Our environmental crisis is clearly an urgent global concern, and demands immediate response from every one of us — and yet it requires a fairly sophisticated consciousness to even perceive the problem, let alone care enough to do something about it. How can we translate a genuine vision of Integral Sustainability to all the different levels of development, meeting people exactly where they are and framing the problems (and possible solutions) in a way they can actually respond to?

This series of clips was taken from an Integral Sustainability seminar in November of 2004. In these clips, Barrett Brown uses terminology from Spiral Dynamics, one of many developmental models useful to help understand people’s value systems.

In order to communicate something as complex and nuanced as ecology and sustainability to the world, we must first understand the many levels of development individuals grow through. This helps us to better step into people’s perspectives, allowing us to communicate in a way they can truly resonate with. Modern developmental research has found that individuals tend to move through numerous levels, stages, memes, or waves of development, including:

Archaic-instinctual (beige)
Magic-animistic (purple)
Egocentric-power (red)
Mythic-traditional (blue)
Modern-rational (orange)
Postmodern-pluralistic (green)
Integral and higher (yellow, turquoise, second tier)