"I Know We're in a Mess; What Can I Do to Make a Real Difference?"

Some of you who read this One Earth Project blog will be impatient for meaningful actions. “I know we’re in a terrible mess,” you may well say, “just tell me what I can do.” That impatience is in me too.

So here’s what I urge as our starting point. The first thing to do is to go deep with the question: “How am I a Multi Earther?” To do that with any traction and fun, you must know your own ecological footprint. If you know it, proceed. If you don’t, go to the most scientific calculator available on the web and do it now.

Unless our doing aligns us with One Earth living, we will expend our energy and time on a goal too small. Every election cycle we hear Democrats, Republicans, conservatives, and liberals all acting with fervor. But despite their fervor for winning, both the winners and losers continue to advance the goals of Multi Earth living. We need to reframe our actions at the level of a One Earth consciousness and paradigm. Unless what we do embraces our one planet’s embedded wisdom, we will not get to where we now need to go. 

To telegraph the direction of this blog, we’re heading for entrees that delve deeper into why shaking Multi Earth living is devilishly hard. Understanding that better increases our percentages for choosing actions that truly make a difference instead of spinning our wheels. Shortly, this blog is heading into a bend on the power of myth to hold us in Multi Earth ways. Beyond the bend we’ll travel into five Earth-destroying patterns that we can change:

1. Multi Earth economics functions as religion, receiving tremendous devotion.
2. Corporations, more than governments, rule the world.
3. You know the frustrations of not being treated like a human being in the Multi Earth way of doing things? It’s not just personal. It’s purposeful.
4. Despite all the praise for democracy, there can never be robust, full participation style democracy under a Multi Earth economy.
5. Our human species has tripled since 1940 to 7,000,000,000. In addition, we are the most aggressive species on the planet. Despite our intelligence, the Multi Earth paradigm seems impotent to address this life-destroying imbalance.

Stay tuned.

America's UnAmerican Activities Flip My Paradigm at Midlife

At midlife my eyes began to open to what I could not see before. In my fifties, what had been orthodox in the morning of life sometimes turned into heresy, and many previous heresies were becoming my truth. By my mid-fifties, I had connected with a lot of people who had been deeply converted politically, economically, and religiously by their experiences in Latin America. All had come to believe that the U.S. and Multi Earth impacts in these countries were mostly wrong, sometimes desperately so. Those relationships offered a safe and sacred place for my own deep changes. When I moved from Lincoln, Nebraska, to the Chicago area, I found other people for whom experiences in Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, or other Latin American countries had similarly been a turning point. One of them was Juanita, a member of the congregation I pastored. She was deeply impacted when she participated in a two week delegation to Nicaragua and Guatemala, seeing and feeling firsthand the injustices of U.S. interventions in those countries and the consequent suffering inflicted on the lives of already struggling people.

The domination of Latin America by the U.S. has consistently including forcing Multi Earth ways onto Indigenous Peoples. The resistance of Indigenous Peoples consistently sprouts from their One Earth worldview. It is encouraging that in the past decade many Latin American countries are reshaping sectors of their economy using models closer to One Earth abundance and enough for all.

If you have had a paradigm flipping experience, please tell the One Earth Project by leaving your comment following this blog.

How Subtly the Multi Earth Paradigm Forms in Us

When I was born in 1940 in an Iowa farmhouse, I was born into a rural family in the early stages of recovery from the Great Depression. As we rented land to farm and lived simply, we had just enough. But I was also born into a country vigorously committed to Multi Earth ways. At age five or six I was playing with sugar rationing stamps leftover from World War II, unaware that my country was asserting itself into world dominance at that time. Soon, the Cold War was underway. In that conflict, two Multi Earth systems, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, faced off in several decades of geopolitical chess.

In school, when I studied “world history,” it was, truthfully speaking, not the history of the world at all. It was the history of Western Civilization. We ignored the history of much of the Far East and also the southern hemisphere. We studied those large regions only in so far as Europe and the U.S. were interested in them. Intentional or not, that view of “world history” built in me the consciousness that the West mattered most and that my country was the leader of the West. Unconscious of it at the time, that schooling nonetheless gave shape to my worldview.

Though neither my parents nor many others in my extended family had gone to high school, my sisters and I did. I continued on and went to college and graduate school, following the path of education that led me into middle class America. In the process, I came to accept that capitalism was superior to socialism, that my country generally was the more moral among global powers, and that America did democracy like my civics book said. It never occurred to me that my path had also taken me into the epitome of Multi Earth living.

What subtilties galvanized the Multi Earth paradigm in you?

A Multi Earth Paradigm? Might as well Believe the Sun Revolves around the Earth

None of us uses the paradigm of the sun revolving around our planet anymore. We know that such a paradigm has been used in the past, but we’ve discarded it. It’s way too inaccurate. And that’s where I am with the Multi Earth paradigm.

Along with many communities of people, I am discarding the Multi Earth worldview as too inaccurate. Many people, of course, are not there and continue their commitment to Multi Earth living.

By learning about how worldviews and paradigms function, I am better able to understand the tight grip and great influence the Multi Earth arrangements have on our species. After all the hard work of arriving at a paradigm, shifting to a different one feels uncertain. Risky. We can even fear that doing so is life threatening. Furthermore, when I recognize that meaningful paradigm shift isn’t just individual but community-wide or even global, I wilt in the hot sun of that seeming impossibility.

Yet, as I’ve been told more than once, “The future is too uncertain to predict that enormous change cannot happen.” Oddly, hope thrives in such uncertainty. With a better understanding of paradigms, I recognize that shifting out of the Multi Earth paradigm comes only through the tense death struggles of the previously held paradigm and the labor pains of the new. I believe the One Earth paradigm more accurately includes the big picture information Earth is giving us about how to live. But the death and birth of getting there as a living community of our species, not just as an individual, dramatizes why Multi Earthers hold onto their paradigm as long as possible — and that’s without even mentioning that most Multi Earthers get their livelihoods inside their paradigm. It’s hard to turn from the source of our income.

If you have examples of how you’re discarding the Multi Earth paradigm, please leave them in a comment below.

Pair 'o Dimes? No, I Said Paradigms!

A paradigm, Thomas Kuhn said, in his extraordinary book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is “an entire constellation of beliefs, values and techniques, and so on, shared by the members of a given community.” He understood that paradigms are strongly built arrangements in our minds based on how we perceive the world. Plus, they are held not just by me as an individual, but reinforced by a community of like-minded people.

For example, in the community of physicists, Isaac Newton (1642-1727) so brilliantly described the law of gravitation and laws of motion that for the next three centuries Newtonian physics was the paradigm by which the scientific community understood the universe. During those centuries, bits of data that did not fit with the Newtonian paradigm were ignored or rejected. But then came Albert Einstein (1879-1955) who showed how those bits of information helped us understand the universe even better. Thus was born the paradigm of quantum physics. 

Like polaroid lenses, paradigms let some light in and keep some out. Like all of us, my mind works hard to give me an arrangement of information (paradigm) that helps me make sense of what I experience. Everyone else in the communities of people with whom I share does the same thing. Among us evolves a broad consensus of approximately the same paradigm. We trust it and arrange our lives around it.

But learning about paradigms has also taught me that the paradigm in my mind screens my experiences so that only the information that fits the paradigm is taken in. What doesn’t fit — oh well, it must be wrong or irrelevant. Whatever paradigm the community I’m in uses, we do so because it helps us understand the world. Our temptation is to revere it so highly that we believe it’s superior to all others. But, in fact, it is only a paradigm, and it’s best to hold it with humility because no paradigm, no matter how useful it is, ever gives a complete and precise picture of reality. It gives me only the best picture that it can at the moment. New information, if I’m open to it, will likely demand that my paradigm be tweaked or replaced entirely. Because Multi Earth thinking is a paradigm, it grips our minds powerfully, despite the obvious failure of the thinking that we have several planets available for our use.

The Earth Story and the Civilization Story

Here is excerpt #3 from the forthcoming book and media project on one-Earth living, i.e., what is the economic model that fits within the resources of our one-planet home and how we can practice that now. Please offer your critiques to these excerpts.

There are two large stories, not one, underway in our lives. The one we hear most about is the story of human civilization; the unfolding story of world events, life in our community, and how we and our immediate circle of relationships participate in this story. This story so occupies what we call “news” that the second large story seems only for specialists who study it. It is the story of the Earth, our planetary home. This story, studied and told by life scientists, geologists, anthropologists, and paleontologists, is really the much larger, older, and dynamic of the two stories. It is, in fact, the larger context in which the human story happens. But for the majority of us, it is a secondary story—like a specialty shop for the few rather than a supermarket for the many.

Or so it was!  But no longer.

Today the Earth story is getting in our faces. It’s not just the meteorologists telling us about extreme weather. Nor the scientists telling us about new stars or new surprise discoveries of fossils or buried artifacts that fill gaps in the story. It is also insurance companies defining limits on which natural disasters they will cover as changes in climate are greatly increasing the number of disasters. It is the U.S. military planning for how to respond to conflicts arising from migrations caused by the exhaustion of mineral and oil resources, or by land that has been farmed for centuries turning to desert, or by low lands and shorelines becoming submerged by rising waters. It is people needing to change careers because their fishing business that has extended over several generations is no longer providing a living due to the collapse of marine species.

The Earth is speaking with increasing volume and frequency. Many of us are hearing her now; many are not. Still deaf. Or hearing, they rush to secure their privileges, power, and assets, not yet believing that Earth’s story holds the remaining trump cards. Or in a different metaphor some use, Earth bats last.

After reading this Section, look anew at the “news.” Which story is being talked about? We humans have been shaped to think that the story of human history is the only one, or at least the only one that really matters. The ego-centrism of that way of thinking contains within it the seed of its own destruction. That seed sprouted some time ago and is now bearing fruit. This Section says plainly why that way of thinking has been wrong all along. The two-story way of thinking is not only rooted in the truth of the Cosmos, it also gives us the story that we can live by if we can bring ourselves to choose it. Many already have. But as of this moment, the human civilization story continues its irrational pursuit of endless “progress” and unlimited growth. In this it behaves like cancer cells which grow and grow, outflanking the immune system, until they kill their host.  Is there still time to intervene? Is there still time, if we choose the Earth story to live by, for Earth’s immune system to gobble up the cancer cells and still offer humans and all species inhabitable Earth space? These are the questions we are living. The answers are not now known.