About

Long Bio – A Personal Journey

Born in 1943, I grew up on a family farm a couple miles outside a small town in southern Idaho. We lived close to the land, the passing of seasons, animals, and one another. I did not see a tele- vision until I was eleven. So, without a regular newspaper, and with only three local radio stations (that played mostly country music and commercials), my regular companions were our farm animals (dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, a horse, and a cow), the sur- rounding land, and the neighbors in nearby farms. I was curious as a young person and loved to read. I also enjoyed building things alongside my dad in his well-equipped wood-working shop where he would build boats, furniture, and more during the long winter months when farming would come to a halt. Growing up on a farm, I learned first-hand how vulnerable crops are to weather changes, insect invasions, and plant diseases.

I was inspired by my mother, who was a nurse, and this led me to study pre-med in college, with the intention of becoming either a doctor or a veterinarian. After two years of college, I was restless and wanted to see the larger world. So, I dropped out of school for a year and earned enough working on various farms to buy a round-trip plane ticket from Idaho to France. In 1963, I traveled to Paris to live as a student for a semester. After arriving, I learned that my residence was in the same student building as the chaplain—a Jesuit Priest by the name of Daniel Berrigan. Father Berrigan was a well-known anti-war, peace activist and, while living in Paris, we spoke countless times and three themes would always come up: the war in Viet Nam, racism in America and the world, and the importance of showing up in life fully and peacefully. Father Berrigan left a lasting impression on me—his deep commitment to peace and social justice, his active resistance to the war in Viet Nam, and the simple ways in which he lived.

After living in Europe for a half-year during a time of student social unrest, I realized that I was less motivated to become a traditional doctor. Instead of physical healing, I felt drawn to a life of social healing—but had no clear idea what forms that could take. After completing my undergraduate education, I began four years of graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, where I earned an MBA from the Wharton School, and an MA in economic history.

After completing this graduate work, in 1972, I began my first white-collar job, working as a senior researcher on the staff of the “Presidential Commission on Population Growth and the American Future” in Washington, DC. It was an eye-opening experience for this farm boy to work on a presidential commission. Our mandate: to look ahead thirty years, from 1970 to 2000, and explore population growth and urbanization. Although the commission had a budget and lifespan for only two years, this was an invaluable introduction to research on the long-range future. It was also tremendous opportunity to observe politics at the White House level and to see how government works. I was surprised to see the extent to which policies are dominated by short-term considerations and the power of special interests.

Disillusioned, I left Washington for California to begin work as a senior social scientist in the “futures group” of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI International) think-tank. Over the next six years, I co-authored numerous studies of the long-range future: for example, Anticipating Future National and Global Problems (for the National Science Foundation), Alternative Futures for Environmental Policy: 1975–2000 (for the Environmental Protection Agency), and Limits to the Management of Large, Complex Systems (for the President’s Science Advisor). I also co-authored a pioneering study with Joseph Campbell and a small team of scholars titled Changing Images of Man. This research explored archetypes drawing humanity into a transforming future, and profoundly deepened my understanding of humanity’s evolutionary journey. Taken together, these years of research made it clear we humans were on an unsustainable path and, within a few decades, would begin to so overconsume the Earth’s resources that we would move into a condition of planetary breakdown and collapse. I saw how humanity would need to make deep changes if we were to avoid destroying the biosphere. At the same time, my inner growth was being catalyzed in surprising ways.

A remarkable opportunity emerged while working at SRI—to become a subject in psychic research that was just getting underway.  The U.S. government was beginning to fund its earliest research exploring humanity’s intuitive skills and psychic potentials. The initial research began at SRI in the early 1970s, funded by NASA, and available to the public. I was fortunate to become one of four primary subjects and to participate in a wide range of experiments exploring both the “receiving” and “sending” aspects of conscious- ness. The receiving aspect included “remote viewing” or seeing places and people at a distance with direct intuition. The sending aspect included “psychokinesis” and involved intuitive engagement with physical systems. Over the course of three years, I learned a core lesson again and again: The world is alive and permeated with consciousness and subtle energy. Our physical body provides a stable foundation for learning about the nature of consciousness, which is not limited to our body, but extends into the universe as an ever-present intelligent knowing and aliveness. In turn, we are far bigger than our physical body and endowed with far more subtle capacities than I previously imagined. We are just beginning to use highly sensitive technologies to provide feedback and develop a “literacy of consciousness.” Lessons learned in this laboratory work continue to inform my understanding a half-century later.

I left SRI in 1977 and began focusing my efforts on becoming a “media activist.” For decades, I had watched how the mass media dominate and orient the mass mind of entire civilizations. Our collective consciousness was being profoundly affected by both the huge number of ads selling a materialistic mindset, and by the media ignoring key challenges such as climate change, poverty, and racism. I began doing non-partisan, community organizing in the San Francisco Bay Area with the goal of fostering mass media much more responsive to the needs of citizens. To accomplish this, we created a non-profit organization — Bay Voice — that challenged the licenses of the major broadcast TV stations in the San Francisco Bay Area on the grounds that they were not serving the legal rights of citizens to be informed. In 1987, Bay Voice collaborated with ABC-TV station to produce an historic, hour-long, prime-time “Electronic Town Meeting” viewed by more than 300,000 people and included six votes from a scientific sample of citizens during the live TV program. The public gave the television station very strong, valuable feedback about their programming.

A contemporary expression of this work is the Earth Voice initiative described in this book, which will use internet technology, now accessible to a majority of citizens on the Earth, to create a planetary-scale voice for the Earth.

Writing and research have been a significant part of my work. For me, writing is much more than a mental exercise; it is a whole-body experience of feeling and digesting the meaning of something, so words then embody the felt experience that gives rise to them. Seeing and feeling how we are overconsuming the Earth; I began writing about simplicity of living in the mid 1970s. My book, Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life that is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich, was first published in 1981 and republished in 2009. My experience of working on the Changing Images of Man project felt incomplete and I invested nearly 15 years in writing my own version of this report—Awakening Earth: Exploring the Evolution of Human Culture and Consciousness was published in 1993. Seeing how slow we were in moving toward a more constructive and sustainable future, I wrote Promise Ahead: A Vision of Hope and Action for Humanity’s Future, published in 2000. While involved in the parapsychology experiments in the early 1970s, I began writing about the nature of the universe as a living system permeated by consciousness and this culminated more than 30 years later in my book The Living Universe: Where Are We? Who Are We? Where Are We Going? published in 2009. In addition to these books, I have contributed chapters to more than two-dozen books and published more than a hundred major articles. These decades of research and writing have all converged and contributed to the writing of Choosing Earth.

Throughout these decades, I have had the good fortune to travel to different parts of the world and give talks to diverse audiences on diverse themes. I have given more than 350 keynote speeches to different audiences ranging from business leaders, and non-profit organizations, to universities, film and media groups, religious organizations, and others. I have also been blessed to attend meetings and gatherings with people from all walks of life—including leaders, teachers, students, and workers.

In 2006, I was honored to receive Japan’s “Goi Peace Award” in Tokyo in recognition of my contributions to a global “vision, consciousness, and lifestyle” that fosters a “more sustainable and spiritual culture.” In 2001, I received an honorary Doctor of Philosophy from the California Institute of Integral Studies in recognition for my work for “ecological and spiritual transformation.”

Looking back a half century, I can see how my professional career has led me to author this final book, Choosing Earth. My intention now is to bring this book and the companion documentary and courses into the world through collaborations, organizing, consulting, speaking, and teaching. Please visit these websites to learn more: my personal website: www.DuaneElgin.com and my professional website: www.ChoosingEarth.org