Imagine walking in an aspen forest on trails trod by all manner of fellow creatures, just like you. You feel the breeze on your cheek, listen to the chirping of birds’ calls. Taking in the dank moist earth beneath you, you look up past the tree trunks to the towering canopy above you, to the wider blue beyond where lazy clouds crisscross. In this moment, as you ride the breath that breathes you, you know that you are not just a part of nature, that you are nature herself, that you just belong.
Standing on the ground, you sense the invisible threads that connect your feet to the soil, to the roots of your own family tree, to the memory of the social organization of the generations of your ancestry, standing there just like a single tree within a community of trees in the forest. How rich is your soil? Do your waters quench and nourish your roots? Does the sun illuminate your knowledge? How responsive are your schools? How healthy your organizations and institutions? How friendly are they to rearing children? What kinds of cultural norms and values are they creating for your children to grow into, to learn from? What is the messaging from the media and the political and economic world about what is socially valuable to the world? What beliefs do you have about education & learning?
Imagine being a city, a modern counterpart to the forest, with its buildings organized around walkways and parks, a livable scale from one neighborhood to the next, with shops and markets delineating social spaces like any cell cluster, defunct shopping malls now transformed into communal greenhouses, all systems designed for inclusive participation, for collaboration, for emotional connection; cities managed as living ecosystems, based on ecological agriculture and urban food cultivation, in an architecture splicing nature with a sustainable benevolent technology.
Imagine the latter not being an oxymoron.
Imagine viewing history from the lens of an emergent future, learning from debunked myths on the competitive acquisition of resources and tallying its true social cost in terms of warfare and ecological disruption; Imagine learning from the effects of resource mismanagement on human beings, the planet and all its creatures; Imagine human ingenuity tasked with inventing technological advances that leave no nefarious footprint and reinvigorates the planet.
Imagine studying the adaptive behavior of societies and cultures living harmoniously within models of social cooperation and economic sustainability. Imagine economies of scale, maintaining balance between centralization and regional development, reassigning correct value to professions that enhance the social good.
Imagine economics as a resource distribution system that factors in the cost of the depletion on our environment to create what it manufactures. Imagine research and development priorities that don’t ignore the social and environmental overshoot they create. Imagine a stock market that thrives from incentivizing economic connection, innovation, sustainability & collaboration as indicators of prosperity and global well-being.
Imagine a society designed around the well-being of its children, with family friendly workplaces such as paternal & maternal leave and job sharing practices. Imagine an educational system designed to provide the resources to keep generating children’s inherent curiosity & wonder.
Imagine a legal system that promotes social justice rather than social control, a social ethic based on the rights of nature and animal rights on par with human rights.
Imagine living in a world at peace. The mind would serve the heart; the masculine would protect the feminine & child, not occupy, as it does now, the economic center while banishing women & children to the margins of poverty; the warrior would collaborate with the healer; emotional intelligence would marry ecological literacy.
Spirit would matter. We’d be living heaven on earth, aligning with the highest energy coming from the realms of the invisible, anchoring it into the three dimensional physical form of flesh and sinew and bone. We would orchestrate our body as a living prayer, mining hardship as fuel for creativity. We’d be living in synch within ourselves, with each other, with the natural world as well as with the living memories we carry within us of long forgotten advanced civilizations.
Imagine living as a full-fledged human being…