My comment:
The Earth is in the grip of a breach birth and we are at the start of the death throws, which will become terrible and could end our civilization, or worse. Does Mother Nature have a right to give birth to life beyond Earth?

After the Moon landing in 1969, humanity was in a position to expand beyond Earth and build solar power stations in space to access the unlimited stellar energy of the Sun. Instead, we chose to continue drilling down into the filthy black carbon fuel reserves from dead life and have now released so much carbon into the biosphere, it has become a poison to life and is driving Earth changes, including global warming, climate change, sea level rise, fiercer storms, heavier rain, ocean acidification and changes in plant biology that are affecting the nutrition and toxic levels in food crops and koala tucker. The koala is at risk of extinction from malnutrition and starvation.

Urgent medical intervention is now required. We need to become world leaders in planet health, by using Australia’s vast resource wealth to build solar power stations in space to have the energy to mine excess carbon from the air, use it as a resource and win back a safe Earth. This will also allow automated factories to be built in space and the expansion of life beyond this planet. The birth could yet be successful. We had better start wriggling and fast.

If Mother Nature has the right to give birth to life beyond Earth, then we as the midwives have a responsibility to assist. After four decades of contractions it should now be loud and clear, that we are killing the Earth. We must allow the birth to save the Earth and from a confident survival position beyond Earth, we will be able to heal the Earth from the pain of labour gone on too long. Continued inaction may result in the death of the Earth and without a living Mother Nature, we will not survive for very long on a dead planet.

There may be many civilizations across the cosmos that have reached their birth moment, but turned back to dig down ever more deeply into the fossil fuel of dead life and found their end on a dead planet. This may be why we have scanned the stars but found no evidence of intelligent life.

Kim Peart
island Earth
kimpeart@iinet.net.au

It seems like the re-imagination has been done countless times; I still remember taking part in one such exercise – a couple of friends and I started that – way back in 1974, I think it was. Sitting in circles with a couple of friends an co-imagining the socially transformed society…

It feels somehow more mysterious this time around; as if now a much greater and deeper – maybe more trusting – letting go into the whole, whatever we re-imagine that to be, happens.

Every morning (at least up until now) in a very mysterious way consciousness re-imagines me back into this world – rarely it is non-local, but always somehow all by itself. So I come into being all by ‘itself’ really. Nothing I do about it.
And I take myself to be a whole.

Sometimes, with friends, in some kind of circle or lopsided other equal shape we are together and a whole springs into being, again all by itself… only since I recognize it and name it something on top of that comes into being, a collectif self-reflection. Amazing…

So there is nothing we can do AND, of course, practicing whatever feels beautiful, true and in tune with people I care about… in communities of practice, if you like, celebrating the “new social practices of ethical economy, open source, open governance, open money, open everything…, then help spreading the practices worth replicating…”

Self is a verb and it is happening in communities and communities of communities these days, it seems. Maybe we still will come to experience the first days of global selfing…

As Mushin, a champion of personal development and transformation recognizes that, I believe so do a growing number of people in the human potential movement who are now turning to social potential.

“[A]s long as it pays it pays to be ecologically irresponsible and exploit human and other living beings… even a large sum of people that transform personally is not going to affect a real change in our living world.”

That kind clarity is much appreciated, particularly because it is so rare even in the good-intentioned environmental circles.

“What needs to transform are communities.”

Yes, *and* if what we aim at is radical social transformation, then even the transformation of communities into Community will not be sufficient. The same way as learners in a community don’t add up to a community that learns, many wise Communities don’t add up to a wisdom society.

For that kind of social transformation nothing less will do than the re-imagining, re-inventing, regenerating all our social systems, institutions and practices.

We are talking about nothing less than a the Big Shift of civilization into the next level of possible human and community. The good news is that the Shift is on, everywhere, in all area of social life, even where it is only hardly perceptible. Rather than creating utopoas, the most (r)evolutionary task is to observe how the future is already here in the new social practices of ethical economy, open source, open governance, open money, open everything…, then help spreading the practices worth replicating…