May 6 was my last good day for a long time. I got the book Choosing Earth, by Duane Elgin, and started reading it. When facing a choice between truth and comfort, I go for truth, so I rarely get caught in denial. Generally I feel much happier with the truth. But this truth is so scary, so difficult, that I have been in despair. I wake up with my heart hurting, and struggle through the day with very little energy.
Duane Elgin says there are three major pathways ahead. Which one we take depends entirely on our own choices.
Pathway 1: Chaos, crash and collapse. Business as usual leads to breakdowns in many systems. “Humanity becomes hopelessly fragmented and dispirited.” p31
Pathway 2: Authoritarian control with artificial intelligence. “The result is a carefully watched, scrutinized and controlled society that lives within ecological limits but at the cost of many freedoms.” p32
Pathway 3: Great Transition and transformation. “A pathway of regeneration and renewal emerges as humanity chooses to live within the ecological boundaries of the Earth and with conscious regard for the well-being of all life.” This path goes into “the depths of tragedy and sorrow while narrowly avoiding a full crash.” p33
He goes on to describe the next several decades: The 2020s: Recognizing Crisis — The Great Unravelling. The 2030s: Collapsing Civilizations — The Great Fall. The 2040s: Into the Fire of Initiation — The Great Sorrow. The 2050s: A Conscious Species-Civilization — the Great Awakening. Things continue to get worse, until by the 2050s they are so bad that humans finally start to wake up and realize they must take action. Even then it will take centuries before the wounds are healed and regeneration can happen. By this point in the book, I was in a state of complete despair. It just didn’t seem possible that enough humans were capable of making good choices to turn things around. As I type this up, I feel the weight of despair. Back in the place where it looks impossible that we will be able to change where we’re headed.
I know the author is heading toward the possibility of self-organization, that diverse human beings, working together, can arrive at a place where their minds organize into a higher-order consciousness. The subtitle of the book is “Humanity’s Great Transition to a Mature Planetary Civilization.” I know that this is possible, no matter how unlikely it looks. I also know that holding a vision of what I want can help make it a reality. So “I choose to trust that humanity will make the great transition to a mature, sustainable, planetary civilization.” I hang on to that.