Here are excepts of two articles that show that this is happening, and what the implications might be:
Red Herrings and HopeThe question for me has become, "How do we ensure that the seeds are in place for a value set that will survive through and bloom after the bottleneck, a value set that will ensure that the next cycle of civilization has a chance at sustainability even in such a badly damaged, resource-poor world?" How will we ensure that our descendants will eventually inherit a sustainable world, even though our current situation is not sustainable by any stretch of the imagination?
I've become convinced over the last couple of months that the seeds for such a transformation have already been planted. They are even resilient enough to make it through the bottleneck, and they carry the correct values for the rebirth I suggest.
American activist Paul Hawken has just written a tremendously important book called "Blessed Unrest" in which he describes a set of one to two million local, independent, citizen-run environmental and social justice groups. These groups exist world-wide, and each is acting on local problems of its own choosing. There is no overarching ideology beyond "making the world a better place", there is no unifying organization, no white male vertebrate leader setting the agenda. As a result the movement is extremely resilient - no government action anywhere can shut it down, even though individual groups may be suppressed. These groups make up the largest (though unrecognized) social movement the world has ever seen. For a glimpse of some of these organizations, take a look at the web site WiserEarth.org.
Hawken sees this movement as part of humanity's immune system. While I like the metaphor and think it is exactly correct, I believe the importance of these groups is much greater than just their efforts to mitigate an unavoidable collapse. These groups have been called into existence by the world's dis-ease, and do two things: they work to fix local problems now (which will mitigate some local effects of the collapse), but more importantly they act as carriers for the values of cooperation, consensus, nurturing, recognition of interdependence, acceptance of limits, universal justice and the respect for other life. Those are precisely the values that a civilization will need to achieve stability and sustainability. To top it all off, many of these groups are led by women or espouse specifically matriarchal values, one attribute I see as essential for any sustainable civilization.
At the risk of sounding sentimental, I call these groups the antibodies in Gaia's bloodstream.
I am convinced we will not save this civilization, and will lose a large fraction of humanity in the process. But I'm equally convinced that thanks to the seeds that have already been planted in these groups we have a shot at a much better one in a couple of hundred years. The crucial change in perspective required to see the hope in this is to stop looking from here forward into the decline, and instead look backward from a position out two hundred years and imagine what it will take to rebuild a truly sustainable civilization from the ashes of this one. The values required are already embodied in a resilient organization, enough of whose elements will survive to transmit a sustainable value set into the ecologically damaged, resource-depleted world we will bequeath to the future.
Changing the DreamI'm now convinced that the only route that will salvage the human potential is transformation. I'm not talking about "transforming our economic system" or "achieving sustainability" here. I'm talking about a full-blown step-off-the-edge plunge into an unknown and unknowable future. I'm talking about caterpillar-to-butterfly stuff.
What takes this hope out of the realm of new-age woo-woo for me is the existence of the social movement that Paul Hawken has described in "Blessed Unrest". Hawken has characterized these eco-spiritual-social justice groups as "Gaia's antibodies", a description that I have promoted for a while now. However, after what I saw in the "Awakening the Dreamer" symposium, I think they are in fact much more than that. I think a more appropriate metaphor is that these groups are our imaginal disks -- those groups of new cells that appear spontaneously and rather mysteriously in a caterpillar's body to catalyze its metamorphosis into a butterfly.
Their value in terms of the direct effects of their work (their "antibody" function) is vastly outweighed by their value as carriers of the new paradigm, catalysts of the new thought patterns and focal points that work to spread these philosophical changes into their communities -- their "imaginal" function. "Awakening the Dreamer" is one group that fully comprehends this aspect of the unfolding changes. The reason they include the spiritual dimension in their mission statement is the same reason that many of us have started seeing the shift in spiritual terms. The change that's coming is so profound that the only way to understand and communicate it is with spiritual language.
Here's why I think this perspective is realistic, and not just another pipe dream of a transhuman singularity. The symposium screened two pieces of video by Paul Hawken. One was from 2005 or so, in which he was introducing the movement to an American audience. In that presentation he said there were about 250,000 of these groups world-wide. In an interview taped earlier this year he said there were now between one and two million of them. This means that a massive amount of value-forming is happening beyond the reach of our culture's guardian institutions. The growth rate is explosive, and given that these groups are nurturing the new world-view, that means the penetration of the transformative value system is reaching a level where it is actually permeating our culture.
Of course this will not prevent the shit from hitting the fan during the coming decades as our ecology unravels, the energy situation becomes more and more parlous, and the economy of growth self-destructs under its own weight. At this point nothing can prevent that. What this new perspective gives us is a realistic hope of humanity coming out the other side with a new culture that actually works, and a powerful reason to keep going in the face of mounting chaos.