Tracking Down Ecological Guidance: Presence, Beauty, Survival

Tracking Down Ecological Guidance is a road map to an emerging worldview. For several centuries the effect of the industrial revolution has been to reinforce the cultural assumption that Earth is just a storehouse of raw materials for human use, and the faster these resources are exploited the better off the human species will be. This exploitive worldview is failing; it no longer provides believable guidance for the human future. The ecological worldview now emerging is focused on what kind of readaptation makes sense given what is known about how Earth's ecosystems actually work. The essays gathered in Tracking Down Ecological Guidance compose a panorama of the author's engagement with the trajectories of culture and economic behaviour over the past fifty years. While the conflict between the growth economy and ecosystem integrity is central to the book, it is also focused on the means of "spiritual survival" - the ability to keep working for human betterment and environmental integrity despite the worst that may happen. As the failed adaptation of the industrial-consumer era plays out, the rise of an alternative, ecologically integrated economy becomes essential for human wellbeing. This book charts a journey through the "storm of progress" to an ecological worldview anchored in beauty and expressed in "right relationship" to our home places, and to the whole Earth. The book moves beyond the temptation of fatalism to a strategy for enhancing both economic and spiritual survival. Keith Helmuth is a founding member of Quaker Institute for the Future, and a co-author of Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy. He lives in Woodstock, New Brunswick where he now coordinates a community garden project.