— John Glavis
Apocalypse Anytime
A psychospiritual workbook for navigating the Polycrisis
by Carolyn Baker
In recent years, the term polycrisis has emerged to describe the tangled relationship between myriad crises on our planet and how they invariably intersect to create a predicament that is not solvable but can only be responded to. This book offers a treasure-trove of practical tools for grounding ourselves emotionally and spiritually amid both the long-term crises and the related challenges that confront us moment to moment as we navigate unprecedented events and their invariable consequences. Apocalypse Anytime is the culmination of fifteen years of the author’s writing and research on the demise of industrial civilization and its psychospiritual impact on Earth’s living beings. It offers a life-altering challenge for readers who are willing to accept the assignment.
Confronting Christofascism: Healing the Evangelical Wound
By Carolyn Baker
Will democracy in America prevail, or will it be usurped by a confluence of fascism and evangelical Christianity? In this book, the author traces the history of this unholy alliance and invites those recovering from the influence of fundamentalist religions, as well as the non-religious seeking to preserve the democratic experiment, to excise the toxic influences of religious authoritarianism from politics and personal life. Readers from all backgrounds will be enlightened and inspired by Baker’s clear and incisive snapshot of this defining moment in our history. Writing from her upbringing as a fundamentalist Christian and her years of practicing psychotherapy, she offers a deep dive into the psychology of fundamentalism as well as specific guidelines for healing the wounds of immersion in a subculture of religious domination. Confronting Cristofascism is a practical guide to assessing the influence of religious trauma in our personal and public histories and committing to recover from it in order to become more whole individuals and pro-active citizens. It is required reading for every awake American.
Carolyn Baker is someone who is unafraid to look at the possibility of human extinction and what we as a global community are facing. She also is willing to look at the spiritual and emotional possibilities that this climate and biosphere crisis presents us with. In this interview with Carolyn we discuss approaching collapse as a rite of passage and accepting and working with the grief inherent in these times.
In It For The Long Haul, Explorations on Emotional Resilience With Carolyn Baker
Saving Animals From Ourselves
By Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker
This book is based on a belief we both fiercely share: That we are not separate from the Divine, not separate from other humans, and are inextricably interconnected with the Earth community, with a responsibility to protect and to live in humble and grateful harmony with the whole of creation.
THE GUILD FOR SPIRITUAL GUIDANCE
Carolyn Baker
Have you ever wished that you could find a course of study that would holistically integrate the perennial wisdom of many spiritual traditions into one curriculum? The Guild for Spiritual Guidance has done just that. A Guild from medieval times to the present day is an organization with a unique purpose and outreach. Traditionally, the goal was to learn a trade such as masonry or carpentry, to become skilled in this work and, eventually, to pass on the knowledge and proficiency learned to others interested in following a similar vocation. The apprentice was under the tutelage of a Master, who mentored the individual for as long as it took to become skilled. Finally, the apprentices became, over time, Masters for others. To become a member of a Guild with others of the same persuasion brought with it responsibility, respect, and privilege in the community. The tradition of spiritual guidance is, in the West, at least as old as the Desert Fathers who gave “a word” to those who came to seek them in the wilderness. We invite you to explore our curriculum and opportunities for lifelong community support.
Journey To The Promised Land: How A Homeless Stranger Took Me Home…
…a memoir by Carolyn Baker
We all want to live and love more fully, and yet the price of our desire is often steep. Journey to The Promised Land is not just a moving story about reconnection, forgiveness, radical ego-adjustment, and having one’s heart broken open. It is a story of what is possible when we are willing to engage in the inner work of healing the parts of ourselves that obstruct our loving aliveness if we allow the ego to be radically transformed as we remain willing to stay present with and surrender to what in front of us right now. At this extraordinary moment of despair on our planet–at a time when hearts and conversations have become so hardened and polarized, it is crucial that we never shut down and that we continually open ourselves to mystery and miracles.
In this memoir, Carolyn writes with naked honesty and unvarnished vulnerability about relationships with two individuals who could not have been more unlike, yet who served as agents of ego demolition and transformation.
“In this riveting story, we bear witness to an authentic transfiguration of the heart. Carolyn Baker is a fierce warrior of love, showing up for the most challenging and meaningful work there is, and showing us the way home to what all of the spiritual traditions have been teaching us forever: In dying to our false self we are born into boundless interconnection.”
—Mirabai Starr, Taos, New Mexico
Teacher of mystical and contemplative traditions and author of God of Love and Caravan of No Despair
“It is rare to find a teacher who has learned to navigate the space between the prophetic cry of justice and the priestly whisper of mercy. This vast in between territory requires the sojourner to practice the alchemy of surrender or what Carolyn names as kenosis. It is only at this kairotic intersection that justice’s sharp sword and mercy’s comforting balm combines to form the golden elixir that our world so desperately needs. Carolyn’s ongoing pilgrimage to the Promise Land is grounded in relationships of impasse that the less courageous among us would have avoided. Thank you Carolyn for showing the way home.”
~Rev. Terry Chapman, Pastor of Forked River Presbyterian Church, Lanoka Harbor, New Jersey
“With her engaging and piercing writing, Carolyn has once again shown us that the particular is the route to the universal, and we all have a responsibility to attend to our shadow work, for personal health, and indeed the survival of our species.“
~The Rev. Michelle A. Danson Episcopal Priest & Spiritual Director
Andrew Harvey interviews Carolyn About The Book
Carolyn Baker interviewed by Andrew Harvey
Ecopsychology Voices
Carolyn interviewed by Canadian Ecopsychology Network
Books by Carolyn Baker
Radical Regeneration: Sacred Activism and the Renewal of the World
with Andrew Harvey (to be released November 2022)
Radical Regeneration
with Andrew Harvey
Saving Animals From Ourselves
with Andrew Harvey
Return to Joy
with Andrew Harvey
Help support this important work
Here are three easy things you can do to help me keep this important work alive
Contribute
If you value this website and wish to see its work continue and expand, please consider contributing.
The Daily News
Subscribe to the Daily News using a sliding scale "honor system" model that's served me well for many years. Each day I compile a list of news stories from around the Net bringing attention to issues the mainstream media doesn't cover. An excellent way to stay on top of what's really going on.
Become a Patron
Become a patron of The New Lifeboat Hour podcast. Make an ongoing pledge to contribute an amount of your choosing each month to support The New Lifeboat Hour. You can pledge as little as $1 per month or as much as you would like to help me with the production costs of this podcast.
— Gus Speth
— Andrew Harvey
News and Articles
What My Puppy Knows About Thunder (That I Don’t), By Umair Haque
The turning points that we reach, my friends, are the times that ask us: will we try to carry the impossible, terrible burden of existence alone? One that’s always been to heavy for anyone to shoulder by themselves? Or will we share it — this hidden truth of us, which we are so ashamed of?
Why The Megacapitalist Global Economy America Made Is Imploding, By Umair Haque
Wait…wasn’t capitalism supposed to bring freedom and democracy with it? Isn’t that whate every American thinker, economist, pundit, politician argued? Isn’t it why America bombed half the world for capitalism’s sake? So…what happened? Here’s what’s really happening. Capitalism’s imploding into fascism. And now it’s going global. The global economy America built is falling like dominoes. Bang, bang, bang. It’s not a coincidence that China and India are imploding into different kinds of authoritarian-fascism shortly after America did. It is a relationship. China and India were the linchpins of America’s model of global capitalism. They are the two countries that bought into it most heavily after America.And now, my friends, they are paying the price: they are collapsing right along with it.
Blithely Ignoring The Heart Of The Matter, By Carolyn Baker
As I have said many times, for me it matters because how collapse unfolds is just as important as the fact that it unfolds. A fascist dictatorship in any country will cause collapse to unfold in unique ways. My work has always been about educating and fortifying others emotionally and spiritually to cope with collapse more resiliently than we might without specific psycho-spiritual tools. The tools we need to navigate the protracted degradation and destruction of the natural environment where there is little authoritarian repression are different than the tools we need to live in a society where food and water might be rationed or we are imprisoned in a work camp or we are living in a constant state of domestic terror.
One Week, Two Massacres: America’s New Wave of Home-Grown Right-Wing Terror, By Umair Haque
Why is it that the average American can’t say the word “fascism” to describe a country of concentration camps, gestapos, kids in cages, organized supremacist political wings controlling government…and now political terrorism? One obvious answer is that they’re scared. And one obvious candidate for what’s scared Americans into submission — into being incapable of saying the word “fascism”…is fascist terrorism. Increasing right wing violence has caused a kind of chilling effect. The worse the fascists do…the less likely Americans are to call it fascism. Don’t you think that’s baffling? Upside down? The world does. I do. Only Americans don’t. And yet there must be a cause.
Fears About The Planet’s Future Weigh On Americans’ Mental Health, By Victoria Knight
“Most of the kinds of pathologies that we’re accustomed to treating in psychiatry, they tend to be out of proportion to whatever is going on. But with climate change, this is not inappropriate,” she explained.
“The goal is not to get rid of the anxiety. The goal is to transform it into what is bearable and useful and motivating.”
Americans Are In Denial That Fascists Took Over The United States, By Umair Haque
America’s not just in danger of having a fascist collapse. It’s having one. It’s bang in the middle of one. It’s not in the early phases — but in fact, beginning the later ones. The ones where concentration camps rise, and hatred spews from the head of a state, and papers are checked on public transport. How much more obvious could it get? How many more data points do you need? If this isn’t enough…what could be?
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
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
What If There Were No Future? Some Overlooked Consequences Of Exponential Growth, By Peter Russell
Can we let go of the cherished belief that we are here to stay, rejoice in our existence, and live our final days with grace?
How America Is Building The Institutions Of A Fascist Society, By Umair Haque
The institutions of bona fide fascism are rising in America. But what else did you think the fascists would do, except use their newfound power, money, and resources, to build them?
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
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.”
About Carolyn
Carolyn Baker’s mission is to create islands of sanity in a sea of global chaos. This mission necessitates the development of a variety of emotional tools alongside commitment to spiritual transformation. Through her multi-faceted outreach via webinars, podcasts, live workshops, books, and articles, as well as one-on-one life coaching, Carolyn is touching the lives of thousands to assist them in preparing for the dire consequences of the collapse of industrial civilization and abrupt climate change. One of her principal goals at this time is to expand her teaching outreach online by presenting more webinars and online workshops as well as workshops for live audiences.
Inherited from Mike Ruppert, the New Lifeboat Hour, now in Carolyn’s capable hands, is reaching thousands of people each week around the world as Carolyn engages in conversation with a variety of captivating guests who offer suggestions for creating and operating Lifeboats for navigating our turbulent times.
Hundreds of people have worked with Carolyn in the past five years to receive guidance around living and loving in the midst of global collapse. Carolyn also offers spiritual counseling to provide meaning and purpose in a time of personal and collective suffering. Carolyn is available to individuals who want a companion on their spiritual journey and seek guidance in finding meaning and purpose in turbulent times.
Carolyn believes that one of the key tools we need for navigating the global crisis is solid information. For nearly a decade, Carolyn has published a comprehensive Daily News Digest, seven days per week unless she is traveling. This amazing, subscription-based newsletter contains key stories on economics, the environment, geopolitics, civil liberties, civil unrest, and cultural trends—and contains a unique Inspiration section which reports ways in which people around the world are responding to our planetary predicament.
IN GRATEFUL MEMORY
This website was made possible as a result of a small legacy from the late Richard (Nick) Fyffe who wholeheartedly supported my work and who devoted his last years to justice-making for the LGBT community. In 2011 Nick founded New Wings, an organization dedicated to supporting LGBT individuals who had been influenced by various fundamentalisms and were struggling to integrate spirituality and sexual orientation.