Globally, the last two years has seen significant climate change tipping points and apocalyptic-scenario enactment. Global pandemics have long been a part of the Climate Apocalypse landscape, the worst of the worst if we truly do nothing to change over the next 10 years. We’d always thought these pandemics would arise from toxins being released into the air when long-frozen ice melted, and this COVID experience has been an early run-through as a planet for the phenomenon. We aren’t doing too well, but at least a poor baseline offers much room for improvement.
While we are finding our way through this disease, its variants, and obstacles in vaccine distribution, the climate tipping points are nearing cascades. These are not fallen towers we can stand back up, or even burst wells we can tap. Much of what we approach are the unfixable shifts to which we must adapt, if we are build what we need. Take the example of Greenland. Its ice shelf has crumbled, deteriorated, far faster than anyone had predicted possible. As a response, the country has ceased all fossil fuel production. [Here]
I have been asked to speak at a Climate Justice retreat about the potential before us in regards to living with Climate Change, and I suppose that syntax itself reveals my first point. We are living with it now. It isn’t stoppable. What IS stoppable are the worst effects of inaction, and for that we need only begin.
15 months ago, I wrote a couple of blog posts about stepping into this strange time of living with an active and reasonable fear and how we might learn to negotiate it, not let it rule us, find hope through it…
@IBChowen
This is a time when individual action has great community impact. Right now, the actions of each person will affect the whole in very tangible ways. We will be able to see it nationally when the virus runs its course, in colorful maps with real data. Where people flattened the curve and where they didn’t. Where deaths were in the hundreds and where they were in the thousands. Where systems of aid and support developed and where they didn’t. But those are the aggregate effects of each person, and much more easily seen.
I’ve never seen a more direct example of the small affecting the large as this right here. Many of us believe that we must embody the changes, the attitudes, the perceptions that we want to see in the world –we are the agents of change. In my Christian language, I am acting as the hands and feet of God and what I bind and name here in that work has deep and real impact. Here
Of course I continue to believe this message, to put faith in it. Our individual actions affect the collective actions of any communities to which we belong -friend groups, school cohorts, family units, community engagement and political action organizations, congregations and other affinity groups. This cannot help but be true.
In all the spheres in which we live and move, in climate action and in Covid control and frankly in basic community organization and development, we all need to practice internal disciplines of empathy, compassion, and connection. Our defaults can be scarcity and fear driven if we aren’t prepared to respond differently.
For me, my own red flags are contempt, superiority, justification, separation, that awful ‘sour-grape’ feeling… I know that when these things come up, I have something to weed out, something to examine, something to challenge and flip. Nothing generative can be built from that foundation. We need to practice the connective actions internally in order to build up the muscles we’ll need to practice them collectively, in community.
@IBChowen
On our own so much, the fear, anxiety, and boredom can be overwhelming. … We can begin to feel alone and small, or manic and panicked. But we are not alone. In fact, we are all here in some way.
And that is the truth: We are connected in the midst of this. Some in fear, yes. But also in generative, connective ways.
Connective action –and inaction- is the key.
At some point, this connective action must begin with the internal. Even if we’re isolated with family, there will be solitude. There will be silence. There will be time to count breaths, to listen to heartbeats. Sometimes, I don’t know myself well or see myself clearly, and I could spend more time being with me. We are also deeply connected to each other at this ground level of being. And to Creation, to Earth and all beings. To find this rhythm, to rest on that ground, requires a radical connective inaction of simply being still. Here
While I will never preach that good works are redemptive in and of themselves, specific chosen actions of service, gratitude, and collaboration can strengthen our powers of empathy and connection, open up new pathways and possibilities. When our actions are based in trust and solidarity, the results begin to change.
We must practice actions that stem from gratitude. We must adopt rituals of connection, theologies of solidarity. We must build anew in collaboration and communion.
We know what will happen if we don’t, if we do nothing. Utter disaster. This is true for Climate, Covid -really all the things. The places from which we speak, the ground on which we stand, the responses we make to crisis all affect the outcome. We can build a different world.
And so we begin.