Have you ever thought that your strongest act in climate resilience could be falling in love? Well, think about it, in our work for creating optimism and hope, love is the ultimate driving force.
If you’re not in love with life, how will you fight to survive? If you're not in love with another person, how could you pray and hope for their return? And if we don’t allow ourselves to fall madly in love with Mother Earth, how will we ever find the courage and willpower to fight for her protection?
You may have felt that in order to live with climate awareness, you need to toughen up and thicken your skin. That in order to step up to your responsibility and fight for our future, you need to close yourself off from some of the heavy feelings that climate despair brings.
But aren’t we doing our hearts a disservice by underestimating its strength this way? Doesn’t a heart, in fact, grow stronger and more resilient with hardship and pain?
As Joanna Macy, environmental activist, author, and scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology, puts it so beautifully:
“It’s okay for the heart to be broken over the world. What else is a heart for?”
In his book What we think about when we try not to think about global warming, Per Espen Stoknes writes about what it means to live with eco-grief. He explains we have three main sets of values: egoistic, altruistic, and biospheric.
Egoistic values are those focused on personal achievements, like social power, wealth, and personal success. Altruistic values make us care about other people and the bigger community, the kind of values that make us good citizens. Finally, biospheric values focus on the health of beings like plants, animals, trees, mountains, and other ecosystems—it’s about caring for the living world.
Research confirms the more connected one is to nature, the stronger their biospheric values are. This means if you spent a great deal of time in nature as a child (or later as an adult), you feel a connection to nature.
To you, nature is more than just a place to go from time to time. You care for nature as if it was a sibling or friend. You understand nature is part of you, as it is part of all of us, and coming to that realization can be the most healing feeling in the world.
But it can also be extremely devastating when you connect the dots and understand that, gulp, we’re all dying. Ecocide is real, and when Mother Earth is hurting, so are we. Not only do we rely on ecosystems for our world to function, which makes the rapid decline of species around the world even more heartbreaking, but we feel this loss on a spiritual level too.
If you can relate to this, if you feel like the loss of nature pains you gravely, embrace that about yourself—it means you’re deeply connected. It also means that you have all the more ability to feel and express love!
I think it’s time to fall in love, deeper, wilder, and bolder than we have ever dared before! Let’s love life, ourselves, each other, and this beautiful Earth in ways we didn’t know possible, and let’s use that as our fuel to activate the change forward.
Times are scary, yes. But they’re also incredibly beautiful and exciting. They are times to get serious about life and our ability to choose change. So, let’s fall in love, shall we?
This is the most beautiful…
… video I’ve seen in a long time. Prince Ea — you’ve understood the message of climate optimism. Do yourself a favor and spend 5.55 minutes watching this short film. (Created in collaboration with the Nature Conservancy)
This Week’s Climate Book Tip
The Ministry for The Future was claimed to be one of Obama’s favorite books of the year, and I’m not surprised. It’s a brilliantly written sci-fi novel on the events that actually might unfold themselves in the coming decades due to climate change. Written with a wild imagination based on way-too-true facts and predictions, this book gives you a captivating insight into what the world coming up might look like.
If you want to spark your own imagination and broaden your mind about what’s actually possible, I wouldn’t let this one pass you by!
Authors: Kim Stanley Robinson Publisher: Orbit I Find the book here
Climate Optimism
Oregon on track to meet 2035 greenhouse gas emissions target
Parts of Great Barrier Reef show highest coral cover seen in 36 years
Start-up plans 2500 artificial coral reefs to fight climate change
“The passing of this bill in the House of Representatives starts a new era of climate and energy certainty, one that is well overdue.”
- Chris Bowen, Australia’s climate change and energy minister
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