Radical Resilience
People choose no pain now, that’s why we’ve done nothing about climate change.4
~dr. joanne chory, the salk institute
“Even though many are still either in denial or preoccupied by the daily struggle for survival, the most serious threat that humans have ever encountered in our 150,000-year evolution is global warming and severe climate change,” says activist Ronnie Cummins.5 UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who spoke at the opening of the 2018 climate talks in Katowice, Poland, called climate change “the most important issue we face.” 6 Since 2017, millennials also consider climate change the most serious issue affecting the world today.7 Belonging to Generation Z, the “Climate Kids”—including activist groups such as Fridays for Future, the Sunrise Movement, Youth vs. Apocalypse, and the Bay Area Earth Guardians—are sounding off their heart-wrenching, no-bullshit message in the face of a dismal future and possible extinction.
These pronouncements and uprisings are reasonable responses to recent, alarming climate science and catastrophic global events (see Appendix I). Deeply concerning ourselves with this crisis is a marginalized pursuit, and only handfuls of us take keen interest. We all need to be talking about climate crisis, and more importantly, feeling its effects. It’s difficult to expect anyone living paycheck to paycheck or with other serious challenges to agonize over climate crisis. Paradoxically, however, empowering ourselves to climate activism can bolster our well-being, as climate prodigy and 2019 Nobel Peace Prize nominee Greta Thunberg did to overcome her climate-induced depression.8 Perhaps we also fear the overwhelming emotions the difficult issues stir—for which we have no adequate forum to share our concern and feelings—and the accompanying sacrifices we’d feel compelled to make if we took the bad news to heart. In truth, we have not done enough, and the discussion to cure the climate crisis continues to focus almost exclusively on what must be done outwardly. Something deeper is missing from the equation.
Our collective inaction has propelled me to wonder what allows us to willfully, even nonchalantly, march toward collapse and our own demise. I have meditated on this question for years, searching for a radical etiology, or root cause for our folly. Even if we address the numerous cognitive biases with which evolution and cultural conditioning have wired us, we still haven’t answered what it would take to empower enough of us to sufficiently care for the natural world and our own survival. We lack a strategy for how to care enough even to learn why we don’t care enough (Resource 2: “Gardner”). We are still without a road map for how to become inwardly (and for many underprivileged, also outwardly) resourced enough, and therefore fulfilled enough, to do without many of the superfluities that exacerbate our Sasquatch-sized carbon footprints and perpetuate our complacency.
In the pages ahead we address precisely these issues by learning how to (1) psycho-spiritually cope with and passionately thrive through climate crisis, (2) become the kind of people capable of acting more wisely and effectively, (3) leverage the effects of climate crisis as an opportunity to profoundly transform ourselves and the world, and (4) increase our capacity for love and connection as climate chaos worsens. To engage these changes would be a humble gesture toward all we have hitherto treated so poorly. In this we find integrity and amends, to let everything breathe more easily as the short-lived sun of industrial civilization sets.
Triangle of Resilience Relationships
Drawing primarily from climate science, holistic medicine, depth psychology, neuroscience, the poetic tradition, and deep ecology, we will explore how we’ve arrived at our current precipice. We’ll learn how to grapple with and grow from this dangerous predicament in the most honest, skillful, and wholehearted way we can.
The climate crisis is generated both by our individual contributions and by corrupt governments and corporations. And while we’ve all contributed to the problem, the corporate elite are especially guilty; their negligence has manifested as murderous corruption, dishonesty, endless pollution, war-making, and mercenary fundamentalism. Most of the rest of us have succumbed to apathy, denial, and a lack of courage to rebel and deny our society’s manipulative enticements and “do without” (live more modestly). On the bright side, recent climate strikes and resistance movements are beginning to move the chains. With this in mind, I propose three primary, invisible drivers for why we destroy the planet and continue to:
1. The first and foremost driver is our fear and failure to be sufficiently transformed by our emotional pain, past and present, including traumas large and small. This dynamic results in hurt people hurt others, including Earth, and is explored in Section III. Climate crisis has been initiated and perpetuated by our collective, unresolved difficult emotions, especially our need to grieve. Psychological depth work, what I also refer to as death-and-rebirth work, helps liberate our vitality from past loss and wounding to break this cycle of needless destruction and demise.
2. The second driver is our disconnect from the natural world with which we have coevolved for millennia, a relationship elaborated in Section IV.
3. The last driver is our loss of heartfelt, tightly knit community, which we shared for our entire history until it became eroded by a modern individualism. This dynamic is explored further in Section V.
These three drivers—with self, nature, and one another—represent three primary relationships, our “triangle of resilience” relationships. Our neglect of these relationships is a radical cause for the symptom of climate crisis. Forsaking any of these relationships causes damage. And in the same way a robust union of these relationships confers exponential strength, abdicating two or more invites catastrophe. Consider that the atrophy of these relationships underlies apathy, war, rapacious capitalism, overpopulation, poor diet and lifestyle choices, laziness, irresponsibility, antisocial psychopathy,9 religious fundamentalism, scientific illiteracy, and excess pollution—the many dynamics often attributed to our failed stewardship of the planet.
While these many symptoms arise from underlying relationship fractures, they also perpetuate and exacerbate our unsustainable ways and cause further damage to our triangle of resilience relationships, resulting in exponential decline. An example: greed and consumerism are often rooted in an impoverished inner life, yet indulging greed and consumerism further impoverishes one’s inner life. Research supports this hypothesis and shows that yoking self-worth to financial success impedes the fulfillment of psychological needs—such as meaning and purpose, confidence, and having close relationships—that creates sustainable happiness.10
In contrast, revitalizing these essential relationships builds a triangle of resilience. Our triangle of resilience relationships dictates the unfolding of three major climate change dynamics. These relationships, when marginalized, are the underlying drivers for climate change’s inception and perpetuation. When nourished, however, they are the best means we have to cope and thrive through climate chaos, and when they are robust and stable, these relationships are the best way to radically mitigate climate damage.
We must therefore practice desisting from the many expressions of relationship illness and, most importantly, restore our foundational triangle of resilience relationships. I don’t propose this strategy as a panacea for all our inner and outer climate challenges, but to equip us with sufficient restraint and resources to renew ourselves and the world—to begin spiraling upward instead of downward. Any progress we make in these ways is significant.
Climate Initiation
Radical imbalance requires radical remedy. When no viable solution exists, we can embrace radical honesty and hold a tension of opposites in order to persevere and preserve a passion for life. The best way I know to do this is to welcome what I call the “spirituality of a broken-open heart”—an honest, Earth-based disposition that embraces both dark and light. It is to embody what Leonard Cohen described as “the crack that lets the light in.” In a modern Western culture that worships steadfastness and constant productivity, such a sacred wound—on behalf of everything—isn’t easy to bear.
The “climate crack” is not only a wound but an invitation into depths we otherwise would not venture into, where the most comprehensive healing can happen. In this sense, climate disruption challenges us to undertake a profound initiation. Because our culture has all but forgotten the value of initiation, we may fail to see the value—much less possess the savvy and behold the wisdom—to accept Mother Nature’s kindness in disguise. The time is ripe to embrace holy struggle for the sake of deliverance to a livable future.
Through this climate portal into our hearts we are given the chance to tend our deepest wounds and restore our dignity with the natural world and one another. This is the opportunity climate crisis offers as it breaks our hearts. Through this transformation, we can reciprocate with a gift of care from our newfound integrity. We don’t have to wait for climate change to wake us up, nor have we ever. We can enter this crucible, instead of turning away, when our hearts are broken open through any kind of death or loss. If we deny this grief-pain, as many of us have throughout our lives, we become disjointed and fragment the world as a result. Climate chaos, however, presents an ultimatum we can’t ignore. We either deal with the shadow pain and deficiencies from which it arose, or we perish.
Building Integrity
Triangles are the most sturdy and stable of geometric structures. Each side relies on the others for support, creating a strength greater than the sum of its parts. In reality, because each of our triangle of resilience relationships is multidimensional, each is a triangle in its own right. Joined together, they form a pyramid, whose base is the common ground shared by all life.
Reviving a triangle of resilience fosters integration. Integration builds integrity. Integrity guides humility, care, and regeneration in the form of courageous awareness and wise action. Take, for example, one facet of our triangle of resilience: healing through our core love wounds. Embracing this form of heartbreak takes (and builds) courage, helping us unlock our vitality and care, resulting in more wholeness and a richer inner life. Our resulting integrity helps us notice (awareness) what’s unsustainable and tread more lightly (wise action). This process makes degrowth (needing and using less) easier, and is characteristic of regenerative living (less waste and emissions, more fertility and thriving). Our newfound awareness, vitality, and care also allow us to take bolder climate action. Noticing and addressing what’s injured catalyzes renewal on all levels, as nature herself models for us via the cycle of death and rebirth. This fertile procession is eloquently represented by the Yin-Yang symbol, one of our constant metaphorical companions on this climate cure journey.
The elixir for developing integrity—what I call “becoming medicine for our times”—exists along a spectrum. It doesn’t seem to be enough only to be close to nature,11 nor only to do the necessary inner work or robustly connect with others in community. A combination of these capacities in varying proportions offers more promise for a well-fortified triangle.
If engaging in emotional work doesn’t immediately appeal to you, getting out to nature more often and engaging more authentically with others can help soften your defenses, renew your perspective, and/or provide support you didn’t know you needed. Similarly, acting for the greater good changes how we think and feel. The catch-22 is that it often takes a level of inner work to build enough integrity to sufficiently free oneself from pain to be of selfless service in a self-centered culture. Moreover, acting without wisdom can be dangerous, even if it looks good on the surface or in the short-term (further discussed under the topic of sacred permission in Chapter 8). Nonetheless, acting on behalf of regenerative values from a place of care is often a good enough effort toward climate cure.
I invite you to sit with these considerations, and if any ring true, to take the next steps into radical resilience. Whatever your unique recipe, together we can begin to shift the paradigm of our disastrous addiction to distraction and unconscious destruction. Please step out of status quo insanity and face this conundrum with me and the many others who can’t ignore our screaming hearts and right minds any longer.
Why Bother
None of what I suggest is utopian; it’s too late for this. I propose what is enough, which requires change from many of us—enough to curb our diseased relationship with the natural world and with one another, for the sake of integrity, regardless of the outcome. Enough that we could move into a functional range of inhabiting the planet without slashing and burning everything to smithereens, or just not so quickly. Enough also means engaging 3.5 percent of the population in rebellion to turn the tides. This figure is based on research showing that “nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts—and those engaging a threshold of 3.5 percent of the population have never failed to bring about change.” 12
Such protests can affect local or global policy. For example, a 3.5 percent threshold was reached during September 2019 when protestors in New Zealand took to the streets for the Youth Climate Strikes.13 This was soon followed by the New Zealand government committing to an ambitious goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.14 If many groups worldwide rebel against their respective local governmental policies, a global shift could occur. This in fact is the basis for Extinction Rebellion’s strategy: engaging collective civil disobedience to target local governments by demanding net-zero emissions by 2025. While parts of the biosphere might be too damaged to substantially recover from our lashings, this should not stop us from doing right. Rather, it should invigorate us.
You might have heard someone ask, “If our planet and humanity are lost causes and there’s not much I can do, why should I care and waste my time learning, worrying, and getting upset about climate change?” Maybe you have even wondered this yourself. Sadly, acting from this perspective results in both inner and outer inaction and is precisely what has contributed to our current state—not only to the demise of the natural world but to our lost sense of belonging, which has eroded our ability to care enough to work through this mess together.
The non-discerning, binary nature of the above question also fails to appreciate the value of acting with integrity despite the condition of the world—that to live with dignity in heart and action always matters. For instance, we might change our behavior to ease the suffering of other life forms we are extinguishing with us. This could include something as commonplace as not driving and flying unless we must, or something as conscientiously rare as not making undue noise in a quiet place. All this requires commonsense care and a capacity for personal “sacrifice” we seem to lack. This broken integrity is the common “patient” inside us all that we must learn to collectively heal.
Reasons to learn about climate change and expose ourselves to the difficult truths are therefore many. While knowledge might sting in the short term, it can help us avoid—and avoid causing—more suffering in the long run. Knowing and naming the nature of the disease helps us best prepare for and prevent further damage. Also, if it were more likely that your lifestyle and well-being would be significantly disrupted earlier than you anticipated by a force other than the usual culprits that spoil plans, wouldn’t you want an informed say in how you spend the rest of your days?
For all these reasons, I offer the following incentives for you to consider learning and feeling more about our climate predicament:
17 1. It’s usually a good idea to be grounded in reality and to learn what’s true, or what is most likely true. “The truth shall set us free,” even if it’s tough to accept. Radical acceptance of what is prompts our creative ability to arrive at nonlinear solutions to what undeniably seem like dead ends. One learns this when passing through any kind of heartache or descent into the underworld, especially when stripped of hope.
2. The lives of our children and grandchildren are lives many of us deem more valuable than our own. A major challenge is deciding how much climate information to share with children: what’s appropriate for them to hear and what knowledge robs them of life versus contributes to their preparation through appropriate learning? Having conversations with fellow parents, psychologists, and asking for feedback from children themselves can help you arrive at the best decisions on this important issue (Resource 1: “Climate Reality Project” and Resource 3: “Hippo Works”).
3. Sleepwalking into the future comes with high costs, as the last many decades demonstrate.
4. The allegory of a frog in a boiling pot of water demonstrates what happens when we don’t pay enough attention and become too comfortable.15 Like the allegorical frog, we can’t see or grasp gradual climate changes (though they are progressing rapidly in meteorological time). Instead of apprehending and responding to these changes, we unconsciously habituate to them and remain idle. Staying informed about climate change news helps motivate us to jump from the pot before it’s too late.
5. Learning how despoiled our world is motivates urgent radical acts of justice such as rebellion. Please consider joining Extinction Rebellion,16 18Fridays for Future,17 or any other climate strike movements. Even climate scientists are joining and asking other scientists to join in protest.18
6. Exposing ourselves now to difficult truths helps us cope ahead and integrate climate changes already in the pipeline. Steady awareness allows us to more gradually metabolize the information and more likely future scenarios. It also helps us begin making sacrifices in our comfort level so we acclimate to living with less. These measures seem more prudent than suddenly being taken unawares by overwhelming news and traumatic climate events. It’s better to kneel now than fall from ten feet later.
7. Learning about the likely future informs every aspect of our lives. Climate change scenarios span a range of possibilities and time frames; they are not black or white. Exposing ourselves to the latest science and global news as it unfolds can help guide us today and tomorrow: in the ways we interact with one another, how we spend our time, what we dedicate ourselves to, how we hold our hearts and our relationships, and what we cling to. For my part, climate change knowledge sways many of my decisions, especially big ones.
For example, you might choose not to have children—as many are now choosing 19—or decide to adopt. You might choose to work at an animal shelter or live in the country. You can choose to change the design of your dreams and let go of those that are unsustainable—all wisely informed by global climate status. Or you might choose to let go more completely, follow your uncanny callings, and see what magic awaits in the radical unknown.
8. I’ve heard many dismiss the far-reaching calamity of climate change with one pseudo-humble retort: “The planet will be better off when humans are gone.” Ironically, this view is hubristic and entitled. Who’s to say we won’t kill the planet, as we have almost everything else? Few realize, for example, that nuclear reactors take decades to decommission. Without an adequate power grid, or due to flooding from rising sea levels, they could melt down and unleash widespread, crippling radiation on life that remains for eons to come.20
9. Painful climate change news affects us emotionally. While this might hurt, a broken heart is also an opportunity. The grief of heartbreak, when held tenderly and wisely worked through, can transform and bring out the best in us. A poster in the Extinction Rebellion office in London reads: “Give yourself time to feel—grief opens pathways of love and melts the parts of you that are frozen.”
10. Resisting a destructive and unsustainable status quo, as well as acting compassionately toward one another and the natural world, helps ease the suffering of all beings. Preventing needless suffering gets my vote every time.
• Exercise •
Chapter 1 Journaling
Take out your journal or notepad, place it in front of you, and write out your responses to the following prompts.
1. What message from this chapter stood out for you or spoke to you most powerfully?
• Why did it speak to you so strongly?
• What action—inwardly or outwardly—are you inspired to take as a result?
2. What holds you back from learning and engaging more about climate crisis?
• For example, is it any combination of a lack of time, fear, hopelessness, or a lack of knowledge?
• What changes or support do you need to engage more fully? How might you make these changes or enlist the support you need?
3. What steps are you willing to take to bolster your triangle of resilience relationships? List up to five superfluous activities you can let go of in order to dedicate yourself to your triangle of resilience relationships—to self-healing, nature connection, and building community.
4. What would it take for you to join a strike or rebellion movement such as Extinction Rebellion and/or introduce your children to any of the children’s strike movements mentioned at the beginning of this chapter?
• What prevents you from doing so? How can you address your concerns and make time for this?
• Are you willing to investigate your concerns and any fears and try to work through them?
4. Popescu, “This Scientist Thinks She Has the Key to Curb Climate Change: Super Plants.”
5. Cummins, “Degeneration Nation 2018: The Darkest Hour.”
6. Associated Press, “UN Chief Calls Climate Change ‘Most Important Issue We Face’.”
7. Loudenbeck and Jackson, “The Ten Most Critical Problems in the World, According to Millennials.”
8. Watts, “Greta Thunberg, Schoolgirl Climate Change Warrior: ‘Some People Can Let Things Go. I Can’t.’”
9. Clark, “The Science of Raising a Friendly Psychopath.”
10. Suttie, “How Does Valuing Money Affect Your Happiness?”
11. I’ve met many a naturalist who is kind to the natural world but is unable to be kind to, and communicate effectively with, other humans.
12. Robson, “The ‘3.5% Rule’: How a Small Minority Can Change the World.”
13. Al Jazeera, “Thousands in New Zealand Kick-Start New Wave of Climate Protests.”
14. Wamsley, “New Zealand Commits to Being Carbon Neutral by 2050—With a Big Loophole.”
15. Acaroglu, “Climate Change Is the Slowly Boiling Frog in the Pot of the Earth.”
16. Extinction Rebellion, “#Whereisyourplan.”
17. #FridaysforFuture, “What We Do.”
18. Gardner and Wordley, “Scientists Must Act on Our Own Warnings to Humanity.” As conservation scientists and members of Extinction Rebellion, we encourage our fellow scientists to join us in embracing activism. In April 2019, over 12,000 scientists signed a letter endorsing the global school strikes, which are acts of civil disobedience, and praising the movement as ‘justified and supported by the best available science’ (Hagedorn, “Concerns of Young Protestors are Justified.”). We ask that scientists take this one step further, and themselves join civil disobedience movements.
19. Timsit, “These Millennials Are Going on ‘Birth Strike’ Because of Climate Change.”
20. Flavelle and Lin, “U.S. Nuclear Plants Weren’t Built for Climate Change.”