In the Soup

Can we grow our wings in time?

by Ron Williams

The way author David Korten sees it, the human species will soon be in the organic soup. And time is running out for us to grow our wings.

In Korten’s new book, The Great Turning (Berrett-Koehler/Kumarian Press, $27.95), evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris tells the story of the extraordinary yet commonplace metamorphosis of the monarch caterpillar to the monarch butterfly, offering it as a powerful metaphor for what the human species now faces.

“The caterpillar is a voracious consumer that devotes its life to gorging itself on nature’s bounty. When it has had its fill, it fastens itself to a convenient twig and encloses itself in a chrysalis. Once snug inside, it undergoes a crisis as the structures of its cellular tissue begin to dissolve into an organic soup.

“Yet, guided by some deep inner wisdom, a number of organizer cells begin to rush around gathering other cells to form imaginal buds, multicellular structures that give form to the organs of a new creature. Correctly perceiving a threat to the old order, but misdiagnosing the source, the caterpillar’s immune system attributes the threat to the imaginal buds and attacks them as alien intruders.

“The imaginal buds prevail by linking up with one another in a co-operative effort that brings forth a new being of great beauty, wondrous possibilities, and little identifiable resemblance to its progenitor. In its rebirth, the monarch butterfly lives lightly on the Earth, serves the regeneration of life as a pollinator, and migrates thousands of miles to experience life’s possibilities in ways the earthbound caterpillar could not imagine.”

In his ambitious and intricately interwoven call to action, Korten mixes up a potent blend of ecological, economic, social, and cultural analysis. The title comes from eco-philosopher Joanna Macy’s statement that has reverberated across the planet: “Future generations, if there is a livable world for them, will look back at the epochal transition we are making to a life-sustaining society. And they may well call this the time of the Great Turning.” Or, warns Korten, if we don’t make good choices, “The Great Unraveling.”

Korten, who is hardly alone in this regard, believes the human species will soon face a perfect economic and environmental storm that will change every aspect of modern life.

He maintains that peak oil, together with global warming and the coming collapse of the U.S. dollar, will converge in such a way as to call the question on social and economic organization as we know it.

In Turning, he contrasts what he calls Empire (the hierarchical ordering of human relationships based on the principle of domination) and Earth Community (the egalitarian democratic ordering of relationships based on the principle of partnership). Based on Riane Eisler’s seminal work, he describes 5,000 years of conflict between the two. While the dominator models have ruled for most of that time in various incarnations from feudal lords to nation states to corporations, he suggests that people and the planet have reached their limit of exploitation.

Newtonian physics, argues Korten, was based on the premise that only the material is real. Quantum physics suggests that the material is an illusion and only relationships are real. The new biology teaches us that, by the very nature of how life manages energy, life can only exist in co-operative community. And psychologists tell us that healthy, caring relationships are the key to achieving a mature human consciousness. His conclusion? A sustainable future must be self-organizing, local, and built on relationships.

He sees a move from global back to local and from suburban sprawl to compact communities with local supply chains that are substantially self-reliant for food and energy. He challenges us to turn away from the domination of each other and the natural world and welcome a new era in which security and prosperity come through community, not through money and military force.

Eckhart Tolle has said that, “At the present time, the dysfunction of the old consciousness and the arising of the new are both accelerating. Paradoxically, things are getting worse and better at the same time, although the worse is more apparent because it makes so much ‘noise.’”

“It seems a hopelessly ambitious agenda,” admits Korten. “ Yet the key to success is elegantly simple: free ourselves from Empire’s cultural trance by changing the stories by which we define our possibilities and responsibilities.”

David Korten speaks on Sept. 22, 7 pm, at the Canadian Memorial Centre for Peace.