Dialogue Description:

Recent natural disasters of wind, water and fire have been brutally extreme in degree and frequency – weekly wakes of immeasurable devastation through communities, homes, ecosystems and lives. In times of severe crisis and long, slow recovery, how can we strengthen community responses and resilience? How can we simultaneously resist ways that corporate and governmental powers can exploit shock for development gain? When disasters strike close to home or at home, how can we connect our heartbreak and concern to more distant realities (made distant by geography and by racism) of communities who bear the brunt of ongoing unnatural disaster, toxic dumping and disproportionate public health impacts? How do we here in northern CA connect the pain of breathing this toxic air to nearby realities in Richmond and Bayview SF, where respiratory diseases are far higher than the average population? Knowing disasters will continue and increase in severity, what practices do we need to cultivate to open hearts, educate ourselves and others, take care of ourselves and others, and intervene into the racism of dirty energy business as usual?

Suggested resources:

Dialogue Notes:

These are rough, uncut, unfiltered, and anonymous notes taken at the dialogue. We get that these may not be very readable to those who were not in attendance at the dialogue, and, honestly, sometimes even to those of us who were. We still feel it is important to keep them available as part of our accountability process and for archiving and reference purposes.  Some of these notes have been digested/transformed into blogs.

  • CORE trainings – action and skill-building as antidote to vague anxiety
  • Emotions around fire
  • Working in food justice, feeling interconnected systems, yet feel urgency toget involved in climate – questioning what I’m doing
  • Hearing Bill McKibben talk about how depressing this work is, tried to escapeto Alaska
  • Part of our task at this time is to hold the duality that nothing and everythingwe do matters, how to hold this in your body every day
  • Being aware of feeling protected and relatively less vulnerable when I thinkabout neighborhoods not receiving public services – that won’t be me
  • Working with kids, noticing atypical behavior during the fires, talking aboutnuclear annihilation
  • Built up arousal and release, like tag – training adrenal system
  • Observing how denial functions
  • Noticing defeated feelings, sure that world will end in my lifetime
  • Set of ethical challenges – these problems are structural, not about individualdecisions
  • Individualism is counter-revolutionary, what is the difference with climate?
  • Individualized responseo Can get meaning out of, spiritual
  • Not ready to relinquish privilege of affordable rent and contributing togentrification
  • Trying to get critical mass to not fly…?
  • Comparison to vegetarian
  • Moral inconsistency
  • Issues of scale
  • Time frame
  • Gentrification and climate change – contrast with blaming individuals andblaming corporations
  • Meeting with younger folks, war part of backdrop of their consciousness
  • Eco-literacy, how to hold this psychologically?
  • Inundated with information
  • Wanting something liberatory and tangible to hold on to
  • Cell phones and earth machines
  • In 3rd grade did presentation on climate change and global warming and wewere nowhere near where we are now – below 350
  • ozone holes closed – we didn’t celebrate that
  • motif and network
  • how we take care of ourselves and each other – strengthening for futurecollapse
  • Klein and Solnit
  • It takes roots to weather the storm – climate justice
  • Therapy – what is it to sit with grief and horror
  • What more might be possible
  • Easier to sit with if feel that it will end, the condition of endlessness does notfeel safe
  • Mourning
  • Feeling these feelings and holding extreme inconsistencies
  • “Breathe into the firm hand of the state”
  • Urgency and capitalism
  • Dark stories that help us process