August/September 2008
We're All in This Together
Tom Atlee
Bridging the Green Divide
Interview with Van Jones by David Kupfer
A Generational Challenge to Repower America
Al Gore
The Golden Voice of the Southwest
Amy Goodman interviews Utah Phillips
The Traveling Peacemaker
Interview with Mashall Rosenverg
Ronna Kabatznic and Margaret Cullen
Non Violent Communication Basics
Gary Baran
Table for Six Billion
Interview with Judy Wicks
David Kupfer
Seasonal Detoxification for Year Round Health
Bonnie Nedrow, ND and Rod Newton, DC
Top-Down or Upside-Down
Peter Moore
Living Deeply: The Art and Science of Transformation in Everyday Life
Book Review by Alan Sasha Lithman
Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain
We Are All In This Together
Evolving into a Bigger Us with Nature
By Tom Atlee
One of the main trends in evolution is towards more inclusive whole systems—the evolution of entities which “include and transcend” more primary entities. One popular map of this hierarchy of inclusion goes as follows:
• Atoms include, and are “more than,” subatomic particles.
• Molecules include, and are “more than,” atoms.
• Cells include, and are “more than,” molecules.
• Complex animals and plants include, and are “more than,” cells.
• Societies include, and are “more than,” we individuals who make them up.
In the last several hundred years, human societies and systems have developed and spread to global proportions. As we have collectively reached and encountered the limits of Earth and the demands of relationship in order to function, it is becoming increasingly obvious that there is no “Other” and no “Away.” We are all interdependent kin, alive together here in this one planetary home.
We Are All. In This. Together.
Martin Luther King, Jr., declared forty years ago: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
Evolutionary pressure is building to include more varieties of people, species, and living systems within our definition of “us.”
I recently ran across two very intriguing news items. First, Ecuador’s Constitutional Assembly is proposing that natural communities and ecosystems have rights, thus initiating the first national legal system to include rights for both human and natural communities. Second, the Spanish Parliament voted last June to grant limited legal rights to our closest biological relatives, the great apes—chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans, thus becoming the first nation to give legal rights to other species. Both of these pioneering initiatives go beyond laws governing animal abuse and species extinction, two earlier steps on the path.
We also find new sciences like permaculture and biomimicry embodying an emerging respect for and partnership with the wisdom of nature. This process of envisioning an increasingly inclusive and functional “us” is and will be slow for society overall. While as individuals we can realize the one-ness of all creation in an instant of insight, a society has to incorporate such a realization into the fabric and logic of its functioning as a complex system. That takes some reflection, creativity, trial and error, even conflict.
It is not an easy task. We’ve seen it with the anti-slavery, civil rights, and human rights movements even within our own species. But it is becoming increasingly obvious that rejecting our kinship with other organisms and natural systems is killing us. So our relationship with nature is now a matter of grave and growing concern.
I find it useful to view this building up of such pressure in, around, and among us as a natural evolutionary pro-cess, a marker of impending transformation, part of a story that has been going on for 13.7 billion years—a story, significantly, that we are very much active players in. Evolution wasn’t something that happened way back when, that has nothing to do with us. Evolutionary Trans-formations R Us.
Similarly, I find it instructive to contemplate how human culture emerged into self-consciousness out of embeddedness in nature. Early human cultures honored and ritualized the human relationship, not so much with nature as an abstraction, but with the living beings, organisms, and systems of their local place and experience—and they had (and have) a very inclusive sense of what is “alive.” As human society grew more complex, breaking into interwoven functional roles and expanding into ever-complexifying civilization, our experience of nature has become more distant, abstract, materialistic, utilitarian, and our honoring of the source of Life has shifted into mystical, theistic, or Western scientific modes of engagement—with all the resulting blessings and disasters we now see all around us. Evolution has thus brought us, step by step, face to face with the challenge of weaving vital human-nature connections newly for our more complex societies. We are about to become a new form of life. Together. Do it or die.
Millions of efforts by Life to create more inclusive living systems don’t work out, and go extinct. The one we’re involved in demands—and has available to it—a much broader palette of individual and collective human consciousness than Life has ever had before—different varieties and levels of individual and collective awareness, intelligence, wisdom, compassion, choice, etc. That’s the Big Picture of the work so many of us are involved in.
The impulse for inclusion is blowing in the wind. What we do with it will make all the difference in the world. Especially for the human species.
And time is of the essence.
Tom Atlee is author of The Tao of Democracywww.(taoofdemocracy.com) and founder of the The Co-Intelligence Institute which works to further the understanding and development of co-intelligence in the realms of politics, governance and conscious evolution of ourselves and our social systems via research, networking, advocating, and helping to organize leading-edge exper-iments and conversations in order to weave what is possible into new, wiser forms of civilization (www.co-intelligence.org, PO Box 493, Eugene, OR 97440). Read Tom’s blog at www.evolvingcollectiveintelligence.org.
