The Ecozoic Way: A New Learning Journey on Substack

Thank you to all those who joined our new Substack publication, The House of Life, last month! In recent weeks, we have been setting the stage for Ecozoic inquiry through explorations of several foundational topics: cosmology, consciousness, and Thomas Berry’s conceptualization of the Great Work of our time.

This week, we are pleased to announce the start of a new weekly series: The Ecozoic Way.

Over the coming weeks, we will examine the dynamics of economic-industrial societies and the invitation to move toward ecological-cultural societies through the work of authors whose ideas have been foundational to CES’s vision of a more life-enhancing human presence on Earth.

To join this Ecozoic learning journey, simply follow this link to our Substack, enter your email address, and click “subscribe.”

Inspired by The Ecozoic Way, a 2018 volume of The Ecozoic Journal, this series will draw on twenty “key books” and six “foundational books” that have helped shape CES’s mission. Each of these seminal thinkers has, in their own way, provided a window into what a more flourishing human presence in harmony with the whole Earth community of life may look like — and the shifts required to move in such a direction. We will also take small detours along the way to hear from other Ecozoic voices.

We encourage you to share your reactions in the comments section on Substack so that this series might become a shared learning process for us all.

For a sense of what’s to come, here’s an excerpt from the introduction to this week’s essay on Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation:

We begin the series by exploring two fundamental inversions observed by key authors in the transformations associated with industrial civilization and the modern period. As CES founder Herman Greene notes in his essay below, historically, the economy was subordinate to society; in the modern period, society became subordinate to the economy. Our next two posts, on the work of Karl Polanyi and D. Paul Schafer, examine this social inversion. Similarly, civilizations were historically based on and defined by humanistic values, whereas in the modern period materialistic concerns — undergirded by scientific naturalism — became primary, representing a cultural inversion. This cultural inversion provides the context for the work of Alfred North Whitehead and E. Maynard Adams to follow soon. Herman points out in his introduction that “both of these inversions resulted in a devaluation of nature and the degradation of nature. . . . These inversions also debased humans.”

Read more of today’s post here.

We hope to see you there!