But we need to get in to this deeper level, we need a transformation. Now this would be equivalent to the creation of a new religion earlier. We can't do that anymore. But this, I call it metareligion. We need something now that will be the horizon under which all human affairs take place. And by which they are the context in which they come to meaning. Now, so we have this reinvent the human at the species level because we have to go to the spontaneities that already exist within the human, wherever a person is, although the cultures differentiate. With critical reflection we can't do this any longer simply spontaneously. In prior ages there was, I would think, a certain spontaneity that we no longer have. We have to think more like with some of our adaptation to the natural world, we have to do it more analytically as far as I can tell. Now, but we know the keystone element of the seven phrases. The fourth one is within the community of life systems. That's the key, we must become members of the planet Earth. We must become functioning members of a life community. So that's the most basic thing we need to do is to get of our exploitive attitude into a participatory attitude. And then the next is in the time developmental context, we live in a historical period of transition. The largest context is the context that Brian Swim gave us this morning, that we have now become a planetary force. And we must assume the responsibilities that go with that. And then by means of story and shared dream experience, our sense of the universe we live in now is given to us by story. And that I think Brian Swim and I have been the first people to write the universe story out of contemporary scientific data. Other scientists have written essays about the universe. Carl Sagan did some wonderful things in his book Cosmos. But he was writing largely about how we know the story of the universe more than the story of the universe. Somebody came from England to visit me a couple of years ago and was a bit upset by the way we had written it in the sense that we didn't put in equations and all that. And they said, don't you think it's a little arrogant to write a book like that, no quotations, no footnotes, no equations, no quotations and all that? Well I said don't take it so serious, it's just a story. >> [LAUGH] >> You know, take it or leave it. But they wrote the other thing, and I says, Homer didn't put any footnotes in either. [LAUGH] >> [APPLAUSE] >> And that account, it's a very,very important thought because it's the epic of our times. Every age produces, I think, some epic expression of itself. Homer with the Iliad and Odyssey give expression to the ideals of an historical period. You have with Virgil, who wrote The Aeneid, he wrote that to interpret the Augustan empire, which was Rome at the height of its achievement. It needed an interpretation and so Virgil wrote the Aeneid. And these are stories, his story of Rome, his interpretation of Rome. Now, The City of God of Saint Augustine is the Medieval, is the epic that founded the Medieval period. Rome was burned in the year 410. The accusation was made, the Empire had become Christian by that time. The accusation was made that the Christians had taken away the worship of the gods. The gods were angry, and therefore, had given Rome over to destruction. Somebody had to answer that. Augustine spent 12 years writing The City of God, which he told the story of the whole human community. And then he told the story of the historical tension between the city of good and the city of evil or the creative city and the destructive elements of the human. And he projected on into the future, and that book together with the ritual books of Christianity and the Bible created the middle ages you might say. Together with the book of Boethius, which was a neoplatonic spiritual teaching. So the gospels, the ritual books used for ceremonies, the City of God of St Augustine, and the Dionysius with the gated spirituality, they provided the guidance for the great work. That was the story of in the middle age you get Dante, who did fantastic thing. I think Dante was probably the most learned person ever in western civilization because he wrote this poem he put everybody in. Real people, a whole look over the course of the human. And he put it in a hundred Cantos, a large poem, put it into the Inferno, Purgatory, or Paradiso. But in it he worked in the whole human story such as it was known in his time. But in our times we need a unifying story. The story creates a community. Community creates a story but the story in a sense creates the community. Is the story of America that creates America and the story that drives this country is the story of a people. I don't know if we have a single, truly outstanding story, but the story is there and we tell it in different ways. But now we need the planet story because the have the knowledge now. We've done the geographical, the inquiry into the geological structures of the planet, we've done the inquiries into the universe. How the planet Earth came into being, how the solar system, and Brian just has this brilliant way of presenting this sequence of things that develop. Well, I don't think of the, this regard to the story I don't think that part of the book that we wrote will be improved for a very long time. He has such lyric powers of expression, and such depth of comprehensive scientific knowledge. But I'm quite sure that that is not going to be substantially proved. The human story, think the early phases will be changed somewhat, is being changed. But certain sections of that and the way it's written, fits into these general ideals all of the same, so that we have now the epic of the universe. Including the epic of birth, the epic of life and the human epic, in a way which was never possible before. Now, this is the, what you might call the perspective in which we function. What as regards to future, we need the dream, the dream drives the action, the dream guides and drives the action. We have to dream the ecozoic era, that's why It's so important, we can only overcome a distorted dream by a more valid dream. We cannot reason ourselves our way out of this type of a distorted vision that has grouped our society. But as it reaches impasse after impasse, and we're in that situation now, impasse after impasse, then we're going to reach a governmentally and economically and health-wise and all that because it is not integral, not an integral context. We need the dream, and the dream has to be guided by the phrase that I mentioned. A period when humans would be pleasant to the planet in a mutually enhancing way. Now it's most encouraging to feel that this is in process. This is in process. This is not something that we have to invent any longer. It really began in, it can be dated from 1962 when Rachel Carson wrote her book, Silence Brain. Ever since then when she identified the devastation of this miracle chemical DDT. We have known that the planet and the life systems were endangered on a census scale. And beginning there, a whole series of things have taken place. In 1972, ten years later, the first time the nations of the world gather together to discuss the relationship of humans with the planet. And that took place in Stockholm in 72, presided over by Rene Dubos and so forth. And it didn't accomplish a great deal, but 90% of the nations there went back and set up the first environmental protection agencies. Now that same year of 72, a very important book came out, called Limits to Growth. Growth is a magic word, development. But and limits are not considered but that book was just denounced as they silenced Brian Wilson announced, and things genuinely in this area are constantly being denounced, but things began and developed. Since then, we have nature writers, people that give us that feel for the natural, people like Barry Lopez, but most of all in this century, I think Lowan Eisley, E-I-S-L-E-Y, he is I think the most competent and it was written most profoundly of appreciation of the natural world within this functional relationship with a human. And there's a long list, but in every profession in architecture, Richard Register. Was done so much in rethinking how to design human habitation, how to redesign these existing cities. He's on the west coast. He's just finished the third of three big international conferences, one in this country, one in Asia One in Africa. The one in Africa just concluded. The procedures were just published. But people from the villages, all over the world, just, I don't know. There were several hundred people there from villages, presenting the sustainable communities. As they were experiencing, this was people from these areas, contributing how to establish sustainable, where you have your food, where you have your water, where you have your clothes, where you have the basic human needs taken care of in a functional contact. So then there are people like Vandana Shiva from India, who does such remarkable work in critiquing some of the distorted agriculture that has entered in the human process. And that makes a person, or I call it the person who reflects on the fact in this country our scientific agriculture's the worst agriculture ever invented by humans. It ruins the soil, its consequences are awful. Its nourishing qualities are not integral. The whole process is ruinous to the land. And then the new green revolution that was put out several years ago, around 10 or 15 or maybe 20 by now, but it was supposed to answer the problems of the food supply of the world, because we could produce so much, but the cost was terrific. You couldn't do small scale things, you had to do big scale. You had to have a lot of water for irrigation, you had to have endless fertilizer and all that, you disrupted societies. And then we lost the varieties of our grains. We have lost our seed varieties on which our food depends. We've lost about half of the genetic basis of our food supply, because of our scientific agriculture as we see it. So we have these people though, people like Vandana Shiva. We have the critique now. We have the education. Tufts University has formed an association of university presidents throughout the world, over 200 of them, to pledge their universities to an integral Earth literacy to be required of all their students. So I could go through all the different areas and identify for you the people like Kirschenmann, Fred Kirschenmann who has this farm in North Dakota who has introduced large-scale organic agriculture. And is organizing the reordering of agriculture in the upper Midwest. First I go through the agriculture, architecture, education, David Orr with Earth Literacy, as the basic context for college university education, so forth. So what I would leave you with is a feeling that there's a great work to be done. It's in process. We have finally the grasp on what happened that brought about our situation. We have the enthusiasm that is awakening throughout the world, not just throughout this country, but throughout the world. This type of understanding is being developed. And when I said that this is the issue, that this is in a sense the comprehensive issue, and that we need to get on, particularly for the younger people, they need a challenge. Younger people need something that makes life difficult but that gives them purpose. The purpose, young people can do anything, endure anything, survive anything. Well, purpose, sit before a television and they don't like that any more than anybody else likes it. But there isn't sometimes anything else to do and they need these things. So what I leave you with then is a sense that there is an issue. We know how it happened, we know what to do about it, and let's get on with our collective dream. So long. >> [APPLAUSE] >> We have time for one or two questions, but not until you get your heads closer to the Earth. Everybody stand and face that door. Put your hands where your hips meet your legs. No, not up, here. Let your chest go towards those doors, drop down and just shake, shake all of those molecules out. Okay, any questions for Thomas now that your heads are closer to the Earth? >> [LAUGH] >> It's all right if you don't. We'll have at least one more. Yes, young lady back there, your name? Good and loud. >> Okay, my name is Courtney Delard, I'm from the [INAUDIBLE] department at UMC. So what I'm interested in is that it seems that while you've been speaking in very spiritual terms here today, have cited examples of individuals and enclaves which have worked to put your ideas into practice. Do you feel that you can use that same kind of spiritual approach in approaching a wider general public? Can we talk about spirituality realizing that [INAUDIBLE] watching television, [INAUDIBLE] do you think they'll understand in our era of sound bites and jaded philosophies [INAUDIBLE] sensitive [INAUDIBLE]? >> I believe she wants to know if you can speak in such spiritual terms to people today whose philosophies are more jaded and are used to understanding things in sound bites, is that right? >> Yeah, I mean, I like the principles, very much, and they speak to me. >> Yeah. >> But would the average person who is processing, who is not as interested in the subject, do you feel that we can use spiritual language? My thoughts are coming out of some of the new sentiments in the environmental where we really cannot talk about current values as much as, for instance, the economic value of long term tourism use of national parks. Things like that, that conversation is replacing the sense of spirituality in nature. That, that's a better sell and that's the issue. >> Well, the spirituality can be communicated. >> Yes, it's going to be communicated [INAUDIBLE] as it stands today. >> Well I think, myself, it is being communicated. In fact, the whole ecology movement has, as far as I can tell, a pervasive religious, spiritual tone. The subject itself is of that nature, and it lacks that type of piety sometimes that people associate with spirituality. But when it comes to basic insight into what I call the numinous dimension, which is the sacred dimension of the universe, of an immense reverence, and it is available. The world of the sacred is available for everybody. And most people, even people that a person has to challenge or be at odds with, people in corporations, it is a challenge. And much of it has become very harsh, because this is such a harsh issue of people that have staked their money and their lives into cutting down trees, into devastating like in this state. The hog farmers who have done such damage feel insulted, but the ecology people say, don't poison the rivers. But the legislature just barely gets enough nerve to insist that industrial hog farms come under the proper zoning that they should. And that they not ruin the natural water systems that are in the area. But the industrial people, the large corporations, what do they do? They buy up space in the newspapers and they put in the advertising. They get the writing. They get the legislature to be sensitive. They say, we make jobs. If you restrict us, then the economy will suffer. And they put up all these dire consequences if you try to have them behave half decently. Now, this issue is of that nature. But in some sense, I would say it's almost an excitement that almost makes you feel like taking out your extra nerve with fighting with people. It's hard not to develop a kind of a bitterness and not to develop the antagonism, but to stay with patient, educational, challenging, but strong processes. And critical and not let people get away with ruining the property that belongs to all of us. Now, one of the ways in which we are all victimized is by the fact that advertising is tax exempt, advertising expense of business. We support that. There's no reason why businesses, they're advertising, and it's through their advertising that they pay the salaries of the big sports people. They pay for a lot of things with our money, and the media. They control the media. They can buy up the media and advertise themselves endlessly at our expense because the advertising is tax exempt, and the government. What a person has to understand, and here's where it really is. I'm glad you brought this up. >> [LAUGH] >> And I'm sure the kind of person, well I'm sure there is a thing. But one of the things [LAUGH] that I suggest people read, there are two books particularly right now. One is When Corporations Rule the World, by David Korten, K-O-R-T-E-N, When Corporations Rule the World. And the other Is The Transformation of American Law, by Morton Horowitz, H-O-R-O-W-I-T-Z. He is the chair of history of law at Harvard. And his first volume was published by Harvard, the next one by Oxford University Press. But in that study, I just regret that I didn't do more in the study of law because what we're up against is largely the terrible, terrible limitations and distortions of our jurisprudence now, because of this. Now, he shows there in his first volume, Transformation of American Law, how the legal profession, the judiciary bonded with the entrepreneurial commercial concerns at the very beginning of this country. The Transformation of American Law is from common law of the colonial period which is derived from England. But immediately in the 19th century, and that was just after the Constitution came into power, the whole structure of this country moved toward the commercial industrial enterprise. And government ever since then has been supporting. Now, the second volume of that is particularly good. If you read the first and the last chapters of the first volume, you may get the basic idea. But it's the corporation. We don't live in nations any longer. We live in a world of corporations, and corporations no longer have any allegiance to any country. And no country can set limits of what they do. They're not under control of any other human concern. On the other hand, the corporations, they own the world now after the gap traders, after the World Trade Organization comes in, the corporations own the planet. They own the land. They own the legislatures. The legal profession is almost totally dedicated to support of the corporations. You see these big corporations now have hundreds and hundreds of lawyers, a single legal corporation supporting the commercial enterprise projects and the different things. >> Thomas? >> It makes a person. >> [LAUGH] >> Another sentence. >> You're going to have to hire a lawyer and sue me, I have to let these people have ten minutes, okay? [LAUGH] >> Good. >> Ten minutes, come back at 3, one minute to 3, thank you. >> [APPLAUSE]
