Gaia's Call

A True Story That Sparked a Movement In 2019, residents of the small French town of Ungersheim made global headlines. Facing the twin threats of climate change and economic instability, the town embarked on a radical experiment: transition to local resilience. With strong leadership and grassroots participation, they transformed their food system to rely on local, organic agriculture, drastically...

Have you ever been so immersed in something you love that time disappeared? Maybe while playing music, sketching a new idea, building something with your hands—or even just wandering in nature, totally focused and free. That feeling of energized ease, where you’re at your best and most creative, has a name. It’s called Flow. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and later peak performance expert St...

How one simple question about a backyard weed revealed a radical new story—and a path toward regenerative living for eco-conscious families. What if our culture wasn’t built on conquest, consumption, or control—but on love? In this special feature from the upcoming One Cause book, we explore the concept of Priya Culture —a regenerative, reverent, and relational way of living. It might just be the...

I know I’ve been a bit obsessed with caterpillars and butterflies lately but here’s one more story about them which was written months ago as part of this One Cause series. Also, don’t miss two new feature being premiered today: one intended to encourage more connection and conversations within this community, and a second one especially designed for young ones being premiered today. Now, imagine...

Are You Ready to Become a Trimtab in Your Life? If you’ve ever seen an oil tanker or a massive ship, you might wonder: how does something so immense ever change direction? It turns out, the answer lies in a small, often-overlooked component called a trimtab . A trimtab is a tiny rudder attached to the main rudder of the ship. While small, it plays an outsized role in steering the entire vessel. By...

I slept well last night—which feels like a small miracle these days. (How about you?) I woke with a renewed sense of clarity. It’s time to write the next One Cause article. But not just another installment. This one feels different. More urgent. More personal. We’ve walked together through the Four Great Truths over the past month. Each one revealing a facet of the deeper story we’re living into:...

From Domination to Stewardship Back in 2011, when I first began writing Dominion Over All —the eco-fantasy novel that launched the Zak Bates Eco-Adventure series—I opened with two quotes that have stayed with me ever since: “God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over al...

Today is Earth Day. A day that for decades has been about honoring the Earth. About planting trees, cleaning up rivers, hosting school fairs, and pretending for just a moment that we’re all aligned around something so obvious it shouldn’t even need saying: this is our only home. Let’s protect it. But today, on Earth Day 2025, I find myself not just planting seeds of hope—but fighting to keep the v...

Prologue Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself writing with more raw urgency, a deeper honesty, and a renewed commitment to speaking the truth about the world we find ourselves in. What I hadn’t fully realized—until now—is that these recent pieces weren’t just one-offs. They were the beginning of a new arc. Today, I’m officially naming that arc: Facing the Metacrisis . The term metacrisis poi...

Preface: An Invitation to Courage Before we begin, a word of care. What follows may be difficult to read or hear. It speaks to truths that are often ignored because they’re uncomfortable, confronting, or heartbreaking. But it’s precisely because these truths are real and pressing that they deserve our full attention. This is not a doomsday message. It’s a call to consciousness. A challenge to step...

What If the Secret to Abundance Is What We Give Away? In Part One, we explored Interconnectedness —how we are not separate from nature, but woven into its web. In Part Two, we looked at Sufficiency , and saw how our world is not defined by lack, but by our ability—or inability—to recognize what we already have. Now we come to the Third Great Truth: Reciprocity. If we are part of a living system… i...

Hey friends, it’s Brad here. Today’s post isn’t part of the One Cause series, least not directly. In other words, it’s unlikely to end up in the book. It’s one of those pieces that came from a restless moment in my heart—and maybe you’ve had a few of those yourself lately. I want to talk about something I think many of us may be struggling with: How do we show up politically in this time of unrave...

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Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wbradfordswift.substack.com/subscribe

In Part One, we explored the first of the Four Great Truths: Interconnectedness—the understanding that we are not separate from nature but woven into its very fabric. If we truly accept this truth, it leads us naturally to the second: Sufficiency. Because if we are all part of a deeply connected, living system, then the idea that there isn’t enough to go around simply doesn’t make sense. Let’s sta...

The time for soft words has passed. The fires in our mountains. The storms wrecking our coastlines. The shrinking windows of food security and clean water. These aren’t just warnings. They’re symptoms—of a planet pleading for our attention and loving care. They are the trembling voice of a living Earth caught in a fever dream, asking us to wake up. They are the consequences of a civilization built...

I used to believe that humanity was on an inevitable collision course with destruction. The news, the science, the endless stream of crises—it all seemed to point in one direction. Collapse. But then, something shifted. It wasn’t a moment of naive optimism. It wasn’t ignoring the facts. It was a realization—a deep, resounding knowing—that we are not doomed. We have what we need. In fact, we’ve alw...

The Four Great Truths didn’t arrive all at once. They weren’t handed down from on high, fully formed and immutable. They emerged—gradually, organically, like the first shoots of a seedling breaking through the soil. At first, we thought of them as counterpoints to the Great Untruths, as simple corrections to the damaging narratives that had guided civilization for too long. But as we wrote, reflec...

What if Earth is the only place in the entire cosmos where life exists? For decades, scientists have scanned the stars, listening for distant signals, searching for signs of intelligent civilizations. Telescopes have peered into the vast unknown, mapping a vast number of galaxies, each filled with countless stars and planets. And yet, so far, we have found nothing —not a whisper of life, not a fli...

Decades ago, as Ann and I were preparing to get married, my boss, Pontish Yeramyan, a remarkable woman and the founder of Gap International , gave me a challenge: “Take a walk with your dog and really be with the predictable future of your marriage.” At the time, I had two divorces behind me, and Ann had one. Statistically speaking, the odds were not in our favor. The predictable future , based on...

I’ve been sick these past few days—nothing serious, just one of those stubborn bugs that knocks you off your feet for a bit. But something about being physically run down made it harder to keep my usual perspective, to hold onto the bigger picture. Instead, I found myself staring straight into the turbulence of the world and feeling... lost. The weight of everything—the climate crisis, political c...

We are shaped by the stories we believe. They influence how we see ourselves, how we treat each other, and how we relate to the Earth. Stories can be invisible cages, reinforcing the Great Untruths (GUTs) and keeping us trapped within cycles of separation, scarcity, and struggle. But stories can also be keys—opening doors to new ways of being, thinking and acting in our daily lives. Right now, hum...

I had an unsettling thought over the weekend. What if the real reason democracy is slipping away isn’t because of corruption or political polarization or misinformation—but because we , the people, have just become too lazy to care? Maybe we don’t really want the responsibility of governing ourselves anymore. Maybe we’d rather just hand it all over to someone like Trump—someone who tells us we don...

I have a confession. My family and I love the convenience of Amazon. And we’re not alone. Our downstairs neighbor? Same story. The Amazon trucks have a well-worn path to our doorstep, practically part of the neighborhood scenery. There have been days when packages arrived before I even remembered ordering them—like some kind of modern-day magic. And yet… There’s something unsettling about how auto...

It’s comforting to think that somewhere out there, a brilliant invention is about to solve the world’s biggest problems. Electric cars will halt climate change. Carbon-capturing machines will erase our emissions. Geo-engineering will shield us from the sun’s fury. But what if our faith in technology is itself a trap? What if the real solution isn’t in a miracle gadget but in the way we live and th...