Home Gardening Evidence of Consciousness Shift

As the vernal equinox on March 20 approaches, a time when darkness and light are in balance, the natural order gives visible signs of rebirth. Birds build nests, flowering trees begin to bud, and streams swell with snow-melt. If we look closely, we will also find signs that the Great Shift in consciousness I wrote about in Spiritual Wisdom for a Planet in Peril: Preparing for 2012 and Beyond is well underway, balancing light against the darkness of war, conflict, and financial collapse.

One positive sign is the increase in home gardening. Just this morning a news article confirmed that more of us are planting gardens to grow our own produce. Burpee Seeds, one of the largest seed companies, is experiencing an unprecedented surge in demand. People have figured out that growing their own vegetables and fruit can not only save substantial money but also provide them with nutritious food and valuable lessons about connecting with the Earth and her cycles.

My husband recently found his sixth-grade report on Victory Gardens, illustrating the importance of home gardening during World War II that provided up to 40% of the nation’s fresh produce. We can do so again and enjoy gardening as a family and community activity.

In my hometown, Detroit, urban blight is being transformed into community gardens. Young people work in the dirt on vacant lots and see the results, renewing their bonds with Mother Nature. Neighbors work together and share the produce. Everyone benefits. This is the new consciousness in action.

Last week my husband and son roto-tilled our garden area, adding home-grown compost to enrich the soil. We’ve already had our annual garden planning meeting with our neighbors and will go together to the local garden supply store this weekend to pick out plants and seeds and begin by planting those that can take hold in an early North Carolina spring. Remembering the lucious tomatoes, zucchini, pesto made from fresh basil, and Arugula last year’s garden yielded makes us eager to get started. Although the local deer ate most of our young blueberry plants, we’ll try again. We don’t mind sharing with the deer. They are part of our ecosystem, and our home took part of their habitat. We enjoy seeing them thrive on the local plant life also.

If you can create a garden where you live, by all means do so. Get your neighbors together to help. Apartment dwellers can start seeds or seedlings inside, then transfer to patios or balconies. Ask your landlords and condo associations for a community garden plot. This kind of contact with the Earth’s cycles and bounty truly is life-giving and enlightening, and returning us to a healthy relationship with the natural environment is part of the Great Shift.

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A New End: A New Beginning (Part 2)

There are numerous indicators that suggest the big change is coming.

• Multiple trends are converging - Huge, extraordinary, global trends, any number of which would be enough to derail our present way of life, are converging to precipitate a historic big transition event.  A partial list would include:
• The global financial system is collapsing.  During the next 10 months, it appears that wave after wave of blows will strike the system (see this Feb. 15^th piece by Dave Martin about the next big shock), raising the very real possibility that it will experience large-scale failure sometime before the end of the year.
• We have reached the beginning of the end of petroleum. Global production has been flat for the last three years.  Senior oil company executives are now saying that they will not be able to pump more.  Supply will likely begin to decrease significantly after we move across the peak.  Prices will increase again if the demand holds up.  This is important because our present way of life is built upon petroleum.
• The global climate system is changing – some say it is getting much warmer, others now suggest a mini-ice age within the next decade.  In any case, probably increased irregularities in local climates will result with attendant problems in agriculture, natural disasters, and economies.
• The cost of food is increasing rapidly as a result of global shortages not seen in 40-50 years.  This could be exacerbated by increasing energy costs and climate changes.
• The effects of larger solar eruptions hitting the earth through a tear in the magnetosphere will disrupt global communications, weather, perhaps satellites, and even organic life over the next 3-4 years.

• Problems are much larger than government – These kinds of problems are much greater than anything that contemporary governments have ever had to deal with before.  Peak oil, climate change, and the financial meltdown by themselves have the potential to significantly overwhelm the capabilities of government. If bureaucracies can’t deal with the aftermath of a natural disaster like Katrina, something ten or more times that damaging would leave most people fending for themselves.  If these extraordinary, disruptive events end up being concurrent, then the whole system is at risk.

• The problems are structural - They’re systemic.  Perhaps the best source for beginning to understand the deep, interdependent nature of all of this is by taking the Crash Course at  Some of these issues, especially the financial, oil, and food problems are also a product of how we live, our priorities, and our paradigms.  We are creating the problems because of our values and principles.  Without extraordinary, fundamental changes in the way we see ourselves and the world, we will keep getting what we are getting.

• Leaders think the old system can be “rebooted” – Almost everyone in leadership positions in the Obama administration and in other countries, wants to make the old system well again.  Jim Kunstler has said it well: “Among the questions that disturb the sleep of many casual observers is how come Mr. O doesn’t get that the conventional process of economic growth — based, as it was, on industrial expansion via revolving credit in a cheap-energy-resource era — is over, and why does he keep invoking it at the podium? Dear Mr. President, you are presiding over an epochal contraction, not a pause in the growth epic. Your assignment is to manage that contraction in a way that does not lead to world war, civil disorder or both. Among other things, contraction means that all the activities of everyday life need to be downscaled including standards of living, ranges of commerce, and levels of governance. “Consumerism” is dead. Revolving credit is dead — at least at the scale that became normal the last thirty years. The wealth of several future generations has already been spent and there is no equity left there to re-finance.”

That is why:

• We’re not dealing with the structural issues - All of the biggest efforts are attempts to reinflate the financial bubble, and keep the mortally wounded institutions alive.  The knee-jerk reactions come from the same people who helped to design and feed the present system.  These people are also deluded – they think (or act like) they know what they are doing.  They don’t realize that:

• The situation is so complex that no one really understands it – TheGlobal Business Network’s Peter Schwartz, reporting on a conversation with the Financial Time‘s Martin Wolf said that Wolf’s key point was that the nature and scale of the credit crisis is so novel that it’s not clear we know what we’re doing when we try to stop it.  He is deeply worried.  Steve Roach of Morgan Stanley said at the World Economic Forum annual meeting at Davos that he agreed with Wolf: we are in uncharted waters.  Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan: Impact of the Highly Improbable, says the financial system is so complex that it is impossible for anyone to understand it . . . and because of that complexity it is inevitable that it will exhibit significant, unanticipated behaviors (his Black Swans) that careen across the planet.

• The issues are global – Japan’s exports fell by 46 percent in January, and Hong Kong’s economy contracted 2.5 percent in the last three months of 2008. Foreign investors closed 45,000 factories in China in the last 8 months and China closed 20,000 itself. Those closed factories mean products aren’t being shipped.

• The system is fundamentally out of balance – In the U.S., the rich are getting richer (at  unconscionable rates).  National media has reported that the government is monitoring all internal communications of its citizens – but lies and says it is not.  Common sense is not included in big, sweeping federal edicts.  The Transportation Security Administration, for example, wants to make pilots produce background checks on members of their family (and their business associates) in order to legally give them rides in a non-commercial, private airplanes.  The Agriculture Department in its NAIS program wants all small farmers (big feedlots are exempt, of course) to put GPS/RFID tags on all of their animals: chickens, cows, horses, goats – even fish were initially included – so that the beasts can be tracked, on a day to day basis by the government,  It’s also now against the law in some states, like Illinois, for farmers to save the seeds that they’ve grown  – they must buy new ones each year from large seed companies.

• Most of the U.S. federal budget goes to the military – More than half of the U.S. federal budget goes to military and military-related agencies. This kind of growth, of course, is what brought down the Soviet Union. In sharp contrast to the political apparatchiks that protest that more money is needed to reverse the shrinking, aging, and decline in readiness in the Army, Navy and Air Force, few seem to understand that budget increases are a primary cause of the problems, a symptom clearly described in the new book, America’s Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress. (by Winslow Wheeler, et al., available in late March)

• No new ideas, government can’t be responsive - If the natural solutions to these massive issues include innovation, foresight, adaptability, sustainability, and resilience, it is unlikely that a thinking American could be found who would suggest that the source for these capabilities would be our government.  They’re in charge, but they have no new ideas about how this all should work.  They’re also slow – and this situation needs fast, agile responses.  There is an additional problem: even if they did have good ideas the government wouldn’t be able to effectively implement them because -

• Too much inertia, too many lawyers and lobbyists — There is a huge, well-funded effort in place to maintain the status quo or to shift the future to benefit one group at the expense of others.  It would be impossible within the present system to initiate dramatic change when the threat was still on the horizon.  Every group or organization that might be negatively affected would fight in congress and the courts to keep themselves alive regardless of what was at stake for the larger community.  Only when the crisis was about to crash down on everyone – when adequate time and resources for effective response were nonexistent – might everyone pull together for the common good.

• Potential solutions take too long to implement – These issues are so gigantic that confronting and redirecting them takes a long time.  One study, for example, suggested that a national crash program to find alternatives for oil would need to have been started 20 years before the peak in order for there not to be significant disruption of the underlying systems.  We do not operate with either that foresight or resolve.

• Supply chains are long and thin - Globalism and just-in-time production has produced supply chains in most areas of commerce that are very long – often to the other side of the earth – and very fragile.  There are many places between there and here where something can go wrong.  If and when that happens, necessities will not be available and in those situations, people resort to unconventional and/or anti-social behavior.

• $600 trillion in derivatives are a house of cards — Looming over the whole financial situation is an almost unfathomable quantity of financial instruments – derivatives – which are essentially casino bets with no underlying value supporting the transaction. Warren Buffett calls them financial weapons of mass destruction that could bring the whole system down.  Derivatives only work if there is confidence in the system – you believe the casino will really pay your winnings.  If other things in the environment erode that confidence there is the real possibility that things rapidly reconfigure themselves.

• Cooperation is unlikely, protectionism will prevail - Instead of countries cooperating with each other to deal with these big transnational problems, we’re seeing a pulling back to protect each country’s perceived short-term interests, regardless of what the implications might be in the longer term.  At the same time we’re all connected to each other in very complicated ways, so if any substantial pieces of the system don’t work it will affect all of the other ones.

• History says it’s time – Perhaps what is most compelling to me is that history strongly suggests that the time is right for an upset – they always happen about now in the historical cycles.  I talk about this in my book a bit, but the short version is that big punctuations in the equilibrium of evolution have produced extraordinary, fundamental reorganizations to life on this planet on a regular, accelerating basis from the beginning of time as we know it.  We make progress as a species when we are forced in one way or another to evolve to seeing ourselves and the world in new ways.  Necessity is the mother of invention, etc.

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ENVIRONMENT: Earth’s Arctic Freezer Turning Into Hothouse

UXBRIDGE, Apr 10 (IPS) – The world is losing its northern freezer as Arctic winter ice is in sharp decline, NASA scientists reported this week. Even with below average winter temperatures, Arctic ice is thinner and covers less area than it did a decade ago.

Arctic sea ice is the cooling mechanism for the global climate system. As it declines and the region warms – already three to five degrees Celsius warmer – then inevitably there are local, regional and hemispheric climate impacts.

“We’ve already lost one third of the summer ice cover since the 1980s. There are already impacts from this,” says Ron Kwok of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

“A completely ice-free summer by 2013 is not impossible,” Kwok said in a telephone news conference. “You would have been laughed out the room if you suggested this five years ago.”

The new study shows that the maximum extent of the 2008-2009 winter sea ice cover was the fifth-lowest since researchers began collecting such information 30 years ago. The past six years have produced the six lowest maximums in that record.

More stunning, and indicative of the rapid warming of the region, is the decline in the thick, hard-to-melt multi-year ice, says Walter Meier, research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado. Multiyear ice is ice that is two or more years old and therefore doesn’t melt in the summer.
“Less than 10 percent is multiyear now. It used to be 30 percent in 1981,” Meier said at the news conference.

Polar amplification is the reason why climate change is warming the Arctic far faster than anywhere else. A combination of processes and feedbacks in the region have resulted a three to five degree Celsius warming already. In 50 to 100 years time if average global temperature rises three degrees Celsius, the Arctic freezer will be a hothouse – at least 10 degrees Celsius warmer.

“The polar cryosphere has long existed as a buffer against [global] climate warming to an extent,” Dick Peltier, Director of the Centre for Global Change Science at the University of Toronto, told IPS.

The Earth’s great northern freezer is undergoing “great transformations of energy” away from cooling and shifting to warming. More ice melt means more open water resulting in more of the sun’s energy being trapped in the Arctic Ocean and warming water temperatures. That means winter freeze-up comes later, the ice is thinner, and more likely to melt when summer returns. This positive feedback loop is already operating and the meltdown of the Arctic sea ice looks to be irreversible he says.

“It’s a bit like a flywheel now able to turn with reckless abandon.”

The loss of Arctic sea ice won’t raise sea levels directly but as it acts to warm the entire region that will affect the massive Greenland ice sheet. If the whole ice sheet were to melt it would result in a six to seven-metre sea-level rise. Recent studies report thinning at the margins of the Greenland ice sheet, an increased fresh water discharge from outlet glaciers, and a significant increase in surface melt, NASA reported in a release.
The current Arctic meltdown is already changing the local climate and having impacts on northern peoples, Meier said.

“No Arctic ice in the summer will result in profound changes,” says Peltier.

Meanwhile weather patterns in the Arctic have already changed with a northward deepening of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), says Peltier. The NAO controls the strength and direction of westerly winds and storm tracks across the Arctic and North Atlantic.

The jet stream has also shifted further north as the Arctic warms. The jet stream is a fast-flowing westward current of air approx 10 kilometres above the ground. It is the boundary zone between the warm tropical air mass of the south and the cold polar Arctic air mass. Less ice in the Arctic weakens the cold polar air and the jet, while continuing its ebb and flow as seen on daily weather maps, is incrementally pushing northwards altering local weather patterns.

“There has been a northward shift in precipitation, with more rain falling on the northern boreal regions while the southern U.S. is becoming drier,” says Peltier. Although those observed changes are not directly attributable to the Arctic ice loss, but to climate change overall. However there is no doubt that the Arctic meltdown “will eventually affect our weather,” he says.

The rapid warming of the Arctic has happened so quickly that scientists have only begun to study what the potential implications may be. Chief among their concerns is the vast region of permafrost that covers one quarter of the land surface of the Northern hemisphere. The permanently frozen bog and peatland contains enormous amounts of organic carbon – perhaps enough to triple the amount currently in the atmosphere, as previously reported by IPS.

As the permafrost melts carbon dioxide and the more potent greenhouse gas methane is released. And that seems to have been the case during the extremely warm northern summer of 2007 when global atmospheric methane levels shot up by several million tonnes after having been stable for more than a decade. However there is no smoking gun pointing to permafrost.

“Our abilities to detect how much and where methane is being released is really bad,” says Peltier. And there is no “predictive capacity” to get some insight into what might happen to permafrost and when. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made permafrost a priority for its next major report in four or five years time, he said. “There is clear potential for large methane releases.”

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CLIMATE CHANGE: Farming Could Be Friend or Foe

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Apr 2 (IPS) – Don’t forget about agriculture in the upcoming global negotiations to combat climate change, experts warn. Not only is farming most at risk in an increasingly variable and tempestuous climate, it is also a major emitter of greenhouse gases.

But with the right policies in place, agriculture could both continue to feed the world and play a crucial role in solving the climate problem.

“Agriculture has been missing in the run-up talks to Copenhagen,” says Mark Rosegrant of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

The nations of the world will meet in Copenhagen this December to hammer out a new climate treaty to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and establish a fund to help poorer countries adapt. The complex process began in 2007 at the Bali talks, continued in Poznan, Poland in 2008 and is ongoing this week in Bonn.

Agriculture accounts for about 15 percent of human emissions of GHGs, IFPRI says, although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change puts it higher at 25 percent. Much of those emissions come from developed countries that rely heavily on fossil fuels and fertilisers and raise far more methane-emitting livestock.

With climate change the world is facing reduced yields of up to 20 percent in maize and rice by the year 2050, Rosegrant told IPS. Much of that yield decline will be in the developing world, mainly because sub-tropical and tropical regions are expected to be hit hardest by significant changes in water availability and warmer temperatures.

Climate change could mean ever-rising food prices and therefore significant investments are needed in agricultural research to help countries cope with the coming changes, he says: “We’re trying to work out what the costs for adaptation in agriculture might be.”

IFPRI seeks sustainable solutions for ending hunger and poverty. It is one of 15 centres supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).

Countries have been talking about creating an adaptation fund, but agriculture hasn’t been a part of that yet. Agriculture is where forests were about 10 years ago – known to be important but peripheral to the actual negotiations, Rosegrant says.

“It is going to be very tough to get anything like this (an adaptation fund). Who is going to pay?” he noted.

And pay for what? There is major divide about the direction the next “green” revolution should take.
The technology-oriented view sees a future involving genetically engineered seeds, fertilisers and new technologies designed to cope with higher temperatures and drought conditions. The eco-agricultural view sees a knowledge-intensive future applying skilled on-farm management to create resilient, smaller-scale operations.

Scientists say climate change doesn’t just mean hotter or drier, it means far more variable weather in the future, says Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, senior scientist at the Pesticide Action Network, an environmental NGO in San Francisco.

“Future conditions will not be like the past. All bets are off. We need to focus on creating adaptive, resilient farming systems,” Ishii-Eiteman said in an interview.

The technological approach of conventional agriculture in developed countries is not only fossil-fuel intensive it is ill-suited to high levels of variability and volatility in weather, she said.

And a three-year assessment of global agriculture completed in 2008 reached similar conclusions.

The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) tapped some 400 scientists and other specialists, including Ishii-Eiteman, to conduct an evidence-based assessment of what direction agriculture should take to feed the world in an era of climate change. The main conclusion: the dominant practice of industrial, large-scale agriculture was unsustainable, mainly because of its dependence on cheap oil, negative impacts on ecosystems and growing water scarcity.

The way forward for agriculture, according to the non-partisian IAASTD, are agro-ecosystems that marry food production with ensuring water supplies remain clean, preserving biodiversity, and improving the livelihoods of the poor.

“The ag assessment (IAASTD reports) should be used as the starting point,” for finding ways to adapt and reduce GHGs, said former IAASTD Co-chair Hans Herren, president of the Arlington-based Millennium Institute, a body that undertakes a variety of developmental activities around the world.

“Agriculture could be a major sink for CO2,” Herren told IPS.

U.S. long-term studies have shown that an agro-ecosystem farming approach such as organic farming used 28 to 32 percent fewer energy inputs, retained soil carbon and soil nitrogen better when compared to conventional agriculture, and offered a higher profitability over conventional systems.

Converting just 10,000 medium-sized farms in the U.S. to organic production would store enough carbon in the soil that it would be like taking 1,174,400 cars off the road, according to the Rodale Institute, a U.S. organic research centre.

Simply considering future energy costs makes it clear radical changes are needed in agriculture, says Herren. Where research is truly needed is at the small landholder level, which provides food and livelihood for more than half of the people on the planet.

Even in Africa organic or near-organic farming were not only practical, they outperformed conventional methods, a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) study reported last year. On 114 small-scale farms in 24 African countries, yields had more than doubled where organic or near-organic practices had been used, the study found.

“Simply ratcheting up the fertiliser and pesticide-led production methods of the 20th century is unlikely to address the challenge (of food security)”, said UNEP executive director Achim Steiner.

Continuing along that path undermines “…the critical natural inputs and nature-based services for agriculture such as healthy and productive soils, the water and nutrient recycling of forests, and pollinators such as bees and bats,” Steiner said in statement about the study.

The IAASTD also concluded that government subsidies of conventional agriculture systems that emit high levels of GHGs should be reevaluated. Research should be focused on water harvesting and conservation technologies for small landholders along with policies that enhance and protect agro-biodiversity and increase the diversification of agricultural systems to boost resilience and adaptability.

Although there is strong European interest in this agro-ecosystem approach, the big global agricultural organisations like the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), IFPRI, CGIAR and others aren’t, asserts Herren. “They haven’t yet realised we need big changes in agriculture.”

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RESPONSE TO G-20 SUMMIT

The G-20 April 2nd Summit in London acknowledged the group’s interdependence and moved toward greater cooperation now essential to reforming global finance. The G-20 endorsed the goal of building a resilient, sustainable and green economy. “We will make the transition towards clean, innovative, resource-efficient, low-carbon technologies and infrastructure.” The G-20 also reaffirmed their commitment to address climate change and to reach agreement at the December 2009 UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen.

Commitments underway by G-20 countries of $5 trillion are expected to raise global output by 4% and accelerate the transition to a green economy.

Fundamental reforms were not addressed, including the need to re-design debt-based money and banking or to create a new global reserve currency, already proposed by China, Russia, India, Brazil and other G-20 members so as to relieve imbalances and excessive pressure on the US dollar.

More immediate reform of the voting representation on the boards of the World Bank and the IMF are a step forward, together with an additional $750 billion: with $250 billion for a new issuance of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs); $250 billion to support trade finance; $100 billion of additional lending to developing countries, as well as an additional $1.1 trillion from IMF gold sales for concessional finance to the poorest countries.

The heart of the G-20 agreements is to move beyond the “Anglo-Saxon” economics typified by the now-rejected “Washington Consensus” model. Many sensible new rules were promulgated to regulate and oversee global financial firms, including hedge funds, new principles for executive pay, accounting rules, credit rating agencies, excessive leverage and restraining excessive risk taking. Rules for tax and regulatory arbitrage are to be tightened and tax-havens “named and shamed.” However, the hypocrisy reported by Australia’s Griffith University professor Jason Sharman must be addressed: that the US states of Nevada, Delaware and Wyoming, as well as some OECD member countries, must be included in the “shaming.”

No mention was made on correcting GDP as proposed by the European Parliament to include statistics on education, health, environment or poverty gaps; nor on the need for incorporating such ESG factors in company balance sheets and reporting (www.globalreporting.org).

A New End: A New Beginning (Part 3)

So, it doesn’t look to me like we’re going to be able to do what might be needed to maintain the present system . . . and it is likely that we’re at one of those extraordinary moments in history when each of us gets the opportunity to play an important role in not only transitioning to a new world, but also designing it.

It appears that the financial system is likely to collapse sometime this year – probably before the third quarter – which will then require a great deal of effort next year (and into 2012?) to design and build a new framework. It is obvious that many businesses will fail as the result of this abrupt slowdown (just read the papers today), and there will be unprecedented hardship for many people around the world. A long view of what is happening could posit that only through the collapse of a legacy system could a new world evolve . . . and that is what is happening.

So, what to do in the face of unprecedented change? Two specific things come to mind:

1. Plan for the transition – Start to think now about how you’re going to provide for yourself and those who are important to you in a time when many things don’t work the way that always have in the past. Dmitry Orlov talks about some options in his above-mentioned talk and book. There are many websites and books on this subject. Key Concept: Cooperation You can’t do this alone. Start to work together with like-minded individuals to sustain yourself – regardless of whether your concerns are food, water, shelter, transportation or finances.
2. Start thinking about the new world – Now is the time to begin contemplating the design of the new world. Governments should be doing this. Companies should start skunk works. Big international organizations should put it on their agendas.

Here’s the catch. This might not happen. Personally, I think that if there is any one person that has the potential to at least soften this transition it is Barack Obama. As I’ve suggested, he will have his hands full just trying to get the underlying people and institutions to think differently and act fast enough, but if anyone has the chance to pull it off, it would be him. Already he’s getting government to move faster and in more substantive ways than any of his predecessors. It may be, by the way, that he will be the best guy to wind down the old system and reconstitute a new one. It’s all of the other folks running the government that I’d be concerned about – the ones who continue to see the world as it used to be.

There are any number of reasons why this scenario might not manifest itself, not least of which is that there will be many thousands, if not millions of people who will be working very hard to assure that the system doesn’t come apart (but then, they may be doing the wrong things).

Seems to me, therefore, that flexibility and permeability (allowing new ideas to get through) are of critical importance here. Remember the first law of Discordianism: “Convictions cause convicts”. Whatever you believe imprisons you.

So, stay loose. The winners need to transcend, not try to work their way through all of this. Concentrate on building the new world, don’t get emotionally involved in the daily reports of the current global erosion.
If your group would like to hear more about this, I’m always happy to come give presentations on these subjects. Drop me a note and we’ll see if we can make something happen.

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Swine Flu: Pandemic or Lesson on Releasing Fear?

In recent weeks I’ve had the opportunity to speak to hundreds of people in person and through radio interviews and teleconferences about 2012: what may be coming in the way of earth shifts and human-caused changes and how to prepare for the most probable outcomes, while envisioning a new way of being in a transformed world and beginning to live out that vision now.

The question that keeps coming up is this: what do we need to know and do now to make it through the coming shift and transition to a higher consciousness?

The first part of the answer is, emphatically, not to go into fear. Fear is a lower-vibration energy that can spread as quickly as a pandemic and cause as much damage energetically. Since 2001, we’ve gotten so used to fear-based interpretations of the world through media, politics, and conspiracy theories that we either panic at the first sign of trouble, giving energy to the worst case outcomes, or sink into denial, ignoring the signs of the times that tell us the world is transforming in many ways at once.

Giving in to fear clouds our judgment and vision, snatching away our sense of security and control of our own lives. It also saps our ability to choose to participate in bringing about the best possible outcome for the highest good of all life on this planet.

Witness the so-called swine flu pandemic. Conspiracy theorists tell us the swine flu virus was concocted in secret labs and released on the public by dark forces hoping to kill off millions of excess humans on this planet or just to create massive panic. The Egyptian government ordered that country’s 300,000 pig population slaughtered out of sheer ignorance and fear, which it multiplied exponentially with this worst possible response to a perceived threat. Even the National Institutes of Health, by recommending that school systems with possible cases close down for days or weeks until the virus is contained, amped up the fear by giving it probable cause and threw a wrench into the end of school year plans of hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, and parents left without child care options. Individuals who can afford to get Tamiflu prescriptions from their doctors are doing so to protect themselves. Spiritual healers are recommending natural products like essential oils to ward off the virus and restore the physical and energy bodies to full health.

It seems that each institution or individual is demonstrating its own level of consciousness in its reaction to this virus.

What is the truth about swine flu? Is the threat overblown, considering the number of cases worldwide? It appears so. And yet, as I point out in “Spiritual Wisdom for a Planet in Peril: Preparing for 2012 and Beyond,” pandemics are one kind of natural- or human-caused disaster we may experience in this time of great change for which we can prepare on both physical and energetic levels.

While science works on understanding the virus and and governments on containing it, we, from a higher consciousness perspective, can deal with swine flu and other potential disasters by recognizing that through directing positive intention and energy to the threat we can influence the outcome. By consciously choosing not to participate in fear but rather to surround the virus, the people and animals touched by it, and the medicines and personnel prepared to counteract it with the energy of love, we can help convert a potential disaster into a soft landing. The more of us who practice sending the high vibration of universal love into the world in place of the lower vibration of fear, the less likely a potential disaster is to become a real one.

This is a huge lesson to be learned as we move forward through this cosmic shift marked by 2012. Knowing how to heal the body, mind, and spirit is essential. Choosing not to participate in fear and to offer love in its place will make all the difference.

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