THE WAY HOME

INTRODUCTION

“Art that expresses timeless wisdom has the potential to inspire humans to imagine living within moral, ethical, and natural constraints. Art that supports the building, or restoring, of resilient place-based cultures can help heal our wounds. Art is both inspirational and aspirational, it starts conversations, changes collective behaviors, and it can set us on a path towards redemption. Art that venerates our living blue and green planet can help remind us of the beauty, promise, and joy of once again thriving in a reenchanted world. This will not happen overnight, of course, but, as Jolene Rickard, a member of the Tuscarora Nation and a professor of art history at Cornell University says, “Art is anticipatory. It can generate an awareness of resilience and survival that can lead to a renewal of Indigenous space.’”

— Stephen Gorman

Decision Point

As the planet warms and ecosystems unravel, the industrialized world puts its faith in technological responses to our global predicament. But what if our crisis is not technological to begin with? Will these solutions solve it? We know nature is not a soulless machine composed of replaceable manufactured parts; it is a living organism; a set of complex, sacred relationships that have evolved over millions of years.

An integrated, living planet may sound like a new concept in our enlightened mechanistic and reductionist age, but it is not. Taoists, Buddhists, and indigenous cultures around the world have understood this for millennia. Indeed, many early societies possessed quite advanced technological knowledge. The difference between them and us is that they often chose not to use that knowledge. They understood that technological and material progress always comes at a price, and they were not always willing to pay it. They saw that those who controlled complex technologies possessed great power, and that powerful technologies in the wrong hands can lead to autocracy and to environmental and cultural disorder. Wisely saying ‘no’ to complex, autocratic technologies helped them avoid these progress traps and retain their egalitarian societies, personal freedoms, and sustainable lifeways. There is always a choice to be made.

Well, here we are at Decision Point.

An Engineering Challenge?

The planet is in a state of emergency. We face multiple cascading crises including climate change, mass extinction, biodiversity loss, desertification, rising sea levels, land and soil degradation, deforestation, ocean acidification, fisheries collapses, depleting aquifers, crop failures and food shortages, plastic and other chemical contamination of food chains, increasing cancer rates, zoonotic pandemics, mass migration, political instability, and resource wars, among other ills. Scientists at the Stockholm Resilience Center have been studying the effects of these multiple cascading crises on the ecological boundaries that set hard limits for maintaining our civilization and the ecological integrity of the Earth. Last September they announced that “Earth is now well outside the safe operating space for humanity.”

The popular response to our predicament is to treat it as an engineering challenge. This only worsens the situation because the institutions and corporations that benefit from this approach have great incentives to preserve the problems to which they claim to possess the solutions. Steps that could have an immediate positive effect are never taken. The engineering approach keeps us focused myopically on symptoms, not root causes, and keeps the way of life that wealthy, modern technological industrial societies currently experience viable for a few more years. As Nemonte Nenquimo, a Waorani leader of her Amazonian people says in an open letter to Western world leaders, “When you say that you are urgently looking for climate solutions, yet continue to build a world economy based on extraction and pollution, we know you are lying because we are the closest to the land, and the first to hear her cries.”

Technology, industry, and economic growth aren’t the best tools to solve the problems caused by technology, industry, and economic growth. They risk catastrophic levels of climate change and environmental destruction as they lock us in to energy and material-intensive solutions. They are the tools world leaders reach for when they acknowledge the failure of climate policy, but refuse to challenge the fundamental forces behind the failure. Our situation demands honesty, and a change of course. A truly coherent understanding of the global polycrisis requires a systems perspective. As Donella Meadows writes in Thinking In Systems: A Primer, “Addiction is finding a quick and dirty solution to the symptom of the problem, which prevents or distracts one from the harder and longer-term task of solving the real problem.” Solutions that do not tackle the underlying drivers of our predicament are exceedingly ill-advised and will only exacerbate it.

The Seductive Promise

Most of the solutions being put forward have serious adverse environmental and social consequences, but they make the seductive promise of zero waste, clean energy, and continued economic growth. Their implicit promise is that market-based approaches will always work. The ideas on offer to extend industrial society’s expiring fossil-fuel based lifespan involve tapping renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power through a massive buildout requiring intensive inputs of depleting non-renewable fossil fuels and non-renewable minerals; deploying global-scale geoengineering technologies to deflect solar radiation and capture carbon from the atmosphere; rapidly building more nuclear reactors and developing third and fourth-generation reactor technologies; and finally, unleashing the unknown and potentially fearsome powers of artificial intelligence (AI), which, according to a recent U.S. government report, could cause an “extinction-level threat to the human species.”

All of these technological responses to our predicament promise impressive economic growth, but none of them acknowledge that pursuing infinite growth on a planet of finite natural resources is impossible. As Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute says, “We are asking technology to solve problems that demand human moral intervention -- ones that require ethical decisions, behavior change, negotiation, and sacrifice. By mentally shifting the burden for solving our biggest problems onto technology, we are collectively making fundamental moral and tactical errors; moral, because we are abdicating our own human agency; tactical, because purely technological solutions are inadequate to these tasks.” Decade after decade we keep investing prodigious amounts of money and energy purportedly to solve problems, yet every time we end up creating much larger problems than we set out to solve in the first place. As Joseph tainter, anthropologist and author of The Collapse of Complex Societies explains, “In the evolution of a society, continued investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy yields a declining marginal return.”

Technological responses to our predicament treat nature as a soulless machine, not a living organism, and represent the triumph of the mechanical view of existence inspired by Descartes: the triumph of the machine over nature, the manufactured over the organic, the global over the local, the dictates of the centralized system over the hopes and aspirations of the individual and the community. Instead of being suggestions for saving the planet and stopping the destruction of the natural world, these technological solutions are proposals to temporarily save industrial civilization itself, and they undermine realistic attempts to change course by creating the comfortable illusion that experts wielding breakthrough technologies have everything under control.

A Disquieting Question

As Aldous Huxley proposed in Brave New World Revisited, “At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?” Testifying before the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954, Robert Oppenheimer answered this question when he said, “It is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

It’s interesting to contemplate that every technological innovation that has led us to this crisis point — the internal combustion engine, the coal fired power plant, forever toxic chemicals, splitting atoms — started out as someone’s brilliant idea to make life better for all. And yet, when we look beyond the immediate benefits of these technologies, we discover an abundance of unintended and often counterproductive consequences.

Jevons Paradox

Today, many technological optimists believe that AI will lead to efficiency increases that will help solve climate change. Unfortunately, Jevons Paradox (which posits that improvements in efficiency, and the lower costs they bring, always lead to an overall increase in resource consumption and pollution rather than a decrease) suggests that AI’s growing demand for constructing innumerable 200,000 square-foot data centers that each consume as much energy as small cities of 30,000 homes will actually result in a dramatic upsurge in energy and material consumption and waste production. AI data centers already use more electricity than most countries, and we are in the very early stages of AI development.

Rather than a solution, AI is compromising any attempts to rein in rising temperatures. According to Google’s latest environmental report, in 2023 the company’s greenhouse gas emissions were 48 percent higher than in 2019, a rapid rise due to the increasing amount of energy needed by its data centers — consumption supercharged by the explosive growth of AI.

Globally, there are some 8,000 new AI data centers either built or in various stages of construction. When operational they will have the combined need to consume as much electricity as Australia uses each year. In just the next decade, global energy consumption by new AI data centers wil be equivalent to how much electricity India, the world’s most populous country, uses each year. In the United States, electricity demand is expected to grow by 40 percent over the next two decades. Boston Consulting Group estimates energy demand for data centers will rise 15 to 20 percent every year through 2030, when they are expected to consume 16 percent of total U.S. power — which is equivalent to the power used by two-thirds of homes in the United States.

This voracious demand will only be met by consuming unimaginably vast quantities of energy, raw materials, and open space; and by wreaking unfathomable destruction upon the natural world.

A Different Interpretation

Those civilizations that viewed power and technology with healthy suspicion understood the delicate relationship between culture and the natural world, and they maintained their sacred order by rejecting actions and technologies that threatened it. But in the West we became captivated by powerful, complex technologies, and for many of us the real, natural world no longer holds any wonder, magic, or mystery. Changing the world through the application of increasingly powerful technologies, and freeing ourselves from both cultural and natural restraints became, and remains, the objective. Our cultural project became the control and eventual replacement of nature with machines of our own design.

This understanding leads to a very different interpretation of our predicament — that the root cause of the systemic planetary emergency is a crisis of culture, spirit, and imagination. Why do we members of modern industrial society believe that everything in Nature is there simply for us to exploit, degrade, deplete, and excrete?

The Myth Of The Frontier

From the beginning of European colonization, the land and natural resources of the North American continent seemed inexhaustible. And despite overwhelming evidence that this is no longer the case, the myth lives on.

Throughout this nation’s history, American culture has been shaped by the myth of the frontier — the belief that everything is a commodity to be bought and sold; that indigenous people standing in the way of “progress” must be be dispossessed, assimilated, and stripped of their resources; that the gratification of our material desires is a birthright; that meaning, purpose, and fulfillment are to be found in the marketplace; that neither progress nor technology have downsides; and that there are no limits to nature’s bounty, nor to its capacity to absorb our waste. The myth of the frontier — supercharged by the transformative, God-like power of abundant low-cost energy and materials — symbolized the liberation of the individual from both natural and cultural restrictions. Through first colonialism and now neocolonialism and globalism, the American empire of technology, commerce, language, and global homogenisation has been exported, imposed on exploited peoples, and adopted throughout much of the world.

Blind faith in this foundational myth has led us to create the richest, most complex civilization the planet has ever seen — and today it is still over 80 percent powered by fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are the pillars of the modern global economy. Without them the economy contracts and then eventually stops. We are, in the words of Imre Szeman, Director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability at the University of Toronto Scarborough, a “petroculture.”

A Civilizational Inflection Point

The concentrated power of fossil fuels has convinced us to ignore non-negotiable biophysical limits and to overshoot what our ecosystems can bear. As a result, all of the finite resources that enriched us, including oil, are depleting — even as our demand for them grows exponentially. Living out our cultural paradigm as frontiersmen on a depleting frontier we are crashing into the limits to growth, and yet that collision remains the biggest and most under-reported story in human history because it creates cognitive dissonance. After all, exploiting the wealth of the ever-expanding frontier enriched us beyond the imaginations of earlier emperors and monarchs. Telling this story conflicts not only with our history to this point, but also with the very basis of our cultural values system and with our firm belief that there is always a technological solution — requiring no significant sacrifice on our part — to every problem we face.

“People would rather believe than know,” wrote the great Harvard sociobiologist E.O. Wilson. Still, some of us sense that the future isn’t what it used to be, that things are closing in around us, that we are at a civilizational inflection point. What changed? When did it change? Life has certainly shifted somehow, and it’s important to recognize this. Cultural scouts at the vanguard are reporting that the system we were raised to believe in is failing. Their dispatches indicate that we are now completely dependent in all areas of our lives upon depleting natural resources, and also upon fragile and highly complex internet technologies we do not understand and that are controlled by a handful of giant corporations owned by a tiny cohort of billionaires guided by their own narrow priorities.

Increasingly unmoored, we feel a growing sense of precarity, and some of us are losing faith in the stories we were taught from an early age. One sobering metric of change is that for the first time in history, American lifespans are in decline. But even this grim statistic isn’t shared equally across our divided society. A recent Brookings Institution study found that college-educated Americans live on average 8.5 years longer than those without a college degree. Each year hundreds of thousands of American lives are lost to deaths of despair — from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism — because the vast majority of people live in a world that is painfully mismatched with the mythology of perpetual progress. This is not the way things were supposed to play out. We are no longer “new pioneers on that New Frontier,” as John F. Kennedy exhorted us during the Cold War as we sought new frontiers in southeast Asia and in space. Changing course will require shedding once and for all the illusions embodied in the American frontier myth.

“There Is No Alternative”

We do not understand our new circumstances, nor do we grasp that inescapable consequences will arise from these emergent circumstances. We desperately hold on to our beliefs in the face of twenty-first century realities. Historian Frederick jackson Turner declared the frontier closed in 1893, but the American people, and especially American politicians, remain in its thrall. And so we dismiss the divergence between myth and reality as nothing but annoying noise that our modern industrial culture does not want to hear or acknowledge. We make no place for complexity in our increasingly complex global environment. It is simply beyond our understanding that the root causes of our polycrisis are the very things that we exalt as our greatest triumphs. These celebrated achievements include the complex technologies, giant industries, robust economic growth, and high living standards enjoyed for a brief moment in time by a small minority of humans who chose the technological and industrial way of knowing and being that is the petroculture’s response to the way it conceives of existence.

And as we are highly social primates, to express doubts about how our culture conceives of reality carries the risk of exclusion from the group, and so few dare to speak up. Also, normalcy bias prevails — without powerful new narratives an alternative to our current system is essentially unimaginable. As we continue to make no measurable progress towards addressing the multiple cascading crises we face, we seem trapped in a remorseless Twilight Zone system that thwarts all attempts to fundamentally change it. As Margaret Thatcher famously said, “There is no alternative.”

Step Outside

Many of us cannot, or will not, acknowledge the danger at our doorstep. We have heard the cultural scouts’ warnings but even then our brains, with their fierce loyalty to the status quo, resist. We cannot bear to look at those things that challenge our fundamental understanding of the world and our current place in it. As a result, we are locked in a desperate struggle to save the planet, and ourselves, that we can neither articulate nor truly understand. We are in denial about what we have done and where we are headed. Our culture is inadequate to deal with the realities of the planetary emergency because it cannot allow itself to acknowledge its root causes and systemic nature.

This is why stepping outside the limited, ethnocentric perspective of modern Western industrial society allows us to perceive dimensions of reality we have become blind to. For many modern, thriving, and dynamic indigenous and place-based cultures, our unfolding environmental emergency cannot be summed up as a crisis of failed policies; and it will not be solved by politicians, scientists, economists, techno-utopians, investors, billionaires, corporations, or governments. Rather, our perilous predicament will only be resolved when we realize that it is the result of our cultural crisis — a tragedy produced by a flawed belief in our birthright to exploit a seemingly ever-expanding frontier. We are still blindsided by this myth despite the overwhelming evidence that the frontier is closed, that the laws of biology, geology, and physics are non-negotiable, that our cultural response to our environment is maladaptive, and that there is little left to exploit.

To suggest that a reassessment of our present trajectory is in order would be one of the greatest understatements of all time.

A New Cultural Narrative And a New Conciousness

The abundance of fossil fuels over the last 150 years gave birth to our petroculture and tricked us into believing that our planet is boundless and that individual self-interest and immediate gratification is the solution to all of our problems. As a result of following this myth our entire way of life depends on endless growth, so it is vital that we not only believe the myth, but that we actively promote it. If we do not grow our economy in perpetuity it will collapse. There is no alternative.

Yet view our predicament from the perspective of other cultures that do not share the frontier myth or our obsession with growth, and it becomes increasingly clear that there is indeed an alternative, and that our existential plight shouts out for a new narrative and for united action based upon ecological literacy, an understanding that the earth is finite, and a rekindled sense of awe and respect for the planet and each other. By recognizing the science of physical limits, and by adopting cultural and spiritual guidelines that encourage us to live cooperatively within nature’s boundaries, we can respond intelligently to our predicament by rejecting the seductive myth that currently guides us. This will allow us to reestablish a sense of who we are, where we are, and what we’re doing here. We can kindle a new cultural narrative to follow into the future.

So, how do we create a new cultural narrative? It’s hard work to change a familiar old story, especially when the society around you affirms it at every turn. But there is one proven way. Historically, one of the most important catalysts for change has been our cultural expressions including music, literature, and art. Cultural expressions have a strong influence on our emotions, inspire us to take action, and shape our belief systems, ideologies, and collective perceptions of reality. Music, words, and images have tremendous power. They can change hearts and minds. They can even change the course of history. Their creators can shape the stories that guide people through their lives. Indeed, they are perhaps the only things that can.

The Power of Art

Art that expresses timeless wisdom has the potential to inspire humans to imagine living within moral, ethical, and natural constraints. Art that supports the building, or restoring, of resilient place-based cultures can help heal our wounds. Art is both inspirational and aspirational, it starts conversations, changes collective behaviors, and it can set us on a path towards redemption. Art that venerates our living blue and green planet can help remind us of the beauty, promise, and joy of once again thriving in a reenchanted world. This will not happen overnight, of course, but, as Jolene Rickard, a member of the Tuscarora Nation and a professor of art history at Cornell University says, “Art is anticipatory. It can generate an awareness of resilience and survival that can lead to a renewal of Indigenous space.”

The photographs in The Way Home show us the results of modernity’s turn away from these aspirations; and then they take us on a revealing journey, introducing us to two very different peoples — Inuit and Sami — from two different cultures and continents, and they show us success stories we might never otherwise see. Inuit are an Indigenous people of arctic and subarctic North America; Sami are a Northern European Indigenous people of arctic and subarctic Scandinavia and Russia. Both cultures are from the Global North, the hemisphere more commonly associated in the popular imagination with equality and respect for diversity, but they share many challenges associated in the media mostly with cultures from the Global South, including fresh rounds of environmentally and culturally destructive neocolonialism. Resisting these incursions into their homelands, Inuit and Sami share similar strategies for living sustainably on a planet of finite resources.

There Are No Perfect Societies, But…

There is no such thing as a perfect society, and there has never been a human culture that is anything but flawed, and surely Inuit and Sami are no exceptions. The legacy of conquest, colonialism, globalism, and extraction have taken an immense toll on them. But if a culture’s success is measured by its longevity rather than its GDP, then the Inuit and Sami peoples of the arctic are among the most successful cultures in human history, and their ancestral homelands are among earth's healthiest ecosystems. Astonishingly, although they comprise just 6 percent of the global population, indigenous peoples protect 80 percent of the planet’s surviving biodiversity in the forests, deserts, grasslands, and marine environments they have called home for millennia. Among their many other benefits, these protected areas absorb vast amounts of carbon and are a crucial buffer against climate change.

Science tells us that biologically, humanity evolved to reproduce exponentially, expand geographically, and consume all available resources. But until we harnessed the awesome power of fossil fuels, we kept these evolutionary tendencies in check through the cautionary stories we told. Today, we have forgotten those stories, and as a result, ninety six percent of Earth’s mammals, by biomass, are humans and their livestock. The remaining 4 percent are all of the remaining terrestrial and aquatic wild mammals combined. The sheer weight of human-made material now exceeds that of all living biomass on Earth. Earth systems science shows us that due to unbridled human activity, the Earth has been in “overshoot” — the state where humanity is using resources at a pace that ecosystems cannot renew, and generating waste at a pace that ecosystems cannot absorb — since the 1970s. Once freed from our cultural self-discipline, our biological evolutionary success has led inexorably to our current planetary predicament.

The Great Simplification

We have hit the limits to growth.

The global economy not only cannot grow without endless supplies of plentiful cheap oil and minerals, it cannot even function. But the inexpensive and abundant energy and materials that have powered industrial civilization for the last century and a half or so have been extracted, drawn down, and are in terminal decline. As a result, it is inevitable that a great simplification is coming. The world of the future is very likely a world where local, community-scale economics and politics necessarily replace the hugely expensive and highly complex global systems that sprang up during the fossil fuel era and the exuberant age of unfettered growth. One way or another, we will have to manage a return to a lower energy, lower materials input way of living. That is the reality of living on a planet of depleting finite natural resources. This has nothing to do with human ingenuity, it is simply pure physics, biology, and geology, and we can no more modify nature’s decrees than we can amend the law of gravity. We can ignore reality all we like, but reality never goes away.

It’s not that we didn’t know better. Since time immemorial, countless sages have cautioned us against separation from nature. We were warned again back in 1972, when the authors of The Limits to Growth presented us with a remarkably prescient picture of how events would play out in our lifetimes — we are tracking their Business As Usual model nearly perfectly, and it does not lead us where we want to go. But then as now, the truth was hard to confront, and the study was dismissed. Few people can deal gracefully with the discovery that their most precious beliefs are mistaken. We preferred our myths of limitless bounty, and so we paid no attention to where those myths were leading us.

Real Human Potential

The dangers of unchecked human activity have been well known to us since our appearance as modern humans some 200,000 years ago. Science tells us that culturally, humans actually evolved as social primates that consciously reined in selfishness, fostered community, and thrived through cooperation. These behaviors were encoded by our ancestors in cultural expressions such as stories and artworks that recognized the physical, spiritual, and psychological dimensions of their home geographies, and they show that humans actually do have the potential to evolve purposefully as a species. Some cultures have never deviated from this wise path.

Every enduring culture in human history has implemented cultural overrides to rein in dangerous expansionist behaviors on a finite planet rather than making them the very basis of its values system. Modern industrial society rejected these cultural checks and balances with the discovery of fossil fuels, and thus has a great deal to relearn from Inuit, Sami, and from others like them who are still guided by the timeless traditional wisdom of humankind. These people — our modern contemporaries who have chosen a different path — prioritize community and the planet above all else, and they may well possess the answers to some of the urgent questions regarding humanity’s future prospects. Respecting, studying, understanding, and incorporating their worldviews — which were once universal — may turn out to be the real key to extending our longevity and living richly meaningful and purposeful lives on our one home planet. Once absorbed, these worldviews provide us with a completely different outlook on the future, and a wider landscape of ideas, options, and actions comes into view.

The Way Home

There is the path. There is the way home.

As my college professor and mentor, Vine Deloria, Jr., a Standing Rock Lakota author and philosopher, wrote, there are indeed other ways to live. All we need to do is to open our eyes and ears:

“American society could save itself by listening to tribal people. While this would take a radical reorientation of concepts and values, it would be well worth the effort. The land-use philosophy of Indians is so utterly simple that it seems stupid to repeat it: man must live with other forms of life on the land and not destroy it. The implications of this philosophy are very far-reaching for the contemporary political and economic system.”

Listening to tribal people is a genuine act of resistance against the contemporary political and economic system. Living sustainably with other forms of life on the land is also resistance. Resistance is never futile, it is the antidote to despair. Resistance, no matter how small, dispels defeatism and engenders positive action. “Art becomes a way to resist and make sure that the truth will come out,” says Sami filmmaker Siljá Somby. The art in The Way Home honors the land use philosophy of Indigenous and place-based peoples, and attempts to bring the truth to light.

Our way home begins on a sound ecological foundation, for that is non-negotiable. Otherwise we will remain on the blind track to failure we have been following for the last 150 years or so. But just to be clear — to begin our journey home we all need not suddenly become hunter-gatherers, or herders, or artisan fishers or growers. As Vine Deloria, Jr. wrote, “This knowledge isn’t unique to American Indians. It’s available to anyone who lives primarily in the natural world, is reasonably intelligent, and respects other life-forms for their intelligence.” We do need to acknowledge the timeless wisdom embedded in indigenous and place-based cultures, adopt their worldview that all things are related and mutually dependent, deploy effective cultural overrides to rein in our expansionist evolutionary tendencies, scale down the human enterprise to a manageable level, and live within the local biophysical limits of our home ecosystems.

Natural and Cultural Assets Exist in Every Place

And — it is just as important to be clear that this is not a quixotic goal. We may be locked in an uneven struggle, but we can begin to treat our land, our neighbors, and ourselves with respect and care — there is truly no alternative. The question is not whether resistance to our high energy and materials consuming way of life is practical or even effective. The question is whether or not it is the right thing to do if we wish to live sustainably on the land and not destroy it. There is a nacent awareness that we cannot continue upon our current globalized growth-based trajectory; and there is an emerging realization that local cultural and environmental conditions dictate that there is simply no one-size-fits-all sustainable living solution for diverse human societies.

Still, the headwinds are fierce. Resistance to change can be steadfast.

Fortunately, in human social systems it’s much easier to change the direction of a local community that that of an entire country. Around the world we are seeing many creative actions taken at the local level — sustainable communities, transition towns, local living economies, sustainable and regenerative agriculture, new regional food systems, and initiatives such as community investment institutions as well as innovative business models that prioritize community and environment over profit and growth. Sustainable economies must emerge from, and respond to, the specific needs, assets, and aspirations of a local, place-based community.

Place Is Our Most Important Gift

Canadian social entrepreneur Zita Cobb has achieved great success building thriving communities through place-based economic development. “Place is our most important gift,” she says. “Place holds nature, and culture is a human response to the nature of a particular place. Natural and cultural assets exist in every place. The essence of asset-based community development is these questions: What do we know? What do we have? What do we love? What do we miss? What can we do about it? That's very empowering.”

We can choose a prosperity that grows not from consumption but from the depth of our connections to people and place, from the relationships that provide us with our true wealth, purpose, and joy. “Indigenization” is what Vine Deloria, Jr. and Daniel Wildcat call it -- rediscovering and adopting the ways of our native lands. In every bioregion there are inspirational models of how things can work if we use our imaginations and devote ourselves to sustaining local human and natural communities. Yes, they are modest efforts so far, but they are growing.

And they are also radical.

The Most Radical Thing We Can Do

The word radical comes from the Latin word for root. When asked what actions we should take to save the Earth and ourselves, Gary Snyder, poet lauriate of the Beats, Pulitzer prize winning author of Deep Ecology, replied, “The most radical thing you can do is to stay home.” Paying attention to the places where we live, to the community of people and other creatures we share these places with, and to the genuine place-based cultures that spring up around us, is indeed radical. We can find our local roots, and nurture them. We can unleash the power of the places we actually live in so that our local communities thrive. There are many paths, and they are accessible to everyone.

The Way Home is both an artistic exploration of the costs imposed on our one and only earth by following our dominant cultural narrative of endless growth, and an invitation to relearn the timeless wisdom of indigenous and place-based cultures as we seek a new story to guide us towards a livable future. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.” In our centuries long quest to free ourselves from the restrictions of nature and culture, we have endangered life on Earth and made ourselves homeless. But we can still shed our identities as cosmic outlaws, and we can once again answer the essential questions, “Who are are you, and where are you from?”

The Mystic Chords Of Memory

These ancient notions of sacred geography define and nurture us. We are still connected to the land, our ancestors, our descendants, and our shared human experience through what Abraham Lincoln called “The mystic chords of memory.”

All lasting human cultures have been rooted in the natural world, in cultural traditions, in ceremonies, and in the divine forces they worship and communicate with. They have been rooted in home, the place where we know exactly who we are. As Simone Weil wrote, “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.”

We can rediscover these roots, nourish our souls, and relearn what it means to be fully human. We can find our way home.