Charles Eisenstein (1967—) is an accomplished essayist and, recently, accomplished copyleft-accommodating author. Commenting, as other rehumanizing spectators, on the spectacle of crises now confronting humanity (enmassed, engorged, and slaying sickness everywhere), he spares no daring, bias-drubbing critique or pared-down, jabbed jibes at industrialism, materialism, and consequent, spiritually inconsequential civilization.
Unlike his more materialist, pessimistically dispirited (and dispiriting) contemporaries — Derrick Jensen, James Howard Kunstler, Richard Heinberg, to catch a few — Charles Eisenstein finds solution; not in the ethereal, control-reeling climes of the body politic, societal superbodies, or technologic prowess, progress, and process (prime composers of our problem, rather than solution); but in the spirit indwelling individual humans, optimistically: you, I, him, her, us, we, and (necessarily) they and theirs. Ours is the bastion of a Gaia-born Heaven, if but we build it (or let it accrete, humbly, about us). And we must. Alternatives — consumption, declension, extinction — are not, nor inevitable nodules of our decision tree. Though these bouldered paths be dark, eye-despairing, and set with besetting, well-arrayed dogmas, we can decide to live for goodness, sufficiency, and the cogent necessities of personal, communal well-being that are our birthright, codified in the veriform genetics of the human form, and Gaia’s godsend to us.
And we must.