Creative Ways to Transform Challenges:
Dealing With Global Challenges

Reflections on The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight  Robert Jones
 
Once in a while we all read a book that really speaks to us, that gives us a rush and makes us shout "YES!" Such a book for me is The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: Waking Up to Personal and Global Transformation (Mythical Books) by Thom Hartmann. The day after turning the last page I purchased ten copies to give to friends.
 
In this Information Age we are overwhelmed by an overload of facts, statistics and miscellaneous verbiage that typically leaves us glassy-eyed and likely depressed, unable to separate the wheat from the chaff. The beauty of this book is the way information is synthesized into a meaningful whole.
 
Most people seem discouraged about the kind of world their children and grandchildren will likely inherit but feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of the challenges. Indeed, the first half of the book is a chronicle of the seemingly insoluble problems of overpopulation, global warming, infectious diseases, destruction of the rain forests and the world's topsoil, pesticide poisoning, and other horrors.
 
For example:

1. Seventy five percent of the world's topsoil has been lost since the European discovery of the New World, a rate currently estimated at 300 tons a minute, worldwide.
    
   
2. Seventy two acres of rainforest are destroyed every minute, much of it so that cattle can be raised to satisfy the North American craving for fast-food hamburger.
    
   
3. The world's population increase adds the equivalent of the population of Los Angeles every three weeks. Our population is about six billion now and is expected to hit ten billion by 2030, 20 billion by 2070, and 80 billion by 21 50, at present rate of increase. Of course, these rates of increase are far beyond earth's carrying capacity.
    
   
4. Many infectious diseases, especially tuberculosis, are approaching run-away proportions.
    
   
5. The most optimistic assessments give the world's remaining oil supply (made by "ancient sunlight") as only forty-five years.
    
   

So will spaceship earth be able to survive? After his brilliant assessment of our problems the author does offer hope. But the hope is not a quick fix; it is too late for anodynes. Hartmann challenges each of us to act as if the success or failure of the human experiment is up to us, individually. The poverty of spirit and pandemic anomie everywhere prevalent are the natural fruits of the values of individuality, greed and domination that have brought us to our present predicament.
 
Lessons from Indigenous Cultures

To survive we need to learn from the few surviving indigenous cultures their life-affirming values of cooperation, respect for the earth, and personal responsibility. For example, one of the indigenous groups we destroyed in our westward march of Manifest Destiny, the Shoshone, had no word in their language for war! Similarly, we need to tell our children new stories that speak of the mystery and sacredness of all life and help them give birth to a world where our neighbors are truly loved as ourselves, and where nothing is "other" in the great chain of existence.
 
These ideas are not merely utopian. Contrary to the Social Darwinism that has brought us to the brink of destruction, there is increasing anthropological evidence that our human instincts are for cooperation and a longing for the divine. But as with young shoots, people become dysfunctional and violent in sick societies. Moreover, the new physics shows that we are connected to all things in the universe at the quantum level. Some of the new physics even suggests that the universe is made of consciousness and nothing else. The implication is that all of our thoughts and actions, including the reading of this review, influence everyone and everything in creation!
 
So this book is not an invitation to despair despite the chilling reminders of the challenges we face. What is to be done? How can we carry the burden of the world's problems in our hearts and still live joyfully and with hope?
 
What We Can Do
 
The author suggests it is the loss of the sense of the sacred that has brought us to our present predicament and it is by the rediscovery of the sacred at both the individual and societal levels that we find the clue that leads us from the labyrinth. We begin by assessing what we want in our lives. Is our present life-style leading to fulfillment and happiness or a materialistic dead-end? If the road signs are marked "dead-end" do we want to keep traveling that road? How can we simplify our lives and so increase our chances for self-discovery and a linking to the great mystery in us and above us? Thoreau said his chief wealth was to want but little. Are there materialistic sacred cows that should be sacrificed to one's goal of seeing the divine in all people, and all things? How, for example, would your life be freed by pulling the plug on the TV?
 
And in a society that has lost touch with the rhythms of the day, the night sky, and the earth, we need rituals in our daily lives. To best achieve this we need communities to give us a sense of belonging and commitment. Our present atomized life-styles, organized around the nuclear family, provide too limited a perspective for facing life's challenges. Bring back the tribe and do it joyfully! In communities we can better meet the inner call to one's own growth and the pollen path of beauty. And in communities we are supported in our attempts to heal the earth.
 
To these ends we strive to live more and more in the now, yes the now! This is it, folks. This is not a dry-run! Strive to create the beauty in your life that you wish for the world! The ocean is composed of individual drops. Each drop influences every other drop. We have a choice as to how to live. As Flip Wilson kept reminding us, "What you see is what you get!"
 
Two paths diverge: One leads to death and the other holds out the possibility of life, abundant and rich to the extent that we make it so. As the author suggests, "All (change) begins with one person understanding how things are, how they got this way, and that there are alternatives. Right now, that person is you, and then you can pass this understanding along to others, and they to others, and on and on..."

 
Want to be informed? Want to be challenged? Do yourself a favor and read The Last Days of Ancient Sunlight!
 
Robert Jones lives with his wife in Ashland, Oregon.

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