The human species faces a defining choice. We can continue on our path to self-extinction in the pursuit of money. Or we can embrace our true nature and responsibility as choice-making living beings dedicated to serving the living Earth community that birthed and nurtures us.

The world’s leading scientists tell us that the 2020s will be humanity’s last chance to save itself from a climate catastrophe. By 2030 we must have achieved a 45 percent reduction in carbon emissions. That is just one among the daunting challenges on which our species’ survival depends.

The science of the Enlightenment taught us to see living beings as machines, dismiss consciousness as an illusion, and explain evolution as an accidental outcome of mechanism and chance. This stripped life of meaning and purpose and absolved us of responsibility to and for one another and Earth.

Economists, eager to elevate their discipline to the status of a science, bought into that story, embracing money as a readily quantifiable metric, market price as an objective measure of value, and consumption as a defining human purpose. Ignoring life and the limits of a finite Earth, they assured us that sustained growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a measure of market-mediated consumption, would ultimately result in limitless and ever-increasing  prosperity for all. Enticed by the promise of an impossible world, human societies made growing GDP their defining purpose.

The result now plays out. GDP has grown dramatically. A tiny portion of our species has achieved unprecedented wealth and power. The rest experience growing desperation. And the sixth great extinction continues apace on a dying Earth as humans strip away nature’s ability to maintain the conditions of air, water, soil, and climate essential to the maintenance of complex life.

Earth now seeks to defend herself from the threat we pose. COVID-19 and extreme weather events are two of the consequences. Our survival depends on reconciling with Earth as Healers rather than Exploiters.

In Africa, the mother continent of the human species, those still connected to their roots speak of ubuntu—“I am because you are.” As leading scientists now acknowledge, life exists only in diverse communities of living organisms that self-organize to create and maintain the conditions essential to their individual and collective existence.

Yes, there is competition. Complex food chains require the sacrifice of one life to provide food for another while maintaining species balance. The resulting competition is a subtext to life’s meta-story of cooperative interdependence.

The human body, the vessel of our individual consciousness and the instrument of its agency, is a demonstration of what living beings together achieve through extraordinary feats of cooperation. Each human body is comprised of tens of trillions of constantly renewing individual cells, each engaged in continuous intelligent labor to manage flows of nutrients, water, information, and energy mediated by the body’s heart, lungs, liver, brain, and other organs. The result is a living being with a capacity for thought and action with an intelligence and conscious intention far beyond what any of the participating organisms could imagine on its own.

We have only the most rudimentary understanding of how the body’s constantly renewing cells achieve this miracle with independence  from the conscious mind. Our mind is thus freed to monitor and respond to sensory data from our eyes, ears, nose, and skin as we relate to the external world to fulfill our body’s needs for air, food, water, exercise, love, rest, and protection from enemies and the elements.

The greatest miracle of all is what Earth’s countless diverse organisms accomplish together as they bring Earth to life with surface conditions unlike those of any other planet humans have yet discovered. It is surely far more than coincidence that these are conditions essential to life and its continued evolutionary unfolding.

Enlightenment science has many accomplishments to its credit. Yet its denial of conscious intelligence has blinded humans to truths essential to the wellbeing of ourselves and Earth. In our quest to meet our current challenges, we must now turn to a defining feature of our human nature: our ability to choose.

We have ample proof of our human capacity for violence, exploitation, and destruction. We have equally impressive proof of our extraordinary capacity for creative acts of love, beauty, and caring. Advanced communications technologies now give humans the ability to think and act in common global cause to choose collectively in ways humans previously could only contemplate. It is within our means to choose our common future with conscious collective intent.

As traumatic and painful as the disruptions of COVID-19 have proved to be, they are a part of the transition to a new era.  So too is the current mass rebellion against sexism and racism. The old, including its outmoded political and economic institutions, must give way for the new to emerge.

The world that is now within our means to create together depends on a compelling vision of possibility —a vision of care for one another and Earth in ways that will achieve material sufficiency and spiritual abundance for all.

We can fulfill our emerging vision of the possible only as we let go of our obsession with money, consumer excess, and growing the wealth of the already rich. That fulfillment requires that we:

1.       Replace growing GDP with advancing the wellbeing and creative unfolding of life as our defining human goal.

2.       Shift power from profit-maximizing transnational corporations to life-serving living communities.

3.       Assure that every human child is a wanted child who receives the loving care needed to become a fully functioning human adult committed to the wellbeing of life.

Life demonstrates intelligence, intention, and ability to learn through creative trial and error. Humans, with our capacity for conscious choice linked to creative imagination, are life’s most daring experiment.

We made a tragic error in imagining and attempting to create a world that cannot be. We now face the ultimate test of our ability for rapid learning. What we have imagined, we can reimagine. Now, as we reckon with the damage we have caused, we must embrace the responsibilities that come with our distinctive abilities and move forward to  create the possible world that serves life’s continued evolutionary unfolding.

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