Purpose Inspired: by Wayne Visser

We live in an unfathomable universe. All around us are mysteries that we cannot pretend to understand. Life is a tangle of complexities, the synergies of which we can only feebly guess at. To survive this uncertainty, to prevent us from going insane with confusion, we automatically try to simplify “life, the universe and everything”. One way is through adopting beliefs – patterns of thought that tell us how things work and what we need to do to fit in. Another way is by using metaphors to fill the voids where un-knowing exists. Metaphors assume that life continuously reflects, refracts and duplicates itself – like a mirror, a prism or a hologram. The most powerful source of metaphors is Nature. We constantly refer to our observations about Earth’s natural processes to explain our own personal, social and mystical experiences – birth, growth, cooperation, conflict, death, seasons, cycles, equilibrium. And of Nature’s metaphors, few can be so meaningful and enduring than the Tree. In this episode, I have interspersed fragments of a poem that I wrote with my own reflections on “The Tree of Life”. As you take this journey of imagination with me, I hope that you will discover you own personal garden of inspiration. 

History shows us that science is always incomplete and very seldom synonymous with wisdom. Some say that science is always playing catch-up with our spiritual understanding. Yet, it is forever pregnant with new discoveries, insights and theories, each with the potential to completely transform our picture of the world we thought we knew and understood. Seen in this context, modern brain-mind research has progressed only as far as naive adolescence, still embarrassingly unsure of what makes people tick. Parapsychology, by comparison, is still a clumsy, babbling toddler, only vaguely aware of the amazing possibilities within its power. In keeping with this metaphor, what I have called “para-ecology” and “ecokinesis” are disciplines that have scarcely been born. But they promise new knowledge that could, in time, completely revolutionise everything we have come to know and accept about both psychology and ecology. 

What are the positive signs - the stories of hope? Well, I draw my hope from the testimony of four people. They are Edgar Mitchell, James Lovelock, Victor Frankl and George Washington Carver. But what about each of us in our own daily lives. Are we listening? I believe that, for Creation to be healed, each of us needs to be that Connection between Earth and Sky. We each need to find our own sense of meaning and inspiration from nature. Whether it be by growing things, by walking in the mountains and forests, by actively campaigning for environmental issues, by consciously buying environmentally-friendly products, or by allowing ourselves to relate more intimately with the creatures which share our planet. So what is your messenger from Nature? Are you ready to listen? 

I wonder what you thought of when you saw this title - Connecting Earth and Sky? Well, for me, there are three ideas or questions which come to mind: Firstly, it is the story of creation - how did the earth and sky come to exist in the first place, and how do they fit into the grander scheme of things? Secondly, there are the environmental issues surrounding our earth and sky - what impact are we having on our planet, for better or for worse? Thirdly, how does Nature influence and inspire us? What are the deeper connections which exist between the living creation which surrounds us and of which we are a part, and our spiritual experience of life? So really, in this episode, I am going to be looking at our relationship as human beings with Life. And it is at a time in history when environmental consciousness is reaching a peak. 

With the rich texture of African soil once again beneath my feet, the warm sun on my back, and the Cape South Easter wind tugging at my hair, my body and soul have unmistakably returned home.  My mind, however, still drifts back and forth between this land and another, the ancient land of the Celts, where I spent the past year studying and experiencing human ecology. A year earlier I had left South Africa for Edinburgh, Scotland, uncertain about the path that lay ahead, and aware of the risk I had taken in forsaking a lucrative corporate career to undertake postgraduate studies in human ecology in a city so far from home.  But I have always been interested in the bigger picture of things.  Through these further studies - in the exploration of human relationships within society and with nature - I could focus on my concerns about modern society; I could find a better way to “make a difference”, and play some small part in securing the future for my home country - and for our home planet. In retrospect, I made a good choice.  As well as enjoying a year of valuable dialogue on environmental issues in a humanistic context, I was exposed to the experience of people who are actively living out human and ecological solutions in the world.

After various world summits on sustainable development, we should take care not to mistake this single event for the greater symphony of change that it heralds. Like fleas on an elephant, we need to jump back and see the greater whole – the challenge of creating a sustainable world. However you want to define it, in the end, it comes down to our ability to endure. Those that understand how social and environmental drivers will be shaping the landscape over the coming decades will be better placed to survive. This episodes ventures ten predictions about how the future will be different. In the future: 
- The number of banned substances will increase exponentially
- Forensic sustainability will emerge as a new professional discipline 
- Governments and civil organisations will maintain and publicise corporate grey-lists 
- Companies will employ sophisticated, real-time corporate stakeholder monitoring
- Every component of every product and service will be coded with sustainability tagging
- Companies will produce and utilise sustainability-intelligent technologies
- Companies will adopt and follow Generally Accepted Sustainability Practices (GASP)
- Companies will operate within a macro policy environment that embodies sustainability economics
- Companies will stretch their strategies to include consideration of future generations and ecosystems
- The power of the mind will be harnessed to achieve sustainability-kinesis effects

This episode deals with the crucial debate that is beginning to emerge about corporate social responsibility (CSR), which acknowledges that the sophistication of stakeholder challenges and corporate responses has gone up a gear, but questions whether CSR itself is too little too late, or even a red herring. Is CSR a distraction from the more fundamental transformation (perhaps revolution even) of the capitalist business model which is needed? And as CSR becomes an established professional practice, will it take as given that its purpose is to benefit those who employ its professionals, rather than a primary goal of transforming the world? If so, CSR will have contributed towards a global Crash and Burn scenario, with growing ecological and social degradation. We have to find the courage to be self-critical, and explore what we are thinking and doing. It is through this reflexivity that CSR might avoid being complicit in a global Crash and Burn and become a crucial part of a Rise and Shine scenario, where the world achieves a greater harmony between people and with the ecology. This scenario requires systemic change. 

As the new millennium looms large on the horizon, speculation about humanity’s recent progress are becoming ever more frequent.  Even more so are whisperings that humanity might be teetering on the threshold of a new phase in its evolutionary development.  Not surprisingly, a search for new images and metaphors to serve as positive visions for the future has begun in earnest.  The purpose of this episode is to explore some of the more recent of these images to emerge from the outstanding research and imagination of a few pioneering individuals.  A good place to start is to get the Industrial Age well behind us, for it has been a crumbling image for at least the past four decades.  In its wake however, we find the explosive rise of a revolutionary successor.  I am of course referring to the Information Age.  One of the pioneering voices in this regard is American futurist Hazel Henderson. Henderson’s suggested alternative is what she calls a “repatterning of the exploding Information Age” into an emerging new Age of Light. 

Surprisingly little has been written about the search for meaning in a workplace or business context, and nothing, in my knowledge, has made the explicit link to corporate social responsibility (CSR). It is surprising, partly because meaning has been a serious topic of research and application for at least fifty years now, following the seminal work of Viktor Frankl and others, as have the fields of industrial psychology and CSR. But it is more surprising still, simply because work is where we spend about a third of lives. If meaning cannot be found in the workplace, our ability to lead a fulfilling life is seriously impaired. The importance of understanding how work can contribute to meaning in life seems more critical now than ever before. Anecdotal evidence is mounting that people in the West are increasingly feeling a sense of existential crisis in their working lives. On the one hand, they are expecting more from their work experience, including that it will nurture personal development and self actualisation. On the other hand, they are finding the capitalist, corporate model of work to be lacking in a meaningful higher purpose, or to put it another way, the modern workplace and economy is devoid of a sense of soul.

In this episode, I want to explode a few myths about corporate responsibility in developing countries. Most of these myths exist as a result of the feeding frenzy that inevitably occurs every time the media has hunted down and sunk its teeth into one or other juicy story of corporate exploitation. The myths are also sustained, however, by whole legions of largely well-intentioned people in developed countries who have vested interests in promoting their particular brand of the truth about corporate responsibility. The seven myths are:
- Economic growth is not good
- Multinationals are the biggest sinners
- Multinationals are the biggest saviours
- Developing countries are anti-multinational
- Corporate responsibility is the same the world over
- Developed countries lead on corporate responsibility
- Codes can ensure corporate responsibility