The only path out of climate crisis is through our grieving hearts
As we brace ourselves for another night of evacuations, power outages and uncertainty in my adopted home of Northern California, I’ve been thinking a lot about how fragile life feels here, and how the ecological crisis is deepening divisions in what is already a massively unfair and broken system, sitting on top of a mountain of unprocessed grief, guilt and shadow material.
I’m thinking of the firefighters working through the nights and doing marathon shifts, many of whom are incarcerated people working for just a few dollars a day inside America’s racist, classist, for-profit prison system. I don’t know how many of the fire fighters are incarcerated, I only know that this is common, and it’s emblematic of the stacking layers of injustice, heartbreak and the conveyor-belts to perpetual poverty that form the substrate of America — a country where 65% of all bankruptcies are due to medical bills.

It’s incredibly painful to watch loss and destruction being layered on top of a system already built on top of so much suffering and violence. But I also know that this is a pain and complexity that desperately needs to be felt and truly examined so we can learn some very important lessons.
We are going to have to change the way we live, who we are, and the way we structure our daily lives and livelihoods in order to survive the twin ecological and economic crises of our time. We’re going to have to skill up in every way — including doing much more heavy lifting together on an infrastructure level to respond to the complex, existential threats we face. This will take a level of collective effort and organization only previously seen in war-time, and it will require generational leaders and movements to build.
But beyond infrastructure (and in fact, in order to find the political will necessary to build it), we are also going to have to examine our hearts and our history so we can greet the grief and loss of these times in a way that produces genuine wisdom and empathy. I believe this examination and the process of actually feeling, is what will enable us to choose a different path for our civilization to avoid social collapse and mass extinctions.
In many ways, the future of the world depends not on our engineering or technological capacity, but on how we choose to respond to grief, loss, and fear, and how well can sit with those difficult emotions individually and collectively. This is now everyone’s work — from the people at the center of loss and physical destruction to those watching from a distance, and experiencing other forms of loss. We are training our hearts and our communities to become stronger, more compassionate and more resilient. This ache in my heart, and maybe yours too, is part of what that training feels like.
I’ve come to believe that this process of burning, the realization of our deep interdependence, and the grief we feel for the state of our world — these experiences happening inside of us are actually the intelligence of nature looking for a pathway to preserve life. The pain in our hearts is not separate from nature, it is nature, alive in its evolutionary action. This is what evolution looks like — it is excruciating, but also profoundly beautiful. And it will do its work by racking us with grief until we find a path out of the collective delusion and violence that gave rise to the extraction economy we live in — the fallacy of infinite growth that will incinerate us and everything we love … unless we wake up.
So let’s be kind to each other, and especially, be kind to our own grief, fear and sadness, because these ancient emotions are here to show us the road to the healing of our relationships with the earth and each other. Try to greet them as if they were strangers arriving at your door in the middle of the night, having lost everything. Don’t shut them out or turn your back on them — so much of what we need to learn collectively is present right here, in our own relationship with the things we fear the most, and in the ability to discover that on the other side of grief is also more love than we ever thought possible. Our job now is to let that all in as deeply as we can, and then to get to work from that place. As unbearable as that may sound, I believe that’s actually where we need to start from.
Every human, every generation, has to eventually confront death. The ecological crisis is in many ways expediting this inevitable reckoning. The silver lining in this will be the strength of our commitment to living in a very different way — and for many this commitment will actually be born out of the confrontation of our impermanence, our complicity in the ecocide and the systems that produced it, and the realization of our fundamental unity with nature itself.
In the same way that is not possible to truly say “yes” to anything until you can say “no,” I don’t think it’s possible to fully live until we recognize that we will die and that we are dying. When I see the children and young teenagers who are emerging as leaders in the climate movement, I see a generation, in Greta Thunberg’s words, that has had its childhood stolen and is having pieces of its collective psyche thrust into elderhood far ahead of the natural rhythm of life. They are confronting the very real, near and potential death of our entire species. I don’t know of anything that could be a more powerful catalyst for deep, structural change. And I’m so very sorry that we’ve gotten here, and that the wild creatures and future ancestors of this world are being asked of yet more from us — to help break us open by breaking our hearts so that we can wake up and have a chance at a different way forward. (I’m phrasing that anthropocentrically because I believe that everything can help serve individual and collective awakening, I don’t mean to imply any kind of hierarchy or particular cosmology).
We have got to find the courage to feel all of this, and to look at the mechanisms and systems that have produced the ecological and economic crises and the potential extinction event that we are feeling draw nearer. The painful excavation of our own hearts, psyches and societies, and feeling the attendant grief — I believe that’s the first step towards healing and building something new that could scale and form the foundation of the next economy.
I’m thinking of my neighbors and friends who are afraid and maybe even losing their homes tonight, and for all the suffering being generated. May we learn quickly, and may we be kind and supportive of each other. May we remember our fundamental interdependence and the shared ancestry that binds us across time and space as one human family — an indivisible part of the earth that sustains us. May we remember that we are not separate from nature — we are nature, learning in real-time what it means to be alive. Together.