As news of the climate crisis and mass extinction currently underway underscore the gravity of the moment, it is natural to turn toward despair and defeat. However, taking a deep-history perspective, which includes five other mass extinctions and re-frames our role and participation in worldwide ecosystems helps to move beyond grief. We enter a dynamic peace where our present blessings and future joys can dialog with the deep, ancestral history of extinction and apocalypse on Planet Earth, through our varied consciousness and experiences. We learn to speak with and through the pain of loss, and hopefully, to transmute this apocalyptic moment into a different tomorrow, beyond disaster.
Tag Archives: hope
Why I am not a “Doomer”
I’m not going to try to tell you where to focus your energy. But I will say this, if your choice is being motivated by a fear of despair, if you are fighting down a feeling of hopelessness, consider letting yourself feel it. Really feel it. Trust that there is wisdom in all of our feelings, even the dark ones, maybe especially the dark ones. And see where it takes you.
Beyond Doom: A Response to Mark Green
I’m not going to try to tell you where to focus your energy. But I will say this, if your choice is being motivated by a fear of despair, if you are fighting down a feeling of hopelessness, consider letting yourself feel it. Really feel it. Trust that there is wisdom in all of our feelings, even the dark ones, maybe especially the dark ones. And see where it takes you.
“Al Gore Didn’t Want You to Panic” by Dougald Hine
On a scale not seen before, people are having an encounter with climate change not as a problem that can be solved or managed, made to go away, or reconciled with some existing arc of progress, but as a dark knowledge that calls our path into question, that starts to burn away the stories we were told and the trajectories our lives were meant to follow, the entitlements we were brought up to believe we had, our assumptions about the shape of history, the kind of world we were born into and our place within it.
Another End of the World is Possible 