The Great Turning, a concept developed by Joanna Macy, is a social, political, and economic transformation from Empire to Earth Community. It is an active movement to abandon a society which has a top-down command structure, a political economy that creates inequality by design, and a corporate culture that exploits people and earth resources, in favor of a society that is decentralized with local decision making, that considers all human beings of equal value, and that is dedicated to sustainable living for people and all life on planet Earth now and into the future.
I delivered a version of this essay at the 2017 Annual Gathering of the Thoreau Society.
Three Dimensions of The Great Turning
The Great Turning has the following three dimensions of activity, all of which are essential to the whole movement and which are being carried out simultaneously.
1. Reducing Harm – resisting the damage to Earth, humanity, and other life forms
For two hundred years in the United States, people have been acting for peace, justice, and preservation of our earth including all life. These activities include political and legal work, demonstrations, boycotts, and civil disobedience. There are three large themes in current mass actions to reduce harm: resistance to corporate and government power; making peace and resisting war; and reducing the speed of climate change. Here are a few specific examples of these themes:
- Lobbying or protesting against the World Trade Organization and the international trade agreements that undermine social and economic justice;
- Blowing the whistle on illegal and unethical corporate and government practices;
- Blockading commercial activities that contribute to ecological destruction;
- Setting aside natural areas free from exploitation;
- Shutting down new fossil fuel extractive activities as a step toward leaving most of the remaining fossil fuels in the ground;
- Continuing anti-war activity and peace action;
- Strengthening the United Nations, international law, and world social and humanitarian healing.
Over the history of the United States these reducing harm activities have resulted in important changes: abolishing slavery; gaining labor rights, civil rights and women’s rights for all; establishing national parks; and maintaining cleaner air and water. But progress is hampered and these activities are insufficient to create a sustainable society, because the corporate Empire always strikes back.
2. Alternative Structures – creation of political, economic, and social alternatives
Paul Hawken, in his book Blessed Unrest (2007), discusses many different initiatives by small grass-roots organizations around the world that are involved in creating alternative self-governing political and economic structures, or reducing harm, or both. He believes that a million such organizations exist with up to a hundred million people involved.
To quote Joanna Macy: “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.”i
Some of the initiatives in this dimension are:
- Conversion to renewable energy sources including local solar and wind power development;
- Cooperative living arrangements such as co-housing and eco-villages;
- Community gardens, consumer cooperatives, and community-supported agriculture;
- Worker-owned and -operated businesses, extending to business cooperatives;
- Making communities resilient to climate change;
- Creating regional economic networks.
3. Shift in Consciousness – toward Earth Community
From Joanna Macy: “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.”ii
One way to understand and become part of the shift in consciousness is through a new, also old, story called the Journey of the Universe to replace the oft-told stories of Empire. This story, the magnificent whole of which is not at present being told in the mainstream media or in our schools, results from a combination of scientific understanding developed over the last 150 years and perennial spiritual intuition. It is the greatest story that can be told, and is being told in many ways; I will try to summarize this story in my own way.
The universe started in a point of tremendous energy, from which it has been expanding for 14 billion years. Gas clouds coalesced and from the force of gravity formed stars, which convert hydrogen into helium, transmute matter into heavy elements, and release large amounts of radiative energy. Many of these stars, as they aged, used up their internal energy and exploded, scattering the heavy elements into other gas clouds. These new gas clouds coalesced and, in the case of our solar system, about 4.5 billion years ago created an ordinary star and a number of planets that possess both light and heavy elements.
One of these planets, Earth, by gravity condensed into a hot body with heavy metals in the core, a mix of materials in the mantle and crust, ocean water and an atmosphere. The heat of the Sun’s radiation and of the Earth’s interior work in various ways on the land and water to create an always shifting, dynamic environment. We now believe that life began to develop as early as
3.8 billion years ago.
Life goes beyond inanimate matter since it is self-organizing in an intentional way. There is also the amazing fact that all life on Earth is interrelated, as shown by relatively recent DNA evidence. Life has evolved into large and complex forms. We humans are related to every other species. We have come to realize that all life survives through cooperation and symbiosis. This is even true within our own bodies, which hold trillions of beneficial microbes.
We humans need to be humble, realizing that we have animal natures as well as our mental abilities. We are part of a glorious ever-changing journey through time. By the logic of the philosophical Copernican revolution, there is every reason to suppose that life is everywhere in the universe, that life belongs in this universe alongside matter and energy.
I say that this is also an old story. People told stories during the 200,000 years of modern humans before empire, and many of these stories are still told by the tribes. In these stories we humans understood that we are part of a ceaseless flux of sun, wind, water, soil, birth, growth, death, and constant renewal. The stories reveal a persistent sense of reverence for this Earth and our animal and plant brothers and sisters.
Ethics is an important part of the shift in consciousness toward Earth Community. The great spiritual teachers of history, starting from different places, all had one thing in common: they were egalitarian. These teachers lived within various empires, and acted against despotism and inequality by asserting that all persons are of equal worth and deserve to be treated with love, generosity, and compassion. No person should be considered a means to someone else’s end.
What You Can Do
I am enthusiastic about The Great Turning. It is a complete program for a much needed social revolution, turning society upside down from centralized to decentralized, from inequality to the equal worth of all, from material living to real living.
Each of us can and should develop activities within one or more of the dimensions of The Great Turning as we work toward Earth Community. Join reducing harm actions such as ending old wars and preventing new ones, stopping pipelines, and preventing passage of economic agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Become active in community organizations that are building alternative structures by developing local agriculture, supporting local independent businesses, and acting to increase the resilience of towns and cities to the effects of global climate change and unstable economic forces. Increase your own consciousness shift by welcoming immigrants, low impact living, experiencing wild areas of nature, and most of all by being mindful of how you live.
Work: A Digression
Let me ask you: would you be considered an employed person? If like me you are not now, well, so you are sitting in a chair, taking it easy, “retired”. I don’t think so.
My definition of work: anything I do to help myself, my family, my community, humanity, life in general, the Earth itself. Some work is paid, other work is not. This has nothing to do with the value of the work: raising our children is the most valuable work we do, and is not paid.
In our economy work gains pay if the product of a person’s work can be captured as a value to some other persons. This results in the strange situation that work on preparation for war or fighting a war is paid because the government has convinced taxpayers to subsidize these activities, while work on world peace, although considerably more valuable than work on war, is not paid except for the generosity of others who subsidize a few people. The benefits of peace are spread thin and in the future, so the value cannot be captured.
I see this concept of work as part of the Great Turning. We all have work to do; I envision that there will be no retirement, that all adults who are mentally able will continue to work in whatever way best suits an individual’s preferences and capabilities.
Additional Sources
Joanna Macy developed the concept and structure of The Great Turning, has written several books related to this subject, and continues teaching and advocacy within this framework. Her thinking is expressed in her personal website joannamacy.net.
The ideas of the Universe Journey were developed by Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man (1955) and Thomas Berry in The Dream of the Earth (1988). These ideas have been well popularized by Brian Swimme and others, including the one-hour film developed for public television and titled Journey of the Universe.
David Korten’s book The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community (2006) presents an “alternative history” showing that what we call civilization is 5,000 years of continuous Empire, and that before this time humanity lived in small communities over many thousands of years. I have also relied on this book and on the Yes! Magazine web site yesmagazine.org for discussions of successful worker-owned businesses and cooperatives that are examples of “local living economies.”iii
Another reference is Tikkun, a magazine founded and edited by Michael Lerner, with a complementary web site tikkun.org. I first encountered in Tikkun many of the good contemporary thinkers involved in The Great Turning.
ihttps://www.ecoliteracy.org/article/great-turning
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