December 11, 2023
Dear Friends,
I hope you were among the many to see the webinar I participated in on November 28, entitled “East and West Dialogue on Ecological Civilization.” If not, you can find a recording of the webinar on the Earth Charter International’s YouTube channel. In the webinar, I joined three colleagues, Zia […]
This brief keynote was delivered on October 19, at the opening of the People for Earth 2022 Ecozoic Culture Forum: ESG & Integral Ecology for Earth in Crisis, held in Seoul, South Korea, and online. David shared the stage with Mary Evelyn Tucker who spoke on […]
We evolved to be connected to nature and to one another, but our exploitative global economy is severing those relations.
As I was reading the current series of YES! articles on the mental health crisis, I received an email from Darcia Narvaez, professor of psychology at University of Notre Dame. She was sending me articles being […]
Transformation begins with clarity on the nature of the choice that confronts our species.
Some ideas hit us in a way that is hard to shake. Last year that happened to me. I was in a public conversation with my friend and colleague, theologian Matthew Fox, when he made this observation: “Humans might be the first […]
We humans organize around shared narratives, theories of reality, that guide us in making critical collective choices. When societies get their shared narrative wrong, they can make disastrously self-destructive choices. As a global society, we face a momentous choice we must get right. And our current narrative is fatally flawed.
Perhaps the greatest threat to our common future is a combination of extreme individualism and extreme arrogance, as we deal with proposals to expand - through the genetic engineering of species and the geo-engineering of Earth's climate - our domination of forces of nature of which we have only the most superficial understanding. The turning we humans must navigate to a viable future depends on a profound awakening to our nature as spiritual beings and our responsibility for the consequences of our choices and our relationships with one another and a living Earth.
We are captive to Empire stories that legitimate imperial domination. Our future depends on embracing Earth Community stories that affirm our potential for creative partnership.
| Empire Story | Earth Community Story |
| Obedience to God the father, creator, and ruler of all is the path to salvation and eternal bliss in […] |
This is the keynote address by David Korten, delivered to the First Annual Earth Charter Community Summit in Tampa, Florida, September 29, 2001, connected via live, interactive satellite links to community summits in 11 other U.S. cities.
Our species is blessed to have a surviving storehouse of Earth Community wisdom and experience that indigenous people have preserved despite the of the institutions of Empire to eliminate it. Indigenous peoples lived close to Earth and were acutely aware that their security and survival depended on their deep bond to tribe and nature. As […]