Welcome
EcozoicTimes.Com is a news source and resource center for the emerging Ecozoic era, an aspirational, nascent, and necessary new era – a geologic era – of mutually enhancing human-Earth relations.
What does Ecozoic mean?
Earth is entering a new geologic era. The previous one, the Cenozoic era, which spanned the last 65 million years, has been terminated by the western-style global, military, industrialized human community in the 19th, 20th, and now still, in the early 21st century.
The word Ecozoic was coined by Thomas Berry in conversation with Brian Thomas Swimme for their book The Universe Story (1992) in order to describe the geologic era that Earth is entering – the “Ecozoic era” – when humans live in a mutually enhancing relationship with Earth and the Earth community.
The options for the future seem to be binary: life or death. We can create the Ecozoic era, living with Earth in a mutual fashion, or we can create a death era, living to destroy ourselves and Earth.
Remember, humans always create culture. We are a species that is constantly deciding how to make ourselves. We do that through culture. Every day we decide anew whether to create a culture of life or a culture of death.
While not intending to change the course of evolution, chemistry, or the large scale cycles of the planet, we have indeed done so. We have been, as a culture, simply paying attention to our own needs, acting out of what Dr. Brian Thomas Swimme calls “local mind”.
While many individuals of the last centuries have been aware of the effects our way of life have had on the Earth community, as a society, and now a global civilization we have been unable to see those effects. We have not historically been paying attention to how our activities have impacted the larger community of life and those structures and systems that support life. Or perhaps, we were not mature enough to understand, we did not have the eyes to see, had not developed the appropriate “organs of perception”.
The evolutionary dynamics that created Earth now include the conscious and unconscious actions of the human family.