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Move beyond concept of the "environment"

Change is possible only if there is a recognition that people and planet are ultimately one and the same.

You carry Mother Earth within you

Mother Earth is not just your environment

Fear, separation, hate and anger come from the wrong view that you and the earth are two separate entities

Putting an economic value on nature is not enough

We want to be connected. That is the meaning of love, to be at one. When you love someone you want to say I need you, I take refuge in you. You do anything for the benefit of the Earth and the Earth will do anything for your wellbeing

When we recognise the virtues, the talent, the beauty of Mother Earth, something is born in us, some kind of connection, love is born

Looking deeply, we see that it's possible to work in the corporate world in a way that brings a lot of happiness both to other people and to us ... our work has meaning

How mindfulness can reconnect people to

Mother Earth

Many people suffer deeply and they do not know they suffer

They try to cover up the suffering by being busy. Many people get sick today because they get alienated from Mother Earth.

The practice of mindfulness helps us to touch Mother Earth inside of the body and this practice can help heal people

be awake to the fact that the earth is in danger and living species are in danger

Every moment can be a happy moment.

Need to deal with ones own anger to be an effective social activist

Only if people discover compassion for themselves will they be able to confront those they hold accountable for polluting our seas and cutting down our forests

Sometimes something wrong is going on in the world and we think it is the other people who are doing it and we are not doing it.

. If you are burdened with anger, fear, ignorance and you suffer too much, you cannot help another person.

Touching the "ultimate dimension"

We know that we do not have to look for the ultimate outside of ourselves – it is available within us, in this very moment

there is a very real risk that we will continue on our destructive path and that civilisation may collapse.

When the need to survive is replaced with greed and pride, there is violence, which always brings about unnecessary devastation.

If we are able to touch deeply the historical dimension – through a leaf, a flower, a pebble, a beam of light, a mountain, a river, a bird, or our own body – we touch at the same time the ultimate dimension.

Remaining optimistic despite risk of impending catastrophe

maintaining optimism is essential if we are to find a way of avoiding devastating climate change and the enormous social upheavals that will result.

We have constructed a system we can't control. It imposes itself on us, and we become its slaves and victims.

In my mind I see a group of chickens in a cage disputing over a few seeds of grain, unaware that in a few hours they will all be killed

biggest environmental issues

outsourced your pollution

but at the expense of the American public.

And I said my job would be to associate them with the reality out there. They're insulated -- heavily insulated -- they don't deal with reality.

And they, if you notice, I haven't seen any of their annual reports that put in the cost of the natural resources that they use

People are extracting

I said, how can you as CEOs of corporations do what you're doing, in terms of extraction, without looking at the consequences?

And that's the problem.

He says, well, as you know, if somebody is living in those terms, they're not going to progress. They're just going to be happy just the way they are. There'll be no progress. And he says, as you know, the bottom line of our civilization is greed.

selfishness

teach them to be selfish, so they can progress

The responsibility of leadership is to look that far ahead

directly due to the idea of capitalism

to give thanks, be thankful for what you have, and to share. And the third one would be respect.

hat's was people power did that. Germany didn't want it, East Germany didn't want it, nobody wanted it. People wanted it, and nothing could stop them. Once they get in a move in that direction they become a force. It's very difficult -- it's not a manageable force -- and that's why leadership is so vital and important.

leadership and the control factor for human beings, in particular, is moral. If you don't have moral law you don't have any law. If there's no moral law, you don't have any.

there's no mercy

There's only law

You're going to suffer the consequence, and that's right where we're headed right now. Six-point-six billion people and more coming every minute as we sit here. That's a compound

And it takes some understanding to rise to the occasion. You've got to comprehend what's going on.

When the Peacemaker talked to us about the foundation of the confederacy, he said the first principle is peace. And you know the Indian word for peace; it also means health. The same word.

It starts with the people; the earth, everything that grows on the earth, bushes, trees, what lives in the trees, what lives on the earth; water, what lives in the water; and food, what grows, where it grows. And the leaders, the animal leaders, who lead the animal. We acknowledge thanksgiving for them.

You're supposed to develop them and then share with those that don't have them. That's how everything has equity. So you come back to that.

And what can we do about it?

bout the world's "accelerating" race toward environmental calamity,

t's always about progress today

No, you sacrifice.

You know, how often do you hear that the United States uses one quarter of the earth's resources and we're only 7 percent of the population. And we use one quarter.

no one paid it much attention,

prescription for long-term disaster.

Its purely voluntary agreements committed no one to anything, and even if countries signaled their intentions to cut carbon emissions, there was no enforcement mechanism

The Buddhist approach is that the mind and body are connected.

we become more and more familiar with our mind, and in particular we learn to recognize the movement of the mind, which we experience as thoughts. We do this by using an object of meditation to provide a contrast or counterpoint to what’s happening in our mind. As soon as we go off and start thinking about something, awareness of the object of meditation will bring us back.

Unlike television, nature does not steal time; it amplifies it

Given a chance, a child will bring the confusion of the world to the woods, wash it in the creek, turn it over to see what lives on the unseen side of that confusion

Experiencing ourselves in relationship to the natural world cultivates something unexpected yet so clear in the woods: the capacity to generate genuine love, for self, for others, and for the world.

The woods remind us of the wide expanse of universe in which we actually live, and appreciation and gratitude naturally ripen; being in nature provides a much-needed perspective, a greater vista. Rather than the multitasking, constricted space of everyday life, we see the larger corral in which we can tame the wild horse that life sometimes becomes.

t is precisely because innovators have the tools to bring about positive and visionary change that there should be an emphasis on ethics in creative work, entrepreneurship, and capitalism.  

Thing is, and as morbid as this will sound: what’s the worst that could happen? May die. Yeah, its not like I was getting out of this life alive anyway

it's as if the gay-rights movement had to be constructed entirely from evangelical preachers, or the abolition movement from slaveholders.

A more efficient method, of course, would be to work through the political system, and environmentalists have tried that, too, with the same limited success.

According to the Carbon Tracker report, if Exxon burns its current reserves, it would use up more than seven percent of the available atmospheric space between us and the risk of two degrees. BP is just behind, followed by the Russian firm Gazprom, then Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell, each of which would fill between three and four percent.

In December, the Canadian government withdrew from the treaty before it faced fines for failing to meet its commitments.

hypocrisy

But Wallace-Wells’ piece was not about that. It was about what will happen if we keep on as-is.

He’s merely describing what could happen if we cease to act, which no one wants ... except one of the two major political parties in the world’s most powerful country, including the man in charge of the executive branch and military

There’s been a sort of general failure of imagination that means we’ve accepted what’s the median-likely outcome as a worst-case scenario. As a result we’ve been a bit handicapped in thinking about how much action needs to be taken.

Things stay roughly as they are” is just as improbable as the worst-case scenario he lays out, yet I’d venture to guess it is believed (or more importantly, envisioned) by vastly more people. Part of that is because envisioning the best-case scenario is easy — it looks just like now! — while envisioning the worst-case scenario is very difficult. It’s especially difficult because the worst-case scenario is treated by the very few people who understand it as a kind of forbidden occult knowledge to which ordinary people cannot survive exposure. Nobody can talk about it without getting scolded by the hope police.

it’s just weird for journalists and analysts to worry about overly alarming people regarding the biggest, scariest problem humanity has ever faced.

When there are important things that people don’t understand, journalists should explain those things. Attempts at dime-store social psychology are unlikely to lead to better journalism.

nobody really knows anything. Even if there are accurate statements about how people in general respond to messages in general, they won’t tell you much about how you ought to communicate with the people you want to reach.

Similarly, the dry, hedged language of science is not the only serious or legitimate way to communicate, though climate scientists often mistake it as such.

consciously pitched to reach and inspire some mythical average reader (as encountered in social science studies filtered through popular journalism) tends to be flavorless and dull.

engineering

a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us.

it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it

I just try to communicate like I would like to be communicated to, frankly and clearly, as though I’m talking to a friend in a bar.