From The Collected Letters of Emily Dickinson

In the last few chapters, I've spoken a lot about how the deprivation of Spirit has had a devastating impact on the quality of our lives. I believe that this suffering will ultimately open many of the most skeptical people to spiritual concerns. However, Spirit Matters in an even more urgent way: the upsurge of Spirit is the only plausible way to stop the ecological destruction of our planet. Even people who have no interest in a communal solution to the distortions in our lives will have to face up to this ecological reality. Unless we transform our relationship with nature, we will destroy the preconditions for human life on this planet.

Denial can only go so far.

For all my daily meditation and spiritual centering, there are times when I watch television, particularly the local evening news, and I want to scream: "When will all this craziness stop?"

o The weather reports are increasingly filled with floods, droughts, and other environmental devastations. Or they depict extremes of hot and cold spells. The television newscaster typically makes some comment to the effect of "imagine that" or "wow, isn't that interesting" (or sad, or depressing, or upsetting to see so much pain), and then moves on to the next item, never stopping to talk about global warming and its tremendous impact on our lives, unless there is an equally powerful statement by some pro-corporate scientist who is willing to make a statement about how the concern about climactic changes is misguided and unproved, and probably just the work of people with some irrational fear of "progress".

o Occasionally, you'll get a report on how there has been an increase in cancer or heart disease in a given area, but rarely is there any discussion of which corporate policies have generated which environmental diseases. Groups that make these links are rarely reported. I know of one group that regularly leafleted hospitals with a message about the link between cancer and environmental pollution generated by neighboring corporate polluters. The corporate polluters responded by issuing a statement calling this activity "insensitive" and "playing politics with the sentiments of families of the sick"-as thought the problem was not the industrial polluters but the people who were calling attention to them.

o We hear reports of famine, but never about their connection to the policies that misdirect food supplies, or to global warming. The "human interest" story of suffering, illness, and injury is rarely accompanied by the ecological story of inexorable environmental degradation.

I know that television stations are owned by large corporations and funded by corporate advertising, so they are not going to link the problems we face in daily life to a global economy run by these same corporations. Without an awareness of these causal links between environmental and economic arrangements, how easy it becomes to fall back into pathogenic beliefs about the impossibility of changing anything!

The Destruction of Our Environment

Do you have ecology fatigue? You may have read the catalogue of environmental destruction dozens of times. If you fell all too familiar with it, you may just want to skip this section, but please read the analysis in the following sections. If you want greater detail than I provide here, I urge you to read Thom Hartmann's The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, Josh Karliner's The Corporate Planet, and Edward Goldsmith's The Way: An Ecological Worldview. Follow the unfolding story in TIKKUN magazine and in State of the World (the annual publication of the Worldwatch Institute), which offers an annual update on the state of the environment. The facts listed below could easily change in the next few years, but the framework of the situation won't change: for every specific reform environmentalists have tried to get through Congress (whether controlled by Democrats or Republicans), a greater number of previously unattended-to problems emerge. The environmentalists run from one area to another, and the public, feeling both powerless to change the basic structure and overwhelmed by all the technical details, loses interest, which gives the reformers even less of a base from which to press for future Band-Aids on the problem.

The basic environmental picture is this: the growth of the human population and the blind human faith in science and technology to provide solutions to our problems and make unlimited "progress" possible have together led to the degradation of the Earth's environment and severe problems that all the world's people face together.

o As Lester R. Brown and Christopher Flavin put it in State of the World, 1999, "Stratospheric ozone depletion and greenhouse warming have begun altering natural ecosystems in the past two decades, doing particular damage to coral reefs and suspected damage to species ranging from frogs to trees." (p.7)

o The same gasses that destroy the ozone layer also contribute dramatically to global warming. A United Nations- appointed group of more than twenty-five hundred of the world's leading climate scientists concluded in 1995 that without a substantial reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of oil, coal, and wood, global warming is almost a certainty. The result will be more frequent and more powerful storms, melting of the polar ice caps, a rise of sea levels, and an increase in the prevalence of floods and drought (Reported by Karliner, ibid.). Human health will be compromised by the spread of disease-bearing insects and pests in response to rising temperatures. Millions of people worldwide will die, and millions of others will become environmental refugees.

o As The Ecologist magazines "Declaration on Climate Change" (Vol. 29, No.2, March/April 1999) points out, the effects of climate change are already present. We face a real possibility of "releasing billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere, as rising temperatures trigger a huge die-back of trees, causing billions of acres of South American rainforests to turn into desert before 2050," we then will face "a situation of catastrophic, runaway climatic destabilization."

o Governmental responses have been thoroughly inadequate The Kyoto agreements on climate agreed to a cut of just 5.2 per cent of greenhouse emissions to be achieved between 2008 and 2012, far below the 60 percent reduction below the 1990 levels that the UN's Panel on Climate Change said was necessary.

Worldwatch also draws attention to:

o Fresh water shortages. World water use has tripled since the middle of the twentieth century, and the result is a decline in water tables on every continent. Meanwhile, oceans are increasingly polluted and fish populations are threatened.
o Depletion of forests to supply wood and paper for the industrialized nations. Forests are also destroyed to provide new lands for livestock grazing and intensive crop production.

o Loss of rain forests. In The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, Thom Hartmann points to a State of the World 1996 report that estimates the loss of thirty-eight million acres of rain forests, enough to wipe out the entire worlds rain forest during our children's lifetime. And that's of the destruction happens at the current rate. But the rate has been increasing.

o Depletion of the world's fish supplies and the possibility that tens of millions of people who depend on fish for income or food will face economic devastation and possible starvation.

o Destruction of plant and animal life. We are facing the greatest decline in plant and animal life in 65 million years. As John Tuxill reports in the 1999 Worldwatch issue of State of the World, according to a 1997 global analysis of more than two hundred and forty thousand plant species, one of every eight plants is potentially at risk of extinction. This undermines a great source of future medicine.

o Effect on human life. As in so many of the environmental emergencies, the problems fall disproportionately on those who are least able to protect themselves. As Tuxill reports, "For the one quarter of humanity which live at or near subsistence levels, plant diversity offer more than just food security and health care-it also provides a roof over their heads, cooks their food, provides eating utensils, and on average meets about 90 percent of their material needs. (The Worldwatch Institute, 1999)

o Environmental degradation. Advances in technology accelerate the rate of environmental degradation. New extractive technologies allow us to take more basic materials from the earth. Advances in transportation and energy allow us to bring a wider range of these materials to market. Governments provide an infrastructure for the sale of these goods, as in the case of the highway systems constructed for automobiles.

The Role of Corporations

We don't all have equal power to shape the environment around us. There are forty thousand transnational corporations, which are the center of our world economy. As Joshua Karliner points out in The Corporate Planet, "These corporations and their 250,000 foreign affiliates account for most of the world's industrial capacity, technological knowledge and international financial transactions. They mine, refine, and distribute most of the world's oil, coal, gas, hydroelectric and nuclear power plants. They extract most of the world's minerals from the ground. They manufacture and sell most of the world's automobiles, airplanes, communications satellites, computers, home electronics, chemicals, medicine and biotechnology products. They harvest much of the world's wood and make most of its paper. They grow many of the world's agricultural crops, while processing and distributing most of its food." (p.5).

And power is concentrated at the top, both within these corporations (most of the people who work for them can rarely shape their policies) and among them. (The top three hundred firms account for 25 percent of the world's productive assets.)
Corporations and their global power are at the heart of many of the ecological problems we face in the world today. With the collapse of the Communist bloc (which, in its way, was every bit as environmentally irresponsible as anything happening in the capitalist world), corporations have gained increasing power to shape the policies of countries around the world. Even in the democracies of the advanced industrial societies, corporations are increasingly able to dominate governments in a variety of ways:
· They can usually ensure that anticorporate candidates are described by corporate-dominated media in ways that make them look irresponsible and irrational, thus making them unlikely to be elected.

· Corporations can throw their huge financial resources behind candidates who support the corporate agenda; and most important, they can let legislators know that any state or country perceived to be unfriendly will see business interests move their investment dollars elsewhere, causing loss of jobs and actual suffering to the people whose interests the legislator is supposed to serve, thus creating a reason for many otherwise ethical legislators to subordinate ecological concerns to the corporate agenda. Choosing to avoid immediate economic pain for their constituents (as well as the possible loss of their own jobs in the legislature), many well-intentioned legislators conclude that it would be irrational and self-destructive to follow policies that antagonize corporate power.

· The Global Climate Coalition, a coalition of fifty U.S. trade associations and private oil, gas, coal, automobile, and chemical companies has put millions of dollars into its campaign to persuade the public and governments that global warming is not a real threat (The Ecologist, vol. 29, no.2). Corporations and pro-corporate conservative organizations have established policy institutes to make their stances against environmental protection look as though they come from objective and credible observers. They represent environmentalists as "an interest group" filled with people pursuing "personal agendas" or simply hysterical, overzealous, well-intentioned fools.

· The Heritage Foundation, one of the largest and most influential conservative think tanks in the United States, published a report on the Kyoto Agreements entitled: "The Road to Kyoto: How the Global Climate Treaty Fosters Economic Impoverishment and Endangers U.S. Security." 1

The power of these corporations to set the public agenda and to marginalize those who take this crisis seriously is immense. Newspaper columnists who warn of environmental dangers are dismissed as "shrill." Politicians realize that they must tone down any ecological criticisms in order to be deemed "realistic." Even the politicians who actually know something about these issues, even those who find them useful for mobilizing some sector of the voting public, almost always quickly shift to more "realistic" ground after being elected.

But Isn't This the Consumer's Fault?

"Corporations are just in business to make money. If consumers want a given product we produce it. So, if you want to change corporate behavior, change what consumers buy and corporations will change accordingly. The marketplace, after all, is a democratic representation of what people want to do with their money, and it's far more responsive to the wants of the population than governments have ever been." So, at least, say those who seek to blame the ecological crisis solely on the rest of us.

There are town fallacies to this reasoning:

Markets respond to whoever has the cash. But money is unequally distributed. A mere 16 percent of the world's population purchases 80 percent of the world's material. So most of the peoples of the world are left out of the vote when it's one dollar one vote. Even in democratic, industrialized societies, money is concentrated in the wealthiest 30 percent of the population. Their disposable income (over and above food and clothing and shelter) is far more than the disposable income (often none) of those in the poorest 50 percent of income earners. So the market reflects the desires of those with the most money to spend.

Choices of consumption are made with in the context of a social order whose basic framework has been disproportionately shaped by corporate power. When General Motors bought up existing rail systems in Los Angeles and dismantled them in the middle of the twentieth century, it ensured that people who wished to get to their jobs would have to buy automobiles. Gas and auto industries spent enormous amounts or money encouraging legislatures to build more superhighways rather than to provide urban reconstruction that would allow people to live closer to where they work. If the only house you can afford is very far from the only work you can get, and there is no public transportation, the choice to use a car is not a moral failing but an economic necessity. Keep this is mind even when discussing my call in chapter ten for "voluntary simplicity" - it's only possible if combined with other systemic changes.

Greed Is a Disease of Fear

Some readers may continue to object, "you try to place all the blame for environmental destruction on corporate behavior, but you fail to acknowledge that it's the greed of the consumers that is at the bottom of it all."
Well, greed is real all right. But greed is a disease of fear.
To the extent that we have come to believe we can't count on others, we tend to protect ourselves as much as possible by accumulating material goods, money, power, sexual conquests, or something tangible.
Nor is this entirely irrational.
In times of crisis, people have historically pulled together, delaying their personal gratification for the common good. To do that, people need to trust that others will do the same. But what if you live in a society in which corporations pour poisons into food, air, and water because doing so ensures a high level of profits? What if you live in a society in which most people have come to believe that everyone else is going to rip them off unless they do the ripping-off first?
In such a society, urging people to reduce their level of consumption in order to protect people in other parts of the world is whistling in the wind. People will be unwilling to make those choices if they believe they will be the only jerks who pursued a selfless agenda. That's why, even though most people agree with ecologically oriented parties like the Greens or the New Party, they don't vote for those candidates. They are convinced that every one else will vote according to selfish interests and that they'd better do that as well.
Ecological programs can never succeed unless ordinary citizens are willing to face a reduction in the level of consumption, are willing to pay higher prices for non-replaceable energy sources, and are willing to support programs for international planning on how to use the world's remaining resources.

Similarly, when asked to support programs that constrain corporate selfishness, many people are reluctant to impose on others an ethos that they don't believe they can follow in their own lives. In my view, the quality of people's lives can dramatically improve if we revamp our whole system for ecologically sustainable production and consumption. But most people mistakenly believe that to be ecological will require immense hardships, and they interpret environmentalism as a demand that they stop using their computers, stop enjoying beautiful furniture, and stop wishing for comfortable homes. Fearful that they must give up their VCRs and compact discs, their Web surfing and their networking, many sensitive people see themselves as "just as bad as the corporations," and thus feel very conflicted about constraining corporate power.

Ecologists often play into this dynamic, blaming ordinary people as the source of the problem. Instead of wagging accusatory fingers, those who wish to transform America need to preach an ethos of compassion-helping people understand that their underlying fears are rational, yet can be overcome. That, of course, is precisely what the rising spiritual energies are all about: legitimating a new way of thinking about of our own lives and about the economy.

As we become increasingly aware of the Unity of All Being, we become increasingly connected to the well-being of every human being on the planet, and less able to close our eyes when corporations dump toxic wastes in the Third World or when the environmental consequences of past injustices fall disproportionately in others. This same consciousness makes us feel personally involved and hurt when species die out, rain forests are destroyed, natural habitats are undermined, and acres of wilderness are turned into shopping malls. And as we develop our sense of awe and wonder at the universe, we become increasingly unable to view the world as anything more than a disposable "resource" to be used for human consumption and discarded. It is this sense of the miraculous and the sacred that will eventually provide the foundation for saving the planet. Spirit Matters.

Aren't Corporations Recognizing These Problems and Becoming Environmentally Conscious?

Some corporations are environmentally sensitive. Others are taking steps in this direction, if for no other reason than because they imagine that a percentage of their potential consumers will be more interested in them if they show environmental awareness. So, there are environmentally sensitive programs in many corporations. In some there are even attempts to take environmental issues into account when making fundamental investment decisions.

But it's amazing how few these are.

And the reason is simple: corporations are set up to make money, and the corporate boards will honestly explain that they have a "fiduciary responsibility" to their investors to make as much money as possible. They will tell heartrending stories of little old widows who have invested in the corporation and who would be left destitute should corporate profits go down for the sake of ecological responsibility.

The simple reality is that the bottom line for most corporations is maximizing profits, and corporate leadership that failed to do so would quickly be booted out.

So, when someone tells you there's a new spirit of corporate responsibility, ethical awareness, or ecological sensitivity, be sure to ask one question: "What is their bottom line when it comes to corporate decision making?" Similarly, when you hear that corporations are considering double or triple bottom lines that include ecological or moral considerations, ask again: "What happens when the corporation recognizes that it can make more profit in the next twenty to thirty years following Path X but that Path Y will be more environmentally sensitive or congruent with the values of love, caring, and community?"

If you ask these questions seriously, you'll find out that much of what appears to be changing in corporations has more to do with hype and marketing than it does with a fundamental change in values.

There are important exceptions to this reality. There are many corporations that do seek to be environmentally sensitive, and others that are actively engaged in selling products that might actually help offset the negative environmental degradation I've described. Those corporations deserve our support and encouragement.

The Globalization of Capital Undermines Democratic Attempts at Environmental Sanity

Government policies are heavily influenced by the inordinate influence of money in elections. Many of the most environmentally sensitive candidates know that they have little chance of raising the millions of dollars it takes to run for major office in the United States unless they can sell themselves to the moneyed interests, who, quite often, have inherited or earned their money through investment in environmentally insensitive operations. Some political donors have transcended these kinds of considerations, but many have not, so it's very difficult to raise enough money if you are a serous environmental advocate, and harder still once the corporate media decides you are a threat. No surprise, then, that it is very rare for elected officials to be environmental crusaders. Given this reality, government budgets tend to favor large corporate interests and to supply the infrastructure for an ever-expanding production of goods that are destructive to the environment.

But even the elected officials who would like to take important step to control corporate power find that the globalization of capital has dramatically reduced their ability to do so. Corporations are able to tell even powerful governments like that of the United States that they will move some or all of their production to other countries if they face serious environmental "costs," The flow of money through electronic markets make sit difficult to trace, much less control, investment decisions on the part of major capital investors, but it's safe to predict that they will invest where they believe their profits are most secure. Faced with this reality, decent people in government decide that they simply can't face the consequences of the potential economic decline that might accompany serious environmental programs. They water their programs down to make them appear more friendly to "the business community," so that they don't precipitate a "loss of confidence," which would result in corporate disinvestments.

The One Hope: The Globalization of Spirit

What I have described above is a system in which everyone acts according to the narrow criteria of self-interest within a social context that teaches us to maximize our personal power and control above all else.

But, as I've written in previous chapters, that system has one major weak link: it doesn't satisfy the fundamental human needs of many of its participants.

"Lefties" used to think that our society didn't satisfy those needs because it didn't deliver enough material goods to enough people. On a global scale this may be true, but in the United States, material well-being is distributed broadly enough that political upsurges around redistribution of wealth can be mostly contained. This was the battle of the 1930s, and the Democrats are still waging it, stuck in a time warp that will not acknowledge the realities that make New Deal visionaries and their New Left allies seem tired and outdated. Though important parts of their program still remain to be implemented, they never will be implemented until the leaders who advocate redistributive politics link that to a higher social vision.

What cannot be contained or outdated is a different kind of struggle: the struggle for a new bottom line based on love and caring, on ethical, spiritual, and ecological sensitivity. It cannot be contained because there is a universal need for this kind of society. The deprivation of meaning and Spirit causes pain that even the greatest material rewards cannot adequately offset. As I've shown in chapters two and three, spiritual deprivation permeates our daily lives and gives us a powerful motive to challenge the ethos of selfishness and materialism generated by the competitive market.

Environmental activists often propose workable alternatives to our current boundless consumption. But their strategies cannot gather the necessary support to stop the degradation of the environment. Why not?

Many an environmental activist may respond here by wondering "Why doesn't ecological survival count as equally pressing as spiritual needs? Why don't people from every class rally around a powerful ecological agenda, joining parties like the Greens or environmental movements, or at least voting for candidates who are ecological crusaders?"

Well, let's start with the fact that this is not happening.

Even if the environmental activists respond to this by saying, "It's not happening because the other side has the money, so we can't get our message out, and people would respond if only we could get through to them..." we have to follow up by asking, "Well, if that's the case, how are you going to change anything when your approach fails to generate the support it needs?"

But the environmentalists rarely try to understand why it is that their programs do not generate the support they need. The basic reason is that in our spiritually deadened society, people don't allow themselves to hope for change. And that's not too hard to understand either. Our society defines the accumulation of material goods as real. It defines the desire for love and caring as utopian. No wonder many people embrace the pathogenic belief that nothing fundamental can change, because people will always be motivated only by narrow self-interest. So how can they be expected to put aside what is taught to be our most fundamental desire, namely the accumulation of things, for the sake of the long-term well- being of people in the future?

Even many people who care about ecological degradation still end up telling themselves some variant of the following story:

· I am up against a system that seems overwhelmingly powerful.

· Most people are interested in themselves and unwilling to make sacrifices for anything larger than themselves. Even people who support social change are constantly pointing out how screwed up most people are (a pervasive, though sometimes unconscious, theme in lefty magazines like The Nation and Mother Jones). Deconstructionism (taught in many universities as the contemporary radical critique of society) has led me to conclude that there is no such thing as a shared or general ethical interest but only particular groups seeking power for themselves under the cover of flowery universalistic concepts. So, when I feel I ought to struggle for ecological sanity, I am already convinced that no one will join me. The momentary upsurges of interest in things like Earth Day only highlight how little follow-through there ever is, and how quickly people return to their narrow self-interest. If I do take risks, I'm likely to find myself isolated and vulnerable.

· The power established interests have to discredit me makes it possible that were I to get seriously involved in struggles that really challenged their power, if would be me, not them, who would end up paying a high price-a price I may have to continue bearing for much of my life.

· The kinds of changes I want to see require people to make major changes in their lifestyle and consumer choices. But most people are more interested in material well-being than anything else. They'll never put the environment above their own interests.

· Environmental degradation still hasn't reached proportions that will destroy my personal life. The environmental harm will affect people of the third World. It'll affect future generations. But it won't hurt me.

· So, I'd better control the things I actually can control, like my own personal family and community. I can do little things like buying environmentally better products and organic food, but it's better to leave the big issues to others, because I can't really handle them. After all, my own hands are clean because I recycle and buy organic.

Environmentalists with a background un the kind of elitist thinking that permeates liberal and progressive circles often find themselves frustrated by these arguments, because they can't imagine how people will ever change. Some turn toward variants of ecological theory that denounce human beings as an arrogant form of life that needs to be controlled.

The reality is that liberal and progressive thought is unable to meet the ecological challenge. The Left struggles for equality and democracy. But it has no answer to the fact that many of the most democratic and egalitarian societies the world has ever known have some of the most environmentally destructive levels of consumption. To the extent that the Left seems to be primarily concerned with the inclusion of everyone in the benefits of advanced industrial societies and makes its major focus the extension of democracy to economic decision making, the progressive forces have no theoretical foundation on which to build a critique of profligate consumption or environmental irresponsibility. Drowned in the ethos of selfishness and materialism, it is possible for people to democratically decide to consume the resources of the world in ways that might leave future generations without the environmental supports they need to survive on this planet.

The Globalization of Capital Or The Globalization of Spirit

Only an Emancipatory Spirituality can add the necessary dimension to our societal thinking by teaching us to think about the universe, the planet, and each other not as resources to be used to maximize our own advantage, but as gifts from God or Spirit, for which we have the responsibility to serve as stewards and nurturers, and to which we respond with awe and wonder. Thinking about the world as sacred makes it possible to stand up to the underlying logic of the globalization of capital, a logic the Left can't really counter, because it shares the notion that what people want is more material goods, and that the only challenge is to make sure that everyone has equal opportunity and that decisions are made democratically.

Only those grounded in a spiritual consciousness can bring a more hopeful vision. The perspective I call Emancipatory Spirituality challenges the premise that people care only about themselves and instead provides antidotes to the stultifying dominant cynicism. Spiritual communities frequently teach and model a basic truth denied by the dominant society that: people are willing to take risks and make sacrifices for causes that go beyond self-interest. As for the premise that people are never willing to sacrifice their material comforts for some higher good (like environmental sanity), spiritual communities demonstrate that many of us have spiritual needs that are at least as important to us as our material needs and that we are sometimes willing to act accordingly. Emancipatory Spirituality challenges the premise that we won't be concerned about environmental problems if they affect only strangers by fostering within us an appreciation of our common humanity, which transcends class, race, sex, and nationality. It teaches is to see the God, or Spirit, within each human being on the planet. It challenges the assumption that people are concerned only about the moment and are not fundamentally linked to the past and the future.

The new spirituality emerging today is all about overcoming our own individual ego orientation and connecting to the world in a whole different way, a way that focuses on awe, wonder, and a sense of stewardship and caring for all that is. The more it becomes widespread, the weaker the "common sense" rationale we give ourselves that "all people want is material goods" or that people are "never motivated by anything higher than narrow self-interest" will be.

The way the public debate is currently framed, environmentalists are made to look ridiculous if they call for any reduction in the level of material consumption. "You are being undemocratic. The 'people' actually want and enjoy new consumer goods. You are being elitist by trying to impose your environmental agenda on everyone else."

Daunting as it may seem, that argument can effectively be countered by speaking of a higher set of values that derive from the realm of Spirit. In our empirical work as therapists my colleagues and I have demonstrated that people have a set of spiritual needs. If environmentalists were able to frame their concerns in a language that spoke to these highest spiritual values, they could reach millions of "ordinary people" who are unmoved by the current technocratic and "rights" oriented discourse.
Unfortunately, most contemporary leaders of the environmental movement cannot make this change in focus. They either don't yet have enough familiarity with Spirit or are fearful of acknowledging that familiarity in public discourse. Reared in liberal and Left circles, they believe that Spirit should be kept out of public discourse, and they feel more comfortable citing facts that everyone will acknowledge as "scientific" and hence "objective" than appealing to values or perspectives that are "merely" subjective. But only the discourse of the Spirit can respond effectively to the world of capital:

"We human need more than just money and power; we need more than scientific innovation and technological advance. What we need is a world based on love and caring, awe, wonder, and radical amazement. You say that people only want more goods, but I know that most people want to live in a world in which our response to nature is maximize our own advantage without regard to the consequences for the future is precisely what leads to so much pain in our personal lives. We need a whole new way of thinking about ourselves, our planet, and our society-and we environmentalists are part of the growing spiritual transformation that is happening un every sphere of our society and that seeks to bring us back to as reverence and awe for the universe taught by our religious and spiritual communities. So don't tell us that most people just want more material goods, because that perception on your part is what makes most people feel discouraged about their own higher values and makes them feel isolated when, in fact, they are part of a growing new consciousness that will change every aspect of life in the period ahead."

It's only possible when environmentalists challenge the discourse of selfishness and foster a spiritual culture with a new orientation to nature that they can hope to win. As long as the argument is carried out within the framework of a materialistic orientation to the world, environmentalists will always be on the defensive and will never be able to awaken their own constituencies to the yearning for a different kind of world.

This is why, in the final analysis, Spirit is the indispensable elopement in countering the globalization of capital. The logic of capital is that people want products, and that globalization is a good way to get more material goods shared by more people. All the globalists are doing, they tell us, is finding effective ways to respond to the desires of the majority of the people. What could be more noble that to make money while fulfilling human needs? Those who wish to stand in the way of these desires are totalitarians forcing their value system down the throats of an unwilling public!

Only when environmentalists can understand the logic of spiritual needs, needs that are just as real but that do not manifest in market terms, can they effectively respond to the powerful "free trade" and "let everyone choose whatever they want" arguments of the corporate globalists. Unfortunately, most hard-nosed environmentalists do not yet understand this need for a spiritual framework. They have no idea how to foster an ethos of awe and wonder in society and no idea that this is why they will need to do in order to counter the logic of unlimited consumption accelerating with the globalization of capital. They and their friends in major progressive foundations pour millions of dollars and huge amounts of energy into approaches that can never work because they do not address the underlying structure of our environmental problem. It never occurs to them that the best strategy would be to help the growing spiritual movements understand that ecological aspects of their spirituality and help environmentalists speak to the spiritual crisis in daily life (described in chapters two and three.) It is only when our hunger for love and caring and our need to respond to the world with awe and wonder can be linked through Spirit that environmentalists will achieve the social and political power to save the planet. It's only through the fight for new definitions of productivity, efficiency, and rationality that we will develop a majority ready to put environmental consciousness above the expansion of material production.

Many environmental leaders imagine that a purely technocratic solution can be found, and that "if only" they could get the people's attention, everyone would recognize how rational their approach is. Some imagine that an environmentally sensitive president will get elected and manage to sneak some decent legislation through Congress or issue some useful regulations. When that doesn't happen, they either withdraw from politics in despair or decide that to accomplish anything they have to be "more realistic" and narrow their focus on what is achievable within the current political context. People who once were environmental visionaries transform themselves into lobbyists fighting for narrow victories that cannot possibly save the planet from ecological destruction because they've given up their dreams and despair of ever obtaining support from the majority of the people.

In the course of the next fifty years, more and more environmentalists will come to understand that Spirit Matters. They will make the spiritual transformation of our consciousness the linchpin of their strategy to save the environment. In the meantime, though I've been critical of some of their strategic choices, I do want to encourage us to show lots of support and compassion for those who have chosen to dedicate their lives to protecting our environment. Many of these people are under recognized and, like all social change activists, underpaid. They are often on the front lines of the struggle, taking personal risks, and doing so for the highest altruistic motives. They deserve our gratitude, as do all who have dedicated their lives to social transformation and healing.

And while I'm on the subject of compassion, let's acknowledge that there are millions of decent individuals involved in corporate life who would be thrilled to be part of a society that served higher goals than corporate profit. They, too, are part of the constituency that will eventually transform our society, and they need to be approached not as "the enemy but as potential allies. An environmental movement that speaks to a higher spiritual consciousness has much greater chance of teaching the people like Samuel Hughes-corporate people whose lives are in spiritual crisis but who would never link their own needs with those of environmentalists unless there were a progressive movement that could make those links. The way to do that is through the discourse of Emancipatory Spirituality.
1. Angela Antonelli, Brett P. Schaeffer, and Alex Rennett, Roe Backgrounder No. 114, The Heritage Foundation, October 6, 1997.

Countering Globalization with a New Consciousness

As spiritual consciousness becomes more prominent, it will become easier to take decisive steps to counter the destructive elements of globalization.

The collapse of societies that described themselves as Communist opened the world to what appeared to be unimpeded power of global capital. Globalization seemed almost invincible just a few short years ago. The World Trade Organization, created to facilitate this process, was ready to consider proposals that would increase the power of multinational corporations, giving them the right to sue national governments if they sought to protect their own industries or shield themselves from the onslaught of foreign capital. In the name of free trade, environmental restrictions were challenged and "the right" to sweatshop conditions was protected. Elites of wealth and power in Third World countries even insisted that they were serving the best interests of their own people by rejecting environmental or human rights restrictions. After all, they argued, if multinationals (largely based in the developed world) could be enticed to produce their goods in third world countries, without environmental regulations or a minimum wage, that would create jobs, albeit at thirty-five dollars a week.

It seemed that the multinationals had the perfect solution: they could use capital-hungry elites in Third World countries to prevent environmentalists, labor, and human rights activists from pressuring first world governments to demand minimal safeguards in the process of globalization. Since the first world governments and media were primarily responsive to the needs of their corporate funders, it would not be hard for them to shed a few crocodile tears about their desire to be environmentally sensitive and supportive of human rights and living wages, but then argue that they were caught by their equally important commitment to helping people in the Third World who would best be served by not imposing "our Western standards" (for environmental safety, labor rights, or human rights) in ways that would limit "free trade" and the befits it would bring to Third World economies.

Imagine their surprise when, in the very last year of the second millennium, tens of thousands of demonstrators showed up at the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle to burs the bubble of governmental hypocrisy and insist that globalization without ethics would no longer be acceptable.

The WTO protests brought together groups that had seldom before seen common cause. Protestors carried signs that read "Turtles and Teamsters - Together at Last." But in the coming decades, the momentary ties between labor, environmentalists, and human rights activists will probably be severely strained. These groups have been schooled in the practice of putting their own interests above the larger struggle, and that practice will almost certainly weaken the kind of alliance that the Seattle demonstrations seemed to protend.

It is possible for that alliance to form again and become a powerful factor in shaping public policy. But that possibility depends in part on the degree to which social change activists are able o articulate their goals in categories that transcend narrow or sectoral concerns and touch on the common needs of the entire society. The more these activists are in touch with a higher spiritual energy, and vision, the more they will be able to sustain the kind of political alliance that could actually win each group's goals.

Contemporary social change movements that lack a spiritual foundation have often gone through a kind of "natural history" that includes many of the following steps:

People come together around some specific grievance, then;

They begin to understand that what they really need is some deeper transformation of the world, then;

A period (a few weeks, months, or years) ensues in which people experience the incredible high on hoping for these kinds of fundamental changes, but;

As the full intensity of corporate/media/governmental power is mobilized in defense of the status quo, people begin to realize that their full vision is not going to be won very quickly, possibly not even in their lifetimes. Without the immediate possibility of achieving the full vision, people become more focused on the quality of the movement itself. Their frustration about not being able to achieve their vision makes them feel more critical of each other and they begin to focus more on the ways people around them are disappointing them and do not fully embody the goals of the movement. This then leads to;

Growing internal resentments, rivalries, displacement of anger at the larger world against movement leaders or fellow participants, and incessant bickering over tactics or theories, which in turn leads to;

A narrowing of focus away from the shared vision and toward what can be won in the short run, and a growing despair about the larger vision ever happening. This in turn is followed by:

An even deeper despair about anything changing because now the movement seems to be just another narrow interest group seeking to move for its own advantages, which finally leads to;

A deepening cynicism, depoliticization, and dissolution of the movement to the point that people feel all alone and unable to act in the world.

The only thing that could stop his process is the development of a spiritual consciousness, which would counter some of these dynamics by;

Helping people stay in touch with their transformative visions even when those visions do not seem immediately winnable;

Helping people develop a practice of compassion for others that would allow them to be less disillusioned when they found that their fellow participants in social change movements were as flawed as we all actually are;

Helping people resist the tendency to settle for the kinds of short-term payoffs that divert attention from longer term goals;

Helping people resist the tendency to restrict their political activity to goals that are practical and realistic, since what is practical and realistic in a society dominated by corporate globalization will be that which is least threatening to the powerful;

Preventing people from demeaning participants in corporate structures, or otherwise engaging in us/them dichotomizing, and instead helping social change activists see the humanity, decency, an spiritual potential even in the people on the opposite side of the table;

Providing activists with a foundational vision that would help them recognize their common goals even as parts of the movement may emphasize more narrow tasks.

Armed with a spiritual consciousness, social change activists have a much easier time acknowledging that there are good aspects of globalization that need not be resisted. As means of communication, the internet and other forms of global communication encourage the development of shared democratic and pluralistic values that have brought distance learning to people who might otherwise be isolated or confined to homes or hospital rooms. It has facilitated the development of international citizen organizations that may become the foundations for international movements toward social healing and environmental sanity. It's not necessary to deny the benefits of globalization to challenge its seamier sides, or to insist that we create social, economic, and political institutions that are more supportive of our growing sense of awe and wonder at the universe and our desire for ecological sanity, social justice, and a world based on love.

A growing spiritual awareness empowers us to fight the TINA (There Is No Alternative) ideology, powerfully articulated by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times and repeated as a mantra by Western political leaders who seek to sanctify corporate globalization with the crown of historical necessity. There is an alternative to unrestrained corporate globalization: it is the globalization of Spirit. As more people build their lives around Emancipatory Spirituality, craven bowing to corporate globalization will appear less the march of necessity and become more recognizable as a contemporary from of idolatry. It then becomes possible to ask the relevant spiritual question; how do we shape globalization in a way that maximizes ecological sustainability, enhances our global responsibility to reduce suffering and promote health and ethical well-being, increases our capacity to see our unity with all other human beings and our part in the unity of All Being, and incorporates a sense of human limitations and humility. Globalization of awe and wonder rather than globalization of our tendency to see the world as something to be used and manipulated, globalization of our sense of the sacred, globalization of our caring and our love for each other and for all life forms, globalization of compassion and generosity-this is what the globalization of Spirit has to offer in response to those who talk about the inevitability of the globalization of capital.

Once they are armed with a spiritual consciousness, social change movements will be able to sustain themselves and resist the internal tendencies toward self-destruction that have almost always undermined social change in the past. To the extent that they embody spiritual consciousness and affirm spiritual visions through some of the methods described in chapter ten, these movements will be in far less peril of self-subversion as they take on important immediate step and demands. Imagine, for a moment, a spiritually grounded social change movement that could:

· Seek new measures of the quality of life that supplement traditional Gross national Product/Gross Domestic Product systems of national accounting. The king of Bhutan has recently called for a "gross national happiness" index, (bootan.com 6/21/99). Such accounting would have to value unpaid caring work (for example, parenting or caring for the sick and elderly) and what Inge Karl, Isabelle Grunberg, and Mark Stern call "public goods" (namely the goods and services need for global human security, survival, and development-including peace, equity, financial stability, and environmental sustainability.)

· Create mechanisms of accountability for multinational corporations. In chapter ten I propose first steps in this direction: the Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would require corporations to obtain a new corporate charter every twenty years, a charter would be granted only if the corporation in question demonstrated a history of social responsibility: and the Social Responsibility initiative, which would make a priority of awarding public contracts to corporations with the best history of social responsibility.

· Build institutions of civic society on the local, national, and global levels that can operate as counter-forces to the market and to global capital's international power base in media, governments, and globalized economic institutions.

· Develop programs to ensure that the earth's resources are shared equitably. Make decisions about production and distribution of goods on a democratic basis. But, as Hazel Henderson points out in Beyond Globalization, "Reshaping the global economy also requires including at all levels the missing feedback from nature, planetary and local ecosystems as well as the human beings also marginalized by the current runaway forms of globalization." (p.22).

· Create incentives for nations to reduce military spending and to direct resources toward building global economic well-being, adequate housing, education, health care, and ecologically sustainable production. For example, create an international fund that will provide development dollars for countries that significantly reduce military spending. To help reduce conflicts that lead to military conflicts, create a truly effective peace corps. As a step in this direction, groups of social change activists are now developing pans for a volunteer army of nonviolent peacemakers that would work to deescalate tensions in areas where conflict might lead to violence. Committed to a spiritual vision of love and caring, and not tied to the specific interests of any particular side in the conflict, such a team might have more prestige than any force that seemed to be a reflection of political intentions of power-hungry national entities. These kinds of interventions, of course, are effective to the extent that their spiritual integrity is assured. The United Nations has lost much of its potential effectiveness precisely because it is seen as the handmaiden of great power interests rather than as an expression of the highest shared ideals of the human race. To assure spiritual integrity, these interventions must be understood to be an outgrowth of a longstanding commitment to a bottom line of love and caring, not of power politics and self-interested maneuvering. Hence the importance of a corps of people whose commitment to a spiritual vision of love and caring is so transparently obvious that it would take enormous energy to see them as anything but spiritually centered and dedicated activists for peace.

· Move from highly concentrated absentee ownership to stakeholder ownership of a society's productive assets. Each person should have an ownership stake in the assets on which his or her livelihood depends.

· Create a Jubilee in which the international debt of poorer nations is forgiven if they establish democratic regimes with functioning guarantees of free speech and assembly, a free media, jury by peers, worker's rights to organize, living wages, and ecologically sustainable policies governing their economic growth.

· Make the funding of international and local media independent from global capital either directly from advertising (commercial media) or indirectly in the form of corporate sponsorship (the misnamed "public" radio and television, which today is often another extension of the corporate mind-set rather than a serious alternative to it.) Such media would give honest accounting of the seriousness of environmental problems and of the most critical strategic alternatives facing the human race as we try to save the planet from further destruction of our life-support system. Such media would see their explicit task as fostering a sense of awe and wonder at the universe, a deepening of our understanding of mutual interconnectedness, and our awareness of the Unity of All Being.

These are a few of the partial measures that could be enacted by a movement that defined the bottom line as love and caring, ethical/spiritual/ecological sensitivity, and the promotion of awe and wonder. Our environmental crisis will only be solved when such a movement develops. Until then, the momentum of the demonstration at the World Trade Organization may recede, criticisms and mutual recriminations may replace solidarity, and narrow reforms may replace a larger vision of a planet saved from moral and ecological degradation. Though it may recede for years or decades, though the bureaucracy of social change may replace passion and vision, it will always be possible for that transformative energy to reemerge. And for reasons that I've argued in earlier chapters, the pain caused by living in a society without spiritual moorings will make people increasingly hungry for spiritual alternatives. Eventually, that hunger, united with an understanding of the destruction being done to our planet, will generate the kind of movement for Emancipatory Spirituality that can save us from ecological destruction.