Climate Change from the Inside Out: Shock. Grief. Respond. Relief. Repeat, By Vicki Robin

Climate Change from the Inside Out: Shock. Grief. Respond. Relief. Repeat, By Vicki Robin

We’ve long had symptoms. We now have a name for the disease: climate disruptions. But what is the prognosis. The shock for me is that we’ve gone from a treatable condition to a fatal prognosis. That’s what has me reeling. I’m ping-ponging around the well-known stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance without resolution. Used to being a leader, or at least a scout who is at least riding shotgun on the stage coach, I felt blind. And if blind, then unable to fulfill my self-assigned duties. People have looked to me. If I just shrug an I dunno, I’m useless – at least in my estimation

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.

Climate Crisis Forces Us To Ask Ourselves: To What Are We Devoted?, By Dahr Jamail

Climate Crisis Forces Us To Ask Ourselves: To What Are We Devoted?, By Dahr Jamail

You, dear reader, who are paying such close attention to the unraveling of all that we know, must share in many of these feelings. When you see another of these grotesque, pasty-white iterations of humanity stuffed into a glossy suit, acting as nothing more than a fossil-fueled ventriloquist’s puppet, do you, like me, burn inside with rage, a rage that threatens to incinerate you? Do you fantasize of their demise? Of somehow bringing them, at least, a taste of the pain their soulless and heartless actions are bringing to the fish searching for food atop the bleached-out coral reefs? To show them the starving polar bears swimming for hundreds of miles to find no ice to rest upon? At these times, I wonder if any of these so-called humans can feel a goddamn thing anymore.

Eco-Anxiety: Navigating The Doom And Denial Of Climate Crisis, By Jack Adam Weber

Eco-Anxiety: Navigating The Doom And Denial Of Climate Crisis, By Jack Adam Weber

The optimistic position is simply naïve. The pessimistic predicts the precise design of the future and doesn’t acknowledge that we can do a lot in the name of compassion to make life easier on ourselves, one another, and other species—our triangle of resilience relationships. Many don’t seem to be able to hang out in the 8–9.5 range, and I am certainly practicing this myself. If our fear is great and especially if we have little tolerance for fear, we might even try to deny climate change altogether.

An Open Letter To David Wallace-Wells By Rupert Read, John Foster, and Jem Bendell

An Open Letter To David Wallace-Wells By Rupert Read, John Foster, and Jem Bendell

The irony of your starkly-titled book is that it ends up being, from our perspective, too ‘optimistic’. This may blind readers to the greatest new need now: for Deep Adaptation – that is, for accepting that some kind of eco-induced societal collapse is now not merely possible, but likely, and preparing honestly for it; for recognising that – while it is absolutely vital to continue to seek to mitigate our society’s climate-deadly emissions – the time is past when it was credible to fixate on doing this while ignoring the increasingly-urgent need for Deep Adaptation.

Climate Trauma And Recovery: The Healing Path Of Cultural Truth And Reconciliation, By Zhiwa Woodbury

Climate Trauma And Recovery: The Healing Path Of Cultural Truth And Reconciliation, By Zhiwa Woodbury

For it is only unacknowledged trauma that prompts us to act out in ways that make the problem worse. If what we have been calling “climate change” is, in fact, an unprecedented form of trauma that is prompting us to act out in such perplexing ways as questioning the validity of facts themselves, then there is tremendous potential for societal and global healing in simply bringing awareness to the nature of our collective wounding. As anyone who has walked a 12-step path will tell us, awareness is a powerful elixir.

In Facing Mass Extinction, We Must Allow Ourselves To Grieve, By Dahr Jamail

In Facing Mass Extinction, We Must Allow Ourselves To Grieve, By Dahr Jamail

A willingness to live without hope allows me to accept the heartbreaking truth of our situation, however calamitous it is. Grieving for what is happening to the planet also now brings me gratitude for the smallest, most mundane things. Grief is also a way to honor what we are losing. “Grief expressed out loud for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them,” thinker, writer, and teacher Martín Prechtel writes. “Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”

Extinction Illness: Grave Affliction And Possibility, By Deena Metzger

Extinction Illness: Grave Affliction And Possibility, By Deena Metzger

The animals know this and now all humans know this as well. Sensing the imminent death of all species, the cellular understanding of our common fate is making us ill. Our nervous and physical systems cannot bear this terrible knowledge. The growing understanding of the reality of the human caused 6th Extinction is resulting in Extinction Illness.