Choosing Earth Project
Fostering Vision and Voice for Our Planetary Future
The Earth has entered a time of profound and pivotal change. The challenges we face are unprecedented in both their scale and urgency—climate disruption, the unraveling web of life, staggering inequities, mass migrations, and more. Where do we go from here? Fostering our collective vision and voice for the future is at the heart of the Choosing Earth initiative. We have developed a 50-year vision for a promising future. We are also pioneering a citizen-voice movement using the internet, mobile phones, and television. With a combined vision and voice, we can choose a flourishing future. The Choosing Earth project is dedicated to fostering inclusive, informed, and courageous conversations among the people of Earth.
To support a generative conversation around the world, we have three important gifts for you — our free film, book, and group guide — that offer a big-picture perspective and deep insights for turning us toward a more inclusive and welcoming future. This package is being sent to citizens around the world.
Free Downloadable Gifts at ChoosingEarth.org
For over 50 years, Duane Elgin has dedicated his life to social healing and awakening humanity’s collective consciousness for a united journey ahead. His work underscores the urgency of collaborative action to
For over 50 years, Duane Elgin has dedicated his life to social healing and awakening humanity’s collective consciousness for a united journey ahead. His work underscores the urgency of collaborative action to choose, together, a more inclusive and welcoming future. With his partner, Coleen Elgin, he co-founded the non-profit ChoosingEarth.Org that has produced these gifts for the people of the Earth:
choose, together, a more inclusive and welcoming future. With his partner, Coleen Elgin, he co-founded the non-profit ChoosingEarth.Org that has produced these gifts for the people of the Earth:
READ THE BOOK
Explore three pathways 50 years into the future and what it will take to make it through. Available in seven languages.
WATCH THE DOCUMENTARY
Explore the challenges and opportunities of our time with compelling stories. Subtitles in 19 languages.
LEAD GROUPS WITH THE GUIDE
Everything you need to create and facilitate an inquiry that results in collective learning.
SHARE FAR AND WIDE
Help launch a tsunami of conversations about choosing our collective pathway forward.
The Choosing Earth book is available in seven major languages and can be downloaded for free from the book page of our website:
Spanish
Portuguese
French
German
Italian
Chinese
Romanian
Spanish
Portuguese
French
German
Italian
Chinese
Romanian
This pioneering book contains a deeply researched 50-year scenario and is available as a free PDF download. Below is a summary of the main themes of the decades ahead.
Importantly, for a more extensive introduction to the Choosing Earth views of the future, see the section of this website: “ELGIN ESSAYS.”
Videos for Choosing Earth
“Choosing Earth, Choosing Life”
Film Produced & Directed by Coleen Elgin
Choosing Earth: Choosing Life is a 63-minute documentary that explores the speed, depth, and magnitude of our growing planetary crisis, and the opportunity to meet this crisis consciously – with eyes and hearts wide open. Through a broad, whole-systems perspective, the film examines key challenges (climate change, inequities, species extinction, overconsumption, and more) and explores the deeper transformation being called forth from humanity. Woven throughout are stories from around the world illustrating both heartbreaking impacts and inspiring resilience. Engaging with this paradox — an unfolding global crisis paired with the opportunity to awaken to and serve the well-being of all of life — is the work of our lifetimes.
Also available on:
A WHOLE SYSTEMS VIEW OF OUR PLANETARY CRISIS
A Video with Duane Elgin
The Choosing Earth Project recognizes the world confronts much more than a climate crisis; we face a whole-systems crisis that includes the mass extinction of species, growing shortages of fresh water, extreme inequities of wealth and well-being, and much more. A greatly expanded view is essential if we are to understand and respond to these global crises. Here are four perspectives that the Choosing Earth Project brings together:
- LOOK WIDE — A WHOLE SYSTEMS VIEW: We bring together a range of interdependent trends, including climate disruption, water scarcity, food shortages, the extinction of animals and plants, unsustainable population growth, inequities of well-being, and more. Viewed together, they bring an Earth-system crisis into sharp focus.
- LOOK DEEP — WISDOM FROM BOTH SCIENCE AND SPIRITUALITY: We bring together insights from both spirituality and science to understand the Earth as a living system. Instead of regarding the Earth as dead at its foundations and merely a resource for humans to exploit, we see the Earth as a living system to be cared for.
- LOOK LONG — EXPLORE THE DEEP FUTURE: We look 50 years ahead to where the long-run impact of critical trends becomes much more apparent. This project does not offer a “prediction” but a scholarly estimation of the three most likely pathways ahead for humanity: 1) authoritarianism with AI, 2) ruinous collapse, and 3) a leap forward.
- LOOK UP— MOBILIZE UPLIFTING FORCES: Assembling forces for uplift is vital if we are to rise above breakdown and collapse and move onto a path of collective renewal. These powerful uplifts include reconciliation, communication, maturation, paradigm change, community, consciousness, and simplicity.
Drew Dellinger is . . .
“At the Threshold:
Grief, Initiation, and Transformation”
Francis Weller, author of the preface to Choosing Earth
A spirited and soul-searching conversation based on Francis’s work as a psychotherapist and soul activist. Francis is also the author of the powerful preface for the second edition of Duane’s book, Choosing Earth. The title of his preface describes what we focus on in this impactful conversation: “At the Threshold: Grief, Initiation, and Transformation.” You can download the full book with preface for free here.
For thirty-nine years, Francis has worked as a psychotherapist and developed a style he calls s”oul-centered psychotherapy.” As a gifted therapist and teacher, he has been described as a jazz artist, improvising, and moving fluidly in and out of deep emotional territories with groups and individuals, bringing imagination and attention to places often held with judgment and shame. https://www.francisweller.net/
An interview with Francis Weller
Summary Scenario of Humanity’s Transition
2020 – 2070
2020s: The Great Unraveling: Breakdown
Every major institution is beginning to fray and break down. The world’s economy is fragmenting and failing at every level, local, national, and global. The Earth’s ecology of land, oceans, animals, and plants is seriously deteriorating. Social systems at every level are malfunctioning, with a loss of public trust, declining legitimacy, and growing divisions. Academic institutions are increasingly out of touch with the learning needs of students for living effectively on our changing Earth. Mass media are promoting consumerism while exploiting fear and distraction. Religious institutions are losing public trust as sources of meaning and understanding in our unraveling world.
2030s: The Great Collapse: Free Fall
The world is in profound overshoot. The demands made by humanity exceed what the biosphere can sustain through its capacity for regeneration and renewal. We cannot continue the patterns of the past. The threads of connection that have held civilizations together are breaking apart, and we are descending into collapse. The entire complex apparatus of a world living far beyond its material means confronts humanity with a collapsing ecology — severe climate changes, mass extinctions of animals and plants, declining food production, growing famine and disease, widespread conflicts, and more.
2040s: The Great Initiation: Sorrow
A collapsing world produces immense loss, sorrow, grief, and blame. Widespread conflicts are generated by climate change, species extinction, resource depletion, mass migrations, and more. The world is spiraling out of control, producing a great dying and incredible suffering as millions of humans perish along with masses of animal and plant life across the Earth. The world must evolve if we are to avoid the functional extinction of our species.
2050s: The Great Transition: Early Adulthood
We collectively wake up to the reality that the Earth system is collapsing. Our choice is to either surrender to the functional extinction of human life or move into our collective maturity. We recognize our collective responsibility to work for the well-being of all human life—rich and poor, North and South, people of all races, and more. Regeneration movements are growing at every scale— in “ecovillages,” “transition cities,” and “eco-civilizations”—and we begin to build the foundations for a new life on Earth.
2060s: The Great Freedom: Choosing Earth
From immense loss emerges a new human maturity and a collective resolve to communicate and collaborate in new ways of living on Earth. With species-level conversations, we choose the Earth as our home and communicate in entirely new ways to bend the evolutionary curve away from ruin and toward an uplifting future. Intense efforts for innovation and restoration surge around the world.
2070s: The Great Journey: An Open Future
An Earth-scale consciousness and species-civilization are emerging. Recognizing we will either rise together or fall together, we choose to rise with a new sense of humanity as a whole-Earth community. A new pathway for restoring the integrity of life on Earth beckons.