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COMING BACK TO LIFE: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World

CHAPTER 1 TO CHOOSE LIFE

I call heaven and earth to record this day to your account, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that  both you and your seed shall live.                                                                                             –Deut. 30.19

We live in an extraordinary moment on Earth.  We possess more technical prowess and knowledge than our ancestors could have dreamt of.  Our telescopes let us see through time to the beginnings of the universe our microscopes pry open the codes at the core of organic life our satellites reveal global weather patterns and hidden behaviors of remote nations.  Who, even a century ago, could have imagined such abundance of information and power?At the same time we witness destruction of life in dimensions that confronted no previous generation in recorded history.  Certainly our ancestors knew wars, plagues, and famine entire civilizations, such as Phoenicia and Imperial Rome, foundered when they cut down their trees for warships and turned their lands to desert.  But today it is not just a forest here and some farmlands and fisheries there today entire species are dying – and whole cultures, and ecosystems on a global scale, even to the oxygen-producing plankton of our seas.Scientists may try to tell us what is at stake when we burn rainforests and fossil fuels, dump toxic wastes in air, soil, sea, and use chemicals that devour our planet's protective ozone shield.   But their warnings are hard to heed.  For ours is an Industrial Growth Society. [1]   Its economy depends on ever-increasing consumption of resources.  To maintain its engines of progress, Earth is both supply-house and sewer.  The planet's body is not only dug up and turned into goods to sell, it is also a "sink" for the poisonous byproducts of our industries. [2]    If we sense that the tempo is accelerating, we are right – for the logic of the Industrial Growth Society is exponential, demanding not only "growth," but rising rates of growth.  Like Alice on the chessboard of the mad queen, we must run ever faster to stay in the same place.  What is in store for our children's children?  What will be left for those who come after?  Too busy running to think about that, we try to close our minds to nightmare scenarios of want and wars in a wasted, contaminated world.We've come so far.  We have survived so many trials and evolved through so many adventures in our planetary journey, and there is so much promise still to unfold – yet we can lose it all.  As the intricate web of living systems unravels, we can bring it all down with us.  Jahweh's words through Moses now bear a literal truth: "I have set before you life and death, therefore choose life."

The Choice for a Sustainable World
We can choose life.  Dire predictions notwithstanding, we can still act to ensure a livable world.  It is crucial that we know this: we can meet our needs without destroying our life support system.  We have the technical knowledge and the means of communication to do that.  We have the savvy and the resources to grow sufficient food, ensure clean air and water, and generate the energy we require through solar power, wind, biomass.  If we have the will, we have the means to control human population, to dismantle weapons and deflect wars, and give everyone a voice in democratic self-governance. [3]  To choose life means to build a life-sustaining society.  "A sustainable society is one that satisfies its needs without jeopardizing the prospects of future generations," according to Lester Brown of Worldwatch Institute.  In contrast to the Industrial Growth Society, a Life Sustaining Society operates within the "carrying capacity" of its life-support system, regional and planetary, both in the resources it consumes and the wastes it produces.  To choose life in this planet time is a mighty adventure.  As people in all countries and walks of life are discovering, this adventure elicits more courage and enlivening solidarity than any military campaign.  From high school students restoring streams for salmon spawning, to inner city neighbors creating community gardens on vacant lots, from forest activists sitting in trees to delay logging until environmental impact studies are done, to windmill engineers bringing their technology to energy-hungry regions - countless groups are organizing, learning, taking action.This multifaceted human activity on behalf of life may not make today's headlines or newscasts, but to our progeny it will matter more than anything else we do.  For, if there is to be a livable world for those who come after us, it will be because we have managed to make the transition from the Industrial Growth Society to a Life Sustaining Society.  When people of the future look back at this historical moment, they will see, perhaps more clearly than we can now, how revolutionary it is.  They may well call it the time of the Great Turning.They will see it as epochal.  While the agricultural revolution took centuries, and the industrial revolution took generations, this ecological revolution has to happen within a matter of a few years.  It also has to be more comprehensive – involving not only the political economy, but the habits and values that foster it.
[1] We are indebted to Norwegian ecophilosopher Sigmund Kwaloy for his formulation of this term.
[2] Just as a continually growing cancer eventually destroys its life support systems by destroying its host, a continuously expanding global economy is slowly destroying its host- the Earth's ecosystem."  Lester Brown, State of the World, 1998.
[3] World Game Institute, 1997:  As of 1997, $19 billion was spent worldwide on weapons every week.  United Nations Human Development Report, 1997: $80 million would grant access to clean water, social services, and basic education for the world's poor for ten years this equals financial assets of the world's seven richest men.