Extinction Rebellion co-founder Roger Hallam stumbled badly with his insensitive remarks to a German newspaper in which he relativized the Holocaust. In essence he equated the deaths of millions in the Holocaust with the future deaths he believes will happen due to climate change. This was insensitive, like speaking to a grieving family while failing to take into account their grieving. In response, the call from XR Regenerative Cultures, the arm dealing with the […]
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Such a help I’d wish for everyone!
Lovely art by Jylian Gustlin. Check out her stuff. Such a help I’d wish for everyone!Here I celebrate the value of safe, respectful groups for keeping our head in a time of change. But there’s a secondary and hidden value in group spaces that is seldom noticed or spoken about. It’s true that we tend to do much better when we’ve full room to express ourselves, when we can tell others what we care deeply […]
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Inside activist culture
Inside Activist culture I received a phone call this morning from a friend in Germany who’s active in Extinction Rebellion. She was concerned about the activist culture there, how it favors action over reflection, a masculine doing over a feminine being, how it has little tolerance for the hidden or secret voices of members which were paved over with a tendency to group think. People often come into activist groups, exploring, and don’t find the welcome or the […]
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Facebook junk food
A friend wrote about her frustration with Facebook where commercialism and self-aggrandizement rule (she didn’t use those words). Here are a few of my thoughts it, not the whole truth most certainly . . . Mostly they’re from my book Evolutionary YOU: Discovering the depths of radical change which is about escaping the control of the social matrix we think we already know about. I added the junk food metaphor just now. In the tribes […]
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Change is a shift in consciousness
My friend John Heney has referred to our normal experience of the world as an “isolating personal performance.” This seems to me a telling phrase, one I can certainly relate to from personal experience. In this essay, I want to take this experience of isolating performance and place it beside the experience of Presence or non-performance and offer some ideas about moving from one to the other. Along the way this I’ll show the relevance of […]
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Climate change as celebration of consciousness
Few of us talk about the inner side of climate change, surfacing the inner angst, sense of pressure or despair we may feel. But when we do we see it as a burden and a problem. It shows up as, “Oh my god, how am I going to be with this?” A hundred, a thousand questions arise: how will our families understand it, how real is the science, Green New Deal?, how does Climate Change […]
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The personal challenge in climate change
How does our inner life connect into our thinking and feeling about climate change? Our activism? Or even do they connect? It’s likely that many of us haven’t considered this question much, if at all, and for good reason: Mainstream thought, which exerts a strong gravitational pull, carefully avoids the connection between what’s happening in the outer world and what might be happening in the inner world of the citizen. The mainstream has its own […]
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The gold in hidden climate change denial
Can it be we’re all grappling with various stages of denial, even those of us who – like me – have been working on it for a while? I think we do know what’s happening, but our knowledge doesn’t easily percolate down to where we actually live. I’ll share very recent thoughts, some coming into focus this morning on a springtime walk with my brother. Truly knowing that profound change is on the way due […]
Continue readingDisrupting the Status Quo – 1
When we first seriously consider the climate change facts, we tend to feel down low and hopeless. It’s tempting for a while to withdraw into a semi-private world where we feel worried or helpless. It’s normal too. Our existential situation is difficult. We or our children are likely to have it much rougher in future than we do now. We may not pull through as a species. But why do we take the climate news […]
Continue readingSaying “No” to the Green New Deal
Many of my friends and connections like the Green New Deal. Here’s why I’m saying “No thank you!”. While it would be wonderful to see a broad coalition toward a new future, the Green New Deal can’t be that. It’s a wish list put forward by a coalition of the radical left without consultation with the rest of society. Small “c” conservatives dislike it intensely. The GND is almost certain to lead quickly to increased […]
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