Category: Mike Bell

In the previous two chronicles I have used the analogy of the chrysalis experience to describe the need for transitions in dealing with a climate changing world.
Chronicle 38 introduced the three life stages of the chrysalis: the caterpillar cocoon stage, the imaginal cell stage, and the new butterfly stage. The major focus was on the cocoon that I described as a colonial cocoon protecting the economic and sometimes political systems designed to gorge themselves on Earth’s resources.

If Earth is in a transition from the Holocene era to the Anthropocene era, we must transition with it. We must find our place in a new kind of Earth. We are, after all, earthlings. We have come from Earth through an evolutionary process. Our consciousness is part of the consciousness of the living Earth and a conscious universe. We are in the Earth… and Earth and the conscious universe are in us.

I’ve been looking for a story to describe the climate change transitions between where we are now, where we are going and how we are going to get there.  I think I have found one—the chrysalis experience. It is an analogy. It shows the transitions that occur between the caterpillar and the butterfly in the cocoon. I’m using it to help illustrate the three stages in the climate change challenge.

The Chrysalis Experience In Nature

In their book, The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era, Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry predict the coming of the Ecozoic Era. (“Eco” from the Greek “house or home”, and “Zoic” from the Greek, meaning “pertaining to living things” thus “the house or home of living things”.) The dominant characteristic of this new era will be a mutually enhancing relationship between our species and Earth.
Some folks will say, “This is ridiculous. They can’t just make up a name for a new era. Do they think they have a crystal ball or something to see into the future?”

I suspect that when many folks hear the term “earthlings” they think of science fiction. I have a favourite movie I watch every time it comes on TV: “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Superior beings in a space ship scoop up “earthlings” into their ship and at the end we see the skinny space creatures walking down a ramp letting the “earthlings” go.

That’s not what I mean by “earthlings”.

In the run-up to the creation of Nunavut in 1999 I was giving a workshop on reframing in Resolute, the small Inuit community closest to the North Pole. The participants were kadluna (white) civil servants. The subject was reframing—how our cultures teach us to see the world and give it meaning.