Multi Earthers Continue 12,000 Years of Secession from Earth's Community of Life

But Ishmael taught his student a different story. He told about a great separation that had happened in the storyline. Some of our human species became so sure that there was a better way than what had sustained us in Earth’s community of life for a couple hundred thousand years or longer, that we seceded from our union with that community. We began a different storyline. But that did not, therefore, end the lineage of all who continued to creatively live in the succession of Earth’s community.

What happened was that now two macro-stories were underway, each shaping differently what would follow. A more accurate diagram, Ishmael said, looks like this, with the Multi-Earth secession happening in the centuries as the Holocene Era began, around 10,000 B.C.E., ushering in a relatively stable, post-glacial age. It’s the only age that the story of western civilization has known.

 One-Earth Story _________________________________________________

                                                    \__Multi-Earths Story__________

According to Ishmael’s correction, what has been called prehistory in the schools of civilization, and commonly treated as inferior, is actually a long period when One Earth living was working for all species. It was Eden. 

Because of Ishmael and other teachers, what Eden means has changed for me. As I’ve come to see how healthy bioregions are the organic units comprising larger, life sustaining ecosystems, Eden has come to represent for me a planet that is a massive interplay of healthy ecosystems. The garden story of Genesis 3 portrays Eden, not as a perfect utopia, but as an evolved creational order of interdependence. Multi Earth living is hellbent on making the secession from it as complete as possible.

Please comment: Isn’t it stunning that Multi Earth living insists we can’t get away from our greed and selfishness so we need The Market to managae it? Yet, such thinking is a recent mutation of thought about our species given that we lived as One Earthers for nearly 200,000 years.

Is Human Prehistory Really Inferior to Multi Earth History?

Two diagrams have contributed to my awareness of the One Earth and Multi Earth stories as I see them operate both in and out of the consciousness of our species today. I first saw a version of these diagrams when Juanita and I read aloud to one another Daniel Quinn’s book, Ishmael.

In that story Ishmael, a gorilla, teaches a person about a way of viewing the world that includes not just humans but gorillas and all species. As his adult student returns regularly to the gorilla’s cage for more lessons, Ishmael challenges his student’s understanding of history. As Juanita and I read, my own view of history also came under the microscope. I, too, had been schooled to equate the history of human civilization with all of “history.”

Even more narrowly, most of what was called “world history” in my schooling was, as I said earlier, no more than the significant, but limited, story of western civilization. As I learned it, whatever came before that “history” was simply lumped together as “prehistory.” Prehistory was inferior to history. So I came to understand that we humans are an advanced species, having ascended from prehistory into history by way of one long continuous storyline that leads to the shining present. It could be simply diagrammed as follows.

Prehistory ————————-> History (10,000 BCE) ———————>

Before getting to the second diagram, the one that rattled my worldview, how about you? What were you taught about the relative significance of prehistory and history? And did your “world history” include more than the history of western civilization? Hopefully, my schooling was the exception.

Which of These Three Audiences Are You In?

Here are three audiences that I’m guessing are most interested in this blog. Which of the three are you in? (multiple answers welcome) OR, if you see yourself in a different audience entirely, … ahhh, then you simply must tell us (comment below) what audience that is!

1.The first audience is people who suspect, believe, or are open to considering that our ecological and economic crises today are also deeply spiritual. They want to engage our need to live on one planet with a worldview that is more powerful than the reigning one. Therefore, they are open to the spiritual and mythological and welcome learning about a compelling, modern worldview that connects with ancient wisdom in an appealing remix of what the Enlightenment separated into secular and sacred. The Cultural Creatives, studied by Paul Ray and Sheila Anderson and comprising 25% of the U.S. population, would be one group who fit this description. 

2. The second audience will be found in institutions and congregations of multiple faiths and traditions who are already pushing in the direction of this blog and my book or could be enticed by it. Because of the 32 years I led such organizations, I am conversant with the context and can target this audience rather readily. Examples:

• The Network for Spiritual Progressives
• Chaplaincy Institute for the Arts and Interfaith Ministries
• Faith and Money Network
• Simple Living Works
• Progressive Christianity

3. The third audience lies scattered in the business, academic, and economics professions. Our One Earth Project team knows people in this audience. They have have expressed interest in connecting with us around this book. Social entrepreneurs, heterodox economists, psychologists, green investors, and corporate attorneys are representative of people I am in relationship with who have an interest in the themes of this book. Most of these people are also active with nonprofit organizations which could become potential advocates of this book.  Examples:

• Center for Advancement of Steady State Economics
• Fast Company Magazine readers
• Wiseologie Media Group
• Industrial Strength Television
• The New Economics Institute
• Solidarity Economy Network

Please, please leave a comment telling us which audience you are in.

The Need for This Blog, and 3 Ways It Addresses that Need

A few weeks ago I completed a “Submission Proposal” to Berrett-Koehler Publishing that followed their guidelines. They have a wonderfully helpful AND challenging set of questions that need to be answered for them to look at a manuscript. Right off they ask, “What is the need for this book and how does it meet that need?” Since this blog has a lot of modified excerpts from the manuscript, my answer tells you what need I feel I’m addressing with this blog. Quoting from the proposal:

When it is obvious that we have only one Earth to live on, but continue to use the resources of more than one, we need to figure out what is going on. Why are our leaders and culture gridlocked, unable to solve this complex problem even when we know it can lead to our extinction? What is the nature of the grip that Multi Earth living has on us? And how can we be released from that grip in order to practice One Earth living more fully? Changing our Earth-destroying habits to life-enhancing ones will persist as the most demanding challenge for our species during upcoming decades. Therefore, interest in the themes of my book [this blog] will increase, not decline, for the foreseeable future.

My book [this blog] addresses the above need by

1. showing how Multi Earth living mesmerizes us despite the inevitable consequences of failure and death that come with  this worldview, 
2. emphasizing how we humans have the capacity to choose the One Earth worldview over the Multi Earth worldview, and 
3. disclosing my own struggle to reshape my life to One Earth living after having come under the spell of Multi Earth ways. I believe that as readers ponder the contrasting worldviews, consider the information I give, and follow my personal story, they will engage in self-reflection on their own Multi Earth vs. One Earth tensions. 

Today (8-7-12) I received a most pleasant phone call from Berrett-Koehler explaining that they would NOT be publishing my manuscript because they were preparing another with similar content for release in the spring. She encouraged me to submit it to other publishers because “you’ve done a lot of good work and it’s a very hot topic.”

If We Free Cain & Abel to be Myth, Then All of Us Get Indicted

Once I understood the brothers, Cain and Abel, mythologically, freed from history, I began to make other connections. The more I learned about the two worldviews they embodied, the more I recognized how Abel represented those who saw Earth as a great commons, providing enough for all through the highly cooperative human work of herding and a nomadic, migratory lifestyle. Cain, on the other hand, represented those who believed that improvement came when humans worked the soil to produce enough so that settlements could happen. Villages, and then cities, followed.

Increasingly, these settlers enclosed the commons, evolving practices allowing for private ownership. Their gains competed directly with the interests of migratory communities. Enclosing the commons continued as a trend, increasing over centuries into the present. Today, people with wealth, corporations, and richer nations follow in this centuries-long pattern of bringing commonly held land into private, highly-profitable ownership. Doing so has been essential to Multi Earth “success.” It’s a primary way that the worldview of Cain has thrived through countless incarnations into the present.

The storytellers who conceived of the Cain and Abel story show dazzling understanding of how worldviews create sharply contrasting worlds. Just as they understood Abel and Cain to represent the two distinct big-picture stories of their time, so also today, life on our planet is defined as a choice between two macro-stories, Multi Earth and One Earth, “descendants” of Cain and Abel. Whether then or now, when Cain killed his brother, Abel, it expresses the deep and murderous separation that happens every time the Multi Earth story splits anew from One Earth ways, believing itself to be a superior way. But if we keep the brothers locked up in a historical story, then Cain is only the prototype of murderers, the ones we criminalize, not the kind of murder with which all of us Multi Earth practitioners kill life on our planet.

Question: How does freeing Cain and Abel to be myth instead of history make them far more dangerous to Multi Earth living?

Cain, the Murderer? Sure ... along with All Multi Earthers! Ouch!

By the time I was learning the Cain and Abel story in the 20th century, the purpose of the first storytellers centuries earlier had been lost on me. The conflict between nomadic herders and settled farmers had been long forgotten in the history I learned in school and church.

So I was well along in my journey of viewing how history portrays the struggle between Multi Earth and One Earth paradigms when I first began to feel the power that the story of Cain and Abel had originally as a story of the great divorce between the herder-hunter-gather, nomadic way of being in the world and the settled agriculturalist way, between those preferring decentralized power to those eager to concentrate it in cities.

Once I could listen to the story with this awareness of why its first storytellers told it, I realized I was coming to a deeper truth. As I’d heard the story taught, preached, and misused, Cain was presented as the first murderer, a dark example of fallen human nature. Nothing much more. But he and his brother are so much more. Cain and Abel were and are representative characters of a drama that changed how our species lives on Earth. Thinking of them as historical offspring of Adam and Eve could never deliver that truth. 

Question: Ray Anderson, late CEO of Interface Corporation, tells how his change of consciousness toward One Earth living involved recognizing that he’d been a predator. All of us Multi Earthers are, no? How are we murderers? (Sorry to ask such an pleasant question.) 

The Cain-Abel Story? Why It's Great One Earth Mythology

When storytellers first evolved the Cain and Abel story, they were grappling with a world undergoing the disruptive change that came with the evolution of settled agriculture. The new lifestyles, economy, and worldview that went with the settled agriculture way of living tore families and communities apart. Humans, during their previous nearly 200,000 years, had never before lived according to those ways, nor the ideas that went with them. The nomadic herders, hunters, and gatherers who declined the new agricultural ways were chagrined by how agriculture was changing the landscape as well as the people involved. Stories such as Cain and Abel grew up among them to express their feelings and describe what they saw happening. Multi Earthism was being born.

It was not until after 587 B.C., the year Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed, that Cain and Abel became part of Genesis. At that point, the destructive effects of city-states and empires was added to the character of Cain along with the effects of settled agriculture that he already represented. Genesis, the book or origins, was compiled during that time while Jews were refugees exiled in Babylon and needed stories that countered the ones they heard the Babylonians telling about how their empire was established by the gods and governed by divine right.

This, of course, didn’t sit well with the Jews who’d been forcibly moved from Jerusalem and their homeland to the city of Babylon. Genesis was their answer. And with Cain and Abel they saw Babylon as Cain. Dominating centers of power like Babylon were the cities that grew out of settled agriculture as they saw it. So in Cain, the farmer who became the city-builder, they folded into one cultural myth what they had come to regard as two major negative developments in the human story. The story also served as a goad to the Hebrews to deepen their repentance of their own Cain-like behaviors that they’d been living during their national monarchies up until the Babylonians whipped them. 

The greatness of the myth of Cain and Abel to speak to many cultures across the millennia becomes apparent not only in Steinbeck’s East of Eden, but also in how eloquently they embody the Multi Earth and One Earth ways today.