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.

The Talking Cure For The Climate Crisis, By Zhiwa Woodbury

The Talking Cure For The Climate Crisis, By Zhiwa Woodbury

When it comes to the climate crisis, what nobody wants to talk about is precisely what everybody needs to be talking about. Up until now, the climate debate has been premised on a false dichotomy between climate science deniers and everyone else. What the Paris accords have revealed is that this overweening emphasis on the science of anthropogenic climate change fails to answer the real question: Why the disconnect between what we know to be the threat and how we are choosing to respond to it?

Finding Hope In Hopelessness, By Margaret Wheatley

Finding Hope In Hopelessness, By Margaret Wheatley

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?

Why Catastrophic Climate Change is Probably Inevitable Now, By Umair Haque

Why Catastrophic Climate Change is Probably Inevitable Now, By Umair Haque

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.

What If It’s Already Too Late? Being An Activist In The Anthropocene, By John Halstead

What If It’s Already Too Late? Being An Activist In The Anthropocene, By John Halstead

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...
Big And Slow, By Elisa Gabbert

Big And Slow, By Elisa Gabbert

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

Kali Takes America: Reconnecting With The Destroyer/Creator, By Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker

Kali Takes America: Reconnecting With The Destroyer/Creator, By Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker

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.

The Deschooling Dialogs:  Grief, Collapse And Mysticism

The Deschooling Dialogs: Grief, Collapse And Mysticism

This is an edited transcript of a conversation that took place on April 24, 2018 as part of the inaugural quarterly issue of Kosmos Journal. The theme of the first edition is Unlearning Together. As such, it felt appropriate to have a quartet dialogue of unlearning, focused on a complex of issues associated with the inevitable transition to post-capitalism; namely, the issues of grief, collapse and the mystical impulse of transcendence that can provide deep healing in such troubled times. One of the key questions is how we come together to explore the edge of our practice as seekers, as activists, and as advocates for a more just and loving world.