When we first began digging into climate crisis we were astonished by what our research revealed. We’ve all known that the fossil fuel industry gives politicians large sums to assure profit-enhancing policies and then pretend nothing’s wrong.
What we were not so aware of is the hundreds of millions of dollars big oil has been spending for decades on an elaborate misinformation campaign to cover up the looming catastrophe that, even their own scientists have warned, was sure to come. But it’s already begun, deception and denial are no longer possible.
So, please, take 20 minutes, click on the link below to be inspired by Joanna Macy’s message and empowered by her presence:
Climate change is here and our weather systems are going haywire and much sooner than predicted. Out of control wildfires are burning down vast forestland, incinerating thousands of homes, and destroying whole towns. Hurricanes and rising seas are battering coastal cities and flooding rivers are inundating inland communities. The worst heat waves and droughts ever recorded are threatening our global food system. All made worse by a pandemic with no end in sight.
One of the people we interviewed in making The Wisdom To Survive, our first climate film, was a young woman from the Navajo Nation. She gave us a key to understanding the deeper meaning of what we are now witnessing. She told us that these climate disasters are “Mother Earth crying out for help because we’re killing her to make a profit.” We’re being called to awaken to a transformative truth while we still have time: just as we rely on own mothers to nourish us before we’re born and sustain us after we’re born, in the same way, we are intimately related to Mother Earth herself. And our fate is bound up with hers.
In our latest release, Climate Crisis As Spiritual Path, Joanna Macy, founding teacher of “The Work That Reconnects,” is also calling us to awaken to who we really are. She’s inviting us through the doorway into oneness with each other and with all life on earth. “You have been here from the beginning of time and are related to all that is…living cells in a living body — an inseparable living part of the living planet Earth.” She helps us take the first step: getting in touch with gratefulness for the life we’ve been given. She shows us how we can then use our anger and anguish over what is happening to our planet not only as a path to realizing our true identity but more than that, as a way of discovering what we can do to save ourselves and this precious world that has brought us forth.
How can you join the conversation and learn more about climate change?
Buy our climate change films
After watching the interview Climate Crisis As Spiritual Path and any of our films we suggested above you can start a conversation.
Here are a few questions to guide a group discussion or simply to help you go deeper into your own thoughts and feelings about the climate crisis that confronts us:
- When have you experienced a connection to nature? How has it influenced what you’ve thought or said or done? Have you “heard within yourself the sounds of the earth crying?”
- Joanna Macy reflects the view of “deep ecology” that the life energy flowing through us is the same life energy that flows through the rivers and the mountains, the trees and the forests, and all the plants and the animals. How might such an understanding help us respond to the climate crisis? Buddhists believe that what we perceive as happening outside us is also happening inside us. Is that in any way true for you?
- Joanna Macy and her colleague Anita Barrows have translated the poet Rainer Maria Rilke who sees the world as sacred, a view Joanna reflects in the poems of Rilke that she recites. Is there a sense in which you see the world, nature, or creation as sacred? Rilke wrote: “Now you must go out into your heart as onto a vast plain. Now the immense loneliness begins.” What are your thoughts?
- Joanna recently framed the essential question challenging us this way, “Our species is destroying our world. How can we live in full presence and enjoy it in a world that is destroying itself?” How would you respond?
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