Nature is deregulating human affairs faster than a lobbyist can buy a politician. Global weirding is upon us.
We’re in the endgame of the Dim Ages: the collision between the state of nature and the nature of the state. Our civilization is a failed state.

The big wheels are turning. We face a reckoning: transform or perish. It’s emergence in an emergency.

We’re entering the Age of Nature. It’s high time to learn the ground rules & play by them to design a regenerative & equitable civilization.

Regeneration is the byword. Building resilience is the grail – both ecological & social. The imperative is to fast-forward the transition to 100% clean energy. What’s perhaps most salient is the extraordinary rise & influence of social movements & civil society.

The Mayan people describe this movement of movements as one ‘no’ & many ‘yeses.’ The “no” is to the concentration of wealth & distribution of poverty.

The “yes” is to “a world where many worlds fit,” a global society devoted to health, justice, dignity, diversity & democracy—to human rights & the rights of nature.

The twin crises of climate chaos & extreme inequality resulted from a desperate capitalist battle, with every man for himself. If producing more crops drove down farm prices & wrecked the land, well, that was just how the market economy worked.

Today the world war is to save human civilization as we know it. In the ‘30s, it boiled down to saving capitalism from itself. But this time around, capitalism may not be salvageable at all.

Beginning in the ‘90’s, corporate globalization triggered a tectonic shift of wealth & political power to a super-elite of billionaires. They launched a full-frontal corporate takeover of government.

If billionaires were a nation, they’d be the world’s 3rd largest country. Call it bottom down & top up – breadcrumbs & circuses.

More & more CEOs worry that public support for the system in which they’ve operated is in danger of disappearing.
They’re worried that when the next recession breaks, revolution might, too. The coming Recession might finally prompt the masses to sharpen their pitchforks

& demand a reckoning. But the CEOs now have a plan to head off revolution. They want you to know: Actually, they really do care about the world. Like, a lot. It’s all a game to the moguls in charge. Their greatest fear is that we’ll stop playing.

It’s easier for most people to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
It’s Boom & Doom — the terminal convulsions of an oligarchic economic system bedeviled by $100 trillion dollars of stranded oil assets

& the impossibility of unlimited material growth on a finite planet.

Petrostates & fossil fuel corporations are growing desperate. The frenzy of deregulation is the distress signal of a failing business model. Market trauma is in store.

Monopolies smother the economy. The roster of Fortune 500 companies reads like a rap sheet of mass crimes. It’s gangsters & warlords making feudalism great again.

Meanwhile, Moneyland has emerged as the “dark twin of globalization.

As much as $36 trillion dollars of dark money is stashed in offshore black holes. $1 trillion dollars a year exits the world’s developing countries in laundered money & tax avoidance.

Untraceable shell companies are behind the majority of investment linked to Amazon deforestation, illegal fishing, & other crimes against nature & humanity.
Most of “Moneyland” is entirely legal. The system is the crime.

Thievery tramples the possibilities of workable markets & credible democracy. It fuels suspicions that the whole idea of liberal capitalism is a hypocritical sham.
The predicament is double-barreled: Failing to imagine the end of capitalism may mean the end of the world.

On the other hand, state socialism has equally failed. The ground truth is that there’s no precedent or grand model for a next economy – one that’s grounded in equity & the limits & principles of nature.

“What’s the economy for?”

If building resilience is the goal, the priority shifts from growth and expansion to sufficiency and sustainable prosperity. Real wealth creation is based on replenishing natural systems and restoring the built environment, especially our infrastructure and cities.

It’s based on investing in our communities & workforce. It works best when done all at once.
Economic re-localization creates 3 times as many jobs, earnings & tax collections—as well as far greater security.

A core principle is shifting ownership of the nation’s wealth institutionally to benefit the vast majority. Ownership becomes diversified, including public, private, cooperative & worker-owned enterprises.

Too-big-to-fail giants are broken up or restructured as publicly owned utilities.
Nor is there a model for what true democratic governance looks like at modern scales. We need to reclaim democracy & decentralize political and economic power to local & bioregional levels.

It begins & ends with community & with building stable transgenerational community wealth & job creation.
But paradigms die hard & empires die harder.

This is a game of power, pure & simple, & it’s about whether the people who have long held power will be able to retain it.

This is how the wealthy world is going to ‘adapt’ to more climate disruption:

by fully unleashing toxic ideologies that rank the relative value of human lives in order to justify the monstrous discarding of huge swaths of humanity.
It’s the last-ditch play by Billionaire Nation to make heaven a gated community – even if it’s in hell on Earth.

Instead what’s rising up is the return of the repressed. Everyone who has been othered, marginalized & deleted. The poor. Working people. Women. People of color. Indigenous Peoples. Immigrants. LGBTQ people. Young people. The last shall be first after all.

The word “crisis” comes from the Greek word krino. It means “to decide.” We need to decide what kind of future we want – & act like our lives depend on it.
It’s now o’clock. The Mayan people call this the “Time of No Time.”

From here on, we’re on Earth time. Mother Earth is shaking to her core. It’s a time of madness, disconnection, & hyper-individualism.
It’s also a time when new energies are coming into the world, when people are growing a new skin.

The Mayan vision says that we will find safe harbor only if we can journey past a wall of mirrors. The mirrors will surely drive us mad—unless we have a strong heart. Some mirrors delude us with an infinity of reflections of our vanity & shadows.

Others paralyze us with our terror & rage, feeding an empire that manufactures our fear into resignation.

But the empire has no roots & it’s toppling all around us. In this time everyone is called to take a stand. Everyone is called to be a leader.

To get beyond the wall of mirrors, the final challenge is to pass through a tiny door. To do this, we must make ourselves very, very small. To be very humble. Then we must burrow down into the Earth, where indigenous consciousness lives. On the other side is a clear pond.

There, for the first time, we’ll be able to see our true reflection.
In this Time of No Time, they say, we can go in any direction we want—by dreaming it. Our dreaming can shift the course of the world.

It’s going to be a long and winding trek across generations.

We’re already making some of the pathways others can walk toward our many dreams. Countless more dreamers will blaze luminous new trails.
The dreams are already within us. One day, may we awaken to find ourselves living in our wildest dreams.
~ Kenny Ausubel