John Todd, an ecological designer in the field of biomimicry, imitates nature’s evolutionary genius to serve human ends harmlessly, using nature’s processes as the design for buildings, technologies and practical solutions to environmental devastation. Educator David Orr suggests that true ecological design can take place only in a society willing to ask, “How would nature do it?”
Ecological Medicine: Healing Health Care | Andrew Weil, M.D. & Charlotte Brody
Did medicine’s separation from nature propel our health care system into its current crisis? Join Dr. Andrew Weil and nurse and health activist Charlotte Brody as they describe how Ecological Medicine reunites the interdependence of medicine and nature, and restores the feminine principle in healing.
Native Land Trusts: Returning to a Land They Never Left | Indigenous Forum
Across California, First Peoples are reclaiming their roles as expert stewards of land, water and resources through cooperative Native land trust partnerships. These mechanisms can help re-integrate traditional lifeways and empower marginalized Native Californians. Working with foundations, state parks and conservationists seeking connection with Traditional Knowledge holders and land-based stewardship ethics, they’re blending traditional and modern ecological and botanical sciences for optimal management strategies.
With: Beth Rose Middleton (Afro-Caribbean/Eastern European), Associate Professor of Native American Studies at UC Davis; Valentin Lopez (Amah Mutsun Tribal Band), Director of the Mutsun Land Trust; Ken Holbrook (Maidu), Maidu Summit Consortium Chairman; Matthew Leivas, Sr. (Chemehuevi), Native American Land Conservancy board member.
Recorded Friday, October 16, 2015 at the National Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, California.
Lifting Women’s Voices in the Media: Tools, Models and Practices
Join a diverse circle of women media-makers to hear how each learned to trust her own voice. They share stories and discuss effective strategies that can be applied to lift the voices of women of every age and perspective. Hosted by Jodie Evans, women’s media champion.
With: Jensine Larsen, founder of World Pulse; Neema Namadamu, internationally renowned Congolese civil society leader, founder of Hero Women Rising; Nicole Middleton, GlobalGirl Media activist.
Recorded Friday, October 16, 2015 at the National Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, California.
The Healing Potential of Psychedelics: Breakthroughs in Research
After decades of the repression and demonization of these substances, research trials around the country have been achieving remarkable results that validate the profound healing potential of psychedelics such as psilocybin and MDMA. Mounting evidence suggests they positively address such varied conditions as end-of-life anxiety, PTSD, and cluster headaches. Hosted by J.P. Harpignies, Bioneers Conference Associate Producer. With: Robert Barnhart, filmmaker of A New Understanding: The Science of Psilocybin; Philip Wolfson, M.D., leading MDMA researcher; Mitch Schultz, director of the film DMT: The Spirit Molecule.
Recorded Saturday, October 17, 2015 at the National Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, California.
Explore our Visionary Plant Consciousness & Psychedelics media collection >>
Racing Up Your Movement
Three national leaders reveal how their organizations and allies asserted a race frame on movements that were predominantly white. From stories about shifting the movements for good food, reproductive rights and media reform, we’ll learn principles and gather ideas for research, leadership development and communications to blast through resistance to a race frame. Hosted by Rinku Sen. With: Malkia Cyril, Executive Director of the Center for Media Justice; Saru Jayaraman, Co-Director/founder, ROC United; Mateo Nube, co-founder of the Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project.
Recorded Saturday, October 17, 2015 at the National Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, California.
Project Drawdown | Paul Hawken, Amanda Raven-Hill, and John Wick
How can we achieve a year-to-year drawdown in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere? Learn about the first truly systematic attempt to weigh the most effective existing solutions and technologies, and what we can do for them to be scaled up over the next 30 years. With: Paul Hawken; Amanda Raven-Hill, Executive Director, Project Drawdown; rancher John Wick, co-founder of the exem- plary Marin Carbon Project.
Recorded Saturday, October 17, 2015 at the National Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, California.
Indigenous Forum – Native Appropriations: Why Representations Matter | Jared Yazzie, Tailinh Agoyo, and Jessica Metcalfe
How do we challenge and transform racist stereotypes and stop the appropriation of Indigenous cultures? With: Jared Yazzie (Diné), Owner of OxDx Native Clothing Co.; Tailinh Agoyo (Naragansett/Blackfeet), founder of The Warrior Project; Jessica Metcalfe, Ph.D., (Turtle Mountain Anishinaabe), founder and CEO of “Beyond Buckskin,” an expert forum for the discussion of representations of Native peoples, including stereotypes, cultural appropriation, news and activism.
Recorded Saturday, October 17, 2015 at the National Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, California.
Indigenous Forum – Idle No More – Bay Area to Tar Sands: A History of the Movement | Clayton Thomas-Müller, Eriel Deranger, and Pennie Opal Plant
The fastest growing Indigenous resistance ever to industrial exploitation, Canada’s Idle No More movement has gone global. These leading Indigenous campaigners share its successful strategies and show how you can participate. With: Clayton Thomas-Müller (Mathias Colomb Cree), 350.org, Idle No More, Indigenous rights activist, Bioneers Board; Eriel Deranger, Communications Manager of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation; Pennie Opal Plant (Yaqui, Mexican, English, Choc- taw, Cherokee), Bay Area Idle No More.
Recorded Saturday, October 17, 2015 at the National Bioneers Conference in San Rafael, California.
Nina Simons: Cultivating Diversity, Intuition and Attention for Resilience
This was Co-Founder Nina Simon’s morning address to the 2017 Bioneers gathering. View the video of her talk here.
It doesn’t seem to matter how long any of us may have anticipated this – this time of cataclysmic climate chaos, escalating violence and infrastructure collapse.
After so many years of learning from brilliant Bioneers colleagues, how much of our civilization needed reinventing to avoid catastrophe, and recognizing the disastrous effects climate chaos would bring, and knowing ecological, economic, political and cultural systems would be under great stress – I have to admit, I still wasn’t ready.
You see, I had imagined it mostly in my mind. And I am increasingly called to notice where my intellect – much as I am thankful for it – without being flanked by my other ways of knowing, is simply not adequate to meeting the new realities we face.
On one level, I believe we were each born for this time, called to accelerate our learning.
But these times of upheaval, loss and uncertainty are causing me to re-assess my own inner resilience, and to question the readiness of my own capacities.
The serial, escalating threats have my heart racing, awakening within me a heightened awareness of my own mortality – but also an acute sense of awakened aliveness each day, seasoned with searing flashes of outrage. All of this seems to be calling me to meet this tidal wave of violence, destruction and uncertainty with a deepening resolve and fierce dedication – to co-create a world where Mother Earth is honored as primary and sacred, and where gender, racial and economic equity and restorative justice are the norm.
I’m also finding a deeper understanding about the primacy of our interdependence.
As I see it, our survival depends on reorienting our daily lives around mutualism, reciprocity and respect in relation to ourselves, each other, all of life’s creatures and elements, and the places where we live and love.
As we face these serial disasters, people often respond with a great desire to help each other.
When people are in shock or grief and trauma-stricken, perhaps we’re better able to feel the truth of our relatedness, of our innate kinship with each other. That experience of inter-being that reminds us that our fates are bound together.
How might we elicit that “golden rule” behavior, and transform our habits, laws and policies to reinforce it, not just when we’re in crises, but on an everyday basis?
Faced with ever more wildfires and floods, mudslides, earthquakes and hurricanes, and immigrants, refugees and evacuees fleeing with terror and trauma in so many places – while five men own as much wealth as all the rest of the billions of the world’s people combined – my animal body simultaneously cringes and recoils in fear, and is filled with a burning desire to take action.
I am trying to learn how to address trauma and increase resilience in myself, in those I care most deeply about, and in the communities I feel called to serve.
I’m realizing that nothing is going to be more important for us than this capacity for resilience. We need to build our ability to bounce back after disruption, and remain centered and resourceful after shocking events, because these events are increasing in frequency and scale.
As I’ve been attempting to develop my own resilience in community with the people I feel tied to and have felt called to work with, there are a few key pieces I’ve learned I need to cultivate:
1. Trusting my body, emotions and intuition;
2. Valuing diversity; and
3. Learning how to place my attention.
An ecological study showed that ecosystems with the greatest diversity of species are the fastest to recover after disruption, while monocultures, or areas with fewer kinds of species take much longer to rebound towards health.
I am convinced that the same holds true for us humans as well.
As a social species, any collective that combines multiple perspectives, orientations and ways of perceiving improves the group’s problem-solving abilities. Within ourselves, if we listen for guidance from our bodies and hearts’ emotions, as well as from our ancestors, intuition, nature and dreams, we may bring greater wisdom, context and flexibility to our interactions than if we’re guided solely by our mind’s planning and imagining.
In nature, the places of greatest fertility, innovation and invention are the places where two or more ecosystems meet.
Where differences collide, newness is born. And if we were ever in need of birthing a new world, now would be the time.
And the diversity we need to cultivate is not only about the colors of our skin, but reaches to the furthest starry edges of our human galaxy – it includes people of all ages, genders, ethnicities, abilities, backgrounds, disciplines and faiths.
It also includes people at all levels of financial well-being – as john powell recently noted: “there is one group that we systematically other today – with hugely damaging consequences – while hardly even realizing we are doing it. People living in poverty.”
In studies intended to surface peoples’ views about often-stereotyped groups, Americans consistently revealed a deep and distinct bias against poor people, considering them both unfriendly and incompetent. Turns out, as a unique subset of our culture, we often offer them neither our empathy nor our respect.
And yet, having been shaken out of the moneyed world, and forced to turn toward a relationship economy, where connections to community and the land and elements are the only safety net they may rely upon, some may have real wisdom to offer to us all.
These ecological and human-enhanced disasters know no pigeonholing, stereotypes or categorization, living in gated, monocultural communities won’t afford protection in the long term. I’m feeling called toward an ever-deepening commitment to standing together for justice, to the public face of love.
We are all in this together. An injury to one is an injury to all. We all have the same hearts, connective tissue and spines.
Our ultimate and inherent interdependence is palpable through our physical bodies, which are gifted with immense wisdom – to sense, to repair, to celebrate, to love and to discern.
As we fill our lungs and bodies with each others’ exhalations, since the Earth is a closed loop, and recirculates everything, the cup of tea we drink today may once have been Cleopatra’s bathwater.
My wise mother taught me that when I listen closely to my body, it never lies.
Sometimes, upon hearing a comment in a group that might offend or hurt someone,Though I may not be able to pinpoint what was ‘off’ about it with my ears or mind, I can feel it in the pit of my belly. I’m learning to say “My stomach just clenched. I wonder whether anyone may have feelings or concerns about what was just said?”
My body also and thankfully lets me know when it’s had enough of perpetual activity, of responding to others’ needs without checking in with my own, although I’ve become deeply patterned to override it.
Since turning 60, and entering my young elderhood, I’m learning to listen (better at least) when it calls me to rest.
The poet, David Whyte, describes this so well. He says:
REST is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. Rest is the essence of giving and receiving; an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually but also psychologically and physically. Rested, we are ready for the world…rested we care again for the right things…and the right people…in the right way. In rest we re-establish the goals that make us more generous, more courageous, more of an invitation, someone we want to remember, and someone others would want to remember too.
To move through this tumultuous time, I believe we must co-create safe spaces for our selves and each other to express the truths of what’s moving in our hearts…
Women have long been ridiculed and derided for being ruled by our emotions, but emotions are central to all human life.
If we learn to heed their messages, they can be our best guides. Without their wisdom, we’d have a dry and soul-less world.
We forsake feelings at our peril. As we become increasingly emotionally illiterate and relationally hobbled, we not only become lonesome and depressed, we forget to prioritize connection, organizing and coalition-building, and we lose our political struggles.
Even anger can be a positive force. It can be negative or corrupted as aggression, violence or rage, but in her brilliant book The Language of Emotions, Karla McLaren notes that in its purest form, anger is actually the body’s way of informing us that a boundary has been trespassed.
Unexpressed or stifled, emotions become toxic to our psyches.
Meant to surface so as to wash and purify us, they’re intended to circulate through their movement and expression our bodies’ real-time response to upsetting, exciting or stimulating events.
As the poet Nayyirah Waheed so elegantly says:
“Expect sadness
Like
You expect rain
Both
Cleanse you.”
And also:
“grieve, so that you can be free to feel something else.”
When I locate an opportunity to express how much anger and grief resides within me, (perhaps surrounded by trusted friends, in ritual, in a drum circle or alone in the woods), I am astounded at the volume and ferocity of sounds that emerge from within me.
Sometimes, when I realize I haven’t cried for some time, I’ll watch a soppy movie so that I feel permission to sit in the dark and weep. I feel cleaner, afterward, with more energy circulating throughout my body, and readier to face what comes.
I’m also learning to listen more attentively to the guidance that comes unbidden, sometimes from a dream, or as I awaken. Other times, a wild creature will visit my path, a rainbow will appear when I need reassurance, or a flash of inspiration whose source I do not know. I’m learning to ask for guidance from my ancestors, and to listen patiently for however they might respond.
My third key has been about exploring attention – choosing more intentionally where and how I invest it. Since energy follows attention, it’s my most valuable resource.
The evening news and opining pundits have become more intriguing than most fiction, as the details and cast of characters in the seemingly limitless greed of the kleptocracy are revealed.
I notice my tendency to get mesmerized, to give over my attention to tracking this detective story. I’ve been trying to rein that hypnotic impulse in, select carefully where to direct my focus and spend more precious time protecting and cultivating my psyche’s well-being.
Lynn Twist suggests – in her Fundraising from the Heart seminar that what we appreciate, appreciates, and I’ve found it to be true, in nearly every area of my life.
Perhaps it’s a basic principle of relationships, that we might all do well to practice, as we all long to feel valued, attended to, and appreciated for the uniqueness that we bring.
And then there’s meditation, the practice of attending within. Long a reluctant, impatient and poor practitioner, I’m discovering the value of regularly and deeply turning my attention inward, to just listen, to check in with my multiple ways of knowing and see if anyone in the Council of Ninas has anything I need to listen for.
A writer and teacher of Relational Mindfulness, Deborah Eden Tull suggests that giving our selves the gift of our full attention is the subtlest form of self-love.
I’m finding that a few minutes, a couple of times a day is making a real difference. Strengthening my centeredness when I’m navigating choppy waters, deepening my capacity to listen and discern, and to receive guidance. As I walk this time when distraction and urgency seem to come at me from every direction,
and there’s so much more need than I can possibly address, the stillness that I am tending within me is aiding me in discerning what’s mine to do.
There is a gentle sense of self-acceptance – that’s causing me to feel kinder towards others, as I’m practicing it towards myself.
Somehow, intimate though it seems, it seems to me a key part of cultivating my own resilience, toward becoming a better change agent and co-creator of positive change. So I offer it humbly, in case it might prove useful to you.
This is my prayer:
May we cultivate resilience by listening
for the wolves’, owls’ and whales’ songs,
For the wind’s whispers and the waters’ ebbs and flows.
For the rustling leaves of aspen trees,
Who weather storms by holding each other, underground.
May will encounter each other anew, as sparks of stars,
Each glowing with a particular radiance and light.
May we heed our bodies’ calls for cycles
Of listening for guidance and learning what’s needed,
Followed by engaged, purposeful and collaborative action.
And may we support each other in exquisite tending and self care.
May we develop our relational intelligence,
and kindle our kindness,
Giving the wild horses of our hearts
rein to lead,
As we remember the Earth who we were born from,
And that everyone – and all of life – is sacred, and relatives.
Again, Nayyirah Waheed, who suggests this:
1. rub honey into the night’s back.
2. make sure the moon is fed.
3. bathe the ocean.
4. warm sing the trees.
And she signs it:
–tend
Thank you.
Turdulent Times: A Hero’s Journey
This was Co-Founder Kenny Ausubel’s morning address to the 2017 Bioneers gathering.
A friend once counseled me that any truly transformative experience is preceded by dread. We’re living in dreadful times indeed. The big wheels are turning. An old order is dying – a new one is being born.
This moment of cataclysmic breakdown is shattering open a space for transformational breakthrough. Although the outcome is deeply uncertain, there’s as much cause for hope as for horror.
We’re taking a collective hero’s journey — a descent through the crucible of the underworld to transform human civilization and ourselves. As cultural historian Richard Tarnas puts it, “We’re in a race between initiation and catastrophe.”
The classic hero’s journey begins with separation from the community — from wholeness and home. There follow a dark night of the soul, a deconstruction of the old identity, and a crisis of meaning.
The hero encounters mortal danger. A hovering shadow seems to darken the whole world, an encroaching peril. The hero goes through a deep inner descent, wrestling with the shadows of the darkness within.
There’s great suffering, the crucial point of transformation. The hero has to clean out the stables of the psyche and surrender the old identity. Only then can the hero discover the hidden potential within to become a person of world historical moment. Now the hero can re-enter the larger community — humbled, reborn — bearing the treasure of new vision and purpose.
Today, modern civilization and the entire species are going through a collective hero’s journey. But in this endgame at the outer limits of Western civilization, we’ve separated ourselves from the entire community of life. As a species, we face mortal danger. We’re compelled to confront our fallibility, our mistakes, our mortality. Very often what’s dying is more apparent than what’s being born.
It’s a crisis of worldviews – because, as Tarnas puts it, “Worldviews create worlds. Our celebrated civilization and rational intelligence have produced so much that is precious to us. Yet that luminosity has come with an enormous shadow where we see ourselves as the sovereign supreme intelligence in the known universe.
“It has produced a spiritual crisis, as well as an ecological catastrophe that comes from objectifying nature as if it’s just there for our benefit.
“Near-death experiences have tremendous power to reconfigure moral values. You see life differently. You see yourself differently. You develop new values – the importance of relationships, the importance of love, rather than of amassing an enormous bank account.”
As Tarnas concludes, “As a species, as a civilization, as individuals, we can go through a profound inner transformation to be reborn into a new relationship to the Earth community. That’s the measure of whether we’re going to survive and flourish.”
Today a new worldview is emerging that’s also very ancient — the spreading consciousness that we’re part of a much vaster web of life in a cosmos imbued with order and genius beyond our comprehension.
This awareness is rising up spontaneously everywhere. Some of the largest global movements in history are converging in the recognition that’s it’s all connected and we’re all connected. The twin crises of climate disruption and extreme inequality reflect the biggest political failure in history, and they’ve catalyzed a five-alarm political immune response.
But the bigger the light, the longer the shadow. Indeed, we’re living in turdulent times. We’re swamping the drain.
As Hurricane Harvey engulfed the Gulf and steeped Houston’s petro-metro in a toxic soup, Irma previewed Florida’s climate future as a deep blue state. Global weirding is upon us everywhere. It speaks in the fierce language of nature: floods, droughts, fires, hypercanes, mass extinctions. Finally that voice is being heard. Robert Jay Lifton calls this mass awakening in the US the “climate swerve.” Denial is over. Better late than never.
Meanwhile the corruption saturating the republic is escalating the chaos by stoking the darkest shadows of the human psyche: the authoritarian will to power – the hungry ghost of greed – the trolls of racism, bigotry, and misogyny. For this job, we need Ghostbusters.
The Joker has taken over Gotham City. As Russia-gate sucks the gangsters and warlords of Trumpistan into what appears to be the greatest scandal in American history, Typhoid Donald’s contagion could lead to a succession crisis and a political clear-cut. Watergate pales in comparison. It’s usually the rot within empires that topples them.
We’re heading for complete political chaos. The empire has no clothes.
As Alexandra Stevenson reported from the 2017 Davos World Economic Forum, summit of the financial masters of the universe:
“The world order has been upended… The religion of the global elite — free trade and open markets — is under attack… The biggest concern? Finding a way to make the people who are driving populist movements feel like they are part of the global economic pie that Davos participants have created and largely own.”
In other words, make feudalism great again. Talk about a marketing challenge.
Try selling that to a world where five billionaires have as much wealth as half the world’s people. Where 737 interlocking financial networks control 80% of global corporate economic activity. Where what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism” profits mightily from catastrophe and capitalizes on chaos to inflict radical fiscal and social policies that concentrate wealth and power even more.
What could possibly go wrong?
The global dark money rabbit hole is where Russia-gate is inexorably leading. Money laundering. Secret offshore accounts. Shell companies. Tax havens. Impeccably buried treasures stashed in the system’s subterranean architecture. Everything the global elites really do not want you to see.
Most of it of course is legal. The system is the crime. Resistance is anything but futile.
Democracy movements are erupting everywhere, confronting corruption — challenging austerity schemes and plutocracy. People are taking to the streets and corridors of power in numbers not seen since the ‘60s — with youth often at the forefront.
In truth, we’re poised to make a quantum leap – to leapfrog into an entirely different way of doing things. In fact, nothing less will do. This Age of Nature calls for a new social contract of interdependence. Taking care of nature means taking care of people — and taking care of people means taking care of nature.
Around the world in diverse fields of endeavor, social and scientific innovators such as the bioneers have been developing and demonstrating far better technological, economic, social, cultural and political models.
They’re inspired by the wisdom of the natural world, and guided by values of social equity, inclusion, cooperation and compassion.
But paradigms die hard, and empires die harder. Progressive movements succeed most when there’s a split in the corporate class. Those fault lines are widening.
The clean energy revolution is now unstoppable. In 2015, twice as much investment globally went into renewables as into fossil fuels. Apple already uses 96% clean energy worldwide. Twenty-three Fortune 500 companies have pledged to reach 100% clean energy. The business case is irrefutable and the worm has turned.
California, the world’s sixth largest economy, has already shown it’s possible and profitable to decouple economic growth from carbon emissions, while also addressing environmental justice and racial equity. The Golden State has set the goal of 65% clean energy by 2030. It already has more clean energy jobs than all coal jobs in the US.
Globally there are over 8,000,000 jobs in renewable energy, versus about 3,000,000 in fossil fuels.
Cities, which account for 2/3 of US emissions, are taking the lead. China and India are on the move in big ways. Germany is the world’s first major renewable energy economy. Denmark produced 56% of its electricity from renewables in 2015. The list goes on – and on.
Clean tech is upending the fossil infrastructure across the board. As Tony Seba, an instructor at Stanford University, wrote in his book, “Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation”:
“We are on the cusp of the fastest, deepest, most consequential disruption of transportation in history. What the cost curve says is that by 2025 all new vehicles will be electric, globally.”
Seba projects that by 2030:
• All new energy will be provided by solar or wind.
• Gasoline, natural gas and coal will be obsolete. Nuclear is already obsolete. Billions of dollars of oil will become stranded.
The imperative now is to fast-forward the transition to 100% clean energy, keep the oil in the ground, and, as Paul Hawken is showing, sequester carbon back where it belongs in a drawdown to 350 ppm, which is completely do-able with what we already know and have. Full stop.
Culture change usually precedes political change, and we’re also on the front lines of cultural revolution.
In the US, multi-cultural society is here to stay. Five states and 50 metro areas are already majority–minority. By 2019, minority children will be the majority nationally. The entire country is projected to become majority–minority in about 25 years.
17% of new marriages and 20% of cohabiting relationships are interracial or interethnic.
91% of respondents to a Pew Research survey said: “Interracial marriage is a change for the better, or made no difference at all.”
Millennials are the most diverse and largest generation in American history. According to a USA Today/Rock the Vote Millennials poll, almost 60% of them have a positive view of Black Lives Matter.
The massive public blowback against Trumpistan’s racist and xenophobic policies has shown how radically out of step this retrograde regime is with the arc of today’s diverse, interdependent world. Very large sectors of the business community are pushing back, even if it’s for self-interested reasons.
Trumpistan’s immigrant bashing is awakening the Latino political sleeping giant, along with big business and a majority of citizens. The Dreamers are inspiring the nation to make America grateful again.
We’re also surfing the next wave of feminism and gender justice. The post-inaugural Women’s March was the biggest demonstration in American history. With women of color at the forefront, it’s a shining expression of the Inclusivity Revolution. It’s making visible a spreading collective understanding: The power and creativity of our diversity grows exponentially at the crossroads where disparate issues and diverse peoples intersect.
As the book “Sex and World Peace” documents, “States that have improved the status of women are as a rule healthier, wealthier, less corrupt, more democratic, and more powerful on the world stage in the early 21st century.” They’re also less likely to engage in conflict both domestically and globally.
As Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden note: “The true clash of civilizations in the future will [be] along the fault lines between civilizations that treat women as equal members of the human species, and civilizations that cannot or will not do so.”
Our entire idea of gender is expanding. California is about to join five other states in making non-binary gender presentations available on driver’s licenses. Culturally there’s no turning back.
Meanwhile, Standing Rock has rocked the world, bringing Indigenous rights and worldviews into mainstream awareness.
It’s seeding a genuine shift in consciousness, especially among young people. Native Peoples are showing the world what it means to come together not as protestors, but as protectors – peaceful guardians of the sacred sources of life and of justice. Indigenous peoples worldwide are linking networks to build power, and engage millions more non-Native allies. This has not happened before.
It’s a movement moment. The crossroads are getting crowded.
But make no mistake: The ecological debt we’ve incurred is dire. The cultural wounds are deep, and divide-and-conquer remains the preferred playbook. We’re in for some very tough sledding across the melting snow.
Fortunately nature has a deep capacity for healing, and people are profoundly resilient. Resilience is the grail, both ecological and social — enhancing our ability to adapt to dramatic changes, while bringing about social healing and reconciliation.
If we act boldly now, we can still dodge complete climate chaos. It requires that we actually change the system, which requires that we build broad-based political power.
But it has to be about much more than that. It’s about a transformation of what power means. We’re moving away from “power over” to “power to” and “power with” – power to create an ecologically vital and socially just world – power with each other to create beloved community.
That’s an epochal shift in worldview. Why does this consciousness seem to be arising spontaneously around the world all at once?
Our scientific understanding of consciousness is in its infancy. The psychologist Carl Jung deeply pondered this mystery of consciousness. While developing his theory of the collective unconscious, he identified what he called the “governing principles of the psyche” – the recurring archetypal myths, symbols and stories that seem to be universally shared across cultures and geographies.
Jung began paying attention to another mystery: frequent instances in which a person’s inner state would be matched by an external event that seemed perfectly orchestrated to speak precisely to it, like some kind of spooky dialogue with an invisible ubiquity. Although these occurrences couldn’t be connected by cause, they were unmistakably connected by meaning. Jung called these meaningful coincidences “synchronicities.”
But how could such anomalies be explained in a materialist, Newtonian cause-and-effect machine of a cosmos? It’s the kind of question David Bohm studied deeply. As a leading quantum physicist who worked with Einstein, he also pursued his quest with leading spiritual masters such as Krishnamurti and the Dalai Lama, whose worldviews he sought to reconcile with science.
After 40 years of research, Bohm proposed that the nature of reality is what he called a Holomovement.
He hypothesized that the cosmos is a single unbroken wholeness in flowing movement in which each part of the flow contains the entire flow.
Bohm believed this holomovement has two aspects: the implicate order and the explicate order. The explicate order is the subset that’s directly perceptible to the human senses and the mind: what we consider the physical universe.
The implicate order is everything else: all that’s beyond our five senses plus the intangibles of life.
Naturally we assume the explicate order is the fundamental reality. Bohm argued the opposite.
His analogy was that the explicate order is like the foam on the waves of the ocean. The implicate order is the ocean itself.
The foam is like the nature of the physical universe.
It arises and it passes away in the endless creation and destruction of matter. Bohm found this understanding of physics consistent with both quantum theory and spiritual teachings down through the ages.
His pathfinding original research showed the electron in quantum physics behaves as if it somehow possessed an awareness of the rest of the universe. In some sense, he said, the electron is functioning as a conscious being — or it can’t be distinguished from functioning as a conscious being.
Bohm proposed that, along with energy and matter, there’s a third irreducible component of the fabric of the cosmos: consciousness, or meaning. He said each contains the other two.
Carl Jung ultimately came to a parallel conclusion. He came to believe the collective unconscious supersedes human consciousness. It appears to pervade nature and the cosmos itself.
Just imagine a cosmos made of energy, matter and meaning. How would that change our way of living?
Here’s how the late Iroquois historian, scholar and longtime bioneer John Mohawk saw it from an Indigenous perspective.
“The culture that I come from saw the universe as the fountain of everything, including consciousness. It’s not only the human who the consciousness; it’s also the plant, the tree, the birds and all the other living things.
When you address that plant, you’re addressing its consciousness in time and space. You’re part of whatever it is that brought the plant into being. You’re related in this way.
“In our culture we’re scolded for being arrogant if we think that we’re smart. An individual is not smart, according to our culture. Individuals are merely lucky that they are a part of a system that has intelligence that happens to reside in them.
“In other words, be humble about this always. The real intelligence isn’t the property of an individual or a corporation — the real intelligence is the property of the universe itself.
“That’s the old spirituality. Acquire that consciousness, and it becomes extremely difficult to rationalize pollution. Acquire that consciousness and it becomes very difficult to rationalize cutting down trees to make board feet-worth of dollars out of them.
“I propose to you,” Mohawk concluded, “that spirituality is the highest form of political consciousness.”
That’s the consciousness that’s arising before our eyes. That’s the real treasure of this hero’s journey.
It’s all alive. It’s all connected. It’s all intelligent. It’s all relatives.
This is the revolution from the heart of nature and the human heart.
And as Joe Hill said, “Don’t mourn, organize.”
An Altered American Dream and Defining the ‘New Better Off’
What does it mean to be “well off”? Is it financial achievement, the amassing of nice things, successfully raising a family? Courtney Martin, the author of The New Better Off (Seal Press, 2016), examines the concepts of success and personal happiness for future generations, who are likely to be less wealthy—at least in the traditional sense—than their parents.
Martin is an accomplished writer and speaker who explores topics related to feminism and social justice. She is the co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network, Valenti Martin Media and FRESH Speakers Bureau. Martin is also Editor Emeritus at Feministing.com, a weekly columnist for On Being, and author or editor of six books. Her work appears frequently in national publications including The New York Times and Washington Post.
The following is an excerpt from the introduction of The New Better Off.
Courtney Martin spoke on a panel about racism and patriarchy at the 2017 Bioneers conference.
For the first time in history, nearly two-thirds of Americans do not believe that the next generation will be “better off” than their parents are—an opinion shared by men and women, rich and poor alike.
To some, that may sound sad. To me, it sounds like a provocation. Better off? Based on whose standards?
To be sure, people need jobs. They need housing. They need healthcare. When these basic needs aren’t met—and for too many Americans they aren’t—we are legitimately not better off.
But for many of us, the concept of “better off” is far more abstract than just putting food on the table. Is “better off” a fancy job title, a bank account with more zeros, a manicured lawn? It turns out that none of those things automatically makes you safe or happy, as evidenced by the Great Recession, when the ground underneath so many Americans’ feet shifted overnight. And, what’s more, some of the things we have historically associated with success actually endanger your health. Underneath the appearance of uplift, a complex story weighs us down. This could play out in any number of ways, like when people decide to erase their ethnic last names; or they set aside authentic—albeit nontraditional—career ambitions in favor of more lucrative paths; or when a father knows his colleagues better than he does his own kids; or a mother who leans in so hard she falls flat on her face. Pressure and debt, missed get-togethers, living for the weekends, living someone else’s dream. “Better off,” left uninterrogated, can be fucking dangerous.
For me, this is not just a societally important matter, but one with personal significance. I was just minding my own business—sweating on subway platforms at 2:00 am and getting weepy over rejection emails from editors and losing track of time while laying on blankets with dear friends in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and dreaming about the person I would one day be, and then—all the sudden—I was that person. Otherwise known as an adult. I had a husband (something I never thought I’d have). I had a daughter (something I always thought I’d have). I had a job. Well, actually, a lot of jobs. I had a car payment. I had no small amount of frustration when the kid next door played his music too loud on a weeknight (to be fair, it was pretty awful music).
And I had a problem. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to become a responsible person. I’ve always been sort of an old soul—watching Oprah with a bag of Ruffles potato chips after middle school so I could try on all the grown-up emotions of her guests. Commitment doesn’t send me scurrying like it does some people. I like feeling needed. I like being accountable. I believe in sensible shoes.
The problem was that I didn’t want to become an adult if it meant falling in line. I didn’t want to get golden handcuffs or check my email every two seconds because I was so “important.” I didn’t want to laugh with my girlfriends about how sexless my marriage was over wine at book group—or stay married for the kids. I didn’t want to let myself off the hook because activism is for young people, or utter that familiar, ugly phrase: “do as I say, not as I do.” I didn’t want to stop having euphoric experiences or long, wandering philosophical conversations. I didn’t want to get a good job, a house with a white picket fence, have 2.5 kids, and then just . . . go . . . to . . . sleep.
And as it turned out, the white picket fence was beyond my reach anyway—as it is beyond the reach of so many people. When the economy plummeted in 2007, it robbed so many Americans, especially the young, of some of the experiences that—up until that point—were widely considered the cornerstones of a successful adult life. Suddenly, owning a home and having a nine-to-five job were stripped of their former glimmer, revealed to be more complicated and maybe even less satisfying than we’d been told. People put off getting married, in part, because they felt like they were supposed to be somebody else when they did it—somebody more financially secure, more established, more sure.
In other words, when the economy crashed, the air was let out of the overinflated ego of the so-called American Dream. I had been scared of what adulthood might do to the state of my soul; I feared chasing symbols of success rather than creating conditions for meaning and joy and justice. But—as fate would have it—the symbols were outrunning everyone.
Since then, so many people continue to reevaluate, turning away from job opportunities that are prestigious but not courageous, making families out of friends and neighbors, buying less, giving away more, sharing and renting rather than owning, reinventing rituals and ritualizing reinvention. So many people are looking compassionately and critically at their own parents’ lives and choosing to do things differently, sometimes even reclaiming edifying, abandoned, elements of their grandparents’ lives.
When I was in my early twenties, my mom gave me a copy of Mary Catherine Bateson’s Composing a Life. In it Bateson, the daughter of anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, writes profiles of five, diverse women with the goal of turning their lives inside out, showing what it really takes to put a day together when you are a passionate person with only twenty-four hours. I devoured it, writing in the margins and putting sticky notes in places where Bateson took my breath away. And then all of my girlfriends read it, each one passing it on to the next.
As I look back, I realize that it took such hold of us because it was the only book we’d ever encountered that described the nitty-gritty of real, somewhat contemporary lives (at that point, 2002, the portraits were over a decade old). To these women, even structural problems—like the sexist workplace—weren’t inevitably crushing, but fodder for subterfuge and rebellion. And Composing a Life was written from a place of deep delight in the capacity of ordinary people to pursue meaning and joy in challenging circumstances. In Bateson’s telling, that we are made even more determined, even more creative by those kinds of circumstances. The book treats “composing a life” as a creative, ongoing opportunity, not a test to be passed. Bateson writes:
I believe that our aesthetic sense, whether in works of art or in lives, has overfocused on the stubborn struggle toward a single goal rather than on the fluid, the protean, the improvisatory. We see achievement as purposeful and monolithic, like the sculpting of a massive tree trunk that has first to be brought from the forest and then shaped by long labor to assert the artist’s vision, rather than something crafted from odds and ends, like a patchwork quilt, and lovingly used to warm different nights and different bodies.
The phrase “new better off” is the shorthand I’ve created for this bourgeoning shift in Americans’ ideas about the good life. It’s the patchwork quilt version of the American Dream, not the (phallic) sculpture reaching high into the sky. It’s about our quest to use our current precarity as the inspiration to return to some of the most basic, “beginner’s mind” questions: What is enough money? How do we want to spend our finite energy and attention? What makes us feel accountable and witnessed? It’s about creating a life you can be genuinely proud of, an “examined life” (in the words of dead Greek guys), a life that you are challenged by, a life that makes you giddy, that sometimes surprises you, a life that you love.
It’s leaving a job that pays well but makes you feel like a cog for a freelance life that makes you feel like a creator—the financial highs and lows be damned. It’s sharing a car with a few friends and learning how to repair your favorite pair of jeans. It’s moving in with your grandmother because she needs someone to reach the highest shelf in the kitchen and you need someone who helps you keep our turbulent times in perspective. It’s putting your cell phone in a drawer on Saturday afternoon and having the best conversation of your life that night. It’s starting a group for new dads where you admit how powerful and confusing it is to raise a tiny human.
But lest I fall into the same trap of all those who idealize bootstraps, the New Better Off mentality is not solely about the individual. It’s also about the collective. Playwright Tony Kushner writes: “The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.”
So, yes, this book is about the brave individual choices people are making, but it’s also about the movements, formal and informal, that are coalescing around the New Better Off mindset—about how people are reinventing the social safety net, and reforming the laws that have prevented us from sharing and reclaiming communal rituals. A surprising coalition of people—from labor organizers to start-up entrepreneurs to legislators—are coming together to push for portable health benefits. A small but growing group of lawyers are agitating for laws that make it easier to start co-op businesses and create communally owned homes. All over the country groups of young people who are grieving the loss of parents are gathering for dinner, to talk about grief as well as about what is being born in them through their loss. Essentially, this book’s message can be conveyed in one phrase: community is everything.
The New Better Off mindset compels you to be wise, to be vulnerable enough to admit that you have limitations, and to surround yourself with people who will take care of you and vice versa. But it’s not just about need. It’s also about fun—unscripted relationships that evolve over years and years; spontaneous, gut-busting laughter; bread and dogma broken with debates around a dinner table. Communities are joy. There’s an almost giddy energy when something as simple as a book club gathers in someone’s living room. Sure, wine flows as people are discussing the text, but it’s not just that; they’re also following the arc of one another’s lives. One of the things that has thrilled me to no end while working on this book is meeting so many impatient, innovative people who are actively figuring out how to reclaim community.
We may be artists of our own lives, as Bateson tells it, but we are not self-made men and women. We live in communities, and beyond that, we live in polities. Part of the New Better Off mindset is also about structural transformation. Systems thinkers and agitators and designers are asking: what would an America look like where all people’s basic needs are met—where more people have the luxury of making choices about the kind of work they do, the kind of homes they live in, the kinds of families they create?
To be sure, the “creating a beautiful life” portion of the New Better Off mindset is about our personal choices, but it’s also about the neighborhood and city and state and nation that we live in, and what their policies say about our rights and responsibilities. One of the sicknesses of privilege is the mistaken belief that we are all islands—when really we are archipelagos. Technology that makes it easier for young, white guys to order a tuna melt is not an example of living the New Better Off life; it’s just a business venture. But technology that makes it easier for everyone to find affordable, high-quality healthcare? That is the New Better Off.
We don’t create this little life in a finite moment in time. We create our lives informed by our parents and our grandparents and all the decisions they made in the America (or the Mexico or the Iran or the Ethiopia) that they came of age in. Or, as author Paul Elie puts it, “We enter the story in the middle.” In this manner, while the New Better Off mentality is about the continuous exploration of what is in front of us, it’s also a fascination and sober reckoning with what lies behind us. Who has lived in these neighborhoods? Who has worshipped in these halls? What worked about the way they built community? Can it be recaptured, maybe even made more effective with modern tools or notions? What was alienating and even discriminatory in these communities? Are there opportunities for reconciliation?
We used to answer these questions within formal institutions— churches, rotary clubs, Junior Leagues, unions—but many of these groups have lost the centrifugal pull they once enjoyed. Many of the authorities we used to rely on to guide us toward the good life no longer exist. Many of the straightforward paths have been bulldozed, or are overgrown with weeds. Many of the institutions have crumbled, destroyed by their own stubborn insistence on doing things as they’ve always been done. The safety net has been torn—and the ladder to success has fallen down.
The demographic makeup of this country is shifting in profound ways. Women now constitute a full half of the professional workforce. By 2044, whites—the majority source of our most dominant and toxic narratives about achievement—will have become a racial minority. And the percentage of Americans that doesn’t identify with any particular religion has grown sharply in recent years.5 The demography “rule book” is written in the language of another era.
If you feel like a failure, it might be that you’re considering yourself against standards that just don’t hold water anymore. Sure, many consider it a sign of success to own a home, but that yardstick got its best traction when the average middle-class man’s salary could support an entire family—something we all know no longer applies. The good news is that you might just be a success based on New Better Off standards, which perhaps you’ve had a hard time articulating but have been bravely grappling toward. Maybe you’re a mediocre earner but a masterful father. Or maybe you can’t afford your dream home but you throw legendary neighborhood parties.
This excerpt has been reprinted with permission from The New Better Off by Courtney Martin, published by Seal Press, 2016.