What Will Survive?
The Road Ahead: Opportunities and Challenges on the Path
"I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change, But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy - and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation - and we scientists don't know how to do that."
Gus Speth, former director, Council on Environmental Quality
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"We have already exceeded the Earth's limits to growth."
Donna Meadows, The Limits to Growth
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"It would take 1.6 Earths to produce all the renewable resources we use [in one year]. And worse, the human population is expected to use the equivalent of 2 Earth's of renewable resources per year by 2050."
'The Human Footprint,' World Wildlife Fund
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"Although human societies have confronted major hurdles throughout history, the challenges of our times are unique in one crucial respect: they are planetary in scope."
Duane Elgin
Elgin can be seen as another "species forerunner".
Reaching the limits to growth is a recurring and predictable occurrence throughout nature. Species tend to seek to exploit their ecological niche to the fullest. Elgin states that humanity's "niche" is now the entire Earth - and we are exploiting it to the extreme.
(Although I have attempted to describe our journey with some objectivity, when considering what we will likely be experiencing my heart cries out.)
Duane Elgin: An introduction
Elgin reports that his current understandings began to emerge after years of research - including two years of work as a senior social scientist with the Presidential Commission on the American Future (looking ahead from 1970-2000), along with six years of work with the "futures group" at the Stanford Institute (now SRI International). While there, he co-authored the study named, "Changing Images of Man", with Joseph Campbell and others.
Other future studies included a long-range report for National Science Foundation and President's Science Advisor, as well as a study exploring alternative futures for the Environmental Protection Agency for the period 1975-2000 focused on policy studies and strategic planning.
After leaving SRI Elgin spent a decade in community organizing and began to create large-scale "Electronic town Meetings," using television and telephone-based voting. The objective was to demonstrate that people in a metropolitan area can have a powerful voice in choosing our future.
Elgin earned a master's degree in business administration from Wharton School of Business and another in economic history. He has also explored the practices of contemplative Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism. His observations have additional foundations in anthropology, systems theory, psychology, comparative religion. economics, physics, future studies, sociology and philosophy.
He first burst into the public eye in 1981 with his now-classic book Voluntary Simplicity, a book that helped to identify a new movement toward more simple and balanced ways of living.
His work had given him an opportunity to observe and document emerging trends in society, and he used this as the basis both for Voluntary Simplicity and for his 1991 book Awakening Earth: Exploring the Evolution of Human Culture and Consciousness, as well as Choosing Earth, published in 2020.
Throughout his career he has attempted to understand the deeper nature and direction of the human journey.
Awakening Earth explored the process of human awakening as we move toward building a mature global civilization. In the book Elgin began to address our current global crisis within the context of the larger evolutionary journey of the species a theme that has been a fundamental part of Elgin's work ever since.
Overshoot
Elgin notes that overshoot and collapse are common in nature, and that humans (despite our pretensions) are not immune from the lessons experienced by the rest of life. Since we have never before encountered this situation, and therefore should not be surprised if a great tragedy will be necessary to awaken our evolutionary intelligence.
"Great compassion will be needed to cope with the immense suffering that will result from our technological powers [combined with our inability to see the results we are producing]."
Stages of Our Species' Development
Elgin posits seven phases of our species' growth. In the first three phase humanity has been separating ourselves from nature and developing our sense of autonomy. Ideally, in the following four stages we will be able to reintegrate our ourselves with nature, find ways to explore a deep bonding with one another, and learn to act in conscious harmony with the universe.
The Near Future
The phase into which we are heading involves an interrelated system of problems that now threaten the existence of our species and the Biosphere. However, most of us are still in denial about this increasingly likely reality.
The time we are entering can be predicted to produce profound stress and challenge regarding the problems generated by our actions - global warming and climate destabilization, the depletion of fresh water, the rapid and massive extinction of animal and plant species, overfishing the world's oceans, growing disparities between the rich and the poor, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, waves of climate refugees that are destabilizing entire nations, an unsustainable and growing world population, and much more.
Elgin predicts that in the next decades the world will become like a super-heated pressure cooker in which the circle has closed and there is nowhere to escape.
These pressures can be predicted to be unrelenting, such that the world will either descend into chaos or ascend in a process of global transformation with a unified intent to come together and generate a world that works for all people and the Biosphere.
If humanity is unwilling to work for the advance of all, the world will likely collapse into constant conflict based on the need for resources and conflicting political and/or ethnic agendas. Misery, poverty and calamity will descend upon the planet. Billions of us will witness these developments online and via television.
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On the other hand, our witnessing of mass suffering may awaken us, softening our hearts by burning though the unconscious greed, fear and denial that now divide us.
That suffering can lead to personal and spiritual growth is, of course, not a new concept. "The wisdom of the heart," as Viktor Frankl put it, reminds us that difficult times can bring forth increased sensitivity to others and wise appreciation of life's gifts.
Alcoholics Anonymous offers us a hint:
"Under the lash of alcoholism, we are driven to A.A. - then and only then do we become - as willing to listen as the dying can be."
And an anonymously written book for women alcoholics catalogs the emergence of superconscious qualities out of the crucible of pain:
"Suffering softens us, helps us to feel more compassion and love toward one another - our sense of belonging to the human race, our recognition of the interdependence of all are the most cherished results of the gift of pain... Our experiences with all other persons thereafter are deeper - pain offers wisdom. It prepares us to help others whose experiences repeat our own. - Pain invites us to rely on many resources, particularly those within - paradoxically these periods strengthen our oneness with the Spirit."
A new human alloy may emerge from the furnace of the next super-heated decades.
As Elgin states: "Unyielding challenges contain unprecedented opportunities."
This new level will leave the door wide open for a time of reconciliation -- economically, ecologically, politically -- also extending to reconciliation among races, ethnic groups, genders, generations and religions.
However, birth involves hard work, and if we do not prepare ourselves for the labor pains of global birth, we will undermine our ability to experience these trials as an initiation into planetary adulthood.
(Article changed on Oct 13, 2023 at 3:59 PM EDT)
