Renewable energy meets the evolution of consciousness in an exciting new documentary! With a special internet release in time for Earth Day, The Future of Energy film is coming off a North American and Australian tour, and was a featured film of New York Climate Week.
I recently watched a newly released documentary called The Future of Energy, a film that is as much about consciousness as it is about solar panels and wind turbines. I connected with Theo Badashi, co-writer and host of the film, for an exclusive Earth Week interview to ask him about the relationships between consciousness, energy, and community empowerment.
You can watch The Future of Energy free right here..
Adrian: When most people think of solar panels they don’t immediately think of the evolution of consciousness, yet your film speaks directly to that correlation. How did your team make those connections?
Theo: We’re deeply interested in understanding how consciousness evolves, and how new phases of evolution are expressed in our culture through the systems and technologies we create. Though we set out to tell a story of how renewable energy can help solve the climate crisis, a bigger story naturally emerged, as it became clear that renewable energy is a physical reflection of a larger shift that is occurring.
Adrian: A lot of people appear to be experiencing the shift in consciousness that your film describes. Share with us how you’re experiencing it.
Theo: The fundamental shift that we see is a transformation of our deeper sense of identity, in which individuals and communities are moving out of the old Egoic Self, and into what many call a Planetary or Biospheric Self. Technology—when used with intention—allows us to engage with people and beings all over the world, and from that people are developing empathy for other cultures, other species, even eco-systems themselves. We’re experiencing a deeper connection with this delicate Web of Life, and creating societies in which the sacredness of all beings is at the center of our decisions and actions. This shift in identity transcends politics, culture, and spiritual beliefs. It appears to be a fundamental evolutionary impulse that is now coming into a new phase of existence.
Adrian: The film places social and ecological justice at the heart of this global shift. With so much concern about racial oppression and economic inequality in America and around the world, what role does renewable energy play in actually addressing some of these problems?
Theo: Ecologist Joanna Macy, who we feature in the film, refers to our current era as the time of the Great Turning, in which we move away from systems based upon oppression and death, to systems based upon justice, abundance, and life. Our entire economic system in America was founded upon the oppression of African Americans and Indigenous peoples, and we see that same oppressive consciousness imbedded within the currently dominant energy regimes. For a genuine revolution of consciousness to occur, it’s clear to us that it has to be founded on restorative healing, honesty, democracy, and community empowerment. Our film aims at showing how this new energy revolution is doing just that.
Adrian: Last question: Can you offer advice to those of us in the consciousness community about how we can help create larger global change?
Theo: One way to further this shift is for the Conscious Evolutionaries of the world to step forward and tell a better story than the one told by Industrial Culture, by embracing our roles as Evolutionary Story Tellers. Climate psychologist Per Espen Stoknes, in his book What We Think About Global Warming, tells us that we have to create stories that simultaneously speak to the heart and the mind. The big mistake most climate educators make is to just lay out a bunch of facts and hope it scares people into action. Studies show that fearful facts actually shut people down and stop them from taking action. What we need is vision from the heart.
Our role as Evolutionaries is to tell a New Story about the world we are creating: a story so beautiful that we wake up each day excited to build it and share it. As cosmologist Brian Swimme reminds us, this is a story 14 billion years in the making. It’s a story about the unfurling of Life and creativity, and about the awakening of a species to its evolutionary potentials. The more we share this story, the more this vision comes to life.
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