The Climate Emergency is Here: Can Anyone Recommend a Good Therapist?
I cannot change anything in the world without changing myself first.
An old statement, underwhelming even, but not untrue. The Climate Emergency is breaching our global conscious like the hull of a great ship shredding the wall of a house. It is here, it is an emergency and I am one of it’s perpetrators. As often as I think I am the person in the house, I am actually much closer to being below deck feeding coal to a roaring furnace. Maybe, more aptly, I am trapped in one of the cabins trying to kick out the portside window.
I like to think myself as an activist and entrepreneur helping to drive change. Yet, time and time again, I learn that the greatest impediment to being effective in this work…is well, me. I am inescapably part of a system feeding dollars into a black box and watching tons of carbon emissions puff cheerily out the other end. When I believe there is a ship, I’ll probably act like I’m on one.
Personal growth is challenging and even more difficult when I realize that, as a part of the highly developed, wealthy Global North, I fit neatly into one of the former metropolitan souls who is a perpetrator of the near-infinite tap of emissions. It is a bitter pill to swallow when it it the black and brown people of hot, dry countries who will likely suffer the worst of an increasingly volatile atmosphere.
It is possible to call this environmental genocide. Which would make me a perpetrator of genocide before it happens. I can’t tell you if I understood this before I started my journey in climate work. What I am is willing to accept it now.
It feels like a far leap to being able to act on the Climate Emergency. Where’s a despairing, hilarious and denial-ridden meme when you need one, huh?
Don’t open the Tylenol yet, kids. There is the Ax of Hope, you use this to chop down the house you’d hang yourself in.
If I can accept I am part of driving this genocide forward, then I begin to see how I can help to push in another direction. This is a Seed of Hope I’ll plant in the garden of all the things I’m not so good at. That seed says, I can change and I can learn to be something else. Being something else means I can begin to push in another direction.
A direction where economies have a soul recognizing planetary boundaries and a basic, common respect for people and planet. A magical, far-away place where they begin to unlearn basing trade on an outgrowth of colonial, white-dominated, extractive business models. A place with drinkable water, clean air, and fish in the sea…just like all the generations before me.
I have no idea if this place is actually possible. But, I will try. It sounds simple and, maybe, it is. And it may cost me more than I’d ever volunteer but it couldn’t be any costlier than living with this knowledge and never changing.
So, feasibly, part of climate action could be admitting I’m not very emotionally intelligent or not judging people. Funny how that works out, isn’t it?
