Choose Life
“I give you the choice between life and death, between blessings and curses. Now I call on heaven and earth to witness the choice you make. Oh, that you would choose life, so that you and your descendants might live!”- Deuteronomy 30:19
Today I’m going to offer one over-arching strategy for the work ahead, along with three climate-specific strategies, and one very specific tactic, that will help us address other big problems as well.
First, the overarching strategy:
Choose Life.
What does it mean to choose life in these times? Especially in the face of daily injustices and lies and horror—an affront to sane and rational and sensitive people, with our young people asking “How do I even hope?”, with the rise of political violence in America, and with the climate crisis looming?
Now is not the time to wallow in cynicism or despair—to give in to a crisis of spirit… but rather it is a time to double down on life itself.
Choose life!
Here are three strategies for doing so. These happen to address the most immediate threat to life on Planet Earth: climate catastrophe:
Transform or dismantle the destructive systems and structures that are annihilating living systems, disproportionately affecting communities, indigenous lands and people of color, and perpetuating the release of carbon in the atmosphere and toxins into the biosphere. Humans created these destructive systems, it is up to us to dismantle them.
Preserve and regenerate living systems. Take Actions to: Create habitat and Rehydrate the landscape. In climate-speak: Turn atmospheric carbon into frogs and trees and newts and otters.
Activate humans (everybody) to do one or both of the above.
And now for the one specific tactic:
Engage people in loving life. Focus on regenerating life in devastated places, together: whether these places are in nature, in our community, our family or in one single human heart. Doing so:
Transforms humans from inaction to action.
Activates people to a mission larger than themselves.
Requires that we learn how to navigate the grief cycle–especially anger and despair.
Challenges us to work from love not fear.
To change hearts and minds requires that we somehow find a path to joy in the work ahead. Joy tells us that this is ours to do.
The good news: there is JOY in this work. It is up to us to find it, to activate it, to cultivate it in ourselves and others.
In other words: Choose life.