A Table Contrasting Multi Earth and One Earth Worldviews (Part 1)

While teaching a group of bright, second-career students at the Chaplaincy Institute for the Arts and Interfaith Ministries in Berkeley, CA, this past June, one asked, “Can you tell us more what you mean by Multi Earth and One Earth?” I wished, then, that I could hand them a table contrasting the two. But I didn’t have one. Now I do. Below is the first of half a dozen installments that will come along on this blog, not necessarily in succession. It’s a work in progress that your comments can surely improve. 

The table shows that worldviews impact all of our structures and behaviors throughout society. It is not comprehensive, but illustrative. The six contrasting points in the first section give a general “Overview.” Subsections that will follow will elaborate on how the two worldviews contrast with one another.

Multi Earth Worldview	One Earth Worldview
Human species strives for lifestyles that use more resources than available on one planet	Human species aims for lifestyles within the abundant resources of one planet
All systems from food production to finance, commerce, and government designed to extract more and more despite creational order and limits	All systems from food production to finance, commerce, and government designed with a sense of abundance within creational order and limits
Ecological footprint exceeds one planet	Ecological footprint fits within one planet
Emphasis on individualism socially and economically reflects the effort to understand all of reality by finding, separating, and examining every particle of matter in search of the basic building block for the whole; energy, community and spirit/Spirit are in a sidebar to essential reality	Emphasis on the entire community of life socially and ecologically reflects the effort to understand all of reality by observing the interdependence of all things, and the energy and spirit/Spirit that holds all systems in vibrant, evolving interconnection
Timeframes shaped by rewarding those who act most quickly to gain advantages in economics and power	Timeframes shaped by rewarding those whose actions consider other species, future generations, nature’s seasons, and Earth’s eco-region cycles
Technology brings convenience, speed, improvement, health, wealth, and scores of advantages in overcoming obstacles to human life and progress; optimism abounds because of wealth created by new products and how they fix and save human enterprises	Technology brings benefits when it is to scale within the parameters of planetary and species wellbeing; skepticism comes from destruction of the planet and people that result from manufacture and use of many technologies

Which Purple Flower Describes This Blog?

Recently, Ellen Roberts Young wrote about the One Earth Project on her blog, Free Thought and Metaphor: Two Sides of One Mind. The interesting blog name provokes curiosity about its content. Ellen delivers there too.

She compared my voice on this blog to a small purple flower in her yard. What’s not to like about that? Anytime my speech can be described by a biological metaphor, I smile, because more and more I am turning to nature for her teaching. It’s so revelatory. Whole. Imaginative. Truthful. Wonder-filled.

Ellen makes the point that this small plant in her yard will be seen by those who look attentively. Her metaphor works for me because it describes what has taken me to blog here about One Earth living. For several years I’ve looked attentively for those who see through the worldview that holds us captive in the irrationality of living as if we have many planets eager to resource our dominating ways. I look for the thinkers freed from that captivity; the metaphors that put doorways into the solid walls of the too-small ego-consciousness that imprisons us — doorways through which we can walk into our truer capacities as participants in a rich interdependence with one planet.

So, again, my gratitude to Ellen for her creativity and continuing work with free thinking and metaphor. Be sure to check out her blog. 

A Divine Tattoo Warns Us against Cain's Multi Earth Worldview

This blog has reinterpreted the millennia-old Cain-Abel myth because, like John Steinbeck in East of Eden, I see it as a compelling myth opposing Multi Earth powers and as a guide for One Earthers to strongly encounter and resist our contemporary situation.

That guidance emphasizes that our resistance to Multi Earthism can best happen without vengeance. Look at the myth again. Cain went from feeling superior to Abel to feeling a victim, fearing that he could be murdered himself. But Yahweh intervened to prevent the notion that One Earthers should rise up against Multi Earthers in revenge. Cain was given a mark, a divine tattoo, if you will. The divine mark on Cain, and therefore the Multi Earths story, is not like the mark on a tree designated to be cut down. The divine mark is not intended to make the Multi Earth story an easier mark for One Earthers to destroy.

The divine tatoo is intended to show us what not to follow. The better we learn the Multi Earth worldview and its mutant traits, the better we know what to look for. When we see the marks of the Multi Earth economy, then, no matter how they may be trying to lure us, we see the tatoo. It warns us, “Stay away if you deeply care for people, planet, and species.” With that kind of consciousness, we are more likely to invoke our greater capacities and choose Abel’s One Earth ways.

Cain’s ways are, after all, not the only way to live. Nor is east of Eden the only place. Choosing Abel’s worldview will empower us to bring a contemporary One Earth version of his offering which Yahweh, the Creator, found pleasing. We CAN offer such to the world, and without vengeance toward Multi Earthers. The divine tattoo tells us to spare the energy that goes into vengeance and use it to strengthen One Earth living.

"But Look at All the Good Multi Earth Ways Achieve"

“But what about the good that Multi Earth ways achieve?” people ask. The urgent necessity of separating ourselves from Multi Earther ways gets blunted for us because we can see Multi Earthers achieving good ends. Multi Earthers continually sell and defend the good they do. We dissenters focus on the bad, often from painful personal experiences. Analyzing the benefits and the costs is made more difficult because many of the benefits can happen quickly while many of the costs can take decades to appear. 

In subsequent blogs, I will acknowledge some of the benefits. But the Cain and Abel story minces no words. Those storytellers saw clearly that the Multi Earth world generates envy and murder. No sooner do Multi Earthers create hierarchies of power and wealth but that envy appears for more of Earth’s natural wealth. Acting upon that envy, Multi Earth ways murder the One Earth ways from which they were born and from which they seceded.

As I see it, today the blood of Earth’s ecosystems cry out like Abel’s blood cried out from the earth. Multi Earth living continues to murder Abel, a One Earther, and the worldview that shapes such. Yet, I am tempted to understate this antagonism of Multi Earth economics, religion, and politics toward their One Earth counterparts; or conversely, to rant against it. 

How do you see it?

A Common Humanity — An Essential Consciousness for One Earth Living

We do not as a species live with a collective consciousness that we are a common humanity. The illusion of the central position prevents it. So, we identify ourselves nationalistically, ethnically, and according to whatever our egos need. Our diversity, though enriching at times, remains a basis for hate, hellish war, and obsene amounts of police and military spending. We aren’t a “we;” we are “us” and lots of “thems.” We do not currently have the political imagination nor the psychological or spiritual maturity to think of ourselves as a magnificently diverse One People, nourished by cooperation and sharing with all Creation. 

Nonetheless, strong examples exist of ethnically diverse people from different nations imagining themselves as a common humanity. One example is in Tucson, Arizona. Side-by-side with the immature consciousness of many Arizonans that plot apartheid and spews hate are those who shape the new consciousness that recognizes the deep bonds between us all, and act on them.

Immigrant advocates in Tucson, along with immigrants from Latin America, see themselves as loyal citizens of their country AND simultaneously bonded in a common humanity. You can read all about it in an engaging book, A Common Humanity: Ritual, Religion, and Immigrant Advocacy in Tucson, AZ, by Lane Van Ham and published by the U of Arizona Press in 2011. A YouTube of the author doing a presentation on his book and a podcast interview are also accessible. (Full disclosure: Lane is my son.)

It’s fascinating how immigrant advocates find the language to express that larger consciousness they intuitively have about how we humans are more deeply connected than our biggest differences can separate. Sometimes their language is humanistic, sometimes political or spiritual. Always their imaginations help take them beyond the more ordinary and confining definitions of who we are into language discovering who we are in the greater whole — that space in which we can live together on one planet and be more complete because of it.

The Illusion of the Central Position — We're Seeing Plenty of That!

Seeing ourselves as the wisest species, we presume that we know how to use, manage, and control more of the powers of nature than we actually do. Our ego-centric views of the world childishly underestimate and understate nature’s wild, wonderfulness. Even though the civilized way of living, shaped by this illusion, has us repeating acts of horrific destructions, we continue to live with our ego-centric assumptions, most of which are too small to assess the true size of Earth’s drama. 

Take the Multi Earth economy as an example. Each time we apply a new technology in the service of the economic structures we have designed for our short-term profit, the illusion of the center position provides us with a bubble of reality to justify what we do. But this illusion dooms its own project, the current civilization. Blinded by Multi Earth civilization, the ego-centric fruit of the knowledge of good and evil that Eden presents so timelessly, we do not see the intricate interconnections throughout our living planet. Yet those interconnections vigorously interact day and night to generate the cornucopia of life. Only within the context of that cornucopia have we made the Multi Earth economy work, and then only for those who have benefited from it.

The current 2012 election cycle in the U.S. gives us an oversupply of the rhetoric of illusion! People caught up in the central position can wear nice clothes, smile big, and speak clever sound bytes. It’s up to us to look past the surface and see the illusion! Planning for One Earth living is not on their minds! So there’s certainly no evidence there that we are a wise species. I’m looking elsewhere.

Are We Humans Truly the Apex of Creation's Evolutionary Process?

A friend once referred to our ego-centric views of the world as the “illusion of the central position.” I didn’t get the meaning immediately, but with a bit of reflection I understood his point.

We humans repeatedly see ourselves as having the best idea and wanting to put our perspective at the center of what needs to happen. But maturity is, in part, getting beyond this illusion. Essential as ego development is in childhood, staying there only assures that in adulthood we will use childish ways of seeing the world to describe reality. 

When we live the illusion of the central position, we see humans, including ourselves, as the culmination of the four and a half billion years evolutionary process. Everything until now has been prelude for our arrival! I’ve heard motivational and self-help speakers put it this way as they seek to stir us into believing we can do what we haven’t yet tackled.

Bur what if it ain’t so? Surely Earth’s processes can generate a species of human capacities or greater that can work with her instead of destroy her? If the central position is illusion, what would you say is reality?

I believe there are far more profound psychic spaces to locate our identity than our egos. Wouldn’t all of Creation rejoice if we did?