The Great Turning

The day started well, and got better.

A book by David C. Korten and subtitled: From Empire to Earth Community was delivered by my friendly courier this morning while talking with Laurence about creative means of increasing our ability to care for our land and use it with greater sensitivity and wisdom. I went out into the sunny afternoon and dived in - it was deeper than I could have hoped for.

The opening of the book has a seemingly endless stream of praise and a small number of the names I recognise are amongst my most respected thinkers. That was before I got to the author's acknowledgements, which lets you know, in no uncertain terms, the extent of the research and the breadth of diverse opinions which have informed his writing.

I'll leave you with the opening page of the Foreword, preceded as it is by a quote attributed to Joanna Macy, then you decide whether this is one for your local library.

Future generations, if there is a livable world for them, will look back at the epochal transistion we are making to a life-sustaining society. And they well call this the time of the Great Turning.

- Joanna Macy -

By what name will our children and our children's children call our time? Will they speak in anger and frustration of the time of the Great Unravelling, when profligate consumption led to an accelerating wave of collapsing environmental system, violent competition for what remained of the planets resources, a dramatic dieback of the Human population, and a fragmentation of those who remained into warring fiefdoms ruled by ruthless local lords?

Or will they look back in joyful celebration on the noble time of the Great Turning, when their forebears turned crisis into opportunity, embraced the higher-order potential of their human nature, learned to live in creative partnership with one another and the living Earth, and brought forth a new era of human possibility?

It is the premise of The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community that we humans stand at a defining moment that presents us with an irrevocable choice. Our collective response will determine how our time is remembered for so long as the human species survives. In the days now at hand, we must each be clear that every individual and collective choice we make is a vote for the future we of this time will bequeath to the generations that follow. The Great Turning is not a prophecy; it is a possibility.

Another excellent review