Don’t Police Our Emotions–Climate Despair Is Inviting People Back To Life, By Jem Bendell

Don’t Police Our Emotions–Climate Despair Is Inviting People Back To Life, By Jem Bendell

Everyone engaging with our climate predicament will have their own emotional journey. None will be easy. The question of how to engage people is a huge one for me. It is why I have focused on how people who are awake to our predicament can help each other. My main suggestion is that we engage and talk with others who do not think that we are confused, depressed, or irresponsible to have concluded that climate change now threatens societal collapse. In those connections and conversations, we find solidarity, joy and pathways for how to be and what to do in future. If you do not yet have that in your life, or want more, then I recommend reaching out through one of the networks I list here.

It’s The End Of The World As They Know It: The Distinct Burden Of Being A Climate Scientist, By David Corn

It’s The End Of The World As They Know It: The Distinct Burden Of Being A Climate Scientist, By David Corn

While Americans feel “an increasing alarm” about climate change, according to a survey conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, scientists have been coping with this troubling data for decades—and the grinding emotional effects from that research are another cost of global warming that the public has yet to fully confront. Before you ask, there is no scientific consensus regarding the impact of climate research on the scientists performing it. It hasn’t been studied in a systematic way

In The Face of Climate Collapse, We Need The Wisdom Of Elders, By Barbara Cecil

In The Face of Climate Collapse, We Need The Wisdom Of Elders, By Barbara Cecil

I am writing to those who are searching for a place from which to understand the disruption at hand and what is behind it, and also to those who want to respond in a way that provides a soft landing as systems collapse, while growing us into the human beings that we rightly are. Perhaps that “place” is under the wing of an elder who might offer shelter and inspiration, who has direct relationship with the spiritual reality that sits behind the concrete world, who is steadily available as a source of sanity and guidance

Idle And Blessed On A Summer Day, By Carolyn Baker

Idle And Blessed On A Summer Day, By Carolyn Baker

On Summer Solstice I always come back to this poem, and if I begin reading it aloud, I’m already crying at the end of the first sentence: “Who made the world?” Why the tears—particularly on that question? Strangely, the most important word in that question is not “who,” but “made.” It is a question of “pure amazement” which is another phrase Oliver uses in other places. It is brimming with innocence and awe. It is the sigh of speechless reverence—pure worship as she declares that “I know how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass.” And then, “how to be idle and blessed.”

What Kind Of People Are We Becoming? By Umair Haque

What Kind Of People Are We Becoming? By Umair Haque

Maybe some of the answers you’ve come up with are things like: terrible people, moral weaklings, disgraces, and so on. Moral answers, in other words. That’s a start — and yet there’s a much simpler and more straightforward answer, that some part of you is still defending against, preventing you from saying or thinking. That answer is this. What kinds of people build camps and commit torture and genocide? Fascists do.

What Would It Mean to Deeply Accept That We’re in Planetary Crisis? By Dahr Jamail and Barbara Cecil

What Would It Mean to Deeply Accept That We’re in Planetary Crisis? By Dahr Jamail and Barbara Cecil

We are not here to save the world

Only to belong to it more fully.”

–Author unknown

At this critical planetary moment, the two of us are each considering what it means to deeply accept that our planetary home is in crisis — and how to move forward. Here are some of our individual reflections.

How The World Moved Right, By Chauncey DeVega

How The World Moved Right, By Chauncey DeVega

It is very regressive for a democratic society to slide towards authoritarianism. One big reason for this change is fear. Donald Trump and Steve Bannon understood the psychological effects of fear and they weaponized it to take power. Consider the Facebook Cambridge Analytica data scandal, where data got into the hands of Bannon [who] used it to manipulate voters. With Trump’s campaign, it seems like they perfected the a strategy of fear mongering to manipulate people into some other type of reality.