Faith & climate practice

A new/old World Order: 1

A new series adding faith to my stories

Update: see the follow-on Faith and Science.

This follows two series: Toward a rational View of Society (1 thru 15), and Speaking truth to Power (1 thru 16a) — click on links and follow from there — those addressed current affairs in light of the Climate Emergency, when I ran a Community Interest Company (non-profit non-charity) and was a scientist on Extinction Rebellion in Cambridge UK. As per my old blog post, however, “[…] my life situation has changed [and] I’m withdrawing from social media, activism and geo work until I sort my life out”. That made space for my spiritual re-emergencs as “I sought out those five who really supported me, rather than the 500 who ‘liked’ me on-line”. Welcone therefore to this third Medium series: A new/old World Order!

I’m a geologist by training who got into computer mapping 25 yrs ago. But when both climate emergency and pandemic emerged, and then was followed by the inability of the powers-that-be to react effectively, I became convinced we’re heading to the next extinction (also More below), one of our own doing as we choke Mother Earth. And it’s manifest through maps that are ‘my thing’.

I was raised Catholic but drifted away. Much later I joined Unitarian Universalism in US, then Quakerism in UK. I followed Re-evaluation Counseling practice for quite a while and recently engaged in Extinction Rebellion activism. Most recently however I discovered that neither of my current activities around faith or activism helped my spiritual journey — I own that and blame no-one else — my cousin and a new prayer friend suggested that if that doesn’t work then try prayer and renewing my relationship with God.

It doesn’t matter, however, in what I’ll say next if “God has a plan”, or we as scientists “acquire enough humility to actually listen to and to engage with others”, or as an individual we “drop out of our heads into our hearts” (esp. for us men) to feel the angst, as the recent movie Don’t Look Up exhorts us to.

Given that, I just realised that if we let God have a design / let us scientists communicate effectively / let our feelings happen, it will appear that mankind’s hubris that is discouraging, is in fact part of an arc that is not discouraging! Let me suggest that if we relax and surrender to the core of our spirit, then we can not only think more clearly and do what can be done, but also let go of what cannot be done.

That is what’s happening to me now. It’s so simple when I think about it: my surrounds have their heart in the right place at a spiritual, collective or personal level; but I think that the reason why the movements I’m involved in are stalling, is that they haven’t put spirit / integrity / feelings in the right perspective. They’re always there — ‘ God is omnipresent’, ‘integrity is king’, ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’— but it’s not until we surrender individually and integrate in our very fibre that collective action can be made effective.

To use three examples:

• prayer helps me let go of it all, and the relief and release help my cry
• active listening as a scientist helps me say it not only as it is, but also as others can relate to
• feeling my feelings helps me process the current emergency, be it climatic or pandemic

I also hope that our collective sharing and learning, such as this piece, will help us through this most critical conjecture of humankind.

This is dedicated to my prayer-friends mentioned above, who gave me hope in this new year.

Addendum: this post by one I respect otherwise, shows why spirituality is needed: civilisation’s end is prognoticated by its collapse into ‘personhood’; I see that going opposite to (re)acquiring our spirituality mentioned here.

More: it appears the Sixth Extinction is here!

The Sixth Mass Extinction: fact, fiction or speculation

“… Incorporating estimates of the true number of invertebrate extinctions leads to the conclusion that the rate vastly exceeds the background rate and that we may indeed be witnessing the start of the Sixth Mass Extinction…”

And yet more: extinction event details as pertain to climate change:

Double Whammy: Two-pronged Kill Mechanism in Triassic Era Extinction Event