In order to learn, teach, and live a OneEarth story we need to move decisions out of the story of human civilization—a 12,000 year long story dominated by gradually intensifying MultiEarth ways which have been pursued as superior. But Earth’s blowback on that story now exposes it as the product of a consciousness that is less than we humans were evolved to live. A New Story, which really means we’re updating our understanding of Earth’s old, unfolding story, calls on a fuller range of the capacities of our minds and greater Self. When we shift our identities from ego-consciousness to the consciousness of our greater Self, we are able to move beyond dualisms, competitions, and imperialisms that bedevil civilization, and into a holism in which we are interdependent with all of creation.
Earth’s story tells us that civilization’s story is an unsustainable mutation that will die in its current form. Just as emphatically, Earth’s story gives all humans with the consciousness to do so an opportunity and an imperative to move into her story, a four billion year story in which Homo sapiens learned, from our first appearance, 200,000 years ago, to live in right relationship with all species. But once the civilization story was invented, it has unfailingly presented itself as a superior story of progress.
The OneEarth worldview evolves in sync with nature, mimicking the natural systems that cycle through small and large circles, ever transitioning from life to death to new forms of life. These productive cycles evoke in our species a sense and experience of mystery and awe, of generosity, of love, of sharing and cooperation—all components in an experience long called sacred. These are all experiences that draw on the stronger and more mature capacities of Homo sapiens. The MultiEarth story minimizes these capacities, functioning in the absence of the sacred. In that absence, it generates an alternative spirituality in a pantheon of deities headed by the god of The Market and idealizing, idolizing profit and power. The OneEarth worldview, when presented as an expression of Earth’s evolutionary story, gives a withering critique of the religious function of the MultiEarth story and exposes its distortions of what it means to be human and the beneficial ferment of creation’s ways.
Components of the OneEarth story include:
- Earth Community includes human community living interdependently with all species and biosystems.
- The Commons evokes human capacities of cooperation-competition balance that mimic what is found throughout nature; corporate-led MultiEarth stories elevate competition and seek to civilize nature.
- Commonwealth is richer than all private wealth ever can be. A corollary is that wealth is not the same as lots of money.
- Abundance is richer than any prosperity civilization can deliver.
- A sense of Earth’s abundant enough, in contrast to the illusion of unlimited growth, increases innovation and creativity.
- Democracy as an extension of how nature functions achieves fair distribution more effectively than civilization’s corporate-led or state-led markets.
- Local generates life for regions without destroying global connections.
- Wellbeing and happiness can happen through OneEarth stories in degrees that MultiEarth’s civilization story cannot deliver.
The choice between a OneEarth and MultiEarth story is a matter of which one we trust most to give life. The determining element of trust, means that our choice going forward is an integrative spiritual or holistic matter, calling on us to engage our best logic, science, imagination, and intuition, as well as recognizing that the story of Earth and Cosmos have an ultimacy that transcends the fullest capacities of our species and all others. We are fully capable of living the OneEarth story and have evolved to do so.