Showing posts with label Climate Change. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Climate Change. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 2, 2022

"A Shrine for the Sixth Extinction"

 

“By burning through coal and oil deposits, humans are putting carbon back into the air that has been sequestered for tens—in most cases hundreds—of millions of years. In the process, we are running geologic history not only in reverse but at warp speed.”  Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

In 2000 I participated in a Samhain "Litany for the Lost".  5 people, standing in a circle, recited names of extinct and vanishing Species.  It was important that we remember the names of some of our  fellow Beings that were lost to the future in ever increasing numbers.  I have thought about that for years, and received a grant from the Puffin Foundation  for which I am very grateful,  to create a  "Shrine for the Lost:  The Sixth Extinction".  

“Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also             risks being one of its victims.” Richard Leakey 

We are not the only life forms striving to evolve on our beautiful Planet Earth, and as species are lost, the Balance of ecosystems breaks down, like a tapestry unravelling.  It is the greatest of human arrogance to think that humanity is not a part of that tapestry, and that our lives do not also unravel with it.  



My Dia de los Muertos "Shrine for the Lost":  the Sixth Extinction   consists of 4 wall hung panels, exhibited with a book, a candle, and a short video.  Each panel has 2 vertical lists with interspersed visuals and is 7 feet long.  I wanted to grasp the magnitude of our loss by actually seeing these long lists......which I could have made much longer. 

The Installation includes my accompanying book A Shrine for the Lost:  The Sixth Extinction and a video  "Litany for the Lost", which artist Kathy Keler  collaborated with me on.  I am very pleased that this Project is completed, and it is my hope that it will serve to educate - and to remember - the profound tragedy of our continuing loss.

https://youtu.be/5GE5kxwhxFw

 






I have made application to create the Shrine at the 2023 Parliament of World Religions, and hope this exhibit will have a chance to travel in the future.  Below are details from the  Panels.  It's my hope as well that I can show it in collaboration with those who can talk about what we can do individually to help to slow this loss of habitat and environmental degredation - such as learning to compost, to eat less meat, and to use clean energy.

Lauren Raine MFA
November 2022








And the List continues................
 

Monday, July 19, 2021

Three Seconds

Powerful, simply expressed:    should be shared widely 

https://youtu.be/B-nEYsyRlYo

Saturday, July 10, 2021

How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint (from the BBC)


https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57751918

"Since the start of the heatwave, people have linked the unusual and extreme nature of the event to climate change.  Now, researchers say that the chances of it occurring without human-induced warming were virtually impossible."

 https://youtu.be/a9yO-K8mwL0


 

Thursday, December 26, 2019

A "Webbed Vision " - Toward a New World Story



"What might we see, how might we act, if we saw with a webbed vision? 
The world seen through a web of relationships…as delicate as spider’s silk, 
 yet strong enough to hang a bridge on.” 

The quote above, from theologian Catherine Keller, has been deeply important to me.   I first read her book "From a Broken Web" in 2008, when I was pursuing my "Hands of the Spider Woman" Community Arts Projects.  The first project  was at the Midland Center for the Arts (with the Alden B. Dow Creativity Center) in Michigan, then at the Creative Spirit Center, also  in Midland (with Kathy Space),  and last when I was a Resident Artist at the Henry Luce Center for the Arts and Religion in Washington D.C. 

Perhaps because I live in the Southwest,  the "legends of the Spider Woman" have always fascinated me as I encountered Her in native American art.  Spider Woman is an ubiquitous Creatrix found throughout the Americas, with her earliest known  origins among the Maya of South America.  Spider Woman manifests among the Navajo and the Pueblo Peoples of the Southwest as the "great Weaver".    Among the people of the Keresan Pueblo she is also called  Tse Che Nako,  the "Thought Woman" who weaves the worlds into being with the stories She tells.  Within this metaphor of the "great weaver",  Spider Woman waits at the center of the Web of life, within which we are all connected,  interwoven and co-creating.
Ts' its' tsi' nako, Thought-Woman, the Spider is sitting in her room thinking of a story now:   I'm telling you the story   She is thinking.
Keresan Pueblo Proverb from Carol Patterson-Rudolph 2

My path on the trail of  Spider Woman has been fraught with synchronicities, which I have come to think of as  touchstones along the way.  Synchonicities, to me, are a mystical part of the overlay (and the foundational "under")  of  the metaphor Dr. Keller writes  of.  As I write about   "A Webbed Vision" , for example, I note that for the past weeks a spider has made its home on the ceiling directly above the keyboard where I write.  I have come to think of that spider as my muse - perhaps, fancifully, she is Spider Woman's envoy,  weaving its patient web just  above my head, reminding me each day of a vision I want to hold.

In her 1989 book  Dr. Keller does not speak of the Native American Goddess Spider Woman, but she often  references  the Greek myth of  "Penelope".  Penelope is a name with  ancient origins that derive from an archaic  Greek word  meaning  "with a web on her face".   It is likely that Penelope was originally a Fate or Oracular Goddess before she was later demoted in patriarchal Greek mythology to the faithful wife of Odysseus, weaving and un-weaving a shroud to avoid her suitors (it's always  interesting the way myths are transformed to suit the evolving mythos and power base of different cultures).   Yet within the earlier context of a more egalitarian society, "Penelope" would be one who could "see" and "weave" the beginnings and the ends of a life.  She might have been personified with a loom before her, or spinning a thread.  Taking the metaphor further, such a Goddess  would "see" the inter-dependencies between all things, the Great Web spreading out across the landscapes of life.   


Pueblo mythology tells that when each of the previous worlds ended in catastrophe, it was Spider Woman who led the people through the sipapu, the kiva (or birth canal) into the next world.  As such Spider Woman is the divine midwife for the birth of  each new age. According to Hopi cosmology,  we have now entered the "Fifth World".  It is interesting that, in contemporary  Neo-Pagan practices,  there are 5 Elements that symbolize the "great Circle".   The Fifth Element is called "Center", and is represented with the color white, the union of all colors.  It is the last Element, and symbolizes the universal force or Aether that unites all the other Elements.  

I cannot resist imagining that the World Wide Web might just be  is Spider Woman's latest appearance!  


“In Hopi cosmology Spider Woman was the first to weave. Her techniques and patterns have stood the test of time, or more properly, the test of timelessness.…..…..Weaving is not an act in which one creates something oneself – it is an act in which one uncovers a pattern that was already there.” 
John Loftin 3

As we confront the universal catastrophe of climate change,  it seems to me that this is a significant and appropriate metaphor.  Indeed, a significant Prophecy:  for what we now confront concerns  not just a tribe or nation, but all beings upon planet Earth.  We must evolve a new, global paradigm  for this Fifth Age if we are to survive.   Spider Woman, bringing a vision of the Great Web of life, once again must be the midwife as She makes visible the connections, the strands of the Web,  whether we speak of  ecology,  economy, quantum physics, or integral psychology.   In our essence, as Jungian psychologist Ann Baring has said, "we are one".


 " The new myth manifests through the triple influence of quantum physics, depth psychology and the ecological movement suggests that we are participants in a great web of life, each one of us indissolubly connected with all others through that invisible field.  It is the most insidious of illusions to think that we can achieve a position of dominance in relation to nature, life or each other. In our essence, we are one."
Anne Baring,  Awakening to the New Story   4
How indeed, as an evolving  global society, would we think and act, if we saw,  like  Penelope (or Grandmother Spider Woman)  "with a webbed vision"? Would we be able to change the catastrophic course of ecological destruction if  we had such a theology based upon Relationship instead of Domination?  If our reasoning, and our way of seeing,  was inclusive rather than dissectionist?  If instead of valuing  competition and the "alpha" winner,  we valued consensus? If instead of "fight and flight" in the face of danger, we instead pulled out the defense tactic found among female monkeys of "tend and befriend"?   If instead of renunciate, hierarchical religions that turn us away from nature and Earthly existence toward an abstract "heaven" or "nirvana", we saw ourselves as profoundly embedded in the sacred body and evolving soul of our living planet?
"The question is not so much "What do I learn from stories" as "What stories do I want to live?" 
David R. Loy, "The World is Made of Stories" 5
                      


If each of us could, like Penelope,  "see" ourselves holding  a thread that originates with all of those who came before us - and touches all of those who will come after us - how indeed might we see, and act?
"The New Story coming into being is that the whole universe is a unified field. The world we experience is like a minute excitation on the surface of an infinite cosmic sea which sustains not only our world, but the entire Cosmos. We live within a cosmic web of life which underlies and connects all life forms in the universe and on our planet. Through a vast network of electro-magnetic fields we are connected to the earth, the sun and the hundred billion galaxies. So we are not separate from any aspect of planetary or cosmic life. "
          Anne BaringAwakening to the New Story 6

As I watch the ongoing corporate greed that is eroding not only democracy, but the very life of our planet,  and the unreasoned ideology of capitalism (as opposed to local free enterprise) that makes it  possible for this new monarchy of the 1% to arise, I wonder sometimes if there is any hope for the future at all.  If I am not my brother's and sister's keeper, and they mine - who is?  Monsanto?  Walmart?  A civilization, indeed the raising of a single child, is a grand collaboration among many,  and it might be said from that "webbed vision" of societies  that the exploiters and  warlords pounding their chests and sitting like dragons on their stolen gold....... are the parasites of a civilization, rather than any  appropriate leaders.

We urgently need pragmatic ways to create and envision expanding community, which can be simplified to a fundamental sense of belonging.   Beyond that, we need an ethos and mythos that supports the fundamental, and foundational, understanding of inter-dependency.    If America was not a culture that idealizes "rugged individualism" where "good fences make good neighbors"  what other kinds of values might enhance the quality of life for us (and perhaps the very survival of our species) along with an extended community of many other species we share our world with?
"The Rugged Individualist" cheers when needy people are deprived of food, battered women are deprived of protection from brutal husbands, children are deprived of education, because this is "getting government off our backs.”
Philip Slater,  The Chrysalis Effect: The Metamorphosis of Global Culture  6
"Alpha male" individualism fails in every way to communicate that we live within a  web of human and environmental inter-dependency, a web that is unimaginably vast and  also very intimate. This is the "Webbed Vision" that sees and recognizes the links that must be restored.   A successful adult is so because of  parents, siblings, friends,  teachers, community resources, the backdrop of nature and environment, global society.........and distant ancestors that enabled him or her to be born.  Without a sense of belonging and contributing to that continuum as it reaches into both the past and into  future generations, human beings end up feeling alienated, disposable,  and without a sense of purpose.   Which is what an unsustainable, insatiable consumer system, as a placebo for the pain of spiritual and communal isolation, feeds on.

In tribal societies, survival depended  on cooperation, as well as the collective ability to adapt continually to new environmental challenges, be it drought, invaders, or the exhaustion of resources.  The mythic foundation of any tribe (or civilization) is ultimately  the template upon which they stand; a culture with a rigid mythos that cannot adapt and change is doomed to collapse.   Without a significant mythos of co-dependency in the face of global ecological crisis, the coming collapse of our civilization is apparent.  
"The culture that is holistic is holistic because its reasoning structure is holistic.  The problem we have with holism is that our reasoning is fragmentary, dissectionist, it removes us from relating things, it structures things in separate compartments in order to "have control"
 Rafael Montanez Ortiz  7

The Latin origin of the word "religion", religios, means to "link back".  To rejoin with the greater and divine  whole in some way.  In my opinion, many of today's religions, at least in their institutionalized forms, fail in communicating  this ultimate "webbed vision" - in fact, as tribal social control mechanisms with millenia of often mutually contradictory doctrines behind them, they do exactly the opposite.  They separate, create discord and fear, and damn those who do not share their cultural or philosophical constructs.  Religions are essentially concretized mythologies - concretized communal stories.  

           

What stories are so many people and institutions telling about the world we live in, the 21st Century world of global civilization? How do these sacred stories - most of them with their origins in ancient tribal societies existing in a very different kind of world - serve, or fail, the world of today?

Returning to "religios", the "linking back" to what is sacred, patriarchal  Renunciate religions that teach us to renounce the world, the body, and the demands of relationships of every kind, either in service of some abstract "better place" or teachings that degrade earthly life as "impure" or "unreality"..............will not help us.  More importantly, they certainly will not  help  those who must come after us to live in a diminished world.   In traditional theological  systems of patriarchal religions,  divinity is placed "elsewhere", be it the literally conceived  paradise that awaits the faithful,  heaven, or nirvana.  Equally, this renunciation of life can include more elegant abstractions that teach us that  "this is not real" but fail to describe what actually "is real" in a way that is tangible.  Renunciation of a false, dangerous, or corrupt world is a prime theme  to be found in patriarchal religions, religions that have their origins in violent  warrior ideology and warrior  lifestyles.  It might be said, for an example, that the  Old Testament God Yahweh, with all his punishments and rules,  is a classic  example of an authoritarian, merciless, warrior  "sky god".   

And more subtly, the  New Age message that "this experience  is not real" which drives devotees to seek "the real world"  found in  some divine, other-worldly, perfected  abstraction once we are "purified" or "surrender" in order to have one's consciousness raised sufficiently.  Which often must happen  through an authoritarian Guru or spiritual leader, with many of the attendant social abuses.  

To speak of "oneness",  to address creating a cohesive vision of holism that is appropriate to the world we live in today,  mythic systems that include  creative diversity within that "oneness" are needed.   Myths and symbols that can include many gods and goddesses, many voices and languages, and many ways to the truth instead of simply eliminating the competition.  Further, our world myth can no longer be simply a human world myth - it must include many evolutions, many other beings within the intimacy of ecosystems.  If we're to survive into sustainability.   

"We live in a world today in which the problems we face are all planetary" Philip Slater commented in his last book The Chrysalis Effect, “the polarization and chaos we see in the world are the effect of a global cultural metamorphosis".  Slater's view was ultimately hopeful - that we are witnessing the chaos of a new evolution.   That metamorphosis he spoke of, I personally  believe, is based on the realization of inter-dependency with all life.  In his view, this is humanity's childhood's end.  We are called now to the world, each other, and the miracle of life, with a "Webbed Vision". 

As the New Year approaches, I personally would like to call on artists, writers, musicians, storytellers,  and all  other "cultural creatives" to help to make a new mythology for the global tribe.   The writer Ursula Leguin called them "realists of a larger reality".  Among the Navajo (Dine`) infant girls still have a bit of spider web rubbed into their hands so they will "become good weavers".   May we all now rub a bit of spider web into our hands for the work ahead of us ..........and, like Penelope, may we all now see "with a web on our faces".


“Hope now lies in moving beyond our past in order to build together a sustainable future for all the interwoven and interdependent life on our planet, including the human element.  We will have to evolve now into a truly compassionate and tolerant world – because for the first time since the little tribes of humanity’s infancy, everyone’s well being is once again linked with cooperation for survival.  Our circle will have to include the entire world. 
Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power 8
                   

1)   Keller, Catherine, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self, 
       1988, Beacon Press

2)    Patterson-Rudolph,  Carol,  On the Trail of Spider Woman, 1997, Ancient City Press.

3)    Loftin, John D., Religion and Hopi Life, 2003,  Indiana University  \
        Pres(first published January 1st 1988)

4)   Baring, Anne, "Awakening to the New Story",  2013, from her  website: 
       https://www.annebaring.com/anbar14_comment.htm

5)   LoyDavid R., The World is Made of Stories,  2010, Wisdom Publications

6)   Baring, Anne, "Awakening to the New Story",  2013, from her  website: 
       https://www.annebaring.com/anbar14_comment.htm

7)   Slater, Phillip, The Chrysalis Effect: The Metamorphosis of Global Culture,  2008, 
       Sussex Academic Press

8)   Ortiz, Rafael Montanez Ph.D., interview with Lauren Raine, unpublished manuscript 
     (1989)

9)  Alstead, Diana and Kramer, Joel, The Guru Papers:  Masks of Authoritarian Power, 
       1993, Frog Books    

Sunday, October 27, 2019

Robert Kohler and Partnership With Mother Earth

A few years ago  I posted an article by Robert Koehler titled "Calling All Pagans - Your Mother Earth Needs You" and wrote to the author in appreciation for his article.  I was surprised when he wrote back, and we had an exchange of ideas.  I felt like revisiting the article in my Blog today.

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH MOTHER EARTH

Dominion! * Nature belongs to us, to suck dry and toss away. And thus we moved out of the circle of life and became its conquerors, an attitude at the core of the Agricultural Revolution and the rise of civilization. The momentum of this attitude is still driving us. We don’t know how to stop, even though most people now grasp that we’re wrecking the environmental commons that sustains life.

Addressing the verse and the idea of “dominion,” Phil Miller, a minister, wrote: “Some of us understand that word to mean ‘stewardship’ or ‘responsibility.’” And David Cameron wrote: “One has to wonder what would have ensued had the translation said  ‘stewardship’ rather than ‘dominion’? Almost incomprehensible that our future and the future of so many and so much may have hinged on that one word.”

If in one of the most defining religious-political texts of the human species we’d been charged with stewardship of the natural world, not some sort of adolescent, consequence-free control over it, what sort of spiritual understanding would have evolved over the millennia? What sort of technology? What would our civilizations look like if we believed in the depths of our beings that they were not distinct from but part of nature? What if, instead of organizing ourselves around the concept that we have enemies to subdue — “survival of the fittest” — we explored the complexity of our connectedness to one another and the whole of creation, even when the connections were barely visible?

What I am coming to learn, as I ask such questions, is that this understanding is already vibrantly present in the collective human consciousness, drowned out as it may be by the special interests that run our world. These interests, which serve war and money, have belittled complex understanding as “paganism” and colonized, enslaved and slaughtered its primary keepers: the tribal and indigenous people of the world. 
Listen to the words of Rupert Ross, from his remarkable book Returning to the Teachings, as he describes his dawning understanding of the aboriginal culture of northern Ontario: 

 “The word ‘connecting’ leapt at me. It captured not only the dynamics I imagined in that room, but also the key feature of all the traditional teachings I had been exposed to thus far. Until then, I had somehow missed it. It involved a double obligation, requiring first that you learn to see all things as interconnected and second that you dedicate yourself to connecting yourself, in respectful and caring ways, to everything around you, at every instant, in every activity.“. . . (Children) had to learn to see themselves not as separate, individual beings but as active participants in webs of complex interdependencies with the animals, the plants, the earth and the waters.”

Indeed, Ross and many others have pointed out that indigenous science has always known what Western science has only recently relearned: that the universe is energy and dynamic flux, that there’s no such thing as objectivity and separation. 

“Like Western science, indigenous science relies upon direct observation for forecasting and generating predictions,” according to the Worldwide Indigenous Science Network. “. . . Unlike Western science, the data from indigenous science are not used to control the forces of nature; instead, tell us the ways and the means of accommodating nature.”   Among other critical distinctions, according to the website: “All of nature is considered to be intelligent and alive, thus an active research partner.”

 I note these ideas not to throw rocks around in some “debate” about who’s right, but to open up the national and global conversation about who we are. We can let these ideas sit in our imaginations. What might stewardship of nature mean if we regarded the relationship as a partnership? What might a celebration of Earth Day (April 22) look like?

“We need to re-myth culture, to re-sanctify nature before it’s too late,” Lauren Raine (“a longtime advocate and practitioner of neo-pagan theology and resident artist for Cherry Hill Seminary, “the only accredited Pagan seminary in the U.S”) wrote to me last week.  “Earth-based spirituality is to be found in all cultures, including many rich traditions from Europe and Great Britain. The evolution of our strange, life-denying religious backdrop has much to do with the evolution of patriarchal culture and values. We need to get rid of the war gods, and return . . . to honoring the Mother.

We also need to put our lives on the line, or at least honor those who do. One of the many responses I got to last week’s column was from environmental activist Jessica Clark, who faces jail time for sitting in a tree last fall. 
In September, she and other members of the Michiana Coalition Against Tar Sands, or MICATS, temporarily blocked Enbridge Inc.’s tar sands pipeline expansion through Michigan. This was an expansion of the same pipeline that ruptured in 2010, badly polluting the Kalamazoo River; it was the largest and costliest inland oil spill in history. 

One night the protesters climbed trees at the construction site in central Michigan and anchored their platform to the company’s construction equipment. If the ropes had been moved, the protesters’ platform would have tipped, dropping them 50 feet to the ground. That didn’t happen, but they were arrested and convicted of trespassing — for the crime of stewardship. It’s the price of growing up.


 Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press), is still available.  V
isit his website at www.commonwonders.com.

*My bold.

Friday, July 19, 2019

Living With the Apocalypse (I.)

Newsweek, 2014

Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.


- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

I bought the above Newsweek special while waiting in line at a checkout counter in a grocery store in 2014.  I still can't quite fathom what it means to be in a world where people graze a magazine while buying beer and cookies about groovy  "places to visit before they disappear" due to global warming.  Are there "soon to be extinct" bus tours?  Cruise ships that will take you on a champagne cruise to islands that are sinking beneath the ocean and/or plastic waste?

                         "The World will end not with a bang, but with a whimper."
                                           ......T.S. Elliot, "The Hollow Men"
 
I've always had an  apocalypse problem.  I  grew up with THE BOMB in the 50's, and remember the mini bomb shelter my father built, with its barrels of water and shelves full of cans of beans and tuna  fish.  It seems so hopeful, naive, and sad in retrospect,  to think that such a stock would help a family survive a nuclear war.  But like all unimaginable horrors it was, ultimately..... unimaginable
Later I encountered literary and film variations on an atomic "End of the World".  Like the poignant  movie  "On the Beach" with Gregory Peck ("Waltzing Matilda" still evokes that heart-breaking image of lines of people waiting for  their euthenasia pills as a radioactive cloud slowly approaches the shores of Australia, the song playing in the background).  Or "Fail Safe", or Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles , which envisioned an inevitable  nuclear war that exterminated what Bradbury seemingly   considered a hopelessly violent and destructive  humanity.


Rock Hudson in The Martian Chronicles (1979)

Being a native Californian,   I also grew up with the San Andreas Fault hanging over  our free-wheeling, hedonistic culture  (actually under us) with an omnipresent End Times inevitability as well.  Fueled by Hollywood and various New Age prophets "The Big One" with its visions of L.A. skyscrapers collapsing and the San Francisco Bay splitting off as the Continental Plates shifted were always underfoot.    
In fact, the high stakes End Times has informed me and my generation, provoking  post-apocalyptic artforms, utopian communes and survivalist camps, dark Gothic  philosophies and Ascendance cults, as well as the truly  mind boggling denial that infects America, especially  now with Trump and regime.  For me The Apocalypse has always been a kind of backdrop to a life lived, as well, among astounding wonders and miracles of social change and new technology. 


I also came of age in the optimistic, activist 60's, a child of the wealthiest, largest, best educated generation the world has ever seen.  A time of huge possibility and creativity.   As a child I watched black and white tv (with tv dinners on tv trays) while I tried to understand images on the news about the  struggle to integrate the schools. I remember well the terrified faces of  those brave black children........fifty years later I watched a black president dance with his beautiful black First Lady at the inaugeral ball.

I've seen  the Second Wave of feminism, marched for women's rights, and later joined the emergence of a spiritual paradigm devoted to the  Goddess and Eco-feminism.  I've seen the development of ecology.  And gay rights.  On another black and white TV I've seen a man walk on the moon.  I've watched computers appear  in offices, and then  into the common market,  and just when it became possible to actually own one of the amazing  things, I watched the Internet appear to  change the world and human culture with stunning rapidity. Now people walk around with them in their pockets, and think nothing of calling someone instantaneusly on the other side of the world.
A movie poster displays industrial smoke stacks whose emissions form a hurricane eyewall
I don't know if the New Age we so fervently believed in in the 70's will include the arising of Atlantis  and a global Golden Age,  but I do sometimes think we might have the beginning of a technology for  it, if humanity can survive its self-destructive adolescence.   If we can survive human greed and violence, if we can find a "Webbed Vision".

  
Earth balance.jpgI remember reading in 1994 Al Gore's EARTH IN THE BALANCE (and what a different America I believe it would have been if Gore had rightfully been President. ). 

Later, when  a movie was made about Al Gore's work to wake up America to climate crisis,  AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH..........I thought, YES!  Now things will change, now the real priority will take precedence.   It's been over  ten years since AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, and in 2017 Gore released AN INCONVENIENT SEQUEL as followup.   It did not do well in the movie theatres, being, no doubt, not very "entertaining".   In particular, AN INCONVENIENT SEQUEL documented what an extraordinary international  achievement it was to create the Paris Accord on Climate Change. 

Now, thanks to Trump and our supposed elected Congress,  the U.S.A. was withdrawn from the Paris Accord, and  is the only country in the world that is not a member of the Paris Accord.  Is this really what the American people want?  To destroy the future to give short term profit to a few corporate entities?  But this is not what the presidential candidates are speaking about even now as another election looms for next year. This is not what our "elected representatives" in Congress are speaking about either.  And our "president" likes to joke about how funny global warming is (along with making jokes about handicapped people and assaulting women's genitals.)  Ha ha.  There goes the population of Zimbabwe to drought!  There goes Puerto Rico to hurricanes!  There goes Florida to the rising ocean!  Ha ha ha!

But Climate Change  is what scientists are speaking about.


As I write there is a record heatwave killing thousands in India, and in June it was 115 in Paris.  As I write there is no water in the capital city of Zimbabwe for some two million people.   
Here it is, accelarating  between the cracks of our so-busy lives. Streaming away on Facebook between the cat videos and the latest warning of what not to eat because it will make you obese or give you cancer. Looming like a shadow over the kids sitting lost over their cellphones on the bus.   As I enjoy movies at the touch of a fingertip, or explore the greatest library the world has ever known, which is literally at the touch of a fingertip.  As I plan a trip to the other side of the continent, a trip that will take me a day, and took my great grandmother a month and my great-great-great-great  Grandfather 6 months, and at the risk of his life. 

Or as I buy  a magazine, found ironically at the checkout counter (see above), next to the latest about Bruce Jenner's sex change or Brad and Angie's marriage problems.  "Places to see before they're gone".    At the checkout counter.......no pun intended.

The end of the world.   Right there at the Check Out Counter.


Not the end of Gaia, Her evolution and experiments, which for all our cleverness and all the gods we've invented and called upon......includes us.  Probably not the end of humanity either, although there will surely be a lot less humans on the planet in 100 years.  But surely the end of so much, so many other species, so many beautiful places, so many lives that will never fulfill their promise.  Our magnificent civilization,  our expanding, insatiable, unsustainable,  global civilization, in its infancy, really.   

Today, as on other days, I ask myself how do you deal with that?  Maybe tomorrow I'll have an answer for myself, but today, I don't know.  
It’s 3:23 in the morning and I’m awake… 
because my great great grand children won’t let me sleep.
My great great grandchildren ask me in dreams:  What did you do?
(Excerpts from Hieroglyphic Stairway,  by Drew Dellinger)


I used to feel self-rightous when I pulled out my shopping bag, or recycled my paper, I would sneer at people in SUV's, feeling "appropriate" in my little mini car.  But now.....I don't.  We're all in this together  and the world my grandson will inherit, and all of those yet to come............will have to know it so much more than I.  

How do we live with this?  What do we do, in our small and daily lives?  Where is the wailing wall, the support groups, the encounter groups, the consciousness raising groups, the "sitting Shiva", the "climate change meditation rooms"......that might bring about dialogue, that could shake us out of our denial, our complacency?  If two movies by a former Vice President of the United States, and 98% of the worlds scientists, won't do it.........what? 

"A Webbed Vision" (2007)

Many people vividly recall from childhood unexpected moments of perceiving the grand unity.  Some experience the grace of inter-being on extended trips into the deep silence of wilderness. Some know a version of it in the post orgasmic state.  Some have reported that such "altered" consciousness occurs suddenly in mundane circumstances.  It seems to persist even through our deeply ingrained habits of seeing only separateness and fragmentation.
Charlene Spretnak, States of Grace:  The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Age
I can cast no judgement on others, or myself, for needing to turn away,  for needing to make my plans, plant my gardens.  I do believe, as Charlene Spretnak comments above, a "Webbed Vision" of interdependancy is the paradigm that just might save us all.  But this is not an essay in which I can somehow conclude with any hopeful closure or self-help cliche.  Yes, we all should be getting solar panels, recycling our gray water, eliminating plastic waste, driving the smallest cars we can get.........but we are all still part of the problem.   Perhaps the only place to begin, each day, is a spiritual place.   The point in the center of the mandala, remembering that we are each a part of the Living Earth  and each other.  From that place proceed with the day...............