Council on the Uncertain Human Future

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Council on the Uncertain Human Future
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In the Council on the Uncertain Human Future
we slow down, come present, and listen deeply.

We share our understandings of the social and political context in which we meet,
the planetary changes underway, and the human behaviors that brought us here…
and stay with the implications for all living beings, including ourselves.

With open hearts and minds,
we acknowledge the conditions and losses underway.

We ask… what matters from here?
Given what we know, how do we live now?
How might we serve, individually and together…
with and for the Earth?

Listening together, collective wisdom may arise
between us, further seeding empathetic, earth-based,
life-affirming ways into the new realities…

These practices of listening, steady presence and reckoning,
and the trust, insight, community and evolutionary visioning
that may grow from them, are path for these times… mycelial and emergent.

Please explore our practice stream, readers and films…
Learn more of our intentions, the ongoing contributions of CUHF members,
and how you might join us.

…and shifting the paradigm.

In the Council on the Uncertain Human Future…we slow down, come present, and listen deeply.

We share our understandings of the social and political context in which we meet, the planetary changes underway, and the human behaviors that brought us here…and stay with the implications for all living beings, including ourselves.

With open hearts and minds, we acknowledge the conditions and losses underway.

We ask… what matters from here? Given what we know, how do we live now? How might we serve, individually and together…with and for the earth?

Listening together, collective wisdom may arise between us, further seeding empathetic, earth-based, life-affirming ways into the new realities…

These practices of listening, steady presence and reckoning,and the trust, insight, community and evolutionary visioning that may grow from them, are path for these times…mycelial and emergent.

Please explore our practice stream, readers and films. Learn more of our intentions, the ongoing contributions of CUHF members, and how you might join us.

…it shifts the paradigm, sustaining us.

Above: Kilauea, on the Big Island of Hawaii, erupting on Dec 30, 2025. More here.

A Council for these times…

The upheaval created by the current U.S. administration is stupefying, disastrous, predictable and revelatory, all at once. To further insight, community and even possibility in these times, we launched the Council series In the flow of rupture in early 2025.

Now in its second year, members of the CUHF community take part in monthly online Council sessions, to consider collectively:

What is happening, and how do we stay present, compassionate, grounded and in community amidst the convulsions? Can we together expand our insight and perspective, while being realistic, agile, skillful and of service?

The speaking portions of each session are offered below, and will be shared monthly, as 2026 unfolds.

Bayo Akomolafe

We began our Council session in July, by screening Bayo Akomolafe’s recent commencement address at the College of the Atlantic. A dear ally and inaugural CUHF Senior Fellow, Bayo’s insights were both poignant and provocative for our ongoing series.

Watch Bayo’s address on YouTube

Pat Benjamin &
Melissa Hoffer

In June 2026, our series continued with a conversation between long-time CUHF members Pat Benjamin and Melissa Hoffer who, together, explored an evolutionary perspective on this time of enormous change.

Watch their conversation on YouTube

Michael Lipson

In December, CUHF member Michael Lipson—a clinical psychologist whose practice and teaching derives from a lifelong training in Buddhist, Christian and Jewish mysticism—opened the year’s final Council session in our ongoing series, In the flow of rupture.

Watch Michael’s full talk on YouTube

Lama Elizabeth Monson

In November 2025, Lama Liz Monson—dharma teacher, scholar, and CUHF Core Team member—opened the sixth Council session in our In the flow of rupture series with a reflection on breathing with reverence in these times.

Watch Liz’s full talk on YouTube

2024 HIGHLIGHTS

Bayo Akomolafe, CUHF Senior Fellow

We are honored that visionary Bayo Akomolafe is serving as the inaugural Senior Fellow to the Council on the Uncertain Human Future this year. He is also W. E. B. DuBois Fellow for Trans-public Intellectualism at the Schumacher Center for Local Economics in Great Barrington MA.

A psychologist, poet, philosopher, teacher, public intellectual and holder of Yoruba ancestry, Bayo encourages revelatory perspectives; he leans into the cracks around the questions of our time.

learn more

2024 Threshold Councils

Transformation—of the planet and the civilizations it has brought forth—is always underway. Yet in this decade, and even this year, we see accelerated change in the living system itself, and the frameworks devised by humans within it.

It is often at the threshold—in the crossing and naming it calls forward—that we may come present more deeply to each other and what is taking place; this year, five distinctive Threshold Councils have emerged as communities of inquiry, insight and collective wisdom for these times.

learn more

REFLECTING AT 10 YEARS

On this community, this practice

Since the beginning, we’ve listened for how CUHF might serve in these unprecedented times. In response, our conversations and practices have been mycelial in nature—deepening and evolving to meet the call. At ten years, the CUHF community and network continues to grow, morph and surprise us in its compassion, tenacity and possibilities.

In this time of profound uncertainty, dissolution and revelation, we asked a group of Council members to speak about how they understand our work, and what it offers for these times. Their voices are gathered in a circle in this special publication.

There is an urgent need for people to bear witness, to truly take in and process what is happening; and do so in community where new insights and collective intelligence can emerge.

CURT NEWTON | Massachusetts Institute of Technology CUHF Steady Council Anchor
It is in these quiet and contemplative spaces, sitting in intentional conversation with others, that the wisdom, strength, and seeds of change we so desperately need to bring about cultural transformation can begin to take root and emerge.

LILY SWANBROW BECKERCUHF National Convener
A Council is a circle. It has no beginning and no end. It has no leaders and no followers, no hierarchy of power or privilege. There are no limits to its revolutions. What a circle has is a center. The center holds honesty, which is a kind of beauty, which is a source of truth.

KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE | Oregon State UniversityNational CUHF member
By listening open-heartedly to one another, we can allow new, unanticipated insights to arise. In this way, Council is a path to an emancipatory way of being with the world and with each other. It is a model for the world we are trying to bring into being.

WALTER WRIGHTCUHF National Convener
There is a spaciousness in our councils—a time-out-of-time—in which we can pause and trust that insight will arise from our creative depths. One insight sparks another and another until we find ourselves seeing possibility and light through the fog of despair. Like an ecosystem, we are generating new ways of being and collaborating for the benefit of all.

KIRSTIN EDELGLASSRando Partnership Council Member
The Council experience rattles the crumbling foundation of a defunct dualistic paradigm, one that demands our choice between mind and body, thought and feeling, matter and energy, self and other, individual and community, human and nature, the mundane and the sacred. It offers instead a vision of the world rooted in interdependence.

KEVIN GALLAGHERCUHF Core Team and National Convener

CUHF IN HIGHER ED

CUHF Community at MIT

Since the summer of 2020, faculty and staff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been convening in small circles to build and deepen collective reflection on the planetary environmental crisis, as an Affiliate of the Council on the Uncertain Human Future.

Read the full article on MIT’s website.

It’s Time for Higher Education to “Get Real” about the Climate Crisis

Learn about the history of the Council on the Uncertain Human Future, and our work in A new Earth conversation (NEC) at Clark University, in a new piece by CUHF Core Team member, Diana Chapman Walsh.

Read the full article on Medium.

A new Earth conversation Brochure

The initial Council on the Uncertain Human Future (2014) inspired Clark University faculty and staff to join the process (2015-2019); a vision for A new Earth conversation emerged from those Councils and has grown into a campus-wide climate initiative, enabling deeper conversation and cultivating possibility with students.

View the brochure here.