Nov 24, 2018 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Emotional/Spiritual, Extinction, Gaia, Grief, Options/ New Paradigm, Resilience, Society In Decline
As the world grows ever darker, I’ve been forcing myself to think about hope. I watch as the world and the people near me experience increased grief and suffering, as aggression and violence move into all relationships, personal and global, and as decisions are made from insecurity and fear. How is it possible to feel hopeful, to look forward to a more positive future? The biblical psalmist wrote, “Without vision, the people perish.” Am I perishing?
Oct 28, 2018 | Articles, Carolyn's Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Emotional/Spiritual, Extinction, Resilience
The elephant in the room that is not seen in the United States or in Canada or in most parts of the world is the trauma we experience each day as even a small part of us feels consciously or unconsciously the gargantuan loss of our ecosystems, the loss of species, the loss of each other, and the loss of our own souls.
Oct 22, 2018 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Preparation, Society In Decline
Many of the world’s richest seem to earnestly believe that some kind of apocalyptic “event” [3] is coming, and have prepared accordingly. You might have read about this before — such as in the New Yorker’s deep dive [4] back in January 2017 — but billionaire doomsday preppers are back in the news again thanks to a new viral article penned [5] by professor and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff. In it, Rushkoff gives some insight on the grave manner in which some of the business elite are going about preparing for a doomsday, which he learned first-hand after receiving an invitation to speak with some one-percenters.
Oct 11, 2018 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Extinction, Trauma, Tyranny
My friends, catastrophic climate change is not a problem for fascists — it is a solution. History’s most perfect, lethal, and efficient one means of genocide, ever, period. Who needs to build a camp or a gas chamber when the flood and hurricane will do the dirty work for free? Please don’t mistake this for conspiracism: climate change accords perfectly with the foundational fascist belief that only the strong should survive, and the weak — the dirty, the impure, the foul — should perish. That is why neo-fascists do not lift a finger to stop climate change — but do everything they can to in fact accelerate it, and prevent every effort to reverse or mitigate it.
Oct 2, 2018 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Extinction, Gaia, Grief, Trauma
If it is true that Climate Trauma is continually triggering all our traumas, creating a psychological milieu of perpetual powerlessness, what does healing our trauma look like? The first step is the most obvious. What do we do in the natural world when a threatening storm is approaching? We find a place of refuge
Sep 3, 2018 | Articles, civil liberties, Climate Change/Environment
What is clear is that drones are priceless tools to many industries, while many applications will emerge as technology improves and breakthroughs allow other tools and devices to be combined with drones to create applications like firefighting and farming drones for other industries.
Aug 29, 2018 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Emotional/Spiritual, Extinction, Gaia, Grief, Resilience, Resistance, Sacred Activism, Society In Decline
I had a terrible thought recently … “What if it’s already too late?” Actually, this idea has been haunting me, hovering on the boundary between my conscious and unconscious mind, for some time. In 2016, Bill McKibben, founder of the climate activist organization...
Aug 2, 2018 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Emotional/Spiritual, Resilience, Society In Decline, Trauma
The extreme weather events of the summer of 2018 are not just symptoms of climate breakdown. They are early stage warnings of a protracted process of civilisational collapse as industrial societies face some of the opening symptoms of having already breached the limits of a safe climate.
Jun 27, 2018 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Extinction, Resilience
It takes 40 years or more for the climate to react to the carbon dioxide and methane we emit. This means that the disasters that have already happened during the warmest decade in civilized history (severe droughts in the Sahel region of Africa, Western Australia, and Iberia; deadly flooding in Mumbai; hurricane seasons of unprecedented length, strength, and damage; extinction of many species; runaway glacial melt; deadly heat waves; hundreds of thousands of deaths all told) are not due to our current rates of consumption, but rather the delayed consequences of fuels burned and forests clear-cut decades ago, long before the invention of the Hummer. If we ceased all emissions immediately, global temperatures would continue to rise until around 2050. I was shocked by this, the idea that the “megadisasters” of 2017 were set into motion in the 1970s, when there were only about half as many humans on Earth
Jun 26, 2018 | Articles, Carolyn's Books, civil liberties, Climate Change/Environment, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Corruption, Emotional/Spiritual, Empire, Extinction, Geo-Political, Grief, Options/ New Paradigm, Racism, Resilience, Resistance, Sacred Activism, Society In Decline, Trauma, Tyranny
In 2016, Andrew Harvey and I published Savage Grace: Living Resiliently In The Dark Night of The Globe. In Chapter 1 of the book, we forecasted essentially what is happening in this moment in terms of the demise of the last vestiges of democracy and human rights on this planet. We chose the image of Kali, the Hindu goddess of creation and destruction as the symbol of our current global predicament. Two years later, we are witnessing a virulent, worldwide embrace of white nationalist, authoritarian rule. Ultimately, Kali seeks to transform the human ego and rational mind and bring us into a more permanent residence in the heart, but the process is often excruciating. Might she also want to transform the image a country or a community has of itself? “This is not who we are.”—Or is it? How shall awake human beings respond? What is our work? What is our calling? How do we reconnect with the authentic sources of meaning in our lives and the web of life itself as totalitarian rule is poised to dominate our consciousness and our countries as we stand on the threshold of the potential extinction of all life on Earth as a result of catastrophic climate change? We will be posting portions of Savage Grace in the coming weeks because it is proving itself to be prescient and empowering in this very dark time.
