Seeds for the Future II

1. Facing the Music: the Accelerating Global Crisis

• Donella Meadows et al, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (Chelsea Green 2004). A systems overview of trends that spell the collapse of a growth-based economy.
• The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Launched by the UN in 2001 and engaging scientists of 95 nations for the past 5 years, this unprecedented research program describes biosphere changes over past decades, and projects them into the future. See wikipedia for summary of key issues.
• Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth (book and/or film, 2005). A sobering, graphically documented introduction to global climate change.
• Richard Heinberg, Powerdown and The Oil Depletion Protocol (New Society Publishers 2004, 2006). A straightforward look at the end of cheap oil and what it portends.
• David Korten, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community (Berrett-Koehler, 2006). How the convergence of three crises--climate change, end of oil, and U.S. dollar meltdown--lead to socio-economic breakdown and spell the end to five millennia of empire.
• Jerry Mander and Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples' Resistance to Globalization. (Sierra Club Books, 2006) A guide to what corporate free trade is doing to native cultures around the world, as well as inspiring examples of refusal at the grassroots.

2. Growing Alternatives: Aspects of the Great Turning

• The Earth Charter. Declaration of fundamental principles for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society. See www.earthcharter.org for the inspiring, consensus-created text, and for examples of local initiatives around the world.
• Thomas Berry, Evening Thoughts (Sierra Club Books, 2006) With exquisite depth and brevity, this pioneer of the new cosmology reflects on the steps we can take now to birth an enduring Earth community.
• Starhawk, Earth Path (Harpers San Francisco, 2005). A manual for body and mind, community and land, grounded in permaculture and pagan traditions.
• Edgar Morin, Homeland Earth (Hampton Press, 1999) Eloquent, evocative French systems-thinker Morin calls us to reclaim our birthright in a transformed relationship to Earth and time.
• Dolores LaChappelle, Sacred Land, Sacred Sex, Rapture of the Deep (Finn Hill Arts, Silverton, CO, 1988). This deep ecology classic is good medicine for body-minds weakened from long exposure to high-tech industrial society.
• Lester Brown, Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble (W.W.Norton, 2006). The clear-eyed founder of WorldWatch Institute offers well-researched proposals for a sustainable economy.
• Elisabet Sahtouris, EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution (iUniversity Press, 2000). Familiarity with our evolutionary journey, which is presented here in terms of living, self-organizing systems, helps us "act our age" with courage for the long haul.
• Leonardo Boff, Ecology and Liberation (Orbis Books, 1996). Boff, the Brazilian prophet, sets a vibrant eco-centrism, or deep ecology, at the very heart of liberation theology.

3. Exercizing our Imagination: Novels of Possible Futures

• Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia (Bantam, 1975) The enduring classic about the Pacific Northwest states that seceded from the USA to evolve a sustainable society.
• George Orwell, 1984 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1949) A grim look at a techno-repressive society that seems all too real.
• Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing (Bantam, 1996) Set in mid-21st century California, this marvelous novel shows how the power of earth-based nonviolence challenges corporate control of water and bio-technology.
• Jean Hegland, Into the Forest (Bantam, 1996) When there's no more electricity from the grid, two teenage sisters survive by returning to indigenous ways.
• Ursula K. LeGuin, Always Coming Home (Bantam, 1985) A richly imagined portrayal of a culture of the far future, when--accept for the poisons left behind--industrial society is lost from memory.
• Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed (Orin Millennium, 1974) In this favorite novel of Joanna's, a scientist from an anarchist culture, who has conceived a theory of simultaneous time, travels to a society which is a logical extension of our own linear notions of time, efficiency and ownership

4. Expanding our Experience of Time

• Jeremy Rifkin, Time Wars: The Primary Conflict in Human History (Henry Holt, 1986). Rifkin's overview of the ways humans through history have experienced and measured time helps us see how peculiar is our current, short-term relation to time, and how urgent it is to reshape the political spectrum according to our capacity to take future generations into account.
• Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (Picador, 1987). Chatwin's journey through the Australian Outback and exposure to aboriginal culture prompts inspired reflections on the nature of the Dreamtime--and especially on how profoundly ownership and cultivation of land changed our felt relation to time.
• Thomas H. Eriksen, The Tyranny of the Moment (Pluto Press, 2001). Norwegian sociologist Eriksen gives us a swift, riveting study of the acceleration of time we're all experiencing: what's causing it and what it's doing to our minds and lives.
• Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (Basic Boks, 1999). Correcting for the pitfalls of short-term thinking and the long-term fragility of electronic technology, Brand describes the clock his team designed for 10,000 years--and how it invites us to relate to time.