The Great Disruption is Here

In what could be a landmark description of what is happening, Thomas Friedman wrote a fascinating column on March 7th in which he speculates on the question:

What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

While this is certainly not a new theme, to see it so well expressed in a national newspaper op-ed represents a major step forward in our culture's attitude about the current situation in our society. It may be a key part of a growing rallying cry around the need for dramatic social change. He goes on to quote a number of experts, including Paul Gilding, an Australian environmental business expert, who coined a term for this period as “The Great Disruption.”

Thomas Friedman finishes by saying that both he and Paul Gilding are somewhat optimistic about our future given the changes that are starting to happen. As Gilding says, “When we look back, 2008 will be a momentous year in human history.” I'll add that in terms of a great transformation starting in 2008, let's not forget the single biggest transformative event of all that year, the November elections.

An Insightful Bush Quote

In his nationally televised speech this week, President Bush actually said something very insightful.

"In the life of all free nations, there come moments that decide the direction of a country and reveal the character of its people. We are now at such a moment."

I couldn't agree more. However, I suspect that he an I interpret this in different ways. We are now in a period where we have to make a fundamental choice about our future direction. Do we want to continue with the policies of attempting to establish military domination over the world? Or do we want to change to a policy of investing considerable effort into building a peaceful, cooperative world community? Depending on which road we decide to take, our future will be very different. This fundamental choice will reveal much about our character as a people. I only wish the politicians, news organizations, and religious leaders would talk more about it.

One of my favorite groups that are talking about it are the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and their promotion of a Global Marshal Plan. The other group is based around the Great Turning initiatives of David Korten and Joanna Macy. More on these later.

The Great Turning Conference

I just returned from a wonderful three day “leadership conference” about “Navigating the Great Turning” in Columbus Ohio (http://www.greatturninggathering.org/ ). The conference featured David Korten, author of The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, and David Cobb, the 2004 presidential candidate of the Green Party of the United States.

Many of the themes in the conference were based on Korten’s book The Great Turning, which made a big impression on my when I read it several months ago (for more information see http://thegreatturning.net/ ). In the book, Korten promotes the theme that the paradigm of Empire, which has dominated much of the world’s stage for 5,000+ years is no longer sustainable (if it ever was) and is collapsing. With some effort, it is being replaced by a paradigm of increased partnership relations in what Kortin refers to as the Earth Community. However, it is also possible that the collapsing Empire could be replaced by an increasingly brutal fight for dominance over other groups and access to the remaining resources. It was the goal of the conference to promote the vision of Earth Community partnerships as the alternative to the vision of Empire, and to help give people the tools and encouragement to work towards this more optimistic partnership vision of the future.

Many of these themes are contained in my presentation linked to on the right hand column of this blog (see Sustainability or Apocalypse). This analysis of events and vision of the future resonated with me personally, and with many of the religious groups represented at the conference. I would like to note that Unitarian Universalists dominated the religious representation there, in large part because they were co-sponsors of the conference. I will post more thoughts and insights from the discussions at the conference later. In the mean time, I added a link to the “Great Turning” web site to the list of links on the right column of this blog.