OUR WORLD
2015: Into the
EMERGING CULTURE
By Ruth L Miller, Ph.D.
Do the breakdowns of 2012-14
have you wondering what’s
happening to us? What’s next?
Have we reached our limits?
What can you DO?
F
or half a century, futurists have
been projecting the potential
breakdown of what most Americans have thought of as “normal”
ways of living on this planet. And
for several centuries before, prophets from other cultures have let us
know that what to us is normal is not sustainable
for the long haul.
Futurists have been saying that population pressure, resource limitations, and pollution would
reach critical levels in the first half of the 21st century, which could lead to great distress around the
world if alternatives are not put in place. Technologists have offered many of those alternatives,
but sociopolitical processes have prevented them
from being implemented on a sufficient scale, so
many of the futurists’ distressing projections have
begun to come into our experience.
Prophets have taken a different view. By and large,
they’ve said that we’re coming to the end of a stage
in a long cycle of human and natural processes,
and that a new way of living will naturally emerge
as those who remain move into the next stage – often called a World.
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Both groups have offered options. Both groups
have said that if we stop doing what we have been
doing the way we’ve been doing it and start paying
attention to the ecological and spiritual bases and
consequences of our actions, this transition can be
relatively smooth and easy.
But we haven’t. As a nation, and as a global industrial culture, we’ve continued to operate on a set
of ideas, beliefs, and assumptions that place humanity in conflict with natural processes, seeking
to exploit the resources this planet offers us for the
enrichment of a few people who then provide the
masses with something to entertain them while
their health, and that of the planet, our home, suffers.
So where are we today? What can we learn from
futurists and prophets that we can use to weather the transition they’ve been telling us about? Is it
possible that what we’re transitioning to could be
even better than how we’ve been living up to now?