First Edition: March 2020, Second Edition: January 2022

ISBN: 978-1-7348121-4-5

Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain
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This is not only a ‘tell it like it is’ book about the perilous state we Earthlings find ourselves in at this point in time, it is also a rallying cry. When something has gone dreadfully wrong, one of the ways we protect ourselves is to go into denial. But when the shield of denial starts to crack, there is nothing for it but to turn and face into the fear and the sorrow, grieve and then start tackling what needs to be fixed. That is the point humanity has reached. For, as Francis Weller points out in his eloquent preface:

Something is stirring in the depths of the times. Our collective denial appears to be cracking. We can no longer deny the fact that the world is radically changing. We sense in our bones the breakdowns occurring and, along with it, our hearts feel weighted with grief. It may be our shared sorrows, stirred by our love of this singular, irreplaceable planet, that will ultimately activate our communal commitment to respond to the rampant denigration of the world.

In the first part of this book, Elgin points out some of the truths we have to face. For example, we have to face the fact that we can’t go back to any ‘good old days’ because they are gone for ever.

We don’t have much time because the speed of change is accelerating.

We can’t depend on new technologies alone to save us.

So if we don’t do a massive re-set – of just about everything – and succeed in bringing our collective human psyche out of adolescence and into maturity, our species will not survive. That is the bottom line.

He quotes the editors of the New Scientist:

“It will arguably be the largest project that humanity has ever undertaken — comparable to the two world wars, the Apollo program [to put a human on the moon], the cold war [with a nuclear arms race], the abolition of slavery [which included a civil war], the Manhattan project, the building of the railways and the rollout of sanitation and electrification, all in one. In other words, it will require us to strain every muscle of human ingenuity in the hope of a better future, if not for ourselves then at least for our descendants.”

In Part 2 of the book, Elgin outlines what he sees as three possible futures for humanity – extinction, authoritarianism or transformation  – and goes on to describe how and why each of these might come about and how they may look and feel – transformation, of course, being the one we would all choose. And in Part 3, he looks at the stages of transformation, seeing this difficult journey from where we are now to where we need to be as a vast, extended rite of passage.

Part 4 is where we get right down into the details. It is constructed around a set of choices that we as a community need to make if we are to survive the transition and transform. He calls these ‘Uplifts for a Transforming Future’.

This is a very important book – you might even call it a bible for our times – and I urge you to visit https://choosingearth.org/book/ and download the latest version in pdf format for free.