We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Soul Power

from Resurgence website.
We live in an extraordinary age – an age of both mortal danger and unprecedented opportunity, if only we can understand what’s happening and why. Our capacity for destruction, both military and environmental, is vastly greater today than it was half a century ago, and will be greater still tomorrow.
It seems as if this mortal danger is forcing us to take a great leap in our evolution that we might never have made, were we not driven to it by the crises facing us. This leap consists of an expansion of human consciousness; a shift from seeing ourselves as the dominant species on this planet with a right to exploit its resources for our own needs, to seeing ourselves as utterly dependent for our survival on an extraordinary living web of planetary life. This great web of life, formed over countless millions of years, will not survive unless we respect the interdependence of its living systems.