Seeking OneEarth Progress

“Seeking OneEarth Progress”
a presentation by LeeVan Ham
at the “Pastor’s Forum,” hosted by Tony Wolfe, pastor
Westminster Church
San Diego, CA
April 27, 2014
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Sunday, April 27, 2014

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Presentation Purpose: To deepen conversations and make
stronger choices on the major challenge our species has
yet faced, namely, sustaining the inhabitability of
Earth in the 21st century, using my book ...
This is a presentation of the OneEarth Project
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The Book Wades into the Crisis
in order ...
• To know the content of the MultiEarth
worldview that has driven the human civilization project.
• To feel our devotion to and the allure of
the MultiEarth worldview and its mythology which
keeps us so enchanted.
• To identify the consciousness attracting us to
MultiEarth Progress even though it deﬁes Nature’s
carefully developed, abundant ecosystems that skillfully
spawn and sustain life within balance.
• To break out of the MultiEarth illusion that
holds us so we can work on solutions in a new paradigm.
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Research & First-Hand Experience
“Blinded by Progress is an eye-opening look at our current
economic and social system that is both heart-centered and
intellectually accurate. It’s one-of-a-kind perspective, based on
deep research as well as ﬁrst-hand experience,
takes the reader quickly to the very foundation of what is
wrong with our current world situation in order to ﬁx it.”
Nikki Lyn Pugh
Published author and journalist

2011 USD Women Peacemaker Project Selected Peace Writer
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Book Subtitle:
Breaking Out of the Illusion That
Holds Us
• The illusion encourages...
• ... a civilization bigger than Creation
• ... immaturity of consciousness focused on ego-centered
identity and achievements
• ... spirituality of The Market and Growth
• The illusion lacks...
• ... the will to shape a civilization which ﬁts our one
beautifully evolved planet
• ... maturity of consciousness which would help us take our
place within Creation
• ... spirituality that is Earth and Spirit centered
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MultiEarth Progress is linear, always looking to
advance, ascend, and grow. But as it moves onward
and upward, it requires many planets—an illusionary
trap in its worldview.
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“System thinker LeeVan Ham has brought decades of reﬂecting
about the dynamics of our predicament and gifted us with this
book. ... Blinded by Progress is our wake up manual, our guide to
deprogramming ourselves from the limitations of
MultiEarth vision.”

Chuck Collins
Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies
Author of several books on wealth inequality
and the transition to a new economy.
We Need to Deprogram Ourselves from the
MultiEarth Worldview
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MultiEarth vs. OneEarth
Antagonism Spans 12 Millennia
• Homo sapiens have been on Earth for 200,000 years,
living OneEarth practices until the end of the last Ice
Age.
• Holocene Epoch began 10,000 BCE as climate stabilized.
Settled agriculture, specialization of skills, and cities
evolved, then accelerated by 5000 BCE; even more so
with intro of money in 8th century BCE; industrialization
(18th century CE) brought Anthropocene Epoch.
• In this context, MultiEarth Progress continues “to
improve life” in the Civilization Project. BUT!,
“civilizing” Nature/Creation has proved to be
antagonistic to Eden.
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Section One
Unpacks the MultiEarth Complex
which is comprised of ...
1. Oversized ecological footprints—what size
is yours?

2.A worldview bigger than our planetary

home, but ﬁlled with improvements.

3.A mythology that describes its sacred

origins and offers continuing support via a

pantheon of gods.
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MultiEarth vs. OneEarth Antagonism
in Cain-Abel Myth & all the Bible
• East of Eden, John Steinbeck’s novel, portrays the crises
present in the Civilization Project.
• Genesis is an anthology of OneEarth stories
protesting the MultiEarth complex.
• The bible portrays a dialogue between spirituality that
is Earth-centered and that which centers in monarchy,
law, and other inventions of the civilization project.
• Jesus is a OneEarther; “Christ” is the divine consciousness
that breaks out of illusion and moves OneEarth
practice from impossible to inevitable—a true
possibility for humanity.
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Section Two
Describes Five BIG MultiEarth Practices
that Hold Us in Illusion
1. Giving primary religious devotion to economics
2. Creating economic frankensteins
3. Shrinking the treasure of humanness
4. Disguising corporatocracy as democracy
5. Neglecting population and species imbalance
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#1-Giving Primary Religious
Devotion to Economics
• Discovering the theology of The Market, ... I have come to
wonder whether the real clash of religions (or even of
civilizations) may be going on unnoticed. I am beginning to
think that for all the religions of the world, however they may
differ from one another, the religion of The Market has
become the most formidable rival, the more so because it is
rarely recognized as religion. —Harvey Cox, Professor of
Divinity at Harvard (retired)
• [It is] apparent that the Market is becoming the ﬁrst truly
world religion, binding all corners of the globe more and more
tightly into a worldview and set of values whose religious role
we overlook only because we insist on seeing them as
‘secular.’—David Loy, authorized teacher in Sanbo Kyodan Zen Buddhism
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#2-Creating Economic Frankensteins
• The men who run the global corporations are the ﬁrst in history
with the organization, technology, money, and ideology to make a
credible try at managing the world as an integrated economic
unit....What they are demanding in essence is the right to
transcend the nation-state and, in the process, transform it.—
Richard Barnett & Ronald Muller, authors of Global Reach:The Power of the MultiNational
Corporation
• Question: Are “corporate persons” emotionally
healthy and mature?
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#3-Shrinking the Treasure of
Humanness
• While corporations accrue attributes morphing them into
“corporate persons,” people are losing attributes belonging
to mature humans.
• MultiEarth shrinks (dehumanizes) us to be ...
• consumers instead of stewards and providers
• technical units instead of employees or human
resources
• forgetters of all but the ofﬁcial story instead of
remembers of truth
• Our vulnerability to MultiEarth practices does not lie in our
humanness, but in the restriction of it.
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#4-Disguising Corporatocracy as
Democracy
• U.S. exceptionalism! Superpowers claiming to be
democracies are not morally superior to other
superpowers.
• Middle class! Corporatocracies primarily redistribute
upward; only secondarily foster a middle class.
• Prosperity! Democracies cannot effect endless prosperity
by collaborating with corporate controlled “free” markets.
• Constitutional democracy! Elections and legislatures
serve corporations instead of constitutional democracy.
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Illusions that Corporatocracy promotes belief in:

From Our Folly of “Me,”
Moving to “We”

“Lee has written a book that is a hair-on-ﬁre call to action

to free ourselves from our folly of looking at Me

and moving us to We ... Pronto.”
Will Marre
Founder,The American Dream Project
Author: How to Change theWorld and Be Home for Dinner; and
Your Dreams on Fire
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Explosion of a Single Species
Has Created Great Imbalances
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#5-Neglecting Population and
Species Imbalance
• “One species is rendering the planet unsuitable for the
lives of hundreds of thousands of species, very possibly
including itself.” —Milton Saier, biologist, UCSD (Saier estimates extinction
rate of known species at 8,000/yr.)
• Which Question? (1) How many humans can Earth
sustain? (2) How many humans and other species can
inhabit Earth in a life-sustaining balance? David Pimental, Cornell
University answers 2 billion; Ecological Footprint Network says 5 billion.
• “Biological diversity” introduced to science as essential
by Thomas Lovejoy, 1980: “Each species is a unique set
of solutions to a speciﬁc set of biological problems,
equivalent not to a book but to a series of volumes.”
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“‘El mundo que queremos es uno donde quepan muchos
mundos’—‘We want a world where many worlds can coexist.’
These words spoken by the Maya Indigenous people in
resistance add color and meaning to the important and timely
message of this book....This book is a must read for people and
communities committed to collectively raise consciousness. It is a
guide in creating concrete steps toward being
responsible citizens of one earth.”
Marco Tavanti
Int’l Sustainable Development,
DePaul University
Linking Indigenous People in Resistance to
Our Being Responsible Citizens of OneEarth
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Courage to break out of illusion!
Earth is now the primary
whistleblower.
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OneEarth Progress moves in rhythm with Nature’s
circling, spiraling patterns that evolve consciousness
and abundance.
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We Might Have Taken Many Paths That Would Have
Led to a Better World Than the One We Inhabit
“Blinded by Progress is a work of keen observation, a great deal of
scholarship and an abiding care for living beings. There were
many paths that we might have taken in the past that
would have led to a better world than the one we
inhabit. LeeVan Ham’s writing delineates a path going forward
that does not repeat the illusions of progress. I hope it opens many
eyes.”
Paul Hawken
Entrepreneur, environmentalist
Author of books: Natural Capitalism; The Ecology of Commerce; Blessed Unrest
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“Blinded by Progress ... is a clear and powerful message that
the author does not dilute with checklists of minor
feel-good actions we can take on our own. Instead,Van Ham
dares to call us ALL to nothing less than a radical change of
consciousness, breaking through illusions of our dominant
MultiEarth economy in order to embrace the alternative
OneEarthism. And contrary to what many claim, there ARE real
alternatives.”

Barry Shelley
Political economist; Global Agriculture and
Climate Change Advisor, Oxfam America
We Must Not Dilute the Message with
Minor Feel-Good Actions
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Read!

Act!
Reflect!
• Calculate your ecological footprint; then bring it
into conversations seeking to fit with Earth’s
abundance
• Practice identifying MultiEarth and OneEarth
ways of thinking and living.
• Resacralize what MultiEarth commodifies;
practice seeing the sacred in all things which is to
see wholeness. 24
$
LeeVanHam
Breaking Out of the Illusion that Holds Us
Blinded
by Progress

The key word for John Steinbeck in his
East of Eden
is the last word in Blinded by Progress:
“Timshel”
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Seeking OneEarth Progress

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