The End of Nature and the Birth of the Supra-organism, Reality Sandwich, Feb 2013

The other night, I saw Bill McKibben speak at Cooper Union. He reviewed his work on climate change beginning with The End of Nature (1989), the first mainstream book on global warming. As he understood the magnitute of the problem, he also realized there was a dearth of collective awareness and a lack of political will to bring about the necessary change. Although he never considered himself an activist, he felt compelled to start an activist organization, 350.org. As part of his talk, he projected images from past 350.org campaigns, all around the world. The pictures revealed the diversity of people who comprehend the necessity for action on climate change, including black veiled women in Yemen, children in Bangladesh, and college students on the low-lying Maldives Islands. He explored the scope of the problem we face, and then presented  350.org’s latest initiative: A national student movement to pressure universities to divest from energy corporations.

The model for this initiative is the successful campaign that pressured schools to divest from South Africa, during apartheid, twenty-five years ago. I remember this movement  from my time in college, although I wasn’t actively involved at the time. At Wesleyan, they set up a shantytown in front of the president’s office – a clever and effective tactic. To supprt the current divestment movement, students may build refugee camps on campus lawns, to show solidarity with the many millions of people already displaced from their homes, and the hundreds of millions facing displacement, due to accelerating climate change. He is a proponent of nonviolent civil disobedience, used tactically. In general, considering the severity of our crisis, he believes that more strident action is necessary.

Tall and professorial, McKibben has mastered the art of synthesizing data. He noted that last year was the warmest in US history – not by some tiny sliver of a percentage of a degree, but by one whole degree. This is very ominous, as climatologists’ study of past epochs of climate change show that, once past a certain tipping point, warming can accelerate rapidly, with as much as an eight degree increase in temperature in one decade. The UN and World Bank now project a four to six degree rise of temperatures in this century – anything beyond two degrees will be catastrophic.

Around the world, temperature now runs a full degree hotter than a century ago. This is already causing extraordinary and catastrophic effects. The oceans are 30% more acidic than they were 40 years ago, because they absorb a large amount of the ten billion tons of excess carbon dioxide we emit each year. Acidity will cause the disintegration of all of the world’s coral reefs in the next 40 years, according to oceanographers. McKibben noted that the climate is 5% wetter now than forty years ago, which is increasing the power of “super storms.” There was three-quarters less ice in the Arctic last summer than forty years ago – in a sense bringing about a change of this magnitude is a tremendous accomplishment on the part of humanity, even though a terrible one.

The divestment campaign is a brilliant strategy to confront the energy corporations. These companies are the most regressive and destructive forces on the planet today, and also the most profitable: Exxon made $45 billion last year, the most money ever made by a company in a single year “in the history of money,” McKibben noted.

Taking this battle to universities could lead to a profound teaching moment. Through the divestment campaign, trustees – at Ivy League universities these include leading investors and hedge fund managers – will be forced to pay attention to the logic of climate activists. Conferences with professors in physics, chemistry, and environmental departments can validate the science and the future projections for the skeptics and uninformed. As McKibben said, many universities – like Columbia in NY – now promote themselves as centers for sustainability, with earth science departments, sustainable design programs, and so on. At the same time, most of them are deeply invested in the very corporations that are driving the planet toward collapse. The most crucial factor will be the young people, and whether they become galvanized in sufficiently large numbers to fight for their future.

What McKibben didn’t discuss is the path toward adaptation – his vision of an alternative future. He has covered this to some extent in his books, Eaarth and Deep Economy, where he looks at the possible scaling up of renewable energy and the transition to localized communities who consume most of their food from neighboring farms. Maintaining his focus on climate change (350 parts per million is the amount of carbon we can have in our atmosphere and maintain a stable climate, according to climate scientists. We currently have 392 ppm), he didn’t discuss the many other dire threats and challenges confronting us, like species extinction or nitrogen pollution, or atmospheric toxins.

I think McKibben is a great writer and a hero. But his message – and that of other leading environmentalists – would be more powerful if it included a transformative vision of the future we will create together. In Eaarth, his vision is of hunkering down to withstand the inevitable assault that is just beginning. The best we can do is to maintain our current society as best we can. He is clearly pessimistic, at this point, that we can do more than preserve some of what we had.

Yet when we review our history, it is obvious that humanity doesn’t stand still – “man is a transitional being,” Nietzsche said. While McKibben is a Sunday school teacher, his rhetoric lacks a truly transcendent perspective – to a certain extent, this makes it more palatable for a subset of the mainstream. Ultimately, though, the environmental movement needs to present a vision of the future – however different, however transformed – that incites and inspires the human imagination.

While environmentalists propose a dissatisfying vision of a future of reduced possibility, of preserving what we can against the natural forces we have unleashed, of downscaling and powering down, prominent technocrats and wealthy financiers remain possessed by a vision of limitless technological and material progress. They argue for the global spread of genetically modified food, for building thousands of nuclear reactors in the next decades, for massive geo-engineering products to forestall climate change like putting sulfur particles in the upper atmosphere to deflect the sun’s rays. According to the visions of Singularity proponents like Ray Kurzweil, within forty years human intelligence will have merged with machines, leading to immortal bodies, and the design of nanobots able to clean the environment and remove carbon from the atmosphere.

The dangers of this approach should be familiar from Greek mythology and from many examples in our past. The unintended consequences of past technology have led to the planetary mega-crisis that now threatens our collective future. A century ago, we didn’t know that plastics would end up in every eco-system and cause cancers in our own bodies as they pollute our endocrine system and mimic our hormones. Today we don’t know what genetic engineering may do to our descendants. Technological advances often have negative consequences that we in the First World tend to ignore. For instance, most people don’t realize that the rush to extract the rare metals used in our smart phones and laptops led to genocide, an estimated three million deaths, in West Africa. We are also depleting and in danger of exhausting many of the resources we depend upon for survival.

As we confront accelerating climate change and species extinction, the high-tech visions of Singularity engineers may be revealed as flimsy fantasies. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, one felt lucky to have a few candles and a working flashlight.

Obviously, it is not a question of rejecting technology, but of finding a path forward that allows for our future continuity. This requires redirecting our technical genius toward redesigning our agricultural and industrial systems so they become far more resilient and humane. We need to use our remaining resources scrupulously and efficiently, and implement natural methods like bioremediation to enhance ecological health. We also need to redesign our social and economic systems so they support local cooperation and community building. From corporate globalization, in other words, we need to make a universal shift to regenerative system design.

Over the next decades, the onslaught of climate change and other aspects of our ecological crisis will bring to an end the delusions of our present society, and force humanity to develop a new understanding of our world – to create a new planetary culture. The kind of linear growth and development that The Wall Street Journal and the World Bank still promote is no longer plausible, and will quickly lead to our doom. Without an awakening of consciousness and a radical change of direction for our civilization, it is quite possible that humans will not survive as species on this planet – the present generations may live through a totalizing collapse of the ecosystem and the beginning of our own dreary plunge toward self-extinction.

While we have reached the limits of what we can materially extract, consume, and plunder from the earth, there are many aspects of our being that remain unlimited and infinite – vast areas of qualitative growth that the capitalist and industrial culture of the last few hundreds years has left largely untapped. For instance, there is no limit to the quality of our relationships, the expression of our creativity, or the inner exploration of the many levels of consciousness that we can access through techniques of self-cultivation, such as meditation or shamanism.

As we – individually and collectively – confront our planetary emergency and begin to take responsibility for what our species has unleashed, we will create a new culture based on the exploration of the depth dimensions of our inner being, on the spiritual essence that constitutes our deepest core. Personally, I believe that not just the many liberation movements of the 1960s, but also the mystical and psychedelic revolution of that time, remain an incomplete project. We are the ones who have the right and responsibility to complete what remains undone. “For those without hope, hope has been given to us,” wrote Walter Benjamin.

I believe humanity has unconsciously willed the planetary mega-crisis into being in order to impel our own initiatory death-and-rebirth journey as a species. It is only by pushing ourselves to the edge of the abyss that we will dig down and reach the next level of our conscious life, individually and collectively. This new level or realization of consciousness will be transpersonal, beyond ego-centrism.

The ecological crisis, in other words, is destined to bring about a profound spiritual awakening on the part of humanity as a whole. As we cross this threshold, we will no longer identify with our egos – which doesn’t mean we will lose or forfeit them. We will realize and conceive of ourselves as consciousness or awareness itself – “the one without a second” of Vedanta – wearing the mask of our particular identities. From a collective of separate individual and tribal identities, humanity will realize that we are one – a supra-organism, in symbiosis with the planetary ecology that sustains us.

From this new perspective, we will realize that our existence is neither accidental nor contingent. We have an intrinsic role to play in the functioning of the biosphere, as protectors of the community of life, stewards of the evolutionary process. We will make a transition in our understanding of technology and media, as well. We will realize, as the psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna liked to say, “Culture is our operating system.”

As this global awakening takes place, we will no longer tolerate media that hypnotizes the populace, turning people into ignorant slaves of a destructive corporate regime. We will create media to attain more refined levels of being and awareness – we will program and entrain ourselves to be more conscious, more empathic, more attuned to the rhythms of our planet, more connected to the community of life. We will, at the same time, evaluate our technologies from a systemic and planetary perspective.

In some areas, we may choose to reverse progress and take a different path. As our coastal cities get flooded in the next decades, we will have the opportunity to construct eco-villages and eco-cities – new metropolises designed for communities to cooperate and share resources. Perhaps in some places we will choose to bring back animals, such as horses and elephants, for transport, and do without noisy metal machines? Who knows what new directions will open up for us when we overcome the belief that progress is only a linear path? Radical solutions to the energy crisis may become available, once we set our minds to finding them. For instance, motors can be modified to run on water hydrolysis rather than fuel – the existing fleet of cars could be re-engineered for this.

The end of linear history will be the birth of the pleasure principle as a new social orientation. Once we realize that we really are not going anywhere in the way we once believed – that there is no place up ahead that is better or more fulfilling than the place we are now – we will redesign our social, political, and financial systems to improve our present world, rather than sacrificing vast populations for some imaginary future goal. We will not bring an end to progress, but we will redefine what progress means. As we realize humanity as one, we will choose to share resources equitably. We will construct systems that enhance the lives of everyone on earth, rather than increasing the wealth of the privileged few. We will come to see greed as a cancer or parasite that feeds on the human soul.

As I left the Great Hall at Cooper Union, I was bombarded by activists with various petitions to sign, asking donations for different causes – all of them ultimately related, or really, ultimately the same cause, which is the cause of saving the earth from the assault of industry. In order to do this, humanity must unite to interrupt the delusional momentum of progress and stop the corporate mega-machine that has gone out of control. Today, we confront the same fight everywhere– for example, New York is currently threatened with hydro-fracking, which permanently contaminates precious freshwater reserves to produce a few months supply of natural gas. The insanity of our system is becoming apparent to everyone, whether they admit it or not.

What prevents all of the myriad righteous causes from being integrated into one efficient and beautifully presented initiative – one massive open-source project that evolves through our collective and collaborative effort? It is hard to conceive exactly how this will come about, but I can’t help sense it as a pressing need, and an inevitability. Surely, the technological infrastructure now exists to unify humanity as one – one cooperative organism, much like the trillions of cells in our body that work together seamlessly. As we make the leap to this next level of unity, much that now seems inconceivable will become possible, natural, and – all of a sudden – the way things are done.

Original Article on Reality Sandwich

The End of the Beginning, Reality Sandwich, Dec 2012

At last, we have reached the end of the classic Mayan Long Count calendar, the 5,125-year cycle that ends on December 21 of this year. The mainstream media has, predictably, used the occasion to ridicule the straw man they irresponsibly helped to set up: That this was a doomsday threshold, as silly as Y2K. At the same time, the worst and best predictions of alternative theorists ranging from Graham Hancock to Paul LaViolette to Jose Arguelles, Terence McKenna, John Major Jenkins, David Wilcock, and Carl Johan Calleman have failed to materialize.

Apparently, a galactic superwave is not engulfing our planet, as LaViolette proposed. We are not confronting immediate cataclysmic earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, as Hancock sensationally predicted in his bestselling Fingerprints of the Gods. We are, also, not suddenly attaining collective enlightenment as Calleman, Arguelles, and John Major Jenkins conceived. Our pineal glands are not being instantaneously flooded with DMT, as Wilcock concocted. We have not reached the Eschaton or Singularity, where time collapses as we construct the final technological object at the end of history and complete the Great Work of alchemy, as McKenna playfully projected.  We are not ascending out of our bodies into the astral plane. But does this mean that this threshold was meaningless? Not at all.

As a personal aside, I am delighted we are finally getting beyond this date with destiny. Over the last months, my work has been constantly ridiculed and put down by mainstream journalists who parrot preconceived ideas. Almost as a rule, these journalists avoided watching the film I made with director Joao Amorim, which is freely available on Netflix, or reading my book. Each article is a tiny piffle of stupidity and ignorance, adding to the great vapidity. Although I am used to it, it is still painful to be misunderstood.

As discussed in my book and film, and repeated again and again in talks and essays, I am among those who consider this juncture to be the center — the hinge point — in a shift of planetary consciousness that will lead to a deep transformation of human civilization over the next few decades. The aspects of our situation that make this inevitable include the ecological crisis unleashed by human activity over the last centuries, the accelerated evolution of technology that has made us globally connected, and the integration of the world’s esoteric and mystical traditions with modern scientific thought.

It is too bad that the media didn’t factor in the recent reports on accelerating climate change from the World Bank and the UN into their articles on the Mayan Apocalypse. According to these studies, global temperatures will rise between 2 and 6 degrees Celsius in this century — but these projections are probably conservative. We currently put more than 8 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year, and this figure keeps rising.

We are discovering there are many feedback loops in the climate that accelerate warming trends, past a certain point. We don’t know when we cross the point of no return, or if we have already crossed it. To take one example, a vast amount of carbon and other gasses were trapped underground and beneath the oceans during previous epochs of geological activity. Gigantic stores of methane lie under the Siberian permafrost — as much as 1.2 trillion tons of CO2. As the Arctic melts, the methane gets released — apparently the arctic shelf is already perforated, with gas leaking from it. Methane is 8 times more powerful than carbon as a heat-trapping gas. Similarly, as the oceans grow warmer, they not only become dangerously acidic, but begin to release CO2 in large quantities. As the tropical climate becomes dryer and hotter, tropical forests, like the Amazon, turn into tinderboxes. When they burn, they go from being carbon sinks to releasing masses of stored carbon into the atmosphere. We are already seeing an increase of forest fires around the world.

Glaciologists found that “roughly half of the entire warming between the ice ages and the postglacial world took place in only a decade,” writes Fred Pearce in With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists Fear Tipping Points in Climate Change, with a temperature increase of nine degrees during that time. While it is possible that nonhuman factors such as solar activity contribute to global warming, our continued tinkering runs the risk “of producing a runaway change — the climactic equivalent of a squawk on a sound system.”

Warming by just 2 degrees will eventually cause the “complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which would raise global sea levels by seven meters,” according to Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. A seven-meter sea level rise would inundate coastal areas around the world, and have devastating effects on low-lying countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Holland. In the US, all of our coastal cities would be abandoned. A 6 degree rise in temperature would have such devastating consequences that there would be little left of the world we know now.

Climate change is only the most immediate of the catastrophic threats we face, due to our own ingenuity and our race to material progress. The loss of biodiversity is another one. We are currently in the Sixth Great Extinction, and it is estimated that 25% of all organisms will be gone from the face of the earth in the next 25 – 40 years. All tropical forests will be gone in forty years at current rates of deforestation. The oceans are 90% fished out of large fish, and coral reefs are disintegrating and disappearing around the world.

As with climate change, the most threatening aspect of species extinction is that we don’t know when our impact on the living world reaches a point where it becomes uncontrollable. For instance, the loss of pollinating species like bees and butterflies could have a disastrous effect on agriculture. Amphibians such as frogs play a crucial role in the ecosystem, and so on. We are discovering that the web of life on earth is an intricate mesh, and we are tearing it to shreds.

The threat of industrial and military cataclysm also remains severe. Recent examples include the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, unleashed by British Petroleum, which released more than 5 million barrels of oil into the ocean before it was capped, with oil probably still seeping out; and the ongoing Fukushima nuclear meltdown, incited by an 8.9 Richter earthquake off the coast of Japan. The potential for the use of biological or nuclear weapons during a military campaign or as a terrorist retaliation remains significant, and could grow considerably as climate change impacts many areas of the world, creating masses of refugees and enraged ethnic groups.

Most people are incapable of contemplating these threats to our immediate future. People have been programmed by the media to remain disconnected, cynical, and detached. They are indoctrinated to pursue their personal ambitions, to take no responsibility for the planetary situation as a whole. A vague faith in technological progress has become the religion of atheists and materialists. While we create amazing things with our technology, we also unleash negative consequences along the way. For instance, plastic not only collects in every ecosystem and in the oceans, but also in our endocrine system, causing reproductive dysfunctions and cancers. Our development of new technology is oriented toward profit, with no precautionary principle in place.

The only way we will be able to confront the extreme challenges facing us is through a planetary awakening of consciousness and a global movement of civil society. Luckily, as we become ever more interconnected through social networks, this awakening is taking place. We saw it last year in the Arab Spring and in the rapid spread of the Occupy movement, which used social media like Facebook and Twitter to coordinate protests and counter lies and distortions of the corporate media. In the near future, it is conceivable that social networks will replace the hierarchical and authoritarian structure of corporations and governments with peer-to-peer and open-source systems for group decision-making and collective action.

We are coming into the realization that our human family constitutes a single collective organism — one that is in symbiotic relationship with the planetary ecology as a whole. As we shift into this understanding, we will redesign our social, cultural, political, financial, technological, and industrial systems so they support the health of the biosphere in its entirety. This will require a massive shift in priorities for us as individuals, as well as a new mythological underpinning for our civilization as a whole. We will shift from quantitative and materialist values to qualitative ones that include a spiritual or psychic dimension. When we act, we will be mindful of the whole of humanity, and the future of the earth — not just our own wants and desires.

What we will give up in this transition will be much less than what we will receive. As Donella Meadows writes in The Limits to Growth: A Thirty Year Update, “People don’t need enormous cars; they need admiration and respect. They don’t need a constant stream of new clothes; they need to feel that others consider them to be attractive, and they need excitement and variety and beauty. People don’t need electronic entertainment; they need something interesting to occupy their minds and emotions. And so forth. Trying to fill real but nonmaterial needs — for identity, community, self-esteem, challenge, love, joy — with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to never-satisfied longings. A society that allows itself to admit and articulate its nonmaterial human needs, and to find nonmaterial ways to satisfy them, would require much lower material and energy throughputs and would provide much higher levels of human fulfillment.”

I believe a very important aspect of this ongoing shift will be bringing our psychic capacities into our conscious awareness, and the continuing realization that the mystical wisdom of ancient civilizations and aboriginal cultures has direct meaning for us now. The integration of Eastern mystical disciplines and indigenous shamanism into the modern Western worldview is an ongoing process. The Eastern concept of non-duality is something that more Westerners understand. Carl Jung was one pioneer in recognizing that the psychic and physical worlds are not separate, but form one interconnected whole.

It is possible that humanity has unconsciously willed a planetary mega-crisis in order to force us to access our latent psychic abilities. Within a few years we may be doing global visualizations and meditations to bring about world peace and reverse climate change. In fact, December 21 is already the subject of a global experiment in collective meditation, happening at 11:11 am Greenwich Meantime, the exact moment of the solstice. You can register atwww.unify.org to be part of this initiative.

The odd fact that the moment of the solstice on 12/21/12 happens at 11:11 AM seems a wink from galactic intelligence, reminding us that what we are experiencing is a dream — a cosmic play, or what Hindus call “lila”. We are being invited to awaken into the dream and recognize our role as conscious dreamers whose thoughts and actions bring this world into being. I agree with futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard that this threshold represents the shift into “conscious evolution.” We are realizing that we have the capacity to advance evolution in all areas of life — and in fact have no choice but to accept this responsibility. But we can only do this properly when we adapt a Christ-like or Buddha-like sensibility, based on empathy and compassion for all of humanity and all of the species that share the earth with us.

As for the misconceptions of the various alternative theorists about this time, it is in the nature of this kind of archetypal process that it is very difficult for any individual human mind to encompass it completely. We seem to be in a time of great destruction as well as a time of creation and renewal, as many prophecies have foretold. We see the same tendency with the various religions around the world, which were based on a mystical revelation of pattern, but over-literalized what they intuitively understood, and built a fortress of faith and belief around it. In the future, we will find a way to speak about this archetypal process – of messianic descent, salvation or enlightenment – that satisfies the various religions of the world, and perhaps defines a new universal religion or spiritual impetus for humanity, as a whole.

Through their deep study of cosmological and natural cycles, combined with their shamanic explorations into visionary states of consciousness, the classic Maya civilization were able to accurately predict this time as the crux of a planetary transition — which it is. They couldn’t comprehend it in the way we can, but they knew that the culmination of this great cycle meant a shift into a new way of being for humanity on the earth. We are the ones who have arrived at this juncture — and we are the ones who will decide whether, or how, human civilization will continue, from here on out. It is wonderful that we have this precious opportunity. The question remains whether or not we will choose to make use of it.

Original Article on Reality Sandwich