Future generations.
  if there is a livable world for them,
will look back at the epochal transition
  we are making to a life sustaining society.
    And they may well call this
      the time of the Great Turning.


The Three Dimensions of the Great Turning
by Joanna Macy


1) Actions to slow the damage to Earth and its being

Perhaps the most visible dimension of the Great Turning, these activities include all the political, legislative, and legal work required to reduce the destruction, as well as direct actions--blockades, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of refusal. A few examples:

    - Documenting and the ecological and health effects of the Industrial Growth Society;

    - Lobbying or protesting against the World Trade Organization and the international trade agreements that endanger ecosystems and undermine social and economic justice;

    - Blowing the whistle on illegal and unethical corporate practices;

    - Blockading and conducting vigils at places of ecological destruction, such as old-growth forests under threat of clear-cutting or at nuclear dumping grounds.

    - Work of this kind buys time. It saves some lives, and some ecosystems, species, and cultures, as well as some of the gene pool, for the sustainable society to come. But it is insufficient to bring that society about.


2) Analysis of structural causes and the creation of structural alternatives

The second dimension of the Great Turning is equally crucial. To free ourselves and our planet from the damage being inflicted by the Industrial Growth Society, we must understand its dynamics. What are the tacit agreements that create obscene wealth for a few, while progressively impoverishing the rest of humanity? What interlocking causes indenture us to an insatiable economy that uses our Earth as supply house and sewer? It is not a pretty picture, and it takes courage and confidence in our own common sense to look at it with realism; but we are demystifying the workings of the global economy. When we see how this system operates, we are less tempted to demonize the politicians and corporate CEOs who are in bondage to it. And for all the apparent might of the Industrial Growth Society, we can also see its fragility--how dependent it is on our obedience, and how doomed it is to devour itself.

In addition to learning how the present system works, we are also creating structural alternatives. In countless localities, like green shoots pushing up through the rubble, new social and economic arrangements are sprouting. Not waiting for our national or state politicos to catch up with us, we are banding together, taking action in our own communities. Flowing from our creativity and collaboration on behalf of life, these actions may look marginal, but they hold the seeds for the future.

Some of the initiatives in this dimension:

    - Teach-ins and study groups on the Industrial Growth Society;

    - Strategies and programs for nonviolent, citizen-based defense;

    - Reduction of reliance on fossil and nuclear fuels and conversion to renewable energy sources;

    - Collaborative living arrangements such as co-housing and eco-villages;

    - Community gardens, consumer cooperatives, community-supported agriculture, watershed restoration, local currencies...


3) Shift in Consciousness

These structural alternatives cannot take root and survive without deeply ingrained values to sustain them. They must mirror what we want and how we relate to Earth and each other. They require, in other words, a profound shift in our perception of reality--and that shift is happening now, both as cognitive revolution and spiritual awakening.

The insights and experiences that enable us to make this shift are accelerating, and they take many forms. They arise as grief for our world, giving the lie to old paradigm notions of rugged individualism, the essential separateness of the self. They arise as glad response to breakthroughs in scientific thought, as reductionism and materialism give way to evidence of a living universe. And they arise in the resurgence of wisdom traditions, reminding us again that our world is a sacred whole, worthy of adoration and service.

The many forms and ingredients of this dimension include:

    - general living systems theory;

    - deep ecology and the deep, long-range ecology movement;

    - Creation Spirituality and Liberation Theology;

    - Engaged Buddhism and similar currents in other traditions;

    - the resurgence of shamanic traditions;

    - ecofeminism;

    - ecopsychology;

    - the simple living movement.

The realizations we make in the third dimension of the Great Turning save us from succumbing to either panic or paralysis. They help us resist the temptation to stick our heads in the sand, or to turn on each other, for scapegoats on whom to vent our fear and rage.


Excerpts from the book "Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age"

  The references to pain and despair are one basis of the book; that since we are exposed to messages about lethal threats to our ecosystems and selves, yet as individuals we can do little about them, some parts of our population carry a profound and gnawing despair. Various coping mechanisms and counter-reactions are portrayed, most of them counter-productive and draining. This passage occurs after that, in an awakening stage.

Through our pain in the world we can open to power, and this power is not just our own, it belongs to others as well. It relates to the very evolution of our species. It is a part of a general awakening or shift toward a new level of social conciousness.

I call this movement a "holonic shift," because it can be understood in terms of our nature as "holons." Open systems are holons. That term, coined by Aurthur Koestler, means that which is both a whole, containing subsystems, and at the same time part of a larger system. For us those larger systems include our famalies, our communities, our society and our planet itself. Like cells in a larger body we participate in them and co-create them....
 
  When a system evolves to great complexity, it needs self-reflexivity in order to survive - that is, it needs the capacity to make conscious choices out of all the information it processes. So far, it appears to have arisen only in the brains of higher mammals..... But now our interactions - the ways we impinge on each other through our economic and political and military developments - are becoming so complex and interdependent that thay, too, require a built-in, self-monitoring capacity. If we are not to commit suicide as a species, a real measure of self-reflexivity must arise on the next systemic - or holonic - level. Our present modes of social decision making - even such fine inventions such as the ballot box - are too crude, too slow, and too fallible for the alert and responsible self-governance we need if we are going to survive.

  Now that next level of self-reflexivity seems, astonishingly enough, to be starting to contellate....

  We can also see that our planetary crises are impelling us toward this holonic shift. In that sense, the Bomb(/Global Warming/Population/Toxics Accumulation) itself is a gift to us. Confronting us with our own mortality as a species, it shows us the suicidal tendency inherant in our conception of ourselves as seperate and competitive beings, and goads us to wake up to our interexistance. Given the fargility and limited resources of our planet....we have to begin to think together in an integrated, synergistic fashion, rather than in (just) the old fragmented and competitive ways - and we are beginning to do that. Once we tune into our interconnectedness, responsibility towards self and other become indistinguishable...
  Where then, does despair fit in? And why is our pain for the world so important? Because these responses manifest our interconnectedness. Our feelings of social and planetary distress serve as a doorway to systemic social consciousness. To use another metaphor, they are like a "shadow limb." Just as an amputee continues to feel itches and twinges in the severed limb. so do we feel pain in those extensions of ourselves - our larger body - of which we have yet to become fully conscious. These sensation do not belong to our past, like the severed limb leg or amputee, but to our future.

  Within the context of that larger body - or living web - our own individual efforts can seem paltry. They are hard to measure as significant. Yet, because of the systemic, interactive nature of the web, each act reverberates in that web in ways we cannot possibly see. And each can be essential to the survival of that web....
  Through the systemic currents of knowing that interweave our world, each of us can be the catalyst, or "tipping point" by which new forms of behavior can spread.... For some of us it can be study and conversation, for others theater or public office, for others yet, civil disobedience and imprisonment. But the diversities of our gifts interweave richly when we recognize the larger web within which we act. We begin in this web, and, at the same time, journey towards it. We are making it conscious.