​The Living Earth Movement

learning from starlings

Living Earth Movement

One of the Cobb Institute's most important partners is the Living Earth Movement. The movement, in which John Cobb plays a crucial role, invites us to learn from our more-than-human relatives, starlings for example, so that we might cooperate with one another, internationally, as starlings do when they fly together, swirling and swaying. Think of China and the United States. Might we, too, swirl and sway together? 

"The mission of the Living Earth Movement is twofold. The short-term priority is to get the U.S. and China ​to cooperate for the sake of all life on this planet. Without their full and joint participation, the necessary changes will not be made in time. However, with their joint leadership, virtually all nations will follow. The second and equally important priority is to promote the foundations for a new kind of civilization in which humans would learn to value and cooperate with the rest of the ecosphere. We need a world in which humans understand themselves as part of a living earth community. We call this an ecological civilization."

60,000 Starlings in Flight
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What is an Ecological Civilization?
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God as a Sky-Like Mind
​in whom all starlings fly
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The Cobb Institute for Process and Practice speaks of fourteen (yes, fourteen) transformations needed in our world today. One of them is to shift “from a human-centered world to an eco-centered world.” In such a world we humans understand ourselves as within, not apart from, the larger web of life.

Another is to shift “from mutual defensiveness to mutual support.”  What does support mean? It means taking care of, and cooperating with, one another, like the starlings in murmuration. There is a joy and creativity in the cooperation that cannot be known otherwise. 

Support also means taking care of, and cooperating with, the more-than-human world. One way that we can take care of the more than human world is to approach other living beings (plants, animals, and microorganisms) as elders from whom we can learn. Learning from them is Biomicry.

Indeed, from the perspective of process theology, even the Soul of the universe, even God, is an Elder from whom we can learn.  Not an elder in the sense of being an old man or woman, or even an old albatross or old sea turtle, but rather a living whole that is older than than the big bang yet ever fresh and ever new. As we learn to cooperate with one another and cooperate with the earth, we cooperate with the divine Elder in whose life the universe lives and moves and has its being. This Elder is the living whole in who all starlings fly. Our task as humans is to learn to fly, to cooperate, along with the starlings.

​Biomicry as an Eco-Civ Practice
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"Biomimicry seeks to emulate the time-tested adaptive strategies of many species of plants, animals and microorganisms to transform how we live on this planet. Janine Benyus of the Biomimicry Guild celebrates the newest ancient ideas bubbling up in the natural sciences, illuminating how evolution's wisdom can help us design benign, life-enhancing technologies while inspiring us to protect Earth's biodiversity."

Notes on a Theology of Biomicry
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A Worldwide Murmuring

A flock of starlings in flight is called a murmuration. The starlings murmur to each other by the flapping of their wings, providing guidance as they seek food and avoid predators. 

The starlings are our elders in the spirituality of cooperation. They are a spiritual pioneer in the evolution of consciousness. Certainly, their spirituality is more than individualized self-preoccupation. It is more democratic and jazz-like in spirit, filled with variegated harmonies relative to shifting winds. In their flying they form an open society of creative collaboration. 

Can we learn from them? Can we evolve into open societies in an open world, where people share information and attitudes of respect and care? Can we enter a human version of starling consciousness? 

We may not have wings to flap, but we can develop winglike technologies -- the Internet, for example -- which help us evolve into a worldwide community of respect and care. And, who knows, even the world religions can help. The religions can highlight their teachings of compassion and the technologies can be mediators of such compassion. Such is the hope of the Charter for Compassion.  In any case, it all begins with murmuring: that is, with communicating feelings of care and respect to one another in ways that offer mutual guidance. 

Divine Murmuring

Murmuring is a low continuous sound such as we hear in a brook or wind or trees. From a process perspective even the Soul of the universe murmurs.

The Soul is the encompassing context of galaxies and stars: the womb-like receptacle for everything that happens in the universe. In this sense the Soul transcends us, not as a monarchical ruler overseeing his territory but as a wider Wisdom in which we are small but included.

And the Soul is also a still small voice within us, beckoning us to realize our potential for wisdom, compassion, and creativity. Even as the Soul transcends the Soul is also immanent within us as our innermost lure toward fulfillment. We murmur best when we respond to the Soul's beckoning by living with respect and care for one another, other animals, and the earth.

The Soul of the universe does not require flattery to be effective in life. The Soul is not especially interested in being worshipped. But the very life of the Soul can be enriched by our living with respect and care for the community of life. Our love is the Soul's glorification. Our respect is divine pleasure. 

Innovation

This respect can be active as well as receptive. We live with respect when we revere nature's wonders. And we live with respect when we creatively respond through innovation: that is, when we create things for the sake of the common good of the world. 

In science today innovative activity of this sort is called biomimicry. It is continually active and dynamic, employing many kinds of intelligence: mathematical-logical, verbal-linguistic,visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, for example. But it is also a form of prayer. It is a way of being with the natural world in a spirit of creative rapport. In process theology even science is a form of listening.

The outcomes of biomicry are manifold and can take many forms: green buildings, green chemistry, healthy villages, creative friendships, acts of love, acts of justice. As humans enter biomimicry, we produce tangible outcomes which can be measured according to empirical standards, but we also create an affective atmosphere, a culture, of creativity and respect. We create a low, continuous sound of our own. A subjective murmuring.

Subjective Forms

The philosopher Whitehead speaks of shared moods as subjective forms.

Objective forms are items of perception which we can see with our eyes and touch with our hands. They are the subject matter of the natural and social sciences, and they are also the domain of architecture, design, manufacturing, and engineering. Janine Benyus provides twelve examples of sustainable objective forms in the video called "12 Sustainable Designes." 

Subjective forms are things we and other animals feel. from inside our own skins, as we dwell within the worlds of objective form. They include pleasures and pains, hopes, and fears, desires and longings, memories and motivations, emotions and attitudes. Subjective forms are the subject matter of the humanities, cognitive ethology, and the science of consciousness. 

Laughter and Music

Subjective forms have a private side, but they can be expressed in objective ways. They can be communicated. For example, you hear subjective forms in the laughter of the women after they watch the starlings in the video at the top. 

Music is especially effective at communicating subjective forms, and this is part of its appeal in human life. It is an acoustic externalization, an outward expression, of subjective forms. Music is what feelings sound like.

Intersubjectivity

Music is not alone in its capacity to communicate forms. Subjective forms can be communicated in myriad ways: artistic, religious, political, economic, linguistic, and imagistic. By these means we human share subjective states. We are not skin-encapsulated egos cut off from each other and other animals; instead, we are porous cells in a web of intersubjectivity.

At least this is what process theologians propose. We feel one another's feelings, both consciously and unconsciously, and form communities of intersubjectivity. A community is an inter-subjective network in which information is shared and, more deeply, moods are shared. Moods are information, too. They tell us what other living beings are feeling. 

Whitehead proposes that the whole universe is a network of feeling. Human feeling is a sophisticated expression of, not an exception to, the very kinds of feelings that are found in other animals and within the very depths of matter. Ultimately, thinks Whitehead, energy is a form of feeling and feeling is a form of energy.

Back to Starlings

How, then, might we humans communicate with one another in respectful ways? How might we share feelings at a global level? How might we murmur?

The internet can help. This very website – Open Horizons -- is a small attempt to share feelings of respect and care for the community of life.

But, in the spirit of Don Tapscott in the TED talk below, we best begin with starlings. He takes the communicative powers of starlings as an example of the creative collaboration the world needs today.

An Open World

An open world is one in which citizens in various nations enjoy the fruits of collaboration, transparency, freedom, and a sharing of gifts. In its openness it has moved beyond nationalist idolatries toward transnational cooperation. It has a freedom to it. Its boundaries are porous. Jesus called it the basilea theou.

In his TED talk called Four Principles for an Open World Tapscott discusses the four traits of an open society.   He is especially interested in the role that technology and the Internet might play in helping create such a world. He is what you might call a technological optimist. He believes, tragedies to the contrary, that the arc of human history is, or can be, a positive arc, and that the Internet can play a positive role. Tapscott points out that Martin Luther saw the printing press as an expression of divine grace because it made possible a spreading of the word of God. Tapscott presents the Internet as a parallel source of divine grace.

Technology

In this website one of our advisors, John B. Cobb, Jr., points in a similar direction in Ten Ideas for Saving the Planet.  He is not the technological optimist that Tapscott is. We might better call him a technological neutralist.

A technological neutralist is one who believes that technologies such as the Internet have both constructive and destructive possibilities, often present simultaneously. Nevertheless, Cobb proposes that, in conjunction with other factors, modern technology can indeed help us move toward a more just and sustainable way of living in the world. 

His tenth idea is that the world is, can become, a community of communities of communities in which people work together to build sustainable communities and avoid self-destruction. 

Cobb is quite serious about our possibilities for self-destruction. Already we have destroyed too much. Our need, he says, is to balance technological consciousness with planetary consciousness, which includes an appreciation of the organic side of life.

In our time, the web of life on earth is not simply an issue among issues but rather than context for all issues. For Cobb, it is not enough that we fall in love with machines. We must fall in love with life, too.

The falling in love is not mere sentiment. It involves a sense of wonder combined with a willingness to think clearly, critically, and imaginatively about the state of the world.

Such thinking, like biomimicry itself, is a form of prayer. To pray, a person may or may not believe in God. All she needs to do is to look around, look up, look down, in  welcoming spirit, hospitable to the countless revelations presented to us in the more than human world. That is prayer.

An Open World for the Open Sky
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