts, the strip mines, the drained swamps, the oil spills, and so on are inevitable when we see Earth as a dead thing, insensate, an instrumental pile of resources.

Our stories are powerful. If we see the world as dead, we will kill it. And if we see the world as alive, we will learn how to serve its healing.

The Living Planet View

And in fact, the world is alive. It is not just the host of life. The forests and reefs and wetlands are its organs. The waters are its blood. The soil is its skin. The animals are its cells. This is not an exact analogy, but the conclusion it invites is valid: that if these beings lose their integrity, the whole planet will wither.

I will not try to make an intellectual case for the livingness of planet Earth, which would depend on what definition of life I use. Besides, I’d like to go further and say Earth is sentient, conscious, and intelligent as well – a scientifically insupportable claim. So instead of trying to argue the point, I’ll ask the skeptic to stand barefoot on the earth and feel the truth of it. I believe that however skeptical you are, however fervently you opine that life is just a fortuitous chemical accident driven by blind physical forces, a tiny flame of knowledge burns in every person that Earth, water, soil, air, the sun, the clouds, and the wind are alive and aware, feeling us at the same time as we feel them.

I know the skeptic well because I am he. A creeping doubt takes hold of me when I spend a lot of time indoors, in front of a screen, surrounded by standardized inorganic objects that mirror the deadness of the modernist conception of the world.

Surely the exhortation to connect barefoot with the living Earth would be out of place at an academic climate conference or meeting of the IPCC. Occasionally such events indulge a moment of touchy-feely ceremony or trot out an indigenous person to invoke the four directions before everyone enters the conference room to get down to business, the business of data and graphs, models and projections, costs and benefits. What is real, in that world, is the numbers. Such environments – of quantitative abstractions as well as conditioned air, unvarying artificial light, identical chairs, and ubiquitous right angles – banish any life except the human. Nature exists only in representation, and Earth seems alive only in theory, and probably not at all.

What is considered real in those places are the numbers – how ironic, given that numbers are the quintessence of abstraction, of the reduction of the many to the one. The data-driven mind seeks to solve problems by the numbers too. My inner math geek would love to solve the climate crisis by evaluating every possible policy according to its net carbon footprint. Each ecosystem, each technology, each energy project, I would assign a greenhouse value. Then I would order up more of this one and less of that one, offsetting jet travel with tree planting, compensating for wetlands destruction here with solar panels there, to meet a certain greenhouse gas budget. I would apply the methods and mindsets that have grown up around financial accounting – money being another way of reducing the many to the one.

Unfortunately, as with money, carbon reductionism ignores everything that seems not to affect the balance sheet. Thus it is that traditional environmental issues such as habitat conservation, saving the whales, or cleaning up toxic waste get short shrift in the climate movement. “Green” has come to mean “low-carbon.”

In the Living Planet view, this is a huge mistake, since the ignored whales, wolves, beavers, butterflies, and so on are among the organs and tissues that keep Gaia whole. By offsetting our air travel miles with tree planting, sourcing our electricity from solar panels, and thereby donning the mantle of “eco-friendly,” we assuage the conscience while obscuring the ongoing harm that our present way of life generates. We imply that “sustainability” means the sustaining of society as we know it, but with non-fossil fuel sources.

This is not to say that it is fine to continue burning fossil fuels as always. In reaction to my last essay, some people labeled me a climate denier or a tool of climate deniers. This is a natural reaction in a highly polarized environment in which the first lens applied to any person or position is “Which side are you on?” In a war setting, any information, however true, that is inconsistent with our side’s narrative must be rejected as rendering aid and comfort to the enemy. When both sides do that, the result is a binary choice that shuts out any alternative that may lie outside either pole and even outside the spectrum of opinion that the two poles define. Furthermore, shutting out conflicting data means that each side becomes impervious to growth, change, and truth.

Thus it is that the Living Planet view (as I interpret it) elicits hostility not only from the anti-environmentalist right but also from the global warming alarmist left – even though the left at least is temperamentally aligned with its premise. Their hostility originates in the implication that I will now draw out: that global warming is not the main threat to the biosphere, and that focusing on carbon emissions and clean energy is not the highest priority response.

The real threat to the biosphere is actually worse than most people even on the left understand; it includes and far transcends climate; and, we can meet it only through a multidimensional healing response.

Are greenhouse gas emissions a problem? Yes. They put more stress on global life systems that development, ecocide, and pollution have already dangerously weakened. Here is a loose analogy: Imagine that Earth’s winds and currents, flows of temperature and moisture, and life-sustaining weather patterns are like a gigantic meandering garden hose, perforated with tiny holes to irrigate plants. Imagine that these plants have grown around the hose to hold it more or less in place. Now uproot those plants (destroy ecosystems) at the same time as you increase the water pressure dramatically (greenhouse forcing). Without the plants holding it down, the hose begins to writhe and kick and run completely awry, no longer delivering water to where it needs to go.

On the real Earth, the ecosystems – in particular forests, savannas, and wetlands – that once anchored patterns of flow into place are severely damaged. Meanwhile, greenhouse gases have intensified the system’s thermodynamic flux, further disrupting atmospheric patterns and further damaging weakened ecosystems. However, even without elevated greenhouse gases, the massive killing of life would spell disaster. Fossil fuel emissions intensify an already bad situation.

Reordering of Priorities

With healthy ecosystems, elevated CO2, methane, and temperature might pose little problem. After all, temperatures were arguably (this is extremely controversial) higher than today in the early Holocene as well as during the Minoan Warm Period, Roman Warm Period, and Medieval Warm Period, and there was no runaway methane feedback loop or anything like that. A living being with strong organs and healthy tissues is resilient.

Sadly, Earth’s organs have been damaged and her tissues have been poisoned. She is in a delicate state. That is why cutting greenhouse emissions is important. However, a Living Planet view invites a different ordering of priorities than the one that conventional climate discourse suggests:

First priority is to protect all remaining primary rainforest and other undamaged ecosystems. Particularly important are mangrove swamps, seagrass meadows, and other wetlands, especially on the coasts. These forests and wetlands are precious treasures, reservoirs of biodiversity, regeneration hothouses for life. They hold the deep intelligence of the earth, without which full healing is impossible.

The second priority is to repair and regenerate damaged ecosystems worldwide. Ways to do that include:

  • A massive expansion of marine reserves for ocean regeneration
  • Bans on bottom trawling, drift nets, and other industrial fishing practices
  • Regenerative agricultural practices that rebuild soil, such as cover cropping, perennial agriculture, agroforestry, and holistic grazing
  • Afforestation and reforestation
  • Water retention landscapes to repair the hydrological cycle
  • Protection of apex predators and megafauna

The third priority is to stop poisoning the world with pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, plastics, PCBs, heavy metals, antibiotics, chemical fertilizers, pharmaceutical waste, radioactive waste, and other industrial pollutants. These weaken Earth on the tissue level, pervading the entire biosphere to the point where, for example, orcas are now found with PCB levels high enough to classify the orca’s body as toxic waste. Pesticides and habitat destruction are also causing a massive die-off of insects, amphibians, birds, soil biota, and other life, weakening Gaia’s ability to maintain herself.

The fourth (and still important) priority is to reduce atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases. To a large extent, this result will be a by-product of the other three priorities. Both reforestation and regenerative agriculture can sequester massive amounts of carbon. Furthermore, to truly protect and repair ecosystems would necessitate a moratorium on new pipelines, offshore oil wells, fracking, tar sands excavation, mountaintop removal, strip mines, and other extraction of fossil fuels, as all of these entail severe ecological damage and risk. The Living Planet view also supports certain carbon-motivated proposals that have broader ecological and social benefits: rooftop solar, local diets and local economies, bikeable cities, smaller passive-solar houses, demilitarization, repairable rather than disposable goods, and reuse and upcycling. To love and care for each precious part of this planet, we have to transform the fossil fuel infrastructure regardless of the greenhouse gas issue.

Paradoxically, we do not need the greenhouse argument to reduce greenhouse gases. By following the priorities listed above, we will achieve (and perhaps surpass) most of what the mainstream climate movement is calling for, but from a different motivation. There are significant points of departure, however. The Living Planet approach rejects big hydroelectric projects because they destroy wetlands, degrade rivers, and alter the flow of silt to the sea. It abhors the biofuel plantations that are overtaking vast areas of Africa, Asia, and South America since these often replace natural ecosystems and small-scale, sustainable peasant agriculture. It dreads geoengineering schemes such as whitening the sky with sulfur aerosols. It has little use for giant carbon-sucking machines (carbon capture and storage technology). It looks with horror at the consumption of forests around the world to produce wood chips for converted coal-fired power plants. It is doubtful of huge bird-killing wind turbines and vast photovoltaic arrays on denuded landscapes.

Polarization and Denial

In the preceding section, I referred to the controversial claim that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the present. I would like to revisit that, not because I think it is important to establish one way or another, but because it offers a window onto a deeper problem that freezes our culture into a holding pattern on numerous issues, not just global warming. The deeper problem is polarization.

Hockey stick reconstructions seem to show the contrary to the Medieval Warm Period assertion – that today is warmer than any time in the past ten thousand years. On the other hand, skeptics assail the methodological and statistical underpinnings of these studies and then adduce evidence of early warm temperatures such as higher sea levels in the early and middle Holocene.

After a couple years of book research, I am confident I could argue either side of the issue. I could, with impressive research citations, argue that the Medieval Warm Period (now called the Medieval Temperature Anomaly) was not really that warm after all, and in any event mostly concentrated in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean basin. I could also argue, again citing dozens of peer-reviewed papers, that the anomaly was significant and global. The same goes for pretty much every aspect of the climate debate – I can argue either side well enough to impress its partisans.

Already the reader’s hackles might be up for implying an equivalency between the two sides, one of which consists of unscrupulous corporate-funded right-wing pseudo-scientists who let their greed come before humanity’s survival, and the other of humble scientists of integrity backed by self-correcting institutions of peer review that ensure that the consensus position of science approaches ever closer to the truth. Or is it that one side consists of brave dissidents who risk their careers to question the reigning orthodoxy, and the other of groupthinking, risk-averse careerists beholden to the globalist agenda of rabid left-wing “enviros” and “greenies”?

The polarizing invective coming from both sides suggests a high degree of ego investment in their positions and makes me doubt that either side would countenance evidence that contradicts their view.

In the face of the extreme polarization of American (and to some degree Western) society today, I’ve adopted a rule of thumb, which applies as much to warring couples as it does to politics: the most important issue is to be found outside the fight itself, in what both parties tacitly agree on or refuse to see. To take sides is to validate the terms of the debate, and to participate in the ignoring of hidden issues.

A meta-level tacit agreement in the climate debate is the reduction of the question of planetary health to the question of whether temperatures are hotter now than X years ago. By pinning alarm over ecological deterioration onto global warming, we imply that if the skeptics are right, then there is no cause for alarm. So the climate movement must prove the skeptics wrong at all costs – even to the point of excluding evidence of historical warm temperatures since these do not fit the narrative.

What is the motive to prove them wrong at all costs? With apologies to the right-wing climate blogosphere, it isn’t to further the diabolical plots of George Soros and Al Gore to implement a socialist One World Government. The motive is a well-founded alarm at the state of the planet. The alarmist camp is channeling into warming an authentic alarm at the anthropogenic deterioration of the biosphere. Basically, both sides have agreed to equate catastrophe with runaway global warming and to debate about that as a proxy for the larger issue of planetary health. In so doing, I fear the environmentalists have ceded sacred ground and agreed to stage the fight on difficult terrain. They have substituted a hard sell for an easy sell. They have substituted a fear narrative (the costs of climate change) for a love narrative (save the whales). They have preconditioned care for the earth on the acceptance of a politically charged theory that requires trust in the institution of science along with the systems of authority that embed it. This, at a time when overall trust in authority is on the wane – and for good reason.

As for the skeptics, I am afraid that the “denialist” slur is in many cases accurate. Whether or not there are valid criticisms to be made of establishment climate science, the skeptical position typically is part of a larger political identity that, in order to maintain its coherency, must dismiss every environmental problem along with global warming. Hewing to a position that everything is fine, climate skeptic blogs usually insist that plastic waste, radioactive waste, chemical pollutants, biodiversity loss, greenhouse gases, GMOs, pesticides, etc. are not a problem; therefore, nothing needs to change. Resistance to change is at the core of psychological denial. On some level, the woman knows she has cancer, but to admit that would require that she quit smoking. The man knows that his marriage is falling apart, but to admit that would require he stop working all the time. And to quit requires a further investigation into what drives these addictions.

So also with our civilization: on some level, we know that the way we are living – more, the way we are being – is destroying our health and our marriage (to the rest of life). We sense a growing unhappiness underneath our collective addiction to consumption and growth. And, we know that we stand on the brink of an initiation into an entirely different kind of civilization. A profound change is upon us, and, fearful of that change, we deny that anything is the matter. The climate skeptics are only the most obvious deniers, but perversely, the global warming mainstream perpetuates a kind of denial too, by upholding a vision of sustainability attainable merely by switching energy sources. The common oxymoron of “sustainable growth” exemplifies this delusion, as growth in our time entails the conversion of nature into resource, into product, into money. Instead, we can embrace the full metamorphosis of civilization and enter a world where development no longer means growth, where the abstract no longer precedes the real, and where the measurable no longer subjugates the qualitative.

One aspect of this shift is the recovery of non-quantitative ways of knowing, those beyond what we call scientific, data-driven, or metric-driven. Let me come out of the closet here: I do not trust climate science, nor the institution of science generally. Generally, I trust the sincerity and intelligence of individual scientists, but as an institution science is subject to a kind of collective confirmation bias mediated by its institutions of publication, grants, academic promotion, and so on. My distrust is also partly personal: I’ve had many experiences that science says are impossible nonsense. I have researched and benefited from healing modalities that science says are quackery. I have lived in cultures where scientifically unacceptable phenomena were commonplace. I have seen scientific consensus fail (for example in the lipid hypothesis of arteriosclerosis). And I see how deeply embedded science is in an obsolescent civilizational world-story. This is not to say that I know the standard narrative of global warming is wrong. I don’t know that at all. It is just that I don’t know it is right either. That is why I have turned my attention to what I DO know, starting with the knowledge that comes through my own bare feet.

The Living and the Local

Perversely, the dominant global warming narrative facilitates denialism by shifting alarm onto a defeasible scientific theory whose ultimate proof can only come when it is too late. With effects that are distant in space and time, and causally distant as well, it is much easier to deny climate change than it is to deny, say, that whale hunting kills whales, that deforestation dries up the land, that plastic is killing marine life, and so forth. By the same token, the effects of place-based ecological healing are easier to see than the climate effects of photovoltaic panels or wind turbines. The causal distance is shorter, and the effects more tangible. For example, where farmers practice soil regeneration, the water table begins to rise, springs that were dry for decades come back to life, streams begin flowing year round again, and songbirds and wildlife return to the area. This is visible without needing to trust distant scientific institutions.

The regenerated soil also happens to store a lot of carbon. Carbon is the atomic basis of life – the very word organic means carbon-containing. We may come to understand atmospheric CO2 levels as a kind of ecological barometer that tells us how successful we have been in restoring life to Earth.

Soil regeneration typifies the intrinsically local, place-based application of the Living Planet paradigm. In contrast, because numbers and metrics are generic – a ton of carbon here is the same as a ton of carbon there – conceiving the ecological crisis in the quantitative terms of CO2 levels encourages globalized, standardized solutions, which are evaluated in terms of their measurable carbon impact. One result has been widespread planting of ecologically and culturally inappropriate trees, which sometimes end up creating disastrous knock-on effects. The carbon stored in their biomass is measured, but not the carbon lost when they use up available groundwater and die thirty years later, leaving the soil barren and vulnerable. Nor do we measure the diffuse ecosystem effects that ensue, nor the pest management costs, nor the disruption of traditional livelihoods that drives urbanization. Such are the perils of metrics-based decision-making: we ignore what we choose not to measure, what is hard to measure, and what is immeasurable.

When we see the places and ecologies of this planet as living beings and not ensembles of data, we realized the necessity of intimate place-based knowledge. Quantitative science can be part of developing this knowledge, but it cannot substitute for the close, qualitative observation of farmers and other local people who interact with the land every day and through generations.

The depth and subtlety of the knowledge of hunter-gatherers and traditional peasants are hard for the scientific mind to fathom. This knowledge, coded into cultural stories, rituals, and customs, integrates its practitioners into the organs of land and sea so that they can participate in the resiliency of life on Earth.

Ritual and Relationship

One of the puzzles of climate science is the persistence of the Holocene Optimum – ten thousand years of anomalously stable climate that has allowed civilization to flourish. Science, as far as I can tell, attributes this basically to good luck. I have encountered among indigenous people a completely different explanation: that the rituals performed by cultures who were in a good relationship with the spirits of the earth maintained conditions conducive to human well-being. Indigenous cultures were in constant communication with other-than-human beings, supplicating or negotiating for ample and timely rains, mild winters, and so forth. But they weren’t merely praying for good weather, they also saw themselves as upholding the long-term relationships with natural powers that were necessary to maintain a world fit for human habitation. Some Dogon I once encountered told me that climate change is the result of removing sacred ritual artifacts from Africa and other places and transporting them to museums in Europe and North America. Dislocated and ritually neglected, they can no longer exercise their geospiritual function. The Kogi say something similar: not only must sacred sites on Earth be protected or the planet will die, but also we must maintain the proper ceremonial relationship to those places.

The modern mind tends to reduce such practices to helplessly superstitious prayers for rain. Our theory of causality has little room to recognize the efficacy of ceremony and ritual to maintain local or global climate equilibrium. I for one am prone to accept indigenous beliefs and practices at face value because I believe that the modern understanding of physical, force-based cause and effect has blinded us to other, mysterious layers of causality. But if you prefer to hold on to modern causality, modern ecology, and modern climate science, you might still validate the rituals of place-based cultures as inseparable from an entire way of life, which in mundane, practical ways included care for water, earth, and life. What motivates this care? It is respect for all beings and systems as sacred living beings. In that mindset, of course, one seeks to communicate with them.

The upshot is not that we should imitate indigenous rituals, but to learn the worldview behind them – the worldview that located them within a living, intelligent, sacred world. Then we will be able to translate that understanding into our own systems of ritual (the ones we call technology, money, and law).

To a primal part of my psyche, it seems obvious that human affairs affect the climate through vectors of symbol and metaphor. This intuition is not so far from the medieval view that social iniquity brought down God’s wrath in the form of natural disasters. As I write this the rain pours down on the farm; having filled all the culverts and basins, it is now breaching the swales, wreaking destruction, carrying off topsoil. Fourteen inches already and still it pours. Meanwhile, the American Southwest suffers record heat and extreme drought. The inequitable distribution of rainfall mirrors the unequal distribution of wealth in our society. So much here that one knows not what to do with it; so little there that life itself becomes impossible. Our culture too has its rituals: we manipulate the symbols we call money and data in the magico-religious belief that physical reality will change thereby. And it does – our rituals are powerful. Yet they bear a hidden price. As other cultures understood, to invoke magic for selfish ends inevitably brings disaster. Sooner or later, a deranged Earth climate will follow derangement in the social climate, political climate, and psychic climate. I may be projecting meaning onto noise, but 2018, a year of extreme polarization in human affairs, has also been a year of extreme polarization of temperature: heat in some places and seasons, cold in others.

What is a human being for?

The Living Planet view, by which I mean the conscious ensouled planet view, acknowledges an intimate link between human and ecological affairs. I often hear people say, “Climate change is not a threat to Earth. The planet will be fine. It is only human beings that might go extinct.” If we understand humanity, however, as the beloved creation of Gaia, born for an evolutionary purpose, then we could no more say she will be fine without humans as we could say a mother will be fine if she loses her child. I’m sorry, but she will not be fine.

The aforementioned idea of an evolutionary purpose, while contrary to modern biological science, follows naturally from a view of the world and the cosmos as sentient, intelligent, or conscious. It opens the questions, “What are we for?” “Why are we here?” and “Why am I here?” Gaia has grown a new organ. What is it for? How might humanity cooperate with all the other organs – the forests and the waters and butterflies and the seals – in service to the dream of the world?

I do not know the answers to these questions. I only know that we must start by asking them. We must – not as a matter of survival. Whether as individuals or as a species, we live for something. We are not given life merely to survive it. What do we serve? What vision of beauty beckons us? This is the question we must ask as we pass through the initiatory portal we call climate change. In asking it, we summon a collective vision that forms the nucleus of a common story, a common agreement. I do not know what it will be, but I do not think it is the old future of flying cars, robot servants, and bubble cities overlooking a befouled and barren landscape. It is a world where the beaches are littered with seashells again, where we see whales by the thousands, where flocks of birds cover the sky, where the rivers run clean, and where life has returned to the ruined places of today.

We live for something. We may not have a grand vision of human destiny to guide us, yet still an internal compass points the way. Following it means stepping into our care. Serving it, we feel, yes, this is why I am here. Maybe your care will guide you to conventional climate marches and the like, or maybe it will guide you to heal and protect a tiny part of Earth, or maybe to address the social climate, the spiritual climate, the relational climate – the health of the new organ of Gaia we call humanity. Some of these activities have no discernible effect on carbon footprint, yet intuition tells us that all are part of the same revolution. A society that exploits the most vulnerable people will necessarily exploit the most vulnerable places too. A society devoted to healing on one level inevitably will come to serve healing on every level.

I can now be more precise about the nature of the initiation I referenced at the outset. Its driving question is, Why are we here? – a key landmark of the maturation process into adulthood. We might, therefore, understand the present convergence of crises as an initiation into collective adulthood – the graduation of modern civilization into its purpose. This is not about survival; that is why the fear narrative, the cost-benefit narrative, the existential threat narrative does not serve the cause of ecological healing. Can we replace it with the love narrative? With the beauty narrative? The empathy narrative? Can we connect with our love for this hurting living planet, and look at our hands and minds, our technology and our arts, and ask, How shall we best participate in the healing and the dreaming of Earth?



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Filed Under: Ecology & Earth Healing Tagged With: climate change, control, cultural narrative, de-growth, Essay, Featured Essay, Featured Home, Featured Topic Essay, grief, Home-V1, metrics, nature, new story

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Karin says

    September 10, 2018 at 11:01 pm

    Good essay. It makes sense that the environmental crisis can’t be reduced to focusing on the single issue of global warming/climate change due to carbon emmissions. Perhaps it’s become that way because the multitude of problems appear too hard to fight all at once, like a war on too many fronts. The powers that think they are love this, because it’s a distraction in a way. One that keeps everyone busy with an unwinnable argument. Sadly, all the arguments about the environment are equally unwinnable because, to those in ‘authority’, the only thing that matters is money, and any concessions they make are just little crumbs to shut up dissenting voices.
    The problems are not too many. Actually, as you’ve pointed out, it’s singular: it’s the attitude held by the power-holders towards nature and our place in it. It’s too bad, Charles, that mostly you’re preaching to the choir. That’s not to say it’s your fault, or that you should stop. It’s that those who aren’t listening to this message, regardless of the source, are too invested in keeping things as they are. Unfortunately, they will not hear it short of a full-on catastrophe, no matter the cause, or causes, of it, just as you mentioned about the moot point of ‘proof’ about global warming. As long as we wait for them, the ‘experts’ and the governments, to come up with solutions, we really are doomed. Until the majority of humans can begin to take significantly effective, collective action themselves, the situation will not improve. That’s how I see it, anyway. I can only hope I”m wrong.

    • Marion says

      November 19, 2018 at 3:08 pm

      Dear Karin .
      Thamks for your assumption – and yes you are wrong. Human brain is also a part of the overall net of breeings .. and thetefore part of a collective Transformation, which is taken part now!!! So good to meet real persons here . Live in Switzerland
      Greetings marion Tiefenökologie @geistigesgaertnern

  2. Lisa Fitzhugh says

    September 10, 2018 at 11:54 pm

    What happens for me when I read your writing, listen to your podcasts or watch your short video asking for help for your new website….what happens is a surge of love for the effort, for the expression and what feels immanently hopeful. It’s so hard to watch the collapse AND read news and other source material that see no relevance in the immaterial. So on this day of September, a day before the fated 9/11, I read your new essay and climb more out of my fog, knowing that what I must do tomorrow is to seek out beauty and soil and wind and be present with what feels most alive in the massive urban crush of Seattle. The size and scope of this transformational crisis is overwhelming most days but you have reminded me to press my feet into the ground for now and remember there are others feeling as fragile, just as the earth is fragile, and our innate connection is the greater truth. Thank you Charles. So much gratitude for your restless, courageous heart.

    • Bill Pfeiffer says

      October 10, 2018 at 9:27 pm

      yes, exactly. thank you.

  3. Eid Heidi says

    September 11, 2018 at 12:47 am

    Thank you C.E.

  4. Kati says

    September 11, 2018 at 1:41 am

    There is a fresh current in this analysis of the environmental concerns we are reminded of every day by climate change slogans. This is a very important move that enables us to step over our narrow interpretations of the ecological degradation and our squabbles, even fierce partisan hostilities towards those who tend to think outside the party lines, and encourages us to dig to deeper levels, touching the spirit behind the idea of Earthly living beings.
    Reading this essay helps me to clarify my thinking and formulate them more precisely in spite of my frustratingly confined linguistic parameters and it lifts my heart which happens when our own internal songs find resonance with someone else’s tunes.
    ….but….but….the political agendas seem to penetrate everything these days, the struggles – some legitimate, many created for the sake of dividing humans so that they can be ruled- degrade now the basic common sense and dignity of our humanity. Given the present political and moral-ethical climate my hopes in humans are dwindling and the only thing, apart from keeping the dreams protected for the right times, is divine intervention.
    Human awareness is way behind of what is required here.

    But very grateful for this essay, thank you Charles!

  5. Adam says

    September 11, 2018 at 1:47 am

    Thank you, Charles, for you help me to know the beauty and full potential of being human.

  6. Daniel Biernoff says

    September 11, 2018 at 4:27 am

    Thank you Charles, I am grateful for your voice which so eloquently expresses and mirrors my thoughts and feelings. I am always reassured by knowing these are held by many and are a growing presence on the earth. Deep blessings

  7. Troels Christian Jakobsen says

    September 11, 2018 at 4:58 am

    Thank you for reminding us, it’s not about survival, but a quest for existential meaning. Why are we here? What purpose do we serve? How do I want to take part in life?

  8. André FRISAYE says

    September 11, 2018 at 5:06 am

    Thank you, Charles !

  9. Sheila Williamson says

    September 11, 2018 at 5:34 am

    Excellent showing so clearly the pointlessness of polarised arguments which miss the point(!),that we are part of the biosphere which needs protection, restoration, healing. How has this escaped our notice for so long ? Looking forward to the book preordered today!

    • Wendi Goldsmith says

      August 1, 2019 at 6:54 am

      It is important to remind us that life matters. What is more powerful than life? It is self-organizing and regenerative: individuals learn, species evolve, and ecosystems adapt. Choosing living options will harness (or unleash?) this powerful ally. This week’s Democratic debates sensibly highlighted the need to prioritize climate change and offered “plans”. The contrast between “building machines that take carbon directly from air” versus “promoting regenerative agriculture and cover crops” was stark. After all, what is vegetation if not living “machines” that use the sun’s energy to convert atmospheric CO2 into biomass? In turn, biomass feeds society, feeds soil health, and feeds ecosystems of land and sea. Life wins out, logically, and also deserves our respect and reverence.

  10. Nicolae Bulgaru says

    September 11, 2018 at 7:13 am

    “Whether as individuals or as a species, we live for something.”

    Maybe you can say for what we live… and in the process you found a new religion or something.
    I am not disagree with factual observation about most of the problems you rise but this line scratched my brain. Sorry!

  11. Jan says

    September 11, 2018 at 7:14 am

    Thank you for exposing alternative ways of talking and thinking around these difficult issues. I liked the text very much, and will share it with others.

    I agree fully with the main conclusion of the text, but needed to do some more thinking regarding the image of the living Earth and who She really is — from the perspective of an open-minded earth scientist and permaculturist.

    You indicated in the text that we humans are capable of destroying Her, or at least that “She will not be fine”. What does that mean? Maybe these two questions are appropriate: Will the living Earth die from the wounds She gets from humans?/Is the human being capable of destroying the pot in which it grows?

    In my perspective, yes we are hurting Her, for sure. At the same time it also seems obvious, especially in these days, that her powers can easily be underestimated, while our own powers are easily overestimated.

    Regarding our image of Her I think it must be noted that the human being has a limited ability to understand deep time – a well known fact by students of geology – which indicates that humans also have limited capabilities to understand Her past. For instance:
    1) She has during eons experienced many encounters with extremely destructive forces. She knows them and have lived through them, but we might not even know the name of some of them.
    2) Her vast experience of chaos and destruction has resulted in immense healing powers. We know that she has them, but still know very little regarding the details.
    The core question here might therefore be: Why would She choose to die because of us, when She didn’t die during the many crises of the past?

    As you indicated, Charles, She might have plans for us to become a very special tissue on the planet (and my answer to Her is already Yes!). So, it would not be surprising to see sadness, tears or even depression in Her — if She looses us. But what can we really know? Probably not much, aside from that Her own path might also be about initiation?

    • Max Girouard says

      September 12, 2018 at 3:14 am

      Jan, my thoughts exactly! 99.9% of all species are now extinct. Mother Nature plays the long game and when an asteroid the size of Everest hit the earth, wiping out much of the life here, it took time but it came back! It always comes back. Bacteria are already starting to eat plastic in the ocean.

      Mother Nature will not shed a tear for us. We have sent thousands of species into the black hole and now, by our own hand, may do the same.

      • Tammy Jo says

        October 20, 2018 at 1:17 pm

        My thoughts – there are more human beings than ever. In the past she may be able to regenerate. In the present the human “Organ” having grown to a point of great size and imlact has ..acted in a way that has made her more vulnerable. I greatly appreciate the likeness charles gives to humans being a child to the mother that if the child dies, the mother certainly., emotionally, and thus physicially and psychically very much so NOT fine. Were talking about a chronic condition that will not simply heal if we are gone like the temporary impact of an asteroid. These are good things to stary questioning and talking about and Im sure charles appreciates the input. Its a complex issue that will require the best of humanitys hearrts and minds to ..transform.

        • Jack Pedigo says

          December 14, 2018 at 1:47 pm

          Thank you. Finally someone who sees reality. I am new to this site and am still feeling my way around. This is an area I have been active in for over 25 years.

    • Mike says

      September 14, 2018 at 12:17 am

      The hardest paradigm to reverse is that of human separate from consciousness, lost in the “downstram” discussion ” of human separatee from Earth. If conssciousness wakes up to Itself inhabitnig in human forms, then It won’t miscarry while in the sleep of “humans being the owners of consciousness”. The metaphor of mother/child is good for the significance of an indiduation of consciousness in a human individual, and presumablly all the more so if that spreads to the collective, but falls apart in thinking the mother will just “carry on”. That’s because the latter is projecting separation of two separate individuals, instead of still One with individuation occurring withIN. The misdirection of seeing separate species as now extinct prohibits seeing those species as still being integral in this moment, not needed to be storied as failures or victims of humanity. The latter does have effects , as I have never read with such clarityy as Charles presents. But they are self-fullfilling effects within a limited story, and to reaize ourselves out of a “failing” story is necessary for a bigger picture to come in to view. Yes, the Universe is impervious to “us”, and maybe Mother Earth too, but that is what “they” want to extend into their creatiion, “us”. A narcissistic human species and a self-hating human species are mirror images that distract from a divinity or sacredness, that yes I still am growing to accept. I think finding Charles’ gifts are “evidence” for me of the willingness Life, as “me”, has been developing to live in this faith. It’s not the other way around, that proof will come first, because the “prooving” need is evidence of not being willing to accept.

      • scott says

        November 12, 2018 at 8:20 am

        I deeply appreciate this Mike.

        Bringing about the beginning of an end to the habit pattern of dualism and separateness is vital; for then we can stand in direct contact with the non-separate ground of being from which loving action and healing emerge precisely because love and wholeness are fundamental attributes of the ground.

        Perhaps initially the conceptual stance of wholeness (non-separateness) and then hopefully the direct non-conceptual realization of this wholeness in and as oneself, are one (among many) avenues of entry into an era of recognition and participation with this Living Planet.

        You said –
        “The misdirection of seeing separate species as now extinct prohibits seeing those species as still being integral in this moment”

        How wonderful this insight truly is!

        Mazu to Baizhang “What was that sound?”

        Baizhang: “It was the cry of wild geese.”

        Mazu: ” Where have they gone?”

        Baizhang: “They have flown away.”

        At once Mazu whirled and grabbed Baizhang by the nose.

        Mazu: “You say they have flown away yet they are here all the time!!”

  12. Merrilee Baker says

    September 11, 2018 at 8:37 am

    Thank you Charles. I love that I can now quote you (from this essay until I can read your book) as I attempt to open minds to taking action for the Living Planet. Since hearing that you spoke at the recent Pachamama Alliance conference I have wondered how your words can be embedded into the Introduction to Drawdown workshops I am doing. Paul Hawken says that most of the solutions in his book we would want to do anyway (socially just etc). However, he has supplied the science data and measured and mapped carbon. I feel that this is what many people want, and the information has been taken up and adapted to many situations. For me, I need to emphasise the living planet, the eco-systems (plastic out of oceans, diversity versus mono-culture plantations that kill wildlife etc). ‘Drawdown solutions’ are tropical forests, mangroves, wetlands, regenerative agriculture and educating girls but do also include solutions that may have detrimental effects. I love that you have come from a different place, the new story, the Living Planet where humans seek to understand their purpose and place and envision the love, empathy and beauty narratives. I look forward to receiving your book. In loving kindness, Merrilee.

  13. John Morgan says

    September 11, 2018 at 9:45 am

    Beautiful Charles, I couldn’t agree more.
    My current volunteer “job” is programming a low power community radio station. It is challenging to find good programming that doesn’t fall into the partisan war model on every issue. That model fosters a win at all cost approach that blocks honesty and openness to understanding. I am gratefully scheduling your podcasts on the radio.

  14. Gary Alexander says

    September 11, 2018 at 11:36 am

    Another beautiful essay Charles. Thank you. The reduction of the Earth’s traumas to a debate about climate change is tragic. The re-ordered priorities you suggest are excellent. However, they require a humanity that has learned to live with the new story to implement them.

    And that is happening too, started by those who are, as Karin says above, the ‘converted choir’ and growing rapidly. I regularly go to meetings of groups that are working on it: Transition Towns, ecovillages, permaculturalists, economic democracy, equality, localisation and so much more. This seems to be a time when these groups are beginning to see the need to join up. And a new infrastructure is nearly here that will facilitate and strengthen that joining, based on a localised, distributed internet, with ‘platform cooperatives’ to make it easy.

    I think that joining and growth could happen very rapidly, once started, because it is about “The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible”. People don’t have to understand it in principle once the converted choir get it started. They just have to feel it working, providing them with personal support, community and care for the Earth.

    My own most recent, very small contribution is in a short pamphlet “A Partnership for People and Planet” (see it at https://tinyurl.com/p3pamphlet ), or for more by me, see earthconnected.net .

    Gary Alexander

  15. Todd Lejnieks says

    September 11, 2018 at 12:12 pm

    So powerful, so beautiful and, to me, so true. I am crying, a deep well of knowing emerging from inside that we, I, all of us humans do have a purpose here. Our Mother Earth, our beautiful, loving mother, she grew us.

    For a reason.

    And we can, if we listen, if we dare, if we feel, if we can awaken into her dream for us, once again—and perhaps even more consciously and powerfully now—know that reason.

    Thank you, Charles.

    ❤️????❤️

  16. Thomas Atwood says

    September 11, 2018 at 1:17 pm

    Thank you as always, Charles, for your prescient integral thinking, heart-based wisdom, and faith in our call to interbeing. May the example of your life and work inspire many more souls to embrace a Living Planet perspective.

  17. Marcelo says

    September 11, 2018 at 1:28 pm

    “I can now be more precise about the nature of the initiation I referenced at the outset. Its driving question is, Why are we here? – a key landmark of the maturation process into adulthood. We might, therefore, understand the present convergence of crises as an initiation into collective adulthood – the graduation of modern civilization into its purpose. This is not about survival; that is why the fear narrative, the cost-benefit narrative, the existential threat narrative does not serve the cause of ecological healing. Can we replace it with the love narrative? With the beauty narrative? The empathy narrative? Can we connect with our love for this hurting living planet, and look at our hands and minds, our technology and our arts, and ask, How shall we best participate in the healing and the dreaming of Earth?”
    🙂 <3

  18. Michael Mulligan says

    September 11, 2018 at 3:27 pm

    This is superb. Rare sanity and inspiration.

  19. Daniel says

    September 11, 2018 at 8:09 pm

    Deeply touched by these profound, wise and sane words. Thank you Charles. For all that you are and all that you remind us.

    It is through our vulnerable, open heart that our divinity rises up to meet us.

  20. Daniel says

    September 11, 2018 at 8:11 pm

    Deeply touched by these profound, wise and sane words. Thank you Charles. For all that you are and all that you remind us.

    It is through our vulnerable, open heart that our divinity rises up to meet us.

  21. Newton Finn says

    September 11, 2018 at 10:04 pm

    “We live for something. We may not have a grand vision of human destiny to guide us, yet still an internal compass points the way.” This reminded me of a hauntingly beautiful song:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFNXnd0cPb8

  22. Stephanie Zee Fehler says

    September 11, 2018 at 10:35 pm

    love this. thank you! I feel like environmentalism (i.e. caretaking our planet) has become Big Business, and the reduce/reuse/recycle, consume less, DIY ethic that leads to a smaller footprint on earth has really been forgotten/denigrated in favour of huge taxation schemes that only serve to make a few fat cats even richer.

  23. Max Girouard says

    September 12, 2018 at 3:04 am

    Charles, you write so well and with so much feeling, something we hear so rarely, it sounds magical!

    I feel your heart ache for this living planet and I commend you but you must be more forceful in your presentation. You must not hold anything back. You must pour your entire being into asking this question: Why are we so willing to extinguish our species? Raise your voice until you are crying out in the pain I know you are feeling! Make a video of it so we can all be there with you! You will have to show us your bare soul, crying for Mother Earth! If you cannot do it, I understand as I know I cannot.

    Short of that, we need to turn our country and the world toward a Democratic Socialist society and quickly! We need to nationalize all fossil fuel industries, plan their phase out in an orderly fashion, turn all industrial capacity toward renewable energy, elimination of waste, especially toxic waste, and redesign our society to support everyone while supporting our life support system.

    Here is a cautionary tale. Take a petri dish with new sterile nutrients, introduce a few bacteria, and the colony goes wild, growing from invisible to easily seen with the naked eye in just 4 to 6 days. Then a curious things happens, even though nutrients remain plentiful and conditions are unchanged. The entire colony suddenly collapses because the success of the colony has created waste, and with more growth, more waste until the entire colony drowns. From their perspective, they enjoyed the good times of plenty and congratulated themselves over how special and lucky they were. The party was good while it lasted!

    The reality is our petri dish is a tiny ball of rock just 8000 miles in diameter. So small, the International Space Station whizzes overhead, circling every 90 minutes! And 99+% of all Life on this pale blue marble lives in a zone just 12 miles deep, that is from the tallest mountain to the deepest part of the ocean. We are the growing colony drowning in our own waste (think CO2, methane, plastic, trash of all kinds, pesticide residues, or anything that is not recycling). We are a global species with old hunter-gatherer attitudes, that is “Use up and move on”! We went from rocks to rocket ships in less than 10 thousand years and our societal consciousness is blind to the fact that there is no longer an “away”! There is no “us” and “them” anymore. There is only “us”! Pogo said it best: “We have met the enemy and he is us!”

    Those of us lucky enough to be alive today, the latest temporary occupants of Spaceship Earth, are not here for ourselves alone, always looking downward, engaged in our narrow selfish interests. When we raise our gaze, we can see that we are caretakers of our planet, protectors and guardians, keeping this place for all future humans that want to have a decent world to live in. We were given a Garden of Eden and we’ve turned it into a giant trash pile, filling the oceans with toxic poisons, plastic, cigarette butts, and all manner of waste, fouling our air, water, and soil, now tinkering with the DNA of life itself. The profit motive makes comfortable zombie beggars of us all!

    We’re slowly circling the giant black hole of extinction and our current incompetence is making it worse. We need to completely rethink our purpose and aspire to a new reality, a new role, beyond consumption, to upgrade our hunter-gatherer operating system to that of competent global citizen. The simple truth is we must do this or we will fail in our most basic of duties, that of protecting our children and their children, etc. Never before in human history has the fate of our species and millions of others been so precariously in the hands of a few thousand (mostly) men.

    Let’s cut to what is already happening right before our eyes: the permafrost in the Arctic is melting. That releases methane, which traps more heat, and the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. And you can easily see that creates a feedback loop!

    The future will take one of three possible courses: A totalitarian state emerges, possibly killing most of the human population to quickly change course and avoid climate disaster, a world Democratic Socialist order, more aligned with taking care of our planet, including all living things or do nothing until it is too late (our present course).

    Good Luck Charles!

    • Andy Baxter says

      September 12, 2018 at 1:16 pm

      Max – exactly! No fairy tales will fix the chaos we’ve caused.

  24. Wendell T Fitzgerald says

    September 12, 2018 at 3:27 pm

    Charles, I think you are saying that there are approaches to the issue that are useless, invalid or at the very least off point to what you consider to be the most valid approach. If you are saying that, I would appreciate you saying so loudly and clearly so we know where you stand. If that is not what you intend, you must know that there are many people some I know personally who interpret what you are saying that way and that you are saying it with a broad brush of condemnation. If you don’t mean it to be interpreted that way, please set us straight. If you consider any of the things you mention in your article summed up in the last paragraph of your article, to be useless etc., I think you are making a mistake. The metaphysical and psychological implication is clear. Anything you determine to be useless and therefore of no value, not worthy of consideration is a reflection of something within yourself that you judge to be useless. Then it is projected out on others and the world. If this is where you stand you have made unnecessary enemies and you have belittled the open hearts of people who care deeply. Some people tell me to get out of my head and into my heart. Does this mean that anything that comes out of an educated articulate head is useless and safely ignored? If so, that does not seem very heartfelt or loving. After considering the admonition I have to say: where do you think what is in my head comes from? I would appreciate if you would make the distinction between people with heart and those without. There are many apparently without heart. That is obvious. On the other hand if you think that the folks who take the trouble to scientifically examine the impact of the many possible solutions and actions to take regarding climate change are not clear about their profound spiritual connection to the earth, all of nature, the entire creation, think again. Are we all to be invalidated? We need each other and of course we need your voice and your heart.

  25. James R. Martin says

    September 12, 2018 at 4:49 pm

    “This is not to say that it is fine to continue burning fossil fuels as always. In reaction to my last essay, some people labeled me a climate denier or a tool of climate deniers. This is a natural reaction in a highly polarized environment in which the first lens applied to any person or position is “Which side are you on?” In a war setting, any information, however true, that is inconsistent with our side’s narrative must be rejected as rendering aid and comfort to the enemy.” — Charles E.

    I paused in my reading here to comment. I will read on and respond further, I’m sure.

    Meanwhile, however, I want to say that I’m loving this essay so far. It says so much I’d say myself! I love the complexity and nuance of Charles’ Living Planet perspective, which is truly a breath of fresh air. And the social and psychological perspective Charles brings is equally fresh and invigorating, and true. “Which side are you on?” is more often than not nothing more than a perceptual and conceptual blinder — at least when the intentions of the participants in conversation are honest and sincere, Earth-loving people. The essay sparkles with intelligence and heart, for sure! But I’m afraid my comment from the earlier essay might be misconstrued as an example of … “some people labeled me a climate denier or a tool of climate deniers”. And this misconstrual of my words would be to take them out of the complexity and nuance of my intended communication. My point was simply that BOTH the Living World perspective AND the mainstream climate science tell us crucial truths about our world and our situation. In my view, we cannot understand our climate situation unless we understand BOTH of these perspectives. They are NOT in conflict with one another — not really. It is only the climate science perspective as divorced from the Living Planet perspective which is both false and crucially inadequate. But this does NOT mean that the mainstream climate science is WRONG. It only means that it is importantly INCOMPLETE. And I sincerely thank you, Charles, for pointing out this serious shortcoming in mainstream climate science(!). What we need, rather desperately now, is a merging of the Living Planet perspective, with all of its nuance, complexity and HEART (which is what Charles is bringing in spades!) with the mainstream climate science. What we decidedly do not need is to throw out either the baby or the bath water. We’ll be needing both.

    But Charles’s remarkable, beautiful, true Living Planet perspective is precisely the corrective which contemporary science in general, and climate science no less so, so … deserves. We deserve such a scientific world view — a world view of radical wholeness — and heart. Which may very well be one and the same darn thing.

    Thanks Charles! Much love (wholeness) to you.

    • Anna says

      October 9, 2018 at 1:10 pm

      Reminds me of the specialisation in the body of different types of “immune system” cells. We need all of the varying systems, not just one or another.

  26. Rachel says

    September 12, 2018 at 9:09 pm

    I know that I’ve a lot to learn from my cat, also.

  27. Kate says

    September 13, 2018 at 5:12 am

    Thank you yet again. You have given a coherent form to my incoherent (to me) reactions to the climate and environmental debate. Your words make me feel renewed in my purpose. So looking forward to your new book. Thank you for all you are doing.

  28. curt hill says

    September 13, 2018 at 8:10 am

    Charles –

    thank you for this exquisitely beautiful and heart-felt essay. Climate change/global warming is symptomatic of how out of balance, out of “tune” we are with this living system called planet earth. Our home. I hear your cry, and I cry with you, for how we are systematically destroying our world and our killing off our fellow travelers. I am with you.

  29. Brian Smyth says

    September 13, 2018 at 6:07 pm

    Many thanks Charles. As always, you get to a level below -or above- the right-wrong, good-bad false and simplistic dichotomies. I look forward so much to the full book.
    After reading the article I recalled a piece from Dr. Zhivago. “I think that if the beast who sleeps in man could be held down by threats – any kind of threat,, whether of jail or of retribution or of death – then the highest emblem of humanity would be the lion tamer in the circus with his whip, not the self-sacrificing preacher. But don’t you see, this is just the point – what has for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but an inward music: the irresistible power of unarmed truth, the attraction of its example. It has always been assumed that the most important thing in the Gospels are the ethical teaching and commandments. But for me the most important thing is the fact that Christ speaks in parables taken from daily life, that he explains the truth in terms of everyday reality. The idea which underlies this is that communion between mortals is immortal and that the whole of life is symbolic because the whole of it has meaning.”

    Fear will not do it for us….only love…love of EVERYTHING and it is easy to love everything as it is so wonderful.

  30. Andrea Robinson says

    September 13, 2018 at 11:56 pm

    Thank you very much for your work , passion and education. I read most of the article, though like many of my other ‘creative’ friends have difficulty ingesting too many words. Not to worry! I am a lover of the Earth, a co-creative, and a Simplifier. I will take the time to create a visual graphic which outlines your List so that it can be taken in, and therefore directional.

    In my opinion, Priority #1 is to first HAVE a relationship with this planet and the Self. I’ve found good rest and a calm rhythm create a space for this. It can be tough to have this calmness and inner spaciousness when one is in a frenetic state of ‘survival’ as you’ve said previously. Many have these energetic tools and are actively using them, tapping in, regardless of the storm of change that surrounds us. Others, do not have these energetic centering tools, do not have proper nourishment and rest, do not have the basic necessities and therefore the ‘bandwidth’ to grasp intellectual, philosophical and ecological concepts. In other words, I see the fatigue, and most people need the As Bs and Cs of how to help. Thank you for the bullet list!

    I feel that part of my role is to line up with leaders like you, and that part of my own leadership is to be a bridge – someone who helps integrate the practice and application of said bullet list, through SIMPLICITY and also bring the higher teachings of simplicity. We both are here to illuminate and liberate. This week I’ve really been taking in your work, and it has really given me an extra boost of energized courage and inspiration! I’m stepping up to the challenges. I’m more than ready. I hope to meet you in person at the SAND event next month. (and hope those NC storms keep everyone safe from harm).

  31. Donna says

    September 14, 2018 at 12:32 pm

    Lovely essay!

    I was one of those who thought that the sooner we extinct ourselves the better for all other lifeforms on our planet until I read, “I often hear people say, “Climate change is not a threat to Earth. The planet will be fine. It is only human beings that might go extinct.” If we understand humanity, however, as the beloved creation of Gaia, born for an evolutionary purpose, then we could no more say she will be fine without humans as we could say a mother will be fine if she loses her child. I’m sorry, but she will not be fine.”

    I lost my daughter two years ago, so I completely understand at a profound depth. Worldview deeply changed… Thank you, Charles!

  32. Douglas Jay says

    September 14, 2018 at 11:29 pm

    My own bare feet–my soles, if you will–know that climate change and global warming are happening. I’ve been paying close attention to my body, to the body of the earth around me, and listening to the embodied intelligence of indigenous leaders and folks as well. On a spiritual level, I feel the unrest of the psychic dimension of the planet, I believe.

    I agree with the central point of this piece, and appreciate Charles’s perspective in his last two essays. We do need to move beyond carbon figures and see the living planet systemically. And his point about the tacit agreement of both sides to focus on climate is an interesting and incisive one.

    As Katherine Hayhoe, the celebrated climate communicator, said recently in a talk–the same science that created airplanes and the cell phone has also understood climate change. We don’t deny airplanes, so why do we deny climate change?

    Mainstream and establishment science has gotten things wrong in the past (the safety of ethyl lead, nuclear fallout, for instance) and is embedded in a limited worldview that denies spirituality and non-rational ways of knowing–I agree and understand. But still–does this mean that climate science can’t be trusted? That it is wrong? By taking the same sort of anti-institutional skepticism that climate deniers take, Charles is walking a thin line–and the same line that doomed the counterculture in times past when it went too anti-science and too magical thinking and lost its credibility. A better tack might be to dig into how to use science given its limitations, rather than doubting it too much away. And how to reform science in the new worldview and new story–what will be the new story of science and how will that help us to understand climate? The threads of that are in this essay–living systems perspectives and non-reductionism, and understanding better the relations between power and knowledge.

  33. Sky Otter says

    September 15, 2018 at 9:01 am

    Dear C.E. : Concise, brilliant, hopeful, Your mom was right. Thank you, Sky Otter

  34. Beau says

    September 15, 2018 at 11:47 pm

    I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address those problems. But I was wrong. The top environment problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy…and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation – and we scientists don’t know how to do that.

    – Gus Speth, Environmental Lawyer and Advocate

    The egocentricity experiment with human Design has run its course – its climax is our confluence of crises. Virtually all system solutions and ascension paths proposed by even the most enlightened among us fail to breach egocentricity’s stronghold. The forecast for our imminent extinction17 is well founded and arguably certain unless we become something new18. Metamorphosis is appropriate terminology here. Relieving humanity of egocentricity’s bondage by consensus is impossible. Political proposals are hopelessly impotent. It is now imperative that we develop metamorphic catalysts immediately – means and methods to efficiently transmute egocentricity and profoundly evoke our innate senses of interdependence and compassion.

    – https://bohobeau.net/2016/07/24/care-to-evolve/

  35. Cindy Dixon says

    September 16, 2018 at 7:24 pm

    What a gift to find and read this today, and so congruent with the ideas I’ve worked with for the last 12 or so years – that we must ask the question about the ultimate purpose of a human life, and of humanity collectively. That we are here at this moment in history for a purpose, to quicken the initiation/birth of a new higher kind of consciousness, both remembering our connection to all life and Earth and achieving an explosion of creativity and compassion. Thank you Charles.

  36. James Cross says

    September 17, 2018 at 10:57 am

    Thanks for a fairly balanced approach not centered completely on Green House Gases.

    I am not sure exactly what you mean by the Holocene Optimum. There is the Holocene climatic optimum but that refers to specific time period 5-9,000 years ago where global temperatures may have been higher than those at present and may have been primarily caused by Earth’s orbital dynamics.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum

    Whether the current interglacial is unusually or abnormally long isn’t entirely clear. Rudiman’s Early Anthropocene Hypothesis suggests that we might have entered a glacial period several thousand years ago had it not been for human forest clearing and farming. Others think that the orbital dynamics are such that we would be still thousands of years away from the onset of glaciation even without significant human influence.

    I am convinced human influence on climate and environment has been significant from the earliest farming communities and civilizations. The Medieval Warm Period follows directly in time the development of the Mayan civilization and the rise of large civilizations in the Amazon. The Little Ice Age comes on the collapse of those civilizations as their populations were decimated by disease. The modern warming period, which some skeptics like to consider to be a rebound from the Little Ice Age, comes with rebound of populations, farming, and the start of the Industrial Era before the massive influence of 20th century technology. I am not saying that human influence drove everything about climate change. Certainly solar and volcanic influences played roles. But there is an obvious feedback mechanism which probably has played a role: warm climate leads to productive agriculture leads to population growth which leads more agriculture which leads to more carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere which leads to warmer climate, etc On the opposite side, before the modern era, bad weather from volcanic eruption, crop disease, or human disease would cause populations to shrink, agriculture to shrink, and crop land to be reclaimed by forest and prairie.

  37. Matt Colombo says

    September 18, 2018 at 2:44 pm

    I look forward to your book! Thanks for the preview. I hope your work makes it out of the echo chamber containing those of us who already know you are right!

  38. El Tucker says

    September 21, 2018 at 1:57 pm

    Most unfortunate that you use Thomas Berry’s ideas without citing them even your titles. Berry wrote ‘The New Story’ in 1978.

  39. Ben Mates says

    September 25, 2018 at 4:22 pm

    The questions posed at the end of this essay have been a central part of Kabbalistic study for thousands of years. To partake of the fruits of that study, I respectfully and heartily recommend checking into a relevant and modern expression of the Kabbalah: B’nei Baruch kabbalah Education and Research Institute http://www.kabbalah.info/

  40. Michael Brookman says

    October 3, 2018 at 6:11 pm

    My understanding is of the desperate need to find the humility, the stillness within, that facilitates conscious connection, conscious participation with Life, the core of Being, wherein all wisdom, all guidance is to be realised. Like the biblical ‘prodigal son’ we’ve ignored our spiritual origins for far too long. NOW is the time to return to our roots, but free of all isms, thinking, rules, regulations will never ever enable us to find resolution.

  41. Dr. David Mead says

    October 9, 2018 at 12:21 pm

    Much appreciation for what should be dog-bollock obvious. But it is not to many due to the conditioning we have all been hammered with and which is being exported to the rest of the world.

    What follows is the need to inspire and nurture people in order for us all to be able to experience and therefore choose another way of life.

    Pushing for change is far harder than seducing for change. Seducing with community action and play, educating our children in natural outside places, experiencing each other as not consumers by first priority but as fellow travellers to love by the opening of our hearts, our imagination and our beautiful empowerment. The action to create a healthy way is to demonstrate the difference we feel when caring and sharing and having fun together. By respecting our true nature we may have a chance to respect the need to nurture our home.

  42. Fahad khan says

    October 10, 2018 at 8:07 am

    I think if we complain to our past nothing new will come, but with this beautiful article, I can say we have to go ahead in future and save natural resources for our future generation. initiation into a living planet can be done by saving resources to the extent and accepting environment-friendly things like solar panel and wind power.

    A very nice article with full detail.

  43. Byron Carrier says

    October 11, 2018 at 1:45 pm

    I am happy to stumble across your inspiring essay, Charles. I agree that the exploitation of life goes far beyond global warming and includes our waste, poisons, and cruelty towards animals and fellow humans. We free-born earthlings. Our American founders realized and actualized that, but our current government is being systematically perverted to keep on exploiting us and Life. When we learn to live with love, pleasure, and happiness, we will find ways to help Eden flourish better than ever. We’d have more salmon in the streams then when we Europeans got here, not less, as is the case. My life’s passion is to relate our innate goodness (our religious, secular, and spiritual natures to the policies, technologies, and underlying assumptions) to loving Eden and each other again (or anew). Please see my writings towards this at http://www.earthlyreligion.com, especially those essays and sermons regarding what is good.

  44. James Martin says

    October 17, 2018 at 2:33 pm

    Hi Charles –

    My book-buying budget is limited these days. And I want to read the new Climate book. And it occurred to me that you’ve historically made your books available at no fee online. So I explored and found that your website says, “Online Book Version — Coming Soon”. Naturally, I prefer the printed page, and will eventually purchase a copy. In the meanwhile, I hope I can get stated reading it online, soon.

    Thanks!

    • Carla Sakrison says

      October 30, 2018 at 12:35 pm

      I posted your beautiful essay with the caption,
      “Charles Eisenstein can just say it better than I can… try as I may:-)!”

      So, so good:-)

  45. Joseph Hyde says

    November 14, 2018 at 2:16 pm

    Yeah, clearly we spend more energy DEFENDING our lives and our children’s lives AGAINST a society that Has taught us all to see each other as targets. Targets for exploitation. Targets for manipulation. Targets for consumption. I sometimes feel like a squirrel. Constantly foraging, always looking over my shoulder for a predator.
    I wonder what it would be like to see the world as a wonderland of security and opportunity for all. It seems to me that as we approach an understanding of mutuality, we will begin to create this utopia. I like the word UTOPIA., as it sets an intention of interbeing and interreliance.
    I also like the word, ENOUGH, as it implies an understanding of actual need, and the renunciation of excess. Which brings me to the topic of population. How much is enough? Is there a number that represents enough?
    Yeah, that’s what I want to hear about from CE.
    Population Control, how many of us is enough?

  46. Ute says

    November 15, 2018 at 4:53 am

    Dear Charles, I would like to hear your opinion on the question that has been looking at me more and more lately, waiting for a response from me – and I feel that I can not do something like it has done before – and yet I know that my motivation is clearly in the spirit of the living earth. I am very sad just when I think about it. I collect colored earth from different regions of Europe and reconnect it to pictures by laying them on a wooden frame with jute. In doing so, I let myself be guided by my relationship to the earth – but when my relationship is disturbed and sick – and when all the little creatures I collect with the earth die drying – where do I find the answer to what I’m really doing alive Earth serves. My pictures have received little attention from the people so far. I see an analogy to the view of the earth as an object. Gradually, however, the pictures get more attention and people around me begin to work towards being exhibited. You could say that is such a small problem – in this is reflected as in every other but all our problem – as in the small so in the big. I will let myself be guided by my feeling. At the moment I have collected earth for many pictures. I handle it carefully, use every crumb. The rest of the old picture I use the next new, no picture is thrown away. Maybe I can see it so that the many little creatures have become part of a new living form, because my pictures are alive. They communicate with their viewer. I think that it is primarily the Earth itself that communicates. I like your thoughts. They talk to me as if they came from a place that is familiar to me. Best regards Ute

  47. Doug says

    November 26, 2018 at 8:57 pm

    What wonderful insights and vision. I love the way you present them. I especially appreciated the grounding in living ecosystems, the whole of Gaia, and the relevance of ritual.

    I wonder however, what you think about the apparent urgency of climate change, extinctions, ocean health, etc. ? I am convinced that in order for a sacred economy to emerge, we must urgently direct all of our actions in some manner to reducing and removing the industrial growth (Joanna Macy) economy and resource extraction process, in one multiply-dimensioned, pluralistic effort with many authors, aspects and levels, It would be as a coherent vector of change. In so doing an ecological and life-sustaining, sacred economy can emerge. The power of each of us comes from all of us.

    Thank you for shedding such an encompassing light on our current situation and reframing it so attractively. And yes, to overcome the behemoth barriers of such a vector, we will have to reach for a “we consciousness” and greater and more diverse expressions of our Love. Isn’t that All that there Ever Is?

    Best wishes, from Geneva and Victoria, B.C.

  48. Michael says

    December 25, 2018 at 1:48 am

    I have seen just a bit of your work in the recent past, and I am glad to find you again. I enjoy your clear and balanced perspective on the importance of addressing ecosystem degradation and pollution, along with the psychological/cultural aspects of restoring human-Earth relations. I concur with your overall point of view, the priority of protecting the Earth’s organs, and I appreciate your emphasis on beauty, love, and holism. I think in the past few months there is much arising within humanity and begin to feel some possibilities for significant transformation. I feel there are many levels available to engage in supporting this evolution and healing, of which I will name four, which certainly overlap.

    1) Indigenous populations have retained and regenerated powerful technologies, if you can call them that, for generating resonant fields – and these are woven with simple elemental ceremonies, songs, chants, prayer, intention, and relational awareness to outline a few aspects. Some tribes are willing to share with like-minded people from all walks of life who arrive with humble, mutual attitudes in order to create mutual healing networks and preserve essential cultural knowledge too easily lost amid inter-generational trauma coping and ongoing corporate assaults on Nature. There is also often some form of giveaway economy in cultures rooted in Earth-honoring norms rather than capitalistic ones. These are some of the factors contributing to Idle No More, Standing Rock, and like protective actions offering such inspiration in recent times. The very liminality these actions open up in the world provides a possibility of powerful emergent socio-political structures, all related to your question, “why are we here?”

    2) There is a great need to do whatever we can to build the new society within the shell of the old presently, as the debt-based money system is collapsing of its own entropy, propped up by multi-trillion dollar bailout, fossil fuels, and warmongering. As the system collapses, every community garden and (again, as you know) gift economy and cooperative effort generates an abundance which can at least soften the ever-steeper landing we face. Studying Cuba’s survival post-USSR is iilluminating and points to the permaculture you advocate.

    3) Beyond the permaculture you list, there are numerous new technologies developing, a kind of permaculture 2.0 with increasing subtlety and transformation potential. Fungi in fruiting, mycellial, and mycorhizal forms are primary regenerative allies, capable, as Stamitz fans like to point out, of regenerating life from previous mass-extinction episodes on the planet. Algae, hemp, biochar, compost in general, and humanure, are a few other simple relational approaches offering us massive opportunities for working with Earth’s processes to detoxify and restore habitat from very degraded areas, without the heavy labor of some of the more traditional landscape permaculture approach.

    4) There is ample evidence of a permaculture 3.0, if you wish to call it that, which is subtler still and cuts to the chase in some ways. By this I am referring to resonant energy fields themselves, which offer tremendous potential for really developing transformational technologies on a quantum, alchemical level. These range from numerous over-unity and anti-gravity devices, to simple empathy work including restorative circles, to holistic healing and ancient yogic/chi practices, and more. These all connect to the Source dimension directly, which I feel humanity is being asked to now step up to as part of the very initiation you outline. This work of unfolding humanity’s full potential is daunting, calling for courage and a humble, grateful heart. In a profound sense, I feel we are being asked to purify our own individual lives and intentions of all violence in order to truly develop the capacity to handle these systems. Is it perhaps a prerequisite for joining the galactic community? Empathy, gratitude, sweat lodge, simple prayer, and other vibrational practices doubly bless us by supporting this field, along with supporting our own heart-centered presence – our personal capacity to maintain it. All the traditional and emergent wisdom I have connected to in my 55 years arrives at this growing consensus of perspectives.

    Thank You and Much Love- Michael

  49. Fahad khan says

    February 7, 2019 at 2:53 am

    planet is the only thing that we have in common. your Green and living planet initiation is good. I really appreciate it.

  50. Kevin Ionno says

    March 27, 2019 at 10:39 am

    Years ago I read a book by Doug Boyd called “Rolling Thunder” about an American Indian of that name who was a medicine man. In the book, Boyd refers to certain non-ordinary occurrences that he experiences in Rolling Thunder’s presence. He also tells of a conversation in which Rolling Thunder describes the Earth as a living that is sick, much the way you do. Rolling Thunder referred to coming Earth changes as readjustments to throw off the sickness like a fever or vomiting .

    Your perspective on life is very similar to the one I expressed in a guest sermon I gave last fall at the local Unitarian Universalist Church. For those interested you can find the text here: https://ionnosphere.blogspot.com/2018/10/seeing-life-around-you.html

  51. Manoj Prusty says

    September 7, 2019 at 7:19 am

    The initiation of green and living planets is good. I really appreciate it.
    Carbon Footprint…

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Charles Eisenstein

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The Coronation

For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them?

Covid-19 is showing us that when humanity is united in common cause, phenomenally rapid change is possible. None of the world’s problems are technically difficult to solve; they originate in human disagreement. In coherency, humanity’s creative powers are boundless. A few months ago, a proposal to halt commercial air travel would have seemed preposterous. Likewise for the radical changes we are making in our social behavior, economy, and the role of government in our lives. Covid demonstrates the power of our collective will when we agree on what is important. What else might we achieve, in coherency? What do we want to achieve, and what world shall we create? That is always the next question when anyone awakens to their power.

Covid-19 is like a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold of normality. To interrupt a habit is to make it visible; it is to turn it from a compulsion to a choice. When the crisis subsides, we might have occasion to ask whether we want to return to normal, or whether there might be something we’ve seen during this break in the routines that we want to bring into the future. We might ask, after so many have lost their jobs, whether all of them are the jobs the world most needs, and whether our labor and creativity would be better applied elsewhere. We might ask, having done without it for a while, whether we really need so much air travel, Disneyworld vacations, or trade shows. What parts of the economy will we want to restore, and what parts might we choose to let go of? And on a darker note, what among the things that are being taken away right now – civil liberties, freedom of assembly, sovereignty over our bodies, in-person gatherings, hugs, handshakes, and public life – might we need to exert intentional political and personal will to restore?

For most of my life, I have had the feeling that humanity was nearing a crossroads. Always, the crisis, the collapse, the break was imminent, just around the bend, but it didn’t come and it didn’t come. Imagine walking a road, and up ahead you see it, you see the crossroads. It’s just over the hill, around the bend, past the woods. Cresting the hill, you see you were mistaken, it was a mirage, it was farther away than you thought. You keep walking. Sometimes it comes into view, sometimes it disappears from sight and it seems like this road goes on forever. Maybe there isn’t a crossroads. No, there it is again! Always it is almost here. Never is it here.

Now, all of a sudden, we go around a bend and here it is. We stop, hardly able to believe that now it is happening, hardly able to believe, after years of confinement to the road of our predecessors, that now we finally have a choice. We are right to stop, stunned at the newness of our situation. Because of the hundred paths that radiate out in front of us, some lead in the same direction we’ve already been headed. Some lead to hell on earth. And some lead to a world more healed and more beautiful than we ever dared believe to be possible.

I write these words with the aim of standing here with you – bewildered, scared maybe, yet also with a sense of new possibility – at this point of diverging paths. Let us gaze down some of them and see where they lead.

* * *

I heard this story last week from a friend. She was in a grocery store and saw a woman sobbing in the aisle. Flouting social distancing rules, she went to the woman and gave her a hug. “Thank you,” the woman said, “that is the first time anyone has hugged me for ten days.”

Going without hugs for a few weeks seems a small price to pay if it will stem an epidemic that could take millions of lives. There is a strong argument for social distancing in the near term: to prevent a sudden surge of Covid cases from overwhelming the medical system. I would like to put that argument in a larger context, especially as we look to the long term. Lest we institutionalize distancing and reengineer society around it, let us be aware of what choice we are making and why.

The same goes for the other changes happening around the coronavirus epidemic. Some commentators have observed how it plays neatly into an agenda of totalitarian control. A frightened public accepts abridgments of civil liberties that are otherwise hard to justify, such as the tracking of everyone’s movements at all times, forcible medical treatment, involuntary quarantine, restrictions on travel and the freedom of assembly, censorship of what the authorities deem to be disinformation, suspension of habeas corpus, and military policing of civilians. Many of these were underway before Covid-19; since its advent, they have been irresistible. The same goes for the automation of commerce; the transition from participation in sports and entertainment to remote viewing; the migration of life from public to private spaces; the transition away from place-based schools toward online education, the decline of brick-and-mortar stores, and the movement of human work and leisure onto screens. Covid-19 is accelerating preexisting trends, political, economic, and social.

While all the above are, in the short term, justified on the grounds of flattening the curve (the epidemiological growth curve), we are also hearing a lot about a “new normal”; that is to say, the changes may not be temporary at all. Since the threat of infectious disease, like the threat of terrorism, never goes away, control measures can easily become permanent. If we were going in this direction anyway, the current justification must be part of a deeper impulse. I will analyze this impulse in two parts: the reflex of control, and the war on death. Thus understood, an initiatory opportunity emerges, one that we are seeing already in the form of the solidarity, compassion, and care that Covid-19 has inspired.

The Reflex of Control

At the current writing, official statistics say that about 25,000 people have died from Covid-19. By the time it runs its course, the death toll could be ten times or a hundred times bigger, or even, if the most alarming guesses are right, a thousand times bigger. Each one of these people has loved ones, family and friends. Compassion and conscience call us to do what we can to avert unnecessary tragedy. This is personal for me: my own infinitely dear but frail mother is among the most vulnerable to a disease that kills mostly the aged and the infirm.

What will the final numbers be? That question is impossible to answer at the time of this writing. Early reports were alarming; for weeks the official number from Wuhan, circulated endlessly in the media, was a shocking 3.4%. That, coupled with its highly contagious nature, pointed to tens of millions of deaths worldwide, or even as many as 100 million. More recently, estimates have plunged as it has become apparent that most cases are mild or asymptomatic. Since testing has been skewed towards the seriously ill, the death rate has looked artificially high. In South Korea, where hundreds of thousands of people with mild symptoms have been tested, the reported case fatality rate is around 1%. In Germany, whose testing also extends to many with mild symptoms, the fatality rate is 0.4%. A recent paper in the journal Science argues that 86% of infections have been undocumented, which points to a much lower mortality rate than the current case fatality rate would indicate.

The story of the Diamond Princess cruise ship bolsters this view. Of the 3,711 people on board, about 20% have tested positive for the virus; less than half of those had symptoms, and eight have died. A cruise ship is a perfect setting for contagion, and there was plenty of time for the virus to spread on board before anyone did anything about it, yet only a fifth were infected. Furthermore, the cruise ship’s population was heavily skewed (as are most cruise ships) toward the elderly: nearly a third of the passengers were over age 70, and more than half were over age 60. A research team concluded from the large number of asymptomatic cases that the true fatality rate in China is around 0.5%. That is still five times higher than flu. Based on the above (and adjusting for much younger demographics in Africa and South and Southeast Asia) my guess is about 200,000-300,000 deaths in the US – more if the medical system is overwhelmed, less if infections are spread out over time – and 3 million globally. Those are serious numbers. Not since the Hong Kong Flu pandemic of 1968/9 has the world experienced anything like it.

My guesses could easily be off by an order of magnitude. Every day the media reports the total number of Covid-19 cases, but no one has any idea what the true number is, because only a tiny proportion of the population has been tested. If tens of millions have the virus, asymptomatically, we would not know it. Further complicating the matter is the high rate of false positives for existing testing, possibly as high as 80%. (And see here for even more alarming uncertainties about test accuracy.) Let me repeat: no one knows what is really happening, including me. Let us be aware of two contradictory tendencies in human affairs. The first is the tendency for hysteria to feed on itself, to exclude data points that don’t play into the fear, and to create the world in its image. The second is denial, the irrational rejection of information that might disrupt normalcy and comfort. As Daniel Schmactenberger asks, How do you know what you believe is true?

In the face of the uncertainty, I’d like to make a prediction: The crisis will play out so that we never will know. If the final death tally, which will itself be the subject of dispute, is lower than feared, some will say that is because the controls worked. Others will say it is because the disease wasn’t as dangerous as we were told.

To me, the most baffling puzzle is why at the present writing there seem to be no new cases in China. The government didn’t initiate its lockdown until well after the virus was established. It should have spread widely during Chinese New Year, when every plane, train, and bus is packed with people traveling all over the country. What is going on here? Again, I don’t know, and neither do you.

Whether the final global death toll is 50,000 or 500,000 or 5 million, let’s look at some other numbers to get some perspective. My point is NOT that Covid isn’t so bad and we shouldn’t do anything. Bear with me. Last year, according to the FAO, five million children worldwide died of hunger (among 162 million who are stunted and 51 million who are wasted). That is 200 times more people than have died so far from Covid-19, yet no government has declared a state of emergency or asked that we radically alter our way of life to save them. Nor do we see a comparable level of alarm and action around suicide – the mere tip of an iceberg of despair and depression – which kills over a million people a year globally and 50,000 in the USA. Or drug overdoses, which kill 70,000 in the USA, the autoimmunity epidemic, which affects 23.5 million (NIH figure) to 50 million (AARDA), or obesity, which afflicts well over 100 million. Why, for that matter, are we not in a frenzy about averting nuclear armageddon or ecological collapse, but, to the contrary, pursue choices that magnify those very dangers?

Please, the point here is not that we haven’t changed our ways to stop children from starving, so we shouldn’t change them for Covid either. It is the contrary: If we can change so radically for Covid-19, we can do it for these other conditions too. Let us ask why are we able to unify our collective will to stem this virus, but not to address other grave threats to humanity. Why, until now, has society been so frozen in its existing trajectory?

The answer is revealing. Simply, in the face of world hunger, addiction, autoimmunity, suicide, or ecological collapse, we as a society do not know what to do. Our go-to crisis responses, all of which are some version of control, aren’t very effective in addressing these conditions. Now along comes a contagious epidemic, and finally we can spring into action. It is a crisis for which control works: quarantines, lockdowns, isolation, hand-washing; control of movement, control of information, control of our bodies. That makes Covid a convenient receptacle for our inchoate fears, a place to channel our growing sense of helplessness in the face of the changes overtaking the world. Covid-19 is a threat that we know how to meet. Unlike so many of our other fears, Covid-19 offers a plan.

Our civilization’s established institutions are increasingly helpless to meet the challenges of our time. How they welcome a challenge that they finally can meet. How eager they are to embrace it as a paramount crisis. How naturally their systems of information management select for the most alarming portrayals of it. How easily the public joins the panic, embracing a threat that the authorities can handle as a proxy for the various unspeakable threats that they cannot.

Today, most of our challenges no longer succumb to force. Our antibiotics and surgery fail to meet the surging health crises of autoimmunity, addiction, and obesity. Our guns and bombs, built to conquer armies, are useless to erase hatred abroad or keep domestic violence out of our homes. Our police and prisons cannot heal the breeding conditions of crime. Our pesticides cannot restore ruined soil. Covid-19 recalls the good old days when the challenges of infectious diseases succumbed to modern medicine and hygiene, at the same time as the Nazis succumbed to the war machine, and nature itself succumbed, or so it seemed, to technological conquest and improvement. It recalls the days when our weapons worked and the world seemed indeed to be improving with each technology of control.

What kind of problem succumbs to domination and control? The kind caused by something from the outside, something Other. When the cause of the problem is something intimate to ourselves, like homelessness or inequality, addiction or obesity, there is nothing to war against. We may try to install an enemy, blaming, for example, the billionaires, Vladimir Putin, or the Devil, but then we miss key information, such as the ground conditions that allow billionaires (or viruses) to replicate in the first place.

If there is one thing our civilization is good at, it is fighting an enemy. We welcome opportunities to do what we are good at, which prove the validity of our technologies, systems, and worldview. And so, we manufacture enemies, cast problems like crime, terrorism, and disease into us-versus-them terms, and mobilize our collective energies toward those endeavors that can be seen that way. Thus, we single out Covid-19 as a call to arms, reorganizing society as if for a war effort, while treating as normal the possibility of nuclear armageddon, ecological collapse, and five million children starving.

The Conspiracy Narrative

Because Covid-19 seems to justify so many items on the totalitarian wish list, there are those who believe it to be a deliberate power play. It is not my purpose to advance that theory nor to debunk it, although I will offer some meta-level comments. First a brief overview.

The theories (there are many variants) talk about Event 201 (sponsored by the Gates Foundation, CIA, etc. last September), and a 2010 Rockefeller Foundation white paper detailing a scenario called “Lockstep,” both of which lay out the authoritarian response to a hypothetical pandemic. They observe that the infrastructure, technology, and legislative framework for martial law has been in preparation for many years. All that was needed, they say, was a way to make the public embrace it, and now that has come. Whether or not current controls are permanent, a precedent is being set for:

  • • The tracking of people’s movements at all times (because coronavirus)
  • • The suspension of freedom of assembly (because coronavirus)
  • • The military policing of civilians (because coronavirus)
  • • Extrajudicial, indefinite detention (quarantine, because coronavirus)
  • • The banning of cash (because coronavirus)
  • • Censorship of the Internet (to combat disinformation, because coronavirus)
  • • Compulsory vaccination and other medical treatment, establishing the state’s sovereignty over our bodies (because coronavirus)
  • • The classification of all activities and destinations into the expressly permitted and the expressly forbidden (you can leave your house for this, but not that), eliminating the un-policed, non-juridical gray zone. That totality is the very essence of totalitarianism. Necessary now though, because, well, coronavirus.

This is juicy material for conspiracy theories. For all I know, one of those theories could be true; however, the same progression of events could unfold from an unconscious systemic tilt toward ever-increasing control. Where does this tilt come from? It is woven into civilization’s DNA. For millennia, civilization (as opposed to small-scale traditional cultures) has understood progress as a matter of extending control onto the world: domesticating the wild, conquering the barbarians, mastering the forces of nature, and ordering society according to law and reason. The ascent of control accelerated with the Scientific Revolution, which launched “progress” to new heights: the ordering of reality into objective categories and quantities, and the mastering of materiality with technology. Finally, the social sciences promised to use the same means and methods to fulfill the ambition (which goes back to Plato and Confucius) to engineer a perfect society.

Those who administer civilization will therefore welcome any opportunity to strengthen their control, for after all, it is in service to a grand vision of human destiny: the perfectly ordered world, in which disease, crime, poverty, and perhaps suffering itself can be engineered out of existence. No nefarious motives are necessary. Of course they would like to keep track of everyone – all the better to ensure the common good. For them, Covid-19 shows how necessary that is. “Can we afford democratic freedoms in light of the coronavirus?” they ask. “Must we now, out of necessity, sacrifice those for our own safety?” It is a familiar refrain, for it has accompanied other crises in the past, like 9/11.

To rework a common metaphor, imagine a man with a hammer, stalking around looking for a reason to use it. Suddenly he sees a nail sticking out. He’s been looking for a nail for a long time, pounding on screws and bolts and not accomplishing much. He inhabits a worldview in which hammers are the best tools, and the world can be made better by pounding in the nails. And here is a nail! We might suspect that in his eagerness he has placed the nail there himself, but it hardly matters. Maybe it isn’t even a nail that’s sticking out, but it resembles one enough to start pounding. When the tool is at the ready, an opportunity will arise to use it.

And I will add, for those inclined to doubt the authorities, maybe this time it really is a nail. In that case, the hammer is the right tool – and the principle of the hammer will emerge the stronger, ready for the screw, the button, the clip, and the tear.

Either way, the problem we deal with here is much deeper than that of overthrowing an evil coterie of Illuminati. Even if they do exist, given the tilt of civilization, the same trend would persist without them, or a new Illuminati would arise to assume the functions of the old.

True or false, the idea that the epidemic is some monstrous plot perpetrated by evildoers upon the public is not so far from the mindset of find-the-pathogen. It is a crusading mentality, a war mentality. It locates the source of a sociopolitical illness in a pathogen against which we may then fight, a victimizer separate from ourselves. It risks ignoring the conditions that make society fertile ground for the plot to take hold. Whether that ground was sown deliberately or by the wind is, for me, a secondary question.

What I will say next is relevant whether or not SARS-CoV2 is a genetically engineered bioweapon, is related to 5G rollout, is being used to prevent “disclosure,” is a Trojan horse for totalitarian world government, is more deadly than we’ve been told, is less deadly than we’ve been told, originated in a Wuhan biolab, originated at Fort Detrick, or is exactly as the CDC and WHO have been telling us. It applies even if everyone is totally wrong about the role of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the current epidemic. I have my opinions, but if there is one thing I have learned through the course of this emergency is that I don’t really know what is happening. I don’t see how anyone can, amidst the seething farrago of news, fake news, rumors, suppressed information, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and politicized narratives that fill the Internet. I wish a lot more people would embrace not knowing. I say that both to those who embrace the dominant narrative, as well as to those who hew to dissenting ones. What information might we be blocking out, in order to maintain the integrity of our viewpoints? Let’s be humble in our beliefs: it is a matter of life and death.

The War on Death

My 7-year-old son hasn’t seen or played with another child for two weeks. Millions of others are in the same boat. Most would agree that a month without social interaction for all those children a reasonable sacrifice to save a million lives. But how about to save 100,000 lives? And what if the sacrifice is not for a month but for a year? Five years? Different people will have different opinions on that, according to their underlying values.

Let’s replace the foregoing questions with something more personal, that pierces the inhuman utilitarian thinking that turns people into statistics and sacrifices some of them for something else. The relevant question for me is, Would I ask all the nation’s children to forego play for a season, if it would reduce my mother’s risk of dying, or for that matter, my own risk? Or I might ask, Would I decree the end of human hugging and handshakes, if it would save my own life? This is not to devalue Mom’s life or my own, both of which are precious. I am grateful for every day she is still with us. But these questions bring up deep issues. What is the right way to live? What is the right way to die?

The answer to such questions, whether asked on behalf of oneself or on behalf of society at large, depends on how we hold death and how much we value play, touch, and togetherness, along with civil liberties and personal freedom. There is no easy formula to balance these values.

Over my lifetime I’ve seen society place more and more emphasis on safety, security, and risk reduction. It has especially impacted childhood: as a young boy it was normal for us to roam a mile from home unsupervised – behavior that would earn parents a visit from Child Protective Services today. It also manifests in the form of latex gloves for more and more professions; hand sanitizer everywhere; locked, guarded, and surveilled school buildings; intensified airport and border security; heightened awareness of legal liability and liability insurance; metal detectors and searches before entering many sports arenas and public buildings, and so on. Writ large, it takes the form of the security state.

The mantra “safety first” comes from a value system that makes survival top priority, and that depreciates other values like fun, adventure, play, and the challenging of limits. Other cultures had different priorities. For instance, many traditional and indigenous cultures are much less protective of children, as documented in Jean Liedloff’s classic, The Continuum Concept. They allow them risks and responsibilities that would seem insane to most modern people, believing that this is necessary for children to develop self-reliance and good judgement. I think most modern people, especially younger people, retain some of this inherent willingness to sacrifice safety in order to live life fully. The surrounding culture, however, lobbies us relentlessly to live in fear, and has constructed systems that embody fear. In them, staying safe is over-ridingly important. Thus we have a medical system in which most decisions are based on calculations of risk, and in which the worst possible outcome, marking the physician’s ultimate failure, is death. Yet all the while, we know that death awaits us regardless. A life saved actually means a death postponed.

The ultimate fulfillment of civilization’s program of control would be to triumph over death itself. Failing that, modern society settles for a facsimile of that triumph: denial rather than conquest. Ours is a society of death denial, from its hiding away of corpses, to its fetish for youthfulness, to its warehousing of old people in nursing homes. Even its obsession with money and property – extensions of the self, as the word “mine” indicates – expresses the delusion that the impermanent self can be made permanent through its attachments. All this is inevitable given the story-of-self that modernity offers: the separate individual in a world of Other. Surrounded by genetic, social, and economic competitors, that self must protect and dominate in order to thrive. It must do everything it can to forestall death, which (in the story of separation) is total annihilation. Biological science has even taught us that our very nature is to maximize our chances of surviving and reproducing.

I asked a friend, a medical doctor who has spent time with the Q’ero on Peru, whether the Q’ero would (if they could) intubate someone to prolong their life. “Of course not,” she said. “They would summon the shaman to help him die well.” Dying well (which isn’t necessarily the same as dying painlessly) is not much in today’s medical vocabulary. No hospital records are kept on whether patients die well. That would not be counted as a positive outcome. In the world of the separate self, death is the ultimate catastrophe.

But is it? Consider this perspective from Dr. Lissa Rankin: “Not all of us would want to be in an ICU, isolated from loved ones with a machine breathing for us, at risk of dying alone- even if it means they might increase their chance of survival. Some of us might rather be held in the arms of loved ones at home, even if that means our time has come…. Remember, death is no ending. Death is going home.”

When the self is understood as relational, interdependent, even inter-existent, then it bleeds over into the other, and the other bleeds over into the self. Understanding the self as a locus of consciousness in a matrix of relationship, one no longer searches for an enemy as the key to understanding every problem, but looks instead for imbalances in relationships. The War on Death gives way to the quest to live well and fully, and we see that fear of death is actually fear of life. How much of life will we forego to stay safe?

Totalitarianism – the perfection of control – is the inevitable end product of the mythology of the separate self. What else but a threat to life, like a war, would merit total control? Thus Orwell identified perpetual war as a crucial component of the Party’s rule.

Against the backdrop of the program of control, death denial, and the separate self, the assumption that public policy should seek to minimize the number of deaths is nearly beyond question, a goal to which other values like play, freedom, etc. are subordinate. Covid-19 offers occasion to broaden that view. Yes, let us hold life sacred, more sacred than ever. Death teaches us that. Let us hold each person, young or old, sick or well, as the sacred, precious, beloved being that they are. And in the circle of our hearts, let us make room for other sacred values too. To hold life sacred is not just to live long, it is to live well and right and fully.

Like all fear, the fear around the coronavirus hints at what might lie beyond it. Anyone who has experienced the passing of someone close knows that death is a portal to love. Covid-19 has elevated death to prominence in the consciousness of a society that denies it. On the other side of the fear, we can see the love that death liberates. Let it pour forth. Let it saturate the soil of our culture and fill its aquifers so that it seeps up through the cracks of our crusted institutions, our systems, and our habits. Some of these may die too.

What world shall we live in?

How much of life do we want to sacrifice at the altar of security? If it keeps us safer, do we want to live in a world where human beings never congregate? Do we want to wear masks in public all the time? Do we want to be medically examined every time we travel, if that will save some number of lives a year? Are we willing to accept the medicalization of life in general, handing over final sovereignty over our bodies to medical authorities (as selected by political ones)? Do we want every event to be a virtual event? How much are we willing to live in fear?

Covid-19 will eventually subside, but the threat of infectious disease is permanent. Our response to it sets a course for the future. Public life, communal life, the life of shared physicality has been dwindling over several generations. Instead of shopping at stores, we get things delivered to our homes. Instead of packs of kids playing outside, we have play dates and digital adventures. Instead of the public square, we have the online forum. Do we want to continue to insulate ourselves still further from each other and the world?

It is not hard to imagine, especially if social distancing is successful, that Covid-19 persists beyond the 18 months we are being told to expect for it to run its course. It is not hard to imagine that new viruses will emerge during that time. It is not hard to imagine that emergency measures will become normal (so as to forestall the possibility of another outbreak), just as the state of emergency declared after 9/11 is still in effect today. It is not hard to imagine that (as we are being told), reinfection is possible, so that the disease will never run its course. That means that the temporary changes in our way of life may become permanent.

To reduce the risk of another pandemic, shall we choose to live in a society without hugs, handshakes, and high-fives, forever more? Shall we choose to live in a society where we no longer gather en masse? Shall the concert, the sports competition, and the festival be a thing of the past? Shall children no longer play with other children? Shall all human contact be mediated by computers and masks? No more dance classes, no more karate classes, no more conferences, no more churches? Is death reduction to be the standard by which to measure progress? Does human advancement mean separation? Is this the future?

The same question applies to the administrative tools required to control the movement of people and the flow of information. At the present writing, the entire country is moving toward lockdown. In some countries, one must print out a form from a government website in order to leave the house. It reminds me of school, where one’s location must be authorized at all times. Or of prison. Do we envision a future of electronic hall passes, a system where freedom of movement is governed by state administrators and their software at all times, permanently? Where every movement is tracked, either permitted or prohibited? And, for our protection, where information that threatens our health (as decided, again, by various authorities) is censored for our own good? In the face of an emergency, like unto a state of war, we accept such restrictions and temporarily surrender our freedoms. Similar to 9/11, Covid-19 trumps all objections.

For the first time in history, the technological means exist to realize such a vision, at least in the developed world (for example, using cellphone location data to enforce social distancing; see also here). After a bumpy transition, we could live in a society where nearly all of life happens online: shopping, meeting, entertainment, socializing, working, even dating. Is that what we want? How many lives saved is that worth?

I am sure that many of the controls in effect today will be partially relaxed in a few months. Partially relaxed, but at the ready. As long as infectious disease remains with us, they are likely to be reimposed, again and again, in the future, or be self-imposed in the form of habits. As Deborah Tannen says, contributing to a Politico article on how coronavirus will change the world permanently, ‘We know now that touching things, being with other people and breathing the air in an enclosed space can be risky…. It could become second nature to recoil from shaking hands or touching our faces—and we may all fall heir to society-wide OCD, as none of us can stop washing our hands.” After thousands of years, millions of years, of touch, contact, and togetherness, is the pinnacle of human progress to be that we cease such activities because they are too risky?

Life is Community

The paradox of the program of control is that its progress rarely advances us any closer to its goal. Despite security systems in almost every upper middle-class home, people are no less anxious or insecure than they were a generation ago. Despite elaborate security measures, the schools are not seeing fewer mass shootings. Despite phenomenal progress in medical technology, people have if anything become less healthy over the past thirty years, as chronic disease has proliferated and life expectancy stagnated and, in the USA and Britain, started to decline.

The measures being instituted to control Covid-19, likewise, may end up causing more suffering and death than they prevent. Minimizing deaths means minimizing the deaths that we know how to predict and measure. It is impossible to measure the added deaths that might come from isolation-induced depression, for instance, or the despair caused by unemployment, or the lowered immunity and deterioration in health that chronic fear can cause. Loneliness and lack of social contact has been shown to increase inflammation, depression, and dementia. According to Lissa Rankin, M.D., air pollution increases risk of dying by 6%, obesity by 23%, alcohol abuse by 37%, and loneliness by 45%.

Another danger that is off the ledger is the deterioration in immunity caused by excessive hygiene and distancing. It is not only social contact that is necessary for health, it is also contact with the microbial world. Generally speaking, microbes are not our enemies, they are our allies in health. A diverse gut biome, comprising bacteria, viruses, yeasts, and other organisms, is essential for a well-functioning immune system, and its diversity is maintained through contact with other people and with the world of life. Excessive hand-washing, overuse of antibiotics, aseptic cleanliness, and lack of human contact might do more harm than good. The resulting allergies and autoimmune disorders might be worse than the infectious disease they replace. Socially and biologically, health comes from community. Life does not thrive in isolation.

Seeing the world in us-versus-them terms blinds us to the reality that life and health happen in community. To take the example of infectious diseases, we fail to look beyond the evil pathogen and ask, What is the role of viruses in the microbiome? (See also here.) What are the body conditions under which harmful viruses proliferate? Why do some people have mild symptoms and others severe ones (besides the catch-all non-explanation of “low resistance”)? What positive role might flus, colds, and other non-lethal diseases play in the maintenance of health?

War-on-germs thinking brings results akin to those of the War on Terror, War on Crime, War on Weeds, and the endless wars we fight politically and interpersonally. First, it generates endless war; second, it diverts attention from the ground conditions that breed illness, terrorism, crime, weeds, and the rest.

Despite politicians’ perennial claim that they pursue war for the sake of peace, war inevitably breeds more war. Bombing countries to kill terrorists not only ignores the ground conditions of terrorism, it exacerbates those conditions. Locking up criminals not only ignores the conditions that breed crime, it creates those conditions when it breaks up families and communities and acculturates the incarcerated to criminality. And regimes of antibiotics, vaccines, antivirals, and other medicines wreak havoc on body ecology, which is the foundation of strong immunity. Outside the body, the massive spraying campaigns sparked by Zika, Dengue Fever, and now Covid-19 will visit untold damage upon nature’s ecology. Has anyone considered what the effects on the ecosystem will be when we douse it with antiviral compounds? Such a policy (which has been implemented in various places in China and India) is only thinkable from the mindset of separation, which does not understand that viruses are integral to the web of life.

To understand the point about ground conditions, consider some mortality statistics from Italy (from its National Health Institute), based on an analysis of hundreds of Covid-19 fatalities. Of those analyzed, less than 1% were free of serious chronic health conditions. Some 75% suffered from hypertension, 35% from diabetes, 33% from cardiac ischemia, 24% from atrial fibrillation, 18% from low renal function, along with other conditions that I couldn’t decipher from the Italian report. Nearly half the deceased had three or more of these serious pathologies. Americans, beset by obesity, diabetes, and other chronic ailments, are at least as vulnerable as Italians. Should we blame the virus then (which killed few otherwise healthy people), or shall we blame underlying poor health? Here again the analogy of the taut rope applies. Millions of people in the modern world are in a precarious state of health, just waiting for something that would normally be trivial to send them over the edge. Of course, in the short term we want to save their lives; the danger is that we lose ourselves in an endless succession of short terms, fighting one infectious disease after another, and never engage the ground conditions that make people so vulnerable. That is a much harder problem, because these ground conditions will not change via fighting. There is no pathogen that causes diabetes or obesity, addiction, depression, or PTSD. Their causes are not an Other, not some virus separate from ourselves, and we its victims.

Even in diseases like Covid-19, in which we can name a pathogenic virus, matters are not so simple as a war between virus and victim. There is an alternative to the germ theory of disease that holds germs to be part of a larger process. When conditions are right, they multiply in the body, sometimes killing the host, but also, potentially, improving the conditions that accommodated them to begin with, for example by cleaning out accumulated toxic debris via mucus discharge, or (metaphorically speaking) burning them up with fever. Sometimes called “terrain theory,” it says that germs are more symptom than cause of disease. As one meme explains it: “Your fish is sick. Germ theory: isolate the fish. Terrain theory: clean the tank.”

A certain schizophrenia afflicts the modern culture of health. On the one hand, there is a burgeoning wellness movement that embraces alternative and holistic medicine. It advocates herbs, meditation, and yoga to boost immunity. It validates the emotional and spiritual dimensions of health, such as the power of attitudes and beliefs to sicken or to heal. All of this seems to have disappeared under the Covid tsunami, as society defaults to the old orthodoxy.

Case in point: California acupuncturists have been forced to shut down, having been deemed “non-essential.” This is perfectly understandable from the perspective of conventional virology. But as one acupuncturist on Facebook observed, “What about my patient who I’m working with to get off opioids for his back pain? He’s going to have to start using them again.” From the worldview of medical authority, alternative modalities, social interaction, yoga classes, supplements, and so on are frivolous when it comes to real diseases caused by real viruses. They are relegated to an etheric realm of “wellness” in the face of a crisis. The resurgence of orthodoxy under Covid-19 is so intense that anything remotely unconventional, such as intravenous vitamin C, was completely off the table in the United States until two days ago (articles still abound “debunking” the “myth” that vitamin C can help fight Covid-19). Nor have I heard the CDC evangelize the benefits of elderberry extract, medicinal mushrooms, cutting sugar intake, NAC (N-acetyl L-cysteine), astragalus, or vitamin D. These are not just mushy speculation about “wellness,” but are supported by extensive research and physiological explanations. For example, NAC (general info, double-blind placebo-controlled study) has been shown to radically reduce incidence and severity of symptoms in flu-like illnesses.

As the statistics I offered earlier on autoimmunity, obesity, etc. indicate, America and the modern world in general are facing a health crisis. Is the answer to do what we’ve been doing, only more thoroughly? The response so far to Covid has been to double down on the orthodoxy and sweep unconventional practices and dissenting viewpoints aside. Another response would be to widen our lens and examine the entire system, including who pays for it, how access is granted, and how research is funded, but also expanding out to include marginal fields like herbal medicine, functional medicine, and energy medicine. Perhaps we can take this opportunity to reevaluate prevailing theories of illness, health, and the body. Yes, let’s protect the sickened fish as best we can right now, but maybe next time we won’t have to isolate and drug so many fish, if we can clean the tank.

I’m not telling you to run out right now and buy NAC or any other supplement, nor that we as a society should abruptly shift our response, cease social distancing immediately, and start taking supplements instead. But we can use the break in normal, this pause at a crossroads, to consciously choose what path we shall follow moving forward: what kind of healthcare system, what paradigm of health, what kind of society. This reevaluation is already happening, as ideas like universal free healthcare in the USA gain new momentum. And that path leads to forks as well. What kind of healthcare will be universalized? Will it be merely available to all, or mandatory for all – each citizen a patient, perhaps with an invisible ink barcode tattoo certifying one is up to date on all compulsory vaccines and check-ups. Then you can go to school, board a plane, or enter a restaurant. This is one path to the future that is available to us.

Another option is available now too. Instead of doubling down on control, we could finally embrace the holistic paradigms and practices that have been waiting on the margins, waiting for the center to dissolve so that, in our humbled state, we can bring them into the center and build a new system around them.

The Coronation

There is an alternative to the paradise of perfect control that our civilization has so long pursued, and that recedes as fast as our progress, like a mirage on the horizon. Yes, we can proceed as before down the path toward greater insulation, isolation, domination, and separation. We can normalize heightened levels of separation and control, believe that they are necessary to keep us safe, and accept a world in which we are afraid to be near each other. Or we can take advantage of this pause, this break in normal, to turn onto a path of reunion, of holism, of the restoring of lost connections, of the repair of community and the rejoining of the web of life.

Do we double down on protecting the separate self, or do we accept the invitation into a world where all of us are in this together? It isn’t just in medicine we encounter this question: it visits us politically, economically, and in our personal lives as well. Take for example the issue of hoarding, which embodies the idea, “There won’t be enough for everyone, so I am going to make sure there is enough for me.” Another response might be, “Some don’t have enough, so I will share what I have with them.” Are we to be survivalists or helpers? What is life for?

On a larger scale, people are asking questions that have until now lurked on activist margins. What should we do about the homeless? What should we do about the people in prisons? In Third World slums? What should we do about the unemployed? What about all the hotel maids, the Uber drivers, the plumbers and janitors and bus drivers and cashiers who cannot work from home? And so now, finally, ideas like student debt relief and universal basic income are blossoming. “How do we protect those susceptible to Covid?” invites us into “How do we care for vulnerable people in general?”

That is the impulse that stirs in us, regardless of the superficialities of our opinions about Covid’s severity, origin, or best policy to address it. It is saying, let’s get serious about taking care of each other. Let’s remember how precious we all are and how precious life is. Let’s take inventory of our civilization, strip it down to its studs, and see if we can build one more beautiful.

As Covid stirs our compassion, more and more of us realize that we don’t want to go back to a normal so sorely lacking it. We have the opportunity now to forge a new, more compassionate normal.

Hopeful signs abound that this is happening. The United States government, which has long seemed the captive of heartless corporate interests, has unleashed hundreds of billions of dollars in direct payments to families. Donald Trump, not known as a paragon of compassion, has put a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions. Certainly one can take a cynical view of both these developments; nonetheless, they embody the principle of caring for the vulnerable.

From all over the world we hear stories of solidarity and healing. One friend described sending $100 each to ten strangers who were in dire need. My son, who until a few days ago worked at Dunkin’ Donuts, said people were tipping at five times the normal rate – and these are working class people, many of them Hispanic truck drivers, who are economically insecure themselves. Doctors, nurses, and “essential workers” in other professions risk their lives to serve the public. Here are some more examples of the love and kindness eruption, courtesy of ServiceSpace:

Perhaps we’re in the middle of living into that new story. Imagine Italian airforce using Pavoratti, Spanish military doing acts of service, and street police playing guitars — to *inspire*. Corporations giving unexpected wage hikes. Canadians starting “Kindness Mongering.” Six year old in Australia adorably gifting her tooth fairy money, an 8th grader in Japan making 612 masks, and college kids everywhere buying groceries for elders. Cuba sending an army in “white robes” (doctors) to help Italy. A landlord allowing tenants to stay without rent, an Irish priest’s poem going viral, disabled activitists producing hand sanitizer. Imagine. Sometimes a crisis mirrors our deepest impulse — that we can always respond with compassion.

As Rebecca Solnit describes in her marvelous book, A Paradise Built in Hell, disaster often liberates solidarity. A more beautiful world shimmers just beneath the surface, bobbing up whenever the systems that hold it underwater loosen their grip.

For a long time we, as a collective, have stood helpless in the face of an ever-sickening society. Whether it is declining health, decaying infrastructure, depression, suicide, addiction, ecological degradation, or concentration of wealth, the symptoms of civilizational malaise in the developed world are plain to see, but we have been stuck in the systems and patterns that cause them. Now, Covid has gifted us a reset.

A million forking paths lie before us. Universal basic income could mean an end to economic insecurity and the flowering of creativity as millions are freed from the work that Covid has shown us is less necessary than we thought. Or it could mean, with the decimation of small businesses, dependency on the state for a stipend that comes with strict conditions. The crisis could usher in totalitarianism or solidarity; medical martial law or a holistic renaissance; greater fear of the microbial world, or greater resiliency in participation in it; permanent norms of social distancing, or a renewed desire to come together.

What can guide us, as individuals and as a society, as we walk the garden of forking paths? At each junction, we can be aware of what we follow: fear or love, self-preservation or generosity. Shall we live in fear and build a society based on it? Shall we live to preserve our separate selves? Shall we use the crisis as a weapon against our political enemies? These are not all-or-nothing questions, all fear or all love. It is that a next step into love lies before us. It feels daring, but not reckless. It treasures life, while accepting death. And it trusts that with each step, the next will become visible.

Please don’t think that choosing love over fear can be accomplished solely through an act of will, and that fear too can be conquered like a virus. The virus we face here is fear, whether it is fear of Covid-19, or fear of the totalitarian response to it, and this virus too has its terrain. Fear, along with addiction, depression, and a host of physical ills, flourishes in a terrain of separation and trauma: inherited trauma, childhood trauma, violence, war, abuse, neglect, shame, punishment, poverty, and the muted, normalized trauma that affects nearly everyone who lives in a monetized economy, undergoes modern schooling, or lives without community or connection to place. This terrain can be changed, by trauma healing on a personal level, by systemic change toward a more compassionate society, and by transforming the basic narrative of separation: the separate self in a world of other, me separate from you, humanity separate from nature. To be alone is a primal fear, and modern society has rendered us more and more alone. But the time of Reunion is here. Every act of compassion, kindness, courage, or generosity heals us from the story of separation, because it assures both actor and witness that we are in this together.

I will conclude by invoking one more dimension of the relationship between humans and viruses. Viruses are integral to evolution, not just of humans but of all eukaryotes. Viruses can transfer DNA from organism to organism, sometimes inserting it into the germline (where it becomes heritable). Known as horizontal gene transfer, this is a primary mechanism of evolution, allowing life to evolve together much faster than is possible through random mutation. As Lynn Margulis once put it, we are our viruses.

And now let me venture into speculative territory. Perhaps the great diseases of civilization have quickened our biological and cultural evolution, bestowing key genetic information and offering both individual and collective initiation. Could the current pandemic be just that? Novel RNA codes are spreading from human to human, imbuing us with new genetic information; at the same time, we are receiving other, esoteric, “codes” that ride the back of the biological ones, disrupting our narratives and systems in the same way that an illness disrupts bodily physiology. The phenomenon follows the template of initiation: separation from normality, followed by a dilemma, breakdown, or ordeal, followed (if it is to be complete) by reintegration and celebration.

Now the question arises: Initiation into what? What is the specific nature and purpose of this initiation?The popular name for the pandemic offers a clue: coronavirus. A corona is a crown. “Novel coronavirus pandemic” means “a new coronation for all.”

Already we can feel the power of who we might become. A true sovereign does not run in fear from life or from death. A true sovereign does not dominate and conquer (that is a shadow archetype, the Tyrant). The true sovereign serves the people, serves life, and respects the sovereignty of all people. The coronation marks the emergence of the unconscious into consciousness, the crystallization of chaos into order, the transcendence of compulsion into choice. We become the rulers of that which had ruled us. The New World Order that the conspiracy theorists fear is a shadow of the glorious possibility available to sovereign beings. No longer the vassals of fear, we can bring order to the kingdom and build an intentional society on the love already shining through the cracks of the world of separation.

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