In 1961, I was preparing to start college at the University of Tennessee, and it was time to choose a major. My dad, Mack Mulkey, was an electrical engineer, and I had previously thought, Maybe I’ll follow in his footsteps. But math wasn’t my strong suit, so I settled on pre-med—not because I wanted to serve and heal people, but because I saw becoming a medical doctor as a pathway to prestige and plenty of money. I had unconsciously bought into the cultural narrative that treats accumulating material wealth as the highest goal in life, the narrative that was dominant then and that remains dominant today.

In 1964, I transferred to Sewanee: The University of the South. Perhaps because I had an inkling of the path to come—but mostly because it seemed a relatively undemanding track to graduation—I became an English major. I was drawn to a creative writing course led by Andrew Lytle, a highly regarded Southern Agrarian author who espoused the belief that Americans are torn between the desire for power and control and the longing for a more pastoral life and deeper connection with our natural surroundings. While fascinated by Lytle’s worldview, I unfortunately allowed my doubts about my writing ability and my fear of sharing my innermost thoughts to prevent me from partaking of his mentoring and wisdom. (Lytle would become a relative by marriage later in my life.)

After college and a time in the construction business, I worked in advertising and marketing, fields that required some writing. However, I didn’t take the hint. So, as Gregg Levoy writes in Callings, “Callings keep surfacing until we deal with them.” And during a break at a weeklong intensive workshop called Way of a Warrior, I was talking with a fellow participant when he asked what I did for a living. I hemmed and hawed, but the senior trainer who had overheard the conversation walked over and said to me, “You’re a writer.” So, after this wake-up call and several others, in 1992 I finally acknowledged the voice inside me that quietly whispered, “You’re a writer, and you’re here to use that skill to help create a more compassionate, just, and sustainable world.”

Living in Fort Worth, I took a gig writing customer correspondence for a national insurance company. In Austin, through a serendipitous connection, I landed a freelance job creating teacher materials for high school textbooks at Holt, Rinehart & Winston. After moving to Asheville, I wrote a regular editorial column on any topic of my choosing for the Asheville Citizen-Times for nearly five years. My column from August 17, 2002, was titled We Have Met the Leaders and They Are Us in which I encouraged readers to break free from consumerism and walk softly on the Earth. I began with a quotation from Barbara Marx Hubbard:

As we approach a time of global breakdown and breakthrough, we find that there is no external authority to tell us what to do: not our parents, our priests, our presidents—the only authority to guide us is the inner authority of knowing.

During this era, perhaps kindled by memories of Andrew Lytle’s thesis, I became inspired by David Korten’s The Great Turning, a sweeping critique of hierarchical, corporate-driven “Empire” and a hopeful call for a grassroots transition to a just, sustainable “Earth Community.” I continued to write in support of such a transition, and my wife and I even explored moving to an off-the-grid ecovillage to more fully live our beliefs. However, when we saw that folks there were living only a notch above camping, we declined the opportunity and settled into a modest condo just north of downtown Asheville, where we could ride our bikes to work, shop, and play.

Given our nation’s current slide toward authoritarianism, I had been searching for a positive vision of our future when I came across Korten’s more recent book, Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth. In this book, Korten argues that humanity’s crises—economic inequality, political dysfunction, and ecological collapse—stem from our dominant cultural narrative, which regards money and financial markets as the highest social values. He posits that if we truly want to change the trajectory of society, we must change the underlying story by embracing a new worldview grounded in interdependence and life-centered values.

What resonates most deeply with me in Korten’s work is his insistence that systems change begins with story change. Policies matter. Institutions matter. But beneath them all lies the narrative we carry about what it means to live well, what constitutes success, and what we want for one another. For too long, the prevailing story has equated human worth with economic output and national success with perpetual growth. Korten invites us to tell a different story: one in which the health of communities, the vitality of ecosystems, and the dignity of every person become our primary measures of progress.

I find myself fully aligned with this life-centered vision. Over the decades—through my writing, my activism, and the choices my wife and I have made about how and where to live—I have been slowly, sometimes haltingly, trying to step out of the old story and into the new one Korten describes. It is not an easy shift. The habits of Empire run deep in our culture and in our own thinking. Yet I see encouraging signs everywhere: in local food movements, in young people demanding climate action, in communities rediscovering the power of mutual aid and neighborliness, in citizens nation-wide taking a stand for democracy.

Korten does not promise that the transition will be smooth, and current events certainly confirm that. Periods of great change are often marked by backlash, fear, and confusion. But history suggests that when old systems begin to fail the majority of people, new possibilities—once considered unrealistic—suddenly move into the realm of the practical. The question is not whether the old story is unraveling; it clearly is. The question is whether enough of us will help midwife the new one.

If we are to come through this current era of chaos, hate, and confusion into a positive future, it will not be because a single leader saves us or a single policy fixes everything. It will be because millions of ordinary people choose, in ways both large and small, to live into a different story—one grounded in compassion, shared responsibility, and reverence for the living Earth. Change the story, Korten reminds us, and we truly do change the future.