As soon as Covid19 touched down, I began a daily social media video conversations. Something exceptional had broken into our lives, and “We’re all in this together” became the surprising shared Mantra. Caring was in the air, stronger than the scent of fear. Sensing an opportunity for our decades-long movement towards a resilient world, I began recording conversations with my long-time sustainability elders and allies, asking what new possibilities they saw.
In the spirit of the moment, I called these the CoVida Conversations. Co-Vida. Life together.
To each friend I posed this question: What are you noticing as things come apart that we can anchor in language, ideas, policies so these can take root in the future. I quoted Milton Friedman: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
Here are 3 of the 10 interviews as a sampler:
They well represent the wisdom shared so generously by each friend. See all 10 of the CoVida Conversations from April 2020 here.
Robert Gilman
Sustainability Pioneer, Creator: Bright Future Now
context.org/bfnow
Robert Gilman and I met in 1984. We’ve worked together and in parallel and always in mutual respect ever since. I turned to him in April as the Pandemic hit to see through his eyes this major societal turning point.
Robert Gilman distinguishes between “the environment”, including climate change, and culture, the set of shared beliefs, rituals, customs, institutions, and lifestyles of a society. “There are no environmental problems there are only environmental symptoms of human problems and those human problems are rooted deeply in our culture. So my focus really has been on how do we help change the culture?”
Likewise, Coronavirus, he says, isn’t just a disease, it is a cultural intervention with three faces: Corona the Destroyer, Corona the Illuminator and Corona the Accelerator. The destroyer kills people but also disrupts patterns of culture. It is a worldwide intervention, illuminating the now inadequate project of modernity: a heavy focus on intellect, analysis, separation, description and control. In Modernity you lose context, process and creativity.
In reality, life is much more like an ecosystem in which you have all these different players interacting with each other.
The enlightenment valued progress and growth, but anything that increases year over year ends grows imperceptibly until it reaches exponential growth. The impact of industrialization was imperceptible until the last decade. Climate impacts, so far, have been too invisible for most people to care about, but the virus is teaching us what exponential growth looks like and how human choices are all that will keep us from an exponential death rate until we get an effective universal vaccine.
So really the virus is illuminating the deficiencies in our immune systems. And I don’t mean just our biological immune systems, but also our social immune systems.
Robert sees us in a transition from the age of Empire to a Planetary Civilization, and Covid in all her three faces is helping us along – however challenging it might be.
When asked if he could boil it all down to a slogan, Robert said, “Context matters.”
Sherri Mitchell
Lawyer, Indigenous rights, Educator, Author
sacredinstructions.life
Sherri Mitchell is a new friend who brings me peace and wisdom by putting the Covid pandemic in a deeper time perspective.
So often Indigenous people teach through stories. Sherri offered the one about the first illness.
There was a time when the children of the earth, the youngest species, fell out alignment with the rest of creation and lost our compassion. We lost our capacity to hear the voices of the plants and animals, the wind, waters and soil. The plants and animals joined in council and decided humans needed to feel again the consequences of their actions, and so gave us illness to teach us.
After a long time, and much suffering for humans, the plants and animals decided to bring them back into the circle to relearn the Mother tongue, the language of Mother Earth, and to offer humans their medicines.
All life is connected.
In the beginning, and at the end, of prayers, often Native Americans say, “Mitakuye Oyasin”. It means “All my relations.” It is the essential reality, what I call “a relational world”. Everything thing is in relationship with every other thing. It can’t be otherwise. Sherri told a story of the first man and woman. The man is a pool unrealized potential in all matter. The feminine spoke words into that pool and matter awoke and she spoke until all life is created. Once the seed of all life is awakened, she sings and life burst forth into the whole universe.
We are all connected to the web of life. From the virus’s point of view, all humanity is one. Physics talks about quantum entanglement – the same essential truth. It tells us is that any matter that was once connected physically cannot be separated energetically.
Through Sherri and these generous teaching stories I am aware that humans can return to what the Lakota taught me to call the Original Instructions, the silent and generous elder brothers and sisters, the trees and plants and water and air. Healing will not come through lurching forward and inventing once again out of our immature human consciousness, but through leaning back into the community of life that will welcome us back without question.
David Korten
Author, Speaker, Engaged Citizen
davidkorten.org
David Korten has been one of my favorite visionaries and guiding light for over 30 years, so I turned to him. His wisdom is so needed now, as you will see.
Over the course of 30+ years, David Korten has crystallized the key code for changing civilizational tracks, for the pattern that must emerge if complex human societies will persist: a shift from returns to money and towards returns to life.
Our civilization is designed around money making money. If a thing has no value in the marketplace, it has no value. Everything is transactional. Every transaction has a dollar sign attached to it. We are drawing down the wealth of the living earth, and feeding it into the furnace of a financial bottom line. What comes after this insanity must, through every exchange, increase the ability of life to flourish. What must grow is well-being for all life, not financial wealth for capitalists. We must go from an economy of things to living economies and living communities.
How? David says we learn from how nature self-organizes, the smallest microbes up to the largest organisms. No domination, only cooperation. No humans on the top of the heap, humans caring for creation as our dearest selves. Which makes community organizing a key foundation – bottom up.
But really how? How to translate the dead, destructive but oh so distracting economies we have to living economies? He gives us a hint: Re-purposing what we have. It’s sort of reduce reuse recycle at a civilizational scale. How do we repurpose existing infrastructure, institutions, patterns? Don’t kill them, but give them a different job to do based on what the virus is teaching us about what doesn’t work. Take education, as that is David’s prime example. Why have two homes for students – their parents’ and their dorm. How could education be better suited to our times? Can we re-purpose war – teams taking on impossible problems that must be won? Airports. Cities. Theaters. Parks. On and on, we can look around at the world as it is and ask how will Life use this in a living economy? For sure, nature will repurpose everything if/ when humans vacate – or are decimated in – every corner of the earth. We won’t create a new civilization out of sequins and gauze. We will repurpose what we have – give it a new job.
Then in May, 2020, I approached the Post Carbon Institute, where I serve as a member of the Board, about continuing such conversations under their umbrella, including a wider range of voices. The question changed; we asked each guest, What could possibly go right? (– even with all that seems to be going wrong). By the time we started, the Pandemic had moved into our lives, like pushy relatives. And the murder of George Floyd suddenly ignited a racial justice uprising with an intensity and engagement not seen in recent years.
The world is still full of possibilities. Breakdowns beget breakthroughs, but it’s clear these won’t come without struggle, grit and endurance. There will be setbacks and strife, especially with the polarization in the US and elsewhere and the heavy breathing of autocrats. The multiplying effects of human impact on the earth systems mean that we don’t even know what fires, floods, droughts this decade will bring.