Doug Della Pietra and Steve Aman offered these core principles and values to the community as they were stepping down from their roles as Course Developers in Spring 2025. These principles remain central to the course community as we move forward:
- Always Free: The course is offered freely, as a gift. It will remain free of charge — an act of love and service, not commerce.
- Gift Economy Ethos: Participants are invited (never required) to donate to a resilience-focused organization of their choice, or to offer their own gifts — time, presence, creativity — in service to life.
- Assumes Unprecedented Global Challenges: The course is grounded in the reality of multiple, interconnected crises including ecological, political, economic, environmental, and societal breakdowns.
- Grounded in a Global Human Perspective: The course does not center on any one nation, culture, or group. Instead, it addresses the collapse of modern industrial civilization as a global phenomenon affecting all of humanity. Content is not designed to react to events in one country or region, but to resonate across cultures and contexts — honoring our shared humanity. The principles, insights, and sense-making are meant to apply across borders, beyond national identities.
- Acknowledges Global Collapse: It assumes that widespread collapse is not a future risk but a current reality unfolding across the global, modern industrial consumer society and interrelated systems.
- Embraces TEOTWAWKI: The course is rooted in the belief that we are witnessing the end of the world as we know it, and seeks to support people in navigating this transformation. (Note: This course does not address related topics of “the end of the world” such as the extinction of the human species, etc.)
- Defines Resilience as Both Inner and Outer: Resilience includes emotional, mental, and spiritual capacities as the “interior condition” that gives rise to what we see and experience around us, and is the foundation for meaningful outer actions aligned with values.
- Affirms Inner Adaptation as Essential: Deep inner work is foundational for adapting to collapse and cultivating a new way of being and responding.
- Honors Emotional Depth: The course welcomes grief, fear, and other “dark emotions” as natural and necessary, not to be fixed but to be felt and integrated.
- Rejects Simple Solutions: Collapse is treated as a predicament, not a problem to be solved. The course encourages adaptive, rather than prescriptive, responses.
- Centers Purposeful Action Without Attachment to Outcome: Action is encouraged because it is life-affirming and meaningful — not because it may lead to or guarantees certain external results.
- Values Indigenous and Ancestral Wisdom: Indigenous teachings are respected and explored as essential to reclaiming our “Original Instructions” for living well in relationship with all life.
- Welcomes Diverse Ways of Knowing: The course invites multiple ways of knowing — including intuitive, embodied, emotional, and ancestral wisdom — not just intellectual analysis. There is no single “right” lens through which to view collapse or resilience.
- Guided by the Serenity Prayer: Acceptance is not resignation; it is a conscious, courageous act. Grief and acceptance are viewed as vital aspects of resilience.
- Anchored in Love Over Fear: The course continually invites a choice to act from love rather than fear, in the face of uncertainty.
- Dual Function of Every Session: Each session both explores collapse and offers a path toward new ways of being, acting, and relating.
- Participant-Centered Learning with Co-Leadership
- Each weekly meetup follows a co-leadership model inspired by the former Northwestern Earth Institute, where participants exercise their agency by volunteering to lead openers and moderate large-group discussions.
- Learners engage critically — taking what resonates, leaving what doesn’t—so the course remains dynamically relevant.
- Ongoing Evolution: While rooted in core principles, the course remains alive — open to emergence, collective insight, and the needs of the moment.