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job through cutbacks. Our confinement, voluntary or not, brings us more time for stillness and contemplation—an awakening of a spiritual dimension and discovery of the world within. Meeting the challenges of global hardship will force a higher level of cooperation. Disasters may awaken our hearts, inspiring compassionate service, increased local cooperation, and connection. Our transformation will take us from an industrial growth society to a service-oriented society, and from an organizing principle based on the love of power to one based on the power of love. The old organizing principle has been around for five thousand years and is based on a parent-child model. The new one is emerging through increased connection on the Internet, access to information and tools of power and communication, and a hunger for values of compassion and meaning. This transformation can bring about a rebirth as an integrated planetary civilization, living at a new level of partnership with each other and our environment, with technologies beyond our dreams. These are all stages that await us as the evolutionary growth hormone peaks and ebbs. This initiation is not the first crisis humanity has faced; it will not be our last. But it is the one facing those of us who are alive today. Our future depends on it.

The context of initiation reveals a silver lining to this wrenching shift. Rites of passage teach the initiate that what is essential cannot be lost, and what emerges is indestructible. One never knows ahead of time what an initiation will bring. Perhaps we will be stripped of what we don’t need and discover a more sacred and eternal realm. Can we let go of another pair of shoes from China to have more time to walk barefoot on the grass? Can we imagine the sound of birds without it being drowned out by combustion engines? Can we join with neighbors to tear down fences between our houses and plant gardens, so our food doesn’t have to be trucked a thousand miles to the grocery store? Will we have more time to read those books, watch those DVDs, and spend time with our children because it’s just too expensive to drive to that meeting or event? Can we finally get in shape riding our bicycles to local jobs that serve local communities, while our minds collaborate in the cyberspace of the global brain?

Members of Homo sapiens sapiens—a species capable of knowing itself—have lived for well over a hundred thousand years without the machinery we take for granted today. If we live a hundred thousand more, it will only be with greater intelligence, maturity, and eco-based technologies. Maturity is a greater understanding of ourselves, both our limits and our capabilities.

Evolution is the gods’ way of creating more gods. We are approaching godlike powers of creation and destruction on a planetary scale, being equally capable of either. Global warming, genetic manipulation, and nuclear weapons have planetary consequences. Limitation requires that creation and destruction be carefully considered (the essence of wisdom). If we survive the initiation and cultivate that wisdom, perhaps we will become as young gods and goddesses, moving from our adolescence to our adulthood, and from the love of power to a far greater power of love.

Anodea Judith, PhD, is a bestselling author, psychotherapist, and evolutionary activist who travels the circuit teaching paths of awakening that address our current challenges. She is best known for her pioneering work with the chakra system, through her books Wheels of Life and Eastern Body, Western Mind. This article is excerpted from her double award-winning book Waking the Global Heart: Humanity’s Rite of Passage from the Love of Power to the Power of Love. For more info on her books and teachings, see www.sacredcenters.com.

Why Bother?

MICHAEL POLLAN

Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it’s not an easy one to answer. I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in An Inconvenient Truth came long after Al Gore