The mainstream news is not about what is working well, but only about what is NOT working. If the mainstream is all that you hear then you can be forgiven for thinking that the world is heading to hell in a hand-basket. Don’t get me wrong, we have passed, or are about to pass, several thresholds that will soon force humanity to change how it lives on this planet. Watch the movies and you will see numerous doomsday type scenarios (e.g. Mad Max) or feudal societies (e.g. Hunger Games) where a dismal dystopic future apparently awaits us. What I am mostly concerned about is that it is rare for the mainstream to give us positive and hopeful futures where humanity actually thrives in a changing world.
We were once a species that merely reacted to events that occurred on our planet – mostly weather or geological events (e.g. storms, droughts, volcanic activity). But with the coming of the industrial revolution we entered a new era of human evolution – technological homo sapien sapien. The crisis we face is not about surviving any apparent cataclysms to come, but adapting to a changing world by rethinking how we live well in a future where the planet and human society is already changing. It seems that within the mainstream we ignore discussing potential problems if they seem to big to deal with, instead pretending the world is going to keep on going as it is. And if there’s one thing you should have gotten from my blog is that the world we know is fast changing whether we like it or not. I certainly do not want to believe that humanity has to live through a rebirthing through some disaster as written about by George R Stewart’s in his 1949 novel Earth Abides. We can do that now with acceptance, adaptation and resiliency of the best of our society – and examples of what and how to this this exist already.
We can use technology to help built a nurturing world or to destroy it – we are now co-creators of what happens in our world. No longer are we simply sitting on the sidelines. We are now the major players in the life of the planet. We are walking a razors edge and need to take our role seriously. That set of choices will determine the fate of future generations and the life on the planet. The world will not go away, this planet has shown over 3.5 billion years that it is a survivor, but the wonderful diversity of that we take for granted will be altered to our own species detriment. Nature is never malicious, yet it is quite happy to extinct species that do not blend with its focus on adaptability and sustainability. Will humanity wake up to its duty to be in harmony, or just noisily slip away into oblivion? It is not my aim to be negative here but merely to ask the question whether we can wake up to what is happening. Somethings we cannot easily cope with such as environmental catastrophes, but even then we can prepare to adapt to such eventualities.
So, what is the worst-case environmental scenario? Ironically, it is not Global Climate Disruption – that is a longer term issue. I would have to say a solar superstorm. In September, 1859, there was a powerful geomagnetic solar super storm. This is a coronal mass ejection (CME) that if it hits the Earth’s magnetosphere causes widespread electrical disruptions. We recognized it for the first time in 1859 because we had the electrical telegraph system that was knocked out for several days. If it were to happen today, it would cause not just global electrical shutdowns, with resulting blackouts but extensive damage to all aspects of the electrical grid. Satellites would be fried and all global communications would be completely knocked out including all computers and phones. In case you think this is a rare event, in 2012, we missed a similar superstorm by a mere 9 days of the Earth’s orbit. I don’t give you this to scare you but to ask, what would we do if we had to adapt to another way of life, literally overnight? Countries where technology is negligible would adapt quite readily. What about the technologically developed areas of the world?
Jem Bendell has done an informal survey of responses to how people think about impending societal collapse – in this case he uses climate disruption, but the answers are good for any scenario (https://jembendell.wordpress.com/2018/08/25/after-acceptance-some-responses-to-anticipating-collapse/?utm_source=discussion_mailer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=user_mentioned)
I like his summary comment, “I have met many more people who believe an imminent societal collapse invites personal and collective transformation with universal love at the core, than I have met people who become grim survivalists.” What this implies is that most people are already mentally prepared for changes coming but need to actually start discussing what they would do if and when such changes occur.
Most of the spiritual gurus have been telling us that humanity is in the middle of a shift even as the planetary thresholds are creating conditions for required for societal transformation. Futurist author and speaker Barbara Marx Hubbard says:
So, the path of the co-creator is to be awakened spiritually within, which then turns into your own deeper life purpose, which then makes you want to reach out and touch others in a way that expresses self and really evolves our communities and our world. Certainly, we can’t do that unless we activate ourselves first. That’s why, for me, emergence is the shift from ego to essence. That is so important…In the next 30 years we can destroy our world. With the very same powers – spiritual, social, scientific – we can evolve our world. Our mission is to serve as catalysts for a planetary awakening in our lifetime, to take a non-violent path to the next stage of our evolution. Synergy does not mean giving up what we want. It means joining to co-create so each is able to receive ever more of what attracts us through joining rather than opposing.
Change is already happening. We can keep on acting as everything will suddenly become OK, or it will happen so far in the future we don’t have to think about it. Or we can start thinking and talking about what we should be doing to prepare for a world, both environmentally and societally different than the one we currently inhabit. How do we empower ourselves to break out of this current consensus reality to co-create a new world?
TBC……………….
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