Context for Planetary Awakening

Something began to happen in the thirty or so years since Limits to Growth was first published in 1972 by Dana Meadows and others. The social justice, environmental and spiritual movements  of the 60’s which were separate went, like rivers, underground all over the globe. The mysterious and wonderful matrix of the deep human mind became a vessel in which these seeds of change, like a soup, began to blend together into something tasty and intelligent for a world that was waking up slowly from its slumber, as human population exploded from about 3.5 billion to almost double that in 30 years. What increasing numbers of people began to see all over the world was the iceberg, so to speak, that humanity was headed for in what had become a titanic voyage toward an unpredictable and chaotic future.

In other words, faced with the mind-boggling idea that humans might actually no longer inhabit planet Earth the way we had been doing, people began to connect the dots. People began to see a pattern among what had before looked like seemingly unrelated issues.

We began to realize the wisdom of indigenous peoples and listen to their admonitions that human peace, justice and prosperity was linked to the Earth and our own attitudes to nature and each other. Social activists began to be worn out by their own angry rhetoric, and felt a need for consolation in nature and in observing their own breath. Seekers and religious church-goers felt a hollowness in their spiritual lives and saw a decline in congregations which were not following the example of their great teachers. So, religious revivals began around commitment to preserve the Earth family, and join anti-poverty activists in the fight for economic and social justice. Environmentalists began to explore the spiritual roots of their love of nature in a wave called the deep ecology movement.

People began to realize that all the social, spiritual and environmental ills had a common cause, and that was disconnection. This is a disconnection from our deeper selves, disconnection from other humans and the natural world, and disconnection from a spirit or ground of being in which we find unity and a greater meaning in life. People began to find common ground in the need to come together and become reconnected. From those roots a global civil society started growing which is dedicated to realizing an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling and socially just human presence on Earth.

I call this coming together and reconnecting the emergence of an integral culture—same as the word integrated, bringing together. The deep human desire to be more whole is happening all over the planet and gaining more momentum every day. There are too many elements in the soup of the authentic, planetary culture rising up today to mention them all here. But I will mention three that are most significant—the first being our view of Earth from space, the second being the proliferation of world and local problems and the third being the Internet.

Perhaps the most significant single shift in human consciousness came from man’s first view of Earth from space from the moon-bound Apollo 8 flight in 1968. Astronaut Bill Anders said “We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” Astronaut Jim Lovell said: “It gives you in an instant, just at a position 240,000 miles away from it, (an idea of) how insignificant we are, how fragile we are, and how fortunate we are to have a body that will allow us to enjoy the sky and the trees and the water … It’s something that many people take for granted when they’re born and they grow up within the environment. But they don’t realize what they have. And I didn’t till I left it.” These words and the Earth photo spreading around the globe gave something none of our human ancestors could possibly have had without the technology making space flight possible. For the first time all humanity saw itself as a totality—all peoples, water, land and air and life forms—as a solitary ship floating through the vast, black oceans of an infinite universe.

Seeing the whole beyond the limitations of looking only at the parts no doubt played its role in helping folks to connect the dots—to make sense of the growing amount of bad news in all aspects of life including the environment, society and individual health and happiness. And there were not just a few dots, but a vast proliferation of problems, and these problems began to form a pattern. You see, in this thirty years period since 1972 things in all areas really got worse. More and more people began to notice how serious the local and global situation was becoming. I’ll give a partial list here:

  *   The Earth is getting overcrowded. Population has soared in the last 150 years from 1 billion people to more than 6.5 billion people and doubled from 3.3 billion to almost 6.6 billion in the last 40 years alone. While the rate of growth is slowing, by 2050 Earth is projected to have 9.2 billion people.

  *  Global wealth and spending has been unequal and enjoyed mostly by the rich, industrialized northern countries whose level of consumption is depleting world resources, polluting the planet and seriously undermining the Earth economy.

  *  The gap between rich and poor has grown intolerably large. The top fifth of the world’s people in the richest countries enjoy 82% of the expanding export trade and 68% of foreign direct investment — the bottom fifth, barely more than 1%. In 1960, the 20% of the world’s people in the richest countries had 30 times the income of the poorest 20% — in 1997, 74 times as much. A few hundred millionaires now own as much wealth as the world’s poorest 2.5 billion people.

  *  Meanwhile, a third of the world’s population—or 2+ billion people—lives in poverty and make an average of $2/day or less.

  *  Human activity is causing the largest extinction of plant and animal species seen on Earth in the last 65 million years. Elephant, tiger, lion, chimpanzee and large fish populations have declined in many instances by as much as 50-90%. By the year 2050, it is estimated that half of all plant and animal species alive 100 years ago will be gone forever. These are facts assembled by the scientific community which the world at large is barely aware of.

  *  The increased emission of C02 and other greenhouse gases is causing global warming. Current trends continuing unchecked could result in sea level rises of 20+ feet around the globe, dislocation of hundreds of millions of people and death from food and water shortages as well as diseases.

  *  We are quickly running out of cheap oil, as global oil production is now reaching its peak. This situation is made worse by the explosive economic growth of the world’s two largest countries (China, India), accounting for 1/3 of world population, and putting more demand not only on oil supplies, but food supplies as well. Rising energy prices are expected to cause world-wide economic shock waves in the future.

  *  Fresh water in lakes and underground aquifers is being depleted world-wide, and there is growing pressure on the world’s basic food supplies (grains) due to population growth and greater world wealth. Already some 1.1 billion people have inadequate access to water.

  *  It is increasingly apparent that large, transnational corporations have begun more and more to determine the political agenda and legislation of nations, causing governmental corruption, loss of democracy and personal freedoms, and destruction to local cultures and the environment. 51% of the world’s wealthiest entities are corporations.

  *  As throughout human history, the relentless development and land acquisition by aggressive nations and peoples has all but caused extinction to indigenous cultures, which are the only remaining examples humanity has of how a human society can live in peace and balance with itself and the natural world.

  *  There is a trend, especially in the USA, toward corporate media consolidation and less freedom for the media to tell people of the truth about what’s going on in the world. The result is that as the number of serious risk factors in the world increase, and major global crises are coming, few people are aware enough of the gravity of the situation to be mobilized toward action. If the media had been looking for and telling the truth, it is very likely, for example, that the tragedies of 9/11 and Katrina could have been minimized or avoided altogether. It is also likely that the American political landscape of the last thirty years since the Reagan administration would have been very different.

Well, this list could on and on for many pages. But when you see all these problems here and around the world the mind is weighed down, perhaps even into depression and denial. But then in a few people a light goes on and they start to see a connection between all these issues. A vision making sense of the greater whole starts to take shape. Some see a pattern in corporate greed and irresponsibility and point a finger at the corporate world where globalization and the network of transnational corporations and their agencies hold governments, people and nature captive. The anti-globalization protests which made their debut at the “battle of Seattle” in 1999 helps people see the emergence of a global civil society movement against control by transnational corporations and their agencies.

But the analysis needed to go deeper, and did. It brought in great cultural scholars like Thomas Berry, who told us that we had to evolve a new human presence on Earth and see reality not as a “collection of objects, but a “communion of subjects.” We could not live as if we were better than and above nature. We are part of nature, and needed to act accordingly.

Suddenly, the echoes of older writers came back with greater meaning to shed light on our times—people like Albert Schweitzer, the Swiss doctor who worked in Africa and made famous the notion of what he called “ a reverence for life,” the single greatest contribution to humankind one could have. Could we revere all of life, not just humans, and not certainly just people of our own ethnic background or skin color?

We began to read again the writings of thinkers like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit Priest, philosopher and paleontologist who in the Phenomenon of Man began to explore the idea that humans were evolving a noosphere, or mindsphere (which like the biosphere or geosphere) was an actual field moving toward greater integration. The idea is that humanity as a whole is like a single person, with its own interconnected mind, a notion taken up by biologist Rupert Sheldrake and, in a different way, by physicist David Bohm.

These intriguing ideas of one planetary human mind moving toward unity within one Earth community revolving through space called upon us to question why now–some 70,000-100,000 years since homo sapiens evolved—had we brought ourselves to what looked like a possibly tragic decline. And why indeed end this celestial journey when we were just beginning to glimpse the magnificence of life, as astrophysics began to explain in greater depth the incredible beauty and mystery of this 13.7 billion year cosmos from which we all have come? Did human life evolve against all odds on a once boiling and often terrifying planet only to perish in great numbers?

If we humans are part and product of that 13.7 billion year evolution, was there not some purpose for which we were destined? After all, homo sapiens are the only life form on Earth capable of realizing its own existence. In fact, we are actually called homo sapiens sapiens, or doubly wise. We don’t just see like animals and birds. We can see seeing itself, being conscious of our own consciousness. Cosmologist Brian Swimme says we are the cosmos seeing itself, the universe singing songs to itself. Why would destiny want the unique beauty humans contribute to the universe to be overwhelmed in the flames of our ignorance, fear and greed.

With all these marvelous reflections, it’s as if humankind at the very threshold of species tragedy were going back to school—not a school made of brick and mortar but one made through intense reflection and interaction with one another. These reflections went into overdrive with the third major catalyst of the last thirty years—and that was the personal computer and the Internet. Never before in human history had we enjoyed the technology that allows humans to communicate with others all around the globe about things that were vital to them. As non-profits for peace, social justice and environmental causes proliferated in response to the looming world crisis, so has the level of dialogue and speculation about something critical going on today that we have to do something about if we want to preserve a planet worth living on. The level of dialogue among peoples living far away from one another has never been more widespread or more intense. These conversations in millions of Internet sites, blogs, discussion forums and social spaces are beginning to weave the fabric of thought for a new world society.

A new consciousness is awakening, and we are all part of it.