Earth Day will turn 40 this weekend. Forty years. Isn’t that how long Moses struggled in the wilderness? For Christ’s sake, when do we get to the Promised Land?

When you think about what’s really needed to steer life on this sweet orb onto a sustainable trajectory, we’re basically still in outer space. We need a miracle, don’t you agree? Maybe we have one right under our noses.

On this Earth Day, four decades in, we may actually need to open our minds to the idea that it’s the relatively ignored mysteries of the earth’s outer spaces that may deliver the push that births a new era.

The quantum truth is that everything is energy. It is our current fixation on matter that is actually deluded and needs to shift.

Taking the measure of our eco-motion so far, we can chalk up climate science’s move from the margin to mainstream as a real victory, despite the vociferous attacks of the climate-change deniers. But it isn’t and won’t be enough to turn the tide, because the stubborn heads and pocketbooks of our opponents aren’t cracked open yet.

Let’s not let our urgency to hit the mainstream keep us from restlessly continuing to experiment with new energy ideas. Big changes take big, new outside-the-box ideas. And no one knows better than we do that these often come from the most scorned fringes.

I’m not just talking about powering hydro plants or cars here. The planetary energy crisis is both an issue and a metaphor. We need to stay fresh to the fact that many of the insights of quantum physics are still not part of everyday reality.

That means that some of the big, mind-bending ideas we need are still out there waiting to be mined from nature’s abundantly weird truths. The stuff we will find here just might unexpectedly change everything.

Though we may think of ourselves as solid consumers trying to make smart individual choices in life, we are actually energy bundles living in vast and mostly unexplored fields of energy whose existence extends far beyond the limited spectrum perceptible to us through our sense organs and measuring devices.

Many aspects of this energy reality are still completely mind-boggling and haven’t come down to earth for us yet. But the coming age will rest on this foundation. The implications of the observer effect in physics, whereby the act of measurement itself affects the behaviour of the objects being studied, is not yet part of our collective common sense.

Same thing for many other “entangled” quantum facts, like non-locality, which Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” when electrons that have been paired continue to react instantaneously to each other despite being separated over space.

My bet is that integrating this class of knowledge into our everyday awareness is where “miraculous” change could surprise us.

But a lot of the people doing work in this area have been shut out of the academy. This is a centuries old tradition.

To feed our Earth Day muse, here are two controversial and ignored energy researchers in very different areas who have some possibly paradigm-shifting results they would like to share.

I caught Long Island academic and energy healer Bill Bengston on his swing through Toronto a couple of years ago. That’s when I was introduced to the remarkable findings of a pretty ordinary man on-the-street with a passionately scientific soul who encountered the inexplicable and couldn’t turn his back on it.

His new book, Chasing The Cure: An Effective Alternative For Treating Cancer And Other Diseases, has just been released, and because it was written with the help of veteran Toronto author Sylvia Fraser, it reads like a guilty-pleasure novel on a summer afternoon. But like the rest of Fraser’s work, it punches way beyond its easy-to-digest weight.

While still a student, Bengston encountered a seriously gifted hands-on healer. Everything in his science-laced background made him want to prove the guy was a quack. That failed. So together they used trial and error to come up with a method that allowed Bengston to reproduce the healer’s results himself. Ever since, he says, he’s been using it to successfully heal human cancers and many other illnesses.

What makes Bengston’s work unique is that he’s taken this learned brain-wave-modulating healing activity to the lab and started doing controlled experiments on mice injected with guaranteed-deadly carcinomas. No belief system in action there. The mice have almost all lived long and prospered.

And those that were re-injected with the disease also failed to get sick a second time. In fact, a surprising number of the untreated control mice also got well. These are just preliminary experiments. So many questions. But I guess you won’t be surprised to hear that as of this writing, Bengston cannot secure a lab to continue his research, despite (or because of) these promising results.

John Bedini’s controversial free energy generators draw on insights going back to the dawn of commercial electricity, when Nikola Tesla, cohort of Thomas Edison and inventor of the alternating current generator and a father of radio and wireless technology and much more, thought that freely available and omnipresent cosmic rays, which he called radiant energy, could replace all other fuel sources.

When he died, impoverished and reviled, his papers were seized by the government and declared top secret.

Today Bedini has created “free energy” battery chargers and working devices that at least appear to emit more energy than they receive. He writes that though “we draw on an inexhaustible source, our device is no more esoteric than a paddlewheel in a river. The only difference is that in this case we have to be clever enough to make and divert the river in the right timing sequence.”

If he’s right, the implications are world-changing. But with no one in authority listening, he sells free-energy battery chargers and publishes his full schematics online. He also has a host of followers who do live demos where they can to prove the idea is not a New Age hoax.

I am not saying these guys are carriers of the new truth. But judging from history, the people who will find the puzzle pieces that will unlock the delusions we now run on will be among the small group who are willing to buck the conventional wisdom and explore both the ridiculous and the impossible.

Copernicus rocked the collective psyche with the crazy idea that, even when we feel ourselves to be standing completely still, the earth is running us round the sun.

That spark of an idea, which eventually birthed our modern world view, was still deeply underground a hundred years later, when Galileo was placed under house arrest by the Church as a suspected Copernican. (He died bearing that bad label.)

But the scientific revolution was birthed nonetheless. Of course, you never know how the kids will turn out when they grow up. When money mated with science, the newlyweds invented some great stuff and conquered the planet a few times over, and now we’re choking on the relationship’s oblivious and never-sated appetite for ownership and control.

Meanwhile, the exciting possibility of getting in sync with the invisible energy that animates every corner of our earthly place-in-space has been, relatively speaking, ignored, ridiculed and/or suppressed.

So while we fight all the good political fights and change all our toxic habits, let’s also have the courage to stand up for the unpopular and ridiculous insights that might unexpectedly pop out a miracle.