PERSON/PLANET PARADIGM STEP-&-STRAND 1:
Clarifying and Evolving Our Goals and Visions

It is so easy, in our modern world, to feel disconnected from the physical earth. Despite dire warnings and escalating concern over the state of our planet, many people feel out of touch with the natural world. Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai has spent decades working with the Green Belt Movement to help women in rural Kenya plant—and sustain—millions of trees. With their hands in the dirt, these women often find themselves empowered and “at home” in a way they never did before. Maathai wants to impart that feeling to everyone, and believes that the key lies in traditional spiritual values: love for the environment, self-betterment, gratitude and respect, and a commitment to service. While educated in the Christian tradition, Maathai draws inspiration from many faiths, celebrating the Jewish mandate tikkun olam (“repair the world”) and renewing the Japanese term mottainai (“don’t waste”). Through rededication to these values, she believes, we might finally bring about healing for ourselves and the Earth.

Our personal fulfillment depends on how well we choose and execute these commitments. Brooks looks at a range of people who have lived joyous, committed lives, and who have embraced the necessity and beauty of [mutual] dependence. He gathers their wisdom on how to choose a partner, how to pick a vocation, how to live out a philosophy, and how we can begin to integrate our commitments into one overriding purpose.  (Editor's note: These are four ways of nurturing Life.  The climate crisis is telling us that we need to expand our vision of the fourth element, community, to include the entire Web of Life, the well-being of which makes all of the commitments possible.)

Choose it or lose it! Now is our time of collective choice and cooperation. Drawing upon a lifetime of research, Choosing Earth looks a half-century into the future to explore our world in a time of unprecedented transition to a mature, planetary civilization. Decade by decade, it describes the stages of great transition that lie ahead, offering a new and large context for understanding what is happening in our world. It also looks deep into the psychological and spiritual dimensions of change and describes a new paradigm emerging from the convergence of science and spirituality. Overall, Choosing Earth awakens our social imagination and looks past a future of crisis and collapse to a future of great opportunity. If you look at current trends with growing despair, then don’t lose hope as this book reveals a promising pathway ahead that is sustainable and calls forth our higher human potentials. Overall, this is a carefully researched book that builds on more than 40 years of research, writing and community organizing by the author.