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.
Prepared for the Workshop: “To Change the Future, Change the Story”
Guiding Lights Conference, Seattle 2012
Based on David Korten, The Great Turning: From Empire to […]
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 […]
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Success in navigating the Great Turning from Empire to Earth Community depends on facing up to the extent to which the crisis is a consequence of deep social and institutional pathology.
Although green technologies will have an essential role, there is no technological fix. The fate of our children turns on our current irrevocable […]
