Deep AF Green
Why healthy, deeply embodied Green values are so often epically overlooked...
Give Green A Chance
If you spend much time around Integral and Metamodern spaces, one of the first things you’ll notice is how commonly there appears both an unspoken and vocalized allergy for what is often referred to as the “Green” worldview.
Frankly, I find it displeasing. And boring.
Mostly because my sense is that the overwhelming majority of the time “2nd Tier” people talk about “Green,” it takes on a caricature of earlier developmental expressions embracing a Green values system and cultural memes. For example, when someone is operated from a Conformist ego developmental wave via a Green worldview lens, which can look like someone proclaiming that BLM protesters are right and cops are wrong. Period. End of story.
But that’s mostly an eye-roll-inducing straw man of the full, whole Green potential.
And I think it’s time for a better story about what a deeper Green is, can be, and will become.
What the heck Deep Green?
I’ll use “Deep Green” as shorthand to describe when one is orienting from a Green cultural lens (LL quadrant) as well as robustly embodying the individual ego developmental expressions (UL) that first gave birth to that worldview, which, in the case of Green, some call Pluralist, or 4.0.
When one is orienting from later stages of ego development (across multiple lines of development) and from a Green worldview, usually most Integralists’ critiques of Green fall away.
Why?
Well, in my experience, Deep Green is usually a very lovely vibe to be around!
Like, actually, tremendously beautiful. Deeply loving. Wonderfully open. Vibrantly sensitive. Passionately devoted. Purposefully aligned. Soulfully living. Energetically attuned. Spiritually connected. Earth and humanity embracing. And playfully curious about the great mystery of it all.
We, meaning the entire planet, do not know what a Deep Green society looks like. It doesn’t exist yet. There are pockets of people in intentional communities, like at PachaMama or Tamera, where Deep Green is abundantly thriving.
But an entire society? Does. Not. Exist. Yet.
This is where one of the biggest straw man critiques of Green gets lobbed. “Green can’t have their own systems, societies and cultures because postmodernism deconstructs everything, so they spend all their time sitting in a process circle and nothing ever gets done!”
The first mistake, I believe, in critiques like this is that it assumes those embodying Deep Green are also card-carrying members of the philosophy of Postmodernism. Frankly, I don’t think 98.89% of humans on planet earth give a flying hoot about Postmodern theory. Even if they did, Postmodernism as a philosophy, as I understand it, goes wildly, absurdly deep. Most people who call themselves Postmodernists barely follow their own philosophy, just like most Christians barely follow (or even know how to follow) the depths and breadth of Biblical teachings.
Deep Green, in my experience, can have a keen eye for calling out injustice and seeing where old stories need to crumble. But to create the portrayal that it’s just a bunch of Derrida-reading nerds endlessly deconstructing theories all day is wildly off the mark, at least in the Deep Green worlds that I orbit.
The second caricature that I sense deserves fresh seeing is the idea that Green can’t create healthier systems and functioning processes for, well, processing. It’s just not true. There’s endless maps, models, and playbooks that are widely embraced and practiced in many Deep Green communities that I’ve been a part of. The idea that it’s all about holding space for every oppressed minority voice at the expense of the whole, is, I sense, a quality more often encounter in earlier developmental expressions of Green, or when shadow is playing out individually and/or collectively.
Deep Green, as I experience it in its healthy expressions, is often deeply passionate about setting healthy boundaries, sharing authentic, vulnerable and direct communication, exploring one’s shadow and edges in effort to become of greater service to the whole, and finding more intimate, loving and reciprocally-nourishing ways of delighting in each other’s being. This includes exploring courageously what might be getting in the way of that!
Deep Green is fundamentally about creating healthier relationships. With each other, with our planet, with Spirit, with the unseen beings and the marginalized voices, and yes, also with those who disagree with us or see things differently. Those folks are, after all, part of our human and planetary family. Deep Green is about loving all of life as literally and metaphorically a part of ourselves. And it’s about uncovering what gets in the way of that love, and passionately yet compassionately working to create a more beautiful world.
Ethan as Archetype
I want to tell you about a very dear friend, mentor and brother of mine. Someone who I feel embodies Deep AF Green in a way that emanates its potential and gives us a glimpse of what’s possible when more and more humans develop to later stages of ego development (Pluralist/4.0 and beyond) as well as commit to engaged spiritual practice and deep healing work.
This beloved being is Ethan Hughes. Check out this podcast series we did together to diver deeper into his world.
Ethan lives with his amazing wife, Sarah, and their two daughters Ila and Etta in Belfast, Maine. They live electricity-free on a small homestead and intentional community called the Possibility Alliance.
They don’t have cell phones, cars, internet, electric lights, or propane. They ride bikes and take public transport. They have a landline rotary phone. They cook by wood stove. They grow as much food as possible on the land, and raise chickens and goats.
They live an absolutely beautiful life in a magical cabin filled with hand-crafted items and art that they and their guests have made over the years, and they survive mostly off donations on something like $13,000 a year. Oh, and by the way, Ethans “pays it forward” aka re-gifts a third (if I recall correctly) of all the money he receives to BIPOC organizations, like a self-imposed reparations tithing.
Ethan is a remarkable human. An old soul. He’s been a front-lines activist for decades. But not in the way you might think. He’s the guy who will be deescalating things when they get tense, passing out drinking water to the cops and befriending them in hopes that others protesting can see their humanity, too. He’ll chain himself to a piano and play music as hundreds protesting an oil pipeline in the freezing cold burst into joyous songs of love and peace.
Ethan is wicked smart. He’s hand-drawn endless diagrams hanging around the Possibility Alliance all of his continuously evolving principles and practices for conflict resolution, community living, restorative justice, and ecological awareness. He knows a lot about a lot, and his library is one of the most epic ones I’ve ever seen, filled with spiritual books from nearly every major lineage as well as endless practical books about regenerative framing, permaculture, racial justice, indigenous wisdom, herbal medicines, integrative psychology, somatic therapies, and on and on.
Funnily enough, Ethan often gets most annoyed with liberals — or what I’d call “Shallow Green” or Orange-embracing-Green-values — as he sees them as talking the talk but not walking the walk (like when Achiever consciousness goes on and on about climate change but doesn’t actually change their lifestyle in any meaningful way).
Ethan often feels much more at home with his church-going traditionalist neighbors, or the Mennonite families he used to live next to in Missouri. Why? Because they show up, they work hard, they help out, they care for their neighbors, and he cares for them. And they actually believe in something! They devote themselves deeply to their values, which Ethan finds more relatable than the wishy washy “anything goes I’ll do whatever I want” consciousness that pervades most of our late-stage capitalist society.
Ethan is palpably soul-initiated. A man on a mission. He’s well aware that this can lead him into all sorts of trouble, as he’s deeply attuned to how white men gung hoe on their missions have caused harm, and he’s seen how his own well-meaning enthusiasm has done the same. So he’s surrounded himself with those who can call him in/out when necessary, including local indigenous elders and BIPOC mentors from around the country who he calls on regularly to support and be supported by. He routinely hosts and participates in grief and racial reconciliation circles for folks to come into deeper relationship with their privilege, not as a point of shame rather as an opportunity to heal and give back to those who need a helping hand, including the inner parts of us who have been lost and forgotten.
Ethan is far from perfect. He is the first to admit - sometimes perhaps too much so - that he is a work in progress. He’s faced first-hand the earlier developmental expressions of Green which have tried to cancel him. He knows that an articulate, powerful presence in a straight white male body can be an automatic target. Yet he doesn’t fall into victim consciousness around this, or try to fight back as if the universe is waging war on him personally, the way many anti-Woke warriors do (you know who you are). Instead, he sees the larger evolutionary, cultural and intergenerational trauma unfoldings at play. He does his best to listen, to learn, to grow and to become a better man.
This is Deep Green. Really Deep Green.
To be extremely blunt about it…I find it exceedingly rare to meet someone in the Integral and Metamodern spaces who has as deeply embodied Healthy Vibrant Green to the extent that Ethan has.
When I often hear Ken Wilber talk about Green, I honestly just feel sad. I wonder if he’s ever met someone who embodies Deep Green in the way Ethan does.
Yes, Ethan is a special soul. But no, he’s not an aberration. He’s just quite unique because there’s not a lot of Deep Green that actually exists in our world. Yet.
Deep Green Exemplars
Some other roles models who I would celebrate as beautifully embodying Deep AF Green…
Venn Diagram of Development
You may be wondering, hey, I think a lot of these people are actually more Teal and/or have Strategist / 4.5 capacities. I agree.
Deep Green, almost by default, means one also expresses developmentally into later stages, hence in part why it’s “deep.” We don’t just express one developmental stage, rather usually across a range, sometimes even in a single sentence.
So maybe Marianne Williamson and Bill Plotkin, for example, have strong 4.5 capacities. But from a cultural worldview lens, I’d say they represent this Deep AF Green sensibility, which I see as overlapping like a Venn diagram with aspects of Metamodernism, Teal, 2nd Tier, etc. Just like we can express multiple developmental stages, we can also embody multiple worldviews, and the liminal lands between the two.
Ethan Hughes, for example, certainly embodies a lot of integral awareness and systems thinking capacities. He’s read Ken Wilber and various other developmental theory books, as many Deep Greeners have, grokking the main concepts. At his core, though, Ethan is deeply embedded in Green culture, and the depth of his capacities within that culture is part of what makes him such a remarkable leader.
A Deep Green World?
If you think I’m being offensive by putting someone in Deep AF Green category, that’s likely because you’re operating with the assumption that Teal/Metamodern/Integral is “better than” Green. Or “more developed.” I don’t feel that way. In fact, I often experience Deep Green friends, teachers and mentors as far less anemic in many developmental expressions than folks who flag wave as 2nd Tier. There are many lines of development, and I don’t see expressing “later” than another in some areas as inherently better, in the abstract.
But I do think healthy, robust Green is worth defending. Because simply put, I don’t sense anyone really knows the extent of what’s possible when more and more folks in our society and world embody Deep Green wholesomely and fulsomely. This will look like a very different reality, and we’re only just beginning to get tastes of it.
Will it be a better world? Well, because of my personal biases, I’m going to say yes, in many ways, it could likely be a more enjoyable, nourishing and abundantly-enriching cultural ethos. One that is meeting the moment of our Metacrisis times with devotional care and compassionate wisdom. One that sees life as an ongoing mythopoetic and ceremonial ritual art. One that deeply feels the earth as our home. Our souls as vessels for service. Our uniquely beating hearts as relational instruments for sensing the diverse fullness of the love that births us all.
That’s a world that I want to live in. It’s a world that I already do, in many ways, as Deep (and Shallower) Green is all around me here in Boulder, CO. But it only exists in pockets, and in the concrete contexts of Deep Orange. Deep Green - in its future potential - doesn’t shop at Whole Foods and pay $20 for a yoga class in a strip mall, like I do. Deep Orange is still alive and well, and even Ethan and his family are conditioned by its saturation of our psyches, like the air we breathe — invisible yet everywhere.
Deep Green Shadows
I’ll offer some brief musings on shadow elements of Deep Green that I see, both in me and in others.
I’d say/project that Deep Green is the Enneagram 4 archetype. Sometimes a bit self-absorbed in their inner worlds, as if everything is some poetic play unfolding as a melodrama. This can lead to a really rich relational life, but can also come with experiences of over-processing and (maybe even a slight addiction) to shadow work that seems to never end.
In doing so, sometimes the overall vibe can feel quite serious, especially given the context of the state of our world. Deep Green, like many of us, could maybe lighten up a little, not taking “the world” so seriously even while passionately showing up to serve it. Ram Dass is a great example of someone who balances this, as is Ethan (perhaps pointing to their spiritual depth).
Not taking things too seriously can also help prevent burnout. It’s a different type of burnout from Achiever/Orange expressions, which often looks more like conventional workaholism. Deep Green, in a sense, sees all of life as “work.” Sacred work, but still work. Every moment is an opportunity to deepen in connection, to heal, to serve from soul, to support one another. Seeing life through that frame can be, well, exhausting, because there’s nowhere to escape to. “Vacations” don’t really exist in the way they used to, because our inner world goes with us everywhere our bodies do.
Deep Green can also still express remnants of Shallow Green and earlier developmental expressions which, on some level, deeply and often unconsciously desire for others to be more like them. For example, when I listen to the Emerald Podcast, which is wildly popular and for good reason, there’s a tone I often hear that seems to want everyone to take on an animist view of reality, as if that’s the “right” view. The narrator doesn’t necessarily say that explicitly, but I sense it can be felt energetically.
Bill Plotkin, a hero of mine, is another example. His work makes a very strong case for how most humans in the West are not psycho-spiritual adults, and he provides a vivid model for creating more soul-initiated humans. Which is beautiful. And, the vibe of it (please forgive the straw man) sometimes has a sense of, “Come on people, wtf, awaken to soul, already! Can’t you see how disastrous our world is becoming?”
Well, maybe not everyone can see. Can we instead meet folks where they’re at, compassionately nudging one into a deeper awareness, if that feels like the most wise action, which often isn’t something we can rationally assess rather intuitively sense.
Another shadow that stems from this is utopianism at the expense of other’s wellbeing. For example, RFK supporters who vote for Trump because “it’s the disruptive change we need, even if its ugly” mentality which is another way of saying, “the world should be more like how I want it to be, and if that harms people in the process, oh well. After all, the system is corrupt.” Yes, but is electing the most corrupt president in American history, by a long shot, really an expression of “the more beautiful world” we want to see flourish?
Or is voting third party really a productive strategy when we live in a two party system? "Yeah, but if everyone voted third party, we wouldn’t have a two party system.” Right, but not everyone — in fact likely no one — will vote third party this cycle, so we’re speaking about abstract ideals not grounded realities. “Well, it’s just what feels like the right thing to do, so I’m going to do it.”
While the stereotype of Green is often left-leaning progressive hippies, we’re beginning to see the rise of right-leaning conservative Green, which can seem odd at first, as it’s combining what was previously thought of as political opposites, like calling oneself a “eco-socialist libertarian.” For me, this is exciting terrain as it may open up what could be the start of a Post-Liberal America.
What’s ya think?
I’ll end by inviting you, dear reader, to explore the links of the exemplars above, diving into their worlds, and seeing if you notice — and more importantly feel — a vibe, an ethos, a mythos and a musicality to these expressions of humanity, whom are inevitably both gorgeous and flawed like the rest of us.
I hope posting these musings can help bring about more awareness of our human potential, and to see areas of our own lives where we can more fully and wholly embody the holy gifts of Green in its depths and breadths — individually, collectively, societally, and beyond.
May it be so!
Absolutely love this inquiry, Tucker. I didn’t really appreciate Deep Green until I saw both of my daughters treading into the territory (tbh, in a way I never had the courage to do,) and then watched then emerge as truly consequential, relational AF, deeply-honoring and strategic in their communication and relational patterns (bc of course they also began gaining “later” skills.) In doing so, they developed relational bonds and capacities that I had skipped and seldom see in others. They’re both powerhouse young women doing important work… and could hardly agree more that the world needs more of THESE people whose focus on how they work with others to accomplish important goals is somehow more meaningful than creating a global initiative… if indeed it is all fractal. Thank you for always asking the best questions. Love you.
I love people loving people so I’m loving you loving green. Always more of that please!
I appreciate:
you naming the wave nature of development
Naming how earlier stages hijack later language and get that stage confused (eg confusing amber woke as green)
I agree there’s often an integral community shadow of not embracing green and all its gifts and beauty, (and sometimes this is orange-wanting-to-be-higher masquerading as integral, etc)
Your courage/willingness to name stages of public figures (I agree with all of them that I recognize btw, except Bayo who seems deeply construct aware to me; that said I haven’t engaged his work extensively so maybe I caught him at a peak)
That said, I think the essence of your claim is not about green/4.0 but about healthy expressions of any level.
Being around heathy good versions of red can feel amazing (power, respect, risk); amber can feel amazing (deep purpose, clarity, belonging, etc); heathy good versions of orange, etc, all lovely. I see you being frustrated by unhealthy Teal (4.5)! “Deep AF Teal” doesn’t have the allergy you’re describing.
one reason I think this distinction matters bc I basically agree with all the standard critiques of Green. It’s helpful for us to make subject-object moves-as we’ve talked abt I think a lot of us who think we’re coming from later stages are really being green; nothing wrong with it, beautiful, Deep AF green often, but let’s not pretend we’re more evolved than we are. I think maybe Wilber overdoes his pointing out shadows (bc he was personally so hurt by the green?), but then again he’s pretty viciously critical of unhealthy orange, amber etc too.
Another reason is because I think there’s a standard developmental pattern where we need to differentiate from our previous embedding and it’s ok to be a little allergic of your previous level for a little while. Ideally with some awareness and compassion, but I think giving room for this dialectical turn allows it to happen with more grace overall.
I spend a good bit of time around Green, healthy and unhealthy, and I get tired of it same way I get tired of being at a fundamentalist church even when I feel the spiritual transmission, and get tired networking and venture capital events even when I am inspired by the ambition and work ethic.