Skills for the Age of Sustainability: An Unprecedented Time of Opportunity by Elisabet Sahtouris




“As we try to consciously and conscientiously fit economics and business back into a holistic approach to life and living; there is much that can be learned from societies and communities that have never forgotten that wholeness;. . . communities that understand Life as flows of energy,. . . [in which] everyone receives basic support . . . everyone contributes . . . no part is separate from any other part . . . the health of the whole enables the health of any part thereof . . . sickness of the smallest part impacts the whole.” (Paula Underwood, World Business Academy Journal, vol. 10 no 4, 1996)

“The repeating pattern of evolution is the sequence from unity to diversification, which produces conflict that instigates negotiations, resulting in resolution leading to cooperation, and thus back to unity in the form of a higher level of organization . . . It [is] obvious that human affairs have reached the danger level at which cooperation must restore the imbalances of aggressive competition and hoarding if we are to survive.” (Elisabet Sahtouris)

 

It is an honor for me to be asked to address young people at the beginning of your careers while also at the beginning of a new millennium. Your generation has been named the Millennials, and this is a very important time in your lives, when you will make crucial decisions. It is also, without doubt, an extremely important time in human history — a time, in fact, when you will necessarily change history forever.

If we are to talk about sustainability, we must, first of all, really understand that unsustainability means CANNOT AND WILL NOT SURVIVE AS IS. In other words, we have no choice but to change the way we live as a human species. You will either be a contributing part of our change for the better, or, if you choose to ignore or deny the fact of our present unsustainability, you will, by default, contribute to the rapid decline of our civilization and all humanity. Naturally, I hope you will all choose the first course.

When you look at your society now, this may seem a difficult and hopeless time, with unemployment at a new high and unsustainability in the very air you breathe. But if you learn to look at the present from a broader evolutionary perspective, you will see the potential for a very different future. In fact, the present is really an unprecedented time of opportunity. Think of it as a stage between caterpillar and butterfly — a time of metamorphosis when an old unsustainable system fights to preserve itself as a new system struggles to be born.

Caterpillars chew their way through ecosystems leaving a path of destruction as they get fatter and fatter. When they finally fall asleep and a chrysalis forms around them, tiny new imaginal cells, as biologists call them, begin to take form within their bodies. The caterpillar’s immune system fights these new cells as though they were foreign intruders, and only when they crop up in greater numbers and link themselves together are they strong enough to survive. Then the caterpillar’s immune system fails and its body dissolves into a nutritive soup which the new cells recycle into their developing butterfly.

The caterpillar is a necessary stage but becomes unsustainable once its job is done. There is no point in being angry with it and there is no need to worry about defeating it. The task is to focus on building the butterfly, the success of which depends on powerful positive and creative efforts in all aspects of society and alliances built among those engaged in them.

If you look at unemployment figures with dismay, worrying about your future, you are not yet an imaginal cell. In my own life as a pioneering imaginal cell, I discovered early that the “business as usual” old system was not going to hire me or support my work. Why should it? My work is to replace it with a different way of doing things. All of my friends and colleagues now are imaginal cells. We have had to be very creative in making our living, generating our own resources and discovering new ones. I will not say it has been easy, but it has carried the enormous rewards of new adventure and pioneering a better future. I can say with assurance that it is easier now than it was half a century ago — much easier, because there are so many of us now.

If you use this butterfly metaphor in thinking of our transformation from unsustainability to sustainability, you will immediately see four sets of critical skills required to realize this great opportunity for co-creating a better world:

  1. the skills of thinking and seeing systemically or holistically
  2. the skills of creating a positive vision of the future
  3. the skills of finding like-minded people for cooperative efforts
  4. the skills of using available resources in new ways

You will have to be adventurous and creative to learn them, because you will not find them in the traditional university curriculum. I believe choices about institutionalized higher education should be made on the basis of specific needs for reaching specific goals. If you want to be an imaginal cell as a doctor or lawyer, for example, you will need to get those credentials. But this will not be an adequate education for sustainability, so know that your efforts to learn must go far beyond university education.

Let’s look at these skills one by one.

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Published::
11.12.07 / 7am
Category:
Appropriate Science and Technology, Change in Change, Learning for Life, Man, Means, Paths, Ends, Spirituality, Unity in Diversity
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