We seek to raise awareness about the ecological crises of our time, and to relearn how to live here. We address these questions here.
What are the cultural/spiritual roots of the ecological crisis unfolding across our planet? As the planetary crisis intensifies, are we willing to let go the cultural values and practices that created it and relearn how to live here? Are we up to the challenges we face from global heating, biodiversity loss, and mass extinctions? And we invite you into this journey with us.
07/12/2024
Climate scientists long predicted that the world would soon see the Age of Fire. And now we have. They are burning all over the planet now, Our West is front and center in the arrival of this new age.
They said it would get worse. It got worse, It's going to get much worse even than this.
Cal Fire head Joe Tyler urges residents to be ‘extra cautious’ and reveals fires have scorched nearly 220,000 acres
07/11/2024
After you read this - and I recommend that you read every word - sit a while and ask yourself this question:
How Are We Going To Live Here?!?!
~ posted by Margaret Swedish
The heat has come for Americans — and everyone else, too.
07/09/2024
The question that names this page is a big one. How are we going to live here as the planet shifts to a new ecological era? The time of transition is going to be painful, indeed. We are all already being impacted, for hundreds of millions of humans in disastrous ways. When we read articles like this, we get glimmers of what this is going to mean for us. This story describes classic positive feedback loops - the more the ice melts, the more and faster the ice melts. The photos in this piece are dramatic and disturbing. Ice worlds are disappearing all across the planet, and none faster than up in the Arctic.
The speed of decline in the Juneau Ice Field, an expanse of 1,050 interconnected glaciers, has doubled in recent decades, scientists discovered.
07/06/2024
How are we going to live here? For increasing millions of people, we won't be. Heat is the number one weather killer, and, folks, it is getting hot on this planet, and the pace of heating is accelerating.
For more terrifying info on what is in store for life as the heat intensifies, check out "The Heat Will Kill You First - Life and Death on a Scorched Planet," by Jeff Goodell.
There is no good future for us on planet Earth if we cannot stop spewing heat trapping gases into our atmosphere.
~ posted by Margaret Swedish
The city just had its hottest June on record, with 175 possible heat deaths so far this year – an 84% increase
07/03/2024
This is not good, not good at all. Another alarm that continues to go off, trying to tell us something...
Something about the radical changes required of all of us, our world, how it works, our ways of life, if we are to continue to live here. Also another indication that we are running out of time to keep our planet habitable for human and other living beings.
Intense wildfires are ravaging the Arctic Circle, bringing smoke and high carbon emissions, according to the European Union’s CAMS.
07/01/2024
"Fewer-and-less" Yes, this is where we are headed. We have no choice about that. But we DO have choice about how this comes about. It will be unavoidably wrenching. But it will be a lot less wrenching, less full of suffering, if we choose freely to prepare for "fewer and less" right now, to start creating community around that path, instead of clinging to the very path that has led us to this era of planetary polycrisis.
~ posted by Margaret Swedish
Changing our political and economic systems to make a decent human existence possible in a big-picture future is crucial, but so is learning to live within the existing systems in ways that are decent in small ways today.
07/01/2024
We are not prepared for what's coming, for all the ways that climate chaos will defeat our attempts to control the forces of Nature. Those forces are going to become increasingly violent and disastrous. And we are not prepared. Try to talk pols into spending the billions and billions it will take just to address the crisis of dams not built for what's coming. Try to talk taxpayers into having their taxes raised to pay for it.
Gift link:
More potential hazards loom even as the waters slowly recede across the upper Plains.
06/26/2024
What human-caused global heating has done to our planet is such a deeply sorrowful reality. And yet we go on. The baking of the atmosphere continues. Just seems humans, especially affluent consumer humans, just cannot stop themselves.
"Last January, more than 40 percent of the planet’s oceans were experiencing marine heat waves, and by the end of the century, given continued warming, those heat waves could be permanent in much of the world’s seas. In shallow waters, coral reefs endured the temperatures of hot tubs, prompting the creation of three new levels of risk above what had been the highest level on the coral-bleaching scale. In a few decades, even in a rapidly decarbonizing world, it is considered likely that bleaching will kill nearly all the ocean’s coral reefs, which support a quarter of all marine life and provide food and other benefits to as many as one billion people.
"A now-subsiding El Niño in the Pacific has helped push sea-surface temperatures above previous records for more than a year straight, with temperatures in the waters of the northern hemisphere so freakishly high they have been described as nine-standard-deviation anomalies. If you have read about scientists expressing alarmed confusion about recent records in global surface temperatures, they are generally more perplexed about what’s happening in the Atlantic, where hurricane activity is predicted to reach historic levels this summer and fall. Many ocean scientists now talk openly of “regime shifts”; others warn, “Expect chaos.” The Atlantic’s Marina Koren has put it more elegiacally: 'The oceans we knew are already gone.'”
The effects of ocean warming are vast, but often invisible.
06/22/2024
The question that is the title for this page is becoming more and more relevant.
“People will die because of global warming on this very day.”
[gift link}
Scorching heat across five continents set 1,400 records this week and showed how human-caused global warming has made catastrophic temperatures commonplace.
06/19/2024
This reminder about the inexorable nature of climate change, as long as humans keep pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere:
It only gets worse from here.
Tropical storm due to form in Gulf of Mexico, adding to extreme weather as north-east and midwest bake
06/18/2024
Speaking of plastics, see if this makes you lose sleep at night. Stunning repercussions of this plastic world we have made. Well, we breathe that world now with every breath in our very own homes, in our schools, by what we wear, what we package, what we eat. And now these microplastics are in our bodies, our babies, our placentas, our brains. This is a gift link and a must-read.
Every time you take a breath, you could be inhaling microplastics. See how tiny and dangerously invasive they can be.
06/18/2024
The disgusting human practice of dumping our garbage. If we are going to continue to live here, we need to stop trashing the planet.
"About 2,300 miles west of central Chile, Easter Island (also known as Rapa Nui) is among the most remote spots on Earth – and among the most polluted."
One of the world’s most remote populations must deal with a flood of multinational plastic, much of it tossed overboard by the factory fishing ships hoovering up sealife just offshore
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What are the cultural/spiritual roots of the ecological crisis unfolding across our planet?
What is the meaning of “new creation”and what does it require of us?
Are we up to the challenge?
We invite you into this journey with us.
OUR VISION
Humanity faces perhaps its greatest challenge in history. A confluence of trends is reshaping our world, challenging a way of life that is no longer sustainable. What are these trends?
global warming and climate change
consuming beyond the capacity of the Earth to renew the resources we need for life
destruction of ecosystems across the planet
painful breaches within the human community, including racism, intolerance toward immigrants and people of other faiths and cultures, and extreme economic inequality
Around the world communities are emerging to counter these trends in the belief that “another world is possible,” to create a human community living in balance within the limits and gifts of this beautiful planet Earth. We seek to be part of that emergence, to support it where we can, and to make it increasingly visible here on this website.
