I think the carbon pulse has skewed our biological template towards being individualistic and competitive and that is not our destiny or our genome. I think a lot of the people who are CEOs and national politicians do have a preponderance of narcissism...it's the way that our culture has trained our human behavior. I'm most interested in the levers and how we might be able to shift them or at least shift them in certain pockets around the world.
By transcending inherited social categories like religious/secular, right/left, East/West, North/South, capitalist/socialist, we see that a common goal of the consolidated regressive agenda is to restore authoritarian, top-down, punitive, in-group versus out-group systems in both the family and the state or tribe.
The entire enterprise of reducing a rainforest or mangroves to so many tonnes of carbon is left brain bias par excellence. The complex web of symbiotic human and non-human life co-evolving from moment to moment in an unbroken chain which goes back hundreds of millions of years is reduced to a single metric - CO2. All so that companies can call themselves “carbon neutral” - another typically left-brain concept.
"The case for cities adopting a beyond-sustainability regenerative approach is profoundly compelling. Pragmatic in their orientation, closely connected to the concerns of their residents, cities also contain the seeds of their own regeneration. However, historically cities have been planned, developed and built primarily through taking the male experience as the reference. As a result, cities tend to function better for men than they do for women."
"If we do not stop degrading the natural environment, it will collapse, so we must harmonise our global society with the natural world. If we allow global inequalities to remain embedded, we will perpetuate hardship on a vast scale, so we must harmonise our human cultures with one another. And if we continue to desire ever-increasing consumption without regard to its negative effects, we will suffer terrible consequences, so we must harmonise our aspirations with our opportunities."
"I know that the coming decades will be darker, as the seas rise and the forests burn, as climate refugees flood the borders of our present world order. And that those clinging to the old stories will resist these primal changes, often through power and oppression. But over the last decades I have sensed, seen deep in the inner worlds...how the Earth Herself is changing. And I believe that there is a need to begin to work with these changes."
After edging close to the brink of ecological and societal collapse and after enduring enormous suffering on our precious Earth, enough people of good will and skillfulness were able to do just enough to pull us back from that brink so that complex life on earth might continue. We now live in the Beloved Community.
I explored the eco-villages of Appalachia, ashrams of Sao Paulo, and Esoteric societies of Turin. What I found is a keyhole view into the next evolution of human consciousness and a nurturing path towards climate action.
Everyone who breathes air, drinks water, takes in nourishment from the land, marvels at the moon, sun, and stars, and is conscious of being energized by wondrous processes that evolved over billions of years is an Ecozoan.
The Barrett model allows you to measure the culture and consciousness of any human entity from a single person an organization, and even a whole nation.