interview

WIE: Many of today's leading thinkers, futurists, scientists, and visionaries are warning us that the next twenty to thirty years will be a testing time for the human species, a time of evolutionary crisis that will entail great, and potentially even catastrophic, change. Could you please describe what you feel are the key factors precipitating this crisis? What will we be facing in the coming years?

DUANE ELGIN: What we're really facing is the convergence of a number of powerful trends-climate change, species extinction, the spread of poverty, and the growth in population. All of these factors could develop individually, but what's unique about our time is that the world has become a closed system. There's no place to escape, and all of these powerful forces are beginning to impinge upon one another and reinforce one another. Our situation is something like a set of rubber bands that you stretch out and out and out until they reach the limit of their elasticity, which is the breaking point of the system. My sense is that we still have a fair amount of elasticity in the world system. It's going to be another couple of decades until we reach the breaking point.

WIE: How would you respond to someone who said, "What crisis are you talking about? There may be a lot going on, but things aren't that bad. I'm sure we'll deal with it. No problem, we'll be okay." What would you say to that person to convince them that the situation is urgent and that we have to face it directly?

DE: Let's take a look at these trends one at a time. First of all, climate change. I think it's clear that, by itself, this could change the entire situation in the world. If you look, for example, at carbon dioxide levels, they are very closely correlated with temperature levels over thousands of years. The carbon dioxide levels have fluctuated between 170 and 300 parts per million for the last twenty million years. And we are now outside of that range. We are at nearly 380 parts per million in CO², which means that we have created a situation that's beyond what has existed for the last twenty million years, a period in which there have been enormous fluctuations in glaciation on one hand and global warming on the other. And we're still shooting out the roof in terms of the amount of CO2 we're putting into the atmosphere.

Now let's look, for example, at the Greenland ice cores and the way they indicate how quickly climate changes can occur. They show that the last great ice age, about 120,000 years ago, descended, scientists believe, in a period of two decades. It wasn't centuries; it was roughly twenty years. So we are creating a very critical situation. But my concern is not simply with warming and the oceans rising, but it's rather with changing weather patterns, precipitation patterns-how much rain and when. If it shifts radically, we will not be able to adapt global agriculture to respond to the new climate circumstances.

At the same time that climate change is under way, in the same twenty-year period, we're going to add roughly two to three billion people to the earth-that means the equivalent of another Los Angeles every month. We're going to be adding enormous numbers of people to the earth at the very time the climate is beginning to shift and make food growing more precarious. It is also estimated that, in terms of resources, 40% of the people in the world will not have access to enough water by the 2020s to grow their own food. Forty percent of the world will not have enough water to grow their own food. And most of those people are going to be in the poorest parts of the world, in developing countries where they have moved to mega-cities and are living in the slums.

We can then factor in other impacts, like species extinction. It's estimated that as many as 20% of all plant and animal species could be extinct in the next thirty years, and half could be extinct within the next hundred years. Now let's put that into even more specific terms. It's estimated that roughly 25% of all mammals are threatened with extinction, 12% of all bird species, 25% of all reptiles, and 30% of all fish; this is the World Conservation Union's recent report. We are beginning to tear at the fabric of the biosphere at the very time that we're stressing it with climate change, at the very time that we're stressing it further with population, at the very time that we're diminishing the availability of critical resources like water. And then we factor in a final force, and that is poverty, which is so extraordinarily massive in the world. I really had no idea until recently traveling in India and seeing the magnitude of it. In the United States, the poverty line is about $11 a day per person. If we cut that poverty line by three-quarters, and set it at $3 a day per person and ask what percentage of the world lives on less than $3 a day, it's 60% of the world! And that means that whether it's a pair of shoes or a book to read or glasses, aspirin, vitamins, etcetera-the basics of life that must be purchased at world market prices are not accessible to 60% of the world's population. But if you walk into the villages in India and Brazil, you see that even the poorest people have a television set. They are seeing, in living color, lifestyles that will never be accessible to them. And historically those are the ingredients for revolution.

So there we have what I call the adversity trends, and we could talk about many others: ozone depletion, ocean overfishing, deforestation, and on and on. And it's utterly clear that not only are these critical individual trends, but that, as you look at the dynamics of their convergence, we are facing an unprecedented whole-system crisis within the next few decades. Something powerful is going to begin happening at that point, and while right now we can turn away from this, in another twenty years a systems crisis will be an unyielding reality that we will have to deal with. And we will either deal with it by pulling together as a human family to produce what I would call an "evolutionary bounce"-or by pulling apart to produce an evolutionary crash. If we pull apart, it will be an evolutionary dark age.

WIE: In your book, you also mention several trends that potentially herald new opportunities for our collective evolution. What are those trends, and how do you see them impacting us in the near future?

DE: I feel that there are a number of equally powerful opportunity trends that are cooking away in the world that have the power to transform what could be an extraordinary evolutionary crash into an evolutionary bounce. The first is the power of perception, the capacity to see the universe as a living system. The second is the power of choice, the power to choose different ways of life. The third is the power of communication, the power to use these incredible tools of communication for purposes way beyond commerce. And the fourth is the power of love, the ability to bring a spirit of reconciliation into relationships of all kinds. We could speak about each of these, but collectively they are an extraordinary force for transformation in the world.

WIE: Could you give a brief overview of each one?

DE: First, there is the idea of a living universe. Science has traditionally regarded the universe as nonliving at its foundations, but it's extraordinary that now, at the frontiers of science, we're beginning to find out that the universe itself is functioning as if it were a living system. For example, the physics theory of nonlocality tells us that the universe is connected with itself, despite its enormous size. And physicists say that there are enormous amounts of energy at the foundations of the universe, the so-called zero-point energy. Also, consciousness appears to be present at every level of the universe, from the atomic scale (and the behavior of electrons that seem to have a mind of their own) on up through the human scale. So the universe has the properties of a living system; life exists within life. This is an amazing miracle, and as we discover this, I think that it is going to begin to shift who we think we are and what we think our life-journey is about. It's transformative. The idea and the experience of a living universe is a powerful recontextualization of who we think we are and where we think we're going.

The next opportunity trend is the emergence of simpler ways of living that put less stress on the earth. These lifestyles of simplicity are not so much driven by sacrifice as they are by a new sense of where satisfaction is to be found. What I see emerging in the world now is what I call the "garden of simplicity." There are some people who are practicing a more frugal simplicity by cutting back on their spending and decreasing the impact of their consumption on the earth. They're choosing to live simply, in Gandhi's words, so that others may simply live. Someone else may be practicing a "political simplicity," feeling that we have to organize our collective lives in a way that enables us to live lightly and sustainably on the earth-and that means changes in our transportation, education, media, and so on. There's also an approach that I call "soulful simplicity," which means approaching life as a meditation and cultivating our experience of intimate connection with all that exists.

The point is that there is a whole shift in mind-set now occurring. In the United States, for example, a conservative estimate is that about 10% of the American adult population, or twenty million people, are making a shift on the inside toward a more experiential spirituality and on the outside toward a more ecological approach to life. Taken together, these could transform the adversity trends into a great opportunity.

Opportunity trend number three is the communications revolution, and it is also a very powerful trend. We can already see it transforming the world. Whether we're going to use this for positive transformational purposes or whether it's going to use us and just transform the entire world into consumers, I don't know. It depends upon us as citizens to see that the power of these communications technologies is used for higher purposes.