Newsletter from David Korten / February 2, 2026

Dear Friends,

We have just posted the third in a trilogy of strategic briefs on humanity’s transition to an Ecological Civilization. The first, Ecological Civilization: From Emergency to Emergence (2021), focuses on why a global civilizational transformation of human society is essential. The second, Eco-nomics for an Ecological Civilization (2024), focuses on framing an eco-nomics to guide us in achieving the future of peace, equality, and Earth care that we seek. This third installment of the trilogy, The Living Universe Story: A Participatory Integral Spirit Cosmology for an Ecological Civilization (2026), puts the challenge now before us into the larger context of the nature and purpose of the unfolding of creation.

This paper is an exploration of my ever-deepening sense of our distinctive human place, purpose, and responsibility in a living, evolving cosmos. In so far as we yet know, Earth is distinctive among all the planets of the cosmos, and humans are distinctive among all of Earth’s living species. We have assumed that this gives us distinctive rights. In fact, it gives us distinctive responsibilities.

In this paper I explore an emerging synthesis of indigenous understanding and breakthrough insights at the leading edge of science. Breakthroughs in science now give us previously unavailable tools to observe the self-organizing inner workings of evolving living organisms and the outer reaches of the cosmos evolving toward ever greater complexity, beauty, awareness, and possibility.

This expanding understanding poses a profound challenge to human institutions that centralize power and privilege to allow a privileged few to rule over the many. The potentially fatal environmental and social problems of our human creation that now threaten our future human viability are a consequence. We are beginning to realize that creation is a self-organizing bottom-up process involving countless interdependent parts. A viable human future depends on our learning to mimic the bottom-up self-organizing processes of healthy living beings to achieve and sustain the conditions essential to life’s continuous re-generation.

This paper may be freely shared, reproduced, and reposted in whole or in part with or without author credits for so long as there is no restriction on further free distribution and use.

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