Usually at year’s end, we’re supposed to look back at events just passed — and forward, in prediction mode, to the year to come. But just look around you! This moment is so extraordinary that it has hardly registered. People in thousands of communities across the United States and elsewhere are living in public, experimenting with direct democracy, calling things by their true names, and obliging the media and politicians to do the same.
Thus, a deeper kind of poverty becomes revealed. Those unwilling to share with others in times of need display a spiritual poverty that overvalues material possessions while conveniently undervaluing the sufferings of those less fortunate.
Despite four decades of detailed warnings, industrial civilization has failed to turn aside from self-destructive policies of exponential growth and dependence on nonrenewable resources. At this point, stark limits of time and resources as well as a failure of political will make attempts to prevent the fall of industrial society an exercise in futility. Individuals, small groups, and communities can still prepare for the approaching crises by mastering low-tech survival skills now to lay foundations for a sustainable society in the future.
The unstated premise of our society is that all of us are born at some level on a socio-economic ladder. Our prime directive is that we must dedicate a substantial part of our waking hours and efforts to climb to higher and higher steps on that ladder. At any step on the ladder we can look down to the comparatively diminished lives we had on the lower steps. And at the very top we–or our descendants–will have attained that perfect Nirvana, the frictionless existence that comes in tandem with virtually limitless wealth.
A new film explores how globalization has resulted in crises of the economy, the environment and the human spirit — and points the way to a new path.
In the deepest sense Navigating The Coming Chaos is a handbook for midwifing the birth that is struggling to be embodied through the great death that is erupting, and like any authentic handbook of sacred midwifery, it is at once stringently unsentimental in its facing of the gritty and grueling process of birth, and loving and joyful in its depiction of what could be possible.
Foreword By Andrew Harvey, author of The Hope: A Guide To Sacred