''This is the introduction to [[SolSeed: The Book of Life#The "SolSeed Gospel" according to Ben|Ben's portion of SolSeed: The Book of Life]].''
Like so many nerdy kids, I grew up with my head among the stars. I cherished my toy Space Shuttles and was drawing pictures of space probes before I started first grade. Once I was old enough for novels, I ate up science fiction by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov like candy. Apart from my parents, probably the biggest influence on my childhood was ''Star Trek'', whose technobabble about warp cores and wormholes stuck in my mind in the same way I imagine religious jargon heard in church might impress a young child of religious parents, as frightfully important despite its obscure meaning. I considered it a matter of faith that one day, people really would boldly go out among the stars on missions to explore strange new worlds.
Oddly, my parents' efforts to interest me in exploring our home planet were largely in vain. I experienced hiking for miles through beautiful Oregon forests as a chore to be endured, or at best, as a challenge to my map-reading skills. The only wonders of nature that impressed me in my grade-school years were flight and massive scale. Flight is self-explanatory – almost everyone watches birds with some mix of awe and envy. I may be a little more obsessed with it than most; ''Winged Migration'' is still my favorite movie of all time. As for scale, witnessing the sheer size of mighty waterfalls, towering redwoods, or the walls of Yosemite Valley shocked me into paying attention to the grandeur of the world. I loved the sense of glorious vertigo I got when looking up at things far beyond the human scale, which somehow failed to make me feel small. I had the same emotional response when watching the huge Starship Enterprise gliding through a door in the side of a massively larger space station. Religious people call it “experiencing the numinous.” Sci-fi fans call it “sense of wonder.”
But I was only awakened to the true wonder and beauty of the natural world by the news of its imminent destruction. Early in my college years, I encountered phrases like “the Sixth Great Extinction” and “the collapse of the biosphere” and realized to my horror that they didn't belong to some sci-fi apocalypse scenario, but derived from scientific analyses of what was already happening to the world. Even worse, the cause of all this destruction was the same large-scale industrial system that had produced all of NASA's spacecraft and might someday build starships, if it didn't manage to undermine the basis for its own existence first.
I started taking a closer look at the amazing complexity of natural forms in the trees, plants, and even insects around me, aided by a digital camera with a “macro closeup” feature that captured details finer that my naked eye could see. And I enrolled in Environmental Analysis courses, thinking only to learn as much as I could about the interlocking global environmental crises and the prospects for solving them. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was spiritually lost, in desperate need of a guiding insight to restore my faith in the future.
That insight came to me, naturally enough, in the form of a science fiction novel: ''Parable of the Talents'' by Octavia Butler, who had given a speech about the importance of perseverance at my matriculation. The novel tells the story of a young black woman who founds a religion called Earthseed to allow her to make sense of the socially and environmentally ravaged near-future world in which she lives, and to persevere through all the deadly challenges she faces as a destitute refugee. Earthseed's core tenet, “God is Change,” never meant much to me, but its scripture also contains a passage that changed my life:
:'''Earthseed is all that spreads'''
:'''Earthlife to new earths. The universe is'''
:'''Godseed. Only we are Earthseed. And the'''
:'''Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among'''
:'''the stars.'''
For whatever reason, Butler never took the logical next step of explaining the word “Earthseed” as part of a metaphor in which Earth is a great mother tree, but I remembered something I'd read about James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis and connected the dots immediately. The result was a near-perfect resolution to my largely unconscious fears that I would have to abandon my passion for exploring the stars because space travel cost too much energy, caused too much pollution, and drew too much money and brainpower away from efforts to solve pressing global problems. Instead, space colonies would become the highest expression of our harmony with Mother Earth, who would be sending us on a mission to transform dead worlds into “new earths,” the children of Gaia. After all, Lovelock's idea of Earth as living organism doesn't make much sense unless that organism can reproduce (which helps explain why Lovelock has written extensively on the topic of terraforming Mars). And we, technologically skilled human beings, would become Gaia's reproductive organs, building silver seeds that would carry life to the stars. I could hardly ask for a greater sense of religious purpose.
Before making this connection, I'd never thought of myself as a religious person. I believed in science and had no use for stories about supernatural beings. But on an intellectual level, I suddenly realized that religion could become a driving force for environmental solutions, as well as a provable means of persevering long enough to complete massive projects like interstellar travel or terraforming Mars. And on an emotional level, I felt like these ideas had given my life meaning.
Brandon CS Sanders came to the same conclusion from a different direction. Born and raised a Seventh-Day Adventist, he had turned away from religion but still felt a need to live inside an "epic story," which he found in the form of the Earthseed Destiny. Brandon and I each independently came to the conclusion that we should revise the teachings of Earthseed and then try to implement them in the real world.
While I was assembling a few scattered thoughts on how to build a "Church of Gaia/Earthseed" on my blog, Brandon was building a coherent and detailed blueprint for a quasi-religious movement called SolSeed on the Omidyar Network wiki. We found each other's online projects in 2006, and I quickly decided to merge mine into his. We finally got around to meeting in person in 2008, began meeting regularly via Skype in 2009, and are now in the process of building the SolSeed Movement into something more than just a framework for impractical philosophizing. But we feel strongly that the philosophy must come first, to ensure that SolSeed's practices are built on a solid foundation of values and goals.
Two weeks before I wrote this paragraph, I attended the Pachamama Alliance's "Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream" Symposium, whose goals are nearly as ambitious as SolSeed's: "to bring forth an ecologically sustainable, socially just, and spiritually fulfilling human presence on this planet." During the lunch break, I talked with an ardent opponent of space exploration, trying and failing to convince her that my support for it grows from the same root as my support for the Pachamama vision. Hopefully this book will be more successful in that task. It's organized around the four SolSeed goals of bringing life to ourselves (spiritual fulfillment), to each other (social justice), to our world (ecological sustainability), and ultimately to the stars.