VII. A Genesis Future: Earthkind at Home and in the Cosmos

The advent of a worldwide discovery by humankind is of little avail if it can not inform a much more peaceful, tolerant, equitable local and global society. But this is quite possible because the nested genesis it has found occurs by a repetition of the same cellular pattern and process at each emergent stage from molecules to societies. Its promise is that human beings, once so advised, can carry forth its complementary creativity of free individuals and supportive groups to self-organize humane communities in a Gaian biowebwork. This feature will be expanded upon in the Sustainable Ecovillages section. And it must be an Earthkind future. Unless we can overcome the archaic discriminations that divide us and rise to a common identity within a conducive universe can this sacred, ovular realm survive and prosper.

As readers well know, we are not there yet. The physiological, homeostatic systems of the supportive biosphere in terms of climate, water, pollutants, biodiversity, coral reefs, and so on, remain in a critical life support condition, as chronicled in The Old Earth. At this moment of spreading terror and blundering militarism, a positive alternative does exist and A New Earth Creation will consider its several aspects. A first module, Planetary Self-Selection, suggests that the phenomenon of people are now called upon to consciously choose this Earth as a successful center of developing life, mind and spirit.

In this regard, the evidence for an unfinished cosmic creation can be drawn as much from these evident future vistas as its prior emergence. Mind Over Matter broaches the intentional advance of elemental, material and biochemical domains. A Learning Planet’s composite knowledge can be fed back to liberate, heal, educate and empower the valiant constituents from whom it arose, as Personal Enhancement testifies. How nature’s universal, recurrent code might advise local settlements and global networks is considered in Sustainable Ecovillages, An Organic Democracy, and A Viable Gaia.

In an expansive vista, The Genesis of the Galaxy section, to use Freeman Dyson’s pithy phrase, poses a quite different cosmic destiny to the old fire or ice fate and concludes with speculative visions of the continued gestation of intelligent, personal life within a numinous universe.

A. The Old Earth: Its Critical Life Support Condition

Although the technological venture to alleviate the human condition is laudable and necessary, it has now grossly overshot in terms of consumption, energy and natural resource usage, weapons proliferation, and many other insults. What follows is a familiar litany of challenges that need to be collectively faced if we are ever to achieve a sustainable, unified, cosmically viable planet. Due to political and economic agendas,much confusion persists about the state of the global dynamic climate, which needs to be straight away admitted, sorted out, properly defined and commonly addressed, especially by the First World for the sake of the whole world. Specific concerns are noted next, with paths to their resolve and a peaceable earth in following sections.

• Global Climate Change The real threat is not a gradual warming and sea level rise but from a critically poised complex weather system that can suddenly and unexpectedly change in a few years. Such instabilities are already being felt in extreme storms and floods or in prolonged droughts. A number of sources on Abrupt Climate Change are included.

• Military Armaments We are awash in guns, land minds, mortars, tanks; land, sea and air weaponry of absurd, epidemic proportions. Their proliferation now fuels ancient and present territorial, tribal, ethnic, national, resource, gang, and ideological conflicts, an anachronism today as humankind converges materially and cognitively upon itself over a finite biosphere. A prime danger remains thousands of nuclear warheads in uncontrolled circulation in an age of terror.

• Population Rising over six billion, it is projected to level off around ten billion by 2100. Asian countries, especially China, now try to enforce a one child policy for sheer survival. Many Third World lands, in their poverty, push the birth rate, often to have sons. A long overdue advance in the status of women to full equality is imperative.

• Natural Resources Exploitation of temperate and tropical forests, strip mining, monocrop soil erosion, aquifer depletion, overfishing, and so on and on, threaten the ecological carrying capacity of the biosphere.

• Energy Expenditure The overshoot impact of fossil fuel power plants, heavy industry, high horsepower vehicles, a non-renewable coal and oil economy, ostentatious lifestyles, et al has raised carbon dioxide levels which accelerate a greenhouse effect.

• Pollution The waste products of a consumptive First World, a burdened Second and catch-up Third foul the atmosphere, contaminate oceans, rain acid on trees, poison the soil and limit diversity so as to degrade their own quality of life.

• Economic Corruption An inhibiting factor to resolution of these interlinked concerns, which needs emphasis, is an excessive money economy. Whether governmental, corporate, financial market, despotic, etc., such greed undercuts the achievement of an ethical, green, closed cycle local and global society.

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B. A New Earth Creation

Now for some good news. This multi-phase section was surveyed in the Genesis Future introduction and begins with some reflections on the imperative for humankind or more rightly earthkind to intentionally select this precious planet as a center of future creation in an unfinished genesis universe.

1. Earthwin: Planetary Self-Selection

As noted in Part VI, Archetypal Psychology, Macrohistory as Psychic Individuation and elsewhere, in order for a person to attain a unique self-identity, one must ultimately do this by themselves, by their own effort, cognizance and vision. Similarly for our planetary person at the verge of integral wholeness and selfhood, it would seem imperative that people individually and collectively be moved to therefore choose earth. For a name, if you will, a bicameral Mary and Charles Earthwin, for this is our mission to become out of the cosmic contingencies a viable center of a still developing creation.

As the website Introduction noted, one reason that a grand new vista is dawning is because humankind’s history has reached global closure, it is time to be born or hatch. A further threshold in evolution, as if a nativity singularity, something like a super-organic body, and brain, appears to be just emerging over the earth. At this natal hour, we seem poised with a decision of success or failure, the continuation of earth’s valiant life and mind or its terminal stillbirth and expiration.

For a natural genesis proceeding within an amniotic cosmos, sentient bioplanets then appear as so many eggs or seeds. Earthkind altogether is thus summoned to select itself, many called but few chosen writ large. By our own initiative, this cosmic embryogenesis may, or may not, pass through precious, fertile, personal earth. It begs the question can we ever stop fighting and in complementary partnership read nature as scripture revealing who we are and might become, a child of an expectant cosmos. These citations explore some dimensions, which include an attempt to weave indispensible feminine sentiments.

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2. Mind Over Matter

Part V, A Quickening Evolution, surveyed the evolutionary nest of complex bodies, larger brains and proactive cognition which defines a central direction and arrow. But what ultimately seems to ascend is information and knowledge itself. Today on a worldwide scope, encoded word, number, and symbol in text and equation becomes commonly accessible and acts upon the material and somatic substrate it arose from. Through computational power, graphic visualization, instrumentation, satellites, virtual shared experiments with instant web postings, and so on, informed mind begins to refashion and innovate matter. If in a few decades from brute privation, inquisitive human beings can identify transuranium elements, modulate the speed of light, customize bacteria, make quantum light sources, along with quantifying the celestial vastness, such achievements ought to have a phenomenal purpose.

To restate our caveat, this sourcebook attempts to gather and review an array of relevant literature. As often cited, many technological projects and excesses are masculine in nature, so an accompanying more feminine social mediation is recorded in Sustainable Ecovillages. And of course we realize that a reader worries over ethical concerns. Deep quandaries now exist in areas such as stem cell research or genetic modification, especially at the edges of life, which are at odds with religious doctrines of human fallibility. What is new, as this site has tried to communicate, is the occasion of a natural, collective dispensation which teaches an understanding of human worth and capacity not before possible. Such a cosmological context and role could begin to provide studied, agreed safeguards and guidance not previously available. Some entry sources are noted for this moral aspect, which will be covered further in the Science section of the Forum for Religion and Ecology website.

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3. Personal Enhancement

In 1800, with nearly one billion people alive, life expectancy at birth did not surpass thirty years. By 2000, with more than six billion people alive, life expectancy reached nearly sixty-seven years amidst a continuing rise. This is the crowning achievement of the modern era, surpassing wealth, military power, and political stability in import. James Riley

An integral, cerebral Earthkind can similarly learn to heal and improve the lives of its beset, valiant constituents. In medicine, for example, the written, stored knowledge about a disease or malady is fed back to salve the individuals who gave it occasion. These references sample a multifaceted literature which perceives a chrysalis-like human person capable of constructive physical and mental self-improvement, within a suitably nurturant community.

An advance emphasized here is a relative doubling and tripling in the last two centuries of the average human life span to almost ninety years. But societies in every country are unprepared for this; traditional religion even less so as based upon a brief sojourn with an elsewhere, afterlife reward. Until recently, the human condition was a short, brutish travail. Suddenly everything has changed of which we are largely unaware. To give a date, it could be the 1930's discovery of penecillin. Rather than to wait for apocalypse and deliverance, in a total change of affairs, this earthly abide can be known to possess its own innate, creative, sacred value. The novel addition of healthy, productive years, soon to exceed 100, with no limit in sight, could gain significant import as the forward edge of life’s florescence in the universe.

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4. Sustainable Ecovillages

It is important to appreciate that humankind has not only realized an overall genesis cosmology but one whose nested development proceeds by the same creative complementary system at each stage. A dynamic, emergent scale of being and becoming results as the universal formative principles infuse and empower everywhere. From biomolecules to ecosystems, diverse, semi-autonomous entities and modules interrelate and combine symbiotically to generate a novel whole individual. The great benefit is that once found these common themes can facilitate the next evident phase of a reinhabitation of the global landscape by way of the local self-organization of egalitarian, human-scale groupings. Rather than a homogeneous globalized organism, rightly seen askance, the imminent evolutionary stage would be a bioregional and biospheric network of urban and rural communities. Examples of constant guiding principles might be:

• An equitable, reciprocal partnership of women and men. (Complementarity)

• A mutuality of free individuals joined in shared relationship. (Creative Union)

• Spontaneous free association without central authority. (Self-organization)

• Modular personal diversity in a beneficial social unity. (Symbiosis)

• Coherent boundaries for self-referential communities. (Autopoiesis)

In an epilogue to The Human Web (2003), the eminent historian William McNeill makes just such a proposal. For thousands of years, homo sapiens dwelt in familial bands of 50 to 100 members. But with the fragmentation, diaspora and suburbanization of modern societies, this identity and cohesion has been lost. Based on the newly revised view of evolution as a recurrence of the same cellular form, McNeill advises that our social future should again be composed of “primary communities” of a similar number of participants.

And such a worldwide movement, as noted above, is already underway for this is the typical size of cohousing settlements and ecovillages. Also known as intentional neighborhoods, its members gain the advantages of shared resources and land, reduced economic burden, and group support along with independent freedom of lifestyle. These books, magazines and websites introduce a vital option to a consumptive, unjust, violent and ultimately unsustainable civilization. Also included here are some entries to an organic, environmentally mindful architecture.

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5. An Organic Democracy

There is a vast literature of recent years about the post 1990 ascent of human habitation to a planetary phase. Compressed by its spherical surface, intensified by instant communications, media, air travel, and commerce, a “new world order” is much in process. A heated debate now goes on over the malleable concept of Democracy, with little light or agreement. The Complementarity of Civilizations sections noted how different, polar cultures and nationalities are spread across the continents. And in academe for reasons such as a past century of carnage and the collapse of any grand political scheme, a sense of an overarching historical destiny or metanarrative is not now admissible.

While aware of this, we offer that from the same worldwide polity may yet arise its own knowledge and revolution unto an organically developing universe, which the website tries to report. By this Copernican discovery, local and global human society can then be appreciated as the latest exemplary manifestation of a nested, repetitive evolutionary genesis. Several sections within Part VI. H. The Phenomenon of Humankind recorded its various animate features. Sustainable Ecovillages above documents an evident next stage of “cellular” communities. For example, Pioneer Valley cohousing in Amherst, MA is eminently democratic because all members can equally participate. This present section seeks to expand this theme through an array of references, taking on how to resolve the current gridlock polarization of electorates.

A case in point would be the United States and its presidential elections. The country is split into right or left, Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, red and blue states, and so on. These preferences are seen to align with gender archetypes of individual autonomy or communal nurturance, militarism or negotiation, past or future, a long bicameral list. The 2000 election between Al Gore and George Bush divided exactly in half down to a few votes out of a 100 million. Again in 2004 the vote again came out 51/49 as if manifesting some deeper polarity. In this same decade, elections in Germany, France, Mexico, and elsewhere in Africa and Asia have similarly split, often with violent consequences. The United States constitution, still a model for the world, was founded upon the Newtonian mechanics of the late 18th century. Could we altogether imagine a 21st century governance (or benign lack thereof) guided by a creative, self-organizing reciprocity?

For at present, rather than the representative democracy we think distinguishes America, actually the two parties are more like Sunni and Shiite tribes. Whoever is out of power tries to block, defame, and blowup the other. A start might be instead of a single president from one party, an arrangement such as the 12 member investigative commissions with 6 persons from each aisle, with annual internet recommendations and votings, might be truly democratic.

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6. A Viable Gaia

To next move on to a global sphere, the local ecovillages from remote hamlets to urban neighborhoods could be organically and electronically interconnected through appropriate infrastructure to further advantage. By so doing, a worldwide anatomy, physiology and homeostatic metabolism could organize itself. As a continuation of evolution’s cellular nest, each diverse tribal, religious, racial or regional heritage need not be lost but actually enhanced by membership in a unified, salutary Earth community. By such a symbiotic reciprocity, a person can at once be ethnic and earthling.

But a dire need is to overcome obsessive male militarism with a long-range program to eliminate weapons production of any and all kinds. Similarly, a shift from a corporate excess, money-driven economy to one based on a family and neighborhood supportive quality of life, where a system of exchange would be a means not an end, is also imperative. These sources introduce various agricultural, economic, gender, and cultural aspects and especially sustainability issues.

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C. The Greening of the Galaxy

As the prior sections of A Genesis Future attest, a real ability exists to begin a promised Earthkind future on the other side of discovery. The many potentials for intelligent life to continue creation are as much a part of and evidence for a natural genesis cosmology as its original emergence. The death sentence imposed by second law thermodynamics is set aside. Our Copernican Revolution from material machine to organic, personal development reveals an unfinished, self-creating universe. If the phenomenon of sentient entities on ovular planets is factored in, the cosmos does not waste away into darkness, but passes to their vital participation as it grows in life and light. This concluding module gathers resources which imagine a lifewave spreading from earth to inhabit, animate and transform the solar system and on to galactic reaches. Considerations of extraterrestrial life and brethren are covered mostly in the Astrobiology section. The green galaxy is NGC 1232 photographed by the European Southern Observatory.

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