Caring Enough
To mobilize people, this has to become an emotional issue.1
~daniel kahneman,
nobel prize-winning psychologist
commenting on climate crisis
In December of 2017 I evacuated Ojai, California, as smoke from the massive Thomas Fire rose above the mountains just outside of town. Five months later I evacuated from Kilauea’s lava flow on the Big Island of Hawaii, which took my new handcrafted home and adjoining five-acre organic farm of eighteen years. Eventually, the lava covered my entire neighborhood and ecosystem under a mantle of black jagged rock.
I never imagined I would lose my home and habitat to natural disaster. It’s still difficult to grasp at a visceral level. I know I lost everything, but my heart doesn’t fully believe it. The lava taught me the strangest thing not only can but does happen at any moment. I suspect that similar disbelief—due to what is too overwhelming to imagine—also prevents many from grasping that climate crisis exists to the serious degree it does and the damage it portends to wreak in the future.
In effect, I have become a climate refugee,2 an initiation I couldn’t have fathomed when I began writing this book in 2014. In hindsight, I see writing it helped me prepare for the aftermath of fire—especially that monstrous, moving wall of lava that no one and nothing could stop. As a result, I’m an inkling closer to realizing what it’s like to be a polar bear or an Australian spectacled flying fox, an orangutan or a dazzling scarlet-breasted fruiteater of the high Andes—all animals facing extinction due to climate change. And I feel closer to the millions of human climate refugees around the world fleeing unlivable conditions.
I’ve also let go of the expectation of living indefinitely in a place I enjoy, in a comfortable and standard home, with money in the bank. These luxuries, while helpful, don’t comfort me as they once did. We are all now more nomadic and vulnerable than we realize or might prefer. We have been thrust, whether we notice it or not, closer to the edge of survival. More than ever, we can’t know when we will be stripped of all for which we’ve worked so hard.
Experiencing these natural disasters firsthand has allowed me to psychologically “die” while still being alive. This has contributed more poignancy to my life, as did the years of emotional healing I had undertaken previously. As a result, I’m more earnestly in touch with what’s most meaningful to me. This reckoning coincides with what many don’t realize until they are on their deathbeds, after having worked too much and taken too little time to experience what matters most. This is but one of climate disruption’s hard-won gifts when we allow ourselves to be initiated and transformed by it.
Heart Matters
For all the bad news about climate change, there is a proportional dearth of wisdom for how to grapple with it. Climate Cure fills this void by showing how to emotionally cope and thrive through climate upheaval, passionately face our climate predicament wholeheartedly, and become caring and courageous enough to act in ways that matter enough to save our future.
While solutions to reduce fossil fuels abound, we have not changed enough to alter our fate.3 Outer solutions remain only as effective as our passionate care to radically minimize, or “degrow,” our personal lives so we (1) consume less, (2) free up time and energy to engage in regenerative acts, such as growing our own organic food and showing up to help one another, (3) demand top-down change from our governments, especially by joining a rebellion or strike movement, and (4) learn about climate crisis to support ourselves and others through it.
To effect any of these changes, we must pay attention and take climate crisis to heart, which means feeling it. This is why Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Dr. Daniel Kahneman says climate change must “become an emotional issue.” To feel the many dimensions of the crisis—how it affects us, how to think about and talk to others about it, how to address and mobilize for it, and how to thrive and not go into denial—requires emotional intelligence and support. This is what Climate Cure is about.
The Anatomy of Cure
Section I is an introduction to the origins of climate crisis in ourselves and its manifestation in the world. Here I introduce the resiliency tools for radical sanity needed to address the many challenges of climate breakdown. Section II explores dynamic emotional intelligence skills for working with and reaping the unique gifts contained within grief, anger, and fear, and concludes with a comprehensive chapter for managing eco-anxiety. These chapters set the groundwork for deep inner healing, skillfully engaging with climate breakdown, and building enduring resiliency. Sections III, IV, and V offer an in-depth look at the invaluable benefits of restoring what I call our three “triangle of resilience relationships”—deeply healing ourselves, our connection with the natural world, and community with one another—to both weather climate crisis and engage in its cure. The conclusion integrates the core messages of the book and summarizes how to address the roots of climate crisis from the inside out. Where further information on any topic is recommended, I include the prompt “Resource” followed by the Resource category, the category’s number, the author’s name, and the first word and any other key words from the citation in quotation marks. For example: (Resource 1: Rogers, “On Becoming”). The resources section is at the back of the book and contains a broad range of additional information and support.
The first appendix provides a unique synthesis of recent climate science themes to inform many of the recommendations and discussions offered in the main text. Thousands of hours of research went into this section, and the unabridged document is available online on my website (Resource 2: Weber, “The Science of Climate Crisis”). Even if you are well-informed about climate science, you might be surprised by some of the information provided. It’s sure to enhance your understanding of our larger climate picture.
I’ve included carefully designed self-enrichment exercises at the end of every chapter to help you personalize the information provided throughout the book, to translate what you read into creating a better life for yourself and the world around you. In-text exercises also appear in the chapters pertaining to your inner work.
Personal and Planetary Transformation
As a holistic physician and organic farmer, I consider the health of the environment and how we treat it as important for our well-being as what we eat and how we exercise. What we sink into the ground eventually seeps from our pores; the world we poison eventually sickens us. Earth itself is my patient, and the patient of each one of us, whether we acknowledge it or not. Climate activism, and all other forms of creating justice, are our most potent forms of medicine to effect climate cure.
We must all consider becoming climate activists to create a livable future. After researching the climate science for this book, the most sane and heartfelt response I could conceive was to found a chapter of the global protest movement Extinction Rebellion in my own city. Simultaneously, I took down the shingle at my Chinese medicine practice in the spring of 2019 and now dedicate myself full time to climate activism. This includes leading climate change support groups, giving talks, protesting, engaging in regeneration projects, and testifying for climate action at local government hearings, as well as continuing to write climate-rich prose and poetry.
Please consider that 75 percent of the battle to be climate aware and to take meaningful climate action occurs between our deep hearts and our first steps in the world. In other words, it’s primarily an inside job. You are therefore not going to find many suggestions for outward climate mitigation strategies in these pages. Instead, I share with you how to inwardly liberate and impassion yourself to take commonsense actions. The heart of this inner work is emotional healing, what I also refer to as “inner activism,” which has likely waited your whole life to engage. Climate crisis catalyzes this healing journey within us. In addition, reconnecting with the natural world and one another is paramount. We have an opportunity for comprehensive healing as we create a new Earth-centric and technologically wise iteration of our humanity.
The belief that climate crisis is separate from us perpetuates the myth that we have to fight against or combat it. While we must mitigate its effects, our efforts are more successful when they stem from our love of the natural world, ourselves, and one another. War terms do double harm: they distance us from being deeply accountable for climate disruption and they demonize nature and make it our enemy. Conversely, when we view climate crisis as an extension of our collective imbalances, we can better address both its root (largely inner) and branch (largely outer) causes.
We are climate crisis because we have caused it. And the roots of our polluting emissions are deeper than what meets the eye. Climate cure, like the crisis itself, functions as a reciprocal dynamic, an inner-outer continuum, reflecting our degree of symbiosis with the natural world. When we heal ourselves, we can better heal the planet. Similarly, the more we rehabilitate the natural world, the more we benefit in return.
We can understand climate chaos as a guru, a consummate healer in disguise. Climate cure is most robust when we engage intimately with the crisis and allow it to teach and change us, rather than merely focus on how to eradicate it. Viewing climate crisis as a relationship begging for our intimate participation opens doors to personal and planetary transformation—to heal together. In contrast, distancing or viewing ourselves as distinct from the crisis (and from the natural world) perpetuates disharmony and suffering.
Bows to the Invisible
While outer solutions are critical to minimize climate “bleeding,” these are bandages until we heal our web of relationships that precipitated the climate wound. We can approach this healing process as we would working through the challenges of any important relationship and be transformed in the same way any injury or illness can transform us. This way, we come back into sustainable relationships with one another and the biosphere (the global ecosystem) to which we belong and upon which we depend. If we cannot ultimately mitigate climate breakdown enough, healing our triangle of resilience relationships will best prepare us to weather the downturn.
The lack of critical thinking and emotional wisdom that has hastened the climate crisis is as unobvious to the naked eye as the cause-and-effect relationship between invisible greenhouse gas molecules in the atmosphere and the incidences of wildfires and floods. This book is dedicated to the unseen causes of climate crisis birthed deep inside us and largely forgotten by our linear, outward-obsessed, and emotionally immature Western culture. May this writing contribute to a sophisticated and holistic, inwardly rich and emotionally intelligent ethos to help us heal through climate illness and save ourselves and all of life any amount of undue suffering.
1. Mui, “3 Reasons There Might Be No Path to Success on Climate Change.”
2. Sneed, “Get Ready for More Volcanic Eruptions as the Planet Warms.” Climate change leads to increased volcanic activity; whether this was a factor in the 2018 Kilauea eruption is unknown. Regardless, it was a devastating climate event on par with a hurricane, flood, or wildfire. The lava flow’s aftermath is arguably worse, as there can be no returning to my land or neighborhood in the foreseeable future. The roads are gone and my farm is now allegedly buried under at least a hundred feet of still-cooling volcanic rock.
3. OXFAM International, “World’s Richest 10 Percent Produce Half of Carbon Emissions While Poorest 3.5 Billion Account for Just a Tenth.” Since the “world’s richest 10 percent produce half of carbon emissions while the poorest 3.5 billion account for just a tenth,” we and us throughout this writing refer primarily to those of us in industrialized and/or first-world countries, or to those who resonate with the message.