A struggle for life

The mission of the Global Compassion Connectors

Refugees crossing from Syria into Turkey — HUFFPOST

The mission of the Global Compassion Connectors is to create a caring and compassionate society.

That might sound like a utopia in which everybody is nice to everybody else. In reality, this is an existential struggle. We are engaged for our and our descendants’ survival. This is a struggle for our lives.

The dominant culture on the planet, that in the last three centuries created vast wealth for some societies and impoverishes others, teaches us to compete with each other. It tells us on the authority of eminent scientist Charles Darwin, that only the fittest survive. This is the culture that is eating the planet, poisoning the skies, and causing what has become known as the Sixth Great Extinction. We are in danger of joining the list of species we have driven into extinction.

Consider sharks. The fossil record shows sharks have been around for 450 million years, surviving both the Fourth and Fifth Great Extinctions. The shark may be a ferocious predator, but it fits into its environment. It is no one’s model for caring or compassion, but the shark is no threat to the rest of the biosphere.

Humans have been around for perhaps two million years, and Nature’s experiment with intelligence may be nearly finished. Our brains made us the first apex predator on both land and sea. And we ate everything. Our ancestors reached North America 100,000 years ago. Only a thousand years later – an evolutionary eye blink – the continent’s large mammals, aurochs, rhinoceri, and mammoths, were all gone. Three hundred years ago we got busy with carbon fuels. The party started… and the damage just keeps growing.

Better living through chemistry: Canvey Island, Essex, 1975

We face extinction unless we mend our ways. Evolutionary fitness requires us to fit in better, to be better neighbours. We need a culture of caring for ourselves, each other and all life, not extracting all we can from the world and from each other.

Caring for all beings. For all our neighbours in the web of life and death that sustains us, whose complexities we barely begin to understand, but erase so casually.

Cathedral Grove, British Columbia: a mature ecosystem, never logged

Darwin was misunderstood. The phrase “survival of the fittest” appears once in his text, and once again in his footnotes; the word “love” 96 times. As W.H. Auden wrote,

We must love one another or die.

The transformation is a worldwide task – a job for the United Nations, but the United Nations cannot do it. The work starts in our hearts, where the UN cannot reach. We have to do this work now, and we have to do it fast. It is an impossible task, except – behavioural change is what humans do best. We might just succeed.

The job of the Connectors is to facilitate that transformation at scale. We start with ourselves.

Even a journey of a thousand miles begins beneath your feet.

Our hearts reach out to our families and neighbours. Caring and compassion flows into whatever our work is. Our circles spawn new circles.

We just might succeed.

Further study

• Planet: Critical podcast with Rachel Donald
• Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures
• Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams
• BOOMERANG: Empire and Britain’s Economy by openDemocracy
• The Deficit Myth: How to build a better economy by Stephanie Kelton
• Gary’s Economics with Gary Stevenson
• The Overstory Richard Powers
• Learning To Die: Wisdom in the age of climate crisis Robert Bringhurst & Jan Zwicky
• World Peace and Other Fourth-Grade Achievements by John Hunter
• Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki