Freedom, Justice, Kinship

In the early days of dealing with the coronavirus and the exponential rise of Covid-19 cases, there was a palpable sense of unity and solidarity – “we are all in this together.” We saw the rise of mutual aid grassroots groups and many expressions of care and concern for what came to be known as the front line.

Tensions and trauma mounted as the weeks of inaccurately titled “lockdown” turned into months. Conflicts have erupted with concerns raised about liberty and authoritarianism. Old divides from unresolved issues in our society have returned with a vengeance. Another black man is killed by a police officer as other police watched. The lack of equality is exposed once again. Riots erupt, and fingers point in multiple ways to the actual source of violence (see for example this report).

Conspiracy theories abound and distract. Meanwhile, and in plain sight, the haves continue to take advantage of the have-nots in an unparalleled extraction of wealth from every aspect of the economy as possible. The Equality Gap is widening dramatically. The extreme inequality in wealth and power that already exists is in the process of becoming vastly more extreme. As Kenny Ausebel put it,

“Corona capitalism just engineered the biggest heist in history: a hostile takeover amounting to between $4 to $10 trillion, with corporate concierge service from the Fed. For everyone else, it’s busy signals and crashed web sites, endless dysfunctional bureaucratic hoops and life-threatening delays. When it’s finally safe to go out again, we will find a very different world: Giants and dwarves, Lords and serfs.”

Naomi Klein has outlined How Big Tech Plans to Profit from the Pandemic via what she calls “The Screen New Deal.”

And Nafeez Ahmed’s investigative journalism has revealed: “The COVID-19 public health crisis is enriching a murky nexus of technology surveillance firms linked to senior Government officials – at the expense of people’s lives. The financial adventures of a former MI5 spymaster and the medical fantasies of Boris Johnson’s top advisor point toward an unnerving endgame: an artificially intelligent (AI) corporate super-state, with a special focus on NHS genetic research inspired by eugenics.”
The wealthiest and most influential asset holders have been insured by the world’s most powerful central bank without conditions.

Forbes reports that “Twenty five of the wealthiest people on Forbes’ list of the world’s billionaires are worth a whopping $255 billion more than when the U.S. stock market hit a mid-pandemic low on March 23.”

With all that is going on as outlined above, I find wisdom from Edgar Morin. His book Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millenium , written with Anne Brigitte Kern, applies very well to the situation we find ourselves in today, with the tensions and trauma of dealing with the coronavirus, combined with the deeply embedded inequalities in our culture, the concerns about liberty and authoritarianism, and the extractive nature of neoliberalism and disaster capitalism currently exploiting the crisis we are experiencing. Not to mention the ecological crisis, which is a central theme of the book.

“In 1789, the French Revolution established the democratic norm, supplemented in 1848 by the triune slogan: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. This trinity is complex, as its terms are mutually complementary and antagonistic: left to itself, liberty kills equality and fraternity; compulsory equality kills liberty without achieving fraternity; and fraternity, without which no lived fellowship can possibly exist between citizens, must check liberty and bring down inequalities, even though it cannot be promulgated or established by law and decree.”

– Edgar Morin, Homeland Earth (1999), p. 90

The French Revolution ushered us into The Age of Enlightenment and Modernity with this triadic concept of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” But how well has any society embodied these three principles?

Liberty (at least for white men) was a theme for the American Revolution as well as well as the French Revolution, and continued as a primary theme during the Civil War.  Even so, it remains fragile, and outside of the grasp of many in the world.

After the two world wars and the great depression, Equality became a dominant theme for the civil rights and feminist movements, and a hallmark of Post-Modern pluralism.  And yet, current events demonstrate how we have fallen painfully short of the mark.  As I write, protests and riots are rocking the United States, in response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.

Fraternity, limited from the beginning, since its Latin root means only ‘brotherhood,’ has still not been successfully demonstrated as a major cultural theme in the modern or post-modern world. Communist regimes have failed to manifest anything beyond a forced unity as they were overcome by totalitarian tendencies.  Post-WWII initiatives such as the U.N. and Bretton Woods institutions have played important moderating roles but have lacked the strength to accomplish much in the way of real change.

Reframing the terminology as Freedom, Justice, and Kinship, our first task is to fully embrace the healthiest expression of the post-modern pluralism. As Gary Hampson has astutely noted, the way out (of postmodernism) is through (postmodernism). We’ve got to fully inhabit and grok this stage if we want to move forward and beyond. Black lives do matter. White male privilege is real. Gender identity and LGBQT issues have something to teach us. This is not to discount dysfunctions and unhealthy expressions we often see at play.

As Edgar Morin suggests, kinship is needed to regulate freedom and to support justice. If we can move past the Post-Modern cultural phase into an Integral or Meta-Modern phase, kinship should become a major cultural theme, which can assist us in a better balance and integration of freedom and justice, and should embody “citizenship in its deepest sense” (Morin).

As the integral framework is intended to “transcend and include,” it can potentially bring forth the best of capitalism (freedom), socialism (justice), and, yes, communism (kinship). And perhaps “transcend and include” could be transformed into “embrace and befriend” as Will Varey suggests – “An approach of ‘transcend and include’ validates the higher by the potential overshadowing of the included lower. In a reflexive reconsideration, perhaps there is virtue in the alternative paradigmatic approach to ‘embrace and befriend’.”  (from Integral Explanatory Coherence: Consilience. Resonance. Coherence).

Can an integral consciousness manifest a type of “communism” that is not a totalizing ideology in nature and able to balance with the best aspects of capitalism and socialism? Riane Eisler suggests that we move beyond terms such as capitalism, socialism, and communism, and embrace a new economic organizational form she calls “Partnerism“.

Jeremy Johnson’s recent essay (Meta, Modern: Understanding the Phenomenology of Consciousness) outlines the vibe and vision for an integral or meta-modern consciousness structure, rooted in the work of Jean Gebser. Johnson explains:

…we no longer inhabit a mere (post) modern sensibility…Our position in the present is oscillatory, characterized by liminality…This structure of feeling, like a pendulum, swings back and forth in anticipation of a new cultural sensibility. But we need not merely bounce between modern and (post) modern; tomorrow is already latent in our cultural phenomenology.

Is kinship so far out of reach as it appears?  Bonnitta Roy has recently provided a startling insight in her recent 2 part essay, Corona: A Tale of Two Systems. Part 1 here and Part 2 here).

Bonnitta points out that civilizations have always had ideologies of connection, and that even prior to civilization there was a felt sense of kinship with others, and even a deep connection with the natural world.  She states:

“Ever since the beginning of civilisation we have built the illusion of unity as somewhere up there, somewhere in our future if we can just get it right. This is because we have turned our backs on the ever-present reality of our prior unity in the depths of our evolutionary becoming. The deeper evolutionary layers of our being are the larger universals. We are precariously tethered by an ideology of the market, but we are innately connected through our participation in and interdependence with the life force of the planet.

… The deeper, ontological reality is that we come from unity and grow toward diversity. There is no need to fashion a story or a system to “seal the deal.” The deed has been already secured through our natural human heritage.”

It is important to understand that it is a unity/diversity polarity – two sides of one coin, rather than conflicting opposites. When we can truly connect with the many elements that provide us with an underlying unity, we can then become more secure in embracing our diversity without conflict.

Diane Hamilton,  Gabriel Wilson, and Kimbely Loh have recently co-authored a book entitled “Compassionate Conversations: How to Speak and Listen from the Heart.”  In a recent conversation about the book between Ken Wilber and Diane Hamilton, they discuss this very topic of Integrating Unity and Diversity  as they address the question, “How can we begin to cross those divides and heal as a community, as a nation, and as a single human family?”

Kinship includes a sense of unity with the natural world as well as our fellow humans.  Here we come to the work of philosopher Donna Haraway: “For Haraway, “kin” means something other than entities bound by ancestry – it signifies new kinds of relations between humans and non-humans alike. She states that “making and recognising kin is perhaps the hardest and most urgent” challenge humans in and of the earth face today, although in the deepest sense, “all earthlings are kin” (Haraway, 2016b).”

Recognizing kin can be a kind of spiritual practice, as demonstrated in this short video on Encounter, featuring Dr. Stephen Harding, followed by some words of wisdom from David Fleming (this is an excerpt from the film on David Fleming, The Sequel: What Will Follow Our Troubled Civilization .

Encountering Another Being II from Empathy Media on Vimeo.

In his recent, masterful, connecting the dots article (White Supremacism and the Earth System, Nafeez Ahmed provides a big picture perspective, pointing out that the “otherization” that is currently happening on such a broad scale is the result of a global systemic crisis. We need to look beyond the obvious symptoms to wider issues behind them, and to be ready to adopt a system change.

Ahmed writes,

“As the prevailing system declines, breaks down, weakens, elicits the unleashing of rage and angst, this very process of weakening creates a clearing of systemic uncertainty….

This is what I call the global phase shift. This is the transition point where small, local actions can have wider, accumulative, system-wide effects. This is the moment where each of our choices has a momentous, history-forging potential.”

Cultural philosopher Jean Gebser envisioned a consciousness mutation after a period of chaotic breakdown.  He referred to this as an integral-arational structure of consciousness (The Ever-Present Origin).

Peter Pogany summarized Gebser’s vision as follows:

“The collision between our civilization and its ecological constraints, along with a likely historic crisis of epic proportions, may be regarded as the struggle of integral-arational consciousness (Gebser’s “fifth structure”) to deprive overblown rationality (the deficient phase of mental consciousness) from its current preeminence.”

Key characteristics of this integral structure of consciousness must include…

Freedom, Justice, and Kinship.

John B. Cobb, Jr: What Keeps Us Trying?

John B. Cobb, Jr. , born in 1925, graduated from the University of Chicago Divinity School with a PhD in 1952. I believe Cobb entered the University shortly after the departure of Henry Nelson Wieman, who had infused the school with the thinking of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.

John B. Cobb, Jr.

In 1958, Cobb began teaching at Claremont School of Theology, and Claremont Graduate University in California. In 1971, he and Lewis Ford established the Process Studies Journal, and soon thereafter co-founded with David Ray Griffin the Center for Process Studies, which became “the center of Whiteheadian process thought” according to Wikipedia. Wikipedia also states that Cobb has been characterized as “one of the two most important North American theologians of the twentieth century (the other being Rosemary Radford Ruether).^[1] Cobb is often regarded as the preeminent scholar in the field of process philosophy and process theology—the school of thought associated with the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.^[2] Cobb is the author of more than fifty books.^[3] In 2014, Cobb was elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[4] “

Another distinction of John B. Cobb Jr. is that he published, in 1971, again, according to Wikipedia, “the first single-author book in environmental ethics—Is It Too Late? A Theology of Ecology—which argued for the relevance of religious thought in approaching the ecological crisis.^[7] In 1989, he co-authored with Herman Daly the book For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, Environment, and a Sustainable Future, which critiqued current global economic practice and advocated for a sustainable, ecology-based economics. He has written extensively on religious pluralism and interfaith dialogue, particularly between Buddhism and Christianity, as well as the need to reconcile religion and science.”

Indeed, ecological interdependence has been an important theme throughout his long career. I read “Is It Too Late?” a number of years ago, and it made a great impact on me (I posted an excerpt on my blog here: https://integralpermaculture.wordpress.com/2012/04/22/the-titanic-on-earth-day/ )

Why am I writing now about John Cobb? Because at the age of 92, Cobb is still actively engaged – still writing, still working to make the world a better place.  In recent years he founded the organization Pando Populous, with an aim to create an ecological civilization.

Just a few days ago, after Trump’s announcement about pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords, he posted an article in which he shares from his years of experience in the ecological movement within the academic community. He speaks honestly about the roles of hope and optimism in the face of the “manifold disasters” the world is heading toward.

“For those of us fortunate enough to have an optimistic temperament, distinguishing optimism from hopefulness is not always easy. But it is important because optimism may fade while hope remains. What I am calling “hopefulness” is grounded in faith and faithfulness. It is because the Cosmic Spirit’s aim can be our aim, that we are never alone. The Cosmic Spirit seeks through us to save this little planet. It has no hands but our hands, as I sang as a boy, but it can direct those hands beyond simply our personal wisdom. That I cannot know what good consequences may follow from some act to which I feel called does not mean that none do. Hope is a kind of trust that we can be partners of a Spirit that guides us, and that can sometimes transform even our sins and failures into stepping stones to something positive.”

Perhaps you’ll take the time to read the entire article, “What Keeps Us Trying?” by John B. Cobb, Jr.

Michael Dowd, Part 3: Grace Limits and Big Picture ‘Apocaloptimism’

Check out Part 1 of this blog post series here, and Part 2 here. Part 3, below, features the third video in a series on the theme “Standing for the Future” by Rev. Michael Dowd.

“These three videos are the culmination of my life’s work to-date and, by far, my most important legacy contribution.” ~ Michael Dowd

Part 1 is about “The Evidential Reformation: Facts as Scripture, Ecology as Theology.” Part 2 is “Reality is Lord: A Scientific View of God on a Rapidly Overheating Planet.” Part 3 is on “Grace Limits and Big Picture ‘Apocaloptimism’: The Great Reckoning as Great Homecoming.”

What is ‘Apocaloptimism’? Michael Dowd first heard Theo Kitchener call herself an ‘apocaloptimist’. I’m guessing Kirchner is author of this post discussing the term, and she first heard it from NASA scientist Peter C. Griffith. She describes it this way:

Apocaloptimism is embracing the unknown, is embracing transformation. It is being okay no matter what the outcome is, but fighting like hell to steer it in the direction that you want.

Dowd has described himself as an ‘apocaloptimist’ because he is a short term pessimist (or realist), but a long term (big picture) optimist. Listen to a great interview with Terry Patten here.

I provide below some teaser screenshots from this third video, to entice you in and to reinforce some key points.

The quote from Teilhard de Chardin above is important.  Dowd believes that one of the most important systemic changes that needs to happen in the world is for us to learn to align self-interest with the well-being of the whole. My wife and I found the following quote from the presentation to be very meaningful:

“[One of the] most important systemic things we need to do is to align self-interest with the well being of the whole. That’s how evolution has proceeded to create greater complexity over time.

When the self-interest of the parts and the well being of the whole are aligned, then when the part does well for the whole, it [the part] benefits. And when the part harms the whole, then it harms itself in some way.

So it is in its own self-interest to do the right thing to the whole. It’s called “consequence capture” – the impact of individuals and groups, for good or ill, must be reflected back to them.”

The following introduction to the video is copied and pasted from the webpage “Standing for the Future.”

Standing for the Future (Part 3 of 3) — “Grace Limits and Big Picture ‘Apocaloptimism’: The Coming Great Reckoning as Great Homecoming”

Given our impact on Earth’s climate, the seas, and other species, humanity is already beginning to experience The Great Reckoning. The good news is that this is also The Great Homecoming: the prodigal species, after squandering our inheritance, coming home to Reality (God).

Big History — the Epic of Evolution or Universe Story — is humanity’s first and only inclusive, globally produced, evidence-based creation story. In this culminating episode, Dowd shows how this Great Story provides clear and compelling guidance to help our species ‘obey’ (honor) physical and ecological processes that have been at work for hundreds of millions of years. He offers both practical tools of resilience and an empowering vision of collective action in response to climate chaos and other large-scale systemic challenges.

Michael and Connie are currently engaged in a speaking tour in the northwest U.S., with upcoming vists to Edmonds, Whidbey Island, Seattle, Orcas Island, and Bellingham, WA, in January 2017.  Check out their itinerary here. Our Transition Whatcom event listing is here – Jan. 22nd (Sunday morning) and Jan. 23rd (Monday evening), both at Bellingham Unitarian Fellowship.

 

Michael Dowd: Standing for the Future, Part 2

As a follow-up from last week’s post, I share with you Part 2 of Michael Dowd’s video series, “Standing for the Future.” You can view Part 1 here.  The text right above the video is just copied and pasted from Dowd’s website.

There are two quotes from this video that I found especially important and meaningful. First on The Importance of Personification.

The words ‘God’ and ‘evolution’ are both pointing to the same divine creative process. Both answer the question ‘How did we get here?’ One uses the mythic language of religion, the other uses the literal language of science.  Arguing whether it was God or evolution that created everything is like debating whether it’s Uncle Sam or the U.S. government that insists we pay taxes every year, or like quarreling over whether it was Gaia or plate tectonics that created the oceans and mountains. Such silly and largely unnecessary confusion will remain the norm until we get and celebrate what I think is the single most important scientific discovery about religion in the last 500 years: personification. – Michael Dowd

The second quote is in support of Michael Dowd’s conviction that Ecology is the new Theology

Every characteristic that we attribute to the divine derives from our experience of Nature. If we imagine God as beautiful, gracious, loving, awesome, powerful, majestic, or faithful, it is because we have known or experienced beauty, grace, love, awe, power, majesty, or trustworthiness in the world. – Michael Dowd

“If we lived on the moon and that’s all we and our ancestors had ever known, all of our concepts and experience of the divine would reflect the barrenness of the lunar landscape.” – Thomas Berry

Standing for the Future (2/3) — “Reality Is Lord: A Scientific View of God on a Rapidly Overheating Planet”

“We each have experienced times of trouble that threaten to overwhelm our individual lives. In such times, a vision of possibility is essential. The same holds for the punctuations in history when whole societies face troubles of an immense and uncharted variety. Truly, we have arrived at such a time. Humans, unwittingly, have become a planetary force. We are irreversibly changing the very climate of our world. Henceforth, any actions we take as individuals and societies will be done in the new light of climate change.

What vision will carry us forward through such times and inspire us to work together? How shall we frame the need to shed our business-as-usual outlook on life and take on a new vision of possibility that can unite us as a species in joyful self-sacrifice and service? What vision will charge us with a sense of heroic purpose that the future is, indeed, calling us to greatness?”

In the video above, Dowd includes some of the amazing examples of nature personified that have been created by Conservation International in collaboration with some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, all available at the Nature is Speaking website, which emphases the point that nature doesn’t need people, but people need nature. Here is Kevin Spacey as the Rainforest:

 

 

Michael Dowd: Standing for the Future

The former pastor, Rev. Michael Dowd, is best known as the author of the best-selling book, Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World. Dowd is a religious naturalist (“Religious naturalism (RN) combines a naturalist worldview with perceptions and values commonly associated with religions”), an eco-theologian and a pro-science evangelist. His passion for proclaiming a nature-honoring message of inspiration – what he calls “Right Relationship with Reality” – has earned him the title “Rev. Reality.”  Michael and his science writer and climate activist wife, Connie Barlow, have dedicated themselves to an itinerant life of permanent travel across North America, speaking out about our sacred responsibility to future generations.

According to their website, their core message is this: “What matters most now, individually and collectively, is to honor Grace Limits, and be a stand for the future, in word and deed.”

What does it mean to honor Grace Limits? Dowd considers Grace Limits to be “the inescapable, geological, ecological, and thermodynamic constraints to which humanity must rapidly adjust.”  He explains:

Both the nonrenewable (“stock”) resources and the renewable (“flow”) resources upon which we depend I call natural grace. The one-time endowments of stock resources and the sustainable use rates of flow resources are both necessarily constrained on a finite planet. These constraints I call grace limits. These are the limits that ecologists point to when discerning carrying capacity. When we overshoot Earth’s bounty and renewal capacities, we effectively remove ourselves from paradise and put ourselves on the path to hell. To learn to recognize and then scrupulously honor carrying capacity as Reality’s grace limits is a task to which the authors included [on his Grace Limits Audios page] are devoted. I think of these advocates as prophets of sacred realism, or factual faith. Each one, in his or her own way, reveals how the future is calling us to greatness. If we hope to spare our grandchildren from hell and spare ourselves their condemnation, we must now urgently attend to, not just personal piety, but systemic piety. We must immediately begin measuring ‘progress’ and ‘success’ in long-term, life-centered ways, rather than short-term, human-centered ways; nothing is more important than this.

Dowd’s Grace Limits Audios are an amazing resource. He’s spent innumerable hours recording in downloadable audio format the best work of a wide array of the most important sustainability and resilience authors – and all available for free download. Some of the authors represented include William R. Catton, Jr., John Michael Greer, Richard Heinberg, James Howard Kunstler, Thomas Berry, JoAnna Macy, Lynn Margulis, Samuel Alexander, Tom Wessells, Erik Lindberg, Walter Youngquist, Theo Kitchener, and more.  In addition to his own audio recordings of these works, he also provides a plethora of links to online information and presentations of others. A wealth of education is available here.

Dowd’s own recent work is perhaps best summarized in a 5 page essay, “Evidential Medicine for Our Collective Soul: What’s Inevitable? What’s Redemptive?,” published in “Oneing” (Aug. 2016, Vol 4 No. 2), the quarterly publication put out by Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation.  A 19 minute audio recording of this essay is also available.

In this essay, Dowd notes that a new “Evidential Reformation” is coming into being, where all forms of evidence are coming to be valued equally and religiously. This includes scientific, historic, cross-cultural, and experiential evidence and includes, as Pope Francis has declared, ecology becoming integral to theology. Faith leaders such as Pope Francis (Roman Catholic), Patriarch Bartholomew (Easter Orthodox), and the Dalai Lama (Tibetan Buddhist) are all at the forefront of this reformation that Rev. Dowd is calling “Religion 3.0.”

However, Dowd warns us that “the noble sentiments that spawned care for Creation are no match for the crises now spinning out of control.” He writes that “It is time for a prophetic turbo-charging of our religious traditions. Foremost is the need to expand beyond the self-focus of individual salvation of enlightenment to also include vital community concerns – notably, survival.”

In the section of the essay addressing “What’s Inevitable?,” Dowd outlines a series of predicaments.  Not problems that can be addressed and solved, but predicaments that we must live through and deal with – hence, what is inevitable. He discusses climate chaos, sea level rise, the end of the fossil fuel era, political unrest, toxic legacy, biodiversity catastrophe, cultural loss, and the unraveling of worldviews. He states that to stay relevant, religions will need to foster not only personal wholeness, but also social coherence and ecological integrity. Dowd prophetically calls us as individuals to “voluntarily sacrifice [our] own comfort and security in service of safeguarding cultural treasures through a dark age.” He invites us to embark on legacy projects that are meaningful to us:

“Love something, learn something, let something go, and pass something forward.”

In the next section on “What’s Redemptive?,” he advises that we can’t compensate for the ecological devastation that has already occurred, nor can we fully reverse the ongoing effects of past behavior. He calls us, as a prodigal species, to come home to reality and set a new course.  “If we treat primary reality as anything other than primary, there will be consequences.”

To realign with Reality means that we must redefine “progress,” and learn that the success of any species depends upon learning to thrive within the limits of carrying capacity of the ecological system that we inhabit. He writes:

It is time to integrate carrying capacity into our theologies. Toward this end, I now speak of “grace limits.” The bounds that delimit safe levels of human use of other creatures and their habitats are there by natural grace. By staying within those bounds, we experience the grace of God’s nature. To venture beyond – which we have done, excessively – we suffer “God’s wrath” via storms, drought, floods, wildfires, rising and acidifying oceans, and in a great dying.

The call to action for religious adherents is this: to first learn about, then reflect upon, and finally evolve our worldviews. Henceforth, the unbending grace limits of God’s nature, combined with carrying capacity deficits inflicted by a century of human overpopulation and extravagant consumption (i.e. “overshoot”) will constrain even our noblest aims and thus the bounds of our efforts.

Dowd concludes the essay with his own ‘top ten’ list: “Reality’s Rules: Ten Commandments to Avoid Extinction and Redeem Humanity.” These are what he considers to be “the limitations on our behavior essential for human communities to persist over the long term,” or the “constraints that our species must now impose on itself while navigating crises of our own creation.” The first five commandments help to disabuse us of an unreal notion of God, and the last five offer a way back into a right relationship with primary reality. The “commandments” are framed in traditional religious language:

“Thus sayeth the Lord”…

1. Stop thinking of me as anything less than the voice of undeniable and inescapable reality.
2. Stop thinking of ‘revelation’ or ‘divine instruction’ without including evidence.
3. Stop thinking of Genesis, or your creation story, apart from the history of the universe.
4. Stop thinking of theology apart from ecology: the interdisciplinary study of my nature.
5. Stop defining and measuring ‘progress’ in short-term, human-centered ways.
6. Stop allowing the free or subsidized polluting of the commons.
7. Stop using renewable resources faster than they can be replenished.
8. Stop using non-renewable resources in ways that harm or rob future generations.
9. Stop exploring for coal, oil, and natural gas—keep most of it in the ground.
10. Stop prioritizing the wants of the wealthy over the needs of the poor.

* * *

 A 17 minute video is available that sums up the message of the above essay: “Ten Commandments to Avoid Extinction: Reality’s Rules.”

A full and expanded presentation of the ideas presented in the essay is also available as a 3-part video series.  I highly recommend this. I feel it is well worth the investment of time.  Part 1 is below, and runs for 55 minutes.  Standing for the Future (Part 1 of 3): “Evidential Reformation: Facts as Scripture; Ecology as Theology”

Michael and Connie are currently engaged in a speaking tour in the northwest U.S., with upcoming vists to Edmonds, Whidbey Island, Seattle, Orcas Island, and Bellingham, WA, in January 2017.  Check out their itinerary here. Our Transition Whatcom event listing is here – Jan. 22nd (Sunday morning) and Jan. 23rd (Monday evening), both at Bellingham Unitarian Fellowship.