A new civilization is emerging. And an old one is dying. There cannot be one without the other. The pattern of death and renewal is both a sacred and practical cycle witnessed to by the Christian faith, economics, and our natural world. Humans tend to try to deny and fight against this pattern. Against death. Against grieving. Against letting go. Until we can’t anymore. As the rest of the natural world seems to take this truth in stride, our species has become too acculturated to growth, progress, and continuation of the status quo. Change, transition, and death are most often viewed with fear and are resisted. We find this true within the microcosm of our own hearts, and in the larger macroscapes.

In my own life stage, I find myself between two worlds. The in-between time between middle and older age; the in-between time of a full house of children and letting go of my youngest as they prepare for their adult launching; the in-between time of rearranging my primary identity as Mother, into something new, not yet known. There is fear. There is resistance. Gradually, there will be acceptance and redefining.

So too, is this new civilization. We are between worlds, fighting to prop up a system that no longer serves the common good. There are many signs of the “end of things.” There are indications that the industrial civilization we have known and regard as permanent, is in its death throes, its glory days long past. Its triumphs of factories and industry and transportation and exporting and importing and technology and commodification and consuming has reached its zenith. It is suspended on the upward trajectory of the Colossos before the plummet down. There is no more track to follow upward. The unintended consequences of our upwardly mobile industrial civilization have finally caught up to us, and we face our own demise.

As a result of our profit-driven industrialization, if we are awake, we see the destruction of ecosystems, deforestation, acidic oceans, climate chaos, species extinction at the rate of 200 unique species per day, and the escalating violent conflicts over natural resources. We witness all of our natural resources – soil, seed, water, air – purchased by the highest bidder for corporate use to create products to sell back to people for our own enjoyment and consumption. We’ve lost our connection with our source. With our Self. The corporate middleman has taken ownership of those very resources we depend on for survival, leaving most of the human population dependent not on the natural world as has been the pattern since the beginning of time, but on a corporate system of competition and consumption. The commodification of resources is a new phenomena in human history, a blip on the radar screen of life, defying our intrinsic connection as part of those same resources. Our biology consists of the same minerals and compounds found in the soil and the stars, and the water within us is part of the very watersheds we live near. But this kind of holistic reality of Self and Other and Earth has been forgotten as markets and money have replaced our sense of belonging and stewardship.

Going back to ancient times, natural resources were decreed to belong to everyone, and to no one. The principles of the Public Trust Doctrine have been an intrinsic part of every government sovereignty, tracing back to the Roman Emperor Justinian, who held that the seashore was available to all citizens, not for private use. These basic precepts have now been appropriated fully by corporate power for private gain. And our governments no longer recognize their fiduciary responsibility to protect resources for the use of all people, and future generations.

Admittedly, industrial civilization has brought us many good things. Things we believe we could no longer live without. And while many of us have been frolicking grandiosely at the party of Too Much, the rest of us have been drowning in the pit of Not Enough. And behind the scenes, our planet suffers, our climate changes, our lifeline connected to the corporate receptacle. Now we are awakening from our hang-over to find ourselves at the brink of our own existence.  

Here’s where hope comes. Creeping in from the margins. New ideas, transformed visions of a new civilization, unnamed and unknown. But many of us grasp pieces of what this new reality looks like. It has something to do with restoring our connections with Earth, with one another, with the essence of what it means to be human, with de-privatizing resources, and a sacred or natural economic system. And we are faced with a colossal collective and personal decision. To grieve the end of the industrial age, accepting the loss of our way of life, accepting our responsibility for allowing it to become so destructive, and holding the in-between tension of not knowing what our new identity will be, and finally growing up. Or to ignore the coming end of a developmental stage, resist change, and fight our new identity. Either way, the death of industrialization is coming, through our own planning and political changes, or amidst much chaos and suffering, without us. As I let go of the last my children, and what that means to my identity, I do so in solidarity with a civilization that is learning how to let go of those practices and identities that no longer serve the purpose of well-being and survival.