Joanna Macy on the Great Turning
Video (trailer) via https://vimeo.com/ondemand/greatturning?
Description
“This is a 26-minute film in which 84-year-old Joanna eco-philosopher Macy shares her understanding of these times we live in, when everything we treasure seems to be at risk. But it is not a film about despair. Instead, it is about the opportunity we have to come alive to our truest power, to "look straight into the face of our time, which is the biggest gift we can give," and to participate in the Great Turning.
What is the Great Turning? It is, as Joanna describes it, the shift from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization. It is, she believes, the third major revolution of human existence, after the agricultural and industrial revolutions. This one, though, has to unfold much more quickly. The good news is that it is, all around the world.
“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth,” says Joanna, “Is not that we are on the way to destroying the world — we've actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other.” This is a thoughtful, and ultimately hopeful, film for anyone concerned about the future of life on the planet.
"We imagine they'll look back at us," Joanna says, referring to future generations, "Living in these early years of the third millennium, and say, 'Oh, those ancestors. They were taking part in the Great Turning.'”
Discussion
Joanna Macy:
"The Great Turning is occurring on three simultaneous levels or dimensions. Recognize how they are gaining momentum through your own life. On the most visible level are holding actions in defense of Earth, including all the political, legislative, and legal work required to slow down the destruction, as well as direct actions-blockades, boycotts, civil disobedience and other forms of refusal. Work of this kind buys time. It helps save biological and cultural systems, and the gene pool, for the sustainable society to come; but it is insufficient to bring that society about.
This first level is wearing. You can get stressed out of your mind, by both the urgency and increasing violence against activists. In point position, you take a lot of punishment; and when you step back to take a breather, you often feel as if you are abandoning ship. But to the extent you still care what's happening to the world, you're probably just slipping back to continue the work of the Great Turning in another form -- the way the head goose, when she's tired, slips back and flies in the windstream of others, and another flyer takes her place.
The second or middle level of the Great Turning addresses structural causes of the global crisis, and creates sustainable alternatives. Only a couple of years ago, it was hard slogging to raise any opposition to, or even interest in GATT (the Global Agreement on Trade and Tariffs); people's eyes glazed over. But now they are rapidly becoming aware of the rape of the world, and the attack on democracy, built into corporate privilege. Novel types of teach-ins demystify economics, engage the practical imagination. At the same time new social and economic arrangements are mushrooming, from local currencies to local marketing and consumer cooperatives, from eco-villages to renewable, off-the-grid energy generation. They may look fringe, but they hold the seeds of the future.
These nascent institutions cannot take root and survive, however, without values to sustain them. They must mirror what we want, and think we are. That paradigmatic shift -- at the third, most basic level of the Great Turning -- is happening all around us. Some choose to see it as an influx of spirit from above, others as "hitting bottom" in our doomed and addictive society. Either way, we are opening our senses to the web of relationships, the deep ecology, in which we have our being. Like our primordial ancestors, we begin again to see the world as our body, and (whether we say the word or not) as sacred.
We hardly have words for the cognitive, spiritual, and perceptual revolution that is occurring now at a stunning rate of speed."