What Indigenous Wisdom Can Teach Us About Economics
What Indigenous Wisdom Can Teach Us About Economics
This article is part of the #CuraDaTerra essay series, focused on Indigenous perspectives and alternatives to industrial capitalism.
The crises of the modern world verify what Indigenous cultures have always known: that all phenomena are inextricably interconnected. As the Amazon—one of the most vital organs of the Earth—is razed to fuel the global economy, a virus borne of disrupted ecosystems assaults the lungs of human beings. As economic policies are enacted in Washington, Brussels, and Beijing, people are uprooted and ecosystems destroyed thousands of miles away.
Over the past 40 years, awareness of our interdependence with the natural world has steadily seeped into the dominant cultural narrative, and with it has come a greater appreciation for non-Western cultures and Indigenous peoples. In virtually every sphere, ecological and socially conscious initiatives have sprouted from the grassroots. From ecopsychology to ecological architecture, from human rights campaigns to support for the underprivileged, people have demonstrated their desire to develop kinder, gentler, more sustainable ways of living.
However, in this same period, the global economy—initially propelled by colonialism, slavery, and racist genocide—has continued on its same trajectory. Just as colonisation accumulated wealth primarily for global traders, the relentless globalisation of the economy is serving an ever-smaller handful of multinational corporations and banks. Under the seductive guise of “progress,” this system continues to undermine land-based economies of interdependence, replacing them with anonymous and unaccountable global supply chains.
As this system rapaciously invades Amazonia, the resulting humanitarian and ecological tragedy ripples out across the globe. With the rainforest giving way to industrial agriculture and desertification, massive amounts of carbon are being released and the global hydrological cycle is breaking down.
As Yanomami leader, Davi Kopenawa, memorably puts it: There is only one sky and we must take care of it, for if it becomes sick, everything will come to an end.
This message has not yet reached our political leaders. Instead, some are becoming demagogues spouting fairy-tales of endless economic growth. Their message is “your job depends on growing the economy, and we will do whatever is necessary to make that happen.”
This can be appealing to the expanding ranks of people made economically insecure and left psychologically insecure by the omnipotent propaganda for consumerism. Frustrated and confused, many have become vulnerable to the xenophobic rhetoric of those who point the finger of blame toward “greenies,” leftists, immigrants, black and people-of-colour, and any cultural “other” rather than the out-of-control economic casino in the hands of the power elite. In their framing, bulldozing the Amazon for its resources becomes a reasonable price for our economic survival.
Heads of state and business elites on both left and right have remained blind to the social and ecological effects of the global economy. As the system has expanded across the entire world, and as econometric thinking has become more and more narrowly specialised, almost no one has recognised the true costs of globalisation.
The truth is that globalisation doesn’t improve the lives of the majority—even in the short-term, let alone the long-term. Of all new income from global growth, only five percent actually goes to the poorest 60 percent of the global population. Look beneath the figures of GDP, and the situation is even more dire: thanks to the global economy, the majority of the world’s people have actually been made poorer in real terms.
In the less industrialised world, the process of “development” has pushed and pulled people out of self-reliant, community-based, local economic systems onto the lowest rung of a very unstable ladder. Generally, they become involved in producing for the global North, whether on monocultural plantations or in sweatshop factories. While they might be making a cash income of a few dollars a day, they are, by and large, experiencing greater deprivation than they did in their village economies.
Even in the so-called ‘rich’ countries, the middle classes have to compete ever more intensely and work ever longer hours just to stay afloat. All the while a propaganda industry pummels them with thousands of advertisements a day making them feel unworthy and perpetually desirous of more.
How has this happened?
Over the past 35 years, in the name of globalization, “free trade” treaties have dramatically increased the power of multinational corporations and banks to take advantage of cheap labour and resources anywhere across the entire planet. The deregulation of these multinationals has worked to the disadvantage of job-rich, place-based businesses, because it has resulted in overregulation, over-taxation and unemployment at the local, regional, and national levels. Global banks and corporations have become the most powerful entities on the planet, effectively giving national governments their marching orders.
To reverse these trends, we need to link hands with our Indigenous brothers and sisters to build up broad, peoples’ movements, united in their call for a renegotiation of trade treaties, this time with civil society at the table. We need to insist that governments stop using taxes, subsidies, and regulations to favour high-tech, resource-intensive industries that concentrate wealth and power in the hands of global monopolies, and instead direct those supports toward more localised businesses.
Reaching out across the left-right divide is critical. The people who vote for Bolsonaro and Trump do so largely because of the cultural and economic marginalisation imposed by economic globalisation—a process that has reduced many once-cohesive communities into isolated backwaters plagued by depression, addiction, and unemployment.
Now is the time to offer new political narratives—inspired by Indigenous ways of knowing, living, and being—that speak to a flourishing of ecologically-rooted communities and genuine prosperity. Now is the time for economic localisation. It is the way human beings can become part of the Cure of the Earth, the Cura da Terra, as Indigenous peoples have been since time immemorial.
By strengthening local economies, we keep wealth circulating within the community where it boosts local businesses and jobs, instead of allowing it to be siphoned off to distant corporate bank accounts. By shortening the distances between producer and consumer, we prioritise diversified production for local needs rather than standardised commodities for export.
In this way, we move away from monoculture toward diversity on the land. This is essential for genuinely ecological stewardship, for restoration of the soil and for increased productivity. At the same time, we decrease our reliance on centralised, fossil fuel-dependent, automated systems, in favour of employing people with diverse skills. And, most importantly, through economic localisation we support long-term, intergenerational relationships and deep community ties—the cornerstones of psychological security and wellbeing, as traditional cultures have always known.
There are already countless grassroots localisation projects, from São Paulo to Sydney, that are demonstrating the way forward. From farmers’ markets and consumer-producer cooperatives to local business alliances and community finance schemes, people are reweaving the fabric of local interdependence from the ground up. Out of common sense and heartfelt intuition, they are finding innovative ways to step out of the consumer rat race to live local lives at a human pace and scale.
These projects demonstrate that, by scaling down and localising economic activity, we can reduce our ecological impact, create more meaningful relationships and livelihoods, restore our relationship with nature, and increase the accountability of business. We can re-embed ourselves in intimate connections with the complex, animate world around us—a process which not only leads to greater individual fulfillment and joy, but also informs wiser, more humble decision-making.
Just as Indigenous wisdom is rooted in a myriad of complex and reciprocal interactions with the community, the land and water, the animals and plants, localising makes visible the threads of interdependence that hold the living world together.
Indigenous Languages As Cures of the Earth
Indigenous Languages As Cures of the Earth
This article is part of the #CuraDaTerra essay series, focused on Indigenous perspectives and alternatives to industrial capitalism.
I’m going to step into the box for a minute rather than indulge the tired cliché of American innovation, “think outside the box”. This box is not one of metaphor or entertainment but one of already understanding that this place has no logic to explore; rather, its logical explanation is an illusion. We are asking questions as if there were answers to everything, and we are somehow entitled to know these answers. Think of this article as an exercise in wondering aloud, exploring the parameters of the political-media-corporate complex that attempts to define “modern reality”, as if such a thing can exist.
What if the nameless copper-tanned toupee’d man living in a house built by African slaves was to be the last president of the so-called United States of America? What if we have reached some kind of expiration date, as the Earth recalls and repossesses an unpaid debt, re-framing the initially callous idea that all life matters? Would we approach our politics or our identity as Americans differently? When we truly face the end of our current illusionary period, will we start entering into a deeper dialogue with the living planet that holds the wisdom we seek.
Some believe the orange man has been “sent by god” in a troubled time –– a savior of democracy ready to do what’s necessary. What the deluded New Age and their uncomfortable bedfellows in the Alt-Right don’t fully explicate is what is it that they believe is necessary? Rolling back environmental protections? Scapegoating immigrants and people of color for the failures of the alleged “free-market”? Concentrating wealth even further into the hands of a tiny, plutocratic elite? Assassinating black men in the streets without trial or due process? Savaging Indigenous lands for more oil and fracking extraction to feed a dying system? Make America Gag Again is a more apt statement of purpose than the official slogan of state fascism.
Perhaps this is the moment in our collective history where we move beyond jingoistic platitudes to expose the apologetic predators, and the predatory aggressiveness embalmed in Eurocentric, Western belief systems. Behind the apologies, excuses, finger-pointing and other victim-perpetrator behavior lays the desires of certain psychopathic power-elites waiting to resurrect themselves with the blood of peoples and of sacred lands such as Turtle Island (now called the USA) and Amazonia (which includes Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana). We know that the ‘isms’ of modern parlance are systems designed to mentally, physically, psychologically, religiously, scientifically, and politically weaken and break our intuitive spirits into a simple reactive biometric database thought process; a reaction of cause and effect that can be understood by the manipulators to further their purpose. From these formulas of non-thinking and belief come the related next steps of consumption, employment, entertainment and other forms of distraction that help adjust and acquiesce us to conform to the material comforts of an addictive, cannibalistic culture. These contours and conditionings help make us “normal” right-angled order takers.
Enter Jair Messias Bolsonaro, a physical and spiritual desert who holds many parallels to the copper-toned totalitarian of the north and has an equally lustful desire to wreak havoc and terror on the lands of the Original Nations of the Western Hemisphere. He too is the “best product” of his culture and the broader globalized culture of capitalist modernity. The selected president of Brazil and author of destruction, through his authority of dogma, has unleashed the brave hidden agenda of Nazi refugees in Latin America dating back to the mid 1940s. So those who see and call out conspiracies are the targets and inheritors of ad nauseam genocide and ecocide. There’s nothing to hide anymore. Sadistic satire in broad daylight is popular among populists.
While the masses are being fed the latest election results, the newest climate change denialism, the “trust science” data of epidemiology and a shake-up in racial tensions, the noble officers of the matrix vaccine (no proselytizing needed), will eventually mandate their “solution” for all good citizens.
We all rush in like fools to find more solutions, better remedies, fix-its from the profit makers, and fuzzy warm language to comfort the addicted aspects of ourselves. We make films, Facebook pages, petitions, we ask politicians to do our bidding, we cast votes virtually because we have to save our country, save the world, save the Earth, save the whales, save anything, but our own sanity.
What is the role of Indigenous peoples in all this saving, all this complexity, all this running away from the very forces that led us into this treacherous moment in the first place? Could it be that the current moment of late-stage capitalism and the collapse of “progress” are related to historical actions?
You kill Indians to save the man, you kill the man to save the citizen, you kill the citizen to save the slave, you kill the slave to save the master, you kill the master to save … the Indians?
The word “Indians” is a moniker embedded in the European languages detailing the very denial languages used by those in agnosia or acutely colonized. The history of ‘Indians’ began when Columbus arrived and refused to call us Human Beings and the history of the Western Hemisphere is a continuum written into every constitution influenced by the Papal Bulls of 1493. The use of the name Indians disassociates Original Nations from Being aspects and the Being aspect is in relationship with Earth, with Amazonia, and with the web of Life and Interbeingness.
The Amazon is a sacred place. Human Beings do not make sacred places, they acknowledge them, recognize them, and sustain them without developing them. We honor them with languages taught to us by the Earth herself. The Original Nations of the Western Hemisphere understand sacred places where Earth has directed their sensitivities to pure energy being in place. These multi-dimensional quantum physics of Earth languages of the Original Peoples are also a part of the sacred places. They are part of the Cura Da Terra, “Cure of the Earth”, to borrow a phrase from the First Peoples of the Amazon.
As Vine Deloria, Jr. stated in his seminal book, God is Red, “Unless the sacred places are discovered and protected and used as religious places, there is no possibility of a nation ever coming to grips with the land itself. Without this basic relationship, national psychic stability is impossible.”
Earth languages are not lies or manipulation to serve political, religious, economic or scientific rationalizations. They are not invoked, entrusted or gifted to be placed within linear boxes of data. They are spoken every moment as cures, where all praise goes to the Earth. Tokahe Makxa Ina (think of Earth nurturing first). Conscious languages do not require a logic of believing but rather, a trans-logic of knowing that the Earth does not lie and only speaks the truth with conscious respect for all Beings. It is up to us to learn how to listen as the Earth who listens to us has taught the Indigenous peoples.
Mind Matters Most
Mind Matters Most
First in a series of essays by youth from Findhorn Community in Scotland, sharing insights for young people during COVID-19.
Photos by the Author
Among the many challenges arising as a result of the coronavirus is the impact of isolation on our mental wellbeing. Confinement, diminished social contact, and worries about the world present a multitude of internal stressors for many of us as we are forced to spend more time with ourselves, exposed to the tumultuous nature of our complicated minds.
For others, this period may also present itself as a blessing in disguise. Much of the outside stimulation that normally captivates us is taken away. With isolation comes a slowed-down pace of life, a simpler existence freed from the constant push and pull of our social commitments, desires, plans, and obligations.
Whether our experience of social distancing has positive or negative undertones, or perhaps a combination of the two, there is an opportunity to get to know our thoughts and become more aware of what’s happening inside our minds. We can use this time to our advantage, to begin understanding the various ways we are limited or debilitated by unhealthy mental habits.
Together, Buddhism and certain schools of psychology have a lot to offer in the quest to live in a healthier state of mind. They show that by gaining a better understanding of our thoughts and how they affect our emotions, we can start recognizing unhealthy patterns that lead to us being stuck in negative states of low self-esteem, anger, jealousy, worry, doubt, fear, and anxiety. By understanding the nature of our mind and how it generates negativity in our lives, we can move toward dwelling in a more peaceful state of loving acceptance.
We may not realize the extent to which our thoughts affect our feelings and influence our sense of wellbeing. Spending too much of our time in negative states of mind—spanning everyday worry, fixation, self-focus, ambivalence, agitation, and restless desire—we are chased throughout the day by our busy thoughts. We become a captive to the voice in our head that constantly judges, speculates, complains, compares, dislikes, and condemns. Most of our thinking is repetitive and often useless. Whether reliving recent or distant pasts or imagining or rehearsing possible futures, we spend most of our time caught up in the ceaseless meanderings of our unruly minds. Our addiction to ‘thinking’ gives us a false sense of pleasure.
The medical field has only touched the surface as far as documenting the benefits of meditation that traditions of the East have promoted for centuries. For instance, in Altered Traits, Goleman and Davidson explore cutting-edge research on meditation, examining how it has the capacity to transform our mind, body, and brain, leading to lasting positive change at the higher levels of practice. They discovered that our brain stays just as busy when we’re relaxed as when we’re under some form of mental strain. In other words, our minds’ ‘default mode’ switches on, even when we’re not doing anything particular that requires effort or focus. This default mode continually rescripts a storyline, in which each of us takes center stage, replaying the particularly upsetting or favorite parts over and over.
The default mode wanders mainly to things about ‘me’—my emotions, my thoughts, my relationships—especially the problems, worries, and anxieties. For this reason, when researchers at Harvard University asked thousands of people to report on their mood and mental focus at several random points throughout the day, they concluded that “a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”
It is through these ruminations that we construct our sense of self, from the mosaic of our experiences, memories, plans, hopes, and dreams. We become the center of the universe as we know it, fully believing and accepting our subjective, self-created narrative.
By applying the right kind of awareness, or mindfulness, we can deconstruct the story that we are continuously creating. At first, this may not be too clear, but it simply starts with a conscious shift in our perception—the way we view ourselves and the world around us. Teachings from Buddhism can aid in unpacking the flaws in our thinking that lead to a skewed understanding of our reality.
Begin by simply becoming more aware of your thoughts, observe how the continuous chatter impacts your emotions—a constant stream, a bewilderingly rapid parade, unpredictably changing and tirelessly repeating the same stories. By stepping back and observing the volatility of your thoughts, you suddenly don’t need to take them all that seriously. The intention is to dis-identify from the mind, reducing the power given to thoughts, delegitimizing their control and pervasive presence by witnessing them as an objective observer.
Meditation plays a fundamental role in this process. It isn’t the only way, but it is a valuable tool to begin understanding, investigating, and transforming mental formations.
A general mindfulness practice begins with noticing our thoughts impartially, without judging or condemning whatever arises. In practice, it typically requires focusing on an object of meditation. This may vary from maintaining attention on the breath, observing the sensations in the body, or mentally repeating a mantra. Thoughts themselves can even be objects of concentration (bearing witness to the stream without getting swept away by the current). Whichever object you choose, the intention is the same: to repeatedly bring your mind back to the present. It doesn’t matter so much what you focus your attention on but rather that you recognize when a loss of focus occurs. There is a difference between thinking and awareness of thinking!
A common misconception is that the mind must be completely quiet, that if you don’t switch off the thoughts you are not meditating. This isn’t the case. You can’t force your mind to be still. With sustained attention the chatter will become quieter, receding into the background. Many factors influence our mental state, and some days this will be more difficult than others. The task is in learning how to observe without judgment or emotional reaction, no matter how still or busy your mind may be.
Start by sitting comfortably, closing your eyes, and observing how it feels to simply be. It’s important to remember to be kind, compassionate, and gentle. If the mind wanders, smilingly bring it back, understanding that it is the nature of the mind to wander. Acceptance is key, acceptance to whatever may arise. Just observe, just remain aware. Simply witness reality as it is, not as you would like it to be. If the mind is busy, the mind is busy. If the mind is still, the mind is still.
By dedicating the time to explore your mind, you will begin to see that much of life’s suffering is unnecessary, self-created, and avoidable. Understanding how your thoughts create reality is one of the most valuable insights you can attain. Through the wholesome cultivation of the mind, it is possible to transform reality and cultivate a more positive way of existing in this world.
Young people planting at Findhorn Community in Scotland
John Fullerton on the Qualities of a Regenerative Economy
John Fullerton on the Qualities of a Regenerative Economy
From Voices of the ReGenerationVoices of the ReGeneration, a conversation between John Fullerton and Daniel Wahl about the qualities of a regenerative economy, February 2020.
On Capitalism
Daniel Christian Wahl | You have the founder of the World Economic Forum, as early as 2012/2013, saying capitalism is broken and needs redesigning. And you even get the IMF or the WTO saying it. And it’s not a taboo topic anymore to say something is fundamentally needing a shift, but then, of course, you get the camps: some people saying we can redesign capitalism, or rescue the world capital if we apply it in a more nuanced way. And others say, “No, no, no—capitalism is the problem.” Are we just getting stuck here with language?
John Fullerton | It’s funny—I think most people would guess that I’m deep in that conversation because I’m out of that world now. And the truth is, my phone doesn’t ring from the folks that are rethinking capitalism. I’m viewed as way too radical, and probably way too theoretical. And I’m frustrated by this. And I kind of roll my eyes when I see the great capitalists now talking about corporations needing a purpose. Well, what a brilliant idea… The business round table last summer came out with this new statement, “Hey, how about if corporations had a purpose?” And of course, that’s the same statement that the business round table had as its premise in 1982, when I started at JP Morgan. And it was only in the early nineties, I think, that the Milton Friedman school sort of took over and said the purpose is to maximize shareholder value!
So, we’re now right back to understanding what was the baseline in the early 1980s, which probably goes back 50 years before that. And there’s a lot of new energy around ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) and impact investing. With all due respect, these folks (most of them are guys) are very smart. They’re very competitive. They’re very successful. And because of that, in our culture, they have a very big megaphone. And so when they get up and say, “We need to reinvent capitalism,” everyone says, “Yeah, we need to reinvent capitalism!”
But they haven’t sat over there and read 100 books to think about this in a deeper way that you and I have. And so there’s a lot of well-meaning and good intention, but I think this gets back to this issue of not really getting your head around the fundamental profound disconnect. It just boils down to this: exponential growth on a finite planet—it won’t work.
How many people that work in business and finance actually understand what the Second Law of Thermodynamics says, and why it’s relevant to our economy? I would bet you, if you put a hundred CEOs in a room, and didn’t count people that worked in a business that requires a physics degree, half of them wouldn’t know what the Second Law of Thermodynamics is. And 95% of them wouldn’t be able to tell you why that’s relevant to economics and business.
Until people get their heads around that issue, we’re sort of moving deck chairs around. I do wish that my voice was in that conversation. I’d be lying if I said otherwise. But that conversation about the future of capitalism is pretty locked in. At best, it’s “We need to internalize externalities,” which is a reductionist way of putting the problem in the old paradigm. And that’s progress, so that’s good.
On Fullerton’s Eight Principles of Systemic Health
Daniel Christian Wahl | You honed in on eight principles. Could you sum them up briefly?
John Fullerton | I think the most important thing about my eight principles is really not my eight principles, but the idea of principles! The idea of principles is that there are patterns and principles of living systems, observed by the giants of living system science. It’s not like they’ve all agreed that there are these eight principles, but if you were to show them my eight principles or whatever eight principles you would come up with, there would be this broad consensus that, yes, these patterns and principles roughly describe our understanding of living systems.
So, the first thing that came to me was this need for principles. It’s a North Star, a roadmap. Maybe the word “qualities” is more accurate. Qualities doesn’t challenge people. It doesn’t have this meaning of, “I’m declaring what truth is.” It’s a less aggressive term.
But there certainly are qualities, like the fractal patterns of living systems and like the symbiotic relationships that are at work in living systems that will make anyone who’s studied them say, “Oh yeah, that’s right.” The real issue is to contextualize them for your purpose. And here’s where—as much as I’m a believer that there are universal principles—for some reason, those universal principles show up differently in different contexts.
As a friend of mine says—I think it comes from Buddhism—there are all sorts of fingers pointing at the moon. My eight principles are my fingers pointing at the moon, but we can’t confuse the fingers with the moon. And so what we’re really trying to do is reduce to as few as possible the patterns, principles, qualities—whatever word we want to choose—that allow us to see things through this regenerative lens.
I can spend an hour talking about each one of these eight principles because they all operate at many, many different levels. For example, one of them I use is called “in right relationship,” which is a Quaker term that I got from Peter Brown. He actually wrote a book called In Right Relationship. That relationship point operates at a planetary scale; the right relationship between planet Earth and the Sun is the reason why we have life on this earth. And so that’s a quality that is manifestly true. And yet it also operates certainly down to the micro-scale, the cellular level; the relationship between the cells in our body is essential to our health. And if that relationship is not symbiotic and healthy, we can’t be healthy. And if we’re living systems, and the planet is a living system, why wouldn’t the human economy also be a living system? And why wouldn’t that same quality of symbiotic relationships operate at the level of the human economy?
You can drill down on each of these principles individually, but the power of the principles is not each of them individually; the real power is in all the principles operating concurrently.
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In Right Relationship — Humanity is an integral part of an interconnected web of life in which there is no real separation between “us” and “it.”
- Views Wealth Holistically — True wealth is not merely money in the bank. It must be defined and managed in terms of the wellbeing of the whole, achieved through the harmonization of multiple kinds of wealth or capital, including social, cultural, living, and experiential.
- Innovative, Adaptive, Responsive — In a world in which change is both ever-present and accelerating, the qualities of innovation and adaptability are critical to health.
- Empowered Participation — In an interdependent system, fitness comes from contributing in some way to the health of the whole. The quality of empowered participation means that all parts must be “in relationship” with the larger whole in ways that not only empower them to negotiate for their own needs but also enable them to add their unique contribution towards the health and well-being of the larger wholes in which they are embedded.
- Honors Community and Place — Each human community consists of a mosaic of peoples, traditions, beliefs, and institutions uniquely shaped by long-term pressures of geography, human history, culture, local environment, and changing human needs.
- Edge Effect Abundance — Creativity and abundance flourish synergistically at the “edges” of systems, where the bonds holding the dominant pattern in place are weakest.
- Robust Circulatory Flow — Just as human health depends on the robust circulation of oxygen, nutrients, etc., so too does economic health depend on robust circulatory flows of money, information, resources, and goods and services to support exchange, flush toxins, and nourish every cell at every level of our human networks.
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Seeks Balance — Being in balance is more than just a nice way to be; it is actually essential to systemic health.
If we can align our economies and our businesses with all eight of these principles at all levels of their meaning, then we unlock immense potential that exists that we can’t see today. Exponential growth on a finite planet has ended; it no longer works with seven billion people, going on 10 or 12 billion. Given the footprint of the global economy and the current state of overconsumption, we need a new source of prosperity. And the reason that people won’t accept the idea of limits to growth is because they know subconsciously that it means depression.
So if we’re going to transition the global economy and survive as a species, we need to find ourselves a new source of prosperity—not just for humanity, but for all living beings. We need to figure out a way for humans to coexist on this planet and be prosperous however we define that. The traditional left-leaning etiology says, “We just need to redistribute wealth and everything will be good.” But it’s not that simple. We actually need an ongoing source of new prosperity, which is the way living systems work. And I believe with all my heart, and I’m dedicating my life to this idea, that if we can shift the human economy into alignment with these eight principles, or something that looks like these eight principles, we will unleash immense potential that we don’t know exists today.
On Regenerative Economy
Daniel Christian Wahl | I would love for you to reflect on why you think that bio-regional scale is important. How would you envision this new economic structure to be fractal—just like nature is in its dimension—in global trade and a global economy? How can we heal that global economy by re-regionalizing and re-localizing it?
John Fullerton | The idea of local is not a new one, but it does a disservice to the profound importance of this shift away from global and national to bio-regional. Bio-regional is a concept in which the geological facts that are not changing anytime soon—a river system, a mountain range, an ocean, a coastal plain—come into contact with human culture. So the context here is human economy and geological facts and the nature that they enable. And human culture comes into contact at a bio-regional scale. Wherever you live or wherever you call home, you can get a vision of what’s unique about that place that is different from other places. And if people have a choice, they tend to move to a place that is either what they know, because that’s where they grew up, or what they are attracted to for some almost spiritual reasons. Some people are attracted to mountains, some people are attracted to the ocean, etc.
To me, it is the sort of self-evident truth that it is where living human systems are grounded. And our global economy and our global capitalism and our pursuit of efficiency has run roughshod over that reality. And so even the idea of a nation state grew out of a different paradigm that has nothing to do with how do we operate in right relationship with this living planet.
If I try to operate on a global scale or national scale, it’s too much for me to hold in my head. Obviously, a tropical culture is going to feel very different than an Arctic culture, and an Arctic economy, but that’s why the qualities, or the patterns, are so important. And if you look at each of these places through a regenerative lens, you see these same qualities appearing in their own unique context. And so, I like to say every snowflake is unique, but every snowflake looks like a snowflake.
If someone wanted to write a Ph.D. thesis, they could write a paper or a book on thousands of bio-regional communities that are emergent and expressing these regenerative qualities. They’re all over the place. But the problem today is that they’re all largely diffused and disconnected and, therefore, “invisible,” to quote the mainstream.
This is my hope and dream. It may or may not be a good idea, but following Margaret Wheatley’s work, the way living systems take change to scale is through this networking, through scaling out and replication. And she’s got a brilliant little short paper she wrote with Deborah Frieze. And it talks about naming this thing. So we’re naming it “The Regenerative Communities Network.” We’re connecting it, making sure that these initiatives are in conversation with each other and that there’s shared learning happening. We’re illuminating it, to shine a light on the concept and the work. We’re telling stories about it, showing that it’s a thing, as opposed to a disparate group of projects. It’s actually one thing. And we’re nurturing it, feeding and caring for this initiative.
And here’s where capitalism comes back. Once capitalists understand that this is the future, understand that their current investments are at dire risk of collapse—the obvious example is in fossil fuels—the entire capital market paradigm is going to have to collapse, I’m afraid.
And so, capitalists will be looking for—to use old language—low risk, low return places to deploy capital, to create real value. The bio-regions will start exchanging with each other and then, before you know it, you’ve essentially reinvented capitalism. You’ve got a regenerative economy that’s operating at a bio-regional scale.
Bioregional Pathways to Regenerative Economies
Kosmos created this short video, based on the words of John Fullerton, to support and amplify the essential work of building resilient, regenerative bioregional economies.
The River That Flows Both Ways
A visit to the Hawthorne Valley Biodynamic Farm in Harlemville, New York, and a trip down to the Inwood Farmer’s Market in Manhattan illuminates the inextricable link between rural and urban Hudson Valley. Credits: Video produced by Creative Class 6. Song “Wide Eyes” by Quinn Murphy.
Gazing Into the Heart of Perfection
Gazing Into the Heart of Perfection
You’re all over the place
You’re all over the place
An endless Eden.
Until I take one of you aside.
Gazing deeply,
I see you for the first time.
It takes time
to know you.
I’ll stay.
-Harold Feinstein
Red Ranunculus, 2003
Stamen Wreath, 2004
“I first began shooting flowers in the mid 80′s. I would go up to the roof of my small Greenwich Village studio and hold blossoms up against the sky to see the translucence of the petals. That series of 35mm photographs was entitled Sky Flowers and I had many of them printed as dye transfers and cibachromes.
In the late 90′s I began to experiment with digital photography and became one of the first to use a scanner as a camera. This resulted in seven books of large format color photographs and the Smithsonian Computer World Award for digital photography in 2000.
During the production of my first book, One Hundred Flowers, I became so absorbed by the flowers that I would awake at night and write short poems inspired by them. This soon became my collection I call, A Garden of Psalms. Here is one of them:
You would not contain yourself!
All that light
All that love.
In a sun,
In a galaxy,
In a flower.
Some call it the big bang.
LIFE Magazine later created a short video of my flower photographs using the same title.”
White Yellow Zinnia, 2003
A Garden of Psalms (transcript from video)
“I did not consider myself religious when I was younger, but in this journey with the flowers — which I truly believe to be messengers from God — I began to see God’s work all over. Looking at a flower closely, no matter how wild or wondrous your imagination is, just what exists in the flowers we see is such a miracle. It’s a gift…and honoring the gift with your work is your responsibility or the way of showing your gratitude.
And so the simple technique that I teach my students is: “When your mouth drops open, click the shutter?” And it is this shock of recognition, this joy, this wonder that shows itself in great art. To me photography is a way to do just that; to call out in a moment of awe: “Will you look at that! Will you look at that!”
Getting people to receive…to see the gifts they’ve been given.. life itself! Life along the roadside, with the flowers and the weeds, and the pebbles and the trees, and the sounds of birds! And looking up and seeing the clouds, the light and the shadows. We’re surrounded! We’re in it! And did you know that the Persian word for paradise means “an enclosed garden?” We’re in paradise, and we don’t see you and we don’t see it. What a waste. Wake up! Wake up!”
Yellow Vermillion Gerber, 2006
“Oh God! I just want to pay tribute to it all! I want to exclaim and proclaim and sing the joyous sounds of tribute and awe to all that my eyes behold!
Whatever is within the flowers is within us. We are a part of this universe! Whether I’m looking at a human hand or looking the galaxies of shooting stars or the flight of a bird…something marvelous is going on and I’m part of it. We’re all part of it!”
More by Harold Feinstein
Pink Ranunculus, 2004
Walking the Labyrinth
Walking the Labyrinth
This is a time of sorrow and wonder. Many hard and painful truths are there for us to see, as well as stories of human courage and healing. We are seeing it is possible for the Earth to heal too. Where I live, it is the peak of summer’s glory – everything fresh and alive – even as the pain of racial division continues. Fresh flowers and fresh wounds.
The accelerated pace of change is dizzying. Could anyone have predicted, on the eve of 2020, that the coming months would unfold like this? In truth, many have been sounding the bell for decades, warning of pandemics, climate chaos, rising gun violence and deepening systemic racism. Yet, only now are we collectively waking up to the intersectionality of these concerns. The virus is forcing us to scrutinize everything, finally revealing the web of fractures in our social, political and economic systems. Like you, I struggle to imagine what the future will be like for our children and their children, and how to make the right decisions for them now.
I chose the theme of the labyrinth for this edition of Kosmos to represent our collective journey in this moment. A labyrinth is not a maze – we can’t get lost. It is however, a mystical path with twists and turns – a deliberate, metaphorical journey of the heart – to the ‘center’ and out. We are not alone in the labyrinth. Others are taking the same circuitous pilgrimage, and yet it is a journey we must take ‘by ourselves’, filled with strong emotions. Friends have reported a kind of fog that lately settles over them..a mix of confusion, fear, and ennui. The labyrinth can feel this way, and it is OK. It is not a journey that always offers answers, but it teaches us to work with uncertainty.
The writers in this edition of Kosmos are on labyrinth journeys. Maybe you have felt yourself to be on such a journey too. We chose essays that expressed experiences and feelings, not rhetoric or opinion. And contrasts – one art gallery contains portraits of flowers, the other, faces of people without shelter. There is the journey of activist Ruairí McKeirnan, hitchhiking Ireland to find hope; and the lived experience of two biracial sisters, seeking identity. There is John Bell’s journey to heal white racism, and Lilia Clement’s quest for meaning after a 50+-year career on Wall Street.
Each step we take, banal or profound, affects outcomes, not just for ‘me’, but for all. Will I wear a mask in public? Fly in a plane? Eat meat? Grow food? Join a protest? Two ideas can help us: accountability and reverence. To be accountable is to answer personally for the outcomes of our choices, actions, and behaviors. No more excuses. And I like this definition of reverence – ‘a feeling or attitude of deep respect tinged with awe’. What does it mean to live a life ‘tinged with awe’?
My children teach me a lot about accountability and reverence. When my daughter joined the protests in New York City, she said her white skin compelled her to show up because she is statistically less likely to be injured by law enforcement than a person of color. And my adult son reminds me each day that we live in paradise, as I join him on walks in the forest, by the cool stream. He is the first to spot a fox, or the Great Blue Heron, his warm brown eyes tinged with awe.
We were careful with this edition not to make pronouncements – ‘Collapse is inevitable’ ‘A new era of unity is dawning’ – because we just don’t know. Both may be true. As Zora Neal Hurston said, ‘There are years that ask questions and years that answer.’ 2020 feels like the former. Maybe we can’t fix the world yet or predict the future, but we can acknowledge that our actions and words have effects, and we can begin each day with fresh commitment to offer our accountability and reverence to the situations we encounter and decisions we make.
Please keep Kosmos and our wonderful founder Nancy Roof in your heart, as you live in ours. For twenty years, Nancy (now age 90) and her circle of luminaries helped us prepare for this moment. Many of the threads that we must now weave into a future, have long been examined in-depth in Kosmos: Regenerative culture, global citizenship, consent-based governance, spiritual ecology, the commons, living earth, local living economy, intentional community, peacebuilding, mindfulness, interspirituality. These models and practices, and many new ones, always have a way of (re)arriving just in time, when they are most needed. And they have something beautiful in common. Nancy reminded me the other day, that like sheltering-in-place and nonviolent protest, they each reflect in some way our instinct to ‘take care of each other’.
Let’s never underestimate that instinct, the human spirit, the human heart. We journey by ourselves, together. And step by mindful step, we find our way home.
Searching for the Anti-Virus | Covid-19 as Quantum Phenomenon
Searching for the Anti-Virus | Covid-19 as Quantum Phenomenon
featured image | Mandala in Rinchepung Dzong, Paro, Bhutan
I’ve struggled to make sense of what is going on. My suspicious mind wandered around restlessly, examining all theories and possible explanations, yet I must admit: I don’t know what is happening. I do know this is a crucial moment of choice for humanity. In this essay, I will not suggest or discuss “what is going on.” I rather want to invite you into a realm transcending the dichotomy of “objective reality” vs “subjective thoughts/feelings,” which underlies most theories, predictions and calls to action in this crisis. Coming from a spiritually-informed holistic worldview, I entertain the possibility that we as humanity – or some deeper part of ourselves, whether conscious or not – have dreamed this moment into existence as a catalyst for our collective evolution. If that were true, how might we engage and respond? Covid-19 could actually present an unlikely possibility for collective awakening and far-reaching system change.
Neither real nor unreal, but dreamlike
“This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.”
– Rumi
For over a hundred years, physicists and philosophers have tried to wrap their heads around the manifold wonders of quantum physics. Subatomic entities, such as electrons, they saw, behave in awe-striking and magical ways. They do not simply exist “as such,” as fixed and finished entities; they can appear as a wave in one instant or as a particle in another, depending on whether or not they are observed. This is true. Our perception of the world isn’t just passive, it is creative – it literally in-forms its very being and reality. Quantum physics invites us into a view of reality in which the seeming “objective” reality out there and the “subjective” experience “in here” become inseparably intertwined. Just as the characters and events in dreams aren’t separate from the dreamer, the world, according to the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung, is but a living symbol, the embodiment of deeper parts of ourselves, which we collectively dream into existence.
Embracing reality in this way, how would we make sense of Covid-19?
Through spiritual experiences and studies, I’ve learned that diseases rarely appear for no reason. They often carry deeper messages. For example, conflicts, longings, and vital drives our minds suppress may resurface in bodily symptoms. Healing often occurs in the moment we realize what we have suppressed. Such insights have the possibility to make us more whole and may, in fact, change our lives. In this way, we can say the healing antidote – or, in this case, the anti-virus – lies hidden within the disease as the treasure of transformative realization. If we exclusively fight the symptoms without exploring the deeper root, we might survive the disease but other symptoms are still likely to materialize.
What is true for an individual disease may also be true for epidemic or pandemic outbreaks. In his provocative book, Selbstzerstörung aus Verlassenheit [Self-Destruction due to Abandonment], the psychotherapist Franz Renggli ascribes the outbreak of the Great Plague in Christian Europe in the 14th century, which killed 30%–60% of the continent’s population, to an “eruption of mass psychosis.” He writes,
My psycho- or rather socio-somatic model is psycho-neuro-immunology: neither a bacterium nor a virus is the core problem, but rather the people within a society who have been shaken by a crisis. If this crisis lasts too long, is too severe or too traumatic, the immune system of the population is slowly weakened and finally collapses. The people become vulnerable to illnesses and finally to death. This model is valid for any epidemic and can serve as a key for a new understanding of history.
In the century preceding the Black Death, he argues, the Catholic Church began advising mothers to separate from their babies during day and night. Children growing up in the 13th and 14th centuries thus suffered a collective trauma of primal abandonment. Renggli shows that regions in which mothers continued to practice close physical contact with their children were spared from the plague. Might we be experiencing something similar right now?
How has the specter of Covid-19 been able to haunt 7.5 billion people and bring the world to a standstill in no time at all? Because the narrative massively resonates with something latent that is both teeming and deeply suppressed in people’s subconscious.
The “mental” coronavirus spread earlier, faster and much more powerfully than its biological counterpart. Covid-19 began to make headlines and people suddenly found an “objective” justification for the fear and despair which had been gathering unconsciously within them for a long time. The feedback loop between the hourly onslaught of fear-inducing headlines in the media and the growing anxious expectations in people’s minds trapped humanity in a vicious neurotic cycle. Every new “case” in our neighborhood or region, every cough in the subway, every stranger coming too close doubled-down on an eerie sense of ubiquitous danger. The more we think about illness, the more afraid we are. The more fear we experience, the weaker our immune system gets. The weaker our immune system, the more likely we’ll develop symptoms. Try not to think of a pink elephant.
The psycho-spiritual dimension has been proven to have a very concrete effect on the material realm. The astonishingly far-reaching physical impacts of the placebo effect are well documented, and likewise, many studies show how emotional stress, chronic fear and loneliness can dangerously weaken our immune system and corrode our health.
Please bear with me. I’m not suggesting Covid-19 is just a hoax, nor am I trying to downplay or deny the tragedy so many people are experiencing.
I’m suggesting we look at it from a different angle: What if Covid-19 weren’t a danger independent from our minds and souls but, in fact, a quantum phenomenon – a shared dream character we’ve collectively summoned into existence? An embodiment of something buried deeply in the realms of the collective subconscious that we haven’t, so far, been able to comprehend? A living symbol of a much deeper infection?
Mind viruses and the magic of fear
Reaching back to the oral traditions of several First Nations, Native American scholar Jack D. Forbes writes in Columbus and Other Cannibals, “For several thousands of years human beings have suffered from a plague, a disease worse than leprosy, a sickness worse than malaria, a malady much more terrible than smallpox.” The Algonquin and other Indigenous First Nations identified the mental illness of the white man, upon his arrival to their native homelands in the 15th and 16th centuries, as “Wetiko,” literally translating as cannibalism: “the consuming of another’s life for [one’s] own private purpose or profit.” Forbes concludes by saying, “This disease is the greatest epidemic sickness known to man.”
Wetiko – often referred to as a mind virus – propagates the deep-seated illusion of seeing oneself desperately confined to the cage of a separated ego. From this perspective of isolation, others appear either as competitors or as prey. In a worldview in which fear is the basic condition, fight and exploitation seem rational, empathy ridiculous and sentimental.
After 5000 years of patriarchy, 500 years of capitalism and 50 years of neoliberalism, Wetiko has come to define nearly every area of our (Western) world and lives. The reason we can accept an economic system celebrating the biggest-possible devastation of the natural world as “success” is due to our own infection with the virus. Wetiko has numbed our hearts, blurring our ability to perceive both the sacredness and the pain of life, both outside and inside ourselves. Innumerable beings are perishing due to this chronic inability to feel empathy.
From the compulsive fixation on maximizing artificial values in the economy all the way down to the pandemic of broken and abusive love relationships, the Wetiko sickness has become so normalized it’s no longer even recognized as such. A miserable cult of self-obsession has eroded the social tissue of humanity and desecrated the Earth. As a result, fear is everywhere – fear of abandonment, fear of death, fear of life, fear of sexuality, fear of punishment, fear of the coming collapse… The benign front of bourgeois decency conceals a psychological basement in which the children of fear roam freely: permanent anger, general mistrust, addiction, depression, boredom, perversion, compulsive consumption and control and the secret or open fascination with violence.
The Red Book of Carl Jung
When Jung began his explorations of his unconscious, he recorded his fantasies in a series of notebooks that formed the basis for the Red Book. Some of Jung’s Red Book illustrations resemble mandalas, used in Buddhism and other religions as a representation of the universe and an aid to meditation. Jung believed the mandala was one of the oldest human religious symbols, found all over the world. Jung remarked that “The “squaring of the circle” is one of the many archetypal motifs which form the basic patterns of our dreams and fantasies. . . . it could even be called the archetype of wholeness.” (via Library of Congress | Exhibits)
The Covid-19 narrative has been able to infect humanity at such record speed because fear is so deep-seated and unconscious in humanity that we’re no longer aware of what is happening within us.
The tragedy is that the virus operates in the shadows of our consciousness. We infect ourselves and others unknowingly. As Forbes writes, we’re conditioned by the disease through “authoritarian family structures,” “male dominance,” “subjugating women” and “extremely negative attitudes towards sex” – and on an ideological level, through “notions of racial and cultural superiority.”
Once stuck in this box, we mindlessly perpetuate the disease in our day-to-day interactions, by feeding off and into each other’s blind spots and pain points. As we project what we fear internally onto others or external events, we validate our fear while suppressing where it comes from. We believe danger to be outside of us, so we try to protect ourselves from it and, thereby, often act in ways that perpetuate the very danger we try to protect ourselves from. Jung describes this mechanism as “shadow projection.”
To the extent we’re unconsciously driven by fear, we become susceptible to manipulation. When millions of people project their unconscious shadows onto others, they conjure up the very danger everyone is trying to escape from. Wilhelm Reich made these dynamics explicit during the rise of Hitler (see his 1933 book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism) and they’re the premise of all totalitarian regimes to this day.
After 9/11, we were told that our enemy was the Muslim world; now the “enemy” is invisible and might await us at every door handle, or creep into us as we kiss, hug or even breathe. The more extravagant the neurotic cinema that’s playing in our minds, the easier it is for external powers to control and use us for their interests.
The great unveiling
Much more than just a difficult trial for humanity, the Covid-19 outbreak also holds the possibility for collective healing from the predatory mass infection of Wetiko. We can make sense of it as a global somatization – or symbolic simulation – of the underlying Wetiko disease. As with every outbreak of severe disease, the deeper patterns are now coming unstuck in plain sight at the global level.
We’re now witnessing a simultaneous unveiling, breakdown and intense exaggeration of Wetiko:
- On an ecological level, Covid-19 originated as a direct result of our civilization’s insatiable greed for exponential growth. Probably wild animals transmitted the virus to people after the natural ecosystems which were home to them were destroyed by the ecocidal steamroller of civilizational “progress.” And now we’re equally astonished to see how quickly the air can clear in China, the speed at which wildlife returns to urban areas, and how suddenly old ecocidal endeavors collapse before our eyes (e.g. the S. fracking industry).
- On an economic level, Covid-19 has been the straw that’s broken the camel’s back, setting off the chain reaction of a long overdue financial collapse. The lockdown has sent our globalized economy into a full-blown, rapid “evaporation,” with entire industries halting, millions of workers being laid off from one day to the next and stock markets crashing. The fossil fuel industry faces its “gravest challenge in its 100-year history,” from which it may never recover. The Federal Reserves are currently lending big banks an additional $1 trillion a day, which is to say, we’re now barely keeping the economic system on life support.
- On the social and psychological levels, we see both a collective frenzy of extreme Wetiko behaviors and also many people breaking free. On one hand, social atomization, the desire for control and egoistic panic are reaching surreal pinnacles. We are seeing a massive surge in domestic abuse and the rapid conversion of liberal societies into police states; even leftists are praising the strengthening of top-down government and restrictions on civil liberties. On the other hand, thousands of local grassroots initiatives practicing mutual aid have popped up from one day to the next. Millions are entering a rare moment of reflection and of asking “what’s essential?” While locked down in quarantine, we’re confronted with ourselves, our longings and our lives. And many recognize how deeply we’ve been “socially distanced” all along – divided up by the competitive ideals of a precarious labor market and our own inability to engage in authentic interpersonal connection.
A parting of ways
What will happen next is uncertain, but we can predict that the chain reaction of economic devastation may be inevitable. The global emergency may have come to stay. In other words, we may not go back to normal anytime soon, or perhaps ever again.
What will happen in the next few weeks and months will likely shape the world for many years to come. Rather than resisting the forces of entropy and indulging in faint hopes of a return to normality, the future will be on the side of those who are able to embrace chaos and disruption as an opportunity to propose a different vision for global society.
Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, says: “If there is one thing history teaches us, it’s that moments of shock are profoundly volatile. We either lose a whole lot of ground, get fleeced by elites, and pay the price for decades, or we win progressive victories that seemed impossible just a few weeks earlier. This is no time to lose our nerve.”
Burdened by astronomical debt and commanded by the imperative for exponential growth, the globalized capitalist system has come to an irreversible breaking point. The powers that be will either have to make way for system change or will stubbornly continue to prop up the old order with ever-more brutal force. While there may be many possible futures in front of us, I want to highlight the stark contrast of the historic choice we’re facing, in two contrasting future scenarios:
- Scenario #1: Surveillance capitalism
After many months of lockdown, people have accepted the new era of quarantined existence. Governments have dismantled civil liberties, human rights and environmental protections and, under the pretext of health and safety, deployed unprecedented levels of surveillance technology. Mobile apps are used not only to track people’s physical movements but also their biochemical reactions. As Gideon Lichfield writes, “intrusive surveillance [is] considered a small price to pay for the basic freedom to be with other people.” In the background of a daily onslaught of fear-invoking messages, governments further redistribute wealth from the bottom 99% to the elites. Banks, fossil fuel and airline industries are bailed out with taxpayer’s money, while social security and public health systems are further dismantled. Austerity measures and the abolition of cash further marginalize working people, the poor and the homeless. General apathy and numbness have reached a dimension where the daily shooting of migrants at the borders and other atrocities no longer provoke any moral outcry. Locked into their flats, afraid of infection, monitored by digital body sensors, the powers that be have almost entirely crippled people’s ability to organize themselves and resist. Should protests or strikes still occur, the mass media can report on new dangerous infections spreading so that governments can swiftly impose new curfews to “keep our communities safe.” At some point, with climate breakdown, water crises and food shortages worsening, the system is no longer able to disguise its collapse. Chaos and violence can no longer be contained. The rich retreat to their gated compounds in remote areas, while masses of people find themselves trapped in disintegrating urban centers.
- Scenario #2: Ecological and social emancipation
In the months of uncertainty and economic disintegration, millions of people begin to organize themselves at the local grassroots levels to cover their basic needs. In this time of hardship, they rediscover the power of community, solidarity and localism. As people help each other through sickness and challenge, a spirit of empathy and interdependence spreads. After many months of unemployment, public chaos and food shortages, hopes for strong government and a return to normality have finally faded. Many realize that either we live out collapse alone or we get through this together. The emergency initiatives of neighborhood aid now turn into more long-term initiatives of social, economic and ecological re-organization. People start collective gardens and food cooperatives to supply themselves with local organic crops and open solar energy task forces to decentralize and democratize their energy supply. More and more people leave the cities to found communities in the countryside, where they engage in restoring ecosystems and radical social experimentation for a more trust-based and loving way of living. People work together with progressive governments on large-scale ecological rehabilitation in response to the climate crisis, while governments support citizens’ agency through introducing Universal Basic Income. In the background of this astonishing social and ecological movement, a profound cultural and spiritual transformation takes place – a shift of consciousness from the Wetiko drive for domination to cooperation with all living beings, from atomizing mass societies to communities of trust, from the patriarchal condemnation of Eros and the feminine to a culture that celebrates sensual love in its freedom and dignity, from subduing the Earth to honoring her inherent sacredness, from fearing death to acknowledging our eternal existence.
System change: the time is now
The dangers of totalitarianism are dire and real and are becoming concretized in many countries already. But we mustn’t forget that those measures are the last resort in prolonging the death of a system that’s already on its way out. At this point, globalized capitalism is only being kept alive by our fearful projections and our inability to imagine something new, which is to say, if people can leave fear behind and unify around a shared vision of the future they want, nothing can stop the inevitable transition.
I see the keys to system change lying in three essential realms of our lives:
– The spiritual sphere
Having exaggerated Wetiko to unthinkably surreal heights, Covid-19 strangely invites us into a dimensional shift of being. As Paul Levy, the author of Dispelling Wetiko, maintains, the anti-virus hidden with the Wetiko disease is the awakening to its dream-like nature – a realization which has the potential to radically change our world.
If we continue to react to the embodiments of Wetiko outside of us (e.g. viruses, external enemies or the dangers of totalitarianism…) as if they were separate from us, we will continue to act in ways that feed the very dynamic we’re afraid of. But if we begin to see Wetiko playing out within ourselves, it loses its grip on us. Compassion opens our eyes to understanding that which we previously could only fear, judge or hate. Trust reconciles us with the world and our fellow beings. Compassion and trust are the ultimate anti-viruses of Wetiko.
We may suddenly wake up and realize how all systems of domination have never been “real” as such, their “reality” has always only existed through our consent. Money, authority, society, pandemics – we can now see the dreamlike nature of what we believed to be rock-solid and unchangeable.
To awaken from the fearful web of Wetiko is to simultaneously awaken to the interdependent web of Life. This is such a profound shift from where we come from in the Western world that it’s hard to even find words for it. The fear-stricken mind always asks for immediate conclusions, solutions, fixes. But maybe there is no such “fix” right now. Maybe, what this moment calls for is for us to let go of all our notions of self-importance, superiority and domination and to surrender to a greater-than-human intelligence and guidance, to inquire for orientation from the Earth and the Indigenous wisdom of cultures centered around the Earth. In this experience of communion lies a truth that is unambiguous, absolute and deeply healing: all life is sacred. This isn’t only a private experience, but an insight into the inherent matrix of Life. In alignment with this matrix we stand outside the vicious cycles of fear, infection and violence.
– The social sphere
As Wetiko plays out relationally, its dissolution is a collective endeavor; a historic project of developing ways of living together in which we can heal our broken relationship to the Earth and each other, and develop deep trust among ourselves.
To build trust, we need conditions which no longer force us to lie, disguise or protect ourselves. We need ways of living, loving, working and relating in which we can truly recognize each other and dare to show what we actually think and feel, love and desire. “Trust” is a word often used, but what does it mean in the delicate realms of our souls, such as love, sexuality and spirituality, where our vulnerabilities tend to be the greatest? This entails nothing short of a social revolution. Dieter Duhm, a mentor and teacher of mine, and author of The Sacred Matrix, writes, “Trust is not only classified as psychological; it is above all a political term – the most revolutionary of all – for we need to renew the entire societal structure to bring about sustainable, systemic trust.”
This revolution may not occur in mass movements immediately, but it can begin in small groups – wells of coherence – and extend across society from there, by virtue of raising a new field of consciousness. Based on 40 years of radical experimentation, the “Healing Biotopes Plan” offers a respective vision for such comprehensive transformation.
– The political and economic sphere
Freedom in the long-term requires our capacity to resist any restriction to civil and human rights in the short-term. In this time of social distancing, let us stand in solidarity together, especially with all those who are marginalized, rejecting any narrative of “us versus them.”
As the globalized system crumbles, localization will be the key to the future. Now is the moment to decentralize supply systems for water, food and energy, to invest in regenerative agriculture and practices of ecosystem restoration, to create seed banks and exchange, and to establish networks and economic mechanisms of mutual aid, resource sharing and reciprocal gifting. Localization not only offers food sovereignty but also a path to political autonomy – as we take charge of our own basic needs, we can come together to make collaborative decisions from the bottom up. From various ecosystem restoration practices to the permaculture, seed saving and ecovillage movements, all the way to large-scale social movements like Extinction Rebellion and experiments of radical grassroots democracy like Rojava and the Zapatistas, the world offers a thousand examples showing that this path is viable.
Because the spiritual, social, and economic-political spheres are so inseparably intertwined, successful system change will rely on profound structural transformations in these three realms in parallel. It doesn’t mean we must all do everything at once, it means we must support each other. May we each listen deeply for what we’re now called to do and be, while remaining aware of each other. As much as narratives of isolation and social distancing threaten to keep us afraid and separate, our ability to go through this crisis relies on our ability to organize and build alliances, remembering that we are community.
Whatever we may do, may we remember that this is a moment of unique historic possibility. As Julian Assange told Yanis Varoufakis from his prison cell by phone, “Anything goes… Everything is now possible.” And if there’s one thing that Covid-19 has taught us, it is that dramatic shifts of collective behavior can actually occur overnight.
Fragile Gold
Fragile Gold
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower,
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day,
Nothing gold can stay. – Robert Frost
There are many forms of currency—and the critical ones needed now to build a regenerative planetary era are the currencies of attention and response to the ephemeral and fragile nature of complex living systems, so that we might use our material resources to understand, protect, and restore them. Biodiversity is a required condition for survival, and so among the greatest forms of wealth. This is an unprecedented moment in the great cosmic drama, when a single species has so interfered with the structure and functioning of Earth, Gaia, Eden, that the glorious and lyrical era of the Cenozoic—the last 65 million years of emergent creativity—has all but ceased its stunning fluorescence.
In our modern, industrial, materialist society, a poetry of ideas (and music!) alone may have the power to evoke in human consciousness the psychic energy needed to ignite the new axial age; to, as Thomas Berry says, “reinvent the human at the species level”; to become a mutually enhancing presence within the community of life systems. Another way of identifying or naming the power sufficient to trigger rapid restructuring of both the immense physical and psychic human interrelationship, is the experiential cosmology of what David Bohm called, the “undivided wholeness” of being. It is a state of full bodily engagement and spiritual/emotional connection to the natural world, more frequently experienced in primordial, indigenous cultures. To experience such abundance only requires surrendering to the great gift economy of Earth, where no living being takes more than it needs without being rebalanced into the stupendous web of life.
With the emergent gifts of our creativity and imagination, we are born with a capacity to freely roam among the galaxies, through eons of time, and into the unfathomable eyes and hearts of loved ones. Meadows of flowers, seashores, streams, and countless other forms of common wealth, for tens of millions of years, have been abundantly available for all living beings.
Frost’s exquisite poem, with a gentle yet compact ferocity, expresses the knife edge upon which we balance between death and life—between the dullness of “day” and the ecstatic mystery of “dawn”—between disintegration and becoming. In an Old Cosmology, “Eden sank to grief” when we became like God by taking a forbidden fruit—the knowledge of good and evil. But in a New Cosmology of an astonishingly creative, evolving Universe, we now can understand that the real forbidden fruit is not knowing the difference!
All wealth is derivative of Earth—most of all, values and wisdom. They are among the most recent emergent properties of our Universe’s 13.8 billion years of inexpressibly glorious creativity, complexification of matter and energy, and deepening of consciousness.
And material wealth—most of all, money—is only an idea of value mainly owing to the “Earth deficit”: the uncompensated or unreciprocated extraction of resources too often used exclusively or ultimately to obtain economic, social, or political dominance.
Frost’s poem begins, “Nature’s first green is gold”—not the shining element overvalued as money—but the far greater value toward which the Universe and Life continually move—BEAUTY! That “leaf subsides to leaf” is the grief and loss that is the ultimate cost of cosmogenesis, the gift of dying supernovas—stardust that becomes a planet that births oceans that birth living cells that become love, poetry, and music. Fragile Gold is a simple tribute to the power of beauty to transform historical trauma and to evoke the cultural currency and urgency needed to turn an industrial, acquisitive, exploitative economy into a new planetary era of radical sharing.
The music, like the poem, is relatively uncomplicated, yet deceptively capable of evoking a continual deepening of perception, understanding, and insight. It isn’t necessary to know what Frost meant, or how the music arose as it did; only to experience the flow of meaning and sound, allowing yourself—as in the moment of slipping into a cool stream on a hot day—to get wet, to be fulfilled and know you are alive.
Our gifts are most surely needed, first in the crucible of our own desire and passion, where they gain power and attraction that draws others; and then—without looking back—given freely, both in the moment, and in careful, just, sustained generosity, to the world.
The world is where we are, and despite ten thousand years of tolerating a domination system of mutual exploitation and self-interest, we have somehow managed, in some measure, to learn to love. And if love is extravagant, selfless concern and action, it has emerged within a Universe of staggering creativity, complexity, and beauty—but also of danger and loss. Our responsibility is to use our great gift of intelligent compassion to help our species recognize the emptiness of affluence, the injustice of poverty, and the incomparable capacity of creativity and beauty to be the basis for a new economy in a new planetary era.
Ten Economic Insights of Rudolf Steiner
Ten Economic Insights of Rudolf Steiner
“The whole Earth, considered as an economic organism, is the social organism. Yet this is not being taken into account anywhere. It is precisely because of this error that the whole science of political economy has grown so remote from reality. People want to establish principles that are meant to apply only to an individual cell. Hence, if you study the French theory of economy, you will find it is constituted different from English or German or other economic theories. But as economists, what we really need is an understanding of the social organism in its totality.”—Rudolf Steiner
Exactly ninety years ago Rudolf Steiner delivered his course on economics in Dornach, Switzerland. He gave fourteen lectures over a period of two weeks, and used the remaining time for seminar discussions in a question and answer format to deepen certain topics brought up by the participants. Reading Steiner’s largely ignored economic lectures today, one becomes aware that most of his concepts are still as fresh and counter to the mainstream as they were in 1922.
As we are entering an age of social, economic, and ecological disruption at this early stage of the twenty-first century, many people are beginning to realize that perhaps the most important root causes for this crisis originate in an economic thinking that is increasingly out of touch with the social, ecological, and spiritual realities of our time.
How, then, can we rethink and redefine the fundamental economic concepts that frame our discussions and shape our key institutions in society today?
This is the big question on the table today.
Rudolf Steiner’s lectures on economics may not seem like the most accessible reading. Yet, they offer a largely unused goldmine of fresh economic ideas that could not be more timely and relevant.
Here is a little ten-point guide that outlines some key ideas that he develops throughout these lectures. All ten ideas seem to me to be more pertinent and necessary today than they already were ninety years ago.
1. Economics today has to be based on a world economy, not a national economy. While many economists today would agree with this proposition, mainstream economic thought in our public conversation and in business schools is still organized around frameworks and mindsets that gravitate around the wealth of nations, rather than the well-being of all in our global economy today.
2. Economic realities today require us to shift our ego-centric frame of thought to an eco-centric mindset. Think about the current Euro crisis. Think about the Wall Street crisis in 2008. Think about the climate crisis ahead of us. What do they all boil down to? The same thing. That none of them can be solved within an economic framework that revolves around ego-system awareness. They all require an economic thought that revolves around eco-system awareness, or, in the words of Steiner, “altruism.” [1]
3. All economic value creation begins with nature and agriculture. Today many leading thinkers of the emerging new economy have started to make nature and agriculture a more central variable in economic thought. [2] Steiner’s economic thinking starts with nature, that is, work applied to nature, and continues with capital (organization and leadership) applied to work, that is, the division of labor. Organic agricultures—such as biodynamic agriculture, which happens to be one of the seedbeds of the emerging local living economy in the US today [3]—are, in Steiner’s view, microcosms of a closed loop economy.
4. Wages are not the price for labor, but the price for goods or services. Steiner proposes that work or labor is not a commodity. Hence it cannot have a price. What has a price are the fruits, the results of what we create. In a world in which we have 1.2 billion young people joining the job market during this decade and only 300 million jobs available for them, we face a shortage of about almost a billion jobs. Steiner’s framing of work as not a commodity, but more as a human right, points to a different way of searching for a solution that focuses on awakening and empowering the deeper entrepreneurial capacities of the human being.
5. Capital is not money but spirit-in-action. The essence of capital and money is that they are realized spirit—the realization of deep human creativity applied to economic value creation. This is certainly one of the most interesting propositions that stems from Steiner’s economic thinking, which leads to a number of interesting frameworks and suggestions.
6. The problem of our economy is a lack of balance between three types of money, resulting in capital congestion related speculative bubbles. Steiner suggests that there are three types of money, which differ in terms of their use: purchase money, lending money, and gift money. Purchase money is used for consumption expenses. Lending money is used for building up new enterprises and usually is more productive than money used just for consumption. The highest long-term productivity, however, comes with gift money, such as expenses for education, parenting, or cultivating the global environmental commons. While we have an oversupply of profit-seeking capital today (about 200 trillion dollars), we have a vast undersupply of gift money, which would be available for social entrepreneurs, schools, and other initiatives that try to cultivate our environmental, social, and cultural commons. Steiner’s framework here suggests that the financial meltdowns of our time are the result of not properly balancing the three main domains of money.
7. Aging of Money as a point of leverage? Today we know that the decoupling of the financial and the real economies is one of the biggest challenges of our time. Already, in 1922, Steiner suggested a possible structural solution for this: That money should, just like goods, “wear out” a little. Because, if it does not, it will create an unfair advantage for money relative to goods, which always tend to wear out. Thus, for the financial and the real economies to have an equal playing field, we need money that would “wear out”—that is, that incentivizes the user to use it as gift money before the end of its life cycle. Otherwise money and the real economy would be “unfair” competitors, which is kind of what we have today.
8. Awareness based self-regulation of the economic process. Steiner also proposes an evolution in our view of how markets work. He suggests a new way to think about coordination mechanisms by closing the feedback loop of economic actors, their collective action, and their awareness. The leverage point to improve the economic process is that the “process” is being observed at each stage and that the observers can instantly respond to what they see through their individual and collective actions and decision-making. Thus, Steiner’s view of evolving the market economy is to build in a higher level of whole systems awareness and self-regulation.
9. Imagine every human being would get an average amount of agricultural land. Another idea that sounded totally crazy in 1922 but has now already entered the discussion in 2012 is the concept that every human being would receive a certain amount of agricultural land in order to take care of it. All approaches to climate change and climate security based on human rights build on a very similar type of idea: that we all, all current (and future) human beings, share the same planet. Thus, we all should be given equal rights of use of global commons-based resources. But, as the Happy Planet Index (HPI) of the New Economics Foundation points out, the developed countries use way more of these resources than their fair share, while the opposite is true for the developing countries. [4] As this concept enters more and more into the global conversation, it will be used as a rationale for transferring capital and technology from places where there is too much (Global North) to places where there is too little (Global South and/or developing countries). Eventually, all economic thinking must be grounded in our one-planet reality.
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), founder of the biodynamic approach to agriculture, was a highly trained scientist and respected philosopher in his time, who later in his life came to prominence for his spiritual-scientific approach to knowledge called “anthroposophy.” Long before many of his contemporaries, Steiner came to the conclusion that western civilization would gradually bring destruction to itself and the earth if it did not begin to develop an objective understanding of the spiritual world and its interrelationship with the physical world. Steiner’s spiritual-scientific methods and insights have given birth to practical holistic innovations in many fields, including education, banking, medicine, psychology, the arts and, not least, agriculture. (Biodynamic Association)
Rudolf Steiner gave this complex sequence of dense, subtle, multileveled lectures and seminars to students of economics in Dornach, Switzerland, during the summer of 1922. The course reflects a lifetime of thinking on the subject and marks the conclusion of his intense five-year period of activism in the service of social, political, and economic issues.
During this time, which began as World War I was ending in 1917, he worked tirelessly to promote the cause of what he called “threefolding” (Dreigliederung), by which he meant rethinking the social order on the basis of clear separation and independence of the three fundamental spheres of activity that make up a society. He proposed three independent systems:
- an autonomous rights sphere (limited to judicial and political matters)
- an autonomous economic sphere (cooperative or associative by nature)
- and an autonomous spiritual-cultural sphere
Autonomy of these three spheres, Steiner believed, would allow a free, healthy, productive society and open the possibility of lasting peace.
Rethinking Economics is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the true nature of an economy and how it works. Steiner presents the basic elements of what it would take to create a just, socially responsible, and ecologically aware economy today. Visit | Steiner Books
This volume is a translation from German of Aufgaben einer neuen Wirtschaftswissenschaft, Bd.1, Nationalökonomischer Kurs (GA 340) and Aufgaben einer neuen Wirtschaftswissenschaft, Bd.2, Nationalökonomisches Seminar (GA 341), published by by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach, Switzerland.
10. We need concepts that are more flexible, fluid, and in synch. Steiner calls not only for a new economics, a new kind of economy, but for a new kind of economic thinking that coevolves with the changing reality in the field. Economic theory has to be different from the natural sciences that look at reality from outside. Research on the economy means being a participant in the reality that you are trying to describe. This type of participatory action research calls for different methods and concepts that are more flexible, fluid and dynamic, and that can coevolve with the reality that they mirror and are part of.
These are ten golden nuggets out of a much larger number of fresh and new ideas. I have just mentioned a few that stood out to me. Take your own journey through this wonderful material—let your own interest and questions be the guide.
The Ten Points above are meant only as a first spark to ignite that journey. Enjoy!
From Rethinking Economics: Lectures and Seminars on World Economics by Rudolf Steiner / SteinerBooks / December 2015. Forward by Otto Scharmer. Reprinted with permission of publisher.
Notes
- For more detail on ego-system vs. eco-system awareness, see my book, co-authored with Katrin Kaufer, Society 4.0: From Ego-system to Eco-system Economies, published by Berrett-Koehler.
- http://neweconomicsinstitute.org/
- http://www.livingeconomies.org/
- http://www.happyplanetindex.org/
Thomas Berry and the Rights of Nature
Thomas Berry and the Rights of Nature
featured image: © User:Colin / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0
One of Thomas Berry’s major contributions to what he called the Great Work was his articulation of the principles and philosophy of Earth Jurisprudence. He originated the term and explained its key concepts over many years.1 A Gaia Foundation report acknowledges: “Earth Jurisprudence is the term first used by cultural historian Thomas Berry to name the philosophy of governance and law, in which the Earth, not human interests, is primary. It accepts that humans are born into an ordered and lawful Universe, to whose laws we need to comply if we are to be a benign presence on Earth.”2 Thomas developed these ideas over several decades in conversation with others.
As he saw it, even the United States Constitution is fundamentally flawed by reserving all rights for humans and recognizing none for nature. For Thomas, the deficiency cries out for a fundamental transformation of our modern ideas of law. At the heart of this transformation, he noted, is the shift from a human-centered to an Earth-centered understanding of our relationship with the larger community of life. A profound change in perspective, he felt, would enable humans to recognize and protect the inherent rights of the natural world.
Given that the prevailing jurisprudence system does not protect other species or components of the living Earth, Thomas asked what would a different system look like? He pointed to various sources of inspiration, namely nature herself and indigenous peoples’ understanding of law. The starting point, he said, is recognizing that the laws of the Earth are primary. They govern life on the planet and human laws should be derived from these. This is clear for indigenous peoples whose languages, customary laws, and governance systems are rooted in the understanding that nature regulates the order of living processes in which humans are inextricably embedded. Thus, to maintain health and wellbeing for people and the planet, humans need to comply with the dynamics of nature. For indigenous peoples, the relationship between land and species is regarded as sacred and involves reciprocity.
Kosmos Great Thinkers and Seekers
Thomas Berry | Cultural Historian and Geologian
Written and narrated by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim
Produced by Kosmos | (TRT 3:06)
Thomas Berry (1914–2009) was one of the twentieth century’s most prescient and profound thinkers. As a cultural historian, he sought a broader perspective on humanity’s relationship to Earth in order to respond to the ecological and social challenges of our times.
Berry urged humans to recognize their place on a planet with complex ecosystems in a vast evolving universe. He sought to replace the modern alienation from nature with a sense of intimacy and responsibility. Berry called for new forms of ecological education, law, and spirituality and the creation of resilient agricultural systems, bioregions, and ecocities.
That nature has rights within this worldview is not difficult to affirm because every component of life is an interdependent dimension of the web of life with inherent rights to exist. But since the language of rights evolved in a modern context, Thomas felt that humans need to acknowledge these biases in recognizing rights in a more-than-human context. These biases include a modern anthropocentric perspective, the objectification of the natural world, a view of the world as inert or even dead, and the assumption of human domination that emphasizes a use relationship with nature in the current industrial system.
Thomas was inspired early on by Christopher Stone, a law professor at the University of Southern California. Stone was one of the first to call for judicial reform, with his groundbreaking book in 1974, Should Trees Have Standing? Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects.³ Stone argued for the rights of natural objects (trees) or ecosystems (forests, oceans, rivers) to have legal standing and to be represented by guardians to protect them, just as corporations and charitable trusts have legal representatives. He felt that these natural objects or systems should be recognized for their own worth and dignity, not merely their benefit to humans.
Thomas drew on this position of the inherent value of nature and of natural processes:
…every being has rights to be recognized and revered. Trees have tree rights, insects have insect rights, rivers have river rights, mountains have mountain rights. So too with the entire range of beings throughout the universe. All rights are limited and relative.4
Thus Thomas emphasized that: “Every component of the Earth community, living and non-living has three rights: the right to be, the right to habitat or a place to be, and the right to fulfill its role in the ever-renewing processes of the Earth community.5” This position has been foundational for many of those involved in formulating and making operational an effective rights of nature approach rooted in Earth Jurisprudence.6 Similar perspectives have arisen in the contemporary period with scientific understanding of the interdependence of Earth systems, particularly in ecology. Thus, by drawing on both indigenous and scientific knowledge, Earth jurisprudence is arising to respond to the needs of the larger community of life.
Emerging Developments of Earth Jurisprudence
Groundwork for the articulation of Earth Jurisprudence emerged with the United Nations’ World Charter for Nature in 1982. This was further developed with the Earth Charter issued in 2000 and the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth in 2010. Thomas was especially appreciative of the World Charter for Nature. He felt it embraced a dynamic bio-centric perspective, and he built on this in his early articulation of the rights of nature.
In this spirit, in 1984, Thomas urged the Gaia Foundation in England to commit to the protection of biological and cultural diversity, restoration of healthy ecosystems, and support of indigenous peoples, especially in the Southern hemisphere.7 Inspired by a workshop led by Thomas more than a decade later at Schumacher College in 1996, the Gaia Foundation launched an Earth Jurisprudence initiative.8 This initiative involved a commitment to explore, develop, and promote pathways to affirm that Earth-derived law take precedence over human law to protect the wellbeing of all components of the Earth community.
In April 2001, the Gaia Foundation and Andrew Kimbrell, founder of the Center for Food Safety, organized a conference with Thomas Berry at the Airlie Conference Center outside Washington. A group of people involved with both law and with indigenous peoples came together from South Africa, Colombia, Britain, Canada, and the United States.9 One of those in attendance was the South African lawyer, Cormac Cullinan, who was inspired and encouraged by Thomas and the Gaia Foundation to write his path-breaking book, Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice, which was published in 2002.10 In the foreword, Thomas calls for the need for explicit legal protection of the larger Earth community. In December 2002, Thomas delivered this message in his plenary talk to an international conference on Earth Jurisprudence at Pace University Law School and its Academy for the Environment. Robert Kennedy, Jr., an environmental lawyer at Pace, was particularly influenced by Berry’s thinking. The following year, in October 2003, Thomas delivered the E. F. Schumacher Lecture in Great Barrington, MA titled “Every Being Has Rights,” which was received with enormous appreciation.11
In 2002, an African regional network was formed—the African Biodiversity Network—with one of its major priorities being to revive indigenous knowledge systems and their Earth Jurisprudence underpinning, inspired by Thomas and supported by the Gaia Foundation.12 In 2005, the Nobel Laureate, Wangari Maathai, and her legal adviser, Ng’ang’a Thiongo, campaigned, as advised by Thomas, to incorporate an Earth Jurisprudence preamble in the new Kenyan constitution.
In the fall of 2006, a major step forward in institutionalizing Earth Jurisprudence occurred with the creation of a Center for Earth Jurisprudence (CEJ) at the Schools of Law at Barry University and St. Thomas University in Florida. Sr. Patricia Siemen, an environmental lawyer and professor, was the founder and first director. Drawing on Berry, she has written on Earth jurisprudence in a cosmological perspective.13 The establishment of the Center was inspired by: “the processes and laws of the natural world that sustain all life forms, the writings of Thomas Berry and other environmental philosophers, lawyers and scientists, and the reverence and care for all of creation.”14
In 2008, the Center for Earth Jurisprudence created the Earth Law Center. Its first Executive Director, environmental attorney Linda Sheehan, advanced passage of new Rights of Nature laws, advocated for rights of rivers to flow, held local Rights of Nature Tribunals, promoted Rights of Nature before the United Nations, developed and taught an “Earth Law” class at Vermont Law School, and offered specific strategies to address the growing number of “co-violations” of nature’s rights, human rights, and the rights of indigenous peoples.15
Milestones in Implementing Earth Jurisprudence
Thomas’ notions of the rights of nature required the transformation of the dominant legal philosophy and principles, widening their ethical perspective to include the whole Earth community of which humans are a part. He often spoke of the need for principles, strategies, and tactics for transformation of individuals, society, and institutions. He and others realized that strategies and tactics leading to the enactment of the rights of nature would be difficult, but contrary to expectations, several significant breakthroughs have occurred. These began the year before Thomas died and have continued since.
In 2008, Ecuador adopted the Rights of Nature into its new constitution. Article 71 reads “Nature, or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and occurs, has the right to integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes.”16
In 2009, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed April 22 as International Mother Earth Day. In so doing, Member States acknowledged that the Earth and its ecosystems are our common home. The same year, the General Assembly adopted its first resolution on Harmony with Nature.17
On April 22, 2010, World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia, approved the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. Over 30,000 people attended, representing more than a hundred nations. The vast majority present were indigenous peoples, especially from Latin America.18 As a follow up, in September 2010, individuals and organizations from four continents gathered in Patate, Ecuador. Out of this four-day meeting, the Global Alliance for Rights of Nature was formed.19
In December 2010, the first indigenous President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, and Bolivia’s Plurinational Legislative Assembly established the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth. The Law defines Mother Earth as “…a dynamic living system comprising an indivisible community of all living systems and living organisms, interrelated, interdependent, and complementary, which share a common destiny.”20 It calls on all people to “respect, protect and guarantee the rights of Mother Earth,” which is considered sacred in the worldview of Indigenous peoples and nations.
Several other watershed moments have emerged in the Rights of Nature movement. These include the adoption by the International Union of the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) at its 2016 meeting in Hawaii of a resolution calling for no development or extractive industries in Sacred Natural Sites and Territories and the recognition of customary governance systems. The IUCN in 2012 also committed to the Rights of Nature in its Resolution 100 and included action on Rights of Nature in its 2017-2020 work plan.
In New Zealand, the Whanganui River was the first in the world to receive legal personhood through a law passed on March 16, 2017.21 This was followed on March 21 by court recognition of legal personhood for the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers in northern India.22 Rights of Nature legal provisions also now exist in Colombia, Mexico, and dozens of municipalities in the United States, and are being debated in a number of other nations. Education in Earth Jurisprudence is also emerging.23 In April 2018, the Colombian Supreme Court ruled that stronger efforts must be made against deforestation in the Amazon and the country as a whole must be protected from the effects of climate change. In this ruling, the Colombian Amazon is granted personhood and thus is regarded as an entity with rights. This is the first such ruling in Latin America.24
Thomas’ contribution to this growing movement was his articulation of the principles of Earth Jurisprudence. This has influenced many individuals and organizations working to promote the Rights of Nature both in theory and in practice. Thus, in the areas of law and religion, as well as in other fields such as education and economics, agriculture, and bioregionalism, Thomas made significant contributions to actualizing the Great Work.
Excerpted from the book, Thomas Berry | A Biography
By Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim, and Andrew Angyal
http://thomasberry.org/publications-and-media/thomas-berry-a-biography
Courtesy Columbia University Press | www.cup.columbia.edu
References
[1] This is confirmed by Mike Bell: “The need for a new jurisprudence was first identified by Thomas Berry who described destructive anthropocentrism on which existing legal and political structures are based as a major impediment to the necessary transition to an ecological age in which humans would seek a new intimacy with the integral functioning of the natural world.” Mike Bell, “Thomas Berry and an Earth Jurisprudence: An Exploratory Essay,” The Trumpeter, Vol. 19, no. 1 (2003). Bell, a community advisor for Alaska’s Inuit peoples, frequently visited Thomas in Greensboro discussing ideas and sharing writings.
[2] See history of the Earth Jurisprudence movement at Gaia Foundation: https://www.gaiafoundation.org/what-we-do/earth-jurisprudence/story-of-origin-growing-an-earth-jurisprudence-movement/full-story-of-origin/
And stored at Ecozoic Times: https://ecozoictimes.com/reinventing-the-human/earth-jurisprudence/history-of-earth-jurisprudence/
[3] Christopher Stone, Should Trees Have Standing? Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects (Los Altos, CA: William Kaufmann Inc. 1974).
[4] Great Work, 5.
[5] Evening Thoughts, 149.
[6] The UN Harmony with Nature website lists experts who are committed to Earth Jurisprudence: http://www.harmonywithnatureun.org/knowledgenetwork/all-members/.
[7] In 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio, the United Nations issued the Convention on Biodiversity, which helped support this perspective.
[8] Gaia Foundation: www.gaiafoundation.org
[9] Those attending included Liz Hosken, Ed Posey, Andy Kimbrell, Jules Cashford, Cormac Cullen, Brian Brown, Martin von Hilderbrand, and John Grim.
[10] Cormac Cullinan, Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice, 2nd Edition (Dartington, UK: Green Books, 2003).
[11] http://thomasberry.org/publications-and-media/every-being-has-rights
[12] africanbiodiversity.org
[13] “Earth Jurisprudence in a Cosmological Perspective” in Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, eds., Living Cosmology: Christian Responses to Journey of the Universe (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2016).
[14] www.earthjurist.org
[15] There is the rights-responsibilities distinction, under which indigenous peoples operate more pursuant to a responsibilities frame, with the rights frame more a “modern” human concept. See Catherine Iorns Magallanes and Linda Sheehan “Reframing Rights and Responsibilities to Prioritize Nature,” in Melissa Scanlon, ed., Law and Policy for a New Economy: Sustainable, Just, and Democratic (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2017).
[16] It is important to note that not all of the aspirations have been achieved in Ecuador. See Neema Pathak Broome & Ashish Kothari, “A Green Revolution Runs into Trouble,” Resurgence, No. 307 (March/April 2018).
[17] In subsequent years, Maria Mercedes Sanchez has been a leading force in the UN Harmony with Nature initiative, organizing annual Interactive Dialogues of the General Assembly. http://www.harmonywithnatureun.org/chronology.html
[18] It has also figured prominently in several International Rights of Nature Tribunals, the first of which was held in January 2014 in Quito, Ecuador. This was followed by International Tribunals in Lima, Paris, and Bonn, all held during the COP climate conferences, and Regional Tribunals held in Quito in Ecuador, in San Francisco and Antioch, CA. in the United States, and in Brisbane in Australia.
[19] www.therightsofnature.org.
[20] Bolivian Plurinational Legislative Assembly, Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, accessed at World Future Fund: http://www.worldfuturefund.org/Projects/Indicators/motherearthbolivia.html.
[21] New Zealand’s Te Urewara National Park had been granted the same legal status in July 2016.
[22] The Supreme Court of India later stayed the effect of the ruling pending the outcome of an appeal by the state government of Uttarakhand, which argued that its new responsibilities were unclear.
[23] In Africa, a three-year training for Earth Jurisprudence practitioners was initiated by the Gaia Foundation, to explore both the philosophy and practice, and an endogenous approach to working with indigenous communities to revive their traditional knowledge, customary laws, and governance systems. The first African Earth Jurisprudence practitioners graduated in July 2017, and a second group has embarked on their training. See https://theecologist.org/tag/earth-jurisprudence. This movement catalyzed the passage of a new Resolution from the African Commission, which recognizes sacred natural sites, ancestral lands and customary governance systems as rooted in Earth Jurisprudence. The strategy is to open spaces in the dominant colonial human-centered legal system in Africa for the recognition of its plurilegal systems, as promoted by the African Charter, which are derived from the laws of nature.
[24]Yessenia Funes, “The Colombian Amazon Is Now a ‘Person’, and You Can Thank Actual People” Earther.com, accessed April 14, 2018. https://earther.com/the-colombian-amazon-is-now-a-person-and-you-can-thank-1825059357.