Kenny Ausubel - Dreaming the Future: Reimagining Civilization in the Age of Nature

Without doubt, Kenny Ausubel has one of the most glorious minds on the planet. Herein he has crafted a dazzling treasury of essays on the destiny of humanity and its place on earth, a rosary of startling truths. His ability to describe the cataclysmic loss of living systems contrasted with the luminous and untold rise of human awakening is unique among living writers and speakers. Read this for its brilliance, but read it also to find joy in the intricate reimagination of what it means to be a human being at this parlous moment in civilization.

Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest ;
coauthor, Natural Capitalism

Dreaming the Future proposes a path forward that is both profoundly radical and full of common sense. An excellent read for everyone who wants to build a better futureand for those looking to supplement the many dry technical tomes about todays environmental problems. Ausubel explores the political, cultural, and personal changes needed to chart a sustainable path forward, leaving readers delighted and hopeful.

Annie Leonard, author and host, The Story of Stuff ;
codirector, The Story of Stuff Project

Kenny Ausubel is one of the planets key people, a kind of hub for the new ideas that will, if were smart, shape our future. He delivers them with the... brio and confidence that will help people overcome their fear and get to work!

Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth ; founder of 350.org

This valuable book underscores that many of the solutions so desperately needed today have already been discovered by nature. In these challenging times, Kenny Ausubel has become a leader of leaders, blazing the trail so others can follow. He is a powerful voice for natures undervalued ecological services[reminding us] that nature has innate resources and solutions for solving the complexity of problems humans have created. Now is our time, and the world needs more voices like Kenny Ausubels. Dreaming the Future is much more than a dream: this is a blueprint for survival.

Paul Stamets, author, Mycelium Running:
How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

A brilliant new look at what it is to be human on a living planet. Kenny Ausubel has devoted his life to creating organizations that dream a new future. In this marvelous book he shares his vision in eloquent words that inspire us to take action. Read, enjoy, dreamand act!

John Perkins, author, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
and Hoodwinked

Copyright 2012 by Kenny Ausubel

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

Project Manager: Hillary Gregory

Project Editor: Joni Praded

Copy Editor: Eric Raetz

Proofreader: Susan Barnett

Indexer: Lee Lawton

Designer: Melissa Jacobson

Front cover image by Nils-Udo

Clemson Clay Nest

Botanical Garden of South Carolina, 2005

Ilfochrome on aluminium 124 124 cm

Printed in the United States of America

First printing August, 2012

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 12 13 14 15 16

Our Commitment to Green Publishing

Chelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reduce the impact of our business enterprise in the environment. We print our books and catalogs on chlorine-free recycled paper, using vegetable-based inks whenever possible. This book may cost slightly more because it was printed on paper that contains recycled fiber, and we hope youll agree that its worth it. Chelsea Green is a member of the Green Press Initiative ( www.greenpressinitiative.org ), a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the worlds endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Dreaming the Future was printed on FSC-certified paper supplied by Thomson-Shore that contains at least 30% postconsumer recycled fiber.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ausubel, Ken.

Dreaming the future : reimagining civilization in the Age of Nature /

Kenny Ausubel ; forward by David W. Orr.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-60358-459-3 (pbk.) ISBN 978-1-60358-460-9 (ebook)

1. Sustainable development. 2. Human ecology. 3. Environmental

protection. I. Title.

HC79.E5.A9257 2012

338.9'27dc23

2012019727

Chelsea Green Publishing

85 North Main Street, Suite 120

White River Junction, VT 05001

(802) 295-6300

www.chelseagreen.com

For Nina Simons, my beloved wife and endlessly inspired cocreator of Bioneers, and Clay Aster Ausubel Grossman, my grandson, whose recent arrival has made the well-being of future generations intensely personal to me.

The Unlikeliest of People in the Unlikeliest of Places:
Corporations, Democracy, and the Rights of Nature

Its All Alive, Its All Connected!

T he greatest discovery of the past century was not in nuclear physics, or biology, or computer science. It was, rather, the discovery (or more accurately the rediscovery) of an ancient premonitionthat we are part of a vast web of life, one large evolving system that has many of the characteristics of a living organism. Intelligence, which Ren Descartes and his heirs believed was a monopoly of Homo sapiens , is no such thing. In ways that we cannot fully describe, it is woven through the whole fabric. We live, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once mused, in the lap of great intelligence. We also live within a network of interdependence and obligation that extends back in time to the beginnings of humankind and forward into the future as far as one can possibly imagine.

We are all descended from a common maternal ancestor. We breathe the same air, drink from the same waters, and are fed from the same soils. Our very bodies are a congress of other life-forms on which we are wholly dependent. We are kith and kin to all that was, all there is, and all that will ever be. Our bodies tell the tale of our origins in ancient seas; our minds still have a reptilian core. We are made of stuff from vanished stars and are destined to be food for worms. Life is that majestic and that mundane. But it is also a mystery. D. H. Lawrence put it this way: Water is two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, but there is a third thing that makes it water and no one knows what that is. I doubt that anyone ever will know or perhaps ever could know such things. For all of our puffed-up self-importance we are only upstart primates occupying one small booth on the outskirts of a vast, turbulent, ongoing bazaar of living, evolving sentience located on a minuscule planet attached to a third-rate star somewhere in a backwater galaxy in a sea of billions of other galaxies speeding toward some unknown destination. Considering our insignificance in the face of such grandeur and mystery, the prudent response for a species pleased to call itself Homo sapiens would be reverence and humility.

The modern world, however, was built on other assumptions. The philosophy of the industrial age is, as designer William McDonough once put it, If brute force doesnt work youre not using enough of it. And so we muscled our way out of the agrarian world into the industrial age, powered by fossilized sunlight and undergirded by bulletproof certainty that there are no pitfalls or traps ahead nor places where angels would fear to tread. And so we conquered continents, clear-cut forests, dammed rivers, diminished distance and time, and probed the far reaches of space. Admonished by Francis Bacon to affect all things possible, we conjured substances alien to life and invaded the recesses of the atom and the gene. In the process, as urban historian Lewis Mumford once lamented, we became very long on know-how and very short on know-why.