Oct 5, 2019 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecopsychology, Emotional/Spiritual, Extinction, Options/ New Paradigm, Resilience, Society In Decline, Trauma
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
Aug 16, 2019 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Ecopsychology, Emotional/Spiritual, Extinction, Grief, Trauma
The turning points that we reach, my friends, are the times that ask us: will we try to carry the impossible, terrible burden of existence alone? One that’s always been to heavy for anyone to shoulder by themselves? Or will we share it — this hidden truth of us, which we are so ashamed of?
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.
Apr 26, 2019 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Ecopsychology, Emotional/Spiritual, Extinction, Grief, Resilience, Trauma
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.
Apr 4, 2019 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Collapse of Industrial Civilization, Ecopsychology, General, Resilience
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.
Feb 18, 2019 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Culture, Ecopsychology, Emotional/Spiritual, Extinction, Grief, Resilience, Resistance, Trauma
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.
Jan 21, 2019 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Ecopsychology, Emotional/Spiritual, Extinction, Grief, Trauma
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.”
Jan 5, 2019 | Articles, Climate Change/Environment, Ecopsychology, Emotional/Spiritual, Extinction, Trauma
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.
Apr 17, 2018 | Articles, Ecopsychology, Emotional/Spiritual, Extinction, Grief, Trauma
Reposted from Alternet We are living in a time of extraordinary ecological loss. Not only are human actions destabilising the very conditions that sustain life, but it is also increasingly clear that we are pushing the Earth into an entirely new geological era, often...