Aug 5, 2019 | Articles, Carolyn's Articles, civil liberties, Culture, Emotional/Spiritual, Geo-Political, Racism, Resilience, Resistance, Society In Decline, Tyranny, Violence
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.
Aug 4, 2019 | Articles, civil liberties, Civil Unrest, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Emotional/Spiritual, Grief, Racism, Resistance, Society In Decline, Trauma, Tyranny, Violence
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.
Jul 21, 2019 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Emotional/Spiritual, Extinction, Grief, Resilience, Society In Decline, Trauma, Tyranny
“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.”
Jul 13, 2019 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, community, Emotional/Spiritual, Extinction, Grief, Resilience, Society In Decline, Trauma
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.
Jul 10, 2019 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Emotional/Spiritual, Extinction, Resilience, Society In Decline, Trauma
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
Jul 4, 2019 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Emotional/Spiritual, Extinction, Grief, Resilience, Society In Decline, Trauma
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?
Jun 22, 2019 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Emotional/Spiritual, Extinction, Gaia, Grief, Resilience, Society In Decline
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
Jun 14, 2019 | Articles, civil liberties, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Emotional/Spiritual, Empire, Racism, Religious Fascism, Resistance, Society In Decline, Trauma, Tyranny, Violence
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.
May 27, 2019 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecopsychology, Emotional/Spiritual, Extinction, Gaia, Grief, Resilience
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.
May 6, 2019 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecopsychology, Emotional/Spiritual, Extinction, Resilience, Society In Decline, Trauma
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.
