Tag: sustainability

The Path To Thriving II: Possess Nothing, Own Everything

The more deeply we dive into the philosophical core of sustainability, the more we realize a critical principle determining our human aliveness is whether we can realize the trans-corporeal matrix currently being impinged by every increment of our expanding economic structure. How do we live as fully connected beings? What are we connected to and what is the currency of that connection? And, starting again at the bottom, what kind of economy grows out of embodying the true nature of our connection to each other and the earth?

Many are addressing these questions and have articulated behaviors that together unleash a living transformational process. We are on the cusp of creating an evolutionary culture in which we arrive at a new clarity about how ego—in the form of the money (and time)–based economy–feeds intra-personal dysfunction (our bottomless desire for “more”), inter-personal dysfunction (“more for you means less for me”) and social and economic dysfunction (acting out of greed, fear and scarcity to destroy the Commons).

Yet also, the term sustainable has been appropriated, co-opted, modified, turned inside-out, contorted to death by the very forces in the culture that have brought us to this precipice. At one time, Shell Oil promoted itself as a “leader in green technologies.” Need I say more?

In the midst of all this blurring of meaning, does the term thriving mean anything? Or is it a merely another artificial designation? I repeat, as Peter Block has said, “All transformation is linguistic.” What does the word thrive convey that the word sustainable does not?

I would suggest Four Principles of Thriving:

  • Thriving is the spiritual dimension of sustainability. What sustainability is—or was–to a material economy, thriving is to the spiritual economy. We intuitively know it is not enough to birth a new world that provides the necessities of life without acknowledging and attending to the spiritual implications for each person in their own lives. To the extent that sustainability is about economics, then thriving is about each of us embodying (living our true nature) that new economy: becoming that new economy expresses not only our love of each other but manifests Love as the primary principle of being alive.
  • Thriving is the fire of spirit and the air of open heart-space. Sustainability evokes the esthetics of earth and water. Thriving is about the inception and integration of a divine fire that infuses all our actions with openhearted possibility. 
  • Thriving is the precarious edge of balance. If sustainability invokes balance, thriving challenges us as chaos and complexity challenge predictability, birthing an order in which emergent complexity demands continuous innovation. Here, at an evolutionary edge, consciousness speaks nature into being, becoming the locus of adaptation and experimentation, the trial and error of organic vitality.
  • Thriving is the mythic dimension of sustainability, the meta-narrative of possibility. It is a reference to the continuous, spontaneous process of creating, modifying and re-forming the open architecture of diversity; where distributed networks of freely accessible information and self-organizing governance activate the free-flow of resources to meet real needs.

The full implication of a healthy earth is healthy beings. Maybe that includes humans, maybe not. The separate (small-s) self is bringing us to the precipice of annihilation. At the root of the consuming fire enveloping all systems of earth is this myth of separation and the acquisitive drive springing from it. The drive to accumulate and “possess” the illusory objects of imagined wealth, drawing unto ourselves all the things that reinforce our personal conception of a unique “self,” is leaving us bereft of humanity and community. Despite the ubiquity of messages reinforcing Separation, its rationale is fracturing and its flaws are becoming ever more apparent.

To the degree that we are able to relinquish the trappings of the acquisitive self and listen to a deeper voice emerging from the inmost fire, guiding us to connected action in the world, we may each discover our personal gift and appropriate occupation. And to the degree we are able to manifest that occupation in service to family, community or bioregion, the Gift of that service is rendered to the Giver, the web of life itself. All the “things” we now “own,” the “possessions” we create and temporarily hold to ourselves, have come from and will return to that web of life, including our “selves.”

The Connected Self is an individual, yet one who no longer has a need to possess an identity based on separation, competition or domination. The Connected Self is awakened to a universal force, becoming an open channel for inspired vocation, beauty and diversity in co-creative action. The Connected Self becomes a unique expression of love and justice, profoundly trusting a rightful place in the world, unflinchingly descending into the reality of and living our common material nature. For the Connected Self, the distinction between Self and Other blurs and dissolves. Every individual who lives this connection enters the heart as an expansive new home and becomes an owner, a steward of a new economy whose currency is compassion.

Our true freedom, finding our place in the connected community of life, derives from comprehending the reality of our temporary ownership of a few objects and, at the same time, our timeless ownership and responsibility to all things. The true nature of all possessions is transitory. Our freedom derives from letting go of separation and simultaneously embracing our Common Wealth with a dynamic sense of ownership and responsibility.

That ownership means we can no longer avoid addressing the depth of our complicity in the way things are, nor can we turn away from the sight of others committing acts of separation and extraction destructive to the common wealth. A new economy derives from our ability to perceive and live the whole, unimpeded by the illusion that any part truly belongs to us. Possess Nothing. Own Everything. Then we may have a chance to thrive.

The Path To Thriving I: Sustainability is Dead

For years the word sustainable held sufficient gravitas to alert us to advance a worthy objective: balance. As the increasingly terrifying news rises to and leaks over the bulwarks of denial and indifference, and despite political orchestrations and establishment media and especially the green washing of Wall Street’s “socially responsible investing”, that word has now become virtually meaningless. It is yet another casualty of the war on truth. It’s an empty slogan. What used to be there is now so muddled as to be unrecognizable.

With all the machinations of the expensive and increasingly sophisticated public relations campaigns bent on greening corporate images (see Black Rock just last week), appearances change while incremental concessions are seduced from the public. The airwaves and social media are infected by super-bugs of disinformation immune to the latest antibiotic push-back of truth. Whatever laurels ‘sustainable’ may have had to rest upon rapidly became linguistic deathbeds. Authentic dialogue must again be rescued from the merely opportunistic.

There is something missing from the conventional use of the term that no longer articulates the full flavor of what we imagine is the coming world. Maybe it’s our imagination that needs an overhaul. The world we want, slipping from our grasp, is something more like sustainability on steroids; not merely providing basic necessities or doing so without degrading life support system, but a world in which all people are living at an enhanced quality that can only emerge when we live in generous relationship and open possibility. Generosity is key. Unfortunately, the rising tide of bad news tends to corrode that option, making it even more urgent.

In the heart of spreading references to thriving is the ratcheting up of urgency that we feel in our bones and brains about the coming transition whose details are beginning to appear and the obstacles to which are emerging just as quickly. We want passion. We want to be touched by passion, moved by it. We want to feel that passion within our lives as a searing fire that will sustain us and burn through the old as we surf–and birth—a transformation into whatever is to come.

But let’s back up for a moment.

A simple operational definition of sustainability is that living systems meet all the needs of its members and don’t borrow (or steal) from the future. Without even checking any “official” definition, sustainability (simplistically) is a condition of using no more resources than can be fully regenerated in the harmonic course of natural process. But we are well past that point. The ecological account is overdrawn and collection is landing heavily at our front door.

This definition would apply regardless of the resource under consideration, from the material to the spiritual. The maintenance of a dynamic equilibrium, a systemic motility embodying a capacity to respond fully to natural forces, is to interpret inputs and modify behaviors appropriately to maintain systemic viability. Lots of attributes of sustainability have been devised and articulated. And surely it means different things to different people, depending on the scale of consideration.

There are the more popular, and also misunderstood, but easily explained practical economic attributes such as zero-growth—which is the primary reality disregarded by Wall Street, global investors, emerging economies and central banks. The dominant human social and economic paradigm of endless growth in a field of limited resources is clearly not sustainable. That’s why it must be disregarded. And, as many have adopted, we humans, having entered the Anthropocene, are on the verge of determining whether we are even capable of interpreting and responding appropriately to clear data that demands we modify our behavior to secure our own future viability. This, while losing a football field-sized chunk of pristine Brazilian Amazon rainforest every minute.

Yet the terms of that “sustainable” future are being redefined as we speak. The planetary system is adjusting according to its own laws, while the homeostasis we’ve depended upon for millennia is degrading. As we notice new and alarming components of the breakdown, such as insect loss, ocean acidification, desertification, the torrential runoff from Greenland being added to the known components such as radical weather, whatever we meant by sustainable a (lost) decade ago now has virtually no meaning at all.

To be bluntly specific, three features of the current paradigm (capitalism, patriarchy and empire) are unsustainable. The extractive industrial growth imperative regarding the earth as a limitless storehouse of resources as well as a waste dump; the dominance of the masculine principle in our social design, economic modeling, learning communities, workplaces and political discourse; and the economic and political class warfare driven by scarcity, fear, morphing into racial and ethnic conflict as we speak, have already conspired to bring many species to extinction and are now conspiring to bring humans themselves to a critical decision point.

Then there are the less widely understood social, political, and spiritual implications of sustainability. Regardless of the domain, however, at its heart, the term sustainable refers to a biological, energetic and social vitality, a structure/process that is perpetually and self-consciously adaptable enough—at sufficient speed–to recognize and address emerging needs, i.e. it is alive! It is dynamic. It changes easily and continuously. If anything is going to save us, it will be our ability to integrate, tolerate and respond to the actual pace of change.