Three things I really want you to know

My intention in writing at all is to transform your conception of the strengthening climate change beast, to inspire new action in the face of this collective emergency, and to do as much as I can in furthering a better future for life than the one we're racing towards.

And facts don't seem to do it much. If you were interested in facts you could Google some from more reputable sources than me.

My oldest son, almost 8, read us a book tonight before bed about a woman becoming weak in old age. I wondered where her grandkids were. Wouldn't they be around and give her something to smile about? When I'm that old, I want family and friends to be around. I want to enjoy connecting with them then as much as I can now.

And when I'm that old, the world will definitely be a different place. What kind of place is honestly, literally, up to you and me.

Three things I want you to know about climate change:

1. Climate change poses an immense threat to all of us.

We're on a course to cause persistent, consistent heat waves around the world (likely an average 4 degrees F increase by the second half of this century, at least). Sea level rise will displace the 44% of the world's population living on coasts, probably by the end of this century. Effects of changing weather patterns, already noticeable locally in superstorms, droughts, and flooding, will become exacerbated as more energy becomes available in the atmosphere to fuel it all. We need drinking water, and it will become more scarce; clean water is also needed for food, so it too will become more scarce and people will become more aggressive to attain these necessities.

And no one gets out. The wealthy can delay the impact on themselves through resource and location fortifications, but it's coming for all of us. Even if we cut off all fossil fuel use by 2050, it will be too late to avoid catastrophic warming.

2. We can cause a shift in this trajectory right now.

It's not magical thinking to get that we can actually alter this trajectory now. Clean energy technologies are available now. We can easily cut back on the quantity of energy we think we need. There's pleasure, fulfillment, enjoyment, and productivity available in living sustainably and respectfully with human and non-human life as a promise.

Notable engineers and scientists have crunched numbers and developed region-specific optimizations, and the necessary capital and subsequent economic benefit are both available.

3. Climate change is a huge opportunity.

A global crisis requiring global commitment and cooperation to solve. Wow. 

Climate change is an equalizer - everyone is impacted, black and white and rich and poor - and overcoming a large number of our social, visceral, ancestral, isolating, and ineffectual intolerances to each other and even ourselves will be a necessity for us to make it.

I want to make it. I want my kids to make it. I want to get old with my wife, have a garden, have grandkids over for the weekend, and sit in contentment and pride in my final years that yes, we pulled it off, we consciously caused humanity to take a new path and create a future that wasn't going to happen on its own - a future where all life is respected, honored, and given a chance at fulfillment.

Read and sign the Pledge to Mobilize: click here. Hit me with some feedback whether you sign it or not - let me know where you stand.

Two of the most practical and effective actions we can take

Crap is crap no matter what kind of package you put it in. There ain't no way you can make it pretty, Josh. Stop trying to make it pretty. Just do it. Just, just show it for what it is. 

 - Lisa Bracken, Colorado resident interviewed in Gasland

Below are two of the most practical and effective actions that each of us can take to foster a future of satisfaction and well being for all life.


1. Educate ourselves.
Most of us use up a lot of our free time on entertainment of one kind or another. And we justify it with hard work, focus, passion, and commitment at work during the day. There ain't no way I can make this pretty - we need to educate ourselves on the facts, we need to get connected to what really matters to us, and we need to start doing it now.

There's information arguing both sides of every topic, obviously. My recommendation is that you err on the side of life and its well-being. Whose side are you on?


2. Talk to everyone about it.
It's usually fun, but it's not easy to get going. That's my experience. But we need to talk with everyone about it. The more we talk about it, the more we discover about ourselves and the issues, and the more we educate others and continue to build a movement. There's no top-down solution to our problem of a diminishing future. It's a bottom-up movement, and it will only get built through conversations.


Here's a relevant quote to close out this week's post:

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.

- Winston Churchill 

(I'm developing a list of the easiest, quickest climate change references to jump into. I'll be publishing the page soon. In the meantime, leave a comment if you'd like my top few recommended references.)

Lighting the tap water on fire

Thousands of people have walked streets, paddled in front of coal ships, camped on coal train tracks, and demanded political action in other ways in the last couple weeks.* They've demanded that governments break free from fossil fuels (pictures and overview).

I experienced a brief bit of euphoria this afternoon as I started meeting people with whom I would soon bus down to DC to march for an end to offshore drilling. These are people committed to forging a path to a different future from the one towards which current economic and political policies are barreling us.

All of us participating in today's actions want a clean energy future and we all know that it will take something to work this problem out - it's not going to work itself out.

The fight against pollution and climate change can seem abstract at times; but wherever people live, people will fight for their water. Even die for it. - Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything

And that's what brought us to DC today. We're fighting for water, we're fighting for food, we're fighting for the chance at a fulfilling and healthy life for all, and especially for our kids, each other, and people like us and you, who all deserve access to the necessities and deeply satisfying complements of a fulfilling life.

I chatted with people twice my age and people less than half my age, white people and black people, lawyers and doctors, women and men, girls and boys. The energy of being together had us all smiling and hopeful, present to possibility and a strange power to actually pull this thing off. This thing: transforming our economic landscape from an exploitative extractivism to a sustaining opportunity at a fulfilling life for all.**

And I talked with at least a few people about the challenge I am experiencing: facts are insufficient to cause a transformation in perspective and volition necessary to move peacefully towards a better future, but what should I say and how should I say it to actually aid this kind of shift? What intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and/or physical needles must I thread myself through to feed momentum toward a future where all life is respected, appreciated, and fulfilled?

The scene in the film where landowner Mike Markham ignites gas from a well water faucet in his home with a cigarette lighter due to natural gas exploration in the area is a far more effective argument against fracking than any report or speech. - Maxime Combes, French economist

By mid-trip my euphoria had waned. I didn't expect it to last, but I didn't foresee the sobering agent being a memory from 2003. The last DC rallies I remembered participating in were anti-war rallies. The energy, camaraderie, and rightness of those experiences were dissolved by one simple statement by President Bush, and the war proceeded without delay. It really seemed to me like we were going to prevent the invasion of Iraq; millions had rallied around the world on a single day, and thousands of us met in DC on multiple occasions.

Some of the chants from today stung a little, messages about people being united, about the movement being incapable of being defeated. It can be defeated. It may be defeated. An industry is betting on it and politicians are being paid for it.

But this movement is our movement, for us and for our kids. The tap water is on fire, I just can't get you to see it yet.


* Vancouver, BC; Seattle, WA; Washington, DC; Los Angeles, CA; Albany, NY; Anacortes, WA; Chicago, IL; Proschim, Lusatia, Germany; Aliaga, Turkey; Newcastle, Australia; Ogoniland, Nigeria; Jakarta, Indonesia.

** "We know that we are trapped within an economic system that has it backward; it behaves as if there is no end to what is actually finite (clean water, fossil fuels, and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions) while insisting that there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually quite flexible: the financial resources that human institutions manufacture, and that, if imagined differently, could build the kind of caring society we need." - Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything

Seeing through the fog of The Dream

I said to a colleague today that I've got nearly no patience for resignation and cynicism about our future. I'm baffled to hear smart people sell out so quickly on hope* because of The American Dream: The Way Things Are.

To judge one dream as fantasy and buy into another as inevitable is a mistake.

There's an experience of freedom, enjoyment, and fulfillment available by creating an inspiring future together. But since the present is busy, distracting, and, for many, not all that bad, why fuss about a future we can't avoid anyway?

I think that black people have a different perspective to offer to this conversation. While all of us are conditioned to believe in the validity, feasibility, and nobility of achieving success approved by The American Dream, the collectively oppressed among us inevitably get a glimpse through the fog of that dream to the price it exacts. From our privileged perspective this dream isn't all that bad, it's just The Way Things Are.

But this dream is that bad, and enough of us are just lucky enough, so far, that we can relax into the illusion just a little bit longer.

We are born with the capacity to learn how to dream, and the humans who live before us teach us how to dream the way society dreams...And through this domestication we learn how to live and how to dream...the information from the outside dream is conveyed to the inside dream...We are so well trained that we are our own domesticator.

- Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements

I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much.

- Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

I know where diamonds come from; it ain't about the bling.

- Lyrics from Black Stacey by Saul Williams

It's absolutely not true that we need natural gas, coal or oil. (Source.) 

- Mark Jacobson, Stanford professor of engineering 

* Hope for a future in which all people have access to clean water, healthy food, great relationships, and hope that all human societies can live peacefully, sustainably, and enjoyable within non-human ecosystems.

Whether we're inspired or not

A friend attended a climate change talk this evening, and he expressed to me that he was left uninspired by it.

My response to him:

What I'm finding for myself is that my writing isn't great, my logic is sometimes flawed, my articulation is lacking, my knowledge is minimal, and my vision is blurred, but what matters most is that I keep talking, keep writing, keep speaking up. It's probably not very inspiring to most people, it's not very engaging, but it's what I've got. 

Identifying myself as part of the climate movement is giving context to all these mediocre actions I'm taking - and it's the biggest, most important fight out there today, in my opinion. 

So the talk tonight may have been uninspiring to you, but consider that it's up to you to find inspiration in the talk and the movement. The time has passed for us to be willing to wait for inspiration to get in action. The time is now for us to act, whether we're inspired or not. 

Thy soul is required of thee

Transcript of a talk I gave in Chapel on Wednesday 4.13.16:

Good morning. Thank you for your attention.

I'd prefer that it not be this way, me standing in front of you. I'd rather have watched Netflix than think and stress and draft and toss and jot notes and talk and stress and write some more.

But here I am. And (to borrow an idea from MLK) if the Creator held me in front of the tapestry of space and time itself, had me pick any time in which to live, I would choose this moment, a moment when humanity sits upon a precipice, not much realizing or caring that we're balancing the satisfaction of our own desires on one side and the satisfaction of the needs of life on the other.

Introduction

I'd like to start off by addressing the typo that isn't really a typo up on the screen behind me [A student was invited to respond to the following questions, and he responded beautifully]:

• Why is it spelled "Eaarth"? The name comes from the title of Bill McKibben's definitive 2009 book Eaarth: Making a life on a tough new planet. Because humans have drastically and permanently altered the biosphere, cryosphere, and atmosphere, it is far from the Earth it was before industrialization.
• Can you give some examples? Melting arctic ice, average global temperature up 1.5 deg F since 1880, increased energy available to storms, changing local climates like California's drought.
• What do you think about all this? I think the scariest part is the uncertainty. Scientists are usually conservative with their predictions, so we could be seeing severe climate change impacts as late as 100 years from now but as early as 30 years from now, and that's not including current superstorms like hurricane Sandy or South Sea storms.

My Boys 

[Picture of my kids on screen behind me.]

I began identifying myself as an environmentalist when I was in the 11th grade. But it wasn't until my older son up there on the right was born, that I began to deeply care. 

I wasn't all too interested in having kids just yet, but my wife was ready and I figured I could go along with it and give it my best shot. The day that little kid was born was the day my life completely altered - who I knew myself to be, others to be. I had felt strong feelings for people before, but I didn't know how deep love could go until I held him for the first time.

It's because of them that I care, it's their future and it's your future that has me stand up here today.

Be Skeptical

In school we're often telling you to think critically and to be skeptical. I request that for the next 10 minutes you be skeptical of your own thinking. I invite you to hear what I'm saying as valid and accurate.

Uncurling from the Fetal Position

The imagery of uncurling from the fetal position brings up two ideas to me. First, it brings up courage. The more data analyses I read or predictions I come across, the more I want to curl up under a blanket and helplessly wait for it all to get over with. But to uncurl, to stand up, and start opening my mouth to say things that might be uncomfortable for me or others, that's me doing whatever I can to make a difference.

The second idea it brings up is society's maturing from the infancy of materialism, of selfishness and greed, to responsibility, compassion, and true fulfillment.

To me there is no other conversation more important than this one - a conversation with the potential to transform who we are for ourselves, each other, and life itself.

And I'm woefully inadequate for the task. I'm too selfish, too uninformed, too ill-spoken to adequately communicate in few words the depth of the climate issue at hand, an issue we don't have much time to address. Decade zero. 

What I've decided to focus on is religion. A student reflected on December's climate change talk that he didn't understand what Christianity has to do with climate change. Religion can provide context for our lives, it can also provide guidance.

Religion 1: Buddhism

I choose to follow many Buddhist values.

Imagine a world with people free from the constraints of judgments, fear, selfishness, and suffering. Imagine a world of personal satisfaction, of compassion and thoughtfulness, of freedom to be however, wherever, with whomever.

Who I Am is nothing, emptiness, an experience. WHAM, I become something. I become a man, a father, a husband, a friend, a teacher. Nothing, emptiness, an experience. WHAM, I become a jerk, cynical, frightened, righteous. Nothing, emptiness, an experience. WHAM, I become a conduit, a commitment to the health and well-being of life itself.

How is your identity confining you to the sidelines of humanity's collective climate crisis?

What perspectives can you try on that provide a more positive few of our collective future?

Are you a taker, or are you a leaver?

Religion 2: Science

Science adds depth to my experience of the material world - such beauty in the depths of it. Understanding the mechanisms in the life of tree, the electromagnetic forces holding atoms and molecules together, the transfer of oxygen in the air I breathe to my blood and body deepens my experience of being alive.

But attempting to reduce the universe to only its material constituents is an immense error in the development of human thinking and ways of knowing. Studying rocks and cells and behaviors doesn't say a thing about my experience of life. Science is a piece of the puzzle, but it alone holds no answers. 

Religion 3: Christianity
I also choose to follow a number of christian values. I think Jesus is an excellent model for human behavior in many ways, and he had great things to say. I like the relationship between Taoism and Christianity - look up to transcend the self, and look side to side to bring others along for the ride.

Jesus gave us two commandments: love God above all else, and love our neighbor as ourself. There's something greater for us, an omega-point. I think that heaven is not a place, it's a state of being. As an individual I can look up, transcend who I've become to become newly. And I am a member of a community, and I am responsible for the well-being of my communities.

[Here I referenced the gospel reading for the chapel service, Luke 12:13-21. I recommend that you read it and see how it relates :)]

The messiahs we're waiting for

Whether we've acknowledged it or not, we're all expecting a savior from the ecological issues we've been collectively causing. We're waiting for:

• Technologists - that they'll figure out solutions.
• Philanthropists - that they'll throw money towards it and fund a solution.
• Economists - that they'll encourage and inspire policies that lead to market solutions.
• Politicians - that they'll stop fighting once the straits become dire.
• Sages - actually, they've already given their two cents about this. We haven't listened yet. For over 2,000 years the great sages have been giving us guidance how to live, and we still haven't listened.

The messiahs who are coming

You and me. We are the someone who's coming. There's nobody else who can step up and work for a solution right here right now.

Seek for Yourself Treasures in Heaven, not on Earth
I assert that if we look deep at what we really want, nearly all of us can point to these items on the screen. Unfortunately, the latest iPhone can't provide these things, but living according to Jesus' two commandments can. And living according to those two commandments can provide us all with those things, not just a privileged minority.

This issue is not about what we need to give up. It's not about not driving an SUV, and you shouldn't. This issue is not about using disposable cups, and you shouldn't. It's about living our lives according to our values and the world that's possible if we do.

We really are balancing life on a precipice, and it's not about what we need to give up. It's about what future we want for ourselves and each other.

These two commandments

Even if we disagree that there was innately anything special about Jesus beyond genetic predispositions, we can likely agree that he was a master. And apprentices, like us, can also develop mastery by taking the coaching.

Matthew 22:36-40
“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

Yang - Roots and Routes
How we think we need to live, deeply rooted in materialism, is destroying the biosphere of human and nonhuman life. Materialism, its distractions, we seem to value quite highly.

A relationship with the Eternal provides a direct route to personal spiritual ascendance: greater heights of personal satisfaction, clarity, enjoyment, vision, and effectiveness. Our distractions, both material and dogmatic, are shiny things that lead us off the path, the Way, of loving God above all else.

And I think that our willingness to disrupt the harmonic equilibrium of the biosphere is an affront to the Source. Impudence in the presence of the Sovereign. Where self-ascendency could lead to greater fulfillment, our materialistic detour stalls us in our reach for personal divinity.

Yin - Food, Dancing, and Hugs
Not only are our lives beginning to be noticeably and dramatically affected by human-induced climate change at the hands of an unrestrained fossil-fuel economy, our children's and their children's lives will be disastrously affected. And the first victims of the most impacting effects will be the poor; the less poor will be the second victims; and so on.

Where uncompromising capitalists see crises as opportunities, it's not typically the same for climate victims without other resources. Josh Fox, director, said at his movie showing in Baltimore a couple weeks ago, "The United States would be a different country today if the poor and brown fleeing New Orleans after Katrina were greeted with food, music, dancing, and hugs instead of shotguns."

All scientific climate simulations, generally presented with minimal sensationalism, point to climate change-related catastrophes occurring more and more frequently this century. And the poorest are impacted most harshly, first.

The depth of connection, compassion, empathy, and concern I feel for my own kids can provide me instruction on how to more fully love my neighbor. Assimilating a bit more of Jesus may too.

Tao - Taking the Coaching
I don't believe that Jesus was inherently divine any more than you and I, but I do believe we won't fulfill on that potential for ourselves if we don't take the coaching.

Uncurling from the fetal position

A mental image of uncurling from the fetal position inspires two feelings in me tonight.

Courage to uncurl.*

I just googled 'courage quotes' and got a site with hundreds of quotes - here's the first one:

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. - Steve Jobs

I worry about sounding too radical with my thoughts on climate change. I fear that I'm turning people off to the message altogether. I'm afraid that most people know much more than I do about this stuff and have really figured something else out, that I'm foolish or naive. I'm concerned I'm not doing as much as I could, like I'm missing the best path for optimum impact. I'm scared to see my kids in pain, scared, sick, or sad. I'm anxious that I'm underprepared.

That's me in the fetal position. 

I uncurl when I'm present to my gorgeous family, the funny things we all say, when we're having conversations. I uncurl when I'm present to life and the physical world around me, the giant trees behind our house or rainwater streaming in a gutter. I uncurl when I'm playing music, or hearing the tick tock of perfect reasoning. I uncurl when I feel compassion without burden, concern without weight, joy without insult.

Uncurling by maturing. 

Here we are, as a society, not exactly prenatal, but young. We've been growing and becoming more coherent, but we've got uncurling left. 

From my favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut:

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

Can we satisfy our needs (including comfort, compassion, and enjoyment) without destroying the place? Yes. So why do we keep destroying it?

What if:
All we're missing is authentic connection - With other people - With the physical and biological world around and within us - Within the world of mind. What if we're just distracting ourselves from loneliness with all this 'progress'?

It's time to uncurl.**

* An interviewee from a new documentary, How to Let Go of the World and Love All The Things Climate Can't Change, on a director's panel this week at a showing in town, described her fetal-to-postfetal self-image when she acts in the face of despair.
** Happy Easter! Uncurling, death and resurrection, either works for this idea!

If'n I was goin' somewhere

"An acorn's DNA has 'oak' written all over it."*

The physical stuff of the universe is there, but the biological stuff of the universe seems to be heading somewhere (telos). The acorn an oak, the tulip bulb a blossom, the apple seed a fruit tree. Even third on the ladder of the stuff of the universe (first is matter, second is plant life, third is animal life, fourth is mind - human life) we find that puppies grow to beget and care for more pups, kittens to cats for more kittens, etc.

Rocks and stars just are. Life aims to beget more life. And human life?

The direction of the highest order of life is less certain. The human mind is the deepest product of evolution on the stage of Earth. We are made of the same stuff that makes up our planet - we're mostly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. And that stuff is arranged in the right way to give us life. Yet we are not the same as other life. We have transcended the domain of other life.

And with each transcendence in evolution there are new opportunities for pathologies:

• Rocks can get banged up. 
• Plants can get banged up and get diseases. 
• Animals can get banged up, get diseases, and get cancers. 
• Humans, well we can get banged up, get diseases, get cancers, and more...

It's the more that I'm mostly concerned with. We are currently living in a society that represses the foundations of our existence. Just as molecules cannot exist without atoms, animals cannot exist without the necessities of life. But humans must grapple not only with the necessities of life for survival, but with the higher-level aspects of our existence: culture, community, and society.

The aspects of our unique evolution that add such depth and fulness to our experience - language, art, science, mathematics, technology - are also new sources of pathologies.

Many of my students say that this disastrous path is just part of our nature, that it couldn't be any other way with us. I am sure that there is another way possible, and that's the direction I think our species tends to head.

"A city fellow, driving through the Vermont countryside, sees a man in a truck on the side of the road. The truck is axle-deep in the mud, and the wheels are spinning. 'Are you stuck?' asks the city fellow. 'I would be, if'n I was goin' somewhere.'"*

I think we're stuck because we're going somewhere.


* Quotes taken from Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution by Ken Wilbur.

Bein' preachy

I was just hanging with a few friends and I'm present to a dilemma (same topic as my last post). Finding balance between personal satisfaction and contributing to the global community isn't so straightforward for me sometimes.

Perhaps I'm just reinvigorated by Naomi Klein's conviction that people have the power to put choice back into each other's hands, but the climate change issue seems to be too big an issue for anyone who knows and cares to not shout about it.

We're on a path right now that has a pretty painful ending for a lot of people, and we're running out of time to effectively put on the brakes. Why isn't every conversation aiming to answer the question, "How do we create a better future for us and other life than the future we're rushing towards?"

Such is the yang side of it, and I can sometimes slip into despair with that one.

On the yin side are all the beautiful lifestyles and communities that people are creating and engaging with that are the birth of that new world. I want to study these much more.

I'm seeing the balance again actually - there's personal satisfaction for me in working for a new future for life. And worry and fear aren't requisite for me to have my cake and eat it too.

As that balance is asking to be sustained, the balance between shifting my own understanding and standing for a shift in our collective understanding also needs to be maintained - my being preachy ain't fun on either side of the sermon!

a Word in a valuable Story

Our language comprises 26 letters. With those letters we compose our words. We group those words into sentences to say anything.

Like different words formed from the same letters, humans are made of the same elements as nearly all other life: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, calcium, hydrogen, phosphorus, and some others in small amounts. We contain within us no special material differences; there is nothing about our material constituents that separates us from other life.

And yet we are different.

I remember a fad in middle school being the drawing of the yin-yang symbol in class notebooks. I thought it was a cool symbol, and I thought there was esoteric meaning there that the cool kids really understood. Though still not a cool kid, I think I'm finally starting to grasp it.

Yin and Yang - agency and communion. Individualism and participation. "How can I be both my own wholeness and a part of something larger, without sacrificing one or the other?"*

Water comprises two elements: hydrogen and oxygen. The two alone are useful gases in their own right, but combine a couple hydrogens with an oxygen in H20 and we've got "a transformation that results in something novel and emergent."*

While I've been sitting to meditate the last few weeks, that voice nearly always pops up at some point during the 30 minutes to loudly question whether meditation is worth anything. The biggest insight I've gotten out of my meditation practice recently is the clarity that I am both an individual and a part; experiencing a perfect balance between those two, while usually fleeting, alone makes the effort and time worth it.

I am an individual aiming for personal satisfaction and fulfillment  ///  I am a part of the global network of life aiming for collective satisfaction and fulfillment.

I'm a word in the story of life: whole and complete on my own, yet part of a bigger story.


* Quotes taken from Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution by Ken Wilbur. 

No one left out

I assert that what matters most to all of us is the health and well-being of life: clean air, clean water, healthy food, comfortable shelter, healing medicine, and authentic connections with life (human and non-human) around us.*

We want ourselves and our families to have easy access to all of that, including great relationships. And if you're willing to authentically look, we want it for everyone else too.

Pathologies aside, we're all naturally compassionate and connected, and we have a fierce desire for fairness. These traits we can cultivate.

There is nothing I'd rather feel than my love for my kids. I'm pretty happy to see that I can actually begin to expand that raw love to my wife and our relationship in new ways. And now to my friends and students and colleagues and strangers.

We can actually grow our ability to feel compassion for and to authentically connect with others.

The survival instinct's pathological partner, greed, takes over sometimes. It's there too. It can be managed and cultivated as well. We live in an economic system that flourishes on the cultivation of this trait.

Compassion and authentic connection to life provide a greater level of fulfillment than material greed will ever provide.

We live inside of a political economy that values an entity's rights to financially prosper through the ownership and/or manipulation of the necessities of life to the detriment of most of us and in the end, all of us. We need governments willing to step up and smack the greedy hands of corporation shareholders, block their access to life-destroying resources, processes, and products. We need governments willing to stand for all people getting the necessities and most meaningful treasures of life (which really aren't material).

It's all we really want - clean air, clean water, healthy food, comfortable shelter, healing medicine, and authentic connections with life around us.

* "Fulfilling God's Will for us" comes to mind as a possible addition to this list. I don't currently believe in God, but I bet God's will for any of us has something to do with providing these 6 things to others and making sure we're using God's gifts justly.

A spoonful of sugar

Until watching Mary Poppins yesterday for the first time in decades, I never got that the "spoonful of sugar" song isn't really about medicine and sugar. It's about dealing with any drudgery that comes up - a spoonful of positive context is all it takes to transform work into a decent time. (Funny how when they actually do consume medicine in the film they don't take a spoonful of sugar with it.)

Humans' ability to create positive contexts is astonishing. It's finding the bright side of things. It's walking on the sunny side of the street. And so on.

That ability is perhaps linked to what at least one paleogeneticist calls the "madness gene." That's the possible gene that led us to explore new territory, reach new and great heights and distances, to justify all sorts of actions and their results in the name of progress. Yes there are some costs (slavery, mass species extinction, environmental degradation, atomic weapons, the Holocaust), but context generation is a gift...right?

As I grow and learn and aim to be an instrument in the creation of a brighter future for life, my main goal, I suppose, is to maintain balance: seeing a need and working to cause a different future while tooting a merry tune.

-------------------------------------

"A Spoonful of Sugar" lyrics
[Spoken]
In ev'ry job that must be done
There is an element of fun
You find the fun and snap!
The job's a game

[Sung]
And ev'ry task you undertake
Becomes a piece of cake
A lark! A spree! It's very clear to see that

A Spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
The medicine go down-wown
The medicine go down
Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
In a most delightful way

A robin feathering his nest
Has very little time to rest
While gathering his bits of twine and twig
Though quite intent in his pursuit
He has a merry tune to toot
He knows a song will move the job along - for

A Spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
The medicine go down-wown
The medicine go down
Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
In a most delightful way

[Interlude]

The honey bee that fetch the nectar
From the flowers to the comb
Never tire of ever buzzing to and fro
Because they take a little nip
From ev'ry flower that they sip
And hence (And hence),
They find (They find)
Their task is not a grind.

Ah-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h ah!

A Spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
The medicine go down-wown
The medicine go down
Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down
In a most delightful way

What they won't care about in 80 years

The following is an excerpt from Derrick Jensen's essay, "You Choose," that I have borrowed from a book of essays titled Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril. I chose where to break the paragraphs.

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"When most people in this culture ask, 'How can we stop global warming?' that's not really what they're asking. They're asking, 'How can we stop global warming, without significantly changing this lifestyle...that is causing global warming in the first place?'

The answer is that you can't...

Those who inherit whatever's left of the world once this culture has been stopped - whether through peak oil, economic collapse, ecological collapse, or the efforts of brave women and men fighting in alliance with the natural world - are going to judge us by the health of the land base, because that's what's going to support them, or not.

They're not going to care how we lived our lives.
They're not going to care how hard we tried.
They're not going to care whether we were nice.
They're not going to care whether we were nonviolent or violent.
They're not going to care whether we grieved the murder of the planet.
They're not going to care whether we were enlightened.
They're not going to care what sort of excuses we had not to act (e.g., 'I'm too stressed to think about it,' or 'It's too big and scary,' or 'I'm too busy,' or 'But those in power will kill us if we effectively act against them,' or 'If we fight back we run the risk of becoming like they are,' or 'But I recycled,' or any of a thousand other excuses we've all heard too many times).
They're not going to care how simply we lived.
They're not going to care how pure we were in thought or action.
They're not going to care if we became the change we wished to see.
They're not going to care whether we voted Democrat, Republican, Green, Libertarian, or not at all.
They're not going to care if we wrote really big books about it.
They're not going to care whether we had 'compassion' for the CEOs and politicians running this deathly economy.

They're going care whether they can breathe the air and drink the water. They're going to care whether the land can support them. We can fantasize all we want about some great turning, and if the people (including the nonhuman people) can't breathe, it doesn't matter. Nothing matters but that we stop this culture from killing the planet...

Those who come after - presuming anyone survives - are going to wonder what the fuck was wrong with us that we didn't do whatever it takes - and I mean whatever it takes - to stop industrial capitalism from killing the planet...

It is long past time for us to be the miracle we've all been waiting for."

The internal world is another

I haven't written a post in nearly two months. The climate change event we held at school went very well. Just over 70 people attended, and our three presenters were such a perfect group. Dr. Holtz from UMD presented on the science of climate change and its impacts; Ms. Archer from UMD presented on ecosystems, true cost accounting, and unquantified connections; and Chaplain Sell from St. Paul's presented on a Christian perspective on climate change and environmental stewardship.

Many of my students expressed that they attended for extra credit, but found the speakers and topics very interesting, scary, and/or inspiring - worth experiencing for their own value.

So I've been wondering where next to focus some energy. We're having another talk in a couple months, educational and inspiring(!), but what should I now do to develop myself as an effective climate change activist?

Speaking with a former student a couple months ago, we discussed how to make an impact in the world. Near the end of the conversation he said that he thinks developing ourselves to our potential in a spiritual sense is an important piece of the puzzle. And I agree (though I find it more challenging than I used to to use the word spiritual).

Developing our knowledge of the external world gives us a good description of what's out there, which is important. Science measures matter and energy, the world out there, and it could inform our actions. But perfect knowledge does not equate to perfect action. Knowing how to lose weight and get strong doesn't have the pounds drop off and muscles grow.

The external world is part of our experience of being alive. The internal world is another. Knowledge on the one hand, being on the other. Epistemology and Ontology.

In every aspect of life we're dealing with those two worlds.

Some facts

One of the problems with climate change is the Omnivore's Dilemma: there's so much info out there, so many different perspectives on the best response, and the facts of climate change so scary, that I'd rather put my head in the sand most of the time.

Here's some of what I know:

Natural Gas:

• Natural gas is not a sustainable solution to our CO2 problem.
• Natural gas, when burned, emits less CO2 than oil or coal, which is good.
• The human 'production' of natural gas, however, especially fracking, releases a lot of 'waste' methane into the atmosphere.
• Methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2.
• Most methane in the US comes from natural gas and coal extraction, transport, and processing. Most is not from agriculture as is commonly expressed.
• Fracking, an industry growing too fast for regulatory agencies to catch up, is a dangerous, polluting process. Water is a much more important resource than fuel, and fracking threatens our water supply. 

Nuclear Power:

• Nuclear power is potentially a sustainable solution to our climate change problem.  
• Nuclear power plants emit no CO2 directly, but mining, shipping, and processing uranium emits some. 
• Nuclear waste remains dangerous to most life for a duration from a few days to a few million years after its creation.
• Nuclear power is very tempting as an interim solution, and I'd be willing to support this option as an absolute last resort. It's dirty, dangerous, and non-renewable, and it's not guaranteed to take us into the 22nd century due to limited uranium supply. 

Tar Sands:

• Extremely destructive to local and distant ecosystems. 
• This extraction method is so energy intensive and dirty that the mere desire to extract oil using this method is a red flag that extraction companies are getting desperate. 
• Again, the fuel obtained from this source is so not worth it that we're better off using no fuel at all than this stuff.
• Most tar sands oil, like most of our coal, would be exported to other countries. Destroying our land and many north americans' livelihood solely for financial gain. 

Geo-engineering:

• While many of us really do believe that a technological solution to climate change will be found before things get too bad, this is extremely not likely. 
• Bill Gates and Richard Branson, among others, have been pumping money into this for over a decade, and they've got nothing.
• However, if we don't mitigate climate change soon, the powers that be will talk most of us into believing that geo-engineering solutions are our best hope.
• The most widely supported geo-engineering solution is dimming the sun. Spraying sulfer into the stratosphere to block some of the sun's energy would keep some heat out of the atmosphere. In addition to turning our sky from blue to yellowish, this 'solution' doesn't help the acidification of the oceans due to CO2 absorption, and it will also lead to changing climate and weather patterns. I am truly disturbed and nauseated that there are smart people out there actually promoting this idea. Another short-sighted, short-term 'solution'.

Renewable Energy:

• A conversion to renewable energy sources would not be easy.
• Manufacturing renewable energy systems uses fossil fuel mining, transport, and production techniques.
• It would take A LOT of renewable sources to balance our current energy needs. 
• It has been calculated that the world could run on 100% renewables definitely by 2050 and perhaps as early as 2030 (Stanford study).
• Renewable energy power supplies would have to be distributed and not centralized. This lends itself to local energy self-sufficiency and small scale, local economies. 
• This is the best option for us and the future of the planet. We should all get behind this now, but it needs to be done right, with a commitment to minimal environmental and social impact.

Free Market Capitalism:

• Any system that puts the needs of the 'market' above those of people and other life is wrong.
• Moving to sustainable energy sources is not economical, and it therefore is not going to be supported by the development of so-called market solutions.
• Capitalism, on a local scale, isn't a problem. It's the dissociation of resources, producers, employers, and consumers at the heart of the global market dissonance.
• Capitalism, as we do it, has a serious flaw - it neglects to consider natural systems and life itself as capital to be valued as an end in itself. Instead, these are viewed as sources of income, cogs in the machines that churn out money, means to an end. 
• The idea that we need energy solutions healthy for human and non-human life that satisfy the needs of the market too is a faulty premise; the needs of human and non-human life should be valued above all. 
• An economic system that continues to jeopardize the well-being of human and non-human life is not an ethical or viable economic system.
• (Don't assume that criticism of capitalism means I promote socialism.)

Values:

• Our best hope is for us all to stop justifying polluting ourselves, our environment, and other life. Nothing is worth the damage we're doing.
• We need to develop courage to pull our heads out of the sand and face the facts.

A little bit

A lot of people care enough to want to do something, but we don't know what to do. We can make better choices about what we buy, what we throw away, how much we consume. Those things help a little bit, and on the scale of one person, those little bits add up to a lot. But on the scale of civilization, those little bits add up to just a little bit.

"Every little bit helps," they say. But it helps only a little bit.

When I was 9 or 10 I read an illustrated Bible for a few weeks. The story of Moses going to talk to Pharaoh comes to my mind a lot. God wanted Moses to go to Pharaoh and ask for freedom. Moses said, "but what will I say?" And God said in response, "don't worry about it, I'll speak through you."

I loved the ease of surrendering to that trust, that the right words will come when I need them. And I surrender to that trust now too. Then it was God speaking through me, and now it's the beauty and verity of my values.

I value honesty, trust, and integrity. I value community, compassion, and freedom*. I value clean air, clean water, and healthy food.

If I'm acting from my values, any bit I give will make a difference. Usually just a little bit of difference, but maybe sometimes a big bit.

* I mainly mean ontological freedom, freedom from any constraints on our ability to be.

Hubris

It's hubris (and conditioning) that leads us to believe that we are the chosen ones, that any negative impact on life and our world is justifiable so long as we can point to a benefit to humanity. It's hubris (and conditioning) that leads us to believe that this way we do things is the best way to do them. 

It's also hubris (and conditioning) that justifies our belief that we can save the world, this pale blue dot. As if we are in charge, guardians of "a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena" (Carl Sagan). As George Carlin points out: "it's arrogant meddling, it's what got us into this trouble in the first place."

Geologically, Earth will be fine. Geologically, the Earth will continue spinning for the next 4-5 billion years or so, when the Sun's expansion puts to an end her time as a planet.

But rocks aren't what many of us are interested in protecting. We're interested in protecting life, and as far as we know, it's the only life the universe has.

Hubris: me and my bottom line are worth the collateral damage of clean air, clean water, and a thriving biosphere.