Sublime

This calls us to undertake a transformation from a worldview of domination and exploitation to a kin-centric worldview that acknowledges our utter dependence upon the life-giving gifts of other species, before whom we can only bow in gratitude. Gratitude awakens the impulse to return the gifts, to enter the covenant of reciprocity.

For only a very tiny sliver of that time, we’ve been organized in empires, doing this large-scale fucked up shit to the Earth and to each other. The vast majority of our wisdom, of our deep ecological knowledge, our ancestral wisdom, our ways of being in the world, is to care for each other in community. I have an exceedingly high level of certaint

Meg began by acknowledging the central place of hope in our lives and culture. “The idea that history moves forward, the idea of progress, is one of the building blocks of Western civilization. Part of the bedrock we stand on. But we made it all up. We think our technology will save us, but it actually traps us. Our activism is fueled by similar no

“Our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life,”45 and sometimes the solution: we need a “Marshall Plan for the Earth.”

What lies before us is the opportunity and imperative for a thorough cultural transformation — what eco-philosopher Joanna Macy calls the Great Turning, the transition from an egocentric “Industrial Growth Society” to a soulcentric “Life-sustaining Society,” or what economist David Korten in The Great Turning calls the transition “from Empire to Ea

We need all hands on deck. While it is not in everyone’s nature to vocally decry the violation of human rights and the degradation of the planet, I believe that we are all on some level prophets, women and men, and that all prophets are reluctant prophets. At least the real ones are.

To name the world as gift is to feel one’s membership in the web of reciprocity. It makes you happy—and it makes you accountable.