Earth Community Dialogues/Books...
We recommend several books, videos, and study guides that can be used to facilitate Earth Community Dialogues. These discussions are the foundation for the work of the Great Turning and can lead to lasting actions.
BOOKS/DISCUSSION GUIDES
The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community
David Korten
The Great Turning is an essential resource for those who understand the need for fundamental change. It cuts through the complexity of our time to illuminate a simple, but elegant truth. We humans live by stories. We are held captive to the ways of Empire by a cultural trance of our own creation.
Changing our future begins with changing our stories in a way that includes our capacities for compassion, cooperation, responsible self-direction, and self-organizing partnership. . In The Great Turning, David Korten points the way to the inspiring outcome within our reach.
The Great Turning is now available on audio from Audible.com®, the Internet's leading provider of spoken audio entertainment, information, and educational programming.
DVD and DISCUSSION GUIDES
Korten's new book provides the perfect opportunity for gathering community members to discuss the work of the Great Turning. The discussion guide provided is based on 5 sessions but can be reorganized to meet the needs of your group.
You can also use the article Korten wrote for the Summer Issue of YES! Magazine which also includes a discussion guide.
You can purchase and resell DVD's of David's Sonoma, May 2006 presentation produced by the Yuba Gals at Peak Moment Television. It’s an excellent production with multiple camera angles. Cost is $15.00. Link here for a guide on how to plan a DVD screening and discussion.
To find more materials related to The Great Turning link to Great Turning Follow-On Materials.
YES! Magazine Summer Issue: 5,000 Years of Empire: Ready for a Change?
YES! invites readers to be part of a global community of change makers. Each issue focuses on a theme, showing the possibilities and practical steps that can lead us all to a more positive future. The Summer 2006 issues is a companion to David Korten's book The Great Turning and features an overview of the the book and a feature article by Joanna Macy. As with all of YES! issues, a discussion guide for the entire issue is available.
YES! Magazine has also created an amazing online resource for hundreds of Great Turning stories. Check it out and be inspired!
Coming Back to Life:
Practices to Reconnect Our Lives,
Our World
Joanna Macy
Macy coined the term The Great Turning. Coming Back to Life is based on The Work That Reconnects, a pioneering form of group work that began in the 1970s. It demonstrates our interconnectedness in the web of life and our authority to take action on its behalf. It has helped many thousands around the globe find insight, solidarity, and courage to act, despite rapidly worsening conditions. Based on systems theory, spiritual teachings, and deep ecology, its methods are described and her book. Also, read Joanna's description of the Three Dimensions of the Great Turning.
Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World
Richard Heinberg
Heinberg presents a brilliant analysis of the options available to a civilization facing resource depletion, biosphere collapse, and financial insolvency. He makes a cogent, impassioned proposal for a strategy of self limitation, sharing, and cooperation while preparing for the possibility of collapse. Powerdown is a must read for anyone concerned about what is happening and wondering what can be done to avert worst case scenarios.
Living Earth Gatherings convened a discussion group after Heinberg visited Portland, Oregon. Based on a 12-week format, the questions are provocative and sure to evoke a deep discussion that leads to personal and community action.
You can also subscribe to Heinberg's newsletter, Museletter, or read older editions on his website.
God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It
Jim Wallis
Wallis provides a great book for exploring the cultural and spiritual turning. God's Politics calls for religious communities and government to be more accountable to the key religious values: pro-justice, pro-peace, pro-environment, pro-equality, pro-consistent ethic of life (beyond single issue voting), and pro-family (without making scapegoats of single mothers or gays and lesbians). Wallis provides a discussion guide to guide you as you explore your own values.
Plan B: Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization
in Trouble
Lester R. Brown
Brown provides a bold new plan for those concerned about rising temperatures, population projections, and spreading water scarcity.
Lester Brown notes that if the environmental trends of recent decades continue, the global economy will soon begin to unravel. The food sector, he believes, is the most vulnerable. Record-high temperatures and falling water tables are already taking the edge off grain harvests in some countries, including China, the world's largest grain producer.
The wake-up call will come, Brown believes, when 1.3 billion Chinese consumers with an $80 billion trade surplus start competing with Americans for U.S. grain, driving up food prices. Rising food prices could create political instability in low-income countries, disrupting global economic progress.
At that point, it will be clear that business as usual—Plan A—is not working. In Plan B, Brown outlines a World War II-type mobilization to stabilize climate by restructuring the global energy economy and to stabilize population by investing heavily in health care, family planning, and the education of girls in developing countries.
There is no formal discussion guide available. However there are several resources available on the Earth Policy Institute website that include syllabii from colleges and universities who are using Plan B for course work.
Democracy's Edge
Frances Moore Lappé
Lappé's most recent book Democracy's Edge exposes the threat of thin democracy, reframes the meaning of democracy, and gives us just what we need to get on with creating a real one. There is a 37-page guide for educators that could be modified for discussion groups of all kinds and her website is full of great resources.
Choices for Sustainable Living
The Northwest Earth Institute
Motivating individuals to examine and transform personal values and habits, to accept responsibility for the Earth, and to act on that commitment. The Northwest Earth Institute offers six self-facilitated discussion courses focusing on environmental and sustainability issues. Course topics include Choices for Sustainable Living, Discovering a Sense of Place, Globalization and Its Critics, Exploring Deep Ecology, Voluntary Simplicity and Healthy Children-Healthy Planet. These self-guided discussion courses are a wonderful tool for building community, and for fostering personal growth and reflection around environmental issues. As a result of taking part in the discussions, individuals and communities can become inspired to action on behalf of the Earth.
The Natural Step for Communities
Sarah James and Torbjorn Lahti
Sustainability may seem like one more buzzword, and cities and towns like the last places to change, but The Natural Step for Communities provides inspiring examples of communities that have made dramatic changes toward sustainability, and explains how others can emulate their success.
David Korten's Recommendations
Origins of Empire and Suppression of the Feminine
Brian Griffith, The Gardens of Their Dreams: Desertification and Culture in World History (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing Company, 2001). A detailed and highly readable account of the early turning from the way of Earth Community to the way of Empire. Addresses the social consequences of the transformation of fertile lands to deserts through a combination of climate change and human mismanagement.
Desertification and World Security
Also by Brian Griffith. When we Western urbanites talk about environmental problems, we tend to deal in predictions about the future. And doubters can easily dismiss forecasts as mere speculation. But actual experience from the past is more difficult to dismiss. The archaeological record reveals that vast regions of North Africa, the Middle East and Inner Asia used to be far greener, supporting substantial populations of hunters, gathers, and gardeners. Then, in various periods over the past 7,000 years, the people of these regions suffered what Jared Diamond calls an environmental collapse, though probably in very slow motion. To this day the same slow wave of environmental catastrophes is spreading further into Africa, Asia, and to a lesser extent the Americas. We are learning how we have helped cause this decline, and how it has affected human history. The consequences for our economic and political life, our social traditions, even our religious values, have been enormous.
Creation Stories and Images of God
Marcus J. Borg, The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More Authentic Contemporary Faith (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).
Brian Swimme & Thomas Berry, The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era: A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
Diarmuid O’Murchu, Quantum Theology: Spiritual Implications of the New Physics (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2004).
Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan, What is Life? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). Explorations into the nature and meaning of life based on our knowledge of the earliest stages of evolution. A readable and richly illustrated presentation by one of the leading biologists of our time.
Matthew Fox, One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2000). A beautiful exploration of the common spiritual wisdom underlying the worlds many religious traditions.
U.S. History
Roger Wilkins, Jefferson’s Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001). An African American perspective on the founding story of the United States and how slavery prevailed in a nation conceived under the premise that “all men are created equal.”
Frank Lambert, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). The deeper story behind the frequently heard claim that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and why the separation of church and state was one of the most important contributions to democracy introduced into the U.S. Constitution by its framers.
VIDEOS
The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream
This film has sparked many communities to take a serious look at Peak Oil. If you haven't seen End of Suburbia, get a copy and invite a handfull of friends over for film night!
The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil
Just released documentary. Read the article by Megan Quinn first published in the special Peak Oil issue of Permaculture Activist, Spring 2006. The author, Megan Quinn, is the outreach director for The Community Solution, a program of Community Service Inc., a nonprofit organization in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
This documentary joins in the processions, protests, and street-corner neighborhood assemblies, visits workers' cooperatives and urban gardens, and takes a close-up look at the ways in which Argentines are picking up the pieces of their devastated economy and creating new possibilities for the future.
Independent America: The Two-Lane Search for Mom & Pop
Independent filmmakers and award-winning journalists, Hanson Hosein and Heather Hughes, take
the road less traveled in a thought provoking new documentary, which uncovers the growing opposition
to big box retail across the U.S. and the often desperate fight being waged by independent
retailers to stay alive.
Independent America: The Two Lane Search for Mom & Pop is an entertaining account of Hosein
and Hughes’s expedition through 32 states as they look for an America unchained by corporate retail.
Self-imposed road rules bar them from major highways and corporate chain retail. Traveling on
alternative roads, the duo can only do business with Mom & Pop.
The Ecological Footprint: Accounting for a Small Planet
In just thirty minutes, the film paints a picture of our current global situation: for the first time, humanity is in "ecological overshoot" with annual demand on resources exceeding what Earth can regenerate each year. Most countries are running ecological deficits, with Footprints larger than their own biological capacity. Wackernagel explores the implications of these ecological deficits, and provides examples of how governments, communities and businesses are using the Footprint to help improve their ecological performance.
Designing a Great Neighborhood
Director David Wann follows the progress of the Wild Sage Cohousing Community project, where future residents participate in the design of their own neighborhood. The stated architectural goal at the Wild Sage site in Boulder is a "zero emissions" neighborhood in which solar energy, energy efficiency, and changes in behavior eliminate the need for fossil fuels.