David Korten — Ecological Civilization: The Vision

I have long been reading the work of David Korten and have met him and seen him speak on several occasions. David Korten is among those treasured visionaries whose wisdom and profound caring and love for life and for our Earth is so desperately needed in these dark times. May we listen. May we be inspired and act. And may we unite with the New Enlightenment that is upon us and together birth an Ecological Civilization! All that we love and cherish is at stake. — Molly

 

By David Korten

 

Ecological Civilization: The Vision

 

We humans now consume at a rate 1.7 times what Earth can sustain and the richest 8 of us own wealth equal to that of the poorest 3.7 billion. We face a choice. We can continue the Imperial Era’s drive to environmental destruction and wealth concentration. Or we can create an Ecological Civilization that secures material sufficiency and spiritual abundance for all in balance with the regenerative systems of a living Earth. Our species survival hangs in the balance. 

Our future turns on a simple, nearly forgotten, truth. We humans are living beings born of and nurtured by a living Earth. Our health and well-being depend on her health and well-being. As she cares for us, we must also care for her.

This is a foundational premise of the emerging vision of the possibilities of an Ecological Civilization grounded in a New Enlightenment understanding of the beauty, wonder, meaning, and purpose of creation.

A Vision of Human Possibility

Adjustments at the margins of the failed cultural and institutional system of the Imperial Era will not take us where we must now go. The system’s cultural beliefs and institutional structures must be retooled and its resources reallocated to realign the defining purpose of human society from making money to supporting every person in making a living.

Hope resides in humanity’s emerging vision of an Ecological Civilization grounded in our deepest human understanding of creation’s purpose, life’s organizing principles, and our human nature and possibility as discerned by the converging insights of indigenous wisdom keepers, the great spiritual teachers, and leading-edge scientists. Some call this emerging 21^st Century intellectual frame, the New or Second Enlightenment.

Naming the future, calls us to envision it. Naming it a new civilization evokes a sense of epic transformation. Identifying it as ecological evokes a New Enlightenment understanding of life as complex, intelligent, conscious, and self-organizing.

Earth Charter

The Earth Charter—the product of a broadly participatory global process begun at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit—was finalized and launched in 2000. A 2002 paper suggested the Principles of the Earth Charter, be considered principles for an Ecological Civilization.

Please go here to continue this piece and to see more of the work of David Korten: https://davidkorten.org/home/ecological-civilization/