The Vision

Ecocentric (R)Evolution

We stand at a collective threshold. Our current world can no longer take us safely and meaningfully into the future. The egocentric separate-self society of our modern times has become pathological and self-destructive. The values and incentives of this industrial growth paradigm are actively undermining our chance of safeguarding a meaningful existence into the future. A new world is asking be born; arising as a visceral remembrance of a different way of being that is rooted in our ancient past and informed as well by an emergent dream of a brighter future sourced from a deep love for life that has the power to support conscious re-alignment with generative patterns of thought and deed.

This new world, if it is to become, will be the result of a collective transition from an egocentric life-diminishing worldview to an ecocentric life-affirming one. This worldview transition is both an emanation emerging out of the evolving context of our times and also a strategic design process vectoring towards a more beautiful, equitable, just and harmonized future.  It is an invitation for radical participation in a social-cultural phase-shift into an ecocentric process-relational orientation to life. This process requires our active and conscious participated in its becoming as a kind of collective choice to co-create the more beautiful future the earth is dreaming through us. The design pathway must holistically include an understanding of the complex interconnection and interdependence between the unique self, human culture, and more-than-human facets of being. For true stability to collectively emerge and sustain itself, all 3 of these primary domains must continually be developed and harmonized toward increased wellbeing, quality of experience, and creative actualization. Through this triplicate design process (further enumerated below in our overview of The Three Pillars of Ecocentric Evolution), the dissemination of ecocentric life-affirming values will be able to permeate and inform all facets of human existence. To that end, we are invited to continually consider how we facilitate soul rooted human development, holistic human cultural exchange, and the re-animation of the more-than-human world of which are interwoven.

The development of an ecocentric worldview is thus an educational and phenomenological challenge that cannot be solved by rational or intellectual processes alone; it must also be experienced as a psycho-somatic remembrance that stimulates a reinvigoration for life, as life. This experiential knowing of a new/old way of being/belonging to ourselves, each other, and the world needs to be at the root of all life-affirming development, technological or otherwise. To provide opportunities to feel and play with this remembrance, it is necessary to design and implement bio-regional hubs (educational centers) of eco-cultural regenesis, which can offer individuals the affective experience of what the application of ecocentric values could look and feel like across different contexts, conditions, scales, and locations.

The birth of these localized semi-autonomus praxis hubs of eco-cultural regenesis is already underway for it the adaptive response of our times to the oppressions of the materialistic, egocentric and life-diminishing worldview that has in large part become entrenched within many our social institutions. While each of these spaces are the emergent process of the earth’s desire to more freely explore the ground of emergent ecocentric visionary unfoldment, we are proposing a kind of scaffolding that can effectively act as a dynamic feedback system for the radical development of all three pillars of the ecocentric evolutionary process (i.e. soul rooted personal development, holistic cultural regeneration, and the re-animation of the more-than-human ecology). By touching and developing all facets of the 3 pillars, as well as the dynamic interchange between them, a hub can serve as a “living symbol” of a new way forward.

Many visionary projects and endeavors emerging across the globe today are tending to the 3 pillars even without formally articulating them or the importance of them. While it is not entirely necessary to have a formal 3 pillar design framework in order to move towards a similar future aspiration, it can effectively support the pace and coherence possible through providing a shared language and teleology necessary for full collaboration. Hubs that effectively develop the 3 pillars will begin to act as living symbols of cultural regenesis through providing essential praxis ground for immersive, holistic, experiential educational development. These praxis hubs will serve as tangible expressions of our human yearning to re-awaken to a meaningful existence through the cultivation of a shared understanding and collective commitment to serve our uniquely human niche as conscious co-creative agents of life’s evolutionary process. We at SEEDS are in service to the sprouting, tending, and propagation of these seeds of a life-affirming pathway forward.

We call ourselves a “school” because we understand ourselves to be actively apprenticing with life itself in order to learn from the diverse ecocentric evolutionary processes that take place within and around us at all times wherever life exists. As students of life, we are striving to remember and (re)learn how life-supporting processes can take place through us and what life is asking of us in these pivotal and unprecedented planetary times. We see the creation of localized praxis hubs of eco-cultural regenesis as the ideal spaces for immersive educational experiences, providing a kind of “living classroom” within a diversity of contexts, scales, and bio-regions.

Below are the three primary Design Aims that serve as scaffolding (“pillars”) for the ecocentric evolutionary process to unfold across place and time.

The 3 Pillars Of Ecocentric Evolution

  SEEDS has identified three primary “pillars” that serve as scaffolding for the ecocentric evolutionary process to holistically unfold. Without attention to all three, true ecocentric life-affirming human evolution cannot and will not emerge. These three pillars, further enumerated below, are ways of relating to the three primary domains of human experience: the individual self, the human collective, and the more-than-human. Without a fundamental shift in self-understanding, human relationality, and how we perceive and steward the more-than-human ecological world, a life-sustaining and life-enhancing existence will remain elusive and perpetually impossible for our species.