Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
…And you’ll know they’re the right prayers when it doesn’t feel like praying is a separate thing from living. …When you don’t feel those disconnects anymore between what you pray and what you do; between the land, your community, your family, and yourself.
One of the highlights of the Transition movement in Japan is that it has become an antidote to the despair that was widely spreading after the 3/11, the earthquake, tsunami, nuclear disaster, the triple disaster that happened two years ago.
While environmental advocates urge individuals to reduce their carbon footprint by taking small, simple actions, others argue that individual actions are irrelevant. Do such actions have meaningful impact on the global systems that drive severe weather? Or is policy—corporate and government—the only thing that will make a real difference?
For those of us who live in countries where we use many fossil fuels, we have been shielded from the consequences of living badly. But that age is ending. Now that the Mayan Baktun 13 calendar has passed, we begin the era of the Gaian calendar. We “will eventually have to reduce either our populations or our living standards (emergy use) by 80 to 90 percent” (Odum & Odum, 2001, p. 170)
How many times a day do we say or think "I’m comfortable with this" or "I’m not comfortable with that"? How often is it a way to avoid looking at what’s going on and our part in it, as much as a valid expression of something really being not quite right?
The obvious and important difference between this potential Sixth Great Extinction and all the others is that they had natural, unavoidable causes. There are fewer and fewer deniers now that our fossil-fueled grow-consume-lay waste-deplete global economy is the cause of this one.
