As the deep ecology movement begins to recognise the importance of grieving the demise of industrial civilisation, conversations around sacred activism and psycho-spiritual healing are inevitably beginning to surface.
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The price we pay for our alienation from the natural world is that of our wellbeing – physical, emotional and spiritual. It’s time we paid back our nature deficit and got back in touch with our true nature. It’s time to go home.
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We have known about human-caused climate change for well over a century, and have had in operation a global framework for dealing with it for well over two decades, yet we are still failing to stop or even slow down its advance toward catastrophe.
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Like a snake eating its own tail, our growth-oriented civilisation suffers from the delusion that there are no environmental limits to growth. But rethinking growth in an age of limits cannot be avoided. The only question is whether it will be by design or disaster.
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While the new cult of scientism produces louder and louder assertions of grand theories of everything and promises of immortality and singularity, scientists and philosophers who know “you can’t be overly humble” marvel at the mystery of how the more we know and learn and examine with a critical and open mind, the more mysteries and inextricable complexities we discover, and the faster absolute knowledge of anything retreats from our grasp. As Marshall McLuhan famously said: “Learning creates ignorance.”
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There is no politically viable response to climate change.
For a response to be politically viable it would have to be politically appealing. A response that politicians know won’t kill their career. That means a response that people would vote for, one that is supported by economists and corporate leaders. And people vote for things they like the sound of, not policies that are likely to pull the rug out from under their way of life.
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Most important of all: Don’t keep singing the same song to the same people and expect the world to change. I know it’s sad that it didn’t work but I must let it go, that’s science! Psuedo-science and religion and conservatism and fanaticism and dogmatism have no place in the scientist’s mind. Letting go of bad and out-dated ideas is at the core of science.
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The ability to slice through the fog of misinformation and disinformation, propaganda and quackery, is a vital skill in our information-saturated digital era.
Critical thinking is a powerful tool, and a discerning mind is aware of how our innermost feelings shape our perception of the world. A critical thinker knows what shade of glasses they are wearing over their mind’s eye.
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A few of the really big questions in life are: does everything depend on perspective? How big an effect do our thoughts have in changing the world? Can fear be overcome by transforming thought itself?
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Every now and then, though, new information comes to light that challenges the very bedrock of our understandings about how the world works, and it’s the job of science to unravel the mysteries and help us make sense of them. It truly is a never-ending process of discovery!
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SHIFT magazine 