May 27, 2014 | Sacred Activism
Contrary to our cherished assumption of vanquishing all forms of injustice, we must ask ourselves if we are willing to put love into action even if we don’t physically survive. The extremity of the crisis does not limit Sacred Activism, but rather expands it because we make ourselves available to 1) Bearing witness to the likely irreversible horrors of climate chaos and 2) Commitment to compassionate service to all living beings who suffer with us. This requires unwavering engagement with serving the earth community and practicing good manners toward all species in order to make their demise, and ours, easier. Taking one’s own life or succumbing to escapist self-medication is easy. Commitment to a life of service and fortifying one’s own connection with the sacred, thus deepening one’s sense of meaning and purpose, constitute a far more daunting and painful path.
May 24, 2014 | Ecopsychology
Thomas Berry’s acknowledgement of the “Others” may seem archaic or romantically idealized to contemporary Western people, or perhaps even superfluous. His words may seem innocent of, and irrelevant to, the urgency of our times, much as the Dalai Lama’s hopes for teaching children about compassion may seem hopelessly naïve to Western minds. But the Dalai Lama is not looking through the same lens of consciousness as most of us, and neither was Thomas Berry. He inhabited a magnificent, animated world, an ensouled universe. His offerings to the other-than-human beings were not naïve, but rather, deeply informed by the body of Earth and by the cosmic mystery – and intentionally reciprocal. He expressed a consciousness of participation – as if gestures such as acknowledging the more-than-human community actually matter.
May 22, 2014 | Climate Change/Environment
It’s difficult to see how any of this destruction will stop until we realize, in the heart as well as in the head, that we are the sea. The earliest forms of life on Earth sparked in saline deeps. Declining plankton still feed plants and animals even while replenishing the atmosphere. The sea gives us minerals and medicines, moist clouds and mild climates. We can breathe because of it.
May 13, 2014 | Collapse of Industrial Civilization
“Put succinctly, the HANDY study found that, given our present circumstances and the current intransigence of the Elites, a preventative strategy that attempts to evade a crisis in one part of the problem causes a crisis in the other part of the problem. The Elites can neither continue exploiting the poor to maintain wealth and power, nor can they create sufficient wealth to elevate the poor out of poverty without doing irreparable damage to ecosystems. Motesharri and his colleagues found that under conditions “closely reflecting the reality of the world today . . . we find that collapse is difficult to avoid.” Not surprisingly, the report was not well received.”
May 13, 2014 | Climate Change/Environment
If you truly understand global warming, then you know it’s all about the ice. That’s what matters. Planet Earth has not always had great ice sheets at the poles, of the sort that currently exist atop Greenland and Antarctica. In other periods, much of that water has instead been in liquid form, in the oceans—and the oceans have been much higher.
May 8, 2014 | Climate Change/Environment
In the end, the deepest insight of the Anthropocene will probably be a very simple one: we live in a world of millions of interdependent species with which we have co-evolved. We sunder this web of life at our peril. Earth’s story is fascinating, rich in detail, and continually self-revealing. And it’s not all about us.