Alternative Editorial: The Dream Of Ecocivilisation
Another day, another emotional roller coaster. As each of us tries to make each day satisfying – getting our jobs done, getting our needs met, staying in good relationship with those we love and respect – it’s hard to take on the bigger picture of the world in crisis. The mainstream news reporting hundreds of thousands of victims of war, climate, inequality, hate crimes. Those with real power proving to be so inadequate to the task of making a difference.
Minute by minute we distract ourselves – scrolling, chatting, gazing out the window – so as not to be overwhelmed by the challenges. Success means maintaining the illusion that it’s all happening somewhere else, not on our doorstep. Yet we feel its presence in our minds and bodies all the time: it destabilises, threatens us.
Some develop clear paths to human and planetary survival, but none have proof of concept – we are all in unchartered territory. All we have is our own histories of power, our stories of success and failure, in which the most vulnerable lost sight of themselves and the most privileged caused -and continue to cause - the trouble we are all in. How can we source new stories of a better future?
For those who are new to the journey of The Alternative Global, welcome: this has been our work for seven years. Directing our gaze away from the mainstream news and shining a light on the revolution that has been taking place for over thirty years since the birth of the internet. A sudden leap in connectivity between multiple points of the old system, waking people up to the causes and effects of their personal and collective circumstances.
It’s not been easy, but we know that it has released previously trapped energy, which now needs new forms of organising. Without this we cannot create any kind of sustainable value for all the forms of life on our planet. The old system does its best to contain this energy – but it’s failing in the same way that Einstein predicted. We need new thinking – and there’s plenty available.
Over the years we’ve perceived a new axis of agency taking shape in the connection between human development (I), community development (We) and planetary intelligence (World). When the work of I-We-World takes form in new initiatives and practices, transformation comes into view: we understand for the first time that how we think and act makes a concrete difference to the future.
Digital natives – RegenA – have first-hand experience of that as they navigate their lives on-line and see real-life consequences of ‘staying woke’. Never having known a world without the possibility of imminent extinction they have less expectation of the future, but make more demands on the present (ref core core, and see our blog this week).
Being born into diversity – not only cultural and economic, but innumerable forms of expression and agency - they seem more capable of holding complexity. However, they’re less aware of—or bothered with—history. We’ve yet to see whether this is a curse or a benefit.
Meantime, their need – all of our need – to ‘find the others’, to belong, is what prompted our naming of Planet A in 2022. Somewhat in response to Elon Musk’s call to move to Mars to escape the ravages of Planet Earth, somewhat in response to more than one call for a Game B, we saw the need to reclaim the ground we’re living on as one we’re capable of stewarding.
Coming back to ourselves as authentic humans in the age of the internet is also the beginning of economic and social regeneration: when you see and feel it, you are with ReGen A, living on Planet A. It’s a new story of possibility with very real coordinates in the present.
Planet A has four incubators working together, worlding the future. New containers of agency, praxis, media and democracy. They add up to evolved ways of being and becoming, which--with the enhancement offered by emerging technologies—delivers original outcomes.
But where’s all this innovation going? Where are we heading? And in the light of the ongoing division and constant hijacking of our minds and bodies, how are we going to get there?
In the launch of Spring on March 1, 2024 we started to answer these questions. We included a number of Planet A terms – cosmolocalism, 4th sector economy, soft power attractors, community agency networks – all phenomena that we have observed in our seven years of ‘system convening’. But they’re now moving into new relationships with each other, by means of a new political system that we believe we can realise in a Scottish context.
What is ecocivilisation?
We also added the term ‘ecocivilisation’ as a new imaginary, to give a name to the future unfolding. Why?
Initially it came naturally as a term that we have seen emerging from more than one source. Previous vice PM of Slovenia and European Transport Minister Violeta Bulc had previously adopted the term to contain all the properties of a socio-economic-political system emerging globally.
Violeta’s network Ecocivilisation began with appointing national stewards – all women – of what she saw as a live space: more about good energy than good organisation; better captured by conversation than by policy agendas. Violeta’s interlocutors are just as likely to be eco-spiritual – Alexander Laszlo, Pavel Luksha, Jude Currivan – as political. Her partnership with Connectathon, an annual event which offers 24 hours of ecocivilisational content from all over the world in one day, gave rise to this event last Tuesday.
Long-term friend and partner to The Alternative Global, Jeremy Lent, author of seminal books such as The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning, recently founded his Deep Transformations Network and is now writing a book titled The Ecological Civilisation. Jeremy’s in-depth description of the shifts that can begin to occur, as our understanding of humanity’s natural capacity for cooperation over competition takes form, are already recognisable through our work in the Daily Alternative.
Jeremy’s principles for transformation are:
· Holarchy
· Balance
You can sign up for a course here.
Perhaps more challenging – but also confirming in other ways – is the revelation that China has been intent on using “ecological civilisation” as expressing its socio-political vision of the future since 2018 (see here for Xi Jinping’s speech at the National Conference on Environmental Protection. While global observers will be sceptical about China’s methods of implementing their goals, visitors to the country report rapid progress along the path described. See here and here for wider commentary.
For our part, we accept that the term ecocivilisation is still pointing at possible futures rather than an already-formed, fully-fledged system. Some say the word civilisation itself is suspect as it conjures up a past, often Western-imperialist, that imagined itself civilised but was instead largely animalistic, upholding the laws of the jungle, enslaving the majority of people and trashing the environment. At the same time, a more globally pluralistic, co-created idea of civilisation should not be ruled out. See here, at the Harvest Festival inquiry [in Kaplankaya 2022] with Gabor Mate, Jamie Wheal, Wade Davis and Indra Adnan.
Until now, much of the language of ecocivilisation has been a wish-list of developments without clear roads to get there – particularly in the world outside China that has more social freedom and hence less governmental control. In fact, our governments are possibly less likely to lead us to that goal. The people themselves might choose it, as they discover how much more deeply in hock to the growth economy their politicians are.
Which is why our focus in Alternative Global is more on reimagining the politics of ecocivilisation – or more precisely, the politics that could lead us to ecocivilisation. As Rupert Read and the Climate Majority project have proved, the people are way ahead of governments (UK, US, Europe) in their unambiguous conviction that urgent action is needed. Giving up fossil fuels, excessive consumerism, flying and eating meat are understood and accepted ways of reaching carbon neutrality by 2030.
But also, people expect that any such shift should be a just transition – enacted in ways that privilege the current victims of our growth economy and put the lion’s share of responsibility on those who propelled and benefited from it.
Yet how can we enact the ‘will of the people’ when we have so little power and agency in the matter? Well, it seems that these new methods of self-organising are already appearing, slowly but surely, cosmolocally evident on Planet A. Our current political project, Spring, brings this emerging democratic architecture to the socio-political stage, like the mycelial network of a coming ecocivilisation.
For some of you reading, these concepts come across like jargon that is hard to penetrate. But we won’t apologise for our excitement that new visions and forms are appearing, and that we need new language to grapple with them. We’re committed to making sense with them; and we’ll work to enable access to anyone whose curiosity is piqued. Or who is desperate for a light in the tunnel and somewhere new to belong.
In this next stage of our development, our emphasis will be on opening spaces of all kinds for whoever is inclined to join us, to make sense of this rapidly emerging future on these positive, hopeful terms.
In Edinburgh this will take the form of arts-driven events, salons, convivial gatherings of all kinds. In them, we’ll inquire into not only the structure and the principles, but the feel, the narrative, the sounds of a possible ecocivilisation. And most importantly, how we develop our personal and collective agency to get there soonest.
And we should say: there will be no newsletter or editorial next week. We will let Easter raise up Spring in us, refreshing and revitalising us all. Have a beautiful one.