Elizabet Sahtouris, evolution biologist and futurist, describes how the caterpillar to butterfly metamorphosis is a good metaphor for our current world experience, http://www.sahtouris.com/#5_3,0,,1:
“A caterpillar can eat up to three hundred times its own weight in a day, devastating many plants in the process, continuing to eat until it’s so bloated that it hangs itself up and goes to sleep, its skin hardening into a chrysalis. Then, within the chrysalis, within the body of the dormant caterpillar, a new and very different kind of creature, the butterfly, starts to form. . .
Cells with the butterfly genome were held as disclike aggregates of stem cells that biologists call 'imaginal cells', hidden away inside the caterpillar all its life, remaining undeveloped until the crisis of overeating, fatigue and breakdown allows them to develop, gradually replacing the caterpillar with a butterfly!
“Such metamorphosis makes a good metaphor . . . Our bloated old system is rapidly becoming defunct while the vision of a new and very different society, long held by many 'imaginal cell' humans who dreamt of a better world, is now emerging like a butterfly, representing our solutions to the crises of predation, overconsumption and breakdown in a new way of living lightly on Earth, and of seeing our human society not in the metaphors and models of mechanism as well-oiled social machinery, but in those of evolving, self-organizing and intelligent living organism.
“If you want a butterfly world, don't step on the caterpillar, but join forces with other imaginal cells to build a better future for all!”