"Our own life has to be our message" -- Thich Nhat Hanh1
I live alone in rural Maine, on native Wabanaki land. My two kids are in their early twenties, alive and well in other states. I can't imagine how their lives will engage this climate emergency.
Unconscious displacement on a global scale
I cannot get out of my head the thought that the global North's panic stricken response to Covid-19 is also a displacement of climate anxiety. This displacement would be working at the level of the societal unconscious; perhaps the most global societal unconscious displacement humanity has ever spawned.
‘In order to find your way, you must become lost.’
Bayo Akomolafe remembers this advice from his ancestors. He insists that we need ‘to fall down to the earth and listen’.
Becoming lost, as we enter the new year, how do I learn to listen to the earth?1
At the recently-concluded COP 26 talks in Glasgow, there were so many representatives of fossil-fuel companies that together they constituted a larger delegation than any nation.1 What is it like to work for one of these companies, to keep doing business as usual in the knowledge of the terrible damage that it is doing to us all?
At the beginning of 2021, I chose a sequence of three books on the climate crisis. In a sense, I curated some reading to experiment on myself, because I wanted to find out how different kinds of books worked on me.
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