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Anger that sinks into despair is powerless to make a change. Anger that evolves into conviction is unstoppable.
If we do not halve our emissions by 2030, we are highly unlikely to be able to halve emissions every decade until we reach net zero by 2050.
This crisis both dwarfs and encompasses any other issue we may care about.
We’ve come to realize, by growing our own, that food is expensive because it should be expensive—it takes valuable resources to grow it, after all. Water. Soil. Sweat. Time.
The most fundamental change was that collectively—as citizens, corporations, and governments—we began adhering to a new bottom line: “Is it good for humanity whether profit is made or not?”
Humanity was only ever as doomed as it believed itself to be. Vanquishing that belief was our true legacy.
Paradoxically, systemic change is a deeply personal endeavor.
a regenerative economy, an economy that operates in harmony with nature,
We need to cultivate a deep and abiding sense of stewardship.
It’s not complicated, but neither is it easy.
We see the direction the world is headed, and we throw up our hands. Yes, we think, it’s terrible, but it’s so complex and so big and so overwhelming. We can’t do anything to stop it. This learned reaction is not only untrue, it’s become fundamentally irresponsible. If you want to help address climate change, you have to teach yourself a different response.
Viewing our reality with optimism means recognizing that another future is possible, not promised.
We are all in the same boat. A hole at one end of the boat does not mean that only the occupants sitting there will drown. We all win or lose together.
If we remove the pressures we have wielded, nature tends to return to health.
We can no longer afford the indulgence of feeling powerless.
The time for doing what we can has passed. Each of us must now do what is necessary.
Recognize and understand the inherent impermanence of our world, and build a practice of nonattachment.
Identity and consumption keep moving closer together.
Forests create the conditions for forests, in a self-sustaining system.
We will lose the great forests of this Earth the way, in an old saying, people go bankrupt: first very slowly, and then very fast.
Almost all tropical deforestation is driven by demand for four commodities: beef, soy, palm oil, and wood.
In short, we could return the climate to how it was decades ago just by planting trees.
But GDP is a poor marker of what human beings need in order to thrive, as it is all about extracting, using, and discarding resources.
the days of valuing how quickly we can dig stuff up and turn it into trash have to come to an end, not as a matter of ideology or policy but as a matter of survival.
