Joanna Macy On The Sixth Mass Extinction

Joanna Macy On The Sixth Mass Extinction

I find a lot of what I am drawn to in the teaching I do, the experiential work, is to help people make friends with uncertainty, and reframe it as a way of coming alive. Because there are never any guarantees at any point in life. Perhaps it’s more engrained in the American citizen that we feel we ought to know, we ought to be certain, we ought to be in control, we ought to be upbeat, we ought to be smiling, we ought to be sociable. That cultural cast has tremendous power to keep us benumbed and becalmed. So it’s been central to my life and my work to make friends with our despair, to make friends with our pain for the world.  And thereby to dignify it and honour it. That is very freeing for people.

Edge-Dwelling: A Social Ecology For Our Times, Part 4: Low Tide, By Dianne Monroe

Edge-Dwelling: A Social Ecology For Our Times, Part 4: Low Tide, By Dianne Monroe

What we see and what we cannot yet see, what we know and cannot yet know, become the edge places from which we create new ways for humanity to live as part of our Earth community, weaving from the frayed edges of what we leave behind a bridge to the potential and possibilities of what we can become. These qualities and abilities enable us to do a dance of co-creation, visioning and building the future out of and together with what exists today.

The Torture Of Not Knowing, By Carolyn Baker

The Torture Of Not Knowing, By Carolyn Baker

With catastrophic climate change we do know two things: We know that it is progressing with unimaginable speed, and we know that if it continues to do so, there will be few habitable places on earth by mid-century. Yet what else are we not being told? Does the silence matter? Will it make a difference ultimately? With Fukushima, however, we know so much less. How much radiation has already been released? How much is being released every day? How much radiated water is actually being dumped into the Pacific Ocean every day? What is the actual size of the radiation plumes that are moving eastward in the Pacific toward the West Coast of North America? Specifically how are these affecting sea life and human life? What is the relationship between environmental illnesses or the incidence of cancer and Fukushima? And the questions exacerbate and spin and swirl in our minds.