Reshaping Our Human Presence

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Reshaping Our Human PresenceKenneth McLeod, August 2012

“It is important to understand ... the magnitude of the change required in shaping a

viable mode of human presence on planet Earth for the future. All our professions and

institutions need to be reinvented in this new context. Eventually this implies

rethinking ... our role within the planetary process.”

Thomas Berry, The Great Work, 1999

PART 1: THE AGE OF TRANSITION

Culture is our shared way of making sense of the world around us. It is the prevailing social consensus about what is real, what is knowable, and what has value. It conditions our ways of being, seeing, and doing. And it determines what we accept as the common-sense limits of the possible.

Look into the rear-vision mirror of history and you will notice times when this cultural consensus begins to crumble, when the efficacy of key institutions falters, when certainty gives way to doubt, and an established order fractures. These are the in-between times, the historical interregnums when one world gives way to another. Look closely and within the chaos and confusion of these times you will discern the seeds of transformation that presage a new age waiting to be born.

At the start of the 21st century we are on the threshold of such an age of transition. Over the last 300 years what has become the dominant global culture has propelled humankind on an accelerating collision course with the planet. For the first time a single species has become so numerous, so widely distributed, so rapacious, and so unresponsive to ecosystem feedback as to seriously disrupt the biosphere's critical life support systems. Evidence is mounting that we have already triggered irreversible changes in the dynamics of life on Earth. The consequences are unknowable, potentially catastrophic, but not hopeless. We are on the cusp of an age of profound uncertainty – a planetary transition that will demand a transformation in how we understand our place in the matrix of life, if our

species is to thrive into the future.

This transformation of our core cultural values will require deep remembering, radical creativity, and new modes of adaptive social learning. To prepare for this age of transition we will need to: remember what surviving indigenous cultures demonstrate humans have long known about the interdependence of all life; creatively embrace the new holism emerging at the frontiers of science; and greatly enhance our capacity to make sense of shared experience and so rapidly modify our collective responses to a changing environment.

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Towards the end of 2009 I realised the life I had been living was over. The stories that animated the social change activism of my generation – the baby boomers – had, for me, run their course. Decades as a change strategist, community facilitator, process consultant, and social entrepreneur had reached a dead-end. For the first time in my experience I had no idea what came next. What could I usefully do or be at this stage of my life? The only way forward seemed to be to break the mould and step into the unknown.

I wound up my affairs in the region where I'd been living for more than a decade and retreated to a small coastal village near a mountain sacred as a creation site to the local indigenous people. There I found myself grappling with the personal implications of the vast disconnect I perceived between the

© Kenneth McLeod 2012

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existential challenge our civilisation faces if we are to restore “a viable mode of human presence on planet Earth”, and the hidebound nature of our responses. This collective cognitive dissonance matched the schism in my own psyche between the void of unmeaning into which I had fallen and my taken-for-granted habits of being and making sense of my life.

A crisis of being

The nature of the 21st century transition and how to respond to it are intensely contested. Yet the picture emerging from a deluge of robust evidence across multiple fields of inquiry is clear enough for those willing to see.

Human activities have become so pervasive and profound since the industrial revolution that they are affecting the functioning of the entire planet - changing the composition of the atmosphere, waters and soils, modifying the energy balance at the Earth’s surface and, consequently, climatic patterns; acidifying land and sea; reducing the diversity of the biosphere and raising sea levels.

Thus the Australian Academy of Science (2010) warned of the threat posed to "the continued provision of ecosystem services" and the "risks of abrupt and/or irreversible environmental changes".

Of course planetary systems are dynamic and, over extended time, in continuous flux – at once both robust and sensitive to disruption. But the evidence suggests our multiple impacts could be pushing the biosphere towards a tipping point beyond which the conditions for viable human societies become uncertain.

Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon (2006) draws attention to the links between the environmental, social, economic and political challenges we face when he refers to five closely inter-related "tectonic stresses" that he contends are building beneath the surface of today's global (dis)order:

energy stress, especially from declining access to the abundant cheap oil that drove unprecedented economic and population growth

for over six decades;

economic stress from widening income gaps between rich and poor, insupportable levels of resource consumption and waste-making, financial instability, market failures, and an increasingly problematic food system;

demographic stress from marked differentials in population growth between rich and poor countries and between population growth and job creation (the 'demographic bomb'), the runaway growth of crisis-prone megacities, and large-scale population movements;

environmental stress from worsening degradation of land, water, forests, and fisheries, and increasing ecosystem fragility as the result of biodiversity loss; and

climate stress from human induced changes in the composition and dynamics of Earth's atmosphere and oceans.

All five stresses impact on each other in complex ways. A crisis in any one area could rapidly propagate across the whole global system in unpredictable ways and trigger knee-jerk reactions that only exacerbate their impact. Witness the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington and the continuing knock-on effects from the subsequent global “war on terror”. The density and speed of communication between contemporary human societies, and the power of small groups to trigger serious disruption, amplify the danger of cascading systemic failure. This, in turn, creates an ever-present risk of escalating political crisis, conflict and organised and random violence at all levels of the global system.

These deep fractures in what is now a single global system will not play out evenly or predictably. They are already manifest in many regions of the world as environmental breakdown, intensifying competition for diminishing resources, economic dislocation, civil strife, war, famine, disease and population displacements. But they can still be disregarded where material abundance distracts attention or masks their effects.

Here in Australia the present generation can readily protect its own short-term self-interest. Our abundant mineral and fossil fuel resources


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will permit us to ride the wave of our trading partners' unsustainable growth, while denying our own. Business-as-usual could well deliver sufficient wealth for decades to allow the privileged, the powerful, and the myopic to ignore the agony of the land, the distress of the global dispossessed, and the needs of the future.

However attenuated, the global trends are clear and well advanced and their implications only too apparent. There will be communities and even whole societies that respond with wisdom and compassion. Others will remain mired in self-deceiving denial and confusion. Some will regress to destructive conflict and violence.

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At times of personal crisis in the past I'd found solace in the healing embrace of nature. So now I spent the first weeks of my retreat in the bush, on the mountain or by the sea, feeling more alive, stronger, enheartened. Then, on about the sixth week, a great tsunami of dread crashed over me. All the hurts and heartaches of life's disappointments, rejections, misdeeds and humiliations swirled into a vortex of despair. My energy collapsed, my joints stiffened, my mind clouded, and I was stricken with pain. For weeks I was unable to venture beyond my cabin. I despaired of ever again finding my place in the world.

I had set off on my quest for renewal with the metaphor of metamorphosis to guide me. Disintegration was indeed what I experienced. The structures of my old identity gave way and I spiralled into a place without form or meaning. But the outcome of this pupation was not what I anticipated. When I eventually began to feel my way back into the world I was startled by how different, how alien, my body felt. In the first weeks of my retreat I'd felt physically much as I had all my adult life. Now that familiar body was gone. I felt an old man. I'd entered a new stage of life.

I spent the next few months reaching out in small cautious ways to the local community. Life there was gentle and slow, tempered by the moods of the ocean, the sky, and the mountain. Days of quiet contentment made poignant by an underlying sense of

meaninglessness and episodes of deep despair. Then I knew it was time to move on. I needed a more culturally stimulating environment and professional assistance to break the endless cycling from creative enthusiasm to black depression that had framed my life for decades.

Catagenesis – the upside of down

It is widely accepted that our existing industrial growth societies are not sustainable in their present form. Yet much public discussion of sustainability seems to assume that these societies can be brought in to a soft landing, given a thorough green makeover, then take off again resplendent in their new ecological colours. Or, indeed, that this refurbishment can happen on the wing without the need to land at all!

This may be a simplistic metaphor, but it does capture something of the dangerous unreality of much thinking about the changes necessary to achieve sustainability – an assumption that we are in control of the process and can manage it, given political will and the right tools. It's not that our efforts are useless. It's just that we're attempting ad hoc workarounds when the problem is with the operating system – the dominant cultural values that define what is possible and desirable and, over time, shape the forms and functions of key institutions.

When we speak of a transition driven by our species' disruption of the life support systems of the biosphere, we must be very clear this is not a process to which we can frame effective responses within the categories of conventional politics and economics. Einstein's oft cited warning about the futility of attempting to solve complex problems using the same mode of thinking that created them has become a cliche. Yet that is precisely what we are doing on virtually every front in our responses to the big systemic issues of our age.

The failure of international and national institutions over half a century to come to terms with climate change is a case in point. In fact, it seems improbable that timely and proportional responses with any chance of averting


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catastrophic climate disruption are even within their functional capacity. This is not only because of the resistance of powerful vested interests, ideologically motivated obfuscation, and public confusion about the need for strong measures. It reflects a deeper systemic incapacity to deal with a threat to our common future that is qualitatively different to the issues that these institutions evolved to manage. They were shaped by the demands of a very different world and are structurally and culturally maladapted to the context we now face. Put bluntly, the institutions of industrial growth society are unlikely to address real ecological sustainability short of systemic breakdown. They are in the wrong ball park.

Nature and history teach us that complex dynamic systems like civilisations and ecosystems tend to cycle from rapid growth to relatively stable maturity. In the process they accumulate increasing rigidities leading over time to a steady decline in the system's adaptive capacity. Eventually, changes in the larger processes within which they are embedded push the system to a tipping point and breakdown occurs. This in turn creates the conditions for renewal. Typically the first two stages of growth and maturity persist over an extended period of time and follow a largely predictable path. The breakdown and renewal stages are much more rapid, chaotic and unpredictable.

Ecologists know this process as the adaptive cycle. All complex systems exist on multiple scales, so shorter adaptive cycles are usually nested within longer ones. Understanding the dependencies between different scales can be important to understanding the dynamics of the whole system. Versions of this cycle have been proposed in other disciplines. Thomas Homer-Dixon (2006) has used the term 'catagenesis' to describe “the creative renewal of our technologies, institutions, and societies in the aftermath of breakdown.”

This concept allows us to think about the age of transition in fresh ways. It suggests that the transformation of core cultural values, as an essential precondition for a viable human future, may turn out to be the consequence of collapse, not a way of avoiding it. How we prepare for such catagenesis would therefore be quite

different to the ubiquitous managerial model of sustainability transition that seems so implausible.

Whichever scenario we think more likely – catagenesis or managed transition – the reality is we are sailing into entirely uncharted waters. Our moribund institutions and hand-me-down ideas about political and social change are products of other times and no longer serve us. Yet most of our thinking is bounded by these structures and their legitimising ideologies, with the current sterility of national politics an inevitable by-product.

We have reached the point where we need to abandon the underpinning and necessary assumption of industrial growth societies – that humans have first claim on environmental resources – and move to compatibility with the life support systems of the planet as the core organising principle of all our social formations and institutions. Such a shift will test the very essence of our humanity, but may be the only way to a viable future. It implies a mode of being present to the Earth that can be encapsulated by the term eco-mutuality.

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At first city life was a roller-coaster ride of exhilaration and lassitude. When my energy was flowing I reached out to rebuild old networks and relationships, finding riches of friendship and wise counsel. When the dark fog of depression enveloped me I turned inwards and watched it pass by. And always the question: is it possible to endure life without meaning?

For someone whose identity had been built around a strong intuitive vocation and for whom meaning was more important than material reward, this was a very big question. To accept the limitations of my life as it was and to more fully embrace the rewards of friendship became my practice.

The city showed me its generous face. From my new place of acceptance I found the needs of friends opened satisfying opportunities to contribute. I was soon engaged in several modest collaborations, and a succession of


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house-sits allowed me to taste the rich diversity of city life. Slowly fear of the void receded and I found myself held securely in a web of mutuality.

But the existential crisis of our global culture continued to shadow my days. I observed a general unwillingness to face the possibility of catastrophic system failure or consider its meaning for the generations ahead. Even those who accepted that effective international action on climate change was unlikely, remained wedded to modes of adversarial politics disturbingly out of kilter with the nature of our predicament. To me their thinking seemed far behind the times. As a society we were evidently hunkering down in a fog of collective denial.

In this respect I felt very isolated – the proverbial voice crying in the wilderness. Was my perception of the dynamics of change in the contemporary world so off beam? An attempt to commit my thoughts to paper faltered, then stalled altogether. Try as I may I could not find a way to express what I wanted to say in words that others might be willing to hear.

Rediscovering eco-mutuality

It seems most indigenous cultures share a common grounding in respect for the interdependence of all life. In modern times this world view has been displaced by the almost universal doctrine of human exceptionalism – an all-pervading assumption that our species stands outside of nature with a self-assigned mandate to “manage” all other life forms on the planet for our benefit. Now we are poised at a threshold that calls us to reconciliation with the Earth. To meet this challenge we will need to draw on the cultural DNA of indigenous ways of knowing, and the new holism of contemporary science.

Over the last four centuries the ideology of Progress has become the main expression of human exceptionalism. Indeed, it could be argued that Progress became the core organising and legitimising principle of Western civilisation with its roots reaching back to Mosaic law and

Classical Greek humanism. In this context Progress can be taken to mean our collective commitment to the steady growth of human knowledge, power and material wealth in order to advance the mastery of our species over the natural world.

In today's dominant societies Progress and its attendant utilitarianism – that the value of any being or thing is ultimately determined by its utility for humankind – are the taken-for-granted foundations of virtually all political, economic, social and environmental policy and public discourse. Yet the over-performance of this ideology has created its own antithesis. By unleashing a destabilising abundance of energy from the Earth's sequestrated reservoirs of ancient sunlight, the industrial revolution triggered a run-away explosion of human population, over exploitation of nature's riches, economies fatally dependent on ever growing levels of frivolous consumption, and a deluge of toxic wastes that now threatens the stability of the biosphere. As we ponder how to deal with the catastrophic success of Progress, a radical value shift may be our best and last chance. Radical, that is, in the literal sense: a return to our roots in Earth's matrix of life.

At the very core of every civilisation one invariably finds a theory of human nature and a cosmology - the foundation stories of who we are and where we came from. In order to upend several centuries of cultural orthodoxy we must reframe these foundation stories for our times. This will require a shift from the story of human exceptionalism to one of eco-mutuality – a mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship that restores our place as a co-creative partner within the planet's community of life.

While the colonising monoculture of Progress has swept away so many alternative ways of being, there are still indigenous communities that preserve Earth-centric cultural resources of inestimable value. They can serve to remind us of who we are and where we came from. And over the past century a series of scientific breakthroughs, and more recent shifts in the focus of scientific inquiry, have started to yield new ways of seeing the world and our place in it.

Contemporary science has slowly unfolded for


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us an origin story of breath-taking magnificence. From the first moments as the building blocks of the universe came hurtling into existence across the threshold of the knowable, to the flowering of life on our blue-green jewel of a planet, it tells a story of the emergence of increasing complexity and coherence from a simpler undifferentiated potentiality. At the same time there has been a refocussing of much scientific effort from a powerful but blinkered reductionism to an increasingly confident holism.

Since the 18th century Western science has given humanity extraordinary abilities to manipulate the natural world by delving into the building blocks of matter. With this power came the conceit that there was nothing we could not know and manage to our own advantage. But the success of this mode of knowing has created an awful blind-spot in our collective way of seeing the world. Preoccupation with the minutiae of matter and the instrumental power it gave us left our culture with a diminished respect for the complex and interdependent systems – both biophysical and social – within which we exist. Such systems exhibit qualities and behaviours as a whole that a knowledge of their constituent parts can neither predict nor explain. The seemingly miraculous emergence of reflexive consciousness from the human brain, for example. These complex systems, with the higher order patterns to which they give rise, constitute much of the world we seek to know.

Our inability to understand many of the processes of life became increasingly obvious as the effects of our micro level know-how, scaled up to macro interventions, started to rebound on the environment, and thus ultimately on ourselves, in alarming ways. The difficulties of managing both the immediate and long-term consequences of unleashing the energy of the atom is a case in point. Then, early in the second half of the 20th century, several new fields of scientific inquiry started to emerge – like cybernetics, systems theory, ecology, and artificial intelligence. Their focus was on emergent order and change in whole systems. By the final years of the century separate developments across numerous disciplines had begun to merge into the new holistic field of complexity science. Concepts such as self-

organisation, adaptation, resilience, emergence, and network dynamics have found application in fields as diverse as meteorology, forestry, electronics, traffic engineering, economics, organisational development and the Internet. They offer new ways of thinking about the dynamics of change in whole systems that transcend the simple linear causality underpinning much of our conventional social and political thinking.

The virtual habitat of human culture as the primary vehicle of our continuing evolution has made us both the subject and the author of our part in the bigger evolutionary story. The fossil and genetic record of Earth's life forms tells us that species are transient and that evolution's unfolding has seen many unsuccessful experiments. Now it seems our species may have become a threat to the integrity of the biosphere. If this is so, only by a conscious act of transformation can we avoid evolution's verdict on the human experiment. We will consciously rejoin the mainstream of life's co-creative unfolding on Earth, or become an evolutionary dead-end.

The values that can inform this transformation must be the participatory values of eco-mutuality, not the hubris of the self-anointed masters of Earth, drunk on our own knowledge and seeming invincibility. We will find the organising principles of our cultural renewal in the interdependence of Earth's community of life, our new understanding of the evolution of complex adaptive systems, and a profound respect for life in its manifold forms.

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Flashback to Easter 1998: I was one of thirty-four people who undertook a pilgrimage to a creation site on Gulaga, a sacred mountain on the NSW Far South Coast, led by Yuin elder Uncle Max Dulumunmun Harrison. The idea of the pilgrimage had come to me on a visit to the area some months before. Sitting late one afternoon on a great granite outcrop above a waterfall on the side of the mountain, I felt a powerful impulse to make a pilgrimage to the sacred site I had been privileged to visit the previous day. Some weeks later I travelled to Nowra to tell Uncle Max of this experience and


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ask his advice. Yes, he said, we must do this.

The pilgrimage began in torrential rain at Sydney Central Station very early on Easter Friday as our group boarded a coach for the trip south. As we travelled through Yuin country Uncle Max showed us how, through its stories, it was possible to find profound meanings in a cultural landscape. That night we made our camp on the shores of Wallaga Lake at the foot of Gulaga. The next morning we walked up the mountain in silence to the sacred site. There, and at other culturally significant sites we visited over the weekend, Uncle Max shared some of his people's teachings with their emphasis on understanding and respecting the proper relationships between people, the earth, and all its creatures.

The pilgrimage was a seminal experience that showed me the possibility of a deeper connection with this ancient land. In Uncle Max's words, the only reconciliation that really matters is between humans and Mother Earth.

When in 2009 I decided to step into the unknown, it was to Gulaga that I returned. And it was Gulaga that held me through the stages of my personal transition.

Navigating transition

There can be little doubt that the 21st century will unfold as an age of transition when humanity will be called to reconsider our global civilisation's core values. The odds are better than even that this essential resetting of our cultural compass from human exceptionalism to eco-mutuality will be driven by an accelerating succession of economic and environmental crises and widespread societal breakdown. We have often experienced such times on our evolutionary journey, but never on a planetary scale and thus never with the stakes so high. We must discover new modes of engagement and new levels of human solidarity for this transition.

Faced with the prospect of inter-linked economic, environmental, and social crises, most of our institutions are in deep denial or, in

much of the corporate sector, a feeding-frenzy of profit-taking. Business-as-usual is their ever more stridently proclaimed mantra, and blind faith in the chimera of unending growth their creed. Yet it is clear that the whole-system complexity of the 21st century's challenges render conventional politico-managerial models, tools and methods redundant.

So what is to be done? Have we no alternative than to fasten our metaphoric seat belts and prepare for an exceedingly turbulent ride into oblivion?

Historically most social change movements have tended to be preoccupied with advocating desirable end states – how a more equitable society might be structured, how a steady-state economy might work, what sustainable development might look like, what the institutional forms of participatory democracy might be. Such blue-sky visioning is valuable and necessary. But, in practice, the Achilles heal of these movements has too often been the process question: by what means do we get from an existing ethically or environmentally untenable state of affairs, albeit one with huge institutional inertia, to a more just and sustainable future, without tearing ourselves apart?

The 19th and 20th centuries saw experimentation in social transformation on an unprecedented scale. Beginning with high hopes, most of these experiments either resulted in the piecemeal amelioration of the worst effects of industrialisation and social inequity, or ended in ineffective trade-offs, fratricidal conflict, or wide-spread suffering.

Now humanity faces a very steep learning curve to develop the collective competencies needed to envision and enact the transition to a viable future. Developing these capabilities will go hand-in-hand with a practical rethinking of the social forms by which we live, work, and learn. This will be a project for generations, but the urgency of our predicament requires that we make a start now.

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Over the last thirty-seven years I've faced the challenge of breakdown several times. For me the typical trajectory has been from high functioning, to over-reach, then panic, crash, depression.

My first response was dogged resistance, soldiering on into the face of the storm. Then overwhelm. Capitulation. Collapse.Later I'd find myself mired in the swamps of depression, clinging to medication to keep my head above water. Eventually my feet would find firm ground and I'd begin the slow slog back into the world, winding up my energy and sense of self, finding my creative fire, reconnecting with my passions.Trying harder, I soon realised, was a dead-end – the trap of denial. Its inevitable result a bigger crash, a harder trek out.The path of transition lay, I discovered, not through control, but through acceptance; not holding on to the familiar, but letting go of the sure; not shoring up defences, but opening to change; not forcing the pace, but dropping to a deeper connection.The mountain, Gulaga, was and is my point of connection. A physical place of ancient power and a metaphorical window into our collective psyche. Gulaga is a place that calls me, and a presence I carry in my being. Earth's creativity incarnate.

I found my voice again through surrender. By letting go of the angst swirling through the blogosphere and listening more carefully to Earth's steady heartbeat. Not how can we save the planet, but how do we restore our place in the community of life.

Only connect...

PART 2: TRANSITION CAPACITY-BUILDING

So what are the capabilities our communities and networks will need in the age of transition? What are the principles that can guide our social practice through times of profound uncertainty and danger?

The following suggestions are offered as starting points for a dialogue that circumstances suggest is well overdue. They are addressed to grass-roots cultural creatives – those thoughtful activists and engaged thinkers who hold to a passionate belief that humankind remains capable of collective learning and radical ingenuity in the face of rapid unpredictable change.

They are not offered as alternatives to the diverse and often creative forms of action for a just and sustainable world arising from the global “movement of movements”. Rather, they are intended to point to the kind of transition capacity-building that should be embedded within our current activities – giving fresh meaning to the familiar adage: “think global, act local”.

The eight areas are:

1. Local Resilience

Strengthening local and bioregional resilience is of paramount importance in transition times.

Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb and utilise disturbances. A resilient ecosystem or human community can withstand unexpected upheavals by reorganising itself to preserve its basic structure and functions.

In times of eco-social disruption and uncertainty, the resilience of local communities and the critical bio-regional systems on which they depend will be of paramount importance, particularly the reliability of local energy, water and food sources. Just as important is building robust social capital and more responsive and adaptable systems of local governance. Thus local resilience is closely related to social innovation and adaptive social learning.

We need a better understanding of the


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conditions for such resilience. Much can be learnt from natural ecosystems, long enduring traditional cultures, and from the experience of contemporary relocalisation movements. We also need to consider how to strengthen local autonomy and confidence and protect them from encroachment by reactive institutions and rapacious interests.

Resilience is significantly a product of a community's deep relationship to a unique place. Sharing historical, cultural and ecological knowledge of the local environment and valuing this as the basis for social partnerships and stakeholder alliances can build strong bonds of respect and mutual responsibility. This is an area in which settler Australians can learn much from the caring for country traditions of the first Australians. When a community shares a strong sense of responsibility for its environment and develops inclusive cultural expressions of this consciousness, it will usually exhibit a corresponding depth of resilience.

Personal and community distress is an inevitable by-product of any process of deep change. Social resilience will be affected by how well we deal with the grief, fear, anger and disorientation that loss and profound uncertainty will cause. Courage, compassion, skill, and strong human solidarity will be required to see us through this transition. We need to devise locally-based support systems that embody these values and are accessible to all.

2. Earth Consciousness

Sharing experiences of deep connection to the Earth with others in places of ecological and cultural significance can deepen our sense of belonging to a larger community of life and develop as foci for cultural renewal and creative inspiration.

Discussions about changing values often lead to proposals for new programs in schools or to possible community education and social marketing initiatives. But nurturing values of eco-mutuality at the core of our culture will require more than curriculum revisions, community service announcements, and “liking” on Facebook. Integrating Earth-centric values into educational curricula at all levels is

certainly a priority, but it is only a part of what we must do to restore a living Earth consciousness at the core of human culture. Such consciousness arises from deeply felt shared experience, not teaching or proselytising.

There are many ways in which communities come together to explore and celebrate their relationship with the Earth in all its modes of being. In some places seasonal festivals and ceremonies have continued down the ages, though sometimes faded to mere echoes of their original inspiration. Even so, they retain the seed of something ancient and valuable and may be capable of reinterpretation in a contemporary context.

Creative expressions of Earth consciousness are limitless, as can be seen in a great diversity of settings around the world involving the full spectrum of artistic forms – music, performance, dance, visual arts, ritual. In some communities more overtly spiritual manifestations may emerge, while for others the emphasis remains on artistic expression and celebration. All have a part to play in weaving the fabric of a renewed culture.

The convening of Earth Dialogues can be another way of deepening Earth consciousness. These can take the form of gatherings at places of cultural and ecological significance and be designed to encourage the sharing of different ways of knowing and being present to the Earth. Participants might include indigenous elders, land stewards working to protect or restore farmlands and habitats, holistic scientists, environmental educators, green entrepreneurs, and artists from diverse creative modalities. Earth Dialogues can open spaces for creative expression and performance and incorporate both newly devised and more traditional forms of ceremony that bring the voices of our non-human neighbours and of future generations into these dialogues. By encouraging a plurality of expression and inquiry, Earth Dialogues foster our identification as part of a rich and diverse community of place.

It is not social marketing or community education we need to restore our commitment to the Earth, but opportunities to share, reflect on, and creatively reinterpret experiences of heartfelt connection with the natural world and


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its precious gifts of life.

3. Cross-Cultural Engagement

Facilitating community-to-community dialogue and co-operation across cultural borders to lessen the alienation, fear, and xenophobia at the underbelly of corporate globalisation.

The 21st century will see human beings colliding with one another and with the limits of their environment with increasing frequency. “The world is full”, says corporate sustainability consultant and author, Paul Gilding (2012).

Complex systemic challenges like climate change should not be thought of only in terms of more frequent natural catastrophes. Perhaps their most threatening consequences are likely to be social. We are already witnessing an increasingly ruthless grab for resources by global corporations and emerging industrial powers, while developed nations strengthen their borders against a rising flood of the desperate and the dispossessed.

Local and regional conflicts and large-scale population movements will be a probable consequence of the unequal impacts of climate disruption, the pressure of population on resources, and global economic instability as the engines of growth falter.

As in other aspects of the emerging global emergency, the costs of passivity, of doing nothing, will be high. Xenophobia, communal violence, ethnic cleansing, and war have often been the outcome of such circumstances throughout history. As German social psychologist Harald Welzer (2012) says: “when people see others as a problem, they also think that killing them is a possible solution”. Only by anticipating the likely trajectory of the forces we have unleashed, and developing pre-emptive strategies to deal with them, can we hope to avoid repeating some of the darkest chapters of human history.

The border zones where cultures, ideologies, and religions clash, where communities and nations compete for advantage or survival, so often become the killing fields. But they can also be spaces of creative engagement, of renewal,

where surprising new cultural syntheses emerge, where evolutionary breakthroughs occur.

In times of heightened tension and risk we cannot afford to leave this to chance. Australia is amongst the most successful multi-cultural societies. This is an achievement to build on, to extend, and to export. We need to experiment with ways of opening up new channels of communication, exchange, and co-operation across cultural and national frontiers. Never has the means to do this been so extensive, accessible, and widely distributed. Communication technologies have opened up previously undreamed of opportunities for experimentation in cross-cultural engagement.

There is an urgency about moving beyond conventional models of philanthropy and cultural exchanges to seek ways for genuinely collaborative exploration and innovation. This is not something to be left to governments, international agencies, and NGOs. It is within the reach of most Australian communities to innovate with new forms of cross-border co-operation.

4. Social Innovation

The challenges of transition require innovative forms of participation – deeper democracy not technocratic fixes. We can enliven our sense of popular agency with new forms of collaborative problem-solving, decision-making, and action.

The institutions of industrial consumer societies were shaped in a relatively stable world of upward trending growth and largely predictable change when strategic planning, management by objectives, standard operating procedures, and risk management were reliable tools. But this world is steadily unravelling and the social, economic, and political forms it gave rise to are maladapted to managing the complexity and unpredictability of this age of transition.

These outmoded institutions and their ways of seeing the world will be with us for some time yet. But they are already showing themselves incapable of dealing effectively with the intractable issues we face. The political and managerial elites of the liberal democracies


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around the world are facing a crisis of legitimacy as their efforts to shore up failing institutions consume ever greater resources and achieve steadily diminishing outcomes, as we have seen since the 2008 global financial crisis. It would be a mistake to persist with unrealistic expectations of these institutions or to blame those who lead them for failures that are systemic rather than personal. The problem is not the players, but the game.

At the level of the nation state, representative democracy has become an instrument of disempowerment. Entrenched political elites have usurped the citizens' sense of political agency, relegating most of the population to the role of spectators in a cynically contrived theatre of politics. It is at the local level that we can recover some degree of collective control over the circumstances of our lives by bringing decision-making as close as possible to the level at which it is applied and devising processes of deliberative governance accessible and transparent to all stakeholders.

Transition times require more fluid structures with permeable boundaries that can speedily adapt to emerging needs and opportunities and readily experiment with new approaches. Social innovation, experimentation, and prototyping in communities and workplaces deserves active encouragement both at the margins of our existing institutions and within them. We need to create more safe-to-fail spaces for creative improvisation, free from conformity-enforcing procedures and management metrics that hobble creativity. These social innovation test-beds will need protection from political and bureaucratic interference.

There are good reasons to believe that social innovation is most likely to flourish in local communities, small workplaces, and networks of practice. In these settings institutional inertia is weakest, resistance by vested interests less, the risks of failure manageable, and the bonds of human solidarity strongest.

For a rich diversity of experimentation at many locations to evolve as a dynamic whole, some form of "connective tissue" or transmission medium is needed to enable exchange and innovation diffusion. This suggests the need to experiment with innovative meta organisations

and processes whose role would be to facilitate collaboration and ensure the rapid dissemination of social learning.

The plasticity of the human brain is a model for how we might think about the organisational forms we need to invent. As neurologist Elkhonon Goldberg (2009) has observed: "The evolution of the brain teaches us the lesson that a high degree of complexity cannot be handled by rigidly organised systems. It requires distributed responsibilities and local autonomy."

5. Holistic Technologies

Commitment to the integrity of the biosphere means moving beyond replacement technologies to a design paradigm based on the holistic principles of natural ecosystems.

Replacing environmentally destructive technologies with “greener” alternatives – like heavily polluting coal-fired power stations with low carbon wind farms – may deliver incremental gains, but will prove incapable of achieving the long-term goal of sustainable and healthy societies. Many of the technologies born of the scientific and industrial revolutions are a perfect manifestation of human exceptionalism, designed to enhance our ability to dominate, manipulate and exploit the natural environment. Their logic is that of mass production: standardisation, centralisation, and economies of scale. Thus, when so-called alternative technologies are applied on the scale required to conform to existing infrastructure and business models, they too dominate and alienate both humans and nature.

Our only way through this conundrum is to turn to nature for inspiration and instruction. As the Biomimicry Institute observes, nature provides us with an inventory of “brilliant solutions” drawn from 3.8 billion years of trial and error. While the concept of biomimicry has inspired some important breakthroughs and encouraged a fundamentally new approach to systems design, many biomimicry designers have themselves pursued a substitutionist approach, using models from nature to deliver enhanced products and materials into the mass consumption marketplace. Biomimicry pioneer, Janine Benyus (2008), reminds us that “a full emulation of nature engages at least three levels


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of mimicry: form, process and ecosystem”.

The age of transition requires us to find a new symbiosis between human culture and the community of life on the planet. To do this we must make a shift from the mindset of industrial consumer culture to a holistic approach to technology that focuses on the complex relationship between humans and nature. Our goal must be to devise “technologies that create conditions conducive to life”. Our commitment must be to the whole and to wholeness.

6. Adaptive Social Learning

Enhancing and making more conscious our inherent capacity for collaborative learning in action will accelerate the changes we must make.

In Western societies we tend to emphasise the importance of individual choices and actions in bringing about positive change. Many activists seem to assume that change will occur through the simple aggregation of individual actions. But it is the intelligence and effectiveness of what we do together that will determine our fate. Ultimately our ability to survive and thrive as an integral part of Earth's community of life will depend on a our capacity for wise collective action. This in turn requires a greatly enhanced capacity for collaborative or social learning.

We usually think of learning as an individual process mediated by a teacher or some kind of instructional technology. But learning is also a social process in which groups of people share their experiences and knowledge, experiment with different ways of dealing with a situation, reflect together on the meaning of their experiences, and decide on new forms of action. Decades of research and experience with organisational learning, communities of practice, and participatory action learning can inform the development of new social learning methodologies to enhance the adaptive capacity of communities and organisations.

Adaptive social learning would be integrated into our everyday social practice and transformative in its outcomes. It would be based on an understanding of how communities and organisations make sense of their shared experience and collaborate to modify their

collective responses. It would be informed by the holistic insights from complexity science into how complex systems (like ecosystems and societies) evolve and transform. And it would be supported by a web of connections to enable sharing of the learnings that emerge from the rich tapestries of experience.

We will ever remain biological creatures, but we are also cultural beings who create our own virtual habitat and through it share an emerging collective intelligence, potentially far greater than the simple sum of its parts. Finding ways to more fully realise this collective learning potential in the service of the continuing viability of our species within the limits of the Earth's biosphere is a key challenge before us.

7. Transformative Activism

A shift from oppositional to transformative activism is crucial in transition times. Our approach to facilitating social change must reflect the whole-system nature of the issues we face by creating opportunities for inclusive dialogue, open participatory inquiry, and collaborative stakeholder alliances.

Conventional political and social change activism tends to polarise, whether by accident or design. Its dynamics are driven by the goal of winning the debate, or defeating one's opponents, or cutting a deal with powerful adversaries. It too frequently deploys fear and anger as its primary motivators, and is too often characterised by alienating self-righteousness and hostility towards opponents. Its fracturing tendency is reinforced by the adversarial nature of our political institutions and the media's obsession with promoting differences and highlighting conflict.

But the challenges of the 21st century will transcend our hidebound templates for change. With the stakes as high as they are, ultimately we will all be either winners or losers, regardless of ideological inclination or sectarian affiliation. The intractable problems we face are not amenable to quick fixes or responsive to partisan polemics. They require a long-term strategic vision, broad popular commitment, and sustained effort over time – not notable features of either protest or party politics.


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Fear and anger cannot sustain the breadth and depth of commitment to change we must build. They tend to alienate many potential supporters and inevitably burn themselves out far short of any meaningful outcome. When we're dealing with issues the resolution of which will not be seen in the lifetimes of present generations, this is a fatal weakness.

It is clear we need a fresh approach to facilitating social and cultural change that reflects the whole-system nature of the issues we face – an approach that proceeds from common interests, is empirically-based, informed by a better understanding of complex system dynamics and social psychology, and aims to bring forth strategies for collective action that all stakeholders are able to commit to or at least accept.

The grave consequences for riverine eco-systems, regional communities, and ultimately all Australians of the Murray-Darling Plan debacle will be with us for many generations. Yet the damaging polarisation that this fatally flawed process provoked was entirely predictable and avoidable. We know from bitter experience that alienation is the chief outcome of the tokenistic approach to stakeholder engagement habitually employed by public bureaucracies. The efficacy of well designed processes for building stakeholder alliances for change have been repeatedly demonstrated, and they produce much more robust outcomes.

Collective action arising from inclusive dialogue is not a new idea. In one way or another it is how all enduring communities work. But it is a model that can help find solutions to bigger problems by bringing all relevant stakeholders into a deliberative process to establish common ground, identify key issues, agree on priorities, and develop strategies informed by the best available evidence. And, by its nature, it encourages innovative solutions and strengthens social capital. If regular opportunities to review and reflect on the experience are built into the process, stakeholder alliances can yield valuable social learning.

8. Transition Leadership

Transition times require a shift in the focus of leadership development from seeking to

identify and promote exceptional individuals to building shared leadership capability at a local level.

We must begin now the task of equipping the next generation, and the generations that follow, with the capacity to rise to challenges unlike anything so far encountered on the evolutionary journey of our kind. For this we need a new form of leadership.

The age of transition calls for a break with the leadership models we're familiar with in politics, corporations, and established institutions, and lauded in the media. The times require a shift from reliance on dominating, heroic leaders to a form of shared leadership embedded in our communities and workplaces – leadership that can empower creative adaptation at all levels. Such distributed leadership capability would foster collaboration and initiative. Above all we need an approach to leadership that engenders the courage needed for bold and genuinely creative experimentation at a local level.

Encouraging the development of activist communities of practice is one way to build local transition leadership. Through such networking, activists can share their learnings, exchange information, resources and methods, support one another, and access peer mentoring. Periodic transition leadership residentials would help build and support these networks.

The challenge of transition leadership is to facilitate adaptive social learning and, by so doing, grasp the possibilities that the long years of our evolutionary journey on this planet have bequeathed to us. Skilled, intelligent and inspiring local leadership equipped to enable social innovation and learning in communities and organisations will hasten the process of cultural transformation and help disseminate important learnings. This is the kind of leadership innovation we most urgently need. Fostering and resourcing such distributed leadership must be a high priority.

Co-creating our future

Despite the pretensions of religions and ideologies, we have always been and can only ever remain an integral part of nature. The


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crippling conceit that we are the exception, standing outside and above, leads only to a barren evolutionary cul de sac. So, how can this understanding inform our approach to the manifold challenges of these transition times?

Science shows us that our human story on planet Earth is one of the emergence of a uniquely reflexive consciousness, embedded in our cultures, and complementing the great diversity of non-human adaptive intelligences with which it has co-evolved. Now, the Earth calls us to mobilise this consciousness to creatively refashion the medium of its own evolution – our shared human culture – by restoring values of eco-mutuality at its core. This is the story for our times. And, as North American performance poet Drew Dellinger reminds us, “the future belongs to the most compelling story”.

Creation is not a singular event, but an on-going universal process within which each one of us has a part to play and for which we are personally responsible. As the ancient stories tell us, we issued from a creative universe and can continue only as participants in its inexorable creativity.

We have no blueprint to guide us in this task of co-creation. It will be a learning journey along a path we must invent as we go. By its very nature, it is a collaborative undertaking. Discovering new forms of creative collaboration will be the necessary first step.

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These days I find myself living a life that, in the past, I would have considered pointless. I notice I am no longer caught up in the once so important – like an identity derived from an evidently valued role in the world; a sense of personal security measured by material resources, however modest, and the predictability of home, community, and routine; and, for me most significant of all, a sense of purpose.

To an observer, my way of being in the world these days might appear passive, even fatalistic. But to me it feels fresher, more alert

to what’s emerging, and more willing to consider and embrace the choices on offer. In short, more awake. And, in making these choices, I find I’m less driven by obligation, outrage, or fear – either personal or tribal.

The political nostrums that once framed my thinking and informed my actions have given way to a broader, less easily defined, more tentative, but perhaps more profound values cloud. It is seeded with the wisdom of some exceptional teachers I’ve had the great fortune to encounter, either personally or through their writings – like Uncle Max Harrison, Joanna Macy, and Thomas Berry – and by the many “ordinary” people of extraordinary commitment and compassion I have encountered on my journey.

Now my life is held within a more modest understanding of my limits, defined by relationships that hold the possibility of mutuality. At the same time, the “big picture” that has always engaged me now seems even bigger, both spatially and temporally. This expansive viewpoint has brought with it a quality of disinterest, coupled with a desire to engage with others – not to persuade, enlist, or even facilitate, but together to explore the human condition at this pregnant moment, and reflect on how a radically new vision of the future might be birthed.

Of course there are days when I feel disheartened, when my inner landscape grows dingy and arid. These are times for stillness, for settling into the bleakness without trying to fade or fix it. Perhaps surprisingly, these days now feel like times for necessary healing. For recuperation. For doing very little and keeping to myself. And they pass.

My experience of transition has taught me that there are times when breakdown is not only likely but even desirable, providing an opening for much needed renewal. Such times are indeed fraught with danger. But they also be numinous if we surrender to the embrace of their creative power.

The apparent paradox within the way I now experience the world – with humility and inspiration, with detachment and passion –


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calls to mind some words of Rabindranath Tagore (1921) that I first heard in a documentary many years ago. Their poignancy touched me deeply then and now seems particularly apt: “I have wondered in my mind

how simply it stands before me, this great world: with what fond and familiar ease it fills my heart, this encounter with the Eternal Stranger”.

Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible.Thich Nhat Hanh, The Practice of Looking Deeply

Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future, Three Rivers Press, New York, 1999.

Australian Academy of Science, First Circular, First Australian Earth System Outlook Conference, Canberra, 9-10 December, 2010.

Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilisation, Island Press, 2006.

Max Dulumunmun Harrison, My People's Dreaming, Finch Publishing, Sydney, 2009.

Paul Gilding, The Great Disruption: How Climate Change will Transform the Global Economy, Bloomsbury, London, 2012.

Harald Welzer, Climate Wars: What People will be Killed for in the 21st Century, Polity, Cambridge, 2012.

Janine Benyus, A Good Place to Settle: Biomimicry, Biophila, and the Return of Nature's Inspiration to Architecture. In Kellert, Heerwagen and Mador (Eds), Biophilic Design: The Theory, Science, and Practice of Bringing Buildings to Life, Wiley. 2008.

Elkhonon Goldberg, The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World, Oxford University Press, 2009.

Rabindranath Tagore, The Fugitive, Forgotten Books, 2008 (first published 1921).


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Reshaping Our Human Presence