Enough, for all, forever,
Four words that heal our Earth.
The simple truth of future life,
The hope that leads to birth.
Enough, for all, together,
For humans, sharks, and trees,
That all of us can live as one,
And sleep at night in peace.
January 1st, 2050
Yesterday, as we were talking about the 25th anniversary celebrations that are being planned, you asked me how it began, the Great Transition from a humanly abusive and ecologically destructive civilization to a heart-shaped ecological civilization. So this morning I woke up early and I’m writing this for you, Echo, my much-loved granddaughter.
2023 was a terrible year. Russia’s assault on Ukraine was continuing with brutal cruelty. The housing crisis had gotten even worse, and rents were rising faster than wages while vacancy rates were approaching zero. And meanwhile, the rich just kept getting richer. The climate crisis had set forest fires blazing all across Canada. It had burnt a whole town in Hawai’i to the ground, and killed 10,000 people in Libya following a disastrous downpour that burst two dams. The Palestinian organization Hamas had made a brutal attack on Israel, and Israel had responded with twenty times greater brutality. Then it became clear that Trump stood a good chance of being re-elected that fall, and the fear arose that democracy itself was in danger. All across the world, people felt afraid, cynical, angry, or just plain hopeless.
When we view the world today it is astonishing how different things are. Billions of people live in selfmanaged housing cooperatives, in control of their homes and no longer paying feudal rent to a landlord.
People who used to be tenants are now co-owners of their homes, with security for life. The difference this has made to their lives and their sense of security is amazing. Almost a billion people earn their livelihood in a worker’s cooperative or an employee-owned business, sharing the risk, the investment, and the fulfilment of productive work. Of the world’s 300 million businesses, two thirds have adopted a social purpose charter, committing their companies to make a positive difference in the world. Many nations have brought in a new social contract that is reducing inequality, taxing the rich and enabling everyone to meet their basic needs and enjoy a meaningful life, with no-one being left behind.
Thousands of banks have become engaged in socially productive investments, not just because so many people were switching to a community or cooperative bank, but because following the Great Financial Crisis of 2029 the regulatory agencies, which used to be controlled by the banks themselves, finally did their job.
It has also been great for families, and children. Back in 2024, when you were born, far too many people lived with their noses glued to their devices. Doom-scrolling, we used to call it. Not real connecting, just digital connecting. Loneliness was accelerating like a freight train, nurturing a host of social dysfunctions.
Young men were embracing pseudo-macho attitudes. People were burying their feelings of emptiness with dangerous drugs. I know from your mother that parenting could be hell, especially when your brother went through his demon years, and she was alone at home. Not that you ever behaved like that, of course. Ahem.
Today, thanks to all the parks and pedestrian spaces, and the separated bike-lanes, it’s safe for children to play on the streets and ride their bikes without fear of traffic. We love to stroll around in our pedestrianized neighborhoods, chatting with friends, browsing in shops, and listening to good music. In our housing cooperative we don’t ever need to be alone unless we want to be. And thanks to the new social contract, when you were young your parents got paid leave, universal childcare benefits, universal healthcare, and cheap daycare. Our new ecological civilization is not just great for Nature. It’s great for kids.
Globally, instead of waging war, nations are using Peace Assemblies to explore and resolve their differences. In the Middle East, the Israelis and Palestinians are building cultural and economic partnerships within their shared federation. On either side, the extremists have been sidelined. In Russia, the oligarchs have been evicted, and Russians are experiencing the benefits of a functioning democracy. In China, the Communist Party is making real progress in its transition to a fully green economy. They have opened their country to immigrants, and abandoned their cultural war against the Tibetans, Uyghurs, and other ethnic minorities. In common with other nations, they have realized that hostility to immigrants happens when people are economically insecure. By rolling out the new social contracts, financed by increased taxes on those who are wealthy and the abolition of the tax havens, most nations are removing that fear.
In the global south, nations that have been able to sideline their ruling clans are pioneering systems of democracy that are far more participatory than those that we enjoy in the global north, drawing inspiration from the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement in Sri Lanka, the Kudumbashree movement in Kerala, and the Unión de Cooperativas Tosepan in Mexico. Through village and neighborhood assemblies, they are engaging millions of people in community economic development and building green social solidarity economies within the market economy, with women in most of the leadership roles.
Nature also is no longer under assault. When the children who were born in the early decades of the 21st century entered adult life they brought with them a disgust at plastic pollution, a feeling of how gross it was to eat animals, and a desire to reconnect with Nature – just as you have. Nature became their religion, and the source of their spirituality. They wanted to pull down the barrier that had caused people to experience Nature an “it”, instead of a joyful “we”. They have been huge participants in the movement to apologize to Nature, to take our foot off her long-suffering neck, and to devote ourselves to her restoration, a task in which Nature is a willing partner.
This is all very good, but as you know, we have not been able to stop the climate crisis. Earth’s atmosphere is still perilously overloaded with carbon and the other greenhouse gases, and the polar jetstreams are still unpredictably wavy due to the reduced heat differential between the poles and the tropics. So we are still experiencing traumatically dangerous storms, floods, heatwaves, forest fires, and droughts.
The problem is the accumulated atmospheric pollution, the 400 billion tonnes of carbon that are still up there from 300 years of burning fossil fuels. They are still trapping heat, messing up the jet streams, overheating the oceans, and stirring up the weather like an angry beast. Thanks to all the campaigning that we did in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and the rapidly falling price of solar and wind, and the supportive policies of the central banks, and some well-timed legal challenges against the big fossil-fuel corporations – I keep forgetting things! – most countries had eliminated their climate pollution by 2040.
But this did nothing to reduce the accumulated carbon pollution. To complete the healing, we are going to have to do everything we can to accelerate the carbon drawdown by restoring forests, restoring organic farmlands, restoring oceans, and increasing the use of those carbon capture machines, which absorb carbon dioxide from the ocean and air and turn it into calcium carbonate rocks such as limestone. Meanwhile, the traumatic weather disasters will continue, and the sea-level will continue to rise. Nobody buys waterfront property anymore. Vancouver, New York, Mumbai, Tokyo – they are all going to have scramble to cope with the relentlessly rising sea level.
“How did it happen, grandpa?”
I’m getting distracted. Perhaps I’m allowed to, at my age. Yesterday you were asking how it began, our Circle of Hope, our global citizens’ movement. I could list the policies, programs, and legislation that made the transition real, but they were the results, not the cause. The changes that made it possible happened deep within our hearts and minds. They were a change in our attitude to Nature; a change in our understanding of why things had gone so disastrously wrong; our rejection of capitalism and its replacement with the economics of kindness; and a change in how we viewed the future, seeing it once again with hope, instead of fear.
So why did things go so disastrously wrong? Why did we define “progress” as a journey to civilizational suicide, and refuse to change direction until the very last moment, when it was almost too late? One of the answers lay in our failure to understand the economy. For more than a hundred years we had been taught that economics was a science, and if economies were allowed to operate in a free market economy, with minimal government interference, the laws of economics would guarantee economic progress for everyone.
We had been taught that the only alternative to a free-market economy was a socialist state economy, and if we wanted to see how that worked, we just had to look at the old Soviet Union, Cuba, or North Korea. Was that what we wanted? We were taught not to question capitalism, so much so that some philosopher wrote that it was easier to imagine the end of civilization than the end of capitalism. Believing there to be no alternative, when people thought about the future they felt fear, not hope. Capitalism had colonized our minds, just as it had colonized the lives and lands of Indigenous people across the world.
We were taught that when it came to voting, the choice was between a party that wanted a bit more government engagement in the economy, and one that wanted a bit less. With that slight difference, all parties bowed to the laws of the market, the untouchability of investors, and their right to maximize their capital, no matter the harm their investments caused. As a world, we had allowed the primacy of capital to over-rule the primacy of compassion. That’s why, back in 2024, we had millionaires owning multiple mansions while millions struggled to pay their rent and 650,000 Americans had no home at all, forced to live in tents on cold winter streets. That’s why we allowed Nature to be so abused, and the fossil fuel companies to continue to pollute the atmosphere.
There are no laws of economics
In truth, Echo, there are no laws of economics. There never were. The whole idea of a ‘free market economy’ in which businesses and investors should be left to do their thing is fake science. It was invented in the late 19th century to protect the greed of investors. Known as neoclassical economics, it was once taught in every university. It claimed that we were all super-rational and self-interested, never willing to sacrifice profit to express love of Nature, or compassion for our fellow humans. We could only do such things, business executives were taught, if it benefited the bottom line. It was their duty, their almost divine right, to maximize their capital gains. The whole thing was a scam, a charade, a pseudointellectual justification for people who wanted to be selfish, to dominate others, to win the competition for wealth and power. Harm to Nature, to workers, to communities, to the climate – these were collateral damage, or in the wretched language of neoclassical economics, ‘externalities.’
Of course we need business. Of course we need good governance, and of course we need a mixed market economy. That’s not what matters. What matters is whether we continue to live selfishly, feeding self-importance and the desire to dominate, or whether we choose to say, “No. I want to live and work cooperatively.” When people realized that capitalism was quite simply the economics of selfishness, it became obvious what we needed: the economics of kindness. Our world needed more kindness, people needed more kindness, and Nature needed more kindness, but we needed it deep within our economies, where so many of our troubles began.
Our Circle of Hope
So to your question. What was it that happened in 2024 that kicked off the changes that have hopefully saved civilization and nature from a disastrous collapse, and set us on the path to a new ecological civilization? And yes, I did play a small part in the events of that year. Your grandpa, who you think so old-fashioned, with his love of Bach, and his books.
I had been pondering the urgency of the time and the need for a new movement of some kind. A global movement. A citizens’ movement. I was a member of the Great Transition Initiative, an international network of thinkers and doers who knew what a mess we were in, who shared a determination to end the craziness and build in its place a new ecological civilization. Together we invited a hundred people to gather for a week in August in Concord, New Hampshire, to share our ideas for a world and an economy based on kindness to humans and Nature, and to build a global citizens’ movement to make it happen. Each of the hundred who gathered represented an organization that was working for change, with a good balance of age, gender, and ethnicity. The most critical election in America’s history was coming up, and we all worried that if Trump was re-elected it would not just be the death of democracy in America. It would be the abandonment of Ukraine to Russian rule, the abandonment of action on the climate crisis, the abandonment of the very people who formed Trump’s MAGA movement, people who had been screwed by capitalism and were struggling with debt, working two or three jobs just to pay the rent. He said he loved them, but in reality, he didn’t give a damn.
So much happened over those seven days. The moment that has remained in my mind happened on the evening of the last day. We had gathered in a circle under the stars. In the center there was an open space, and a circle of candles. We were taking it in turn to speak about our hopes for this global movement we were planning to build. Then a woman from Lake Tahoe in Nevada did something different. “I speak for all the world’s birds,” she said slowly, with intention. “I speak for the elephants, and for the forests. I speak for the insects. I speak for all of Nature. Please, they are saying, do something. Please, they say, join hands now and promise us that you will turn all this around, you will stop this holocaust against us. We have no voice. We depend on you. Please promise this, now.”
I was crying. Everyone was crying. Then a young woman moved into the center and knelt down. “Before all of you”, she said, “I give myself to the service of the Great Unknown, to the unfolding of love on this Earth, our only home. I surrender. I ask to be of service. Please help us. Please use me.” Then she lowered her head to the ground. There was intense silence, and then another person, then two, then almost everyone stepped forward and did the same. Each person, in their own space, made some kind of deep inner commitment. After five minutes we gradually stood up, and there followed a wonderful night of dancing and singing. It will live in my heart forever.
Who knows how these things work? It is my personal belief, from a lifetime of surrender and commitment to service, that when we ask for help in this way, things happen. It is as if there are hidden angels who step in, and join our quest. If you learn this, Echo, you will have a very rewarding life.
So, three things came out of the meeting in Concord. As you know from your civics classes at school, the Democrats won that fall’s election, and the second attempt at a coup was defeated. It caused widespread dismay among Trump’s followers, but it gave us breathing space, and time to get organized.
The first was that we were given $1 million by one of the participants to hire staff and organize a much larger gathering in Rio de Janeiro, in 2025. We invited people from 150 of the world’s nations, people who represented every major movement for change, including from socially responsible businesses, labor unions, anti-poverty organizations, racial justice organizations, women’s rights organizations, Indigenous people’s organizations, religious congregations, new economy organizations, global debt organizations, biodiversity organizations, climate action organizations, and so on. It was attended by a thousand people, with as many from the global south as from the global north, and many Indigenous people. Titled Hope for the Earth, it was opened by Brazil’s President Lula de Silva, who promised his nation’s full support. This was where Circle of Hope was born, our global citizens’ movement that has had such a huge impact. Yes, we flew there, burning fossil fuels. We neutralized the two thousand tonnes of emissions by donating $100,000 to the Solar Electric Light Fund, which is still going today, replacing kerosene oil in remote villages in central Africa with solar systems, but we still got criticized for it.
The second thing that happened was the Netflix movie Economy of Kindness, which showed what a cooperative, democratic, nature-loving economy looked like, with examples from around the world. It was commissioned by the Obamas, and it said, “This is what we can achieve if we abandon the economics of selfishness.” It became a global sensation that was dubbed into twenty languages and seen by more than two billion people. Wherever they lived, people who saw it used our Circle of Hope organizing platform to set up local and national chapters. The third thing was a total surprise. Taylor Swift tweeted how much she loved Circle of Hope. She got together with Beyoncé, Ed Sheeran, Arijit Singh, Drake, and other musicians who were global celebrities at the time, and they released a video-anthem that was seen three billion times in its first year, drawing millions of people into the movement, many of whom became activists for social change. That was how your mother first got involved.
Everyone who joined the movement was asked to sign a Code of Kindness: to be kind and inclusive; to extend a warm welcome to people who had been silenced or oppressed; and to engage in a personal learning journey through which we would learn to suppress our egos and our self-importance. If we wanted a livable future, we had to cooperate with each other, and with Nature. In the local chapters people formed kindness circles for personal sharing and support; study circles where they explored new books on how to build a cooperative economy and things like that; and action circles where they helped each other to start new initiatives. So much strength has been gained from the circles, and is still being gained.
When I look back, in every country where Circle of Hope was established, the many movements for social change, have merged into a mighty river, and the mighty rivers have merged to create sea-change across the whole ocean, transforming our troubles into hope.
Between us, we have ended capitalism. We have built instead a cooperative economy based on social solidarity and reciprocal kindness. The combination of secure jobs, affordable housing, a new social contract, community wealth, safe democracy, increased taxes on the rich, and compassion for nature turned out to be a platform that could win elections. One thing that has helped has been the public realization that cooperation is so much more friendly and sensible than ruthless competition, and that cooperative and employee-owned businesses are more successful, more productive, more egalitarian, and more resilient than privately-owned businesses, where the driving motive is personal profit, not community benefit. Throughout evolution, cooperation has been more effective at achieving results than competition, so it should be no surprise that the same might apply in the economy. There is still so much to do, but Circle of Hope has achieved what we set out to do. So yes, back in 2024, we, our thousands of partners, and our hidden angels – we did kick off the movement that has hopefully saved the world – at least for now.
It’s over to you, Echo! There’s still so much to do, but I have every faith that your generation will continue the good work.
Leave a Comment