A Happy New Year to everyone, everywhere. This is of course using the Gregorian calendar, which is the dominant one used at the point for most global businesses. But it might be good to remind everyone that it isn’t just the Chinese that have a different date for the New Year. There are over 40 different calendars in use around the world that measure the year through calendars other than the Gregorian one using the solar cycle. The solar cycle measures the time it takes for the planet to rotate around the sun between the vernal equinoxes – this means adding an extra day every four years. A lunar calendar tracks the phases of the moon throughout the year, a which gives a slightly shorter year necessitating adding an extra month every 3 years. The lunisolar calendar uses both the solar and moon phases to track time and needs odd days added here and there according to specific calculations unique to each lunisolar calendar. So why is this pertinent to this blog? Just need you to get away from the notion that everyone in the world is thinking the same way. Each area and region can find ways to live sustainably that fit with the specifics of that place. In other words, there is no ‘one’ right way! But there are basic principles that can be followed (Hence the title of my 2012 textbook, Principles of Sustainable Living).
A continuation of a fictional reflection by a hundred-year-old Esperanza (Espe) from 2112 about the start of the transformation to Sustainable Living. I add clarification links and quotes as needed.
I recall my father telling everyone that the way forward was not technological but socio-spiritual. My father disdained religious practices that emphasized human dominance, and pushed for a more spiritual practice of living that had humans as part of the ecosphere and not controllers of it. He was fond of using quotes from many great thinkers of his time (early 21st century) that made this point – we need to change our worldview. “We need to change the way we view the world and our place in it”…”We have become the impatient species, too busy to let nature replenish itself and too puffed up with our own sense of importance to acknowledge our utter dependence on its generosity” David Suzuki. The worlds ecological problems were getting worse and for humanity to make it, we had to realize how the materialistic consumer worldview was failing us in every way.
As I said earlier, the solution was to move away from materialism. And while the powers that be had a different notion of what the future would be, through the use of their draconian actions during the Covid era (2020-2030), they inadvertently created the path of change that people were now willing to follow for a more sustainable future.
The big change was a change in ethics that created a different worldview. Philosophers throughout the centuries from the Greeks to modern times have debated human ethics and I suspect they will continue to do so as situations and times change demanding a fresh look at how our actions affect humanity, all life and the world in general. I recall the 2078 treatise of Enrique Diego Sanchez explaining how humanity had transformed so radically during the previous 50 years, more than it had since the time of the Greek philosophers. Yet, it was the change that was required if the planet was to thrive with humans on it. My father, the professor of sustainability in the U.S., always talked about the ideas of Aldo Leopold and his ‘Land Ethic’ (e.g., The Non-Solid Universe 2 – Human Societies Before Civilization – Deep Spirituality {March 2018} and A New Beginning – Part 5: Interconnectedness – a deeper introduction {January 2021}).
Wise ecologically minded Philosophers across the planet came together in 2028 in a great conference, ‘The Great Connection’ to help people understand the transition that had to happen. I was 26 years old and proud to accompany my father, who was one of the many speakers, in leading this amazing transition – he used Aldo Leopold as a model of different thinking. For sure, it was a chaotic time but so many people across the world people were ready to listen to a new, and what we believed, was a better path for humanity. While many outside of the U.S. at this conference had not heard of Aldo Leopold, they found his teaching from 1947 resonated readily with their own views on how worldviews had to change.
Leopold ‘s vision was that the relationships between people and land are intertwined. Care for people cannot be separated from care for the land – this moral code was the core of how we treat each other, and also the natural world. Leopold had coined the term ‘Land ethic’ yet, there are many philosophical theories that spoke about how humans should treat the land. Most had their roots in economics, utilitarianism, libertarianism, egalitarianism, and ecology so it wasn’t hard to get buy-in. My father readily admitted that Leopold’s land ethic couldn’t prevent the use or alteration of the land, but it did help protect it from the conqueror mindset that had caused so much global ecological destruction. As Leopold said in his beautiful yet understated book ‘A Sand County Almanac,’ a land ethic ideally makes humans feel as though they are respectful citizens of the land-community, not conquerors of it.
You don’t just come out of a materialistic worldview and start living the lifestyle of some highly technological hunter gatherer, which is what some back in 2025 thought was going to happen. The misconceptions and preconceptions of sustainability beyond being green technological were quite an impediment to the transformation. If not for the unintended consequences of the draconian actions perpetrated on humanity, changes that were coming might have taken a darker direction. Fortunately, people everywhere had had enough. The puppet masters totally misunderstood the deeper spiritual nature of humanity, and it was this that brought people together in their desire for something different and I might add in retrospect, better.
Change was already happening on a global scale, but the conference created a big demand for inclusion, recognition of personal sovereignty, human rights and civil rights – all expressed positively. And as importantly, technological progress also transformed quickly. Things that could not have occurred before the Covid Era were viable options by 2028 to create the Nova Renascentia. So many things had to change, almost simultaneously, that without the draconian actions it would have taken longer for people to break out of the materialist mindset set in place by the Medieval Renaissance so many centuries before.
For one, scientists began to rethink the many ideas they were researching. In just a few years, before 2030, science was no longer the sole truth finder it pretended to be and accepted a broader and more ethical view of technology. While scientists from Tesla with his global power supplies to Oppenheimer and the Atomic bomb there was always a ethical component below the surface, but this had been suppressed by the globalized corporate systems of the later 20th and early 21st centuries. What happened after 2028 was a much needed merging of science, philosophical teaching, and spirituality understanding coming together to transform humanities thinking. This created a growing integrity of the academic influence of the world, that created a connection with the natural world as a natural connection.
By 2030, people all over the world starting releasing the fear that had been so engrained for millennia as part of their social conditioning. They were willing to expand their consciousness and truly become the Homo Sapien Sapien they were meant to be. In 2112, the young are amazed when they hear what a challenge that had been, but transition, while unstoppable by 2030, was by no means straightforward.
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