Exploring the emergence of a new world
“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
Culture is our shared way of seeing and thus of making sense of the world around us. It is the prevailing consensus about what is real, what is knowable, and what has value. It conditions our ways of being and what we accept as the limits of the possible.
Over the last 200 years the now dominant global culture has propelled us towards collision with the biophysical limits of 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 may already have triggered irreversible changes in the dynamics of life on the planet. The consequences are unknowable but potentially catastrophic.
We are on the cusp of an age of profound uncertainty, a planetary transition characterised by unpredictable shocks and surprises that will demand a transformation in how we perceive and understand our place in the matrix of life.
This transformation will require deep remembering, radical creativity, and a new mode of adaptive learning. We need to remember what surviving indigenous cultures demonstrate humans have long known about the interdependence of all life; to creatively embrace the new holism emerging at the frontiers of science; and to greatly enhance our capacity to make sense of shared experience and so rapidly modify our collective responses to a changing environment.
At such a time terms such as "optimistic" and "pessimistic" have little meaning as we probe the possibilities of the age of transition. The history of the 20th Century alone is enough to show us that major social realignments seldom occur without widespread disruption, breakdown and distress. To imagine that a transition of this scope and scale could be accomplished smoothly is, I would suggest, not optimistic but delusional.
*****
Last year 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 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 in this final stage of my life? The only way forward seemed to be a step into the unknown.
After disposing of most of my belongings I headed for a small coastal village near a mountain sacred as a creation site to the local indigenous people. There I found myself preoccupied with the epoch-changing transition our species must make if “a viable mode of human presence on planet Earth” is to again become possible.
My personal existential crisis was provoked by a growing understanding that the sustainability strategies I and others had been advocating were unlikely to significantly influence the direction of society. To me, many proposals for action on global challenges like climate change only made sense in the abstract. They could be enacted within the time frame now available to us only by a single all-powerful authority; if opposing interests simply melted away; or if the whole population miraculously agreed to act as one.
Instead of swimming against the tide of centuries that had brought us to this sorry impasse, I wondered if it was possible to discern within the looming global crisis the seeds of its transformation?
December 2010 will see the convening in Canberra of the First Australian Earth System Outlook Conference by the Australian Academy of Science. In their introduction the conference organisers set the context in these words:
"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."
They warn of the threat posed to "the continued provision of ecosystem services" and the "risks of abrupt and/or irreversible environmental changes".
The scale and scope of the challenges we face is reflected in the conference's main topic areas: regional climate change, sustainable food production, national water resources, biodiversity decline, land use planning and land tenure, sea-level rise repercussions, ocean acidification issues, human health, geo-engineering options, low carbon energy futures, and human population size. "Continuing major human impacts on global systems are now unavoidable", the convenors observe.
Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon (2006) contends that five "tectonic stresses" are building beneath the surface of today's global order:
energy stress, especially from declining access to the abundant cheap oil that has driven unprecedented economic growth for over six decades;
economic stress from widening income gaps between rich and poor and increasing global economic instability;
demographic stress from marked differentials in population growth rates between rich and poor countries, from the runaway growth of crisis prone megacities, and from 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 changes in the composition and dynamics of Earth's atmosphere and oceans.
All five stresses are interlinked in complex ways, and a crisis in any one area could rapidly propagate across the whole global system in unpredictable ways. The ever growing density and speed of connections between human societies amplify this effect, and also the power of small groups to trigger serious disruption.
One of the foremost and most intractable drivers of the unfolding global emergency is the continually growing size, density, and impact of human population on the planet.
There is no reason to believe that humans are different to other organisms exhibiting runaway population increase. Swarming, or rapid unsustainable growth, reaches a peak determined by bio-physical constraints and then moves into a phase of equally rapid decline or die-back. Despite our ability to shape the environment, we are animals too.
Over-population is the elephant in the room that we have a demonstrated inability to address, probably because of biological predisposition reflected in cultural taboos and societal blind spots. But we can be sure that nature itself will deal with this problem. The experience will not be a happy one for humanity and the many other species we are crowding out of their only viable habitats.
We should not expect this gathering global crisis to unfold evenly or move to a sudden apocalyptic climax. It is a crisis already well advanced in many regions of the world while barely apparent where material abundance still cushions its effects.
In a country like Australia the present generation can readily protect its own short term self-interest. Our abundant mineral and fossil fuel resources will permit us to ride the wave of our trading partners' unsustainable growth. Business-as-usual will deliver sufficient wealth for decades to allow us to remain blind to the suffering of our land and the needs of the future.
But, 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.
Much of the public discussion of sustainability strategies seems to assume that industrial growth society can be brought in to a soft landing, given a thorough green makeover, then take off again resplendent in its new ecological colours. Or, indeed, that this refurbishment can happen on the wing without the need to land at all!
Of course this metaphor is simplistic, but it does capture something of what I believe is the disturbing unreality of much thinking about 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.
So much sound and fury is expended advocating for specific policy reforms, market interventions, technological applications, shifts in energy use, and desirable lifestyle changes intended to address this or that aspect of what is in fact a complex whole. Yet the evidence before us suggests that we are already in the early stages of a much more fundamental transition than these approaches imply – a transition that will extend over generations and take us towards a future and along a path we cannot now foresee.
When we speak of a transition driven significantly by our species' disruption of the life support systems of the biosphere, we must be very clear what this means. It is not a process we can choose to be part of or not. It is not a process we can control in any meaningful sense. And it is not a process to which we can frame effective responses within the categories of conventional politics and economics.
Einstein's warning about the futility of attempting to solve complex problems using the same mode of thinking that created them seems to pop up all over the place these days – from popular publications and scholarly journals to activist websites and advertising campaigns. The paradox, of course, is that we are doing precisely that on virtually every front in our responses to the big systemic issues of our age.
The recent health care reform controversies might serve to illustrate this point in microcosm.
In both Australia and the United States what we now habitually call centre-left governments staked their political credibility on structural reforms to health care systems that are already institutional dinosaurs. Through all the fractious public debate on the merits and cost effectiveness of the intended reforms there was barely a mention of alternatives to the clearly unsustainable model of health care that has evolved in symbiotic relationship with the corporate industrial growth economy.
Our society devotes mega resources to promoting intrinsically unhealthy but hugely profitable patterns of production, consumption, mobility, and lifestyle. These create major health problems, often of epidemic proportions. Then similarly huge and inexorably growing resources are poured into high-tech, capital intensive, corporate profit driven systems of reactive disease and injury treatment. Little attention is paid to fostering more holistic preventative approaches to human health and wellbeing capable of producing significant benefits at much less cost.
The result: our existing unsustainable health care systems continue their drift towards terminal crisis. Both the Obama and Rudd reforms were based on thinking that is decades too late. Our generals are fighting the last war that they can understand, not the one we're actually engaged in.
The health care reform campaigns demonstrate the massive institutional inertia any attempt at managed systemic change must overcome. The resistance to transformative change by huge public bureaucracies, powerful professions, global financial and pharmaceutical corporations and their armies of lobbyists, and the political class itself is hardly surprising. They all have an immense stake in the status quo even if we accept the good faith of their resistance.
Much the same could be said about the deeply flawed and now abandoned emission trading schemes in Australia and the United States.
Without doubt a carbon pricing mechanism is one essential element in a strategy to counter the tendency of investment markets to amplify ecologically destructive commercial behaviour. Inevitably such proposals emerge within intensely contested contexts where process integrity is inherently difficult and long-term holistic thinking even more unlikely.
It is to be expected that current stakeholders will exert immense pressure to preserve their short-term advantages, and the more entrepreneurial players will have their eyes on the next big profit frontier. Even assuming motivations of the most enlightened self-interest by leading carbon-trading exponents like Goldman Sachs, the natural tendency of all our institutions – private and public – is to look for solutions within contexts they already know and understand. We have no need for conspiracy theories to explain this. It would be surprising if it were not so.
In the same way the inability of international and national institutions over more than three decades to come to terms with climate change was entirely predictable. It is improbable that they are even capable of a timely and proportional response that has any chance of averting catastrophic climate disruption. This is not only because of powerful vested interests, conflicting assessments of the danger, and soft public support for strong measures in many countries. 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 are in the wrong ball park.
These examples illustrate why the institutions of industrial growth society won't address real ecological sustainability short of systemic breakdown. They were shaped by the demands of a different world and are structurally and culturally maladapted to the context we now face.
This is not to say that the many forms of action designed to promote a viable Australia in a viable world are futile. No one can know how the gathering global emergency will play out over the decades ahead or what innovative responses by communities, nations and international bodies will, to varying degrees, prove effective.
My intention is not to discourage anyone from ethical action to protect the integrity of life on Earth. Nor would I dismiss the impulse to protect specific places and life forms that we value highly or that touch us deeply. Such impulses are powerful signifiers of our love for life and will serve us well in difficult times.
Of course we must utilise all available Earth-friendly technologies and forms of action to mitigate and if possible reverse the harmful impacts of human activity. Of course we must mobilise public opinion to influence today's decisions in cabinets, board rooms, and executive suites. Of course we must advocate for and where possible act to protect those who are voiceless in these forums – the manifold life forms we share this planet with and future generations of our own kind.
We must do all of these things, and more.
But at the same time we need to reflect more deeply on the nature of the global emergency we have provoked and its implications for what we should do now.
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 decline in the system's adaptive capacity. Eventually changes in the external environment push the system to crisis point and breakdown results. 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 and chaotic.
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 interactions between different levels of scale can be important to understanding the dynamics of the whole system.
Versions of the adaptive cycle have been proposed in other disciplines. Political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon has used the term 'catagenesis' to describe such a process of creative renewal emerging from systemic breakdown.
This concept allows us to think about the age of transition in fresh ways. It suggests that the cultural transformation I've argued is a precondition for a viable human future may turn out to be the consequence of collapse, rather than a way of avoiding it. How we might prepare for such an eventuality would therefore be quite different to the managerial model of transition that seems so implausible.
Whichever scenario we prefer, the reality is we are sailing into entirely uncharted waters. Our outmoded 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 concepts and ideologies.
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 institutions and cultural values.
Most traditional societies seem to have been grounded in respect for the interdependence of all beings. 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 a 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 idea of progress has become the main expression of human exceptionalism. Indeed, it could be argued that progress has been the core organising and legitimising principle of Western civilisation with its roots reaching back to Mosaic law and Greek humanism. By progress I 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 utilitarian values – that the value of any being or thing is ultimately determined by its utility for human kind – 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 development, 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 can invariably find 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 an integral part of 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 to remind us 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 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 own blue-green jewel of a planet, it has been the 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 long dominant reductionist approach to an increasingly confident holism.
Since the 18th century Western science has given humanity extraordinary abilities to manipulate and transform the natural world by delving into the building blocks of matter. With this power came the conceit that there was nothing we could not manage to our own advantage.
But the success of this reductionism 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 awareness of and respect for the complex systems – both ecological and social – within which we exist. Such systems exhibit qualities and behaviours as a whole that a knowledge of their constituent parts cannot explain. They constitute most of the world around us.
Our inability to understand many of the processes of life became increasingly obvious as the effects of our micro level interventions started to rebound on us in alarming ways. Many fundamental questions remained opaque to us. Then, early in the second half of the 20th century, several new fields of scientific inquiry started to emerge – like systems theory, cybernetics, ecology, and computer science. Their focus was on 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 found application in fields as diverse and meteorology, forestry, electronics, traffic engineering, economics, and organisational development. They offer new ways of thinking about whole system change that transcends the simple linear causality underpinning much of our conventional 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 this bigger 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 the inevitability of 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 co-creation, not the hubris of the self-anointed masters of Earth, drunk on our own knowledge and seemingly irresistible power. We will find the organising principles of our cultural renewal in the interdependence of Earth's community of life, the evolution of complex adaptive systems, and a profound respect for life in its manifold forms. I call this way of being present to the Earth: eco-mutuality.
I have argued that to successfully negotiate a transition of the kind that could be upon us will require the transformation of our deepest cultural values from human exceptionalism to eco-mutuality.
Such a transformation means rethinking all the social forms by which we live and work and it will, in turn, be conditioned by this process of social innovation. It will involve developing new forms of social resilience and creative resources that can carry us up an extremely steep learning curve to a new stage on our evolutionary journey.
This is a project for generations, but I believe it is critically important that we make a start. So, I would like to suggest five areas of capacity-building that we can begin to address right away:
Local and bioregional resilience
Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb and utilise disturbances. A resilient ecosystem or human community can withstand unexpected disruption by reorganising itself to preserve its basic structure and functions.
The structure of a community is determined by the relationships between the groups and individuals within it, and with the natural environment and wider economy and polity of which it is a part. Its functions are to maintain and enhance the mutual wellbeing of its members and the integrity of their environment.
In a period of eco-social upheaval and uncertainty, the resilience of local communities and the critical bio-regional systems on which they depend will be of paramount importance. The reliability of local energy, water and food sources and the preservation of bio-regional environmental services deserve particular attention. Just as important is building robust social capital and systems of local governance.
We need a better understanding of the conditions for such resilience and what can be learnt in this regard 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 identity and mutual responsibility. This is an area in which settler Australians can learn much from the caring for country traditions of the first Australians.
Personal and community distress is an inevitable by-product of any process of deep change. Social resilience will depend on how well we deal with the grieving, fear, 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.
Social Innovation
I have argued in this essay that the institutions of industrial growth society are maladapted to the challenges of an age of transition. They were shaped in a relatively stable world of upward trending growth and predictable change when strategic planning, management by objectives, standard operating procedures, and risk management were reliable tools.
These institutions and their ways of seeing the world will be with us for some time to come. But they are likely to exhibit a diminishing capacity to deal effectively with the complex issues we face. It would be a mistake to expect too much of them or to blame those who lead them for failures that are systemic rather than personal. The problem is not the players, but the game.
Transition times require more fluid structures with permeable boundaries that can rapidly adapt to emerging needs and opportunities and readily experiment with new approaches. Social innovation, experimentation and prototyping in communities and workplaces must be actively encouraged both at the margins of our existing institutions and within them. We need to create 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.
In my view, 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 risk of failure limited, and the bonds of human solidarity strongest.
For diverse activity at multiple locations to evolve as a dynamic whole, some form of "connective tissue" or transmission medium is needed to facilitate exchange and innovation diffusion. This suggests the need to experiment with innovative meta organisations and processes that can encourage collaboration and ensure the rapid dissemination of social learning. Can we envisage a kind of embedded or viral learning institution working in and between communities and organisations?
Adaptive social learning
Ultimately our ability to survive and thrive as an integral part of Earth's community of life will depend on a greatly enhanced capacity for collective learning.
We tend to 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 an issue, reflect together on the meaning of their experiences, and decide on new forms of action. Decades of research on 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 in 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 to external change. 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 such rich tapestries of experience.
We will ever remain biological creatures, but we are now 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 apply this collective learning potential to ensure the continuing viability of our species within the Earth's biosphere is a key challenge before us.
Distributed leadership
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. The times require a focus not on heroic leaders but on shared leadership embedded in our communities and workplaces – leadership that can facilitate creative adaptation at all levels.
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. Skillful, intelligent and inspiring leadership equipped to facilitate social innovation and learning at all levels will hasten the process of transformation and help disseminate important learnings.
This is, I'd suggest, the kind of leadership innovation we most urgently need. Fostering and resourcing such distributed leadership must be a high priority.
Earth-centric values
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 and community service announcements on TV.
Integrating Earth-centric values into educational curricula at all levels is certainly a priority, but it must first be informed by on-going, broadly inclusive, generative dialogue about our relationship to the Earth in all its modes of being.
Such Earth Dialogues could focus around places of cultural and ecological significance and be designed to encourage the sharing of different ways of knowing and being present to the Earth. They could involve indigenous elders, land stewards working to protect or restore farmlands and habitats, holistic scientists, environmental educators, green entrepreneurs, and artists from diverse creative modalities. And we must devise ways of bringing the voices of our non-human neighbours and of future generations into these dialogues.
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 Earth and its precious gifts of life.
*****
My ruminations on humanity's historic predicament brought me to awareness of a deeper intelligence inherent in the very process of life's unfolding.
Science and intuition tell us that creation is not a singular event but an on-going universal process of which we are an integral part. We have issued from a creative universe and continue as participants in its inexorable creativity.
Our human story on planet Earth is one of the emergence of a uniquely reflexive form of consciousness, embedded in our cultures, and complementing the great diversity of adaptive intelligences with which it has co-evolved. We are and always have been an integral part of nature, despite our recent fantasy that we alone are the exception.
Now, our challenge is to mobilise the power of this reflexive consciousness to purposely refashion the medium of our own evolution – our shared human culture – by restoring values of eco-mutuality at its core. For this we will need to tap the deep spring of creativity that we share with all life.
Exploring what this means in my own life will be the next stage of my journey.
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice.
Mary Oliver, The Journey
Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible.
Thich Nhat Hanh, The Practice of Looking Deeply
(C) Kenneth McLeod, Bermagui, 2010
“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 1
The full text of the most recent version of this paper appears at the end of this post. You can download it as a PDF file. As the document evolves new versions will be uploaded.
1. Crossing the Abyss
Last year I realised the life I had been living was over. The stories that had animated the social change activism of my generation had run their course. A decade as a freelance change facilitator 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 in this last stage of my life? The only way forward seemed to be a step into the unknown -- to cross the abyss.
After disposing of most of my belongings I headed for a small coastal village near a mountain sacred as a creation site to the local indigenous people. There I found myself preoccupied with the epoch-changing transformation required if our species is to cross the abyss of transition to “a viable mode of human presence on planet Earth”.
Most of our actions towards sustainability seem to me to be based on fatally flawed assumptions about how such an historic transformation could occur. 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.
This blog is the vehicle I have chosen to examine some of the outmoded assumptions and cultural bind spots that I believe compromise our collective capacity to face the challenges of the sustainability transition. It is a work in progress, a living document that I expect will evolve over time. I welcome the contributions of others who share my intention.
By attempting to better understand the nature of this transition and the potential of our species to engage creatively with forces over which we have no control, I hope to gain a deeper understanding of the personal transition I have embarked upon.
__________
1 Thomas Berry, 'The Great Work: Our Way into the Future', Three Rivers Press, New York, 1999.
2. What's Wrong with Sustainability Action?
Much discussion of the sustainability transition seems to assume that industrial growth society can be brought in to a soft landing, given a thorough green makeover, then take off again resplendent in its new ecological colours. Or, indeed, that this refurbishment can happen on the wing without the need to land at all!
Of course this metaphor is simplistic, but it does capture something of what I believe is unexamined wishful thinking behind much discussion of transition strategies – an assumption that we are in control of the transition process and can manage it if we just use the right tools.
Such thinking leads to a focus on policy reforms, market interventions, technological advances, shifts in energy use, and lifestyle changes. All these things are necessary. But the evidence before us suggests that we are already in the early stages of a much more fundamental transition than these approaches imply -- a transition that will extend over generations and take us towards a future and along a path we cannot now foresee.
This dawning Age of Transition will entail much more profound fracturing of the world as we know it than we commonly assume. When we speak of a transition caused significantly by our species' disruption of the life support systems of the biosphere, we must be very clear what this means. It is not a process we can choose to be part of or not. It is not a process we can control in any meaningful sense. And it is not a process to which we can frame effective responses within the categories of conventional politics.
We must understand that we have triggered forces over which we have little control and that will, in time, drive social and cultural changes on a scale never before encountered by our kind. We are sailing into entirely uncharted waters. Our 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 concepts and ideologies.
I suggest that many of the conceptual tools and the inspiration we need to engage with this process of transition can come from three separate but converging knowledge domains:
i) Understanding of the interdependence of all life still accessible through surviving indigenous ways of knowing and augmented by leading edge ecological thinking.
ii) Insights into the behaviour and evolution of complex adaptive systems (like ecosystems, climate systems, and social systems) emerging from the still infant field of holistic complexity science, giving us new ways to think about whole system change.
iii) The potential for a more conscious participation in an intrinsically creative universe revealed by the last century of scientific inquiry.
In this context terms such as "optimistic" and "pessimistic" have little meaning as we probe the possibilities of the Age of Transition. The history of the 20th Century alone is enough to show us that major social realignments seldom occur without widespread disruption, breakdown and stress. To imagine that a transition of this scope and scale could be accomplished smoothly is not, I would suggest, optimistic but delusional.
If a transition of this kind is likely or even possible, should we not be considering now how to prepare for such radical uncertainty? What capabilities will the next generations need to successfully navigate their way through a profoundly unfamiliar and perhaps very hostile environment?
3. Five Propositions for a Conversation
It is against this background that I'd like to invite a more deeply reflective conversation about transition strategies. I offer the following five propositions as a starting point.
1. Industrial civilisation is heading for systemic breakdown at an accelerating pace.
By almost any key measure our species is on a collision course with the biophysical limits of planet Earth. There is only one possible outcome of such a collision – human ecological collapse.
The momentum of this process is variable and uneven in different societies and locations. Nevertheless, because of the density and continuing growth of human populations, historically unprecedented global integration, the already advanced degree of social breakdown in many societies, and the sheer magnitude of our impact on the planet's life support systems, few if any human communities can be insulated from it.
Consider one of the foremost drivers of the unfolding global emergency -- human over-population.
There is no reason to believe that humans are different to other organisms exhibiting exponential population expansion. Swarming, or rapid unsustainable growth, reaches a peak determined by bio-physical constraints and then moves into a phase of equally rapid decline or die-back. Despite our ability to shape the environment, we are animals to.
Over-population is the elephant in the room that we have demonstrated an inability to address, probably because of biological predisposition reflected in cultural taboos and societal blind spots. But we can be sure that the planet itself will deal with this problem. The experience will not be a happy one for humanity and the many other species we are crowding out or destroying their only viable ecological niches.
2. The notion of human ecological sustainability is meaningless without acceptance of the necessity for cultural transformation.
To continue to talk of the dominant industrial growth civilisation achieving sustainability has become a nonsense. We have reached the point where we need to abandon its underpinning and necessary assumption -- 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 institutions and cultural values. This means a very different kind of society.
If culture is the prevailing consensus in any human society about what is real, what is knowable, what has value, and what is possible, then a complete makeover of the existing consensus is a precondition for a viable human future. Achieving sustainability is not a question of public policy, green technologies, responsible business practices, or popular education, though it subsumes all these. Nor is it a question of personal commitment to a 'sustainable lifestyle' -- a worthy but ineffective aspiration.
It requires the transformation of our deepest cultural values.
3. The transformation we require is most likely to occur within a process of collapse.
Thomas Homer-Dixon (2) has used the term 'catagenesis' to describe the process of creative renewal emerging from systemic breakdown. It is a process that can be observed in the life cycles of virtually all natural systems.
Consider the implications of the inability of international and national institutions over more than three decades to come to terms with climate change. It is improbable that they are even capable of a timely and proportional response that has any chance of averting catastrophic climate disruption. This is not only because of powerful vested interests and conflicting assessments of the danger. 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 have evolved to manage. They are in the wrong ball court.
Without doubt the transition will not be a more or less managed process of incremental change from society as we know it to a fundamentally different world. We have neither the knowledge nor the institutions to achieve this. The Age of Transition is more likely to be marked by sudden unforeseen fractures in the unsustainable reality we have convinced ourselves is normal. It will be an age of shocks and surprises.
If we accept that the cultural transformation we need for a viable future is likely to be a consequence of collapse rather than a way of avoiding it, then how we prepare for it will be significantly different. Transition strategies must aim to support creative renewal within a context of systemic breakdown.
What can we do now to strengthen the resilience of communities and crucial social institutions? How do we nurture the shared values and skills to carry us through? How do we enhance our capacity for effective adaptive social learning to better face circumstances of profound uncertainty within a changing and sometimes hostile environment?
4. Transition strategies must encompass both conservation and transformation.
If indeed we are already seeing the first stages of accelerating global systemic breakdown, then creating intentional "lifeboat" communities that can preserve pockets of viable human society through the hard times ahead could make sense. There are certainly those who think so.
Others propose a similarly defensive posture at a national level. But, the logic of Australia as an island of sustainability is not a scaled-up version of a lifeboat community, but Fortress Australia. Unfortunately, it would be a fortress fatally vulnerable to much greater external forces, both natural and human, that would inevitably lay siege to it.
It is not my intention to dismiss this impulse to preserve that which we most value. It is a powerful motivator that will serve us well in difficult times. But what if we were to conceive of this transition as an opportunity for creative transformation, as well as defensive conservation? What approaches to strengthening local and national resilience would this suggest? What genuinely radical social and cultural innovations would we need to bring forth? What communities of practice and learning networks would we envisage to nurture such creativity?
My suggestion is that we turn our attention to ramping up two of the most powerful emergent characteristics of our species: social learning and creative adaptation. How can we equip communities and organisations to be vehicles for co-designing a viable future? How can we create working models of cultural transformation here in Australia that can inform and inspire experimentation around the world?
5. Transition leadership is about facilitating adaptive social learning.
We should not expect the gathering global crisis we have provoked to unfold evenly or move to a sudden apocalyptic climax. It is a crisis already well advanced in many regions of the world while barely apparent where material abundance still cushions its effects. However attenuated, the 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 reaction.
In a country like Australia the present generation can readily protect its own short term self-interest. Our abundant mineral and energy resources will permit us to ride the wave of our trading partners' unsustainable growth. Business-as-usual will deliver us sufficient wealth for decades to maintain our lack of care for the future. But if we retain even a glimmer of respect for the sanctity of life on Earth, 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. The times require a focus not on heroic leaders but on shared leadership embedded in our communities and workplaces -- leadership that can facilitate creative adaptation at all levels.
Ultimately our ability to survive and thrive as an integral part of Earth's community of life will depend on our capacity for greatly enhanced adaptive social learning. This will not look like anything presently offered in our educational institutions preoccupied as they are with individual learning for career success in competitive settings.
We must bring forth an altogether more open, reflective and creative process of learning integrated in 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 to external change. It would encourage social innovation, experimentation and prototyping at a local level where the bonds of trust are strongest and thus the potential for risk-taking greatest. And it would be supported by a web of connections to enable sharing of the learnings that emerge from such rich tapestries of experience.
The challenge of transition leadership is to facilitate such 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. Can transition leadership networks become the crucibles within which to develop new social learning methodologies as tools for conscious evolution? Can we conceive of a new kind of viral learning institution embedded in communities and workplaces to nurture such leadership and propagate the required social technologies?
This is, I'd suggest, the kind of leadership innovation we most urgently need
__________
2 Thomas Homer-Dixon, 'The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilisation', Island Press, 2006 Link to: Thomas Homer-Dixon's website.
4. In the Wrong Ball Court
Einstein's words about the futility of attempting to solve complex problems using the same mode of thinking that created them seems to pop up all over the place these days – from popular publications and scholarly journals to activist websites and advertising campaigns. The paradox, of course, is that we are doing precisely that on virtually every front in our responses to the big systemic issues of our age.
Take the recent health care and emmission trading scheme controversies for example.
In both the US and Australia what we now habitually call centre-left governments (3) staked their political credibility on efficiency reforms to health care systems that are already institutional dinosaurs. Through all the fractious public debate on the merits and cost effectiveness of the intended reforms there was barely a mention of alternatives to the clearly unsustainable model of health care that has evolved in symbiotic relationship with the corporate industrial growth economy. Yet a moments reflection would reveal the absurdity of pouring mind-boggling resources into a high-tech, capital intensive, corporate profit driven system of reactive disease and injury treatment, while doing very little to foster a more holistic proactive approach to human health and wellbeing.
The result: our existing unsustainable health care systems continue their drift towards terminal crisis. Both the Obama/Rudd reforms were based on policy thinking that is decades too late. Our generals are fighting the last war that they can understand, not the one we're actually engaged in.
One night a neighbour of Mullah Nasrudin was walking home and found the Mullah squatting on the ground beside a lamp post evidently looking for something.
What's the matter Mullah? asked the concerned neighbour.
I've lost my keys, replied the Mullah.
Oh! Here let me help you, and the kindly neighbour got down on his knees and started searching for the Mullah's keys as well.
After some time spent looking the neighbour straightened up and, quite puzzled, asked: Are you sure you dropped your key's here?
Oh, I didn't drop them here, replied the Mullah.
Where did you drop them then? exclaimed the now bewildered neighbour.
Over there, and the Mullah pointed to the front of his house that was in darkness.
So why are you looking for them here? the neighbour asked.
Because there's light here, replied the Mullah.
The health care reform campaigns are instructive in many ways and worthy of much more extensive consideration than is the purpose of this piece. Suffice here to note the massive institutional inertia they demonstrate. The resistance to meaningful change by huge public bureaucracies, powerful professions, global financial and pharmaceutical corporations and their armies of lobbyists, and the political class itself is hardly surprising. They all have an immense stake in the status quo even if we accept the good faith of their resistance.
At the level of policy development the health care agenda precisely illustrates the point that Einstein was making – addressing an issue within the frame of thinking that created it. The culture of our institutions is, by their very nature, resistant to fundamental change and, with few exceptions, determines the limits of the possible for those working within them.(4)
Much the same could be said about the the now abondoned emmission trading schemes in Australia and the United States. Consider why the foremost advocates of such schemes have been the very corporations that brought us the yet unresolved Global Financial Crisis. Indeed for leading exponents like Goldman Sachs, carbon trading represents the next big profit frontier. But even if we assume their advocacy to be enlightened self-interest, it again illustrates that, like Mullah Nasrudin, the natural tendency of all our institutions is to look for solutions within contexts they already know and understand – the very contexts they evolved within and co-created. We have no need for conspiracy theories to explain this phenomenon.
The point of these observations is to illustrate why the institutions of the industrial growth society cannot transform themselves to become compatible with the life support systems of the planet. That is, why they won't address real ecological sustainability short of systemic breakdown.
Consider our legal system and its crucial role in maintaining a regime of property ownership that assumes the primacy of human control over the Earth and its natural resources, or our modern system of mass education that grew historically out of the needs of the factory system and remains fundamentally wedded to the identity formation and productivity requirements of a consumer growth economy. Consider our system of governance characterised by a choice between factions within a growth-oriented political orthodoxy conditioned by innovation averse bureaucracies with low tolerance for radical creativity and a structural inability to respond holistically. Or consider the dominant market-driven forums of public discourse with their tendency to promote simplistic polarisation around superficially presented and often trivial issues and to foster fragmented thinking and profound confusion.
Can we imagine these instituions coping adequately with the Age of Transition?
There are three great mysteries in the universe:
water to fish, air to birds, and culture to humans.
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3 The dominant political parties in virtually all Western-style democracies are these days invariably described as either centre-right or centre-left. This usage points to a tacit recognition that our available political choices are simply variations of an established orthodoxy. Perhaps the term 'centre' denotes an unquestionable consensus that continuous economic growth is the fundamental goal of all public policy and the final justification of state power.
4 In his helpful feedback on this paper Tom Atlee drew my attention to the many good people working within institutions to achieve changes for the better. I wholeheartedly endorse his sentiments. My focus here is systemic – the historical, structural and cultural characteristics of our established social and economic institutions that mean they are maladapted as vehicles for the transformation we need. Link to: Co-Intelligence Institute
5. Values for a Viable World
In section 2 I suggested that navigating our way through the Age of Transition to a viable human future requires that we reconsider the values that underpin our civilisation.
To do this I'd suggest we must be prepared to go way beyond the usual shopping list of favourite feel good catch phrases or fashionable buzz words that discussion of values so often evokes. This inquiry demands that we dig down to the first principles that underpin our institutions, professions, codes of behaviour, public policies, social and cultural practices, and official ideologies.
So here goes...
It could be argued that the notion of Progress has been the core organising and legitimising principle of Western civilisation for the last four centuries, with its roots stretching back to Mosaic law and Greek humanism. By Progress – with a capital P - I 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 modern times Progress has come to be the ideological justification for the assertion of human exceptionalism, that is, the 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.
When the jealous tribal god of the Jews demanded “thou shall have no other god than me” and signed them up to an exclusive franchise to exercise his will on their bit of the Earth, the consequences for the rest of humanity were relatively benign. But when aggressively evangelising Christians and Moslems took “thou” to mean not just the chosen people but everyone, things took a turn for the worse. Mix this conviction of humanity's divinely sanctioned preeminence with classical Greek humanism -- man the measure of all things -- and you have a particularly potent and dangerous brew.
Thus we can trace the emergence of Progress as the core legitimising concept of industrial growth societies from the patriarchal religion of a nomadic desert tribe, through the co-optation of Christianity by Imperial Rome, Augustine's reconciliation of Christian theology with Aristotelian science, the emergence of the Renaissance mercantile state animated by resurgent classical humanism, the Protestant Reformation's reification of the individual, the rational utilitarianism of the Enlightenment, to Europe's global expansion and colonial enrichment fueling, in turn, the technological transformations of the Industrial Revolution and its derivatives.
In today's dominant societies Progress and its attendant utilitarian values -- that the value of any being or thing is ultimately determined by its utility for human kind -- 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 concentrated energy from the Earth's sequestrated reservoirs of ancient sunlight, the industrial revolution triggered a run-away explosion of human population, over development, and a deluge of toxic wastes that threatens to so harm the biosphere that the continuing viability of our species and many others is seriously in doubt.
Now, 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.
To overturn several centuries of conventional wisdom is no small task, but it could be the price for our species' continuing evolution. It would require a shift from human exceptionalism to a mutually enhancing human-Earth relationship in order to restore our place as an integral part of the planet's community of life.
While such a transformation may seem daunting, the irruption of this ultimately life destroying ideology has been a very recent occurrence in humanity's long journey on this planet. Though Progress has swept away so many alternative ways of being, surviving indigenous communities preserve inclusive life-centric cultural resources of inestimable value. The story for our hoped for renaissance must be a new one, but the Earth wisdom of indigenous traditions is the cultural DNA that can point us towards a renewed partnership with all life on Earth and remind us that we do know how to do this.
At the very core of every civilisation one can invariably find a theory of human nature and a cosmology - the foundation stories of who we are and where we came from.
Over the last century scientific research has slowly unfolded for 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, through the creation of the first molecules within the swirling clouds of energy and proto-matter, the formation of stars and galaxies and planets, to the flowering of life on our own blue-green jewel of a planet, it has been the story of the emergence of increasing complexity and coherence from simpler and more undifferentiated potentiality.
Our human story on planet Earth is one of the unfolding of a uniquely reflective form of culturally embedded consciousness complementing the great diversity of adaptive intelligences with which it has co-evolved. Science's story tells us that creation is not a singular event but an on-going universal process of which we are an integral part. We have issued from a creative universe and continue as participants in its inexorable creativity.
Now, 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 this bigger 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 the inevitability of 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 co-creation, not the hubris of the self-anointed masters of Earth, drunk on our own knowledge and seemingly irresistible power. We will find the organising principle of our cultural renewal in the interdependence of Earth's community of life – a profound respect for life in its manifold forms, the impulse from which all our becoming arises.
Life loves life.
When the priest of the Catholic parish of Broadmeadow in NSW told some Aboriginal elders in his congregation that he would use his sabbatical leave to study at an ancient European university associated with his religious order, they asked: why don't you study at our university? Your university, where's that? he responded. The Earth is our university, they replied. The writing is still on the blackboard. Anyone can read it.
6. Building Capacity for Transformation
How then do we go about building resilience and fostering creative adaptation?
What should we be doing now to improve the chances for the next generations of humankind to realise the potential for transformation implicit in systemic breakdown?
Of course there is no simple answer to these questions, no blueprints exist, no strategic plans are possible. By its very nature this will be an emergent process – a path created by walking, noticing where we've got to and how we got there, being sufficiently alert to feedback from the biosphere to intuit what needs to happen next, making shared meaning from our successes and failures along the way, experimenting with a diversity of approaches, and continuously sharing our learning.
I do believe, however, that we can make a start on sketching out the processes needed to catalyse and nurture a consciously proactive engagement with this Age of Transition. One way of doing this would be to develop plausible transition scenarios, then use them to identify the capacities that will be needed for renewal and thus what capacity-building processes we can begin to experiment with now.
It seems to me there are five particularly important areas of capacity-building that we can address right away. Our approach should be holistic – all these areas should be engaged simultaneously with a continuous exchange of information and learning between them. The creation of meta processes to facilitate and integrate such an holistic approach is therefore essential, a question I address in the final point.
The five priority areas I'd suggest are:
1. The resilience of local communities and of critical bio-regional infrastructure on which local viability depends.
We need a better understanding of the conditions for such resilience and what can be learnt in this regard 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 place partnership can build strong bonds of identity and mutual responsibility. This is an area in which settler Australians can learn much from the caring for country traditions of the first Australians.
Personal and community distress is an inevitable by-product of any process of deep change. Social resilience will depend on how well we deal with the intense grieving, fear, 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.
2. A resurgence of Earth-centric partnership values.
These values are grounded in a profound respect for the interdependence of Earth's community of life and frequently celebrate our place in the universe story revealed by scientific inquiry. As I have argued throughout this paper, such core values are essential to inspire and inform the kind of cultural transformation that can carry us through.
Opening a series of Earth Dialogues with indigenous elders, land stewards, holistic scientists, and creative practitioners would advance this process of value renewal here in Australia. Such dialogues could be designed to encourage creative expression of transformational core values in ways that resonate into every facet of human experience. We must go beyond proclaiming charters and manifestos to a broadly participatory process of co-creation. It is not marketing we need but heartfelt creative engagement.
3. A greatly enhanced capacity for rapid adaptive social learning.
We need a better understanding of how diverse human communities make sense of their shared experience and modify their social practices in response to sudden and unforeseen environmental changes.
The development of more effective methodologies of social learning can be informed by the holistic insights from complexity science into how complex systems (like ecosystems and societies) evolve and transform. Decades of experimentation with approaches to organisational learning and communities of practice are also a valuable resource.
Social innovation, experimentation and prototyping in communities and workplaces must be encouraged. To support this we need to open up spaces within existing institutions for autonomous action and innovation, linked by robust networks of reflective learning. These social innovation test beds will need protection from political and bureaucratic interference. Devising effective ways to build and maintain inter-regional and global learning exchange under difficult conditions will also be important to the bigger human project.
4. Effective transition leadership in communities and workplaces.
Skillful, intelligent and inspiring leadership equipped to facilitate social innovation and learning at all levels will hasten the process of transformation and help disseminate important learnings. Fostering and resourcing such distributed leadership must be a high priority.
5. Dynamic meta processes for learning and integration.
For such diverse activity at multiple locations to evolve as a dynamic whole, some form of "connective tissue" or transmission medium is needed to facilitate exchange and growth. This suggests the need to experiment with innovative meta organisation and processes that can encourage collaboration and ensure the rapid dissemination of social learning.
In my experience neither existing educational institutions nor activist organisations are equipped to facilitate this kind of holistic, transdisciplinary, and exploratory developmental work. They are too bound by their origins and the ideologies, interests, and agendas of their controlling elites and sectional interests. Transition times require more fluid structures with permeable boundaries that can rapidly adapt to emerging needs and opportunities and readily experiment with new approaches.
Can we envisage a kind of embedded or viral learning institution working in and between communities and organisations?
Some of its principal functions might include:
i) Catalysing and facilitating collaborative projects to flesh out and implement capacity-building initiatives like those proposed above, using a diverse range of creative processes.
ii) Stimulating experimentation and prototyping of social innovations.
iii) Researching, developing, and propagating social learning methodologies and tools.
iv) Identifying and advocating for enabling policies and action by established (old order) institutions at all levels.
v) Fostering transition leadership learning networks and communities of practice.
7. Reframing Our Thinking About Action
In this paper I've argued that humankind is hurtling towards a collision with the limits of the biosphere. For the first time a single species is disrupting the planet's critical life support systems with unknowable but almost certainly catastrophic consequences. Nothing in our evolutionary experience compares with the challenge this represents.
But if large-scale systemic collapse is looming, it also offers an opportunity for a renewal of the human project. As William Morris wrote: "Ill were it not for the change within the change."
History and nature teach us that many complex systems, like civilisations and ecosystems under certain conditions, tend to cycle from effusion to maturity, over-extension and breakdown, which in turn creates the conditions for renewal. This could be the "change within the change" of the global emergency our profligacy has provoked.
Existing political, social, and economic institutions are, by and large, unequal to this challenge. They were shaped by the demands of an entirely different world and are structurally and culturally maladapted to the context we now face. Sustainability action that is ultimately directed at changing the policies and actions of these institutions can, at best, result only in advances at the margins.
Thus the viability of our species through this transition is an open question. To successfully transit such a planetary phase-shift will require the transformation of our deepest cultural values, the core organising principles of our civilisation – from human exceptionalism to reintegration within the planet's matrix of life. A fundamental shift of this nature would necessarily cascade into a rethinking of all the social forms by which we live and work. It is a project for generations, but I believe it is critically important that we make a start.
Such a transformation requires both deep remembering and radical creativity. We need to remember what surviving indigenous cultures demonstrate we have long known about the interdependence of all life. And we need to creatively embrace the universe story that modern science has revealed to us. Only on this basis, I'd contend, can we reestablish a viable place within the community of life.
To seize this opportunity we need to better understand the nature of the transition ahead and how complex adaptive systems evolve. We must also begin now to develop the social resilience and innovative cultural resources that can carry us up an extremely steep learning curve to a new stage on our evolutionary journey.
Adaptive social learning could be an important vehicle for such conscious cultural evolution. We will ever remain biological creatures but we are now 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 the ways to apply this collective learning potential to ensure the continuing viability of our species within the Earth's biosphere is probably the key challenge before us.
In making this argument it has not been my intention to dismiss the many forms of action designed to promote a viable Australia in a viable world. No one can know how the gathering global emergency will play out over the 21st century or what responses by communities, nations, and international bodies will prove effective.
My intention is not to dissuade anyone from ethical action for the Earth. Of course we must mobilise public opinion to influence today's decisions in cabinets, board rooms and executive suits. Of course we must advocate for and where possible act to protect those who are voiceless in these forums – the manifold life forms we share this planet with and future generations of our own kind.
I am simply proposing that there is a place for a more critically reflective dialogue informed by emerging insights into the behavior of complex systems and a deeper inquiry into the roots of our culture -- a dialogue that takes an over-the-horizon view of where we are heading and its meaning for what we do now.
My plea is that we liberate our thinking from the confines of wishful thinking and outmoded assumptions and take a bolder more inspiring view of human potential within the unfolding of life on Earth.
Thanks to impermanence, everything is possible.
Thich Nhat Hanh, The Practice of Looking Deeply
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