CHAPTER 13

The Problem with Peak Everything

Until recently I believed complete collapse of the world’s industrial economy would prevent runaway greenhouse and therefore allow our species to persist for a few more generations. But in June 2012, the ocean of evidence on climate change overwhelmed me, and I no longer subscribe to the notion that habitat for humans will exist on Earth beyond the 2030s. We’ve triggered too many self-reinforcing feedback loops to prevent near-term extinction at our own hand.

—GUY MCPHERSON, EXTINCTION DIALOGS

Much of the purpose behind presenting the data about Peak Everything is to provide the context for the work of an evolutionary catalyst, most particularly one working in food localization. It’s important that we know why we’re compelled to do what we are called to do.

From a certain perspective, it appears that Peak Everything can only end badly: the sixth mass extinction of species could ultimately include our own. Guy McPherson certainly makes a compelling, if compassionate, argument for this inevitability.

When we finally face the full extent of our collective predicament, it does at first seem that all is lost—or perhaps that we’re in the fourth quarter of the game, with three minutes left, and we’re down ten points. Unless something completely unexpected and unpredictable happens, we will surely lose the game. Or so it seems.

On my recommendation, a friend recently dove into the McPherson material for the first time, and even though I had given him fair warning, he was immediately overwhelmed. After just a brief exposure, he emailed me: “Pretty sobering stuff, which, if believed, makes the food relocalization effort pointless, does it not?”

Never mind, for the moment, that he felt that he actually had a choice whether to believe McPherson or not.76 On first encounter with McPherson’s tough love, this individual was apparently ready to abandon his commitment to local food, to just give it all up as hopeless. Why?

What this reveals is that my friend’s veneer of hope and positivity was suddenly stripped away, and his underlying fear and hopelessness (previously denied, but lurking beneath the surface) were moved starkly into the foreground. This is not a pleasant experience for anyone, but it is instructive.

The problem with this reaction is that the context is incomplete, as I wrote back to my friend.

To the contrary, this makes the food-localization effort urgent and essential. What McPherson does not understand is emergence. Revolution is (can be) a manifestation of emergence. The reason McPherson can’t see any way through this evolutionary threshold (impasse, to him) is he is a scientist who cannot look beyond a certain bandwidth of physical reality, cannot comprehend that there are even larger forces at work that are being expressed through 13.7 billion years of physical evolution and are heading in a particular direction, and that humans are capable of embodying the thrust of evolution itself, even consciously. In other words, he’s looking at an artificially limited data set—yet another form of denial. His data set leads to only one conclusion: extinction; but he’s not seeing the whole picture (this is the problem with scientism). And his data set is extremely valuable to evolutionary catalysts (keeps us honest and outside the realm of ideology).

Well, this exchange perhaps demonstrates that such matters are not best discussed via email.

Part four of this book is an exploration of the broader context in which Peak Everything and the local food revolution are occurring. And here I would slightly paraphrase Gus Speth’s admonition: “Unless we comprehend the full context of our predicament, we will never do what is necessary.”

As a people, we do not know where we are or when we are.77 Thus we do not know who we are or who we are becoming or how we should proceed together on this planet. This, too, is part of our predicament, characteristic of our plight.

Nostalgic or indignant as we might be over our myths and creation stories of the past, they are simply no longer relevant. Created for earlier eras and tribal peoples, they can no longer serve us. We must let them go.

In our predicament, we can grasp that somehow we must become one people, the people of earth. Yet we have no shared origin story, no unifying myth, no single context that might make this possible.

A collective context is beginning to appear, however, which we might call the evolutionary context, based on a growing understanding of the patterns by which the universe itself has evolved. This perspective has developed only recently in human history, and it changes everything.

• We are beginning to discover that healing and regeneration are natural, inherent, evolutionary responses that are, in fact, emerging nearly everywhere in our midst on this planet, and that we evolutionary catalysts are ourselves instruments of that evolutionary force—and thereby instruments of healing and regeneration. At least we have that opportunity—and potential responsibility.

• Emergence arises out of cataclysm. This is an important realization. This evolutionary drive for healing and regeneration is the only source of hope that has any solid grounding these days. The universe, it turns out, is not only self-organizing but also self-healing.

• As Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry make undeniable in The Universe Story, the evolutionary processes that have been unfolding in the universe for the last 13.7 billion years—and for 4.5 billion years on this rarest of planets—are deeply embedded in us as humans, and they are now beginning to become conscious in us.

• It is increasingly clear that our converging global crises have one single cause—our fundamental disconnection from nature, from spirit, from the sacred. Any “solution” that does not address this disconnection will not only fail but will further exacerbate our predicament.

It’s been said that the New Cosmology is America’s spiritual gift to the human species. And in a way, it is a uniquely American gift to humanity.

There are many ways to view the evolution of the universe, of course, and nearly every day our media bring us astonishing glimpses into the ways our cosmos seems to work, often accompanied by flights of unbridled speculation. While these can provide endless fascination, they too lack an overarching context.

Our own rather revolutionary understanding of the evolution of the universe—and of the process of evolution—has come to us through a traceable thread that goes back to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit paleontologist of the mid-twentieth century, whose writings and teachings on evolution were banned from publication by the church until after he died, in 1955.78 This awakening has since been amplified by the likes of Jean Gebser, Henri-Louis Bergson, and Sri Aurobindo. In recent decades, Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme forged a seminal breakthrough in our comprehension, which has been carried forward and amplified by Mary Evelyn Tucker at Yale and Sister Miriam Therese MacGillis at Genesis Farm, and many others.

Meanwhile, there have been other voices who have shown us additional syntheses and dimensions of the evolutionary perspective, including Barbara Marx Hubbard, Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow, Ken Wilber, and Andrew Cohen (who even developed an “evolutionary spirituality”). There is something important to be learned from each of these pioneers. A good introduction to all this is a fairly recent book by Carter Phipps, Evolutionaries: Unlocking the Spiritual and Cultural Potential of Science’s Greatest Idea.79

And there are still others, people whose work is far less well known, who have given us an even deeper understanding of how the evolutionary process itself unfolds, and how we can align with it and embody it: for instance, Arthur M. Young, the inventor of the first commercially successful helicopter and the author of The Reflexive Universe: The Evolution of Consciousness; David Sibbet, Young’s American student, who has given us the whole discipline of graphic facilitation and who broke the code for practical human cocreation; and, perhaps most radically, the visionary architect Christopher Alexander, who, in recent years, has been saying such disruptive things as, “Everything we do is in the service of God” (by which he means the natural creativity in the universe).80 It is Arthur Young, David Sibbet, and Christopher Alexander, in particular, whom we draw upon heavily and whose work we will build upon in this book.

Part of the promise and the challenge of this book is to begin to understand, align with, and consciously yield to these evolutionary processes—to become conscious agents for emergence or evolutionary catalysts. This turns out to be quite different from being “change agents.”

In Blessed Unrest, Paul Hawken has spoken eloquently about the rapid emergence of awakening individuals and organizations around the planet and how together they represent the planet’s immune system finally beginning to kick in. Well, yes, there are powerful evolutionary forces at work here. We evolutionary catalysts are finding ourselves in the most extraordinary situations, and we need support. We need orientation. We need grounding. We need evolutionarily significant tools and processes, cocreators, and communities of practice. And all that just begins to point to what this book is truly about. The book itself is an emergent process, and we’re constantly learning.

The evolutionary perspective (especially as expressed in The Universe Story by Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme) is having a tremendous impact, which we’re just beginning to perceive and integrate. This appears to be but the beginning of an entirely new paradigm, one that will ultimately displace those of the past. It’s difficult to see how profound the impact of all this will be, but it’s likely to be much more far-reaching than the discovery that the world is not flat or that the world is not the center of the cosmos or that the universe is 13.7 billion years old and comprises billions of galaxies. This perspective embodies the fundamental discovery that the universe is an unfolding, self-organizing process that is alive and can find conscious expression in what humans are capable of becoming. This perspective also includes the dawning reality that this universe is likely replete with intelligent life and that we are but a young, naïve, emerging species.

And if we can but hold it, we will also begin to see that the increasingly prevalent suggestion among scientists—that this universe is part of a much more vast multiverse—is part of the same process of our reality or context being radically expanded. (At this point, we can’t even imagine what the impact of integrating this aspect of reality could be.)

We need to be quite humble about what we think we know and understand. For instance, on this beautiful island of earth, even the most aware of us are just beginning to grasp the recently discovered reality that we inhabit but one of forty billion worlds that lie within the habitable zones of hundreds of billions of stars in this Milky Way galaxy—which is but one of perhaps a trillion galaxies in the entire universe, which we are now learning could be but one of an infinite number of universes. We simply do not have the mental capacity to hold all this—yet—but there is considerable evidence, rapidly unfolding now, that this approximates reality.

It’s useful to remember that merely a hundred years ago, our best scientists believed that our own Milky Way galaxy was all there was to the entire universe. Edwin Hubble shattered that conception ninety years ago, when he was only thirty-five years old, and our view of reality has since continued to expand exponentially.

This process is likely to continue indefinitely. This may seem disorienting, but learning to shift paradigms is a skill that we need to cultivate. After all, we don’t want to get stuck in an obsolete reality. We are learning not to convert beliefs—even scientific beliefs—into certainties.

I am reminded of the admonition of the evolutionary ethicist John David Garcia: “To be certain is unethical.”81 All beliefs need to be held tentatively, as hypotheses. We have to learn to not fear abandoning them when they are superseded.

As we will see, where this evolutionary perspective will ultimately have the most impact is in a complete reconsideration of what it means to be human (individually and collectively) in this vast panorama of life, and of what our real purpose is. We are about to discover who we are. Or, perhaps, who we are becoming.

Every great culture has had, at its beginning, a creation story or creation myth. These stories have informed us about our identity and about the world we live in. But there has never been one truly universal creation story that was free of religious dogma, tradition, and beliefs. We may have been the first generation born without a creation myth; this was probably necessary, to free us to receive something entirely new.