Special Preview | Kosmos Journal 2016 Spring/Summer Edition
May 3, 2016 Kosmos Community News


Excerpt | Mirror Flourishing: The New Business North Star

by David Cooperrider, Spring | Summer 2016

The purpose of this article is to join with what I’m now sensing as the most important business-for-good movement in the world today. Its message, paradoxically, is to declare that it’s time to abandon the language, the cultural meme, and the vision of a ‘sustainable’ economy. Just at the historic inflection moment when it seems like the whole world united in common cause in Paris around the call for sustainability, recent thinkers and researchers of pioneering stature are casting doubts. There is the very real possibility, says the evidence base, that the incrementalism involved in sustainability-as-less-harm is going to wear itself down to a trickle of energy, deplete our intrinsic motivation, and ultimately, result in too little too late. Our frames are like eyes and if we want a quantum leap in society we need the gift of new eyes.


Excerpt | The Enlivenment Manifesto: Politics and Poetics in the Anthropocene

By Andreas Weber, Hildegard Kurt, Spring | Summer 2016

A ground-breaking new vision of humankind is quickly spreading into the mainstream of our self-understanding. We are no longer standing apart from nature, so the new belief goes: We are enmeshed in it. Some authors even assert that nature and humans are one and the same. This comes not just as a philosophical claim but rather as an empirical realization. The cultural image man has of himself has become a scientific issue. Traces of pesticides, nuclear fallout, and nitrogen fertilizer can be found in the Arctic ice crystals and in the soils of the Amazon. Climate change has proven that humans are inescapably connected to Earth and its systems.


Excerpt | A Glimpse into the More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible: The Art of Hosting Conversations that Matter

By Helen Titchen Beeth, Spring | Summer 2016

The quality of our conversations makes our world what it is. How we talk to each other determines whether we walk away from each other and prepare to fight for our separate interests, or hold fire, stay together, and open up into a future of mutual understanding and brighter possibility. Conversation is an art that can be practiced at any scale, from ones and twos to thousands, on timescales ranging from minutes to days to permanently ongoing.

This article is an introduction to a body of practice and a growing global self-organising network that I feel holds a crucial piece of the puzzle of how to start to embody the new story of the civilisation that we deeply intuit is possible and that human hearts and souls long for.


Excerpt | Harmony with Nature

By Robin Wall Kimmerer, PhD, Spring | Summer 2016
Fifth Annual Conference at the United Nations on Harmony with Nature

Shaapodaske Gizhgokwe, my name in my ancestral language, refers to light shining through sky onto the face of Mother Earth and I carry the responsibility for that name, but I never would have dreamed that responsibility would lead me here. For you see, a little more than one hundred years ago, my grandfather was taken away from his family in Indian Territory to a government run boarding school where the policy was to wipe away every trace of the indigenous worldview from our people and replace it with the western settler mindset. It is a miracle that today his granddaughter has been invited here to speak of our worldview at a time of accelerating climate change, as we enter the Age of the Sixth Extinction, when the world now has need of the wisdom that was very nearly driven to extinction.


Excerpt | Transformative Media: From the Hero’s Journey to Our Collective Journey

By Maya Zuckerman, Spring | Summer 2016

Breaking Free of The Hero Myth

We humans and the way we interact with narrative, we’ve come a long way. We’ve evolved from the days of stories round a campfire, epic tales of heroes fighting monsters in far away lands, the gods playing tricks with the mortals, the hubris of humanity, and legends of beautiful and scary creatures who filled the oceans, forests, and skies.

Those ancient tales served as teaching tools for elders to explain the wonders and horrors of the world around them, to teach children what it takes to become an adult, and to perpetuate tribal legacy. The Hero’s Journey was a tool for adolescents to learn their role in the community and how to mature through use of metaphors such as quests, gods, monsters, and magic.