Michael Schacker - Global Awakening: New Science and the 21st-Century Enlightenment

Global Awakening

Take the time to read Global Awakening and once you havedigested its magnificent context and contents, consider sharing itwith your friends and networks and spread the word. The bookprovides a very real sense of our place in the transformation ofculture that holds the promise of reclaiming the world from thosewho have taken it hostage. The time to act is now, and GlobalAwakening belongs in the library of every awakened activist.

JEFF HUTNER, EDITOR OF NEW PARADIGM DIGEST

Michael Schackers book reveals the hidden history of great thinkersand change-makers along with progressive solutions for thehere and now. This truthful and positive book could have powerfuland far-reaching effects and will benefit anyone who reads it.

MAURICE HINCHEY, U.S. CONGRESSMAN FROM NEW YORK

Global Awakening is just what is needed right now: a penetratinganalysis of the historical context of our current global crisis, plusthe all-importantand hitherto missingplan of how we get towhere we want to be. This is the book the organic movement hasbeen waiting for and, I hope and trust, will embrace as its blueprintfor the future. It is as important as Silent Spring and as prescient:a must-read for anyone struggling with the question of howto engage with the world in a positive and productive way.

PHILIP CHANDLER, AUTHOR OF THE BAREFOOT BEEKEEPER

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book could not have been completed without the help of my wife and partner, Barbara Dean Schacker, who supported my work on this book for over thirty years. After my traumatic brain injury, she updated facts and worked on my behalf with my editor, Anne Dillon. Without Barbara, I would not be here and this book probably would not have made it into print. She dedicated herself to this book, my recovery, and our family in the hardest of times. Barbara finished the book (my speech and writing disabilities prevented me from doing this) and continues to handle the ongoing process of publishing and promoting it as well as directing the Global Regeneration Network (GlobalRegen.net) and all of its related websites.

I thank Stephen Larsen for writing the introduction, helping with the book, and providing LENS neurofeedback treatment, which has made such an enormous difference in my recovery. I would like to thank Anthony Rodale, who helped me develop my knowledge and ideas for global regeneration and for creating brilliant new ways to transition from chemical to organic agriculture and gardening and for paving the way of the future of organic farming.

I thank Dr. John McMillin, regenerative scientist and activist, for his guidance and life experiences and for being the person primarily responsible for the well-known greening of the Antsokia Valley in Ethiopia. McMillins systematic approach solved the famous African dust bowl of the 1980s, saving more than six hundred thousand people from starvation. He confirmed my experience that for every problem humanity faces there is a solution.

I thank my editor, Anne Dillon at Inner Traditions/Park Street Press, and all the people there who made this book the best it could be.

I would also like to acknowledge all those who provided their love and support: my daughter, Melissa Schacker, for her love and help with the book; my mother, Maxine Schacker, for her brilliance and her tremendous faith in me and my recovery, and for providing financial support in our time of need; my father, Jerome Schacker, for his love and financial support; my sister, Jeannie Schacker, for all she has done; my brother, David Schacker, for his love and support; and my stepdaughter, Jennifer Crosby, for lovingly putting up with her writer stepfather through the many years of research during her childhood.

I extend gratitude and love to my friends Mitch Ditkoff, Evelyne Pouget, Maureen Radl, Michael Latriano, Tad Wise, Marc Miller, and Mae Skidmore; to all my doctors and therapists; and to my caregiver aides for everything they have done. My gratitude goes out to my friends in California, in Woodstock, and all around the world. As this book was thirty years in the making, there is very little doubt that the true length of acknowledgments would shadow what is written here.

INTRODUCTION

REVEALING THE HIDDEN PATH TO THE POSSIBLE HUMAN

Stephen Larsen, Ph.D.

Before the stroke that eclipsed half his brain, I knew that my friend was a genius. Whether I was improvising music with him in an impromptu band, attending an opera or a concert he had written, or reading one of his books, there was the sense of a mind on fire with a love for ideas, beauty, and nature. I knew that generally he was engaged in a private and ceaseless act of mega-scholarship. He was attempting to create a global curriculum, an online or computer-based course of study designed to bring new and important knowledge about the world to culturally isolated and historically ignorant Americans. The earlier thousand-page version of the curriculum, I learned, had metamorphosed into a simplified four-hundred-page version for students at American high schools and alternative schools, and for young people being homeschooled. He was also secretly working on another book that was an outgrowth of that researcha history of the current paradigm shift, an organic shift leading to a global awakening where an enlightened civilization would save mankind and the planet from global catastrophe.

Michael was hoping to introduce his learners to a new way of looking at history that didnt shy away from the fact that much of what is conventionally taught history is skewed by ethnocentric values and a dominant Western mechanistic paradigm in which power and the sometimes violent doings of the wealthy elite determine the most important events, almost unnoticeably creating a distorted conception of where we have been and thus where we are going. He held an exciting vision of a different historyone in which, over generations, ordinary men and women have reached out to find the novel perspective, the transformative idea, the discovery or invention that helps to heal the world.

Michael was in search of an alternative history, if you will. I came to understand that his laudable goal was to save future Americans from an even worse navet (you could also call it parochial isolation) than current generations enjoya navet that allows America to throw its weight around like a cultural bull in an international china shop, often lunging destructively among exquisite traditions and cultures that Americans fail to understand.

But this vast labor of learning contained in the global curriculum and this book you are now reading would be put on hold by an even more urgent problem that came to Michael. An amateur but avid naturalist, Michael had learned about a colony collapse disorder among the bees of Europe and North America (primarily). Bees not only produce honey but also pollinate basic food crops, such as the fruits, nuts, and vegetables that are instrumental to our very survivaland apiculturalists were finding their colonies empty. The busy little workers had seemingly gotten lost en route to their hives.

Michael temporarily put the global curriculum aside and for months began a concentrated effort of reading and research that would prove beyond a doubt that neonicotinoid pesticides (and particularly imidicloriprid)neurotoxic chemicals widely used in commercial agricultural pesticides as well as lawn and garden productswere responsible for the death of billions of bees, thus endangering the entire food chain. I know of no comparable project in modern science research: Michael perused hundreds of monographs and reports, some in other languages, to culminate in an immensely important book,