Our life-aligned culture is alive and growing, Part 1

Are you open and ready to see that?

The Ecocivilization Coalition is a worldwide alliance of changemakers coming together to act as a focused transformation catalyst. Their aim is to foster an alternative cohering narrative and act as connective tissue to help catalyze the movement for change—to find the most skillful ways to cohere, serve, and amplify groups already actively engaged, and to try to bring the movement itself to a new level of effectiveness and empowerment. It’s led by Jeremy Lent, whose new book is Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All. 

You can find out about the Ecocivilization Coalition in two ways:

1)     Read the Overview.

2)     Attend a presentation on Tues. Aug. 4, 2026 at 1:00 pm Pacific time                     

In "When the Commons Disappears" Part 1 and Part 2, Barbara Vacarr points out that when a campus closes, "we do not simply lose buildings or institutions. We lose places where people once gathered with intention. . . We lose a kind of commons." She identifies a growing hunger beneath it for belonging, meaning, intergenerational connection, and places where people can live, learn, create, and evolve in relationship to one another rather than in isolation.

She goes on: ". . . perhaps what we are actually missing are places intentionally designed for shared human life, places rooted in real life"--in relationship, responsibility, creativity, and shared belonging--and asks how to reimagine the commons, e.g. "What kinds of places does human flourishing now require? What forms of shared life are worth rebuilding?"

She suggests that the most vital places will no longer function as isolated institutions, but as living commons, where people do not simply consume experience but participate in shaping the life of the community itself, connected, once again, to the shared project of being human together. The deeper question is "What forms of human life do we still know how to build together?" Many people are hungry for forms of life that feel more connected, participatory, intergenerational, and rooted in place.

"We consume content, experiences, education, community. But belonging cannot be consumed. Belonging is practiced. It is created slowly through participation, mutual responsibility, shared rituals, collective care, and sustained presence over time."

The City That Chose Nature Over Billboards “When the French city of Grenoble declined to renew its billboard contracts in 2014, it did something quietly radical: it treated public space as belonging to the public. Over the following decade, 326 advertising structures came down, and in their place came trees, bike lanes, and open sightlines to the Alps -- a transformation so well-received that not one of the two election cycles since has seen any effort to reverse it.

“What Grenoble's experiment quietly reveals is how much we have normalized the colonization of our shared attention, and how little it takes, politically and practically, to begin reclaiming it.”

Do you see our new “cultural butterfly” mycelium emerging? It’s co-creative, cooperative, relational, and aligned with life, vs. our current competitive, individualistic, transactional culture that is primarily aligned with matter and things.

This a growing movement, and it’s a shift in our consciousness, not just in our physical/material experience or framework. As Iain McGilchrist puts it, "The kind of attention we pay to the world changes the world we pay attention to".

 Our paradigms are shifting. This is good news, because what got us here can’t get us “there” (where we want to go).

Part 2 of this series will be about the 300+ movements, frameworks, and approaches already creating the new economy that works for all of us now.

I plan to publish that by Wed. Aug.5^th. Stay tuned, and thank you for being here!