true abundance comes as a result of tuning into your purpose and focusing on the 11 dimensions of wealth. photo: lerina winter

In the following interview we sat down with Seth Streeter, one of the most inspiring, knowledgeable, and brilliant people we know, to get his take on holistic success, conscious wealth, and the trends shaping the emerging Financial Revolution. Seth has over 25 years in the financial industry, is the CEO and founder of Mission Wealth, a conscious wealth management firm managing $5 billion in assets for over 2100 families and non-profits. Seth holds a Masters of Science in Financial Planning and is widely renowned throughout the financial industry and entrepreneurial community as a thought-leader in the area of conscious financial planning.

In addition to helping hundreds of individuals and families to redefine wealth beyond finances, he remains active with environmental and entrepreneurial organizations in his local community of Santa Barbara, California where he lives with his two children. In 2017, Seth founded SustainableFuture.org, a nonprofit designed to unite the community to address serious climate change concerns. The technology platform utilizes gamification to amplify existing nonprofit, business, schools and public programs that empower positive actions. Seth has been an active member of YPO (Young President’s Organization), serving in various capacities, including as the Global Chair for the Financial Services Network with over 2,000 executive members, as the founder of the Inspired Living Subnetwork and as a board member for the Health and Wellness Network with over 6,500 global members. In 2017 he spoke at the organization’s Global Leadership Conference in Vancouver and has since become a keynote speaker and facilitator, including the award-winning “Develop your 3.0 Vision for Life” international retreats that he leads. In 2016 he graced the TEDx stage and delivered his first Tedx talk, which you can watch below. Conscious Lifestyle Magazine: Please define Conscious Wealth and give us an outline of what it means and what’s involved in it, so that anybody walking into this conversation can wrap their head around what we’re talking about. Seth Streeter: Wealth traditionally has been about money—it’s been about material accumulation, it’s been about your 401K plan, it’s been about the home you purchase—it’s how much money is in the bank account. Conscious Wealth is when we step beyond that definition and look at our lives much more holistically and factor in different components, such as our health, our relationships, our career satisfaction, the amount of impact we’re having in the community and in the world, to our intellectual growth, to our spiritual capital, to our emotional wellbeing. These broader definitions are what I’m really calling Conscious Wealth. Because someone could be worth $50 million, but if they can’t climb two flights of steps without being winded because they’re so out of shape, and they go home a stranger to their family because they’re working all the time, and they need sleeping pills to sleep at night because they have so much anxiety, are they truly wealthy just because they’re worth $50 million? So, Conscious Wealth looks at the broader picture of what wealth truly should be. CLM: Beautiful. So, let’s dive into some more of these different aspects. Can you define the Ten Dimensions of Wealth and Holistic Success? SS: The one that everyone knows about is the financial dimension. Do you have enough to live your life? Wealth is living within your means. So, as long as you have enough to live the life you want to live, well, then you’re wealthy. The next component of wealth is impact. Do you feel like you’re really leveraging your talents and gifts in the world and making a difference? It could be in a small way, volunteering with one child at a school, or pet-sitting. Or, it could be in a really large way in which you want to impact the environmental issues we’re facing today or global illiteracy. So, impact is an important dimension of wealth because we know the more we give, the more we get. Emotional wealth has to do with your attitudes and wellbeing. Do you wake up happy? Are your stress levels low? The social and family dimensions have to do with our intimate relationships—both our family and friends, as well as our relationships in the community. The amount of fun we have is about whether you are living your bliss? Do you have big belly laughs? Are you having enough fun in your life? A lot of people are really actually lacking in that wealth factor. Your physical wealth has to do with how your body looks, feels, and functions. Is it able to do what you want it to do without pain or injury? The environmental dimension is about feeling a sense of place with where you live. It could be the geographic location and the feeling you have within your home. Are your lifestyle preferences optimized there, such as the climate and access to nature or a city, and does it feel like you? Spiritual wealth is your connection to a framework beyond the everyday, something that anchors and centers you. Intellectual wealth is whether you’re feeling stimulated. Do you feel like you’re growing intellectually or do you feel kind of stagnant? Your career wealth has to do with whether you feel you’re being appreciated for your talents and contributions and do you feel aligned with a mission beyond yourself with your employer. The 11 dimensions of wealth. CLM: Definitely. So how did the Ten Dimensions of Wealth come together for you? How does it relate to your experience and your background? SS: First, professionally, I’ve been in finance for 25 years, and I’ve been an advisor to hundreds of families, mostly on the dimension of financial wealth, and then I realized firsthand how financial wealth really wasn’t the sole source of happiness for these people, or the sole source of frustration in some cases. So, it was from my own professional experience of having thousands of appointments over the last 25 years, and seeing, wow, there’s more to this than money and then starting to put that into practice in my professional life. From a personal standpoint, I’ve lived this myself. I was someone who was raised within a very goal-driven family. My brother and I had high expectations on us to do well academically, do well in sports, be involved in student government, and we always had jobs. So, I executed that strategy diligently, thinking that was going to get me ahead. It got me to a point where I realized that, even though I was achieving a lot of success in a traditional sense, I was really not fulfilled, and I was longing for more. So, from a personal standpoint, I realized that there was more to success than these achievements, these traditional metrics of career and finance and looking good on paper with all A’s. I knew that I was longing for something deeper and more fulfilling. So, I think it was kind of a bridge of those two—my professional life and my personal life—that led me to where I am today. CLM: Of the Ten Dimensions, which are the ones that you see people struggling with the most? SS: I would say it all starts with the self. Most people are so focused outside of themselves—and I’ll say financial, of the ten, is the one that hits on that the most. Because most people are thinking that once they get that job promotion, once they make more money, once their 401K balance goes up, once they can buy their first home, once they pay off their school debt… well, then finally they can be happy! So, it starts from a finance standpoint because people might actually attain those milestones—they might get the job, get the new car, get the promotion—and then realize they’re never satisfied because that benchmark always gets raised to another level. This goes for people I know who are worth $20 million who are not satisfied because their neighbor has $30 million, and then that person knows someone who has $50 million. And you’re never there when you’re looking for these external benchmarks to then trigger internal happiness; it doesn’t work that way. So, I would say once someone realizes that that’s fools’ gold, that pursuit of the external, it really gets into the personal. Really, it’s a blend. The spiritual is a big part of it; the physical too—if you don’t feel good it’s hard to perform in life. Your social structure matters, specifically because the people you are around all the time shapes the person you are, so if you’re around people who are solely focused on “greed is good” and capitalism in the traditional sense, then you are going to think that is what you need to be pursuing. So, oftentimes, re-shifting a social structure really helps someone find more of that personal balance. Emotional wellbeing is critical; there are so many people who are so stressed and beating themselves up to try to get ahead—fighting traffic, battling hundreds of emails, doing the dance everyday—thinking that once they finish those emails at midnight and once they get ten appointments in a week, then, finally, I’ll be good enough. All of these other nine dimensions besides finance blend together because it comes down to realizing that your sense of worthiness isn’t tied to any type of performance. There’s nothing you can achieve or acquire that will allow someone to actually feel worthy. Once someone gets that eye-opener, that translates across the board—in their careers, relationships, health and their emotional wellbeing, and in the impact they’ll ultimately be able to have in the world. CLM: How do you see peoples’ lives shift once they make that connection to the deeper aspects of Conscious Wealth? That is, once they understand that they are being psychologically driven by these unconscious things, that aren’t necessarily in alignment with their life purpose, and let them go, what happens? SS: Oh, man! It’s really exciting! It’s incremental and sometimes it’s exponential. When someone has the AHA!–which really comes from hitting a pause button in their life and actually asking: “Am I happy or do I need to redirect my energies and focus elsewhere?” Once they make that shift, then all of a sudden, I’ve seen that things really start to fall in line. People might make major career changes and then their stress levels go down. As their stress levels go down, their health improves. As their health improves and their stress goes down, they have more family time and balance, their relationships improve. As they have more time and balance, they begin to think about ways in which they can give back, which they didn’t have time for before. There is an absolute domino effect between all these other nine dimensions that all seem to conspire in someone’s favor toward justifying and validating the decision to step away from that prior path and into what’s truly in alignment with their highest goals. CLM: I love that, and let me play devil’s advocate for a little bit. What would you say to people who have this idea that they can’t do these things, that they can’t play more because they have bills to pay or responsibilities or a family? Because what you’re essentially saying is, follow your bliss on a certain level. Do the things that really bring you joy and happiness first. How do you do that and still create wealth in your life and still deal with responsibility? SS: Like with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, there is a certain baseline of financial practicality that needs to be adhered to. I am not advising people to just leave all responsibility and be whimsical—not pay your mortgage bill and forget your credit card bill and stop funding your kids’ college and just go join the circus! I help them make sure that their blocking and tackling of their baseline finances are in good order. That’s why financial planning is a great portal into these conversations. Because once someone has a basic understanding of cash flow, assets and liabilities, taxes, estate planning—which are kind of the baseline four—then we can start moving up that Maslow pyramid to start working toward areas of self-actualization. There’s a study that was done in 2010 by a couple of professors at Princeton that actually had a sample of 450,000 people that they studied over two years, and it was about the correlation between income levels and happiness. What they found was that there was a positive correlation between these peoples’ happiness and income levels up to $75,000 a year of income; beyond $75,000 a year of income, there wasn’t that much of a correlation at all with happiness levels. Typically, I’m dealing with more affluent people who are above that baseline threshold—they know that they’re going to be able to pay their rent or pay their mortgage that month—and they’re stressing out in a zone where it’s not about turning the lights on; it’s about them stressing over stuff they shouldn’t have to be stressing about. But, yes, there should be a baseline level of practicality we have with our finances; and, in doing so, it’s going to free you up to pursue your bliss in a sustainable way versus just over two months until your credit cards are capped and you have to go face reality again. CLM: As you were talking about this, it came to me that this idea that it’s not spiritual to focus on money, that money is just a distraction from the spiritual path, this is something that comes up a lot, even though one of the Ten Dimensions of Wealth is spiritual. Can you talk to how having a healthy relationship with money can actually be in support of your spiritual path and the spiritual dimension of love? How can we include money on the spiritual path, because it’s so necessary in our day-to-day lives? SS: Money has no value in and of itself; it’s just a representation of its value elsewhere. A dollar is just a piece of paper of paper that’s worth about four cents. A credit card is just a piece of plastic that’s worth about one cent. Gold bullion is just gold that we put a monetary value to. When we think about value, value is really energy. With money, we’re putting a lot of value, a lot of energy, into something that really doesn’t have power: a piece of paper, a piece of plastic. Instead, the spiritual integration with money is more about how that energy can flow through you into the world and make a positive difference and help others. The spiritual framework around money is really about creating value by being of service to others. And, when you are leveraging your gifts and being of service to others in your own unique way, then money will be a by-product of that, rather than saying: “I need to make as much money as possible and what careers will pay me the most money?” I’ve counseled a lot of young people over the years and eventually with this type of thinking they will burn out because they’re not being fueled from an authentic place. So, really, the spiritual connection to money is about authenticity, it’s about service to others, it’s about recognizing that your job is to be in full expression of your gifts into the world; and, if you do that, money will be a by-product. CLM: In that same vein of thinking, is worthiness, which you mentioned earlier, a by product as well? SS: First of all, for me, spirituality is an inside job; and I’ve learned that worthiness is an inside job as well. Spirituality, for me, doesn’t come from doing a bunch of things out there; and worthiness, I’ve learned the hard way, doesn’t come from retaining a bunch of things out there. All three—spirituality, worthiness and wealth—all three are inside jobs, so in that way, they’re completely connected. CLM: So how does this tie in to life purpose? A lot of people make their money just being driven by wealth. But, after a certain point, after you make enough money, then what? SS: It’s interesting; I’ve worked with a lot of executives over the years, and I’ve taken them through a process I call the Inspired Life Purpose Assessment (see graphic below). The best part is that when we have them look at the intersection of the four categories from the exercise—where their gifts intersect with their skills and education, what their greatest passion is and what they believe the world needs most—that intersection is their inspired life purpose. What’s really cool is that, instead of just thinking about return on money, its important for people to reflect on their return on purpose. What type of return are you getting on the purpose that’s within you that you really can’t deny? The one that has always been knocking on the door inside your soul. Return on purpose is an important dimension of wealth when we look at our Conscious Wealth assessment. to learn more about creating conscious wealth and to take your inspired life assessment, visit: missionwealth.com/redefining-wealth CLM: Return on purpose instead of return on investment. So, the more you align with your purpose, the more return you get? SS: Absolutely. That’s been a truth I’ve seen over and over again. Back to those examples where people are taking the job out of college that they think will pay them the most rather than saying or thinking, “My biggest priority is to be in pursuit of my inner purpose. And I’m going to be in the fullest expression of my gifts, abilities, skills, and passion to try to push this purpose forward.” If those are the two things that they focus on, I can tell you they will achieve tremendous success and tremendous wealth in the ways that matter most to them. CLM: That framework that you just outlined sounds like it’s a perfect way for people, if they’re not sure what their purpose is, to figure out where all these things overlap and to crystallize that for them. SS: I would just encourage people to realize that you can be in expression of your purpose and be wealthy. I think a lot of people have this mindset that there’s two camps when it comes to money: There’s the capitalist who thinks greed is good, who’s just focused on money and has no life balance and maybe limited spiritual connection; and there’s the yogi who’s meditating on a mat and has their abundance board and their vision wall, and they’re praying to be able to pay their rent that month, but they don’t have a lot of financial abundance. It’s important to realize that you can have both; one is not in conflict with the other. The people that I’ve worked with who have become the wealthiest are those that have realized that there’s an absolute integration of those two. That you can be in full expression of yourself, connected to source, amplifying your gifts, being of service, coming from a place of joy while also kicking butt at a business, being paid a fair exchange for the goods or services that they’re providing to the world. Again, that’s what money is: money is just a reflection of energy, it’s a reflection of value. When you’re coming from an authentic place, putting out your best into the world with a purpose you care deeply about, there’s going to be value, there will be money. CLM: I love this idea, especially with the new paradigm emerging from the way that society is restructuring itself with the Internet. It’s allowing people to earn money in ways that you’ve never been able to do before. You can have a knitting store selling little personalized mittens for children and be a millionaire! You have to start to rethink your life if you’ve been operating from the old paradigm where you just have to show up and get your paycheck. You really have to reconsider what your life purpose is because that’s going to be the key to your happiness and abundance and all those things that you’re talking about. SS: Everything is available. People feel threatened by the changes that are happening now, where more and more jobs are going to be automated—whether it’s driverless cars or robotics or it’s artificial intelligence coming into our machines—the Internet of Everything; yet, I see it the opposite. I see it as such a tremendous opportunity for you to finally say what is uniquely you and ask how can you bring that into and a place that you really care about. And you guys are a great example of that by the way! That’s why the best companies out there that are attracting Millennials are those that have a purpose and a mission to their company and people will work for those types of companies—with even a lower income level—because they are so behind what that company is about. And Millennials want to work for a company that they believe is doing something good for the world. It’s not just about a paycheck, and that’s been a shift. photo: lerina winter Our parents’ generation would go where the jobs were. They would move the family, and they would make their life in Toledo, Ohio, if that’s where the job was. Millennials say: “Where do I want to live? How do I want to live? And, by the way, I will find a way to make my career blend into that lifestyle!” CLM: You’ve intuitively pulled up the concept of Financial Evolution; it was kind of bouncing around in the background. What is Financial Evolution and how does that play into everything? SS: As we’re talking about Conscious Wealth, I think there are additional trends that are supporting it besides what we spoke about before. Those trends include careers where people want to work for mission-led companies and be part of a culture that feels really aligned with them, and they‘ll make less money to work for a company like that. When we take a look at investing, it used to be that people invested just for a return, and they wanted to maximize return. And, now, there’s over $20 trillion in socially responsible investments. People now are saying, “I want to invest according to my values. I don’t want to own tobacco companies if I’ve lost my mom to lung cancer. I don’t want to own a company that does animal testing.” Whatever someone’s values are, they can now invest according to those values. Companies are taking note, and now companies are really cleaning up their practices because they realize not only their investors but then also the consumers really care more about the products they are buying. They look at labels and they wonder is this an organic product or is this made chemical-free? Companies are waking up to a greater level of consciousness because of investment influences and consumer influences. When we look at definitions of success, it used to be that material success was the greatest—the Porsche and the Ferrari and the boat and the mansion—that was how someone was successful. And, now, as we mentioned (and Millennials know) it’s about lifestyle—it’s about balance, it’s about time for health, it’s about purpose, it’s about giving back. Even in my career, in the financial services world, it used to be that advice was solely based on investment decisions, cash flow planning, taxes, estate planning, insurance. Now advisors are starting to measure these holistic metrics. They’re starting to talk about happiness and career alignment and return on purpose to actually measure what matters most to people. There’s a lot of wonderful trends that are also kind of shifting this greater consciousness around money and I call that the Financial Evolution. CLM: So, here’s another kind of devil’s advocate question: Having been on both sides of the coin, where, at first, financing business was just this super-complex, obtuse thing; it seemed hard and expensive to play with and risky. But since I’ve erased that, I’ve really learned that it’s not that hard, it’s not that complicated; just some general ideas and principles that, once you understand those, things start to make sense. Taken out to a practical level—this might seem like a basic question for someone who is running a wealth management company—how can someone get started? Not everybody who’s reading the magazine is going to have millions of dollars. How can someone with $30,000 or $74,000 who wants to invest their money impactfully, how can they get started? SS: It’s interesting that when I think of the 35-year-old who makes $70,000 a year, the level of attention that I will hear that they put into their diet, their workout regime, their travel, vacation planning, their social events that weekend, maybe even their wardrobe—they put a lot of thought into those areas. But when it comes to really building their personal wealth in the traditional financial sense, they put very little thought. Maybe they just invest in a 401K, and they just try to pay off credit cards and student loans and that’s all they really think of. We’re talking three minutes a week is all they spend thinking about this. The first step is to have a dedicated practice to your wealth—the same way you have a dedicated practice to meditation or to your yoga practice. You have to have a dedicated practice in which you first sit and visualize what you want from your life—as far as lifestyle, as far as the types of investments you want to make, as far as the type of home you want to live in—you know, really visualize your life. Step two is making an honest assessment of where you are at today. Ask yourself: “Now that I know where I want to go, where am I today? How is my career tracking? Am I maximizing my career opportunities in my current role with my current company? How am I doing with my debts, with my savings, with my investments?” Once you then have that honest assessment, then the third step is to now develop a strategy forward. “What are the next steps that I can take?” It comes down to kaizen: incremental small steps. First is, “I’m going to commit to spending less than I earn, so I have a surplus. I’m going to find a way to live within a certain budget and be mindful because paying myself first needs to be one of my most important bills.” Just as important as it is to pay your mortgage, you need to pay yourself first. Once you’ve committed to having that surplus to pay yourself first, then you ask: “How should I be investing this surplus?” However small it is, starting somewhere—it could be $50 a month—start there. You want to say, what’s the smartest ways I can invest? From a smart standpoint, tax-wise, you want to take advantage of pretax or tax-free type of growth vehicles. Maybe it’s your 401K with your employer; maybe it’s a SEP IRA if you’re self-employed; maybe it’s a Roth IRA; there are a lot of different tax structures that can benefit someone for long-term accumulation. Now that you know how to invest in a smart fashion, you then ask: “Now what do I do as far as my investing within that vehicle? Within my Roth IRA or within my 401K, how can I invest that money?” That’s where you can seek professional guidance or do some research online to understand the power of compounding interest, the importance of asset allocation, the importance of rebalancing. Once you have that type of piece in place, then you can ask: “To what degree do I want to make this a socially responsible investment?” There’s mutual funds out there; there’s exchange-traded funds out there; there’s companies that can do screening on stocks and bonds for you to make that investment a socially impactful investment. It comes down to simple steps; but it really begins with taking time to visualize, making it a priority, and then breaking it down into simple, action items the same way you would if you were trying to change your diet or begin a yoga practice. CLM: So many people just ignore finances, especially conscious people because money has got so much stigma around it. Without guidance, without having gone to school for it, it could be a little intimidating. It’s pretty straightforward; if things get complicated, then you can just go with a financial advisor. SS: There are also a lot of online robo-advisors available today. You could do this all from the comforts of your home and be able to have professionally managed money much cheaper than ever before. There’s really no excuse; it can be done—with a few clicks of a button, you can have a portfolio. The thing that I would encourage people to think about is not just their financial assets but that we all have a lot of forms of assets. What is your artistic capital? Maybe you have a lot of creative genius that isn’t being fully deployed with your current employer. Or, maybe you have good social capital: you have some really fantastic relationships and connections that you aren’t fully leveraging right now. Intellectual capital: what’s something that you have knowledge of or unique insight into that maybe isn’t being brought into the marketplace today? So, when you’re thinking about your assets, it’s not just how much cash and debt do I have today? It’s what are your unique assets that can be leveraged to help build more value and more financial wealth in your life? CLM: To make this as practical as possible, let’s say someone’s in their 30s, somewhere in the middle of their life, and they’re wanting to be as successful as possible but still have fun, still honor their life purpose and have a meaningful life. What advice do you have for them? SS: It may sound counterintuitive, but I would say they should be a lot more playful; they should have a lot more fun and have a lot more levity in their approach to life. I know that I always felt that to be successful in my career, I had to be super serious because money is a serious thing! Same with my workouts: I had to train to do an Ironman, and I’d be really serious about that. In my relationships: I want to be a really good parent. In a lot of different dimensions I’d realize this is really serious; I had a lot of responsibility in me. At some point, I realized that Buddhas are playful, and some of the most successful people out there have a kind of a gleam in their eye and a certain sense of playfulness. So, to that person I would say to think about ways in which you could have more ease, more relaxation, more playfulness. When you’re at work, smile more; I think you’ll find that you’ll actually do better. It sounds kind of counterintuitive, but those people who have a lightness about them, it brings a certain confidence, it makes you more approachable, it makes you more likable; you’re going to be more promotable if you have more playfulness and ease in your every day. You don’t have to prove anything to anyone. Just be light. Be yourself and allow your natural abilities to flow into your career. I’d say that’s the most important advice: have more ease, more joy. CLM: Do you have any final thoughts that you’d like to share? SS: I’d say that my passion is being a positive catalyst in people’s lives. Anyone in professional services has this ability to be almost a Trojan horse, to show up and have the other person think we’re talking about a tax return or a portfolio, but really we’re here to be a change agent in someone’s life for the positive. That is really helping my business grow exponentially across the country. You can really have the same thing. Figure out what your deepest purpose is; be bold enough to pursue that. Understand that vulnerability is strength; it’s not weakness. The more vulnerable you are, the more people are going to feel they can relate to you, and they’re going to feel like you are being truly honest and genuine with them. It’s going to serve you in your career and in your relationships. Be able to really define what wealth means to you. My experience with hundreds of families has been that wealth is not external; it’s really about internal work. Wealth is about knowing your priorities and living them. It’s about a lot more than just money and encompasses those other nine dimensions of wealth. It’s about being of service to others—the more you give the more you get—and that’s the truth. It’s about meaning; making sure you have meaning and connection every day with others and with strangers. It’s about appreciating what you have and it’s about wanting less than you have. As long as you want less than you have, by definition, you are already wealthy. Be bold enough to redefine what wealth means to you and just lean into that and watch the abundance flow your way.

About The Interviewee Seth Streeter Seth Streeter is the Co-Founder and Chief Impact Officer of Mission Wealth, a nationally recognized and employee-owned wealth management company that empowers families to achieve their dreams. Mission Wealth manages $5 billion in assets for over 2100 families and non-profit organizations. Headquartered in Santa Barbara, CA and Austin, TX, the firm has offices located across the country. Mission Wealth is proud of its recent Best Work Places recognition by Fortune, Investment News and Inc. Magazine and as the #1 ranked Best Places to Work for Financial Advisers for firms in its size category. Seth is a thought-leader in the area of conscious financial planning. He helps people reframe their perspective of wealth beyond the financial to enjoy more balanced, impactful, and fulfilling lives. In 2015 he was recognized by Real Leaders magazine as one of the Top 100 visionary leaders. In 2016 he spoke on the TEDX stage, The Untethered Life: Wealth Redefined and shared his powerful message. Since this time, he has been an in demand podcast guest on numerous industry shows; including, Fidelity Fin Point, ForbesBooks, Belay Advisor and Becoming Referable. For more information and resources, visit: missionwealth.com/redefining-wealth

photo: artem bali

The Importance of Voting with Your Dollar: How to Save the Planet as You Shop

Let’s cut right to the chase: Every time you buy a product or service, you are either voting for a sustainable, humanitarian, and ecologically sound future for all life or one filled with pollution, destruction, and inhumane treatment of workers, plants, and animals. This concept is called voting with your dollar, and it is one of the most powerful ways you can help make big, positive shifts in the direction of a healthy, sustainable future on this planet both locally and globally. Every time you support and shop with brands or stores that promote ethical, environmentally sound values, you direct money away from companies with harmful practices, forcing them to either change and stop their destructive practices or go out of business. Not only that, but the more people are buying organic, sustainable, fair trade, and natural products, the cheaper they get due to economies of scale. Due to this fact, it is now cheaper than ever to shop sustainably; and unlike years past, there are socially conscious options for virtually every product on the market, so you can powerfully vote with your wallet. Make no mistake about it, this is how we solve the planets biggest problems starting right now.

Where to Find the Best Eco-Friendly, Fair Trade Brands and Products

But all of these options present another set of issues: How do you know which brands to vote for that are actually doing good versus those that are just marketing themselves as sustainable when they are really not (aka greenwashing)? And beyond that: How do you know where to find these companies and products in the first place? Up until recently, to find and keep track of all the brands and companies doing good in this world, was basically a part-time job involving serious time spent researching and seeking out these products. But that’s all changing thanks to The Etho—an online marketplace founded to promote and expand fair and ethical trade practices by exclusively selling ethically sourced items.

The Biggest Challenge in Voting With Your Wallet Just Got Solved

The Etho saves you countless hours of endless searching and vetting by bringing all of the best sustainable, eco-conscious, transparent, and ethical brands all into one place, making it easy and convenient to live a life of positive environmental and social impact. This woman-owned and operated company, is like an online Amazon.com of only products and services that contribute to the life and planet-supporting future that we all want—without having to sacrifice comfort, luxury, style, quality, or any of the other things you love. In addition to highly fashionable clothing for men, women, and children, The Etho has everything from handmade jewelry, luxury vegan handbags, and biodegradable yoga mats; all kinds of beauty and self-care products; and even home goods like candles, artwork, and bedding. The Etho’s mission was inspired by the CEO’s time spent traveling abroad in which she regularly saw beautiful places filled with hard working people (and the unique things they made) who were almost always stuck in crippling poverty. As a result, they’re on a mission is to create a higher standard of living for marginalized communities around the world, by supporting trade relationships that reflect a higher ethical standard, and changing the way people think about and participate in commerce. They have spent thousands of hours vetting and sourcing brands and products from around the world that meet their stringent quality standards, so you don’t have to and can simply feel good about what you are buying, knowing that you are contributing to a better world with every purchase. Literally. The Etho is making it easier than ever to do the right thing. Every brand they sell must adhere to their 7 Core Principles of Ethical Production, which are adapted directly from the Fair Trade principles set by the WFTO. No matter what you are shopping for, whether clothes, coffee, beauty, or cleaning supplies, each purchase is supporting fair wages and safe working environments for workers across the globe. As you shop this holiday season and beyond, remember that you can play a major part in setting positive change into effect RIGHT NOW by making a commitment to voting with your wallet—by voting with your dollars. Every purchase counts. Every purchase matters because they collectively add up to a lot of money and can be the difference between perpetuating an environmentally and socially destructive enterprise or shutting it down forever in favor of a future that works for us all. To learn more about some of the eco-friendly, ethical, and innovative products and brands that The Etho supports, visit their website: The Etho This article is a sponsored post written in collaboration with The Etho, whose products and ethos complies with Conscious Lifestyle Magazine’s stringent quality and integrity guidelines.

About The Author Meghan McDonald is the Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Conscious Lifestyle Magazine. She holds a master’s degree in social psychology from San Diego State University where she conducted award-winning research into the nature of human social behavior. She is an advocate for many environmental and social justice causes and a champion of social impact-focused brands and products that adhere to high sustainability and ethical standards. As a regular travel and lifestyle contributor to Conscious Lifestyle Magazine, Meghan funnels her extensive knowledge of natural products, organic living, and consumer behavior into researching and reviewing brands and products that promote health, wellbeing, sustainability, equality, and positive social change. She has traveled to over 25 countries and loves exploring diverse destinations worldwide while documenting the local artisans and businesses offering conscious, healthy alternatives.

photo: pepe reyes

Editor’s Note: In the following piece Frances Moore Lappé presents several widely held ideas and beliefs about the environment, presenting a challenge to the notions and premises that underlie each of these thought traps. Backed by science and research, she shows how we can reframe these ideas and use them to create the world and future we really want.

We’ve Hit the Limits of a Finite Earth

We’ve had it too good! We must “power down” and learn to live within the limits of a finite planet. “We’ve been living beyond our means for a long time and now it’s all blown up in our faces,” scolds Sir Jonathon Porritt, recent head of Britain’s Sustainable Development Commission. Over the last sixty years or so, we’ve all binged at a big fossil fuel party, we’re told. Now that party’s over and, well, too bad, we must pull back. Conveying the “power down” message quite vividly is Earth Hour. In 2008, from Sydney to San Francisco, people worldwide were encouraged to turn out lights during the same hour. More than 50 million people joined in. Since then, Earth Hour has gained enthusiasts, with people in 135 countries participating in 2011. Wonderfully, such massive involvement is yet more proof of people’s longing to be part of the solution. But does Earth Hour signal that the climate crisis and the end of cheap oil mean more darkness, so let’s all start getting used to it? True, fear can motivate action, but it can also backfire. It’s a “fundamental truth,” says psychology professor Tim Kasser, that “when sustenance and survival are threatened, people search for material resources to help them feel safe and secure.” Insecurity can heighten fixation on material acquisition. “We have a problem with Earth Hour,” said student Victoria Miller at the University of Michigan, “because it suggests that the proper route to progress for humanity is shutting down and moving backward toward the Middle Ages.” So Miller organized “Edison Hour,” encouraging everyone to turn on lights to celebrate technology’s contributions to progress. The students’ response suggests that, at least in a culture like ours, where we’re encouraged to go it alone, “shutting down,” as Miller calls it, can feel scary. By the way, choosing the incandescent bulb, Thomas Edison’s baby, as a symbol of progress is ironic, as it turns into light only 5 percent of the electricity it uses. Edison himself saw a lot of room for improvement.

The Limits of Limits Thinking

“Fossil fuels made the modern economy and all of its material accomplishments possible,” writes the Worldwatch Institute, which I greatly admire, in its State of the World 2008. And in their green economics textbook, Ecological Economics, environmental leaders and professors Herman Daly and Joshua Farley tell us that “fossil fuels freed us from the fixed flow of energy from the sun.” Hearing these assessments, it is easy to assume, Whoa! Without fossil fuel, human ingenuity would never have come up with other ways to power our lives. The end of oil will mean giving up all the wonderful, modern “material accomplishments” that fossil fuel has made possible, as we get used to living constrained, once again, by the sun’s “fixed flow.” But wait. Each day the sun provides the earth with a daily dose of energy 15,000 times greater than the energy humans currently use. The sun is in fact the only energy that is not fixed in any practical sense. The energy of the sun is not even renewable. Rather, it is continually renewing. We can’t stop it! But the biggest drawback of the “we’ve-hit-the-limits-of-a-finite-earth” idea is this: It frames the problem out there—in the fixed quantity that is earth. Its limits are the problem. This frame is carried, for example, in British environmental leader Tim Jackson’s phrase “our ecologically constrained world.” But, more accurately and usefully, the limit we’ve hit is that of the disruption of nature we humans can cause without catastrophic consequences for life. The first frame conjures up the notion of quantity, as in a fixed but overdrawn bank account. The problem is the darn limit of the account, and the solution is to cut back what we withdraw. The second frame keeps attention focused on us—on human disruptions of the flows of energy in nature, which, if considered as systems, are renewing and evolving. Oil and coal, for example, are limited, certainly, but, as just noted, energy from the sun, for all practical purposes, is not. So, attention in this second frame is not on narrowly cutting back but on aligning with the laws of nature to sustain and enhance life.

Beyond Limits to Alignment

If we conceive of our challenge as accepting the limits of a finite planet, our imagination remains locked inside an inherited, unecological worldview, one of separateness and lack. Precisely the thinking that got us into this mess. It’s true, of course, that for all practical purposes our planet and atmosphere are made up of a limited number of atoms. But their configurations are essentially infinite. By conjuring up a fixed and static reality, the finite-limits frame draws us away from the deeper reality of our world—that of dynamism, which can offer stunning possibility if we learn to align with nature’s rules. Think of music. Yes, there are just eighty-eight keys on the piano. But if we instruct ourselves to focus primarily on this limit, we won’t get very far in creating beautiful sound. It is the possible variations on these eighty-eight keys that are important. And they are virtually endless; some are gloriously harmonious, others harshly discordant. Such quality is what must command our attention. A limits frame asks us to focus on the number of keys we use, but creating beautiful music requires deep learning of the principles of harmony. It requires both discipline and invention. Only by focusing on harmony can we know whether more or fewer keys are needed. Making this core shift, we learn that, yes, we do uncover real limits on what we can do without disrupting nature’s regenerative flows. But our sights remain clear: We make these discoveries as we focus on how our actions touch and are touched by all other life and as we continue to uncover and take inspiration from the laws of biology and physics. We can learn, for example, how to cool our homes from a zebra’s stripes. Really. A zebra reduces its surface temperature by more than seventeen degrees Fahrenheit with microscopic air currents produced by the different heat absorption rates of its black and white stripes. In similar fashion, in Sendai, Japan, the Daiwa House office building uses alternating dark and light surfaces to create tiny air currents that control the building’s exterior temperature. So indoor summer temperatures are lowered enough to save around 20 percent in energy use.

Waste Not

Plus, once we see ourselves living within ever-evolving systems, our understanding of waste changes forever. We see that waste is not waste if it feeds an ecological process. This holistic approach was dubbed “cradle to cradle” by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in their 2002 book by that name. The term stuck. Cradle to cradle is the notion that, from buildings to upholstery to utilities, we can design productive processes so that their “waste products” feed other living processes rather than harm them. And it’s spreading fast, in part through efforts of the Geneva-based Zero Emissions Research Institute (ZERI) founded by green innovator Gunter Pauli. ZERI’s motto: “Follow nature’s example, realize waste’s potential.” A few years ago, in beautiful, mountain-ringed Manizales, Colombia, I got to see ZERI’s vision coming to life when formerly jobless women showed me how they were earning a good income by using waste from local coffee processing as the substrate in which to grow highly nutritious mushrooms. The waste from the mushrooms then became feed for animals. This coffee-waste-to-mushrooms-to-feed connection has created 10,000 jobs in Colombia. Imagine if the 16 million tons of waste now left rotting, and emitting greenhouse gases, on coffee farms around the world were instead feeding mushroom cultivation. Plus, if each of the roughly 25 million coffee farms in the world generated only two jobs growing mushrooms, says Pauli, coffee waste could provide 50 million protein-producing jobs globally. And tea farms could do the same with their waste, he adds. ZERI has spread this “pulp-to-protein” strategy to eight African countries. In Kenya, for example, water hyacinth—a vexing, foreign invader— has found an honorable calling as substrate that villagers now use to grow nutritious mushrooms, long part of local culture. To me, mushrooms have become almost magical in their powers: Scientist Paul Stamets, the mushroom magician, is showing the world that fungi can accomplish everything from killing termites to filtering toxins from farm waste to cleaning up oil spills—all by using nature’s genius. Industrial ecology—one industry directly feeding another—is a step toward leaving behind the notion of waste. Another simple but powerful story comes from Japan, which in seven years cut municipal waste 40 percent: Professor Yoshihito Shirai of the Kyushu Institute of Technology became so distressed by the vast amount of food waste from the restaurant industry being carted off to landfills that he and his team of students and colleagues went to work. They came up with a way to use the discarded food—with help from a fungus (of course!)—to produce polylactic acid for bioplastic. It’s done at nearly room temperature, saving energy, and the residue feeds animals. Growing rapidly, bioplastics are mainly produced with fossil fuel-intensive corn, displacing food crops. Professor Shirai’s approach makes a lot more sense.

Garbage Heat

Far from Japan, the 80,000 citizens of Kristianstad in a farming region of southern Sweden now use essentially no oil, natural gas, or coal at all to heat their homes and businesses—even through Sweden’s long, cold winters. Two decades ago, fossil fuels supplied all their heat, but citizens of Kristianstad started to see farm waste—from potato peels to pig guts—with new eyes. Through a fermentation process, the city now generates methane gas, which then creates heat and electricity and even gets refined into car fuel. “Once the city fathers got into the habit of harnessing power locally, they saw fuel everywhere,” noted a New York Times account of Kristianstad’s turnaround. So the city soon began taking advantage of waste wood from flooring factories and tree prunings to generate methane, as well as putting to use methane that was before being emitted into the atmosphere by an old landfill and sewage ponds. (And because methane has even more potent greenhouse effects than does carbon, putting it to use is critical.) “Waste to energy” is huge in Europe, with four hundred plants. Denmark is near the top, with twenty-nine. By 2016 Denmark will be the “top” in a very different way. A futuristic, waste-to-energy plant in downtown Copenhagen, serving five municipalities, will generate heat and electricity for 140,000 homes, while doubling as a ski resort. In this flat city, skiers will be able to ride an elevator to the plant’s “peak,” then ski down its three encircling “slopes.” Built into the design is a sobering lesson as well: The release of a visible smoke ring will be timed precisely so that onlookers can count five rings and know a ton of carbon dioxide has been released into the environment. The ring is intended as a startling way to make carbon dioxide real, motivating citizens to produce less waste to begin with. In the US, only a quarter of landfills capture methane from decaying garbage to make electricity, and even these emit over 50 percent more in carbon dioxide equivalents than waste-to-energy plants. But imagine the positive potential: In the US, more than half of municipal solid waste—almost a couple of pounds for each of us each day—is just the kind of stuff used to heat Kristianstad. However, our waste is simply wasted, supplying 0.2 percent of our total energy demand. Over half of our municipal waste goes to landfills—including 10,500 tons of residential waste leaving New York City every single day for landfills as far away as Ohio and South Carolina—a big contrast to Germany and the Netherlands, where roughly two-thirds of urban waste is recycled or composted, while only 1 to 2 percent goes into landfills.

Edison’s Other Idea

Then there’s wasted fuel itself. Two-thirds of the potential energy in fuel that goes into a typical power plant is released as waste heat. Thomas Edison realized it didn’t have to be this way and designed the world’s first cogeneration plant on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan. That was 1882. In cogeneration, a power plant’s “waste” heat is captured and piped to heat or cool buildings or to power industry. Then, instead of two-thirds only 15 percent of the energy is typically wasted. Notwithstanding Con Edison’s thirty cogeneration plants now serving 100,000 Manhattan homes and buildings, this Edison invention hasn’t taken off in the US… yet. Its potential is huge. Cogeneration by itself could cut carbon emissions globally by 10 percent in twenty years, estimates the International Energy Agency. In Denmark it already provides over half of the electricity. These stories are a mere suggestion of the ways in which we’re learning less about how to limit ourselves to stay within the earth’s limits and more about how to harmonize our human systems with nature’s ways. As we become students of nature’s laws, we find endless ways we can mimic the strategies of other creatures and plants to solve human challenges. In fact, what science writer and innovation consultant Janine Benyus has dubbed “biomimicry”—mimicking nature—is emerging as a new field of science. Engineers and architects are finding that even our most prized inventions are modest imitations of nature’s feats: Lily pads and bamboo stalks mastered impressive structural supports long before human architects caught on. And the ability of termites to keep their towers at precisely eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit outperforms even our most powerful modern heating and cooling systems.

Righting the Balance

Another downside of narrowly focusing on reductions to stay within “limits” is that we’re apt to miss a huge, crucial piece of the solution to the climate challenge. Big mistake. In the minds of most of us worried about climate change, averting catastrophe means cutting greenhouse gas emissions as fast as we can, mainly from their biggest current source—burning fossil fuel. That’s essential. But, more accurately and usefully, we can frame our challenge as restoring a balancing cycle in nature. “Carbon moves from the atmosphere to the land and back, and in this process it drives life on the planet,” observes a 2009 Worldwatch Institute report. But we’ve been emitting much more carbon than our earth can reabsorb, throwing the cycle seriously out of whack. Our task now is restoring the “harmonious movement of carbon,” the report concludes. It’s an example of what I mean by aligning with nature. Greenhouse gas emissions now total roughly 47 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent annually, and our earth has been absorbing about half, or about 25 billion metric tons. Way out of balance! To close the 22-billion-metric-ton gap, re-establishing a balancing cycle of carbon as quickly as possible, we therefore need both to reduce emissions and to increase absorption of carbon each year. Efficiencies, renewable-energy breakthroughs, and halting deforestation, along with shifts in our own perception of what makes us happy, can reduce carbon emissions. But how do we also enhance the equally critical carbon-absorption side of the cycle? To get a grip on why this question matters so much, consider what, for many, is a big surprise. It’s possible that deforestation, farming, grazing, and other people-caused soil disturbance during prehistoric times put more carbon into the atmosphere than has fossil fuel since 1850. And even during the fossil fuel-intensive, post-1850 era, soil and plant disruption has released over one-third as much carbon as has fossil fuel. So, in righting the carbon balance, soil and plants have a big role to play. It requires both a “stop” and a “start”: We stop misusing rangeland and tearing down and burning forests. (The net loss of forests globally each year equals an area the size of Costa Rica, although the rate, still horrendous, has begun to slow.)  And we start caring for soil, plants, and trees in ways that increase their carbon storing—some new ways, some very old. And some pretty simple: Lengthening the time between “harvesting” trees, for example, in “forests of the Pacific Northwest and Southeast could double their storage of carbon,” notes the Union of Concerned Scientists. Better farming practices are just as central to our successfully rebalancing the carbon cycle. Today in the US, the food system contributes nearly a fifth of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. Answers start with the dirt—no surprise once one learns that, overall, soil itself holds twice as much carbon as plants in the soil do. Since both exposed and disturbed soils release carbon, the answer is farming in ways that avoid both as much as possible. When using annual crops, that means not letting soil lie bare and instead planting cover crops, such as soil-enriching clover, in the gap between plantings of the annual crop. Better yet, it means relying more on perennials, including food-bearing trees as well as certain root crops and beans, so farmers don’t have to disrupt the soil. Dr. Wes Jackson, the determined plant geneticist, and his team at the Land Institute in Kansas have strived for decades to develop perennial grains. They’re getting closer, and their success could radically transform agriculture’s negative eco-impacts. Climate-friendly farming also means forgoing chemical pesticides, as well as rotating crops and using compost, manure, and plants whose roots fix nitrogen, rather than applying manufactured fertilizers, to enhance fertility. Agriculture contributing to a balanced carbon cycle also requires phasing out feedlots—now encouraged by tax subsidies—and moving livestock to well-managed range and pasture. Until recently most worriers about carbon overload, including me, saw livestock as climate criminals, in fact among the worst offenders—now blamed for 9 percent of carbon emissions and 18 percent of all greenhouse gases measured in CO2 equivalents. But here, too, some serious reframing is going on: It’s not the animals that deserve all the blame, even though the livestock sector emits 37 percent of all methane, and methane packs a climate punch twenty-three times that of carbon dioxide. A big part of the problem is the way humans mismanage them: The largest share of carbon that livestock “cause” results from humans tearing down forests to create pasture and grow feed for them. And add to that the climate costs of growing more than a third of the world’s grain and about 90 percent of our soybeans—using vast amounts of fossil fuel—just to feed them. But livestock didn’t ask to be penned up and stuffed with grain. Proof is trampling in from Australia and Africa that carefully managed grazing animals can help the earth absorb carbon. Despite widespread overgrazing, speeding desertification and releasing carbon worldwide, livestock could actually help reverse the process: They can break up hard-packed earth, deposit manure, enable seeds to take hold and water to penetrate, and, without even trying, regenerate healthier grassland and waterways—absorbing significant amounts of carbon. But for that to happen, humans would have to learn to herd the way nature used to: From time immemorial, natural predators have forced animals into groups and kept them moving often, and now herdsmen are learning to mimic the approach. They bunch animals together and leave them no longer than three days on one piece of land. While school kids now know that forest vegetation stores carbon, it turns out that the grassland stores as much, mainly in the soil, so the potential impact of this breakthrough—what renowned innovator Allan Savory calls “holistic, planned grazing”—is big. Worldwide, grazing land covers more than a quarter of all ice-free terrain, 8 billion acres or more. But so far this low-cost, holistic, carbon-absorbing path to grassland restoration has only reached 30 million. Imagine the possibilities if we shifted public support to such efforts: Even without counting what this grazing breakthrough could mean, experts report that these very doable farming practices cooperating with nature to grow our food—called agroecology—have the “technical potential” to absorb up to 6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent each year by 2030, or roughly a quarter of what’s needed to achieve carbon balance. And some experts say the potential is much greater. We certainly don’t want to miss that. One reason agriculture can become such a big piece of the climate-stabilizing puzzle is that growing trees and shrubs among food crops is not a problem. It’s a really good thing. Called “agroforestry,” the practice can improve productivity not only because the trees help keep soil from being washed or blown away but because the roots help water penetrate the soil. Plus, some tree varieties “fix” atmospheric nitrogen in the soil, effectively producing their own fertilizer. Farms with these “fertilizer trees” mixed in among field crops double or triple crop yields, reports the World Agroforestry Centre, while at the same time cutting the use of climate-disrupting commercial nitrogen fertilizer by up to 75 percent.

“We Stopped the Desert”

Consider the impact in West Africa, where in many minds climate change and deep poverty meld into heartbreaking images of destitution on increasingly scorched earth. Indeed, three-fourths of Niger is now desert, and the only news we heard from the country in mid-2010 is that famine threatened half of its people. Grim… yes? But there’s another story. Over two decades, poor farmers in the country’s south have “regreened” 12.5 million desolate acres, a momentous achievement not of planting trees but abetting their “natural regeneration.” There, a farmer-managed strategy has revived a centuries-old practice of leaving selected tree stumps in fields and protecting their strongest stems as they grow. The renewed trees then help protect the soil, bringing big increases in crop yields, and they provide fruit, nutritious leaves, fodder, and firewood. In all, Niger farmers have nurtured the growth of some 200 million trees. In the mid-1980s, it looked to some as though Niger would be “blown from the map,” writes Chris Reij, a Dutch specialist in sustainable land management, but farmer regreening has since brought enhanced food security for 2.5 million people. So, in late 2010, even as many in Niger were facing shortages, village chief Moussa Sambo described his village near the capital as experiencing the greatest prosperity ever, with young men returning. “We stopped the desert,” he said, “and everything changed.” And why hadn’t hungry farmers in Niger figured this all out long ago? Well, they had. But in the early twentieth century, French colonial rulers turned trees into state property and punished anyone messing with them. So farmers began to see trees as a risk to be avoided and just got rid of them. But Niger gained its independence in 1960, and over time, Reij says, farmers’ perceptions changed. They feel now they own the trees in their fields. And why haven’t we all heard about their extraordinary achievement? The whole of southern Niger “was assumed to be highly degraded. Few thought to look for positive changes at a regional scale,” Reij notes. And “if people don’t know to look for it, they don’t see it.” Could this be yet more evidence of our mental map’s filter working against us? Now aware, though, we can take heart from African farmers’ creativity in the face of a deteriorating environment, and they’re hardly alone. If proven agroforestry practices, like those in Niger, were used on the over 2 billion acres worldwide where they’re suitable, in thirty years agroforestry could have a striking impact—accounting for perhaps a third of agriculture’s overall potential contribution to righting the carbon balance. Beyond agriculture is the larger potential of forests. Reducing our current forest destruction, planting new forests, and improving how we manage forests could sequester almost 14 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent a year by 2030, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. So, adding this 14 billion potential contribution of forests to agriculture’s 6 billion potential, we’re approaching the brass ring: closing that 22-billion-metric-ton gap between the carbon dioxide equivalents we’re now emitting and what earth must absorb to avoid catastrophe.

From Ancient Farmers, a Soil Secret

Another dramatic climate-helping, soil-enhancing breakthrough is nothing new at all: It’s an ancient Amazonian practice of smoldering organic waste to create a form of charcoal that’s added to the topsoil. Now called “biochar,” its secret is its porous structure, which is welcoming to the bacteria and fungi that help plants absorb soil nutrients. So, biochar added to soils typically increases crop yields, sometimes even doubling them. And it is great for poor farmers because it can be made from material that otherwise would be discarded—in Africa, for example, cassava stems, oil palm branches, and common weeds. The controlled smoldering required to make biochar can also generate clean energy, obviating the need to cut down the forest for firewood. Plus, producing biochar removes carbon from the atmosphere and can lock it away for centuries. Biochar’s promise is being explored in test fields from Iowa State University to villages in the Congo. It’s a breakthrough worth following with an eco-mind that knows context is crucial: Even biochar could harm those less powerful, if agribusiness is allowed to create huge biochar operations displacing them. An eco-mind sees that balancing the carbon cycle, while enhancing fertility and yields, is largely about spreading proven practices available to almost all farmers, not new purchases available only to a minority. It focuses on empowering relationships—resisting technologies, including genetically modified and other patented seeds, that make farmers dependent on distant suppliers. What’s great is that balancing the carbon cycle and helping the poorest farmers calls for the same public actions: We shift support from fossil-fuel intensive farming toward agroecological practices. We take strong action against deforestation while supporting massive tree-planting initiatives, as in Ethiopia, and fostering trees’ “natural regeneration,” as in Niger. With an eco-mind, these steps—both cutting carbon and storing more—are urgent and satisfying.

Hunger as Teacher of the Eco-mind

The danger within the “limits frame” first hit me when I began asking, How do we end hunger? I realized that humanity has long seen the solution as getting the quantities right—making sure the quantity of food can feed the “quantity” of people. And we’ve done it. We’ve succeeded in both growing more food and slowing population growth. But, still, 868 million people go hungry. And this “official” count needs a hard look. To be counted “hungry,” a person has to survive for more than a year on less than the minimum calories required for a “sedentary lifestyle.” I was shocked. Poor people in developing countries are likely among the world’s least sedentary. So what if the UN hungry-people counters had instead used their definition of “normal activity”? Hungry people would almost double, to1.5 billion. And because we humans tend to see what we expect to see, it’s easy for us to see so much hunger and blame “too little food and too many people,” whether true or not. In the summer of 2009, a National Geographic’s cover story “The End of Plenty” stated flatly: “For most of the past decade, the world has been consuming more food than it has been producing.” Even the brilliant environmental leader Bill McKibben suggests that climate change is already denying us the quantity of food needed. So of course we’d assume humanity has overrun Earth’s finite capacity and our only hope is fewer people. But we’d be wrong. Yes, of course, our birth rates must come into harmony with the earth, and that can happen as we tackle the root cause of population growth—the same power imbalances in human relationships that create hunger. Note that 95 percent of population growth is in poor countries, where the majority, especially women, lack sufficient power over their lives. But a “not enough” diagnosis ignores this even more obvious fact: Even though the world’s population has nearly doubled since the late 1960s, today there’s significantly more food for each of us, reports the UN’s agricultural arm: now almost 3,000 calories per day. That’s plenty—and, remember, it’s only with the leftovers: what’s left over after we feed more than a third of our grain and most of our soy to livestock. Over the last decade, even the fifty “least-developed countries” as a group have experienced per-person food production gains. So National Geographic’s scary declaration belies the facts. Hunger isn’t the result of a lack of food. And thus a simple frame of “hitting the limits” can’t help us understand what’s going on. We need an eco-mind that never stops asking why. “Since the early 1990s, food[-import] bills of the developing countries have increased by five-or six-fold,” notes Olivier De Schutter. And he should know, for De Schutter is the UN Special Rapporteur on the “right to food.” He emphasizes, though, that this deepening dependency reflects powerful human-made forces, including foreign aid and local governments’ defunding agricultural development, including agriculture extension agents. One reason is that foreign aid to poor countries was often tied to their governments’ opening doors to imported food and cutting public supports. Sound familiar? So agriculture in many poor countries faltered, and millions of farmers abandoned the land for urban centers. Cities grew, and poor city folk couldn’t find decent work, so their lives depended on cheap food. Feeling that pressure, governments have tried to keep food in cities cheap, which depends on further undercutting profits farmers need to invest in producing more. Desperate governments opening their doors to cheaper imported food only made it harder for their own farming to flourish. Speeding the cycle, governments in the Global North didn’t follow their own advice, and continued to subsidize their farmers big-time. So their artificially cheap grain exports also encouraged import dependence in poor countries. At the same time, corporate control over seeds and farming supplies has been tightening, leaving farmers with a shrinking share of the return from farming. And, as if these extreme power imbalances weren’t bad enough, there’s Wall Street’s entry. Over just three years, from 2005 to 2008, the price of hard red wheat, to pick one example, jumped fivefold—even though wheat was plentiful. What had happened? In 1991, Goldman Sachs, followed by other banks, started putting investor money into their new commodity indexes—where dollars invested have ballooned fifty-fold since 2000, explains Frederick Kaufman in Foreign Policy. In what he calls a “casino of food derivatives,” speculative dollars overwhelmed actual supply, and in just three years, 2005 to 2008, “the worldwide price of food rose 80 percent.” And it’s only gotten worse. During much of the last few years, the UN Food Price Index has been roughly twice as high as a decade ago, unleashing a long-term, hunger-making force: In an era of rising food prices, speculators and governments worried about their populations’ future food supply—including the Gulf States, South Korea and China—are seizing cheap land. In 2009, land purchased by speculators and foreign governments, especially in Africa, jumped more than tenfold (to about the size of France) compared to previous years, reports the World Bank. They’re buying especially where governance is “weak,” the Bank notes; thus making it easier to get land “essentially for free and in neglect of local rights.” Imagine our feelings of vulnerability if this loss of control were happening to us. Other factors have played, and continue to play, a role in both food-price escalation and price swings, including worsening climate-change-related flood and drought, the rising price of oil, world food reserves allowed to sink too low, along with government-mandated diversion of grain into making fuel—which in the US is enough in sheer calories to feed a population larger than ours. Thus, the continuing tragedy of hunger, during an extended period of largely excellent world harvests, stems overwhelmingly from concentrated economic power. My point is that fixation on quantities and limits makes us eco-blind, unable to see, and therefore not driven to explore, key human relationships—in this case, from those setting off food-price escalation to those enabling people to choose the size of their families. All make up our social ecology, determining who has the power to eat. The mechanical, quantitative view keeps us from seeing that in both human and nonhuman realms, relationships have become so mal-aligned, so unharmonious, as to generate vast hunger—even amid unprecedented food abundance. So, the useful questions are about the re-alignment of our most basic relationships. They are as follows:

+ Do our methods of production enhance ecological relationships that restore and maintain food-producing capacity as they help to rebalance the carbon cycle?

+ And do our human relationships enable all people to gain access to what is produced?

Diverted from these questions by thinking within a simple, mechanical frame of “more or less,” we can’t see that the very strategies we’ve used to grow more have ended up so concentrating power over food that hundreds of millions go without. The frame has kept us blind to an entirely different approach already flourishing in diverse settings—an approach focusing on dispersion of social power as we cooperate with nature, one through which all of us can eat well while enhancing soil and water quality. Think back, for example, to the farmers’ breakthroughs in Andhra Pradesh, India, or in Niger. Not by focusing narrowly on “more” but by radically and positively remaking their relationships to the land and each other, they’re gaining ground both in meeting food needs and in creating healthier communities.

Flourishing as, or Even Because, We Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Given all we now know, why, I often ponder, aren’t we in the midst of exciting national discussion about how quickly we can leave fossil fuel behind? One obstacle might be an unspoken notion that if we’re not doing something we “should be,” the reason has to be that it costs too much. Since we’re not responding to the threat of climate chaos, it must be that the price tag is too high. So we can‘t see that what’s hugely expensive is inaction, whereas action will save us vast sums. Or maybe our country’s Puritan heritage is still whispering to us that doing what’s right has got to hurt. And we don’t want to hurt; we’re already hurting too much. This “the-party’s-over” thought trap might reinforce these perhaps less-than-conscious assumptions, blocking us from realizing that cutting greenhouse gases can enrich many aspects of our lives. Here are just some of the ways: We’d certainly save money. The Union of Concerned Scientists “blueprint” shows how in two decades, primarily via renewable energy and advances in efficiency, we could cut carbon significantly and at the same time end up saving the average US household $900 on electricity and transportation a year. By 2030, overall, Americans would experience a net gain of $464 billion annually. Buildings offer huge potential for energy savings, since they account for more than a third of US energy use. Consider the Empire State Building, where investing in efficiencies is projected to reduce by 40 percent its $11 million yearly energy outlay, reports Amory Lovins’s Rocky Mountain Institute. Strategies include super windows six times more efficient than regular double-paned windows and insulated barriers placed behind radiators to reflect heat. In similar redesigns across a wide range of industries, Lovins’s team consistently finds energy savings of 30 to 60 percent in old plants, paying back the investment in two to three years, and 40 to 90 percent in new plants. A sixth grader could grasp some of the money-saving energy efficiency schemes. Lovins notes, for example, that 60 percent of the world’s electricity runs motors, and the biggest use of motors is for pumping. Out of pumps come pipes, and Lovins finds that cheaper, low-friction pipes can save as much as 92 percent of the pump’s energy. The trick? Replace “skinny, long, crooked pipes” with “fat, short, straight pipes…. This is not rocket science,” says Lovins. Such is a taste of the kinds of savings within reach. And if one still doubts the big efficiency gains available to us, take note: Other countries are already far down the road. Ireland and Switzerland generate twice as much production as we do for every unit of energy used. And meeting the challenge of up-front investment required? In 2008, the research arm of eighty-two-year-old management consulting firm McKinsey & Company found that, globally, “the costs of transitioning to a low-carbon economy are not [economically] all that daunting.” The study estimates that the US could fund a low-carbon economy mostly “from investments that would otherwise have been made in traditional capital.” Globally, investing $170 billion each year in energy efficiency would bring an “energy savings ramping up to $900 billion annually by 2020,” concludes another McKinsey report. And investors would get a 17 percent rate of return. Not bad. And jobs? Moving toward electricity from wind, solar, and biomass could provide three times the number of jobs compared to continuing dependence on coal and gas, finds the National Council for Science and the Environment. And health? One measure of the vast health dividend we can enjoy as we move away from fossil fuel is captured in part within estimates of the hidden costs of coal, reported in the major new study cited earlier. In illness, lost productivity, and more, these costs come to $269 billion each year. Imagine being free of that burden. Food offers another enticement to embracing the sun’s energy. Here the alignment between what’s good for our bodies and what’s good for the earth—plus other creatures on it—is stunning. My daughter, Anna Lappé, brings to life in her 2010 Diet for a Hot Planet how earth-friendly, family-scale farming captures all the “efficiencies of scale” while creating healthy soil, water, more and better jobs, and healthier food. Not only does eating food produced organically, especially fresh and whole food, encourage modes of production that reduce climate impacts, but we eaters avoid toxic chemicals and highly processed products—saving ourselves from a diet that’s become a major health hazard (with costs rivaling that of tobacco-related disease). Plus, we get on average a quarter more nutrients per bite than if eating produce grown using farm chemicals. Now there’s a win-win. And, to help us see these gains, Hollywood is pitching in too: “You don’t even have to believe in the existence of climate change to understand that an energy revolution may be the very thing we need,” says TV and movie producer Marshall Herskovitz, who’s leading an entertainment industry initiative to open Americans’ eyes to the benefits of moving beyond fossil fuel. “We are in a very rare moment in history where the solving of one problem would actually solve four or five or six other intractable societal problems we have in the United States—unemployment, the deficit, our trade deficit, health, national security.”

Have Fossil Fuels Freed or Enslaved Us?

Yet, within the limits frame, the opposite seems to be assumed—that fossil fuel temporarily removed constraints so we could indulge ourselves. We’re told that we are “addicted to oil,” as if on a drug high from which we now must descend. In fact, many people promoting a post-fossil fuel world use the term carbon “descent” to capture what’s now required of us. So, here’s the snag: When economists write that “fossil fuel freed us,” they make it easy to forget that fossil fuel has also entrapped us. Because it exists in concentrations, fossil fuel has inexorably fed the concentration of social power in the hands of the few with the resources to extract it and to make the rest of us their dependent customers. That power means profits. Exxon’s almost doubled in just four years, to more than $45 billion in 2008, even as much of the world was devastated by the financial crisis. That’s $1,434 a second! Such highly concentrated power, as we’ve long known, typically leads to really bad things—cruelty and suffering among them. Consider Nigeria. “Everything looked possible” for Nigeria, writes Tom O’Neill in National Geographic. Then oil was discovered in 1956, and “everything went wrong,” as he captures in these scenes of Nigeria today: “Dense, garbage-heaped slums stretch for miles. Choking black smoke from an open-air slaughterhouse rolls over housetops. Streets are cratered with potholes and ruts. Vicious gangs roam school grounds. Peddlers and beggars rush up to vehicles stalled in gas lines. This is Port Harcourt, Nigeria’s oil hub…. Beyond the city… exists a netherworld…. Groups of hungry, half-naked children and sullen, idle adults wander dirt paths. There is no electricity, no clean water, no medicine, no schools. Fishing nets hang dry; dugout canoes sit unused on muddy banks. Decades of oil spills [by one estimate, equal to an Exxon Valdez spill each year for over fifty years], acid rain from gas flares, and the stripping away of mangroves for pipelines have killed off fish.” Nigeria is the world’s seventh-largest oil exporter, earning the country nearly $60 billion a year, yet it so lacks refining capacity that it must import fuel, and its annual per capita income is less than that of nearby Senegal, which exports not oil but fish and nuts. Nigeria’s poverty is so great that life expectancy there, forty-seven years, is among the world’s worst. Oil wealth breeds a deadly antidemocratic unity of foreign corporate power interested only in protecting its profits and local government corrupted by the huge sums it can pocket by cooperating with the oil companies. Royal Dutch Shell, for example, has dominated oil extraction in Nigeria since the late 1950s. Recently, the company agreed to settle out of court a lawsuit by victims’ families and the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which accused Shell of colluding with the Nigerian government to abuse human rights. Denying any guilt, the company paid out $15.5 million—or about four hours’ worth of its 2008 profits. In countries where oil is concentrated, “freedom” and “oil” operate in “an inverse correlation,” notes New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

And How Else Has Oil Enslaved?

Here at home, whether or not you believe that the drive to control oil lies at the heart of the $1 to $3 trillion US-initiated war in Iraq, it is unarguable that a fear of losing control of oil drives key aspects of US foreign policy. How could it not? The thirteen-member Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries—half of which are in the Middle East—controls about half of the world’s oil, and we depend on this cartel for 40 percent of our crude oil. How can any nation feel free and confidently plan for its wellbeing if dependent on imports for essential energy? Concentrated social power—flowing inexorably from the physical concentration of fossil fuel and the concentrated wealth it takes to extract it— undercuts democracy in yet another way: As long as we allow private wealth to influence campaign outcomes and infuse itself into public policy making, Big Oil will continue to throw its gargantuan resources behind policies favoring it at the expense of the planet. Just one galling example: Despite our climate crisis, $300 billion in annual global energy subsidies continue mostly to promote planet-heating fuels. For years, US oil and gas companies have wrangled major exemptions from laws, including the key Clean Water Act, that might have protected our water from the toxins they use in drilling. Perhaps with BP’s recklessness—abetted by lax government oversight—now exposed in the tragic 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil gusher, more Americans will awaken to the downside of oil dependency—if we can make clear that a safer alternative path is truly viable. The concentrated power flowing from fossil fuel also gives those who control it so much wealth that they have plenty to put toward confusing us—for example, by purchasing $50,000 ads in the New York Times on the opinion page, which readers associate with ideas, not advertising. There, in June of 2009, for example, ExxonMobil bragged that it had invested $1.5 billion over the previous five years to decrease emissions and increase energy efficiency. What readers weren’t told was that in 2008 alone, the company spent $26 billion—seventeen times more—on oil and gas development. And Exxon’s research on renewable energy? In 2008, Exxon spent $4 million (that’s an m, not a b) on renewable-energy research. From their claims, we’d never guess that during the last fifteen years the top five oil giants, with roughly $80 billion in combined profits in 2008 alone, provided only about a tenth as much capital for clean energy as have venture capitalists and other corporate investors. At the same time, they’ve helped to confuse citizens about climate change and spread the “government-is-our-problem” philosophy to disempower our democracy. The oil giants are in the way of, not part of the way toward, life. Finally, since security is foundational to democracy, fossil fuel dependency undermines democracy in yet another way. Former director of the Central Intelligence Agency James Woolsey nailed it when he noted that in the US “our focus on utility scale power plants instead of distributed generation” makes our energy grid “vulnerable to cyber and physical attacks.” He called on us to boost distributed power generation from wind and solar. Considering all this, might our descendants look back at this era of The End of Oil and conclude that it marked the beginning of real freedom? With hindsight, will they see that as humanity moved to rely on the sun’s distributed energy, social power became more distributed too—and that this shift was a necessary antecedent of real democracy?

Distributing Social Power as We Generate New and Clean Energy

Unlike fossil fuel, solar energy in all its forms gives most humans the chance to be cogenerators. For the biggest “waste” in today’s world is that of the sun’s rays. Less than five days of the sun’s energy is greater than all proven reserves of oil, coal, and natural gas. Consider Denmark. Its early experience with wind energy—a form of solar power itself, since wind results from the sun heating the air—offers a taste of how humans can use the sun’s distributed energy and keep social power distributed as well. In 1980, Denmark introduced a 30 percent subsidy for investing in wind power. Partly as a result, cooperatives, made up of a few individuals or a whole village, helped turn Denmark into a world leader in wind energy. Cooperatives now own about a fifth of Danish wind power. Denmark’s policies ended up encouraging 175,000 households to become producers, not just consumers, of energy—either through individual or cooperative ownership. This direct citizen involvement changed Danes’ perceptions. With a stake in the wind installations themselves, producer families accepted their altered landscapes. But when government support for distributed production waned and “larger, purely business investments” came in, the “public became less willing to look at wind turbines.” The shift in perception highlights a common human experience: that what we ourselves choose and create we see through different eyes than if the very same thing had been imposed on us. This insight seems key to transforming resistance in the US, where big wind projects, most notoriously Massachusetts’s offshore Cape Wind, have met mighty opposition. And how has Denmark become a world leader in renewable energy? Jane Kruse says it started with regular citizens. Jane directs a center for renewable energy in one of her country’s poorest areas and credits “young people and women [who] were very vocal against nuclear energy.” Momentum grew steadily through the 1970s and early 1980s, she says, until in 1985 the Danish parliament decided to build no more nuclear reactors. In an interview at Wind-Works.org, Jane adds, “But, we were not only struggling against nuclear, we also wanted to work for positive alternatives.” So women politicians (now more than a third of the parliament) joined to oppose nuclear energy and “cooperated across parties to pass legislation supportive of renewable energy.” In Germany, too, everyday citizens stepped up. In the Black Forest community of Schönau, Ursula Sladek, a mother of five, was shaken up by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. She, like Jane, decided not just to fight nuclear power but to create an alternative. By 1997, she and neighbors had raised the millions of euros needed to buy out the area’s private power grid and turn it into a co-op. Now owned by more than 1,000 people, it uses and supports decentralized renewable power, including solar and wind, to serve 100,000 customers, including both households and factories. It all got started because one woman said “no”—and “yes.” Now all Germany is with Ursula, rejecting nuclear power.” In the early 1990s, Germany had virtually no renewable energy, but now the country gets 16 percent of its electricity from renewables and is on track to achieve 35 percent within ten years. Germany’s policy, now spreading worldwide, is called the Feed-In Tariff because producers receive a payment (“tariff”) for feeding clean energy into the energy grid. The law obligates utilities to buy electricity from renewable installations, like a solar panel or small windmill, at a price that guarantees a good return. German households seized the opportunity and now own roughly 80 percent of the country’s solar installations as well as most of its small hydroelectric power plants. The cost of the whole program is spread across all ratepayers, coming to less than $5 a month per household—all while stimulating 370,000 jobs in the renewables industry. This practical scheme for distributed power generation is now working in dozens of countries on six continents. Yes, experts tell us, to fully embrace the dispersed sun, wind, and other clean-energy possibilities, we’ll also need to invest in what’s called a “supergrid,” connecting and balancing demand through dispersed green power generators. If we let it happen, concentrated social power—those companies wealthy enough to invest in grids—could gain ground in a new form. But it’s not a given. As more of us become energy generators ourselves—picking up the spirit of Jane and Ursula, in ways impossible with fossil fuel—isn’t it likely that we’d resist a return to dependency?

A Different Pathway, a Different Message

Of course, only a portion of the vast potential suggested here, in everything from “natural regeneration” of trees, to biochar enhancing of the soil, to impressive energy efficiencies and distributed energy generation, is practically achievable any time soon. But their potential is so far beyond what’s required that a “portion” would be terrific. My concern, however, is that a frame of “limits” can limit our view—keeping us from seeing the many positive steps we can take right now to balance the carbon cycle. The 2009 Union of Concerned Scientists peer-reviewed study Climate 2030: A National Blueprint for a Clean Energy Economy would put us on the path to cut climate-disrupting emissions by 2050 to 80 percent below their level in 2005. Is it enough? The Copenhagen Accord, signed by 167 countries, says that to avoid catastrophe we must keep planet-heating below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degree Fahrenheit). But even if we stopped carbon emissions now, reports climate-change fighter Bill McKibben, our prior actions mean we can’t avoid a planetary temperature rise approaching 2 degrees. Worse, burning remaining fossil fuel could release carbon propelling us five times beyond the 2 degrees. It’s “terrifying math,” says McKibben. And it is. Our response can be to freeze in fear or to use this new knowledge to motivate us to implement with even-greater vigor the many known strategies for reducing emissions and holding more carbon in the soil and plant life. To do so, though, we need very different messages. “The-party’s-over” framing of our challenge is a big nonstarter for many. In 2008, British prime minister Gordon Brown dubbed what we’ve been living the “age of global prosperity.” Oh yeah? Most people didn’t feel they’d been invited to that party, even before the Great Recession. The financial stress many Americans feel well predates the most recent crisis: The bottom 90 percent of us, were already earning less in real dollars than in 1973. We defeat our ends if environmental messages make already-stretched families fear that protecting the environment means losing further ground. An understandable response might be to grab everything in sight, now, before it’s all gone. So, let’s strive for a vision of less pressure and more security. “The place we could finish up could be so much nicer than the one we’ve got now,” says Tony Juniper, once director of Friends of the Earth, UK, and now a leader in an international movement called “Transition Towns.” “We’re not headed back to a new Stone Age or Dark Age, we’re headed toward a much brighter, secure future, where communities are rebuilt, pollution is a thing of the past, we’ve got food security, biodiversity, people have long comfortable lives, energy is secure forever.” No doubt this spirit is a key to why the Transition Towns initiative is taking off. It was launched only six years ago in Kinsale, Ireland, by eco-farming and gardening educator Rob Hopkins. Rather than as threatening a scary time ahead, Hopkins sees the climate challenge as an “extraordinary opportunity to reinvent, rethink and rebuild.” It’s an “experiment in engaged optimism,” he says. The movement has become a network of communities pledging and plotting to transition to renewable energy, while re-creating local economies and other aspects of community well-being. In addition to the almost four hundred “official” Transition Towns already participating in fourteen countries, many hundreds of other communities have expressed strong interest. And thousands of communities see themselves as part of the movement, says its founder. A couple of Transition Towns in the UK have even created their own green energy utility companies, and the Scottish government is helping fund local Transition Movement initiatives as part of its official response to climate change. The Transition Towns movement’s slogan of “carbon descent” might more appropriately be “carbon freedom,” for Hopkins’s message and the movement’s spirit capture a way of seeing that ignites human imagination and invention. Who wouldn’t want to be part of his “experiment in engaged optimism”? Because most people know they weren’t invited to the “Too Good Party,” the message of limits falls flat. An effective and ecologically attuned goal is not about more or less. Moving from fixation on quantities, our focus shifts to what brings health, ease, joy, creativity—more life. These qualities arise as we align with the rules of nature so that our real needs are met as the planet flourishes. This article on limitless living is excerpted from EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want by Frances Moore Lappé.

About The Author Frances Moore Lappé has authored, or co-authored, 19 books on social justice, sustainability and humanitarianism, including the legendary bestseller Diet for a Small Planet and her newest book, Daring Democracy: Igniting Power, Meaning, and Connection for the America We Want, which focuses on the roots of the U.S. democracy crisis and how Americans are creatively responding to the challenge. Frances is co-founder of Food First and Small Planet Institute, which she leads with her daughter Anna Lappé. She has received eighteen honorary degrees and many prestigious awards for her humanitarian work, including the James Beard Foundation Humanitarian of the Year Award. Visit her website: smallplanet.org

in order to develop a sustainable future that works for all life, we must build it on a foundation of higher consciousness and awareness.

The Challenge Of Planetary Civilization

The Earth’s biosphere is being severely wounded, even crippled, by humanity. Yet through humanity, the Earth is awakening as a conscious global organism. These two facts are intimately related: pushed by the harsh reality of an injured Earth, the human family is being challenged to realize to a new level of identity, responsibility, and purpose. The human family confronts a future of great opportunity and great peril. On the one hand, a communications revolution is sweeping the planet, providing humanity with the tools needed to achieve a dramatic new level of understanding and reconciliation that, in turn, can support a future of global sustainable development. On the other hand, powerful countervailing trends are also at work—climate change, overpopulation, dwindling reserves of oil, the ruin of rainforests, soil erosion, ozone depletion, and many more. In the next few decades these driving trends will either devastate or transform the economic, cultural, and political fabric of the planet. It is bewildering to see how quickly economic progress has turned into ecological devastation. Yet, with a deteriorating biosphere already stretched past the limits of its ability to carry the burden of humanity, the views and values that have served us so well in the past must now be reconsidered. If the Earth is to awaken in good health and a sustainable future, then we need to stand back, look at the larger sweep of human evolution, and ask ourselves basic questions: Who are we? What are we doing here? What is the nature and purpose of human evolution? Where do we go from here as a species? Are we destined to wander blindly into the future, or are there major stages along the way that we can anticipate? Is the universe coldly indifferent to our struggles, sufferings, and joys—or is it compassionately non-interfering? Although answers to these questions must be conjectural, there is a story of human evolution emerging from the enduring wisdom of the world’s spiritual traditions as well as from new insights in science that suggests we are involved in a highly purposeful process of development. Just as there are recognizable stages in the movement of an individual from infancy to early adulthood, so, too, do there seem to be stages of learning that describe our maturation as a species. As told in this book, humanity’s story has seven distinct chapters that describe our evolution from awakening hunter-gatherers to our initial maturity as a planetary-scale civilization. In my view humanity is roughly halfway through seven stages of development that must be realized if we are to experience a sustainable future and become a planetary civilization that is able both to maintain itself and to surpass itself into the distant future. Discovering the story of our evolutionary journey is vital. Confronted with a global crisis and lacking a vision of a sustainable future, we can lose confidence in ourselves, our leaders, and our institutions. A disoriented world civilization faced with dwindling resources, mounting pollution, and growing population is a recipe for ecological collapse, social anarchy, religious fanaticism, and authoritarian domination. We need to get our bearings for the journey ahead if we are to move swiftly towards our early adulthood as a planetary civilization.

Sustainability—and Beyond

To be sustainable in its development, a civilization must maintain the integrity of the physical, social and spiritual foundations upon which it is established. To seek only to survive—to do no more than simply exist—is not a sufficient foundation for long-term sustainability. An insight from Simone de Beauvoir clarifies our challenge: “Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.” If we do no more than work for a sustainable future, then we are in danger of creating a world in which living is little more than “only not dying.” To engage our enthusiasm for evolution, we must look beyond sheer survival—we need a compelling sense of purpose and potential for living together as a world civilization. If industrial societies are to turn away from materialism and commercialism as organizing values, then other values and purposes are needed that are at least as compelling. The survival and integrity of our biosphere, the quality of life for our children and friends, and the coevolution of culture and consciousness—these are life purposes that offer a sustainable future and a powerful alternative to those of the industrial era. There is growing evidence that a substantial majority of the human family would support this shift in life orientation. For example, a Gallup poll for the first “Earth Summit” in 1992 surveyed people in twenty-two diverse nations around the planet and found that in all but three, a majority is “increasingly worried about the global environment and gives its protection priority over economic growth.” For a majority of humans, representing a wide range of income levels, to place the well being of the Earth ahead of their personal economic concerns shows that a dramatic shift in values and priorities is taking place around the world—a shift that is concerned with creating a sustainable future. Although humanity is expressing growing concern for protecting the Earth’s environment, we do not yet have a shared vision of how to build an advanced, global civilization while simultaneously restoring the health of the biosphere. We do not have a vision of the future that is sufficiently realistic, comprehensive, and compelling to be able to coalesce the enthusiasm of the human family into a process of sustainable and surpassing development. We have economic forecasts, but these are bloodless projections that do not inspire civilizations to reach new heights. We have projections for single issues—the prospects for the rainforests, AIDS, education, health care, and so on—but we don’t have comprehensive visions of the whole planetary system that portray how humanity can live together successfully. We have technological forecasts— trends for computers, cars, air travel, nuclear technology, and so forth—but we have few integrative views that combine technology, psychology, spirituality and sociology into persuasive scenarios of a diverse, creative and sustainable future. When we can collectively envision a sustainable and satisfying pathway into the future, then can we begin to construct that future consciously. We need to draw upon our collective wisdom and discover images of the future that awaken our enthusiasm for evolution and mobilize our social energies. By drawing upon the world’s growing body of wisdom—in biology, anthropology, history, physics, systems theory, comparative religions, and so on—we can begin to discern the overall direction of human evolution that leads toward our maturity as a planetary civilization. With a clear vision of a positive sustainable future, we can proceed with confidence on our evolutionary journey. If humanity is successful in building an enduring civilization on the Earth, then it will come from the synergy of the collective experience and wisdom of the entire human family—the entire species. The world has become so interdependent that we must make it together, transcending differences of race, ethnicity, geography, religion, politics and gender. It is the human species that is devastating the planet, and it is the entire species that must learn to live together as a civilized and mutually supportive community. To focus on the development of civility among the human species is not to unduly inflate the importance of humanity within the ecosystem of life on Earth; rather, it is to recognize how dangerous humanity is to the viability of the Earth’s ecosystem. Humanity must begin consciously to develop a planetary-scale, species civilization that is able to live in a harmonious relationship with the rest of the web of life.

A New Paradigm for Evolution

Two views of evolution—materialism and transcendentalism—are dominant in the world today; but a third view is emerging that integrates them both into a co-evolutionary perspective. All three paradigms involve assumptions regarding not only our material and biological nature but also our consciousness and spiritual nature. 1. Materialist View—In this view, prominent in Western industrial societies, matter is considered the primary reality. Consciousness is secondary and is thought to emerge with high levels of complexity in the organization of brain matter. As the astronomer Carl Sagan writes, “My fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings—what we sometimes call ‘mind’—are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology, and nothing more.” Philosopher Daniel Dennett compares human consciousness to a “virtual machine,” a sort of computer software program that shapes the activities of the hardware system, the brain. The materialistic paradigm views evolutionary progress in terms of material achievements in science, architecture, art, literature, and so on. 2. Transcendentalist View—In this view, prominent among many ancient Eastern religions and contemporary “new age” spiritual movements, consciousness is believed to be the primary reality and matter is secondary. The material world is seen as being constructed from consciousness, so undue attention to material things represents a distraction from, and a substitute for, the unfolding of consciousness. Evolutionary progress is a journey of transcendence that moves from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit. 3. Co-evolutionary View—In this emerging view, which integrates East and West, reality is seen as being comprised equally of matter and consciousness, which are in turn assumed to be continuously regenerated by the more fundamental reality—an infinitely deep life-force that is called here the “meta-universe.” The evolutionary journey involves the synergistic development and refinement of both the material and the consciousness aspects of life. With their co-evolution we ultimately discover that we are identical with the vast and subtle life-force from which everything continuously arises and can move toward a more sustainable future for all life. Each view of evolution has a dramatically different social expression. The materialistic paradigm emphasizes material growth, unsustainable development and growth, worldly expressions of significance, status, and power. The transcendentalist paradigm emphasizes rising above the material world with its seeming distractions and substitutions for the perfect peace of ultimate transcendence. The co-evolutionary paradigm integrates the material and consciousness aspects of life into a mutually supportive spiral of development that can produce a sustainable future, planetary civilization and a global “wisdom culture.” Basic to the co-evolutionary paradigm is the idea that, moment-by-moment, the entire cosmos is being regenerated by an infinite field of life-energy that is called here the meta-universe. The meta-universe is assumed to have been present before the big bang and is the generative ground out of which our universe (including the fabric of space-time) emerges in a flow of continuous creation. The meta-universe thus infuses, underlies and transcends our cosmos. As a further note of definition, I will use the term universe to refer to the still-expanding system that emerged roughly fifteen billion years ago with the Big Bang. Although I will use the term cosmos to refer to the same system as the “universe,” I often use that word to communicate an extra measure of appreciation for the aesthetic structure and purposeful harmony evident in the design of the universe. We need to return to these basics of definition because the old approaches are no longer working in isolation from one another. For the past several thousand years the materialistic view has been dominant in the West and the transcendentalist view has been dominant in the East. Our time of planetary crisis demonstrates that both views have exhausted their evolutionary potential in isolation from each other. We need to move into a new era of co-evolutionary sustainable development that integrates them both into an organic whole. The West has pursued external, material growth without a balanced regard for the interior human potentials and the result has too often been a life-denying and self-serving social order that is exhausting its vitality and sense of direction. The East has pursued the evolution of internal consciousness without a balanced regard for the exterior human potentials of material and social growth and the result is that the development of consciousness has too often become a spiritual escape for the few, leaving many locked in a struggle for sheer survival. Where the West has concentrated on the finite and the momentary, the East has concentrated on the infinite and the eternal. The Eastern approach has been world-denying in its excessively transcendental orientation, while the Western approach has been world-destroying in its excessively materialistic orientation. To achieve a balanced and sustainable future way of living, each perspective requires the participation of the other. Only if they are joined together can they reach beyond themselves to a new, unifying paradigm, involving neither the material passivity of the transcendentalist perspective nor the all-consuming worldly obsession of the materialist perspective. A co-evolutionary perspective fosters entirely new dimensions of sustainable development. If the human family rises to this integrative challenge, we will embark on a breathtaking evolutionary journey—one that would not have been possible, and could not have been imagined, by either perspective working in isolation. The energy and creativity released by combining a balanced concern for the material and consciousness aspects of life are not simply additive, they are synergistic. In the partnership of the material and consciousness dimensions are the seeds of a new era of human growth that we have only scarcely begun to envision and explore. A co-evolutionary perspective reveals an elevated pattern and purpose to human evolution that can guide us toward a future bursting with creative possibility.

“Knowing That We Know” or Humanity’s Double Wisdom

We can get a clearer sense of direction for humanity’s evolutionary journey to achieve a sustainable future by considering the scientific name we have given to ourselves as a species: Homo sapiens sapiens. We are accustomed to the phrase Homo sapiens, but our full designation is Homo sapiens sapiens. To be “sapient” is to be wise or knowing. We humans describe ourselves as being more than sapient or wise, we are sapient sapient and have the unique potential of becoming “doubly wise” or “doubly knowing.” Our highest potential as a species is our ability to achieve full self-reflective consciousness or “knowing that we know.” As humanity develops its capacity for reflexive consciousness, it enables the universe to achieve self-referencing knowing of itself. Through humanity’s awakening, the universe acquires the ability to look back and reflect upon itself—in wonder, awe and appreciation. Development of our capacity for reflective knowing is a complex and multifaceted process. We are moving through a series of stages, each of which draws out different aspects of this potential. As we develop our capacity for reflective knowing, we acquire new levels of mastery in our personal and social evolution; for example, an enhanced capacity for self-determination, reconciliation, cooperation and creativity. With reflective knowing comes a double registering of experience and the ability to assess the appropriateness of our actions against the guide of our own knowing. With reflective consciousness, we become self-directing agents of our own evolution who are more than capable of building a sustainable future. Reflective consciousness is basic to social as well as to personal evolution. For example, in a democracy, when we are informed as individual citizens, then we “know.” However, when we communicate among ourselves as citizens—publicly learning about and affirming our collective sentiments as an extended community—then we “know that we know.” In our dangerous and difficult time of transition into sustainable development, it is not sufficient for civilizations to be wise, we must become doubly wise through social communication that clearly reveals our collective knowing to ourselves. To do this, we need to consciously use our mass media for vigorous public learning and dialogue regarding the critical choices for our future. Developing our capacity for reflective consciousness, both personally and socially, is a paramount evolutionary challenge.

Steps to Our Initial Maturity as a Planetary Civilization: The 7 Stages of Development

It will be helpful to gain some perspective by summarizing the broad outlines of human history thus far. For roughly two million years our ancestors struggled in the twilight of self-recognition and self-discovery. Then, sometime during the rugged conditions of the last great ice age, roughly 35,000 years ago, physically modern humans broke free from the limited consciousness of the animal kingdom. With this initial awakening we entered an epoch of growth lasting nearly 25,000 years, during which time we developed sophisticated language, art, trading networks, musical instruments and new tools of stone, wood, and bone. Then, roughly 10,000 years ago, we began another momentous transition by gradually shifting from the nomadic life of gathering and hunting to a settled life in small villages that relied upon subsistence agriculture for survival. Sustainable development and a peaceful and simple village life endured for thousands of years when, with surprising abruptness, the world’s first large cities arose roughly 5,500 years ago. With the blossoming of agrarian-based civilizations, a new level of drive and dynamism entered the world. Humanity’s evolutionary journey moved out of immersion within nature began to take on a character that was uniquely human. Major civilizations emerged in Mesopotamia, India, China and the Americas. For nearly 5,000 years these agrarian-based civilizations matured, generating the bulk of recorded human history. The next momentous leap forward began roughly 300 years ago, when a revolution in science and technology propelled a portion of humanity into the urban-industrial era. The gradual pace of urbanization and material development was transformed into an explosion of technological progress, moving forward with such ferocity and speed that it now threatens to devastate the entire biosphere of the planet. If we stand back from these immensely complex historical dynamics, there seems to be a relatively simple process of development under way that involves three major phases in the evolution of culture and consciousness. The first phase lasts for several million years and is the time when our human-like ancestors lived without any appreciable degree of self-recognition or reflective consciousness. The second phase began roughly 35,000 years ago when humanity became decisively self-aware and we moved into an era of rapid and less sustainable development. Since then we have been working through a series of developmental stages, increasing our capacity for reflective consciousness and building corresponding forms of civilization. Looking ahead, when we develop the full spectrum of capacities associated with reflective consciousness, we will then move into a third phase of “post-reflective consciousness,” or integral awareness with the wisdom essential for creating a sustainable future into the distant future. Humanity appears to be working its way through a relatively brief but critical phase of development. Millions of years were required to get to this transitional phase of evolution, and if we are successful in realizing its potentials, millions of years of future sustainability can follow. Hopefully the intermediate phase will be little more than a scratch on humanity’s evolutionary calendar. To fully coevolve our capacity for self-referencing consciousness along with a supportive planetary culture, I believe that humanity must work through seven major stages of development. Described simply, these are as follows: + Era of Awakening Hunter-gatherers—Roughly 35,000 years ago humanity awakened with a distinct capacity for self-reflective consciousness. Nonetheless perceptions were extremely limited, social organization was on a tribal scale, and life was centered around a gathering and hunting existence. Nature was viewed as intensely alive and filled with mysterious forces. + Era of Agrarian-Based Civilizations—Roughly 10,000 years ago human perception expanded to include a new sense of time—a wheel of existence that embraced nature’s seasons and cycles—and a farming consciousness emerged. With the development of systematic agriculture and a food surplus, the world’s first great cities began to appear around 3,500 B.C. and developed all the basic arts of civilization (for example, writing, division of labor, a priestly class, religion, city state governments, and massive architecture). + Scientific-Industrial Era—By the 1700s in Europe nature’s mystery and magic were giving way to impersonal science and the analyzing intellect. A progressing time sense coupled with a materialistic view of reality fostered an unprecedented emphasis on material progress, which moved in the direction of an unstainable future. Technical innovation brought with it the rise of mass production, the extreme division of labor, the unsustainable development of massive urban centers, and the rise of strong nation-states. + Communications and Reconciliation Era—Given the pervasiveness of television, computers and satellite systems around the planet, people in both agrarian and industrial societies are being swept up in the communications revolution. The opportunity for global communication provided by these new technologies is arriving just in time to allow the human family to enter into serious dialogue about how to cope with the intertwined system of problems that threaten our collective future. With communication we can discover a shared vision of a sustainable future. With reconciliation we can build the trust and sense of human community that will be essential for creating a future of mutually supportive development. + Bonding and Building Era—After reconciliation comes rebuilding. In working together to translate the vision of a sustainable future into tangible reality, humanity will naturally develop a strong sense of community, compassion, and deep bonding. Cross-cultural learning and planetary celebration will flourish. People will also feel a new depth of connection with nature and will work to restore the integrity of the global environment. + Surpassing Era—With the sustainability of the planet assured, a new level of human creativity will be liberated. Planetary civilization will move beyond a concern for maintaining itself to a concern for surpassing itself. This will be an era of explosive growth as the creativity of billions of persons is set free. Given the creative tumult, the strong bonding achieved in the previous epoch will be essential to keep the world from swirling out of control and tearing itself apart. Humanity will learn to balance the drive for creative diversity with the need for sustainable unity and development. + Initial Maturity as Planetary Civilization—In reaching this stage, humanity will have acquired sufficient perspective, wisdom, creativity, and compassion necessary to sustain itself into the distant future. This stage represents both the completion of a long process of development and the foundation for a new beginning, perhaps to participate in a community of life of galactic scale. This is not a linear view of sustainable development; rather, it portrays a complex cycle of separation and return that leads to our initial maturity as a species: In the three beginning stages of awakening, we separate ourselves from nature, develop our sense of autonomy as a species, and discover of our abilities for rebuilding the world in accord with our designs. In the following three stages, we reintegrate ourselves with nature, explore our deep bonding with one another and with the cosmos, and develop our capacity to act in conscious harmony with the universe. Whether we are successful in filling out these evolutionary stages and developing a sustainable future or whether we get off track and move into a dark age of stagnation and collapse will depend on the choices we now make freely. Our evolution is similar to a seven-stage rocket: Each of the booster stages must work properly if we are to be successful in launching a sustainable species-civilization. If any one of the stages fails, the evolutionary dynamic can veer off into stagnation or collapse. Arnold Toynbee spent a lifetime examining the emergence and decline of civilizations throughout history and described civilization as “a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour.” He also noted that the people and events that make good headlines tend to float on the surface of the stream of life, whereas it is the deeper changes, working below the surface of popular culture, that ultimately make history. Consistent with Toynbee’s insight, the seven stages of development described above are assumed to be the organizing paradigms that live beneath the surface of popular culture and whose potentials we are working to realize. While this approach bleaches out much of the complexity and richness found in the rise and fall of individual civilizations, it will reveal more clearly the step-by-step advance of culture and consciousness as we work to become a doubly-wise species-civilization. At the core of our history as a species is the story of our movement through a series of perceptual paradigms as we work to achieve our initial maturity as a self-reflective and self-organizing planetary civilization. 

Building a Sustainable Future: The 6 Key Needs

The sustainability crisis is now viewed largely in terms of dwindling resources, mounting pollution, population growth, and other physical indicators that measure the Earth’s ability to support the burden of humanity. Although these are of critical importance, they do not go to the heart of our situation. More basic is an invisible crisis in the consciousness and culture of humanity. Until we come to terms with the nonmaterial aspects of our crisis, we will not be able to make the many material changes required to build a sustainable future. Here are six priority needs for building a sustainable and satisfying future: + Breaking the Cultural Hypnosis of Consumerism—The mass media are aggressively promoting a consumerist mentality in developed nations. In the United States the average person sees more than 35,000 commercials a year, most of which are ads for a high-consumption lifestyle as well as a pitch for a product. We need a new social ethic that holds the mass media accountable for its programming of our civilization’s consciousness with antisustainability messages. We need to counter this cultural hypnosis with programming and advertising that foster a sustainability consciousness. From documentaries to dramas to “Earth commercials,” we need to use the mass media to awaken and sustain a new understanding and caring for the planet and for the future. + Ecological Ways of Living—We need actively to envision new ways of living that reflect our understanding that the Earth will be humanity’s home for countless generations into the future. We need to invent new patterns of ecological living that moderate our impact on the Earth—from the design of our homes and neighborhoods to the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the transportation we use, the work we do, and much more. To design our way into the future consciously offers an inspiring challenge—an exciting experiment in intentional living that can bring forth our most creative potentials. + Compelling Visions of a Sustainable Future—We cannot build a future consciously that we have not first imagined. Many people can visualize a future of worsening crisis—ecological destruction, famines, civil unrest, and material limitation—but few have a positive vision of the future. Without a hopeful future to work toward, people will tend to withdraw into a protected world for themselves and focus on the short run. We need to see that with new patterns of consumption, housing and community, work and livelihood, we can create a sustainable and a satisfying future. These visions of the future need to involve more than “only not dying”— we need to see how we can both maintain and surpass ourselves and thereby continue our evolution toward our initial maturity as a planetary civilization. + Conscious Democracy—To choose a sustainable future, we need a revitalized democracy that engages citizens in a whole new level of dialogue and decision making through innovative use of our tools of mass communication. We need to energize the conversation of democracy by developing regular electronic town meetings with effective forms of feedback from citizens. As citizens come to know their own minds on issues and priorities, representatives in government can work with greater confidence to develop policies for a sustainable future. With active communication we can achieve the level of mass consensus, cooperation, and coordination needed to adapt our patterns of living to the new global realities. + Nurturing a Reflective Perceptual Paradigm—We need to cultivate a witnessing consciousness that is able to stand back and directly experience the Earth as a tightly interconnected and living system that deserves great care and respect. In seeing the Earth as alive and worthy of reverence, we will cultivate a mind-set that naturally promotes the frugal and judicious use of resources and that safeguards all life on the planet. + Reconciliation—Humanity is profoundly divided between: the rich and the poor, racial groups, ethnic groups, religious groups, men and women, current and future generations, and many other polarities. We need to use face-to-face communication, as well as our tools of electronic communication, to achieve a new level of reconciliation as a human family that gives us a fresh start for moving ahead. The communications revolution will leave no place on the planet to hide from these realities. Nearly every dwelling will have an intelligent and interactive “picture window” that opens with stark clarity onto the world’s divisions and suffering billions. If humanity is to work together cooperatively, we must learn to accept our diversity—racial, ethnic, generational, religious, sexual, cultural, geographic, and more. Without reconciliation our efforts to achieve sustainability will be stalemated and stalled. When we have broken the cultural hypnosis of consumerism and can envision ecological ways of living, and when these modes of living connect with a clear vision of a sustainable future for the Earth that we co-create with other citizens through the ongoing conversation of a conscious democracy, and when we have the objectivity of a witnessing or reflective consciousness and can achieve reconciliation among the diverse members of the human family, then we have a realistic basis for making the technological and material changes required for building a sustainable future.

Final Thoughts: A Summary

Although the human family is only roughly halfway through the stages of growth required to move from pre-reflective consciousness to integrated awareness, our initial maturity as a species may be closer than we think. Summarizing our evolutionary journey thus far: Roughly 2.5 million years were required for our earliest ancestors to move from the first glimmerings of self-recognition to decisive awakening in the initial stage of reflective consciousness. It then took about 30,000 years for physically modern humans to move through the stage of awakening hunter-gatherers; approximately 5,000 years to move through the stage of agrarian-based civilizations; and then around 300 years for a number of nations to move through the stage of industrial civilization. Because the pace of evolution is accelerating enormously, the past is not an accurate guide to the future. If we do not veer off onto some evolutionary detour, then it is conceivable that within a very brief period of time (perhaps five hundred years, or a dozen generations or so) we could build a sustainable future and creative planetary civilization, that celebrates the many threads that make up the tapestry of its rich character. We are rapidly approaching one of the most momentous occasions in the evolution of life on any planet—the inevitable “evolutionary inflection” where an arduous process of withdrawing from nature makes a decisive shift toward an equally demanding journey of returning to live in harmony with nature. The inflection represents a unique pivot point in human history where evolution finally becomes decisively conscious of itself as a planetary-scale process, begins to intentionally direct itself, and begins to deliberately shift from a pathway of separation to a pathway of reconciliation. The period of inflection is reached when our material powers become so great that they progressively destroy the ecological foundations of life on the planet and make it essential for us to work together as a species in a common task of survival. By my reckoning, humanity will likely “hit the wall”—or run into unyielding limits to material growth and be forced to squarely confront the imperative for pervasive change—in roughly the decade of the 2020s. How humanity prepares for this unique evolutionary shift toward what I hope is a sustainable future will be a real and visible test of our evolutionary intelligence as well as our capacity for compassion and creativity. To move onto a pathway of sustaining and surpassing development will require the enthusiastic involvement of billions of people. Therefore the concerns raised in this broad review of human evolution are ultimately very personal. Who we become as a planetary civilization will depend directly upon our actions as a global community of individuals. We each have unique talents—and correspondingly unique responsibilities—for participating in the unfolding of life. The awakening of the Earth now depends directly upon the citizens of the Earth acting in concert with one another to build the foundations of a sustainable future. Each individual needs to tithe a significant portion of their time and talent to the healthy coevolution of the planet. Millions of years lie behind us, bringing us to this moment in human history; and millions of years could lie before us, unfolding a future whose nature may well pivot upon choices we make now. We do not need to belabor the stages of learning and growth that remain. With diligent efforts, a sustainable, compassionate, and creative world civilization could become established within perhaps half a millennium. However, before we reach that stage of dynamic stability, humanity’s mastery of the dimensional complexities of the evolutionary process will be challenged repeatedly. What an exciting, demanding, and rewarding journey stretches out before us. This article on developing a sustainable future is excerpted from Awakening Earth: Exploring the Evolution of Human Culture and Consciousness by Duane Elgin.

About The Author Duane Elgin, MBA, M.A. is an internationally recognized speaker, author, and social visionary who looks beneath the surface turbulence of our times to explore the deeper trends that are transforming our world. In 2006, Duane received the International Goi Peace Award in Japan in recognition of his contribution to a global “vision, consciousness, and lifestyle” that fosters a “more sustainable and spiritual culture.” Visit his website duaneelgin.com

ben decker is one of the world’s leading meditation teachers and executive director of the providence project, an LA-based non-profit dedicated to improving the health, quality of life and overall wellbeing of communities worldwide through the power of meditation and mindfulness. photo: ian bailey

A wise mentor of mine used to say that to understand where life is leading you, connect the dots between where you have been. Following this logic, it becomes quite clear why Ben Decker would undertake the incredibly challenging, but infinitely rewarding path that he has of dedicating his life to transforming our society’s most bureaucratic and underserved institutions through meditation and mindfulness. Having experienced its massively transformational power firsthand and witnessing its impact on the lives of others, it became clear that life was indeed leading him somewhere profound. “There have been many moments in my life where, in meditation, I experienced a direct transition—from addiction to freedom from addiction; from dysfunctional relationships to seeing the way out of dysfunctional relationships; from bearing witness to my own suffering, my own childhood traumas and being able to process through and ultimately overcome them,” Ben shared with us during an interview about his burgeoning nonprofit, The Providence Project, which offers meditation and mindfulness training to various institutions and communities, including schools, rehabilitation centers, detention centers, hospitals, and law enforcement officers. His fascination with the life-altering power of meditation came not just from personal experiences with the practice but from witnessing firsthand its effects on others. “There is one unforgettable incident that I experienced where I was able to bear witness to the immense transformation of others through the power of meditation.” He shifted nervously in his seat as he opened up to us: “I’ve never shared this story publicly until now… When I was on a trip to the Philippines with an anti-human trafficking organization I‘d become very involved with, Unlikely Heroes, we were spending a few days working with a group of girls that had been rescued from sex trafficking. Each girl had their own individual story; but, they were all under 18, most under the age of 15, and had been raped countless times.” The mood in the room grew tense as the story unfolded. Ben recalled that one of the girls had been strangled and left for dead, but was fortunately found and resuscitated. “Encountering these girls, and seeing their social dynamic with each other, it was unmistakably obvious: they were very guarded, they had walls up against each other; they didn’t even want to look me in the eye. They had walls up against all of the people that were there to help them, especially the men that were there, myself included.” Ben paused to take a sip of water and collect himself, clearly still moved by his experience many years later. “They had been through very serious, very extreme trauma,” he murmured before continuing.  After being moved to a safe place, the girls were fed, given gifts, and reassured, but there wasn’t much of a change in their demeanor. “After a series of different activities, we actually sat down and had them close their eyes. We said a prayer with them. We had them just sit there in silence, taking a few deep breaths. In those moments, we let them know that they were in a safe place; that we were there specifically for them and to help them… that they mattered; that their lives mattered; that things that had already happened to them were irrelevant to what was going to happen to them in the future, and that they are powerful; that they could overcome anything. The energy in the room became very still as we sat there in silence. We saw all of the girls—the demeanor of each of these very hard, very tough girls—became very soft and they all suddenly became very vulnerable.” meditation has been a powerful transformational force both in ben’s own life and the lives of the people he works with—from people like presidential hopeful bernie sanders to police offers, inmates and underserved children worldwide. Ben described the scene after the meditation as one of great transformation—the girls were crying and hugging each other—later that day they were playing and singing as if all of that trauma had suddenly evaporated. “It was like a miracle had been performed,” he choked. “Even just for that day, they were allowed to just be teenagers again, they were allowed to just be young girls rather than having to live through the horror of what had happened to them.” Although reluctant to admit it, it’s clear this experience left an indelible mark on his soul. “It was emotional for me also. It was one of the most magical moments I have ever experienced. I was crying; I had tears in my eyes. All the other adults that were with me, we were all really speechless. It was something very divine; it was so much bigger than we ever could have imagined that moment to be. It was as though something truly divine, truly powerful, had passed through that room. My immediate thoughts were relating that moment to my own life, how I could overcome anything in my own life.” Experiences like these shape our lives in unexpected ways, instantly transforming the way we see ourselves and the world around us. Ben remembers seeing a female police officer a few days later while still in the Philippines, whose demeanor was also characteristic of the same tough exterior and a similar underlying hurt and trauma. “I just started to see it. And, I thought, wow; what if we could provide that moment to police officers? And let them know: Hey, you’ve got this! You’re awesome! We so appreciate what you’re doing. And you, as an individual, matter no matter what, if you decided to not be a police officer or if you decide to continue being a police officer.” Swept up in the zeitgeist of his experiences, Ben began to see the pressing need for similar interventions throughout society’s most troubled institutions. “I thought: what if we could provide that healing, transformational moment to people who are in prison, who believe that they’re bad and believe that they should be judged for the things that they’ve done? What if we could start to bring those transformational moments into those places? Would they cry? Would they hug each other after? Would they start laughing with each other after the way these girls did?” “In the months after that, all these other ideas started to come through,” remembers Ben. “I started to meet people: cancer patients, AIDS patients, mental health patients—and even just children living their normal lives, with normal upbringings. What if we could provide that moment to children who just feel insecure on their first day of school? They don’t even need to have experienced extreme trauma; everyone experiences anxiety and suffering in their own way. What if we were able to just provide that in areas where it could be needed? The transformational potential in that was really inspiring.” Upon his return to the U.S., the inspiration continued to avalanche in. What would happen if everyone could experience something like this?  How would society change?  What would happen if world leaders and politicians had this same experience? Would wars end? Would major issues find peaceful resolution? Would it trickle down to the masses? “Giving myself that time to dream about that—it was a few months of dreaming—a few months of just, what can I do? I don’t know where to begin with this; it was just such a big, lofty dream. And I realized you just kind of start where you are.” What you don’t know about Ben is that he knows how to hustle—how to make things happen. The intoxicating dream of becoming an actor lured him out west as a teenager, leaving behind everything that couldn’t fit in his car—family, friends and the only life he knew up to that point. Like so many before him, he soon found himself stranded in Los Angeles without a cent to his name.  But there was no turning back. It was all or nothing, a proverbial right of passage to discover who he truly was. When the acting failed to pan out, he quickly discovered he was good at public relations. Really good. Within a few years, he was running a well-staffed PR agency that he had built from scratch, working with some of the world’s most well-known brands and a number of burgeoning nonprofits, including Unlikely Heroes, to raise awareness about humanitarian causes closer to his heart. But despite the fame, glamour and success, the unrelenting pressure to perform and the toll it was taking on his life was slowly eating away at his conscience. “It was a lot of stress—it was a really high stress environment,” Ben reflected on his life running the agency. “Everyone around me was constantly having anxiety attacks, and there was a really serious issue with depression. It was constant chaos. My health was deteriorating, my anxiety was off the charts.” “Before I knew it, I had been in LA. for six years and my entire life had been co-opted by the PR industry. I was gaining a lot of weight and aging really rapidly. I had all kinds of health issues coming up left and right. Doctors were shoving medication in my face… I eventually realized that my life wasn’t working, and so I began the process of unraveling everything I had spent the last half decade building.” And as is so often the case in these moments of defeat, we find great clarity. Ben’s story was no exception. “I was feeling really disconnected and disinterested with life. I was broke and depressed and cynical… even suicidal at times… and then I started meditating. And it changed everything.” His face lit up as he recounted the moment, clearly still feeling the emotional ethers of the experience. “I woke up to the reality of my life and realized that it wasn’t at all what I wanted, and I just started purging everything negative from my life. Meditation and a handful of close friends saved me from a massively self-destructive trajectory.” And yet, in an ironic twist of fate, it would ultimately be his PR skills, coupled with a newfound self-awareness and meditation practice, that led to the transformational experiences that were his salvation from the unrelenting stress of the entertainment industry. “After I got back from the Phillipines, I got involved with Marianne Williamson, serving on her campaign for Congress, and through relationships developed by working with her, I began teaching meditation publicly. It was really through that experience of teaching publicly that I started to see how this vision could become something that could pragmatically begin and actually, effectively, be implemented now, right away. So, I decided to create The Providence Project from that place of inspiration to just begin something now.” It didn’t take long before Ben had developed and implemented free meditation and mindfulness classes across the city. Building on his early successes, he began developing relationships with mental health facilities and other organizations as The Providence Project grew. His background working closely with charities during his PR days suddenly came into greater focus and found a new form of expression. Instead of raising money for other nonprofits, he’s now running his own. From the very beginning, The Providence Project was different—the ethos was about far more than just raising money for a good cause, it was about transforming society from the roots up—giving the often-marginalized people who need it most a direct experience of the transformation, joy and peace that meditation could bring… just like he experienced with the girls from the Phillipines.

The Beginnings of a Movement

Two years in he’s off to a great start. Ben and the project have worked tirelessly to set up regular classes across Los Angeles and are making inroads into many underserved areas of society. Their model is twofold: provide free community classes to anyone looking to learn meditation and mindfulness and serve specific communities by partnering with existing organizations and acting as a social service-enhancement program. By operating in this manner, the classes can be tailored to meet the specific needs of the communities being served. But despite initial success, it’s hardly a walk in the park. Transforming bureaucratic organizations and marginalized communities takes time, patience and fine tuning to meet the specific needs of the people being served. “We’re working with the case managers and everything; hearing what the needs are. Sometimes, for example, if you think it’s going to be encouragement these people need, it’s not always the case; sometimes you’re surprised to find out it’s actually anger management; and then we tailor the meditations to really fit what the case managers tell us about the population. And then, once we work with the population, we receive real-time feedback in tailoring that specifically for them,” he explained about the intricacies of developing effective programs. ben teaching one of many regular meditation classes he leads in the los angeles area. photo: ian bailey One of his favorite projects to date offers meditation classes to survivors of sex-trafficking in Los Angeles county by working with Saving Innocence—a nonprofit that rescues and advocates for sex-trafficking survivors. As of this writing, Ben and The Providence Project have set up or are in the process of implementing free programs working with police departments, prisons, mental health facilities, rehabilitation centers, school teachers, HIV/AIDS and cancer patients, and virtually everyone in between. Although the programs have generally been well-received, they face unique challenges with people who don’t understand meditation or have preconceived notions about what it is. “There’s some people that believe it’s a religious practice—there are people who are misinformed about the different types of meditation, and there’s also a members-only-club mentality about this type of meditation is better than that type of meditation.” On top of this, there’s the ingrained belief in our society that doing more is better, and slowing down is a sign of weakness. “Convincing someone like a police officer or politician to sit quietly for a session can take some finesse. There’s not only overcoming some of the ignorance and confusion surrounding what the actual work is but also being able to calmly and effectively communicate what the clinically proven benefits are to get someone to the point where they say: OK; I understand meditation; I understand what this is, and I’m open to trying it.” Which is why The Providence Project has adopted a hybrid, science-backed form of meditation that transcends traditional definitions and stereotypes of the practice: “The method that we use in The Providence Project is based on what has been clinically proven to be effective. So, it has its roots in both Vedic and Buddhist mindfulness meditation, which have a lot of similarities with Kabbalistic meditation and other forms of meditation; but, primarily, it is a mindfulness-based practice.” While The Providence Project doesn’t use traditional mantra in the meditations, they still teach about them, along with the various types and styles of meditation. “I really like to teach about the different kinds of meditation, so people can find out what really resonates for them and learn more about that. What we are teaching directly is a totally secular, non-spiritual exercise to connect with your body, take inventory of your body and become aware of the thoughts that are coming through your mind. It’s very similar to mindfulness in that way, and it’s technically based on mindfulness, but we also use very foundational, fundamental techniques that are not considered to be part of any specific lineage exclusively.” And Ben should know. In addition to running The Providence Project full time, he currently teaches meditation at various locales in Los Angeles, including Wanderlust Hollywood and Unplug Meditation, and works with a number of private clients looking to go deeper in their own practice. His intimacy with the art is a big part of the organization’s success, encoding the entire project with deep roots in an experiential, non-dogmatic model. A model that is also designed to be highly scalable—perhaps a reflection of the open-source ethos characteristic of Ben’s generation. “The programs are organized in such a way that they are easy to duplicate; the model was created to be reproducible,” he chimed when asked about the project’s evolution and development. In order to restructure the fabric of society and have the widest possible impact, The Providence Project will eventually take on a life of its own, meaning that volunteers around the world will be able to form their own spinoff groups based on a shared common methodology and system currently being developed by Ben and his colleagues. “I think that what the world needs and what The Providence Project needs is really committed people,” says Ben. “The best way to contribute is to take an inventory of what you do with your life; everyone can help in their own way. You are helping because you have the magazine; you’re helping by getting the word out there.” In addition to spreading awareness, The Providence Project is particularly focused on finding and training facilitators across the country and world and connecting them with groups in their area that can benefit from meditation. “We can provide the training for how to teach meditation. We can even connect you with groups in your area that need the work and coordinate all of that,” he explained. “More than anything, I just want to see the programs grow and thrive with a team of really committed people.” When asked about the future of the Project, Ben is optimistic. “I’ve already seen so much transformation that my hopes and my vision are very high. In fact, my expectations are really high. There’s no limit to what one individual can create and experience. Knowing that and then providing a tool that can actually help an individual recognize that in themselves, we open ourselves up to a world where anything actually is possible.” And in the end, like everything, it all comes full circle. To learn more about The Providence Project visit their website: theprovidenceproject.org All photographs shot on location at Wanderlust Hollywood and the Four Seasons Hotel, Beverly Hills.

About The Authors Justin Faerman has been studying and writing about holistic health practices, herbalism and natural medicine for over 14 years and is a leading authority on both modern and ancient therapies for creating lasting health and wellness. He has a degree in Environmental Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara and has conducted field research into organic and regenerative agriculture practices and eco-social sustainability during his time there. He is also the Founder of Lotus Superfoods, a boutique purveyor of rare herbs and superfoods as well as the Co-founder of Conscious Lifestyle Magazine and the Flow Consciousness Institute. Learn more about his work at flowconsciousnessinstitute.com and lotussuperfoods.com Meghan McDonald is the Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Conscious Lifestyle Magazine. She holds a master’s degree in social psychology from San Diego State University where she conducted award-winning research into the nature of human social behavior. She is an advocate for many environmental and social justice causes and a champion of social impact-focused brands and products that adhere to high sustainability and ethical standards. As a regular travel and lifestyle contributor to Conscious Lifestyle Magazine, Meghan funnels her extensive knowledge of natural products, organic living, and consumer behavior into researching and reviewing brands and products that promote health, wellbeing, sustainability, equality, and positive social change. She has traveled to over 25 countries and loves exploring diverse destinations worldwide while documenting the local artisans and businesses offering conscious, healthy alternatives.

a new class of safe, natural mushroom-based biopesticides is a very real alternative to health and environment damaging synthetic pesticides currently in widespread use. photo: der hannes photocase.com

It has been said by some of the wiser among us that if a problem exists, a corresponding solution will also exist to be found in nature. That somehow, some way, this planet we live on is a self-contained, self-regulating, even self-aware system that balances itself continually in response to the evolving species and situations present at any time. Just as we evolve in response to our environment, so too does the living earth respond to inherent and human-made challenges. So, it should come as no surprise then that world-renowned mycologist Paul Stamets has discovered a mushroom-based biopesticide that is just as effective (if not more so) as synthetic chemical pesticides, without any health or environment-disrupting effects. In what some are calling “the most disruptive agricultural technology ever witnessed,” Stamets has patented a strain of entomopathogenic fungi (read: insect-killing fungus, commonly referred to as a biopesticide) known as M. anisopliae that can be specifically engineered to repel over 200,000 different types of insects. Through a process called “sporulation”, the entomopathogenic fungi spores are freeze-dried and subsequently sprayed over entire fields of crops, effectively making them invisible and undesirable for insects, who are evolutionarily wired to avoid such fungi.  

“Stamets’ has discovered a mushroom-based biopesticide that is just as effective as synthetic chemical pesticides, without any health or environment-disrupting effects.”

  Traditional synthetic pesticides, on the other hand, have wreaked nothing short of total havoc on the biosphere, humans included. Largely believed to be responsible for the alarming disappearance of the bees, which is threatening to collapse the entire food chain, synthetic chemical pesticides are also strongly related to the sharp rise in autism, cancer, and other life-threatening autoimmune conditions, as they severely disrupt the body’s natural functioning. Make no mistake about it, pesticides are biological poisons and are being used in greater and greater quantities every year to offset the immunity that insects develop to them over time. It’s a vicious cycle that can’t be solved by further pesticide use and, in fact, is already reaching a zenith as so-called superbugs develop after thousands of successive generations that are basically immune to pesticides altogether. The rise of pesticide use has also played a large part in the development of highly controversial genetically modified (GMO) crops, which are bred to be resistant to pests and the pesticides used to protect them even further. These GMO foods, as you can imagine, have their share of side effects as well, which include everything from cellular damage to cancer and beyond. The case in point being that the current agricultural paradigm of “playing God” by introducing chemicals into the environment is a train wreck that’s in the process of happening. However, Stamets’ biopesticide innovation offers a glimmer of hope—implementing nature’s own bioregulation mechanisms on a massive scale to create further harmony and balance rather than the continual disruption propagated by the current agricultural model. Furthermore, only a teaspoonful of the fungus grown on a substrate such as rice—and costing only a few cents to produce—is sufficient to treat an area the size of a house for nearly an entire growing season, Stamets claims. In addition, the M. anisopliae strain and the active compounds it generates don’t appear to be harmful to humans, other mammals, fish, useful insects such as honeybees, or plants.

About The Author Justin Faerman is the co-founder of Conscious Lifestyle Magazine.

conscious evolution allows to grow and meet our needs while respecting the planet and all life. photo: no more lookism photocase.com

The Awakening of Humanity

Occasionally in the course of human events, a new worldview emerges that transforms society. It happened when Jesus’ disciples were inspired by his life to believe in radical transformation of the person and the world through love. It occurred in the Renaissance when the idea of progress through knowledge was born. It took place in the United States when the ideas of freedom and democracy became institutions through the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It happened with the advent of the British Royal Society and the dawn of science through Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, and again among the transcendentalists, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, who believed that each individual is an expression of the divine, a free and sovereign person. Now, once again a new worldview is arising. This idea is the culmination of all human history. It holds the promise of fulfilling the great aspirations of the past and heralds the advent of the next phase of our evolution. It is the idea of conscious evolution. Conscious evolution is occurring now because we are gaining an understanding of the processes of nature: the gene, the atom, the brain, the origin of the universe, and the whole story of creation from the big bang to us. We are now changing our understanding of how nature evolves; we are moving from unconscious evolution through natural selection to conscious evolution by choice. With this increased knowledge and the power that it gives us, we can destroy the world or we can participate in a future of immeasurable dimensions. Into our hands has been given the power of codestruction or cocreation.  

“The most meaningful activity in which a human being can be engaged is one that is directly related to human evolution.”

  As Jonas Salk stated in Anatomy of Reality:

The most meaningful activity in which a human being can be engaged is one that is directly related to human evolution. This is true because human beings now play an active and critical role not only in the process of their own evolution but in the survival and evolution of all living beings. Awareness of this places upon human beings a responsibility for their participation in and contribution to the process of evolution. If humankind would accept and acknowledge this responsibility and become creatively engaged in the process of metabiological evolution consciously, as well as unconsciously, a new reality would emerge, and a new age would be born.

Consciousness has evolved for billions of years, from single cells to animals to humans, but conscious evolution is radically new. In The Life Era, Professor Eric Chaisson of the Wright Center for Scientific Education suggested that the second great event in the history of the universe is happening now. The first event was when matter gained charge of radiative energy, which organized the explosive energy of supernovas into metals and materials that formed the material world more than 10 billion years ago. The second is when technologically competent human life gains an understanding of matter. As we learn how nature’s invisible processes work, we can restore the environment of our Earth and free ourselves from poverty and disease; we can design new life forms, bring life to other planets, and eventually explore and bring Earth life into the universe. Chaisson wrote in ZYGON: “The change from matter-dominance to life-dominance is the second of two preeminent events in the history of the universe… If our species is to survive and enjoy a future, then we must make synonymous the words future and ethical, thus terming our next grand evolutionary epoch, ethical evolution.” conscious evolution is calling us to expand our worldview to care for the planet and all life, not just meet our immediate needs, integrating generational thinking at the deepest levels of our society. photo: thomas brault

Evolution or Extinction

An irreversible shift toward conscious evolution began in 1945 when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With this dreadful release of power we penetrated one of the invisible technologies of nature—the atom—and gained the power that we once attributed to the gods. This capability, combined with other rapidly developing technologies such as bio-technology, nanotechnology (the ability to build atom by atom), and artificial intelligence, if used in our current state of self-centered consciousness could lead to the destruction of the human race. We must learn “ethical evolution,” as Chaisson said. And we do not have hundreds of years in which to learn. The response to this crisis has been an uprising of a new consciousness—almost a new kind of humanity. Since the 1960s, the metamorphosis has accelerated as millions of people have become aware of environmental degradation, social injustice, and the need for radical change. In Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, Paul Hawken, a leading environmentalist and social change activist, examined the worldwide movement for social and environmental change. He discovered that groups working in these causes comprise the largest movement on Earth, a movement that has no name, leaders, or location and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up. Fundamentally, it is an expression of humanity’s collective genius and integral desire for conscious evolution. As Hawken suggests, in the 1960s through the 1980s networks of people in every field and sector of society formed to respond to crises as well as to realize new opportunities. But we had no social map of our collective potential. Although there were many positive social innovations, we didn’t have a way to connect the dots. We entered a period of confusion—a loss of vision and direction. We continued to destroy our rain forests, pollute our soil and water, and increase our rate of population growth. Our global population is still rising. We cannot continue to increase our population at the current rate and survive. If we continue with our current practices, we may destroy ourselves. Many of us have seen looming catastrophe, but few of us have realized that this crisis is driving us toward positive change, toward a quantum transformation of conscious evolution.

Imaginal Cells

Let’s compare our situation with the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly. When the caterpillar weaves its cocoon, imaginal discs begin to appear. These discs embody the blueprint of the butterfly yet to come. Although the discs are a natural part of the caterpillar’s evolution, its immune system recognizes them as foreign and tries to destroy them. As the discs arrive faster and begin to link up, the caterpillar’s immune system breaks down and its body begins to disintegrate. When the discs mature and become imaginal cells, they form themselves into a new pattern, thus transforming the disintegrating body of the caterpillar into the butterfly. The breakdown of the caterpillar’s old system is essential for the breakthrough of the new butterfly. Yet, in reality the caterpillar neither dies nor disintegrates, for from the beginning its hidden purpose was to transform and be reborn as the butterfly. As Ferris Jabr wrote in Scientific American:

Before hatching, when a caterpillar is still developing inside its egg, it grows an imaginal disc for each of the adult body parts it will need as a mature butterfly or moth—discs for its eyes, for its wings, its legs and so on. In some species, these imaginal discs remain dormant throughout the caterpillar’s life… Once a caterpillar has disintegrated all of its tissues except for the imaginal discs, those discs use the protein-rich soup all around them to fuel the rapid cell division required to form the wings, antennae, legs, eyes, genitals and all the other features of an adult butterfly or moth.

 

“Many of us have seen looming catastrophe, but few of us have realized that this crisis is driving us toward positive change.”

  By applying this analogy, we can see that during the 1960s our social systems started to become dysfunctional, or began to “disintegrate,” as we experienced the Cold War and the threat to the environment, the growing population crisis, pollution, and social inequities. As people started waking up, they became imaginal discs in the body of society. The environmental movement, the antiwar movement, the Apollo space program, the women’s movement, the civil rights and human rights movements, new music, Transcendental Meditation, yoga, and mind-expanding substances all encouraged a young generation to act as instruments of social transformation—striving to birth the still-invisible emerging world. But if we had been offered the opportunity to prematurely form a new kind of society, we would not have been ready. We were too young, too few, and too inexperienced to bring forth a more just, humane, and life-enhancing society at that time. And often when new leaders did step forward, they were attacked by society’s immune system fighting to maintain the old social order of the caterpillar: witness the assassinations of Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, John Lennon, and Martin Luther King, Jr. The new social processes, structures, and systems to create environmental restoration, better education, universal health care, economic justice, alternative currencies, restorative justice, tolerance for social, sexual, and racial differences, and many other requirements of the coming age are just beginning to emerge, leading us towards an era of exponential conscious evolution. It may well be that our deep sense of life purpose, our callings, and our various passions to express ourselves are actually the still-dormant components of the emerging societal “butterfly,” now in the process of metamorphosis. Our attraction to join with one another in specific groups and configurations may be the prepatterned requirement to find our appropriate partners with whom to cocreate our unique components of the whole-system shift now occurring. Not only are millions of us developing ourselves as individuals in the spiritual and human potential movements, but we are just starting to organize new social functions in every major field, including health, education, environment, and governance. Yet we still are lacking a coherent social potential movement to connect what is already working and to guide us in the conscious evolution of our communities and of society as a whole. In the midst of this nascent uprising of wellness, innovation, and compassion, our basic social and economic systems have attempted to maintain the status quo despite the many warnings that the old ways, particularly in the developed world, were no longer sustainable. In many instances our existing systems are not humane; homelessness, hunger, disease, and poverty consume the lives of hundreds of millions of people and the environment continues to degrade. We can view the reactive and conservative ways of the past few decades as a survival mechanism—as the caterpillar’s immune system rigidly holding on to old structures until new social systems are mature enough to function. But the fact is that millions of people are now awakening in every field, culture, and ethnic group. The imaginal discs are linking up, becoming imaginal cells, and are beginning to proliferate throughout the social body. Each person who says “I know I can be more,” “I can do more,” or “The world does not have to be this way” is an imaginal cell in the emerging culture of humanity. The social immune system is beginning to surrender as the new consciousness arises everywhere. In Global Consciousness Change: Indicators of an Emerging Paradigm, Duane Elgin and Coleen LeDrew wrote:

From this inquiry, we have concluded that a new global culture and consciousness have taken root and are beginning to grow in the world. This represents a shift in consciousness as distinct and momentous as that which occurred in the transition from the agricultural era to the industrial era roughly three hundred years ago… This change in consciousness has two primary features. First, there is a further awakening of our unique capacity to be self-reflective—to stand back from the rush of life and, with greater detachment, observe the world and its workings non-judgmentally. Second, from this more spacious perspective, the Earth (and even the cosmos) are seen as interconnected, living systems.

Cultural Creatives

It almost seems as though imaginal cells are beginning to gain ascendancy. This phenomenon is vividly presented in The Integral Culture Survey: A Study of Transformational Values in America. Noted social analyst Paul H. Ray revealed through extensive research that there were 44 million “cultural creatives” in the United States alone in 1995—almost one-fourth the American population. By 2008, that number had increased to 80 million adults, or roughly 35 percent of the American population. Cultural creatives are defined by a set of values, a new lifestyle and worldview. Feeling that we are all members of one planet, they are concerned about the environment and social-economic justice. They have a different notion of relationship—one that is less hierarchical and more cocreative and participatory. They are interested in holistic health and are extending women’s concerns into the public domain. Their emphasis is on transforming consciousness and behavior in all aspects of our lives—personal, social, and planetary.  

“Cultural creatives are social idealists, concerned not so much with political and economic power, but rather with seeking to change our image of the world, our sense of identity.”

  Cultural creatives are social idealists, concerned not so much with political and economic power as those in the old movement were, but rather with seeking to change our image of the world, our sense of identity. Cultural creatives originated in the great social movements of the 1960s and are now maturing, taking their stand for a more spiritualized, personalized, and integrated culture worldwide. According to Ray, cultural creatives are the fastest growing subculture in the United States, yet most of these creative individuals feel they are alone. They have not yet sensed their connection with one another or with the pattern and momentum of the collective change they represent. Nonetheless, as Marilyn Ferguson wrote in her seminal work The Aquarian Conspiracy, “A leaderless but powerful network is working to bring about radical change in the United States. Its members have broken with certain key elements of Western thought, and they may even have broken continuity with history.” These are the imaginal cells of the social body working towards conscious evolution. This emerging social potential movement is not revolutionary, but evolutionary. Its aim is not to destroy, but to fulfill. When the butterfly emerges, it doesn’t deny the caterpillar—it has actually consumed it! It is the caterpillar evolved. In this analogy, this movement is not an attack on another group or an assertion that “our way is better.” Instead, we recognize that we have inherited enormous resources and intelligence from previous generations and that many of those resources can be repurposed now for the social good. The movement is not here to attack but rather to transcend and include the best of what has come before and to attract that which needs to come forth for the flourishing of our human and planetary potential. Its purpose is to evolve all of us, our communities, and our world so that all people are free to fulfill their highest potential. Today, cultural creatives are communicating ever more rapidly with one another, affirming and reinforcing the new emerging pattern of more conscious living. Thousands of transformational workshops, trainings, and teachings are appearing in mainstream businesses, churches, and organizations. Books by new paradigm teachers and leaders consistently reach the bestseller lists. Through resonance, or echoing and reinforcing one another, values of inclusivity, spirituality, attunement with other species, ecological sensitivity, and social innovations are spreading. These values are not new; many are ancient, yet they are emerging now in a new way that is vital to the survival of the whole system. This is a call to those who are experiencing a deep motivation to be more, to find their life purpose and to contribute their gifts to the conscious evolution of the world. Since the 1960s, countless such individuals have been maturing, yet mainstream media and our political system fail to adequately acknowledge them. These cultural creatives are rarely, if ever, at the heads of corporations, governments, or traditional religions because their current function is to evolve and expand systems, not to maintain or strengthen the current power structure as it is. Although the desire for something more is widespread, often that something is not known. We lack a vision of what we want to create. Inquiries, conferences, and symposia throughout the world seek answers to major problems, yet something is still missing—we don’t see where we are going; we have few positive visions of our next stage of conscious evolution. Our media, which are like a planetary nervous system, are far more sensitive to breakdowns than to breakthroughs. They filter out our creativity and successes, considering them less newsworthy than violence, war, and dissent. When we read newspapers and watch television news, we feel closer to a death in the social body than to an awakening. Yes, something is dying; however, the media do not recognize that something is also being born.

The Noosphere

A radically new phenomenon has emerged worldwide, and it is just now being more widely recognized. It is called the “noosphere” by Teilhard de Chardin in his famous work The Phenomenon of Man. The root of the word is “noos,” meaning “mind.” The noosphere is the mind sphere, the thinking layer of Earth, the “global brain,” the larger social body created by human intelligence. It is composed of all the spiritual, cultural, social, and technological capacities of humanity, seen as one interrelated superorganism. It is formed from our languages, our art and music, our religious and social structures, our constitutions, our communication systems, our microscopes, our telescopes, our cars, planes, rockets, laboratories, and more. For Teilhard, the noosphere was actually the consciousness field of Earth. He believed that when infused with enough love and creativity, it would “get its collective eyes,” and like the nervous system developing in a newborn baby, it would open its eyes. Then we, as a newly born planetary culture, would see that we were one whole global body. As a Catholic, he called it the Christification of the Earth.  

“A leaderless but powerful network is working to bring about radical change in the United States.”

  We as individuals have not changed much physiologically or intellectually in the past two thousand years, but our larger social body—the noosphere—has become radically empowered. We are now being born into an extended social and scientific capacity that has never before existed on Earth. It is through this collective social body of shared intelligence, capacities, and systems that we go to the moon, map our genes, clone a sheep, and transmit our words and images around the world at the speed of light. It is with this body that we codestroy or cocreate. It is into this body that our imaginal cells are born—the still-invisible, emergent societal butterfly. Conscious evolution has arisen at this precise moment of history because the noosphere has matured and has given humanity powers to affect evolution by choice. We cannot see the noosphere. Neither our past philosophies or religions nor our social, economic, technological, or scientific systems have yet been able to encompass or guide the power of this collective body—a body that has been built by human endeavor and intelligence. With the advent of the idea of ethical and conscious evolution, however, we are beginning to discover a path of collaborative action that will lead us toward an immeasurable and positive future. Without such a new and guiding worldview, further development of the planetary system will be increasingly distorted and destructive. If, however, we can see the glory of the noosphere maturing toward an immeasurable future for the human race—a future that attracts us, and calls forth our gifts—and if we can learn to collaborate even more effectively in bringing forward that future, we will then serve the purpose of awakening the whole body to its capacity.

The Social Potential Movement

The human potential movement began to come to public attention in the 1960s with the seminal work of Abraham H. Maslow, Viktor Frankl, Robert Assagioli, and others who discovered, nurtured, and affirmed the higher reaches of human nature. They developed techniques and practices to fulfill untapped human potential. In his seminal book, Toward a Psychology of Being, Maslow identified a hierarchy of human needs inherent in all of us. He said that we all have basic needs for survival, security, and self-esteem. When these basic needs are relatively well met, a new set of needs arises naturally. They are growth needs for self-expression in work that is intrinsically valuable and self-rewarding. Then, transcendent needs emerge: to be connected to the larger whole—one with Source—to transcend the limits of self-centered consciousness itself. Maslow had the genius to study “well” people rather than the sick and discovered that all fully functioning, joyful, productive, and self-actualizing people have one trait in common: chosen work or vocation that they find intrinsically self-rewarding and that is of service. If we do not find life purpose at the growth stage, he reasoned, we become sick, depressed, and even violent. People in modern society, he said, are stuck between survival needs and growth needs for further self-expression and self-actualization in a culture of intrinsic meaning. Through the human potential movement millions of us have awakened, crossing the barrier from survival to growth needs and eventually to conscious evolution. Yet, ultimately all of us want to find life purpose and meaning—a potentially huge community of people, perhaps a majority in the developed world (where basic needs are relatively well met). The social potential movement builds on the human potential movement. It seeks to identify and map peaks of social creativity and works toward social wellness, a self-actualizing society, the same way the human potential movement cultivates the self-actualizing person. It seeks out social innovations and designs social systems that work toward a life-enhancing global society. I believe the social potential movement is on the threshold of a mass awakening, seeking to carry into society what individuals and small groups have learned spiritually and personally.

An Evolutionary Agenda: The 10 Keys to Conscious Evolution

The social potential movement is the vital catalyst to carry us through the twenty-first century and to fulfill our collective potential in the third millennium. It is now surfacing in society and is ready for a shared vision that attracts and connects us, not only with one another but also with society as a whole. The time is ripe to move toward a new, conscious, evolutionary agenda—not to reform but to transform based on the full and appropriate use of our immense new powers. This agenda is based on the hierarchy of social needs, which calls upon us to:

1. Meet basic food and shelter needs of all people;

2. Limit our population growth;

3. Restore and sustain Earth’s environment;

4. Learn to coexist with other species;

5. Learn sustainable economic development and new forms of monetary democracy;

6. Shift the vast military-industrial-technological complex toward building new worlds on Earth and in space;

7. Redesign social and economic systems to enhance human compassion, cooperation, and creativity;

8. Emancipate individuals’ unique potential and life purpose;

9. Explore and develop the further reaches of the human spirit and the universe beyond the planet of our birth;

10. Guide our radical new technologies, such as genetics, nanotechnology, robotics, and space development toward evolutionary, life-oriented purposes.

What would happen if we began to use our new scientific and technological powers within such an evolutionary, open-ended agenda? Ancient prophecies have foreseen our self-destruction, but few of us have seen the magnificence of what we could become, collectively, through the use of all our powers—spiritual, social, scientific, and technological. In the past our glorious visions of the future—heaven, paradise, nirvana—were thought to happen after death. The newer thought is that we do not have to die to get there! We are not speaking here of life after death in some mythical heaven, but life more abundant in real time in history. We are discovering and participating in the next stage of our social evolution, the next turn on the Evolutionary Spiral.

A Spirit-Motivated Process of Action for the Twenty-First Century

We now know that a pattern or design of action, also known as DNA, is encoded in the genes of every living organism and guides it from conception through gestation, birth, maturation, and death. From the study of epigenetics, we have also learned that the DNA code is a script that is influenced by the membrane or consciousness that surrounds the cell. It is not static and unchanging; it is responsive to its environment. Like the human body, planet Earth is a living system. Is it not possible, then, that there is a pre-patterned (but not predetermined) tendency, an encoded design for planetary evolution, just as there is for biological evolution? And that our attitude, consciousness, and every action are affecting that life cycle?  

“I believe that the crises and opportunities we face today are triggering the next stage of planetary evolution.”

  As there is a biological cycle, it is also evident that there is a planetary life cycle. Earth’s conception occurred with the big bang. The period of gestation included its 13.8 billion years of evolution, from its formation 4.5 billion years ago to the origin of human life. Its “birth,” or collective awakening, is happening now as we begin to realize that we are one planetary body, capable of destroying ourselves or co-creating an immeasurable future, on this Earth and in the universe beyond. And we know that 4.5 billion years from now our sun will expand and destroy all the planets in the solar system. We live precisely midway in the life cycle of our planet. We have not yet seen another planet go through this change, so we have nothing with which to compare it. But let us imagine for the moment that we are a normal planetary event in the universe and that there is a pattern encoded in our collective spiritual, social, and scientific awareness, ready to be activated and affected by our actions, when the time for conscious evolution is here, just as the imaginal discs self-organize into new bodily functions when the caterpillar is ready to transform. To awaken our magnificent social potential, we need first and foremost to become aware of our “new story,” our evolutionary story. This story places us in the cosmos and reveals to us our vital part in the evolution of ourselves and our world. I believe that the crises and opportunities we face today are triggering the next stage of planetary evolution and that we, as individual members of the planetary body, are now being awakened to our new personal and social capacities to participate in our evolution. This is not a plan imposed by any group or individual, but rather a design of evolution, a tendency toward a higher, more complex order and consciousness, with which we can cooperate and align ourselves to repattern our social systems and evolve ourselves. This article on conscious evolution is excerpted from Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential by Barbara Marx Hubbard. Copyright © 2015. Reprinted with permission from New World Library. NewWorldLibrary.com

About The Author Barbara Marx Hubbard is a futurist, prolific educator and author of seven books, including a revised and updated edition of her seminal work Conscious Evolution. She is an evolutionary thinker who believes that global change happens when we work collectively and selflessly for the greater good. Visit her online at evolve.org

staying focused on the connection with ourselves, others and the world around us. photo: lichtsicht photocase.com

Focus is a skill too easily tossed aside in a world where we praise the multitasker, where devices with myriad functions are always considered superior, and where the ability to work from anywhere often means we never stop doing so, rendering workaholic an uncomfortably admirable superlative. On the surface, it seems as if our multitasking makes us supremely productive, and therefore little about that feels problematic. We marvel at the wonders allowed by our technologized world: sending an email instead of waiting for snail mail, WhatsApping a friend while Skyping with Mom while streaming Netflix, opening endless tabs and windows in a daily quest for information. As technological tools become increasingly integrated into our everyday activities—not only through smartphones and tablets but in wearable technologies and real-time, auto-updating applications—we become socially conditioned to multitask with the same effortlessness that our gadgets demonstrate. And we are conditioned to believe this power to be a blessing, not a curse. The reality is that when we try to juggle many tasks at once, we often never finish any one of them fully. We talk about doing many things and ultimately do very few, often leaving efforts unfinished or abandoned. We rush through projects to achieve short-term gains at the expense of losing our focus on the bigger picture. In our efforts to be more productive, social, and informed, all at once, we may end up slowing down, running in circles, and becoming more isolated and less informed than we could ever imagine. Why don’t we just stop and take a breather? Why do we keep firing on all engines, even if we can tell we’re losing a sense of direction?  

“If you stop every time a dog barks, your road will never end.”

— Arabic Proverb

  Enter the fear of missing out (FOMO) that pervades young, as well as adult, mindsets. In small doses, FOMO can be a harmless fixation, even a positive force of motivation. But in excess, it can translate into more dangerous outcomes. Dr. John Grohol, a specialist in psychology and mental health, writes about our fixation with multiple, simultaneous digital connections, “It’s not ‘interruption,’ it’s connection. But wait a minute… it’s not really ‘connection’ either. It’s the potential for simply a different connection. It may be better, it may be worse—we just don’t know until we check.” And check we do, again and again, without pause for reflection, to the detriment of authentic connection. The result of multitasking on our everyday relationships is that we become only superficially committed to one another. The palpable social pressure governing our online communities often pushes us to abandon difficulty, rather than stick with tough tasks. We’ve become so accustomed to shutting down or logging off during information overloads that rather than adopting more moderate workloads, we continue to keep countless browser windows open until it’s time to reboot. As these norms begin to infiltrate our behaviors offline, they create very real distractions and keep us from staying focused. Can you recall the last time you kept up an in-person conversation or worked through an assignment without pausing to check your phone? How do we even begin to cultivate habits like focus, persistence, and discipline against the ever-present expectation that we can multitask through our every action? Simply enough, we start with ourselves. Daniel Goleman, author of Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, explained, “The real message is because attention is under siege more than it has ever been in human history, we have more distractions than ever before, we have to stay more focused on cultivating the skills of attention.” When we think about improving our overall success at work, in school, and in our relationships, staying focused is tantamount. “The more you can concentrate the better you’ll do on anything, because whatever talent you have, you can’t apply it if you are distracted.” Think about the flight instruction to put on your own oxygen mask before helping others: if we can’t focus enough in our own lives, on our work tasks or our relationships in our own homes, then we’ll never be able to stay focused long enough to be of service to others.  

“Their aptitude when it came to staying focused was the number one predictor of career success, health, and financial success.”

  One of the most well-known studies on concentration looked at children in New Zealand every eight years, until they were thirty-two, measuring their ability to ignore distractions and focus. Unsurprisingly, their aptitude when it came to staying focused was the number one predictor of career success, health, and financial success. What it boils down to is focus equals self-control: being able to finish that email before you begin online shopping, or continuing a conversation instead of checking the text message that just buzzed in. Without focus, you cannot reach your personal peak capacity for effectiveness, health, and happiness. And you certainly can’t help others reach theirs. the art of staying focused and connected takes many forms. photo: raffiella photocase.com When it comes to social impact work, only someone who is healthy, happy, and focused can build relationships on trust and respect. Self-help gurus and yogis call this quality mindfulness, or simply being aware of what is going on around you. But it can’t be attained if you are consumed by what you might be missing out on or if you are overly concerned with hitting a virtual benchmark. (One hundred likes! Yes!) In the midst of my own chronic FOMO-fueled distraction years ago, a beloved boss reached out to me with the proverb of Shiva and Shakti, the divine Hindu couple, which I now think of when trying to stay focused. Upon seeing an impoverished man, Shakti implores Shiva to leave gold in the poor man’s path, and Shiva at first resists. (“I cannot give this to him because he is not yet ready to receive it.”) Shakti beseeches Shiva again, so he decides to leave a bag of gold in the man’s path. But as Shiva predicted, the man steps right past it thinking it is a rock in the road, his mind so busy with his own tribulations that he doesn’t see the fortune directly in his path. How often do we miss things along our paths because we’re distracted by other worries and concerns? Staying focused means being mindful, aware of, and awake to the world around you, and that can be a tall order in a world where we’re bombarded with one hundred new hours of YouTube content every minute and take in roughly 174 newspapers’ worth of information every day. There are a number of ways to start cultivating focus in your everyday life. Some are even showing up as social games in public places, such as friends piling their phones facedown on the table when out for dinner (whoever picks up his or her phone first pays the whole bill!). Here are some simple first steps to finding your focus:

+ When you’re working online, keep the number of tabs you have open to a smaller number than usual. You don’t have to go cold turkey, but if you’re typically in the double digits, try cutting it down to below ten. Eight? See what only having four open does.

+ When your work doesn’t require seeking online references, shut down your browser or disconnect your Wi-Fi altogether. You’d be shocked how eliminating alerts can fuel you to get more work of a higher quality achieved in a shorter period of time.

The same goes for your phone. If you’re not expecting a truly important call, turn your phone off or put it on airplane mode the next time you’re dining or hanging out with a friend or your family. Silencing notifications will help curb your desire to check your phone and leave you more present and focused in your human interactions.

+ On your smartphone’s desktop, try minimizing the number of screens you keep active, and the number of applications you keep in easy access. Try to pare your home screen down to the bare essentials, so that you need to click and swipe a few extra times to get that Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram icon. Out of sight, out of mind can be a magical mantra.

+ When someone is talking, pay attention to whether or not you’re actually listening. Are you processing that person’s words or already devising what you’re going to say in response? (Or are you thinking of checking your email?) In every interaction, attempt to be present, fully. Just sit and listen.

More Focus Now

There’s one key word to moving online focus into your offline world: presence. Presence is the ability to be fully engaged in the task at hand, whether it’s a conversation with your sibling, sending an email, or crossing the street. At least once a week, try to institute a “presence policy” throughout your day. If you’re chatting with your brother, don’t answer any text messages or even check your phone.  

“There’s one key word to moving online focus into your offline world: presence.”

  If you’re sending an email, don’t pick up a call or scroll through your Facebook wall, and if you’re walking to work or class, try literally just walking—phone tucked away, observing the people and scenes around you, letting any other tasks that come to mind slip away for the moment. You’ll be surprised at how much your productivity increases, and how much more connected you feel, when you’re truly present.

Employ Your Focus to Make a Difference

After you’ve begun to really focus in on the very notion of focus, what is the next step? In the world of social impact, staying undistracted is not as easy as you might think. Most of the time, keeping our sights set on a single goal conflicts directly with our innate, boundless desires to make a difference in the world. Usually when we witness hardship or encounter suffering, our natural instinct is an emotional drive to solve the entire problem, not to address only one focused piece of a solution. Our genuine intentions to make a significant, positive difference in someone’s life can often leave us in multitask mode, trying to achieve too much but consequently achieving very little at all. And the social media systems in which we operate tend to nurture, instead of challenge, our tendencies to be spread too thin. We append multiple tweets with multiple hashtags, working from a place of good intention to show support for many issues. But the parameters enforcing brevity prohibit us from focusing on each issue’s details. One of my favorite examples of this undistracted focus, and the benefits it yields, is the story of Mark Arnoldy and Possible, a non-governmental healthcare organization serving some of the world’s poorest patients in rural Nepal. In 2012, on the night of his annual board of directors meeting, with an orchestra of bleating car horns and humming holiday foot traffic echoing up to his office window from New York City’s Union Square below, Mark’s mind was still in the quiet, verdant hills of rural Nepal, where he had just been on a regular site visit. As he prepared to face his donors and public relations professionals who had leveraged their powers to support his organization, Possible, Mark reflected on his recent travel to the developing country where 25 percent of citizens live below the national poverty line. In particular, he thought about the unforgiving, thirty-six-hourlong bus ride required to travel from the capital, Kathmandu, to his organization’s headquarters in a remote, poor, far-western region. Most of Possible’s supporters had never even been to Nepal, never mind the rural hospital where their investments were saving lives every day, yet Mark’s board was coming together with enthusiastic commitment to a different kind of journey: ensuring health as a human right for even the world’s most disadvantaged citizens. “It’s not self-righteousness or even moral compulsion that pushes us to work this way,” Mark said, speaking of Possible’s model of providing intensive healthcare to each and every single patient in their catchment area—and by that, he means 1.2 million Nepalis, most of whom have never been provided professional healthcare in their entire lives. “Our model is sensible; it’s logical,” he noted. “Our team, partners, and supporters share the same level of commitment to our patients as the patients and their families feel for themselves.” Although Mark’s compassion is both common practice and common sense, many professionals in the wider international development community criticize organizations like Possible for their acute focus on individual care. With a planet full of people in need, their argument goes, it is unreasonable to invest great wealth into an incredibly hard-to-reach location and a relatively small number of patients with complicated health conditions. Possible’s approach is considered too costly, yielding an insufficient return on investment compared to the resources devoted. They diplomatically label Mark’s work as “place-based public health,” implying that it is inherently neither scalable beyond rural Nepal nor sustainable in the long run.  

“Great gains are achieved when you focus on yourself—not the you projected on Facebook or Twitter but the you who emerges when you’re silent and unplugged.”

  But so far, Mark’s progress in one single community has been remarkable. In the year 2013 alone, Possible fully electrified a local hospital campus with 48 solar panels, funded a surgical center and microbiology lab, grew the hospital’s Nepali staff to over 160 members, oversaw almost 500 ambulance referrals, and treated over 34,000 patients. In 2014, that figure grew to over 56,000 patients cared for by over 270 staff. Possible’s long-term devotion to community transformation is evident not only in their strengthening of a local hospital, through a unique public-private partnership with the Nepali government, but also in 14 additional clinics and their hiring and training of 160 community health workers to run a far-reaching community health program for over 37,000 rural patients. In a world where we’re constantly pressured to do more in ever-shorter time periods, Mark and his Possible team are taking a different, highly focused approach worthy of emulation. Rather than focusing only on scaling the organization’s numeric impact, purpose sees, and serves, the wide scope of human needs within every patient who enters their doors. “Our model of accompaniment and attention to long-term health of all patients is not self-righteous or blatant disregard for cost. It actually represents the ultimate pragmatism: that people don’t get healthy unless you make a remarkable level of commitment,” he argued, highlighting the value of staying focused on a single goal. “I understand that everybody wants a way to make people healthy in a really cheap way. And I know that our level of commitment is really hard and requires commitment and does, quote unquote, cost a lot of money. But commitment is the only way, if you care about being effective.”

Everyday Ways to Stay Focused

Mark’s leadership at Possible presents an exceptional example of cultivating undistracted focus on a single community in order to make a measurable difference in the world, but you don’t need to travel around the world or start an organization to follow in his footsteps. There are many ways you can cultivate focus in your everyday life in ways that will yield a better, healthier, more peaceful world. Part of Mark’s great example is that he doesn’t pay heed to his critics; he forges ahead with confidence because he knows himself and his organization at a deep level. Similarly, it is most effective, if not necessary, for you to start your practice of staying focused from small, daily, digital interactions—like email, social media, and texting—instead of aiming first for big, ambitious plans. Great gains are achieved when you focus on yourself—not the you projected on Facebook or Twitter but the you who emerges when you’re silent and unplugged.  

“Try focusing first on your own strengths and weaknesses, dreams and drivers, and then you can be a source of positive change in your everyday, offline human interactions.”

  To employ focus in our everyday lives, it is important that we don’t interpret focus too literally, as if only certain jobs or career choices will lead to having a social impact. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not only the social sector where your focused behavior can make a major difference in the world. Though some people may be wired for a career in health, education, or other obvious social services, many people find their passion in the corporate world, in the fine arts, or in other careers where there isn’t always a clear correlation between vocation and making a difference. In fact, sometimes there’s a stigma that someone who makes good money can’t possibly be doing social good in the world. But focus does not mean choosing a specific type of social-good career; staying focused means finding a sector that fits your personality and then finding ways to give back. Whenever someone confronts me with this eternal self-versus-society dilemma—“I want to help people, but I also need to make money”—I cite the story of Cesar Francia, a lawyer in New York City who emigrated from Venezuela to the United States during high school. Gay, black, and an immigrant, Cesar has always been an advocate for LGBT issues, racial justice, and immigration reform; he worked hard enough and was smart enough to earn a coveted spot at the NYU School of Law, and even served as an aide to Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor along the way. Yet Cesar’s roots are thick with hardship as well. Born in Caracas to ambitious but underprivileged parents, he was raised in a hilly, urban terrain of slums stacked high into the mountains, in a city with staggering rates of murder and violent crime. Cesar is deeply committed to bridging the disparate worlds of his inherited humble upbringing and his earned world of privilege. Unlike many of his social justice–oriented law school peers, who came from economically wealthy families, he also had complex family financial obligations. He therefore did not take the stereotypical social change job in public defense law after school; he opted instead for a well-salaried gig at a private law firm. “In many ways, taking this path felt alarming, as if I was getting ‘offtrack’ with my social commitment,” Cesar explained. But when we examine Cesar’s choice, it’s clear that a higher corporate salary doesn’t mean he must deviate from his desire to do good. As Cesar noted, simply being a member of multiple minority communities—as a person identifying as LGBT, a person of color, and an immigrant—and succeeding against the odds is a victory for those communities. Cesar also sought out opportunities to work on pro bono projects as part of his larger work portfolio, and giving employees time to work on social issues is now frequently the norm within competitive law, finance, and technology companies. What I love about Cesar’s story is that it redefines the idea of a meaningful career; we don’t need to fit any specific mold to be an everyday ambassador. Rather, any career in any sector presents us with opportunities every day to pursue a focused path of social impact, if we keep our eyes open for the opportunities.  

“To employ focus in our everyday lives, it is important that we don’t interpret focus too literally, as if only certain jobs or career choices will lead to having a social impact.”

  Similarly, being a focused everyday ambassador happens not only in our careers, but also outside of our workplaces as well, and can be as simple as powering down in the presence of other people or stopping the urge to snap and upload a picture during moments of genuine connection in your daily life. Ask the barista making your coffee how her day is and look her in the eye when she answers. After your coworker shares a detail of his personal life with you, remember to ask him about it the next time you chat. Try turning off everything, television included, at least one night a week for a family, or solo, dinner. Branching out from your daily one-on-ones, you can also practice staying focused within your various communities, by integrating more human engagement into whatever you do. Organize a block party simply to create conversation opportunities with your neighbors. Make an effort to introduce yourself to others in your building or on your street. Ask a local organization you support what task they really need a volunteer for that you might be able to do. Making stronger human connections doesn’t mean that you have to commit to a regular schedule or even to large events. Just go and do a single thing they really need help with, even one-off experiences, so you feel comfortable focusing and helping in a specific way.  

“When you focus on the people around you, and building strong connections with them.”

  For example, when I was young, my hometown rallied around a family whose child had a life-threatening heart condition, a tragedy even more palpable within the intimacy of our tiny town’s borders. Knowing that these parents were racking up burdensome medical bills for treatments, surgery, and testing, and rushing to doctor’s appointments unpredictably, many households in the community decided to come together and cook meals for this family. This generosity rotated organically and never turned it into an act of sainthood; it was simply what one neighbor does for another in a difficult time. The small, focused idea that originated from one person had a ripple effect in our whole town and evolved into a hugely positive impact that brought some peace to a family during a time of crisis. This type of compassion can happen just as powerfully in the online world as well. Thanks to Kickstarter and GoFundMe campaigns, we can raise money for terminally ill friends, or we can host Change.org petitions to support neighbors in desperate need of advocacy. Coming together in person is irreplaceably powerful, but uniting communities across the globe via the internet has its own unique potency for positive change. Such simple acts of solidarity are too often missed in a culture of multitasking, where we’re perpetually busy and can’t seem to spare extra time for interaction. We might naturally respond to suffering around us by feeling sympathetic and sending condolences, but inevitably, we get distracted by our busy lives and often never end up doing anything for that mourning friend or frazzled parent. Sometimes, if we’re really too busy, we may not even be aware of the crises going on in our loved ones’ lives and therefore can’t provide any support. Think about it: if we constantly appear to be stretched too thin, it becomes uncomfortable for others to ask favors of us or share bad news. We are, or are perceived to be, unavailable to take on burdens, which are actually priceless and precious moments; they are the building blocks of healthy communities, everywhere in the world. The same type of conflict arises when you partake in a volunteer trip or overseas stint as well: if the trip is just one more accolade tacked onto an endless list of activities, then it becomes more difficult to have a deep and meaningful experience. Any travel or service opportunity deserves extensive preparation and attention, such as taking the time to truly research where you’re going, the history of the local community, the status of the issue you’re aiming to solve, and the customs and cultural norms of where you’re staying. Think about what specific talents you possess and, instead of trying to “end poverty” in an entire village, simply offer your talents and time in a way that is requested by the community. Instead of trying to be everything for everyone, stay focused on one thing you do well, and do it.  

“When you focus on the people around you, and building strong connections with them.”

  That is enough. The best volunteers are those who have some idea of what they’re getting into and how they can truly be helpful. And when you arrive abroad, be sure to focus first on the people around you and your relationships with them, whether they’re your peers, your elders, or the kids hanging out on your street. Notice details of their life. Converse to every extent possible, even if you need a translator to help. Explain who you are and what you hope to offer, and graciously accept and ask for feedback and opinions. When you stay focused on the people around you, and building strong connections with them, you will find that any other dramas or dilemmas that arise can be easily solved with the help of a friend.

A Final Word on Staying Focused

Whether in your mind, in your neighborhood, or across the ocean, there are just as many ways you can stay focused as there are reasons why you should. Focus is the everyday ambassador’s antidote to multitasking pressures and the flagging commitment it perpetuates. This means developing habits to follow through with ambitions—or to simply set realistic goals in the first place. In a world where we communicate in 140-character quips and goofy GIFs, we need to work harder to keep our passion alive for in-depth analysis or, when it comes to human interaction, fully involved conversations. When you return to your world of refreshing your screens and scrolling through repetitive RSS news feeds, it will require superhuman strength to force yourself to stay focused on a single item for more than a millisecond. But everyday ambassadors need to have the self-control to prohibit constant updates from becoming distractions that pull us in multiple directions. We can pledge to support or complete a single issue at a time and stop overcommitting ourselves. We can make ourselves personal social media policies, like only retweeting articles we have fully examined, not merely skimmed, to resist being swallowed in a sea of sound bites.  

“Focusing our attention on the people and the services we care for passionately might require us to close a few windows, but that is ultimately the key to opening some of the most important doors.”

  Research already proves that when we multitask, we make ourselves less productive. Experience tells us that distraction causes us to lose sight of the bigger picture. The choice is ours to not succumb to various pressures. As our everyday ambassadors, such as Mark, Cesar, and my hometown neighbors, demonstrate, specificity and focused attention leads to positive social change. Focusing our attention on the people and the services we care for passionately might require us to close a few windows, but that is ultimately the key to opening some of the most important doors.

Cultivating Focus

As technological tools become increasingly integrated into our everyday activities, it is inevitable that we will continue being conditioned to multitask with the same effortlessness that our gadgets demonstrate. We will try to juggle so many tasks that we will never finish any one of them fully. We will leave efforts unfinished or abandoned. We will rush through projects to achieve short-term gains and then lose focus on the bigger picture. Against the ever-present expectation that we will multitask through our every action, how can we possibly cultivate habits of commitment, persistence, and focus? The three reflection categories below are intended for three different purposes: Inner reflections are questions you should be asking only yourself, and answering as honestly as possible. Jot your responses down in a journal or contemplate them before you go to bed, while on a run, or in the shower. Inner reflection questions focus on your perceptions of yourself and your understanding of your own relationship with the disconnectivity paradox. Outer reflections are meant for small group discussion, whether you’re part of a book club or just want to ask these questions over the dinner table with family or friends. These questions focus on your perceptions of the communities and society around you, and in discussion with others, you should gain a sense of how your opinion might differ from others’ as well. Action steps are meant to move you from thinking about making a difference to actually doing it—whether that means making transforming behaviors in your own life through healthy digital detox or positively impacting someone else’s life by being a more aware, present, and thoughtful companion (an everyday ambassador!). Action steps are meant to challenge you to modify your life and push past your comfort zones in healthy ways that equip you to be the most humanly connected person you can be.

Staying Focused: Inner Reflections

1. When I’m online, do I keep multiple tabs and applications open at once? Why? Do I honestly think it allows me to be more productive? What are some recent examples of my multitasking, both online and offline, and what do I think I gained and lost from them?

2. How does social media nurture me to feel distracted? Has it ever disturbed my sensitivity to subtle communicative cues offline?

3. What is an example in the past few days of when I missed out on giving someone my undivided attention because I was distracted by another activity. How was I likely perceived by that person, and what consequence might I have incurred as a result of being aloof?

Staying Focused: Outer Reflections

1. When it comes to your work, have you ever resisted an instinct to multitask and focused on completing individual tasks instead? Was it challenging? What tips or tricks helped you achieve focus?

2. Is multitasking a social norm in your work, school, or social community? What about the community in which you’re doing service work? How might others interpret your rushed behavior?

3. What are some examples of when multitasking may have led you to be unproductive at work or in school?

4. Can you think of an example in the past week when you needed someone’s attention—at home, school, work, or elsewhere—and they were too distracted to offer it? How did it make you feel?

Staying Focused: Action Steps

1. What has been your most multitasked moment during the past five days? Think about how much you were trying to achieve and subsequently how successful you were. Make a list for yourself of tasks that you think are fine to multitask and ones that you want to vow you’ll start doing solo.

2. Ask your friends and family for their best tips on how to be efficient, yet still effective, without having to continually multitask.

3. Choose one relationship that, over the next week, you will not allow to become multitasked. When you interact with this person, there should be nothing else on your radar, nothing in your hands, and definitely no replying to digital alerts

This except on how to stay focused is from Everyday Ambassador: Make a Difference by Connecting in a Disconnected World by Kate Otto.

About The Author Kate Otto is a global health consultant who has worked in Indonesia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Tanzania, South Africa, Mozambique and Haiti for several development institutions including The World Bank, USAID, and various grassroots organizations. She designs, deploys, and researches innovative mobile phone-based technologies to improve health service delivery in areas of HIV/AIDS care, maternal and child health and nutrition. Kate is the author of the critically acclaimed book Everyday Ambassador: Creating Connections that Last in a Digitally Distracted World. Visit her website: everydayambassador.org

A playful group of young boys in Madurai, India. photo: 100Cameras.com

When thinking of impoverished children worldwide, it’s easy to assume that their most pressing needs are food, water and shelter, but of equal importance is the ability to express their own individuality and creativity. After all, is this not what gives life meaning? Life lived purely at the level of survival is hardly a life at all. It is the drive towards self-realization and expression that ultimately gives our journey through the world meaning, passion and joy. Realizing this, a New York-based group of empowered, socially conscious women led by Angela Francine Bullock, Susanna Kohly, Emily Schendel and Kelly Reynolds set out with a big vision—to give marginalized children worldwide an opportunity to tell their story, to express their creativity and in their own words, “…capture stories of the world around them in ways an older or outside photographer could not…to give kids the opportunity to document their lives as they experience it.” They firmly believed these stories could transform lives, both in their communities and worldwide. In 2009, they formed the nonprofit 100Cameras around this vision after their first successful project at the St. Bartholomew’s Orphanage in Kajo Keji, South Sudan. The premise was simple, but innovative: Give kids cameras, teach them the fundamentals of photography and photojournalism, and share the resulting powerful work with the world. That in itself is a truly worthy cause, but 100Cameras took it one step further by turning the children’s photos into a holistic form of empowerment for the communities they work with. The kids’ photographs are then made available for sale in the 100Cameras art gallery in New York City and via their website. The proceeds from the sale of the photos go directly back to the children via the nonprofit organizations and caretakers that support them, who are then able to use the money as they see fit to provide whatever the community needs most. But perhaps even more importantly, 100Cameras managed to do something no amount of press coverage or charitable aid would ever do—give the kids an outlet to express their voice in a world where they often didn’t have one.

Kajo Keji, South Sudan

Near the Kajo Keji Orphanage, Sudan. photo: Josephine, 100Cameras.com Their first project at St. Bartholomew’s Orphanage in Kajo Keji, South Sudan, arguably one of the world’s most conflict ridden and impoverished areas, torn for years by civil war and ethnic cleansing, was a resounding success, which speaks volumes about the power of beauty and creativity to transform lives. Armed with a bag full of donated cameras, one for each child in the program, the 100Cameras photojournalism team taught the children the essentials of good photography and let the kids loose to capture whatever drew their inspiration. And what they found was a voice of hope, joy, curiosity and wonder despite the often times unimaginably difficult situations in which the kids found themselves. Back in New York, the kids’ photos made a major splash, drawing hundreds of visitors to the various galleries where they were shown; the sale of which generated over $17,000 for the orphanage. The funds amassed through 100Cameras have been used to ensure access to lifeline supplies, such as protection and access to food, water and medicine back at the orphanage. Children taking pictures, Sudan. photo: Josephine, 100Cameras.com

New York City

After the success of the Sudan project, 100Cameras expanded the program in 2009 to their own backyard, partnering with New Life of New York City, an inner-city community center that focuses on improving youth education by plugging them into extracurricular activities that encourage character development. The project generated $3,000 from the photos of five kids, all of which has been used to purchase computers, providing tens of thousands of hours of access time at the New Life center. New York City project. photo: Andrew, 100Cameras.com

Cuba

The year 2011 saw 100Cameras traveling to Cuba to work with Campo Amor, a Spain-based organization that provides intermediary services to encourage community development that directly benefits those who have been financially, socially and culturally excluded from society. The Cuba project generated $12,000 ($1,200 per participant), which was used to purchase 1,000 pairs of eyeglasses, 20 cameras and three sewing machines for members of the community. The remaining $3,809 was disbursed to Campo Amor to meet educational and medical needs in the community. Cuba project. photo: Jose, 100Cameras.com

Madurai, India

In 2012, the 100Cameras photojournalism team found itself in Madurai, India, a culturally rich area of the country plagued by extreme poverty and lack of employment opportunities, which has led to a massive increase of women and children entering the sex industry out of desperation. There they partnered with the Russ Foundation, which works to bring vitally needed changes to the Madurai district through a children’s home, community health services, and AIDS prevention and care. Half of the money generated by the India project supports ongoing project implementation and the remaining half is used to provide medicine for over 700 children and access to mobile medical care for more than 2,500 community members through the services provided by the Russ Foundation’s Community Health and HIV Care and Support programs. Boys playing at the Madurai project, India. photo: 100Cameras.com

Baltimore, Maryland

In 2013, 100Cameras once again set it sights on the frequently overlooked social issues existing in the United States and partnered with the Baltimore Community College’s Refugee Youth Project (RYP) located in Maryland. Surprisingly, Baltimore, Maryland is home to at least 5,000 refugees, 35% to 40% of which are children. “These are kids that have often times been forced to flee their home countries overnight, leaving behind everything that gave their lives comfort and meaning without so much as a goodbye,” Bullock explained in a recent interview. “They face unique, often times overwhelming challenges such as learning English, stereotyping and bullying, difficulties navigating new educational systems and overcoming vast cultural differences.” Baltimore project photo. photo: 100Cameras.com According to Bullock “While these kids are at high risk, they are also extraordinarily resilient and hopeful about the future.” Providing them with cameras and photojournalism education not only provides them with an outlet to express themselves, it also builds self-confidence and equips them with valuable skills for the future. Funds generated through 100cameras supports the RYP in preventing school drop outs, preparing refugee youth for college and future careers, easing the integration experience and promoting creative expression to build self-esteem and foster community among the diverse refugee youth populations.

The Model

What originally began as a side project for a group of friends has now blossomed into a team of over 20 volunteers, with Bullock overseeing the operation on a near full-time basis. This is a truly intimate organization—100Cameras generally works with no more than 15 or 20 kids, which allows them to form deep connections that are often lost with organizations operating on a larger scale. Bullock says that their smaller size gives them freedom and flexibility in addressing each community’s needs individually. “That’s the great part of our model. We get to have the conversation with the organization and ask, ‘What do you need?’” 100Cameras is structured in such a way that 100% of profits from photo sales are fed back into the program, with 50% of the funds generated going towards supporting local, tangible, highly individualized needs of the kids and their communities and the remaining 50% being used to fund ongoing project and production costs. 100 Cameras founders, staff and kids in Madurai, India. photo: 100Cameras.com What separates 100Cameras from many other non-profits is that they are truly focused on holistically empowering communities, and specifically children, to create meaningful change in their lives through their own creativity. In every sense, 100Cameras is engaged in the act of ‘teaching kids to fish’ rather than giving handouts. “It’s really exciting for kids there to see these changes and to feel an ownership in that,” Bullock says of their efforts.

The Future

With five successful projects worldwide to date, the 100Cameras team has clearly demonstrated the viability of their model and is looking to grow the organization and expand the reach of the kids’ work. According to Bullock, their long-term goal is to create a network of cameras spanning the globe and have an impact that is not just economic, but personal as well. “We want as many kids as possible empowered with the idea and concept that their perspective matters—to know it’s their work that can create change in their own communities.”

Support 100Cameras

View Photos From the Projects

100cameras.org/shop-photo-prints

Adopt a Camera

100cameras.org/adopt-a-camera

Get Involved & Learn More

100cameras.org

About The Authors

Justin Faerman is the co-founder of Conscious Lifestyle Magazine.

Celebrating access to clean water. photo: digdeepwater.org

You may already know that one of the biggest challenges developing countries face is the widespread lack of access to clean, uncontaminated water. But would it surprise you to learn that 2.2 million Americans don’t have access to running water or basic plumbing. And beyond that, 44 million people in the United States don’t have clean water that’s safe to drink. While many of us often think of water access in the U.S. as a given, this is far from the reality. Across the country, it is largely Black, Latinx, and First People’s households that are most affected by this water gap. It’s a massive worldwide problem that the government has made little progress on over the years—but a group of young, Los Angeles-based humanitarian visionaries are aiming to change all that by empowering rural communities across the Southwest (and previously across the globe) with water resources and infrastructure to provide clean, running water. DigDeep, which was founded in 2010 by George McGraw, began working with rural communities across the globe to develop access to clean water by providing infrastructure to dig wells and build distribution systems. Today, they focus on improving water access and infrastructure to those in the U.S. that need it most, transforming the quality of life for individuals, families, and schools as a result.  

“Clean water is not a privilege,   but a human right“

 

What’s unique about DigDeep is their philosophy and approach to solving the worldwide water crisis—to them, water is not a privilege, but a human right and one that is best managed by the very people who it is intended for. They simply help communities access their own resources and then empower them to take ownership. It’s a beautiful model that has been massively successful to date, with projects currently operating in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, West Virginia, and Kentucky. DigDeep also has an innovative organizational structure that allows them to pass 100% of donations directly into their projects. An egalitarian mirror of their field model, DigDeep has their own ‘water council’ made up of a group of ‘venture philanthropists’ who generously cover their operating costs so that they can focus on what matters—giving rural communities across the states access to a basic human right—clean water.   The original version of this article appears in the Feb. – Apr. 2014 Issue of Conscious Lifestyle Magazine. You can download a copy of this issue by clicking here or subscribe by clicking here

About The Author Justin Faerman is the Co-founder of Conscious Lifestyle Magazine.