Each of us must ask ourselves what the future we want to step into looks like. Let’s replace platitudes about making the world a cleaner, healthier and safer place for our children, with actionable, tangible details. What does this future actually look like? How do we communicate? How does it function? How is it powered? What value system is it based on? What does it feel like to participate in? What are we eating? Change the Course, an initiative of the Rainforest Action Network, launched a virtual visualization exercise this summer that gave the listener many provocative prompts. More of this kind of intentional use of imagination is desperately needed now.

When we consider the short timeframe in which humanity must reckon with the ecological crisis we have unleashed, we do not have time for chaos and incoherence — for a slow-motion breakdown, the rise of Right Wing despotism, or a political vacuum. Pretty soon, people may reach a tipping point, a collective realization that our social structures — our political and economic system — must be reinvented. As that realization dawns, an alternative must be ready with a plan of action, and working prototypes.

The best, perhaps the only, option will be to design and implement an orderly, humane, and relatively harmonious transition. The procedure is a bit like installing a new operating system for human society, using our current hardware. As part of this transition, we need to restrict greenhouse gas emissions to the bare minimum, eliminate unnecessary sectors of the global economy, rapidly convert to renewable energy, phase out fossil fuel usage, put limits on corporate power, and shift from industrial farming to organic, regenerative agriculture.

To ensure our continuity, we must distribute wealth and resources more equitably across the human community, as a whole. This proposition presents difficulties for the ruling elite, that tiny segment of the population who currently control the lion’s share of capital. However, what must be done is necessary for our collective survival, which includes the financial elite. It is, ultimately, in their best interests, as much as they may not like it.

What makes this project feasible — at least, in theory — is the development of the Internet. The Internet could be used to distribute new systems of participatory democracy, as well as new networks of value exchange, based on principles of cooperation and mutual aid. The transition strategy to implement a regenerative social design would be based on “Cradle to Cradle” principles, where manufacturing meshed with the health of the biosphere. It would apply permaculture practices, both ecologically and socially, on a global scale. All of this starts with the most regenerative of resources: human ingenuity. As we are natural beings, human society, in itself, can only be an expression of nature, an unfolding of its hidden capacities.

Perhaps, the discovery of fossil fuels under the Earth — stored reservoirs of millions of years of ancient sunlight — were a one-time bequest to humanity. This stored sunlight gave us the power to construct a global civilization. This power also has blinded us. It prevented us from reckoning with the negative consequences of our behavior patterns, which included the urge to dominate and control natural processes, as well as human societies.

The last few hundred years, since the Industrial Revolution, were a telescoped process. During this time, humanity overcame local boundaries and became a globally interconnected species — in a sense, a super-organism. We continuously transform our physical environment to satisfy our needs and desires. Imperialism, colonialism, neoliberalism, capitalism, industrialization, and even communism are all transitional systems. They meshed humanity together, crudely and brutally, connecting the entire species through networks of communication and infrastructure.

We now require a rapid transition — what the philosopher William Irwin Thompson called a shift from the “globalization of civilization” to the “planetization of consciousness.” As difficult as it is to imagine, we must overcome the blind spots in our ideologies and belief systems. We must find the path that leads to a harmonic, peaceful unification of humanity. This requires defining a new form of political economy that supports the restoration or regeneration of the Earth’s ecosystems, while allowing every human being to live decently. It also means defining a new relationship to technology and innovation.

As we approach the threshold of ecological catastrophe, we must question the capacity of an aggregate of self-interested nation-states, as well as self-interested multi-national corporations, and a tiny coterie of the super-wealthy (the 85 individuals who control more capital than half of the world’s 7 billion people), to make the necessary course correction. What we need, instead, is a social movement that builds commitment, solidarity and collective intelligence. Such a global movement must have at hand a comprehensive, systemic alternative. It must be ready to implement scalable solutions, quickly.

The potential to establish a worldwide social movement — to bring about an evolutionary mutation in our current way of being — depends on finding a narrative, a mythology, that awakens the deepest yearnings within the collective soul of humanity. It must, also, incite us to manifest our latent capacities for democratic participation and cooperation, for determined action based on empathy, for strategic planning and coordination. The basis for this must be a combination of what Pope Francis calls an “ecological conversion” and a kind of revelation: A shared belief that we can reinvent human society for collective benefit — for the benefit of humanity as a whole, as well as the other species that share this living world.

The only option is to define, and promote, a model or models for a future human society that are aspirational, inspiring, pragmatic and dare we say utopian. Models that creates desire, that kindle the deepest hopes, even long forgotten ones, in the hearts of the people — the teeming multitudes.

The vision must, also, supplant the current ideal of material and technological progress, which has taken deep roots in the collective consciousness. It must offer something new — and not just novel — something that can regenerate, morph and change as we are called to respond and adapt to a world in a state of extreme transition.

We can conceive of a transition to a regenerative society, where economics and industry benefit the Earth’s ecosystems, where we have shifted from competition to cooperation as a basic paradigm, where the world’s religions have been reconciled in a framework that supports peace and harmony. This may seem farfetched — but once the idea of a jet plane or a smart phone was inconceivable. Humanity has the capacity to realize the impossible, when we so choose. Human nature, in itself, is not fixed, but variable and highly contextual. What we can conceive, we can accomplish.

Technology has a crucial role to play in this transition, but its power must be harnessed and mastered for ecological restoration and social evolution. We could use the mass media and the Internet to retool the human population, on a global scale, in ecological practices, such as rooftop gardening, rainwater harvesting, composting, ways to produce renewable energy from biodigestors or solar heaters. We could repurpose the engineering genius which created the Internet and the smart phone to build wilderness corridors, rapidly replant forests, reverse ocean acidification, use natural bioremediation techniques on watersheds and wetlands, and so on.

To build a regenerative society will require that we supersede the current global financial system, based on debt and compound interest, and use our social technologies to devise an economic system that supports healthy lifestyles and patterns of behavior.

Many approaches to this already exist, such as the Terra, a negative interest currency proposed by the economist Bernard Lietaer. Peer2Peer Foundation has worked with the Ecuadorean government to create a “Commons Transition plan, proposing a model for transitioning to a “partnership state” that supports open-source, cooperative economies based on free access to education and distributed manufacturing. There are a number of excellent proposals and prototypes for a new economy — these need to be rapidly tested, tried on large populations, perfected, then scaled up.

If we look at our social and technical evolution over the last centuries, it seems similar to a gigantic activity of self-organization, perhaps a transition to a higher order of coherence and complexity. Humanity has overlaid roads, train tracks, fiber optics, urban and suburban sprawl, across the surface of the planet. We have also constructed a global communication infrastructure, like a planetary nervous system, that allows humanity to communicate instantly, from anywhere across the globe. Now we could, in theory, make use of this electronic nervous system to raise the consciousness of the planet, building a collective movement toward social and ecological transformation.

The only hope for the future is that humanity embrace a period of shared, collective sacrifice — a path that the ‘Developed World’ must model, as we have been responsible for the largest amount of the pollution as well as promoting the consumerist lifestyle around the planet. Rather than some form of punishment, the sacrifice could be seen as an opportunity to strip ourselves back, to rebuild and embrace local community, to find our essence and connect with our soul. If we can marshal our resources to confront the ecological mega-crisis, we can define a path beyond it that integrates cradle-to-cradle principles, biomimicry, and other principles that are symbiotic with nature, eventually producing abundance for all, while enhancing the health of the biosphere. This is the call-to-action for this generation, the re-generation, the generation that re-thought and re-constructed how we lived in harmony with the planet.