Climate Quotes

“We never were separate from nature and never will be, but the dominant culture on earth has long imagined itself to be apart from nature and destined one day to transcend it. We have lived in a mythology of separation.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“Regenerative agriculture represents more than a shift of practices. It is also a shift in paradigm and in our basic relationship to nature.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“The point here is not that emissions don't matter. It is a call for a shift in priorities. On the policy level, we need to shift toward protecting and healing ecosystems on every level, especially the local. On a cultural level, we need to reintegrate human life with the rest of life, and bring ecological principles to bear on social healing. On the level of strategy and thought, we need to shift the narrative toward life, love, place, and participation. Even if we abandoned the emissions narrative, if we do these things emissions will surely fall as well.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“The new God is the intelligence of a living, sacred universe. The purpose that guides the evolution of species comes from larger, living wholes. The environment creates organisms for its purposes, as much as organisms alter the environment for theirs. The parts create the whole, and the whole creates the parts. 20 Thirteen years ago when I first began telling people I was a Lamarckian, I was met with eye rolls or blank stares. But last week I confessed it to a biologist I met at a conference and he didn’t bat an eye. “Everyone is a Lamarckian now,” he said. “Lamarck was right.” This is no longer fringe science. I refer the interested or skeptical reader to James Shapiro’s Evolution: A View from the 21st Century, Denis Noble’s Dance to the Tune of Life, and Scott Turner’s Purpose and Desire. The Whole has created humans too for its purpose. There is a certain comfort in thinking that the planet will be fine without us, yet there is also a certain fatalism. It is akin to the fatalism that comes in response to disconnection from one’s destiny. It induces a kind of aimlessness. As humanity exits the old Story of Ascent and its triumphant techno-utopian destiny, we are indeed experiencing a collective aimlessness. In that story, our purpose was ourselves. That purpose has been exhausted. We are ready to devote ourselves to something greater. In the Story of Interbeing, entrusted with gifts and bound by love, we realize that our passage through the present initiatory crisis is of planetary moment. Out of the wreckage of what we thought we knew, something else may be born.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“Climate change portends a revolution in the relationship between nature and civilization, but this is not a revolution in the more efficient allocation of global resources in the program of endless growth. It is a revolution of love. It is to know the forests as sacred again, and the mangroves and the rivers, the mountains and the reefs, each and every one. It is to love them for their own beingness, and not merely to protect them because of their climate benefits.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“Climate change is inviting us to forge a different kind of relationship, one that holds the planet and all of its places, ecosystems, and species sacred - not only in our conception and philosophy, but in our material relationship. Nothing less will deliver us from the environmental crisis that we face. Specifically, we need to turn our primary attention toward healing soil, water, and biodiversity, region by region and place by place... We must enact a civilization-wide unifying purpose: to restore beauty, health, and life to all that has suffered during the Ascent of Humanity.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“When we transmit our love of earth, mountain, water, and sea to others, and stir the grief over what has been lost; when we hold ourselves and others in the rawness of loss without jumping right away to reflexive postures of solution and blame, we are penetrated deep to the place where commitment lives.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“...one of the addictions--more fundamental than the addiction to fossil fuels--that we are going to have to give up is the addiction to fighting. Then we can examine the ground conditions that produce an endless supply of enemies to fight.
The addiction to fighting draws from a perception of the world as composed of enemies: indifferent forces of nature tending toward entropy, and hostile competitors seeking to further their reproductive or economic self-interest over our own. In a world of competitors, well-being comes through domination. In a world of random natural forces, well-being comes through control. War is the mentality of control in its most extreme form. Kill the enemy--the weeds, the pests, the terrorists, the germs--and the problem is solved once and for all.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“When we chop nature into bits in an attempt to understand it, we lose sight of the relationships among those bits. But ecological healing is all about the healing of relationships.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“...if everyone focused their love, care, and commitment to protecting and regenerating their local places, while respecting the local places of others, then a side effect would be the resolution of the climate crisis.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“People tend to conceptualize problems in such a way as to validate the tools that are familiar and available to them. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If all you have are antibiotics, you will always look for the germ. If all you have is a mindset of war, then you will always look first for an enemy.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“Thus, what we observe to be happening in the world says as much about ourselves as it does about the world. It reveals what we think is important, significant, valuable, and sacred, and what is irrelevant or useless too. Put another way, what we see reveals how we see.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“Our intellectual habit is to find the One Cause, our scientific programming is to measure it, and our political gearing is to attack it. When the One Cause is global, we cross our fingers and hand over responsibility and power to distant global institutions. They'll take care of it. We hope. But too often, blaming climate change means not doing anything at all.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“We cannot expect a miserable, oppressed populace to exercise much care for anything outside its immediate survival and security. While the poor are kept in a state of survival anxiety through sheer deprivation, the rich suffer poverty of another kind: lack of community, connection, meaning, and intimacy, which can cause severe psychological stress even in conditions of material plenty.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“fighting the enemy is futile when you inhabit a system that has the endless generation of enemies built into it. That is a recipe for endless war.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“We must remember that purposive change is possible beyond what we direct ourselves. We must remember that this is not a fight we can win just by fighting.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“It’s like this: Suppose I were infected with a flesh-eating bacteria that is killing me, and everyone is arguing over whether I have a fever or not. Those who say “Yes, he has a dangerous fever. We’d better take care of him” are closer to the truth than those who say “He doesn’t have a fever, so he must be fine.” Now, my condition might indeed be accompanied by a dangerous fever, and it might make sense to take down the fever. But if the flesh-eating bacteria is not stopped, I will die soon anyway, whether by fever or something else. For the planet, the flesh-eating bacteria is the global financial system, and underneath it the Story of Separation. Development and extraction are devouring the world.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“...in the U.S. during the Second World War, victory gardens were responsible for 40 percent of all vegetables grown during that period: 9-10 million tons...This just goes to show how our notions of what is possible or realistic depend on cultural perceptions. Cultural perceptions change, must change, and are changing. If by realistic we mean keeping everything the same, then we are going to have to stop being so 'realistic.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“Urbanization is not some law of nature, nor an inevitable stage of human progress. Economic and technological conditions, among them the mechanization of agriculture and its conversion into commodity production, drive urbanization. Urbanization is uprooting; it is disconnection from the places of multigenerational cultural embedment; it is a distancing from the land. Yes, there is a role for cities; the archetype of the city will not and should not disappear from earth. Cities can be beautiful cauldrons of cultural ferment, alchemic crucibles that yield products only possible in an intense concentration of humanity. Yet for many, the land is calling; in fact, the trend toward urbanization is already showing signs of reversing in some developed countries.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“Only dead things can be reduced to a set of data. A civilization that sees the world as alive will learn to bring other kinds of information into its choices.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“We must turn away from an attitude of nature-as-engineering-object to one of humble partnership.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“To put it in more shocking terms, it doesn't matter if the skeptics are right or not, because the assumptions on which the debate is based are already enough to doom us to a dystopian future.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“reductionistic thinking pervades the entire political spectrum...When no proximate cause is obvious, we tend to feel uncomfortable, often to the extent of finding some reasonable candidate for "the cause" and going to war against that.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“Living in a delusion, we endlessly re-create its landscape; we repeatedly enact its roles and manufacture its dramas, racing along the same old paths of the maze. Even if we achieve temporary victory against the bad guys, the overall situation doesn't seem to change. We never get closer to the exit. What we normally achieve is, instead of victory, a strengthened conviction that we are in fact the good guys. That polarized view is one of the things we will have to give up if we are to launch the era of ecological healing.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story

“...we live in a system, an ideology, and probably a wounded psychology that allow full feeling only sporadically. The system numbs us; it also depends on our numbness.”
― Charles Eisenstein, Climate: A New Story