—
I hesitate to go too much into data about how much carbon can be stored through regenerative practices, holistic grazing. These numbers can be helpful to give permission to the inner Bean Counter that wants to do these things anyway, to fit it into the language of policy which prides itself so much on being scientific. What do we really mean by ‘scientific?’ We mean quantitative reasoning. Doing things by the numbers. And that has its place. But to paraphrase Einstein in his over-quoted saying, “We can not solve the problems that face us today from the same level of thinking that created them.” So to extend quantitative reasoning, to extend financial incentives to a new level isn’t going to bring us to the place of love that we need to occupy to really do what we need to do. Not necessarily to save the planet, not because bad things are going to happen to us, but because we love this place.
What if we could? What if we could, through geoengineering, through carbon sucking machines, through algae pools to make oxygen, bleaching the skies with sulphur aerosols; what if we could endlessly engineer our way out of each crisis and end up on a concrete world where all human beings still survive, and in fact have rising incomes, and are better off by every measure? What if we could achieve that at the expense of all of the rest of life on earth? Would we want to do that?
This is the transition that’s upon us into a different set of values, a different set of motivations. One thing I’ve learned in my research for this book is that the things that we’ve ignored are a lot more important than we’ve given them credit for. That we tend to emphasize the things that fit easily into our existing ways of thinking. If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So what we’re good at is reducing numbers. Or working with numbers; increasing numbers, reducing numbers, thinking in terms of Return on Investment, pay back periods, things like that. That’s familiar territory, that’s financial thinking. So it’s not too hard to transplant financial thinking onto environmental thinking and say that “this global problem is a matter of getting certain numbers down, not into coming into intimate relationship, reestablishing intimate relationship to place, to life, to rivers, to mountains, to forests, to farms. Reestablishing intimate relationship is kind of the opposite direction of improving and extending our metrics.
For example, in the car ride over, Matthew was talking about the weird weather that New Zealand has been having. The really long summer this year, the almost nonexistent summer last year. Nowadays when it comes to climate weirdness, weather weirdness, we have the go to explanation; “Well, it’s because of global warming. It’s because of global climate change.”
Whether or not that’s true, it obscures local reasons that are much more tangible that we might actually have a lot more power to do something about. Because if it’s a global thing then nothing you do is going to matter very much. At best we can vote for the right people, empower the right bureaucrats, and, especially if its urgent, give more power to the centralized institutions that have the wherewithal to deploy resources quickly.
But when we understand the importance of the hydrological cycle, the water cycle, in maintaining the stability of weather, of climate on a local, regional, and even global level, then we are no longer so disempowered. But you are familiar with the idea that we are entering a time of more drought and more flooding at the same time, and how this is caused by climate change. Well, there is another understanding of the causes of this that has to do with the water cycle that basically says, look: when you cut down the trees, when you deforest the land, when you plough up the soil, then instead of the water soaking into the ground, replenishing the water table, and then through evapotranspiration generating moisture, generating clouds that maintains regular rainfall; instead the water runs off into the oceans, you get flooding, you get topsoil erosion, you get much less penetration into the groundwater, you don’t have the trees transpiring water maintaining humidity. So you get longer droughts.
And I’m not going to get, I don’t think I want to go too much into the science of this, but long story short: some of the things that we would like to blame global climate change for are actually local in their origin and can be mitigated or reversed when we devote care and attention and energy and healing toward these local Beings. Toward the rivers. How do you maintain a healthy river? You have to have healthy land. You have to have healthy forests. Rivers are not supposed to be fed by run-off. They’re supposed to be fed by water sinking into the ground and then coming up sometimes decades later as springs. That’s the full water cycle. And that’s why in places they are practicing regenerative practices, springs that have been dry for ten or twenty or fifty years come back to life. Streams that were seasonal for generations become year round streams again.
The question then; this is the basic question of regenerative agriculture but it’s also what we come to through the lens of seeing Nature as actual Beings worthy of love, worthy of respect. What we come to is: How can I serve you? How can I serve the soil? How can I serve the water? How can I be part of the collective thriving of beings that include not just human beings, but also the beings of Nature?
And this is not to sacrifice human welfare and to become an eco-nazi and say, “Well, humans aren’t important and in fact maybe they’re a pest and the earth would be better off without us.” This is to say that human beings like all beings have a gift to give to the wellbeing of the totality. That it’s an understanding, it’s the ecological understanding that no species is superfluous. That a new species comes into being when there is an evolutionary need for that species. It’s as if it were called into existence by the needs of the environment. And it sounds kind of anti-Darwinian, but really what is is a Lemarckian understanding. I’m not going to go there, even.
I’m just going to say that human beings are no exception to this. So it’s not that we’re a scourge on the planet, even though it has looked that way. The question is; what is the next evolutionary step of which we are a part? How can we serve that?
How do we even know that? That’s not even a question that we’ve been asking. We, the Dominant Culture. We’ve not been asking that. One thing I appreciate about what Matthew said yesterday morning, and I might be paraphrasing a bit here, but he said, “Let’s be a little careful about jumping too quickly to the answer, too quickly to the solution, because so often the answers that we come up with reflexively encode the same biases and assumptions that the problems come from. Maybe we have got to pause for a second here. Pause and listen.”
And I would go even further to say, not only do we not know the right answers, but we don’t necessarily even know the right questions.
This is the humility that our converging crises have brought us to. I’m not sure if we’re there yet. But I’m seeing signs of it, especially in my country – where that kind of ‘gung-ho, we can do it, we can solve everything, technology is going to solve all of our problems, the world is going to get better and better, we’re going to engineer a perfect society through material technology, through social engineering, political science, etc., etc., we’re gonna solve this thing!’ – that confidence is unraveling.
That’s one reason why we are so interested in the ways and perceptions of the indigenous. Some of it is like an identity piece and they become a fetish object etc., etc., cultural appropriation. But there’s also a humility there that’s like, “Wow… we don’t know after all, maybe you know. Or maybe you know something. Maybe you remember something. Maybe you can weave a thread of knowledge into the tapestry of ‘how are we meant to live on this planet.’”
So the first step then is to listen. To answer that question, “How can I serve the land and what is the next evolutionary step?”
The first step to do that, to find that, even to ask to those questions starts with listening. And listening doesn’t mean like some new age spiritual state where I’m going to channel the beings of the land – I mean it might include that, actually – but it also includes what we call science. It includes careful observation. It includes the knowledge that farmers and ranchers gain if they’re paying attention through long connection with a piece of land. It includes the knowledge held by communities, held by lineages, that’s been passed down by the ancestors through stories. What Grandpa remembers when things were like this.
To recover connection to land it requires rebuilding a culture.
The right relationship to place only happens collectively. One person living on the land can gain part of that knowledge, but not the same way that a culture can. Not the same way that a lineage can. Not the same way a community can. That means that – ok, so draw the logic here. The logic, that I haven’t pretended to rigorously establish, but, the logic is that planetary health, global health, depends on the health of the local. That cutting emissions is not enough. It’s not sufficient because even if we cut carbon emissions to zero overnight; if we continue to destroy forests, mangroves, wetlands, rivers, mountains, coral, seagrass, then the planet will die a death of a million cuts. This Earth is not a complicated machine; it is a living Being. And when we destroy these ecosystems we are destroying the organs and tissues of Gaia because it is a living Being. It would be like destroying your own organs. Maybe you destroy your hypothalamus and your body temperature goes up and you’re like, ah, warming! Let’s cool it down. But no, we’re destroying – so –
So the health of the global depends on the health of the local; the health of the local depends on our ability to serve its health, to live in a way that is aligned with its – with its thriving, with its regeneration, with its renewal – because it’s so damaged today. And that requires social health and cultural health, and there then is a link between what we might call climate activism and social activism, political activism, social entrepreneurship. All these realms of healing contain each other. And that’s why when you hear about, like yesterday, one of the Fellows was presenting about her social enterprise that brings intellectually disabled people into meaningful employment and into society, into community. You know, the climate puritan would say, “Well, that’s all very nice, but you know, you’re wasting your time, because when the sea levels rise 50 feet there aren’t going to be any jobs. Let’s do that social stuff later and take care of the urgent problem first.”
Now that thinking is called fundamentalism. I would call it climate fundamentalism. That thinking is war thinking that says “Everything must be sacrificed to the One Important Thing.” That’s fundamenatlism. And it ignores the interconnected nature of all things. It ignores that we ourselves are among the organs of a living planet. That’s why you recognize that woman as an ally. Even if your cause is saving the whales, or your cause is protecting the rivers, restoring New Zealand’s rivers to purity, or your cause is regenerating the soil, or changing the criminal punishment system, we recognize you as an ally because all of this work is necessary.
So I guess I’m, I don’t know, how is this going to be useful to you as you sit at tables and try to formulate the Carbon Zero policy? And I guess if I was going to make that bridge, I would say, “Give a bit more attention to the health of the land.”
And I know this is part of it already, but even more. How do you transition to a holistic, agricultural system from where we are right now? How do we bring politically conservative farmers and ranchers onboard? Because it’s not like they hate nature, you know? They should be allies too. How can you narrate this endeavor, that we really are all in together, in a way that doesn’t alienate them right away? That respects where they are, that respects that they’re up to their ears in debt, that they’re trapped in a commodity agricultural system? How do you make that transition, knowing that maybe the word ‘subsidy’ is politically poisonous? So maybe you’re starting to talk about ‘transition grants’ that say we’re going to help you repair your relationship to the land because we know you love the land and we know that you are probably, right now, the person best equipped to serve that land. You know what this land needs and we’re going to help you do it, because it’s in the interests of the nation and its in the interests of the planet for us to have healthy watersheds, healthy farms, healthy forests.
So maybe that kind of narrative would be a step to the enactment of what we are becoming conscious of, which is that we are not alone on this planet; we are not the only sentient, conscious Beings here, but we are among our brothers, and that our role here is to give to the evolution of the whole from the gifts that have been given to us.
And I’ll, and I have like a minute here left, so I’ll say, maybe I’ll just end with um –
The question that often comes up: “Well, what should I do?” When we understand that social healing, relational healing, personal healing, ecological healing, climate healing, are all part of the same healing, then the scope of our activism broadens and we allow ourselves to listen to the communication of the world to ourselves about what is needed. What am I called to do? What is mine right now to do?
The mind may not be able to say how this will bring down CO2 numbers. “To house homeless people, how is that going to bring down CO2 numbers?!” But we don’t need to listen to that. We can trust that what is called by our care, as our informational horizons expand, it’s not about ignoring what the science is telling us. But we can trust that as our informational horizons expand, and as we listen, that our care will call us to the right action. Even if it doesn’t obviously bring down the numbers, even if it doesn’t obviously scale up or go viral. But we can trust that just like humanity and just like every other species we ourselves are brought into being with a gift.
I would say that that is where the initiatory ordeal of climate change is taking us. Thank you for your attention.
—
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Transcript Provided by YouTube:
I hesitate to go too much into data
00:04
about how much carbon can be stored
00:08
through regenerative practices holistic
00:12
grazing these numbers can be helpful to
00:17
give permission to the inner beam
00:20
counter that wants to do these things
00:22
anyway to fit it yeah thank you to fit
00:28
it into the language of policy which is
00:31
prides itself so much on being
00:33
scientific what do we really mean by
00:35
scientific we mean quantitative
00:38
reasoning doing things by the numbers
00:41
and that has its place but to paraphrase
00:46
Einstein in his over quoted saying we
00:51
cannot solve the problems that face us
00:56
today from the same level of thinking
00:57
that created them so to extend
01:00
quantitative reasoning to extend
01:03
financial incentives to a new level
01:06
isn’t going to bring us to the place of
01:10
love that we need to occupy to really do
01:12
what we need to do not necessarily to
01:17
save the planet not because bad things
01:19
are going to happen to us but because we
01:25
love this place what if we could what if
01:31
we could
01:32
through geoengineering through carbon
01:36
sucking machines through algae pools to
01:38
make oxygen bleaching the sky with
01:41
sulfur aerosols
01:43
what if we could endlessly engineer our
01:47
way out of each crisis and end up on a
01:50
concrete world where all human beings
01:54
still survive and in fact have rising
01:57
incomes and every measure and aren’t
02:02
better off by every measure what if we
02:05
could achieve that at the expense of all
02:08
the rest of life on earth would we want
02:09
to do that
02:11
this is that this is the transition
02:14
that’s upon us into a different set of
02:18
values a different set of motivations
02:24
one thing I’ve learned in my research
02:27
for this book is that the things that
02:32
we’ve ignored are a lot more important
02:35
than we’ve given them credit for fourth
02:38
that we tend to emphasize the things
02:42
that fit easily into our existing ways
02:44
of thinking if you have a hammer
02:46
everything looks like a nail
02:47
so what we’re good at is reducing
02:49
numbers that’s the or or working with
02:53
numbers increasing numbers reducing
02:55
numbers thinking in terms of return on
02:58
investment payback periods things like
03:01
that that’s familiar territory that’s
03:03
financial thinking so it’s not too hard
03:05
to transplant financial thinking on to
03:08
environmental thinking and say that this
03:10
global problem it’s a matter of getting
03:12
certain numbers down not into coming
03:15
into intimate relationship
03:16
reestablishing intimate relationship to
03:21
place to life
03:24
to rivers to mountains to force to farms
03:29
reestablishing intimate relationship is
03:31
kind of the opposite direction of
03:35
improving and extending our metrics so
03:40
for example so in the car ride over
03:43
Matthew is talking about the weird
03:46
weather that New Zealand has been having
03:48
the really long summer this year the
03:52
almost non-existent summer last year and
03:54
how this like nowadays we have when it
03:59
comes to any kind of climate weirdness
04:02
weather weirdness we have the go-to
04:06
explanation well it’s because of global
04:08
warming it’s because of global climate
04:09
change
04:10
whether or not that’s true it obscures
04:15
local reasons that are much more
04:18
tangible that we might actually have a
04:20
lot more power to do something about
04:21
because if it’s a global thing then the
04:24
only thing
04:25
nothing you do is going to matter very
04:26
much and at best we can vote for the
04:30
right people and power the right
04:31
bureaucrats and give and especially if
04:34
it’s urgent
04:35
give more power to the centralized
04:38
institutions that have the wherewithal
04:40
to deploy resources quickly but when we
04:47
understand and this is one thing that I
04:48
was coming to in my research when we
04:50
understand the importance of the
04:54
hydrological cycle the water cycle in
04:57
maintaining the stability of weather of
05:04
climate on a local regional and even
05:07
global of level then we are no longer so
05:10
disempowered but you’re familiar with
05:12
with the idea that we’re entering a time
05:14
of more droughts and more flooding at
05:17
the same time and how this is caused by
05:20
climate change well there’s another
05:22
understanding of the causes of this that
05:25
has to do with a water cycle that
05:27
basically says look when you cut down
05:30
the trees when you de forced the land
05:32
when you plow up the soil then instead
05:35
of the water soaking in to the ground
05:39
replenishing the water table and then
05:43
through evapotranspiration generating
05:46
moisture generating clouds that that
05:48
maintains regular rainfall instead the
05:52
water runs off into the ocean you get
05:55
flooding you get topsoil erosion you get
05:58
much less penetration into the
06:01
groundwater you don’t have the trees
06:04
transpiring water all the time
06:05
maintaining humidity so you get longer
06:08
droughts and I’m not gonna get alpha I
06:14
want to go too much into the into the
06:15
science of this but long story short
06:17
some of the things that we would like to
06:20
blame global climate change for are
06:22
actually local in their origin and can
06:25
be mitigated or reversed when we devote
06:30
care and attention and energy and
06:32
healing toward these local beings toward
06:35
the rivers like how do you maintain a
06:37
healthy River
06:39
you have to have healthy land you have
06:41
to have healthy forests rivers are not
06:44
supposed to be fed by runoff they’re
06:46
supposed to be fed by water sinking into
06:48
the ground and then coming up sometimes
06:50
decades later as Springs that’s the full
06:53
water cycle so and that’s why when in in
06:58
places where they are practicing
07:00
regenerative practices Springs that have
07:04
been dry for 10 or 20 or 50 years come
07:07
back to life streams that were seasonal
07:09
for four generations become year-round
07:13
streams again the question then this is
07:23
and this is the the the basic question
07:26
of regenerative agriculture but it’s
07:28
also what we come to you through the
07:31
lens of seeing nature as actual beings
07:34
worthy of love worthy of respect what we
07:37
come to is how can I serve you how can I
07:41
serve the soil how can I serve the water
07:43
how can I be part of the collective
07:47
thriving of beings that include not just
07:50
human beings but also the beings of
07:53
nature and this is not to sacrifice
07:56
human welfare and to become a eco not
08:00
see and and say well humans aren’t
08:02
important in fact maybe they’re a pest
08:04
and the earth would be better off
08:06
without us
08:07
this is to say that human beings like
08:10
all beings have a gift to give to the
08:14
well-being of the totality that it’s an
08:18
understanding of its the ecological
08:19
understanding that no species is
08:21
superfluous that a new species comes
08:23
into being when there is an evolutionary
08:26
need for that species it’s as if it were
08:28
called into existence by the needs of
08:32
the environment and this sounds kind of
08:35
anti-darwinian but really what it is
08:38
it’s a Lamarckian understanding that
08:41
that about I’m not gonna go there even
08:45
I’m just gonna say
08:48
that human beings are no exception to
08:50
this so it’s not that we’re a scourge on
08:54
the planet even though it is looked that
08:55
way the question is what is the next
08:59
evolutionary step of which we are a part
09:01
how can we serve that how do we even
09:02
know that like that’s not even a
09:05
question that we’ve been asking we the
09:07
dominant culture we’ve not been asking
09:09
that one thing I appreciate about what
09:12
Matthew said yesterday morning and I
09:15
might be paraphrasing a bit here but he
09:17
said you know let’s be a little careful
09:19
about jumping too quickly to the answer
09:21
too quickly to the solution because so
09:24
often the answers that we come up with
09:26
reflexively encode the same biases and
09:29
assumptions that the problems come from
09:32
maybe we got a pause for a second here
09:35
pause and listen and I would go even
09:39
further to say not only do we not know
09:41
the right answers but we don’t
09:44
necessarily even know the right
09:45
questions this is the humility that our
09:52
converging crises have brought us to I’m
09:58
not sure if we’re there yet but I’m
10:03
seeing signs of it especially in my
10:05
country where like that kind of gung-ho
10:07
we can do it we can solve everything
10:09
technology’s gonna solve all of our
10:11
problems the world’s going to get better
10:12
and better we’re gonna engineer a
10:14
perfect society through material
10:17
technology through social engineering
10:19
political science etc etc like we’re
10:21
gonna we’re gonna solve this thing like
10:23
that confidence is unraveling that’s one
10:27
reason why we are so interested in the
10:31
ways and perceptions of the indigenous
10:36
they’re not like yeah I mean some of it
10:39
is like an identity piece and they
10:41
become a fetish object and we etc etc a
10:43
cultural appropriation but but there’s
10:44
also there’s also like a humility there
10:47
that’s like wow we don’t know after all
10:49
maybe you know or maybe you know
10:51
something maybe you’ve remembered
10:53
something maybe you can feed a thread of
10:57
knowledge into the tapestry of how are
11:01
we meant to
11:01
on this planet
11:10
yeah so the first step then is to listen
11:17
that to answer that question how can I
11:20
serve the land and what is the next
11:22
evolutionary step the first step to do
11:25
that to find that even to ask those
11:27
questions starts with listening and
11:29
listening doesn’t mean like some new-age
11:32
spiritual state where I’m going to
11:34
channel the beings of the land I mean it
11:36
might include that actually but it also
11:38
includes what we call science it
11:40
includes careful observation it includes
11:44
the the knowledge that farmers and
11:48
ranchers gain if they’re paying
11:50
attention through long connection to a
11:53
piece of land it includes the knowledge
11:57
held by communities excuse me held by
12:01
lineages held that that’s been passed
12:04
down by the ancestors through stories
12:08
well you know grandpa remembers when
12:12
things were like this like to recover
12:20
connection to land it requires
12:23
rebuilding a culture
12:32
the right relationship to place only
12:36
happens collectively one person living
12:41
on the land can gain part of that
12:45
knowledge but not the same way that a
12:48
culture can not the same way that a
12:51
lineage can not the same way that a
12:53
community can that means that so ok so
12:58
let me draw the logic here the logic I
13:02
haven’t I haven’t pretended to
13:04
rigorously establish it but the logic is
13:07
that planetary health global health
13:09
depends on the health of the local that
13:11
cutting emissions is not enough it’s not
13:15
sufficient because even if we cut carbon
13:18
emissions to zero overnight if we
13:21
continue to destroy forests mangroves
13:24
wetlands rivers mountains quarrel sea
13:28
grass then the planet will die a death
13:32
of a million cuts because this earth is
13:35
not a complicated machine it is a living
13:37
being and when we destroy these
13:40
ecosystems we are destroying the organs
13:46
and tissues of Gaia because it is a
13:51
living being
13:53
we thought it would be like destroying
13:55
your own organs and then maybe your you
13:59
destroy your hypothalamus and your body
14:02
temperature goes up and you’re like oh
14:03
warming let’s cool it down but no you’re
14:07
doing we’re destroying so ok so the
14:11
health of the global depends on the
14:12
health of the local the health of the
14:14
local depends on our ability to serve
14:19
its health to live in a way that is
14:23
aligned with its health with its
14:25
thriving with its regeneration with its
14:28
renewal because it’s so damaged today
14:30
and that requires social health and
14:34
cultural health and there then is a link
14:36
between what we might call climate
14:41
activism and social activism political
14:43
activism social entrepreneurship
14:46
all of these realms of healing contain
14:51
each other and that’s why when you hear
14:55
about like yesterday one of the fellows
14:58
was presenting about her social
15:01
enterprise that that brings
15:07
intellectually disabled people into a
15:10
meaningful employment and into society
15:13
and into community you know the climate
15:19
Puritan would say well that’s all very
15:20
nice but you know you’re wasting your
15:23
time because when the sea levels rise 50
15:27
feet there aren’t going to be any jobs
15:29
let’s do that social stuff later and
15:33
take care of the urgent problem first
15:37
now that that thinking is called
15:40
fundamentalism and I would call it
15:43
climate fundamentalism that thinking is
15:46
war thinking that says everything must
15:49
be sacrificed to the one important thing
15:51
that’s fundamentalism and it ignores the
15:54
interconnected nature of all things it
15:58
ignores that we are we ourselves are
16:03
among the organs of a living planet and
16:10
that’s why you recognize that woman as
16:12
an ally even if your cause is
16:16
I don’t know saving the whales or your
16:20
cause is protecting the rivers restoring
16:26
New Zealand’s rivers to purity well your
16:29
cause is regenerating the soil we’re
16:34
changing the criminal punishment system
16:38
we recognize you as an ally because all
16:44
of this work is necessary
16:51
so I guess I’m I don’t know I’m trying
16:57
to think how is this gonna be useful to
16:58
you as you sit at tables and try to
17:00
formulate the carbon zero policy and I
17:06
guess if I was gonna make that bridge
17:10
I’d say give a bit more attention to the
17:16
health of the land and I know this is
17:18
part of it already but even more like
17:21
how do you transition to a holistic
17:24
regenerative agricultural system from
17:27
where we are right now how do we bring
17:31
politically conservative farmers and
17:33
ranchers on board because it’s not like
17:35
they hate nature you know they should be
17:38
allies too how can you how can you
17:42
narrate this endeavor that we really are
17:46
all in together in a way that doesn’t
17:48
alienate them right away that respects
17:50
where they are that respects that
17:52
they’re up to their ears in debt that
17:54
they’re trapped in a commodity
17:55
agricultural system how do you make that
17:57
transition knowing that maybe the word
18:00
subsidy is politically poisonous so
18:03
maybe you’re starting to talk about
18:04
transition grants that say yeah we’re
18:07
gonna help you repair your relationship
18:11
to the land because we know you love the
18:14
land and we know that you’re probably
18:15
right now the person best equipped to
18:19
serve that land you know what this land
18:20
needs we’re gonna help you do it because
18:23
it’s in the interest of the nation and
18:24
it’s in the interest of the planet for
18:27
us to have healthy watersheds healthy
18:29
farms healthy forests so maybe that may
18:33
be that kind of that kind of narrative
18:36
would would be a step to the enactment
18:40
of what we are becoming conscious of
18:43
which is that we are not alone
18:45
on this planet we are not the only
18:48
sentient conscious beings here but we
18:51
are among our brothers and that our role
18:53
here is to give to the evolution and
19:00
well-being of the whole from the gift
19:02
that have been given to us
19:12
and all and I have liked in a minute
19:15
here left so I’ll say maybe I’ll just
19:18
end with um the question that is that
19:24
often comes up well what should I do
19:28
when we understand that social healing
19:35
relational healing personal healing
19:37
ecological healing climate healing are
19:40
all part of the same healing then the
19:44
scope of our allowable activism broadens
19:47
and we allow ourselves to listen to the
19:55
communication of the world to ourselves
19:58
about what is needed
20:00
what am I called to do what is mine
20:03
right now to do the mind may not be able
20:08
to say how this will bring down co2
20:12
numbers to house homeless people how is
20:16
that going to bring down co2 numbers but
20:19
we don’t need to listen to that we can
20:23
trust that what is called by our care as
20:29
our informational horizons expand it’s
20:33
not about ignoring what the science is
20:36
telling us but we can trust that as our
20:41
informational horizons expand and as we
20:44
listen that our care will call us to the
20:47
right action even if it doesn’t
20:49
obviously bring down the numbers even if
20:51
it doesn’t obviously scale up or go
20:54
viral but we can trust that just like
20:59
humanity and just like every other
21:01
species we ourselves are brought into
21:05
being with a gift
21:18
yeah I would say that that is where the
21:23
initiatory ordeal of climate change is
21:24
taking us yeah thank you for your
21:30
attention
21:31
[Applause]
—
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This post was previously published on Charleseisenstein.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license CC BY-ND 4.0.
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Photo credit: Charles Eisenstein