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A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe
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VIII. Earth Earns: An Open Participatory Earthropocene to Astropocene CoCreative Future

C. An Earthropocene Era: Pedia Sapiens Can Choose a Unified, Peaceful, Creative, Ecosphere Future

Earth Charter Initiative. www.earthcharter.org. This is an international program affiliated with the United Nations, empowered by leaders such as Maurice Strong and Mikhael Gorbachov. An Earth Charter has been prepared stating that the sustainable care of the earth should rightly be the primary concern of humanity today. This document along with many other relevant handbooks and materials can be accessed at this website. The Charter leads off with this vital cosmological dimension which draws on both astrophysical science and indigenous wisdom.

An international program affiliated with the United Nations empowered by leaders such as Maurice Strong and Mikhael Gorbachov which has prepared a charter statement that the sustainable care of the earth should rightly be the primary concern of humanity today. This document along with many other relevant handbooks and materials can be accessed at this website. The Charter leads off with this profound cosmological dimension which draws on both astrophysical science and indigenous wisdom.

InVIVO: A Collaborative Network for Planetary Health. www.invivonetwork.com. We are a progressive, humanist, scientific movement promoting both evidence and advocacy for People, Place, Purpose, and Planet. A 2018 informative site for this energetic worldwide option to a plethora of global maladies, as they reach a critical, maybe terminal condition. Formally the InFLAME Global Initiative, its main founder is Susan Prescott, an Australian pediatrician, see herein her paper with Alan Logan for much more. The opening, appropriate image, a painting by Susan, is a half-round Earth with a hand holding it, quite as a gravid pregnancy.


The concept of planetary health emphasizes that human health is intricately connected to the health of natural systems within the Earth’s biosphere—and that the health of all species depends on the health, biodiversity and stability of whole systems. Planetary health is a product of human social, political and economic ‘ecosystems’. The global challenges facing humanity include climate change, biodiversity losses, population growth, socioeconomic inequalities, environmental degradation, health disparities, ultra-processed foods, and the pandemic crisis of non-communicable diseases. In addition, there is ongoing political polarization and conflict, and growing ‘dis-ease’ which compromises quality of life. Against this background, personal and public health have become planetary health – and virtually every aspect of society must be allied in this new reality. This will help to strike a balance between socioeconomic development and sustainability, and so foster social and ecological justice.

Sustainable Development Solutions Network. http://unsdsn.org. This Global Initiative for the United Nations to “mobilize scientific and technical expertise from academia, civil society, and the private sector in support of sustainable development problem solving at local, national, and global scales” was launched in August 2012 by Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon. From the home page can be accessed its main document An Action Agenda for Sustainable Development. As an example of its import, the editor-in-chief is Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, to which an extraordinary array of international practitioners contributed. As a sample, “Ten Priority Challenges” include End extreme poverty, Effective learning for all children and youth for life and livelihood, and Improve agriculture systems and raise rural prosperity.

Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingourworld. A United Nations directive and manifesto that cites goals over the next 15 years by which to achieve a habitable biosphere we do not yet have. Here is a brief sampling of wishful agendas, but as we note for Shima Beigi herein, nothing will live unless men can stop incessant warfare.

People We are determined to end poverty and hunger, in all their forms and dimensions, and to ensure that all human beings can fulfill their potential in dignity and equality and in a healthy environment. Planet We are determined to protect the planet from degradation, including through sustainable consumption and production, sustainably managing its natural resources and taking urgent action on climate change, so that it can support the needs of the present and future generations. Prosperity We are determined to ensure that all human beings can enjoy prosperous and fulfilling lives and that economic, social and technological progress occurs in harmony with nature. Peace We are determined to foster peaceful, just and inclusive societies which are free from fear and violence. There can be no sustainable development without peace and no peace without sustainable development Partnership We are determined to mobilize the means required to implement this Agenda through a revitalized Global Partnership for Sustainable Development, based on a spirit of strengthened global solidarity, focused in particular on the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable and with the participation of all countries, all stakeholders and all people.

World Pulse: Women & Children Transforming Our World. www.worldpulsemagazine.com. The website for a new journal of woman’s and indigenous wisdom to extend their task of cleaning up after men to a vital global phase aided by local initiatives. The current issue, No. 2, contains articles such as raising African orphans after AIDS, efforts for peace in Sri Lanka, a natural healing vision by grandmothers from every continent, and programs for female education. Here is an excerpt from the talk of Bernadette Rebienot, a grandmother from the rainforests of Gabon.

“Is the world sick?” Unfortunately we are bringing up this topic rather late in the game since this immeasurable organism called Earth is already beset with gangrene. Our planet is sick from the never-ending ravages of people, pollution, abusive power, jealousy, and hatred. (35) Today’s civilization has been cut loose from the essential roots that formed humanity. We are destroying and polluting nature. The people of the future will no longer be those who believe exclusively in logic, in the reign of numbers and capital, but rather those who have understood that the net of tomorrow’s society resides in respect and consideration of the Other. Such respect would mean that dialogue would replace war. (35)

Le Prestre, Philippe. Global Ecopolitics Revisited. London: Routledge, 2017. A Laval University, Quebec political scientist proposes a new approach guided by an array of complex, living systems principles. A final chapter is thus appropriately titled Toward Fractal Governance.

Ahvenharju, Sanna, et al. The Five Dimensions of Futures Consciousness. Futures. Online June, 2018. University of Turku, Finland and University of Geneva post-doctoral scholars advise that a vital missing aspect in these terminal times is a better actual future to look forward to and bring into being. In contrast to despair and resignation over apocalyptic events, we peoples can do more than struggle to cope and exist. Rather, a radical awareness is envisioned with humane, empathic values and sensitivities. As dread takes over (e. g., We’re Doomed by Roy Scranton, July 2018), it is imperative to feel that a peaceable sustainability is really possible if we might believe, cooperate and respectfully proceed toward.

Futures research studies and builds images of possible, probable and preferable futures and paths to such futures. Underlying this effort is human consciousness of futures that is present in everyday anticipatory behaviour and explicit foresight. Futures researchers often aim to increase this consciousness in order to enable decision-making towards more desirable futures. Despite the importance of the concept of Futures Consciousness, and the proliferation of related concepts, there is no commonly used definition or operationalization that would permit empirical research. This article presents a conceptual model of Futures Consciousness that is based on an integrated review and analysis of the descriptions of future consciousness and its related concepts in literature as well as in the theoretical underpinnings of futures research. The model contains five dimensions: 1) Time perspective, 2) Agency beliefs, 3) Openness to alternatives, 4) Systems perception and 5) Concern for others. The model provides the basis for further conceptual development and the operationalization of Futures Consciousness, which would enable its use in empirical research. (Abstract)

Alberti, Marina. Cities That Think like Planets: Complexity, Resilience, and Innovation in Hybrid Ecosystems. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016. The University of Washington professor of design and planning, with many colleagues, achieves a visionary vista of integral human-earth habitabilities. Since peoples increasingly cluster and abide in large urban centers, it is vital they take on a true organism-like, sustainability. Going forward, a dynamically creative project of vitality, regeneration and wellness is scoped out via mindful sensitivities of a finite bio/eco-sphere. For this website then, could a next phase be “a planet that thinks as a person?”

As human activity and environmental change come to be increasingly recognized as intertwined phenomena on a rapidly urbanizing planet, the field of urban ecology has risen to offer useful ways of thinking about coupled human and natural systems.
Marina Alberti’s innovative work offers a conceptual framework for uncovering fundamental laws that govern the complexity and resilience of cities, which she sees as key to understanding and responding to planetary change and the evolution of Earth. She describes a science of cities that work on a planetary scale and that links unpredictable dynamics to the potential for innovation. Cities That Think like Planets advances strategies for planning a future that may look very different from the present, as rapid urbanization could tip the Earth toward abrupt and nonlinear change. Alberti's analyses of the various hybrid ecosystems, such as self-organization, heterogeneity, modularity, multiple equilibria, feedback, and transformation, may help humans participate in guiding the Earth away from inadvertent collapse and toward a new era of planetary co-evolution and resilience.

Albrecht, Glenn. Earth Emotions. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. The Australian environmental philosopher was a professor of sustainability at Murdoch University, Sydney until 2014. He presently has a blog dubbed Psychoterratica at glennaalbrecht.com. This neologism is a negative term for global climate crises as industrial human beings live far apart from, and in destructive denial of, an abiding ecosphere. His project is to vivify a practical 21st century re-union by way of the latest organic sciences. A path forward might well be a respectful avail of life’s natural symbiosis between member entities and a supportive grouping at each and every phase. A prime case is the eukaryotic cell with prokaryotic microbes, as long taught by Lynn Margulis. This me + We reciprocity for mutual benefit within a “US” whole suffuses evolution, until our homo sapiens came along.

Albrecht also sees this proposal as a recovery of indigenous, perennial wisdom, and an animate way to inform and foster a “terranascian,” Earth creator mindfulness to replace the dominant “terraphthora,” Earth destroyer peril. In regard, he replaces the Anthropocene or Technocene moniker for a “Symbiocene” era of human beingness in harmony with local bioregions and a Gaian viability. While Australian concerns are leading edge in the “Great South Land,” he worries over the northern conflicts between an apocalyptic Armageddon and new green movements struggling across America and Europe. We add a notice that a solution could reached by identifying and putting into practice a universal, independent complementary Ubuntu, Taomics, bigender guidance.

“Sumbiocracy” I define as a form of cooperative rule, determined by the type and totality of mutually beneficial or benign relationships, in a given sociobiological system. Sumbiocracy is a form of government where humans govern for all the reciprocal relationships of the Earth at all scales, from local to global. Organic form (all biodiversity including humans) and organic processes (symbiotically connected ecosystems and Earth systems) are primary in this new form of government. (106)

The neologism “ghedeist” was thus created by me to account for a secular positive feeling for the unity of life, and the intuition, now backed up by science, that all things are interconnected by the sharing of a life force. My definition of the “ghedeist” is the awareness of the spirit or force that holds things together, a secular feeling of interconnectedness in life between the self and other beings (human and nonhuman) and their gathering together to live within shared Earth places and spaces including our own bodies. It is a feeling of intense affinity and sense of empathy for other beings that all share a joint life. (151)

Allen, T. P. H., et al. Supply-Side Sustainability. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Ecologists propose a human commerce that is sensitive to environmental principles as the way to achieve a sustainable world. This can be enhanced by a “self-reflective science” that does not try to manage or control, as modernity would, but allows for a postmodern, self-organizing dynamics. In their “flux-oriented view,” natural selection is an external, evaluative complement to internal, generative thermodynamic forces. Altogether they can describe an oriented evolutionary emergence.

Anderson, Chris. Free. New York: Hyperion, 2009. In a work we have been waiting for, the editor of Wired magazine augurs a megatrend from a centuries old monetary cost for goods and services to a 21st century economy based on giving them away, which then creates all sorts of other business activities and prosperities. Among many cases are free websites, university educations, airline tickets, that serve to generate substantive flows around them. Along with a world cleansed of viral guns and weapons, here is a vital liberation from addictive obsession with money as an end all, now in epochal crash mode.

Apostolopoulos, Yorghos, et al. Complex Systems and Population Health. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. The editors are Texas A&M University, University of North Carolina and University of Houston public health scholars. This is the first volume to integrate complexity theory, methods and models and show its benefits to the now pan-important field of local, area-wide, national and planetary well-being and survival.

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