Climate crisis a chance to reset our relationships

It’s natural to see climate catastrophe as an environmental problem: CO2, wind and rain, melting glaciers ...

The environmental knowledge which drives your solution has at its roots the wisdom acquired over ten thousand years or more. Traditional Ecological Knowledge, TEK for short, values sharing life with all creatures and plants — their well-being tied-up with ours. — the environmentalism of Rachel Carlson.

Some cling to technical solutions concocted by the very same forces that produced the problems they seek to address: runaway industrial growth, pollution, over-consumption, the internet’s electrical imperative.

Reducing greenhouse gases is not a technical problem. Solutions by machines, engineering, chemistry and the like just make it easier to over-consume and demand more. They don’t reach the root of the imbalance driving climate catastrophe.

Manufacturing electricity for a brief 30 years at great cost (in dollars and fossil fuels), as Terra-Gen proposes, is a technical solution, sure to have unforeseen consequences, and “significant and unavoidable impacts.”

Our indigenous community speaks out against this. Wiyot are most affected, and other tribes stand solidly with them — people who successfully lived off-grid since time immemorial.

Western industrial culture has a deadly speed addiction. We want things now — blinding us to wisdom and help from those not addicted.

The climate crisis is an opportunity to reset our relationship with each other and the earth — requiring a leap into an uncertain future with a faith in values more fundamental than the laws of gravity we manipulated to create it.