The Empire Strikes Out

EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece is adapted from Kenny Ausubel's opening remarks to the 2003 Bioneers Conference, which takes place Oct. 17-19 in San Rafael, Calif. Kenny founded Bioneers in 1990.

Speaking once at the Bioneers conference, Paul Hawken re-framed the famous defining image from the movie 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind.' As you may recall, while the horizon fills with a flotilla of space ships, the earthbound scientists are feverishly fumbling to make contact with the E.T.'s. Awestruck, they try sending out a sequence of musical tones to establish communication. Meanwhile, unseen behind them rises the Mother Ship, dwarfing everything else, blotting out the entire horizon. The Mother Ship is the biology of the planet. The Mother Ship is the Mother Earth. And it is bigger than anything we can imagine.

That's about the size of it. For all the chatter about the Age of Information, what we are really entering is the Age of Biology.

We didn't invent nature. Nature invented us. Nature bats last, the saying goes, but even more importantly it's her playing field. We would be wise to learn the ground rules and how to play by them.

When I founded Bioneers in 1990, the impulse originated from my exposure to the work of biological pioneers searching to rediscover nature's own operating instructions. Their quest has been to glean what we might learn from four billion years of evolutionary intelligence and apply it in practical ways.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, what the bioneers are doing is mimicking nature in order to help nature heal and serve human ends harmlessly. In many cases their knowledge is prefigured by ancient indigenous science from First Peoples, the world's original bioneers. These are the true biotechnologies.

The great ecological play takes place in a food web that makes no waste. It's powered by a solar economy that neither mines the past nor mortgages the future. Some of its guiding principles are diversity, kinship, symbiosis, reciprocity and community. It's all alive. It's all intelligent. It's all connected. It's all relatives.

One of the beauties of biology is that its facts can become our metaphors. These underlying codes may also serve as inspiring parables for how as human beings we might organize a more just, humane and authentically sustainable society.

If there is a single story woven within these many stories, it's the grand tale of interdependence. Life is intimacy interconnected, and as a culture we've made a basic systems error to believe that we exist somehow separate from nature, or from one another. That illusion could prove fatal at this momentous cusp where our turbo-charged technologies and overwhelming numbers have given us, for the first time in history, the capacity to blow it on a planetary scale.

Today a globalized corporate empire is menacing the future of the entire biosphere. We all know that empires are castles made of sand that always crumble and fade away, but by the time this empire strikes out, the biological game could be all but over. Corporate globalization is killing off its host -- and ours -- mother Earth.

Gary Larsen once did a great cartoon that sums up the empire express. A ship is sinking, and a pack of dogs crowded into a lifeboat are watching it go down. The lead dog says to the others, "OK -- all those in favor of eating all the food all at once, raise your paws." That's economic globalization in a nutshell.

The real-world situation that's spontaneously combusting today is a perfect storm of extreme environmental degradation and rolling infrastructure collapse. It's by no means the first time this has happened. Previous civilizations bought the farm because of self-induced environmental catastrophe, but in the past the damage was localized.