Earth Has Sent Us Her Overdraft Notice for 2012

With the arrival of September 1, I remembered that September was the month when we begin to use more of Earth’s resources than her capacities can provide for the year. But I’m already too late. It had been in September! But this year the overdraft notice went out on August 22. We’re now drawing down the inheritance of future generations and other species.

On Aug. 22, we slipped into borrowing from the future without even noticing it. That’s how I became a Multi Earther: unconsciously. All I was wanting to do was make the best choices for self-improvement, self-responsibility, and advancement. But while doing so, the Multi Earth consciousness and paradigm captured me.

This blog is not an academic blog, though the voices and sources I bring to this space have credibility in academia. My blog is a personal, confessional blog of one who has joined with others in the primary odyssey of our age. It is a journey we will make together or not make at all.

Thus, I write with the hope that you, the readers, will go further into One Earth living and scatter your comments among the blog entries. As you do, you will undoubtedly generate additional consciousness among us all.

I believe that when personal stories are written and shared, readers implicitly feel invited to think about the same issues in their own lives. In this non-directive way, this blog asks readers to explore, without guilt, shame, or despair, “How did I become a Multi Earther? Why do these unsustainable ways have such a grip on me? And what will I do to live with a different consciousness and worldview?”

Having already gone into living off the inheritance of future generations, can we not hear them wanting our answers to these questions?  

Sharing our answers publicly and confessionally, provides a doorway, I believe, to the transformation of people and policies into One Earth consciousness and culture.

'Fessing Up & Thinking Mythologically, Are You More Like Cain or Abel?

If someone were telling me the Cain-Abel story, and then asked, “Who in the story do you most identify with?” I’d hesitate. If I say “Abel,” I identify with the victim of murder. If I say “Cain” I identify with the murderer. But when I remember that Abel represents the One Earth paradigm in this myth, and Cain bears the burden of the Multi Earth paradigm, I can identify some with both.

Having already acknowledged my Multi Earth ecological footprint earlier in this blog, I know Cain lives in me as well as Abel who is that part of me questing for One Earth living. I like being the good guy in stories. But I do feel jealous and envious far more than I admit publicly; and, whether actively or passively, I have sought revenge in varying degrees. Furthermore, Cain’s notion that he could improve on One Earth ways lives in me and lives at the crux of my decisions when I choose Multi Earth ways.

Our decisions are complicated because we love creativity and improving things. Not that anything about Eden or One Earth living thwarts creativity. The question seems to be more whether our creativity is within the creational order or improving upon those orders themselves. Are we going about creating from our ego-centered, Cain-like self or are we centered in a greater Abel-like self that is in tune with Creation?

U.S. Decline Brings a New Moment for Faith in One Earth Mythology

The failing infrastructure in U.S. education, roads, mass transit, soil and biodiversity protection, drinking water quality, and waterways all indicate a superpower in decline. So do our lagging behind in green energy and rapid rail. As has happened throughout the Multi Earth story’s history, empires lose resiliency as their interior weakens.

The Jews in Babylon way back in 587 B.C.E. give us one such historical example. They knew that their own Multi Earth experiment in the monarchies of David, Solomon, and their successors, ended horribly. Plus, when they heard their conquerors’ stories, these conquered Jews knew beyond a doubt that they needed stories to help them understand how humans were being repeatedly tricked into believing the shining lie of Multi Earth living. Like them, I too want stories that expose Multi Earth ways and speak truthfully about the possibility of One Earth living. With the great U.S. superpower in decline, those stories have a new moment to be embraced.

My search for such stories and practices has been all the more challenging because of the many voices I’ve heard over my lifetime who’ve taught me to think of Eden more as history. As a story of the past, it tells how we humans fell into sin and that ever after we’ve been in a weakened state. In our fallen condition, human greed and Multi Earth ways become too mighty to be mastered. Capitalism is partly based on this idea. Since greed cannot be fully mastered, markets must be designed to make the best of greedy urges. But as myth, the choice of Eve and Adam in the Garden was for Multi Earth views, a terrible choice with sinful consequences, but not some psychological taint that has forever been passed along in historical succession. It’s just that too many humans have continued to choose Multi Earth views. Whenever we do so, we take our own bite from the forbidden fruit.

Over decades many teachers and authors have invited me to look through different lenses. As a result, I’ve been led to unbelief regarding Multi Earth stories and any reinterpretation of Eden or other One Earth myths that make them support the Multi Earth system. Instead, I’m putting faith in the One Earth paradigm and now seek the stories and interpretations that express it.

Eden as a Protest Story That Rejects Superpowers

The Jews living as captive refugees in foreign Babylon protested what they heard and saw there by compiling their own stories of how things had come to be as they were. Eden, Cain, and Abel are at their core protest stories, mythology rooted in dissent from Multi Earth ways.

But in addition to saying “No” to Babylon and empires, these stories also plotted a new direction for themselves. Living under Babylon’s Multi Earthers, the Jews saw anew the wisdom of the One Earth worldview. “How had they gotten so far away from it?” they wondered. Shunning the Babylonian Enuma Elish creation story in which humans and empires rise out of acts of violence among the gods, the Jews told stories that reconnected their own origins to an incredibly good Creation brought forth by powerful, nonviolent words of the Creator. They compiled Genesis as their anthology of their origins, including origins of what went wrong. 

Once I knew how and where the Eden, Cain, and Abel stories came to be, I recognized them as stories that know our situation today. The authors had lived in the bitterness of Multi Earth conquest more deeply than I have. They knew what it feels like to be living in the Multi Earth culture of a superpower and having to listen to its self-justifying stories. The stories they created in protest then, energize my turning from the Multi Earth story today and to make the story for One Earth living more fully my own. 

And now, I’d love to hear your comments on how retelling the stories of Cain, Abel, and Eden in this way radically reorients their significance for you facing the macro-issues today. 

Imagine! D.C. and New York City Destroyed, Their Leaders Forced to Live in Bejing

Wes Howard-Brook explains how Genesis, as we read it today, came together in Babylon among Jews whom the Babylonian military had removed from Jerusalem, marched forcibly to Babylon, and put into settlements there designed for captives taken in war. The Jews were hurting badly and needed stories that gave meaning to their ugly situation.

Living as Jewish refugees in the capitol city of the empire that had conquered them and their beloved Jerusalem, Genesis was their answer to what is otherwise the oldest written book of origins that we know, Enuma Elish, the Babylonian book of origins. Enuma Elish told how Babylon had been established by the gods. With that kind of lofty sacred heritage and divine authority, Babylonian Multi Earthers justified their right to bring their “superior ways” to the world around them, using force as necessary.Their expansionist plans included the land to their west which was controlled by the monarchy of Judah, a weak monarchy that was in considerable disarray. By 587 B.C.E., the Babylonians completed the leveling of Jerusalem. Included in the destruction was Solomon’s great Temple.

This double destruction of the two anchors of their culture had been inconceivable to the Jews. They were in as great a disbelief at what had happened as we would be if Washington, D.C., and New York City were demolished along with all of their economic centers, national shrines, and houses of religious worship. Furthermore, imagine all of the ruling elite of these cities being taken captive to live in Beijing, China, or any other foreign city of power. 

The same Jews who had that unimaginably devastating trauma brought together the story of Eden and its immediate sequel Cain and Abel. More about how these stories vigorously protest empire will follow in subsequent blog posts.

What stories would we tell if two of our city-centers of power and wealth were destroyed and military reprisal was NOT an option?

Wes Howard-Brook Retells Eden for One Earth Living

My assertions about those who first told the stories of Cain, Abel, and Eden, come from scholars whose writings I have sought out to answer my own questions about why so many people feel more attracted to Multi Earth living rather than One Earth living. One such scholar, Wes Howard-Brook, distinguishes between empire religion and creation religion, rough equivalents of Multi Earth and One Earth worldviews.

One day, when I opened the Catholic Agitator, the newsletter of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, I read a highly affirming review by Frank Cordero of Howard-Brook’s book, “Come Out, My People!” God’s Call Out of Empire in the Bible and Beyond. I recognized quickly that this book was important to my quest. 

Howard-Brook teaches theology and scripture at Seattle University. He gives a long, well-researched answer to the question, “Just who were these storytellers who told the tales of Eden, Cain, and Abel?” I wanted to know who, when, and why they were told. Were they living in the cities that adherents to Cain’s worldview built or were they back-to-the-land peasants?

The short answer is they were Jews living in the grand city of Babylon in the 6th century B.C.E. when Babylon was the center of the dominating Babylonian Empire. These stories were their protest stories, protesting what was for them the highly offensive stories they heard in Babylon to justify the Babylonian empire of conquest and domination.

I’ll unpack this short answer in blogs over the next days. 

Let's Take Back the Great Eden Myth so It Can Help Us Shape One Earth Living

The Eden myth has been told and taught for centuries in ways that play completely into the hands of Multi Earth thinking. That’s what happens when we make it a story of how we humans individually “fell” from innocence into sin. But that’s NOT what the original storytellers were talking about.

When the Eden story was first being told it was by tellers who anguished as they observed a phenomenon in which fellow humans continued to chose out of the One Earth paradigm. As they watched so many around them put their faith in Multi Earth ways, and believed that doing so meant progress, they shook their heads in dissent.

Many of them had even tried Multi Earth ways for themselves, but had come to see those ways for what they are: highly seductive illusions. They turned from them. They wanted once again to arrange their lives economically and politically in step with One Earth living. They preferred One Earth ways, not because they did not know better or because they didn’t care about being “modern” and up to date, but because they had seen and tasted where Multi Earth thinking goes. They no longer believed it could finally deliver on its promises. It was a forbidden fruit for good reason. Despite its delicious appearance and the first juicy bite, successive bites turn gradually into an unpleasant taste, a bitterness. Today, more than ever, we know the bitterness of having bitten into Multi Earth ways.

Much more about Eden will follow on this blog, but all of us who are inclined to, can start immediately correcting how this story gets told. It’s proven across centuries that it has great mythic power to shape life. It still does. But instead of playing into the worldview of Multi Earthism, we need to tell Eden as its first storytellers did, as the story about the paradigm of One Earth ways and the negative logical consequences of believing Multi Earthism will improve on them.

Are you on board?