Earth Celebrations: Mainstreaming the Planet
Foundation Archives 1989

an interview by Antero Alli

It's 1989, twenty years after the first photographs of the Earth arrived from American astronauts on the moon. Inspired by its powerful image, thirty-year old Jose Argüelles, then a UC Davis art history professor, helped initiate the first Earth Day celebration on April 22, 1970. Since then, numerous earth-based ecological movements and organizations have rallied on behalf of the environment to raise the mass consciousness to planetary issues. In August of 1987, Argüelles spearheaded the Harmonic Convergence, a world wide ceremony engaging the awareness and participation of millions....

Antero Ali: Directly following the Harmonic Convergence, a dark period ensued where enthusiasm died out and left people wondering...How did the "post-convergence dead zones" effect you?

Jose Argüelles: For myself, after the Convergence all I wanted to do was find a cave and do my breathing exercises. You see, it caught on way past my wildest dreams and so, that's a tremendous release of energy. I just had to take it easy afterwards. In any case, my son Josh was killed on October 29th that year; he was eighteen then. And so, I wanted to go in a cave anyway. We did a 49-day retreat after his death. I'm still pretty much in a state of shock and grief so, Lloydine and I pretty much stayed close to the ground until just recently.

Antero Ali: On a collective level, it really feels like we're between stages...

Jose Argüelles: I get that feeling too, like we're between worlds. We're between the world of Ronnie Reagan and George Bush, on one hand, wondering if the American Dream is going to hold up or what...

I think lots of people are experiencing this thing of being caught between worlds right now. Since most people are still "wage slaves" there's the quandry of showing up at this big party like the Harmonic Convergence and then having to arrive at the office the next morning. For a lot of us, it's hard to cope with that kind of adjustment. Yet, the world keeps moving on and people really don't know what to do...

Antero Ali: It seems as the Earth's vertical emanation grows stronger in our awareness, the more horizontally-identified entities like governments, big businesses and such collapse unless they're aligned with the planetary intention.

Jose Argüelles: That's absolutely correct. We're definitely in a transition of indecision, collapse, chaos, and more indecision while something else emerges...

Antero Ali: What's working for you as a creative response to all this chaos...

Jose Argüelles: What I ended up doing from the time of Josh's death in October of 1987 to the beginning of December 1988 was pretty much nothing. I didn't do anything except to attend to business at hand day by day. What each day needed to have done, was done and very little else. I also remember not looking for anything not seeking for anything beyond the immediate work at hand. There were a couple of slogans that did come up during this period, like: "Don't be foolish enough to believe other people's projections of you" and "Everything takes care of itself." Other than that, it was just tending to my own business.

Antero Ali: You mentioned the time period between 1988-92 as being crucial to your vision of the Campaign for the Earth. Recently, the American people elected ex-CIA director George Bush to govern us with his visions during this same time. How do you see these two visions coinciding and/or colliding with each other?

JA: My feeling is that this is going to be the last presidential administration as we know it. Mr. Bush is in a position where he can either continue to go in the direction we've been going in over the past decade or so, like greater involvement in the world drug wars and military sales, the crime cartels and all that. Now this is a very big and bizarre ball game where the United States government has gotten itself into a position of actually competing with other governments and international crime cartels.

Or.. Bush could start hearing what's going on environmentally and pick up some cues to do something about it as the head of this nation state called America. He might, for instance, send battalions of troups with picks and shovels to restore ruined land masses or start paying more attention to the effects Gorbachev is having by his actions. It's hard to say but I think if he goes in the former direction, he's a dead duck...

The tenure and nature of the events occurring over the next couple of years is going to force some real hard decisions about what's actually going on in the world. The reality is that the nationalistic approach is really a destructive one at this point the way nation states are set up right now.

You see, the atmosphere doesn't know boundaries, the weather doesn't know boundaries and, the ozone doesn't know boundaries. The level of cooperation that's going to be necessary to deal with all this is showing us now that the present nationalistic government approach is quite obsolete.

AA: The late Joseph Campbell stressed repeatedly of the need for a new collective mythos to help people organize their lives around a common vision and purpose. What part does the planetary entity, the Earth, play in the emergent mythology?

JA: I agree with Campbell on that. In 1969, we had the first trip of a man to the moon and the first photographs of the Earth sent back to us from the lunar surface... It is a very powerful image and the basis for what I believe Campbell calls the new mythology. Allen Ginsberg once said, "Whoever controls the image, controls the mind." Even though we've had this image of the Earth for twenty years, the people who've controlled the images have not understood or used it or have not wanted to understand how to use it. As a consequence, we're not totally up-to-speed with this image. However, I think developments since the Harmonic Convergence are taking us back to integrate that image and the power of the mythos that image carries... The next step is really embedding this image of the whole Earth into the collective mass consciousness. The unconscious has to become conscious through articulation in other words, and the Earth has suddenly come back into prominence. And we're looking for ways to mainstream the planet.

AA: This is the selling of the Earth, isn't it, Jose?

JA: Like I said, Antero, mainstreaming the planet is where it's at now. In regards to this, we've a lot to learn from the skill and effort used to sell Coca Cola, Proctor & Gamble, and the lot... Twenty years ago the environmental movement was there but it was never coherent in a global sense. Military issues seemed to be more critical back then. Now, the campaign for the Earth is the moral equivalent of world war. We need that right now...

AA: How exactly are you going to accomplish this necessary shift in people's attitudes and thinking about the Earth to make it normal to celebrate the planet?

JA: I think that will come about through an economic shift, specifically from an economy of efficiency to an economy of sustainability. Our total throw-away culture, which was produced by the industrial age, is a prime example of what I mean by "efficiency." When mass production of commodities, at the greatest possible speed, uses up natural resources with little regard for toxic side-effects and waste material, well, we end up with what we have now -- an environmental emergency. Now, we don't have much time to make this shift into an economy of sustainability...

What I mean by "sustainability" is where technology serves to improve the quality of life by fostering creativity instead of non-stop consumption of non-renewable resources.

This can be achieved by "linking" rather than "ranking" our concerns with those of other people and those of the Earth. What it is, really, is a shift in values from standardized mass production to individual and collective creativity. Five hundred years ago a cultural renaissance exploded in Europe... I think everybody's ready for it.