We will soon enter year five of what climate scientists tell us will be humanity’s decisive decade. Unless we navigate a global change of course before 2030, they warn, we risk doing such irreversible damage to Earth’s regenerative systems that the survival of our own species is doubtful.

The planet won’t die – it will continue to unfold as the universe  is forever unfolding – but we might. 

We deny or minimize the sober counsel of climate scientists at our peril. Yet deny and minimize we do. Many governments, corporations, and institutions are attempting to greenwash their way through the crisis. Or denying there’s a crisis at all. 

Many of us find all the catastrophic messaging over-whelming at times, and try to shut it out. Reports like that by the UN Environment Programme – that 150-200 species of plants, insects, birds, and mammals become extinct every 24 hours – can do that to you. 

It’s as if we, the global community of nations, our leaders have somehow rendered ourselves, or been rendered, incapable of rational, objective thought and action, at least on the climate breakdown front.

  United Nations (UN) Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, puts it this way: “We are gridlocked in colossal global dysfunction.” The international community has not been ready or willing to tackle the major challenges of our age, even though they “threaten the very future of humanity and the fate of our planet.”

Author and visionary David Korten puts a finer point on this seeming human and planetary death wish. “Our current society cannot be considered civilized by any objective standard,” he says. “We grow the fortunes of billionaires, even as we increase the numbers of homeless refugees and destroy Earth’s capacity to sustain life.”

To Korten’s list of wrongheaded, socially and environmentally destructive human behaviours, we could add 23rd century conflicts like the war in Ukraine, and the threat of war in the south China Sea. Both threaten nuclear conflagration. Also the war crimes and crimes against humanity taking place as I write among Israelis and Palestinians in Israel, Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

Grim as these various scenarios are, we mustn’t surrender hope. David Korten certainly hasn’t. Last year, in yes! a magazine, the then 84-year-old Korten reflected on a lifetime of engagement in conversations with some of the world’s most extraordinary minds. In recent years, the discussions have become especially exuberant and hopeful, Korten says. 

A stirring vision of a life-serving civilization, an Earth community, has emerged. It has its genesis, Korten says, in an exciting convergence of Indigenous understanding of the world and observations at the leading edge of contemporary science. 

At the core of the vision is the “foundational truth” that life is a “fundamentally cooperative enterprise.” Indeed, as science has been increasingly demonstrating, life depends on diverse and inter-connected communities of all living beings (not just humans). They self-organize to establish and maintain the conditions essential to their (and our) individual and mutual existence.

It's a truth, Korten says, that calls us to transform how we structure and manage our relationships with one another and the Earth. Because as humans, we have the distinctive ability, the extraordinary power, to consciously shape the planet’s future, something we’ve demonstrated time and again and in a multitude of ways. But when we make wrong choices, Korten adds,  we become “an existential threat to ourselves and to the whole of the living community.”

We are sorely mistaken, Korten adds, if we think these are short-lived problems we can put behind us just by electing new political leaders or reducing our use of plastic bags. “We are dealing with false assumptions about what and who we are that lead to deeply flawed collective choices…We must publicly challenge those false assumptions and replace them with our deepening understanding of (the ecological way) life works.”

So what would a truly civilized, life-centered civilization look like? 

● An ecological civilization will differ dramatically from our current world, Korten says, obsessed as it is with maximizing growth in individual and corporate financial assets. Korten and his colleagues have outlined some essential components: 

● Conflicts will be resolved peacefully through energetic and engaging diplomacy. 

● Power will be shared within and among bio-regionally self-reliant local communities, and most decisions will be made locally through radically democratic processes. 

● Government and business will be accountable to the people they serve.

● Everyone will share in the ownership of and responsibility to care for the physical and intellectual assets on which their means of living depend. 

● Each community will care for and seek to live within the capacities of its local ecosystems. Most material needs will be met with local, circular supply chains.

● Farms will be small-scale. Farming methods will feature regenerative soil care. Diets will be mostly vegetarian.

● Cities will be designed to reconnect people and nature while meeting needs for personal transport with walking, cycling, and public transit.

Such changes are not modest. Sacrifice will be needed, especially for those of us who currently consume well beyond our share of Earth’s means. 

Some may chafe at the thought of being stripped of their assumed right to exploit others for personal gain. Perhaps with time, Korten thinks, they will come to cherish the restoration of their humanity.

  Civilizational renewal of this order surely begins by learning to recognize the sacred in every person, and in every aspect of the created order – animals, plants, insects, even inanimate objects like rocks and water. “All my relations” as Indigenous peoples say. 

Korten reminds us how diverse people and communities in different social, political, economic, and environmental contexts are investing hope, ingenuity, courage, and determination to live into Earth community. Its realization is ours, he would say – if we choose it. ◊