Gaia Lives!

It might show up as a sinking feeling, a knot in your stomach, a sudden realization that your life plans don’t make sense anymore. Maybe you read Deep Adaptation or you just couldn’t look away from the mountains of (in many cases, tangibly felt) evidence any longer. 

However it happened, you’ve received your climate call.

I received mine in early December 2015. You see, at the time, I was busy preparing for the adventure of a lifetime. In just a few short months, I would be moving to the City of Lights. I had saved up for it for years. Yass, honey! I was going to live my best life ever, reaching fluency in French, writing my memoir, and just focusing on me.

I had always thought, climate change? I’m doing my part. I’m vegan, I recycle. I’ll leave the rest up to the experts. The people in charge aren’t going to let it get that bad, right? (lol!) 

Plus, I mean, the environment is important to me, of course, but it’s just not my issue. And shouldn’t I be following my bliss anyway?

But then the talks began, talks about two degrees, talks about losing island nations to rising seas, talks that laid bare a cold calculus to save the wealthy of this earth and to sacrifice the rest. 

Spurred on by COP21, I tore through Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate. And quite literally it changed everything.

Klein painted a dire picture. With each page I turned, I became more incensed — and filled with grief.

Oh shit — my heart dropped — the people in charge had let it get that bad. 

At the moment, I might have had a few choices. I could have tucked the truth of the climate crisis away in a corner of my brain and gone to Paris anyway. I could have numbed out by drinking or smoking. I could have rationalized to myself: I’m just one person, what can I do? Other people will fix it. Or not . . . I mean, if it’s our species’s time to go, it’s our time, right? I might as well go live it up in Paris.

But really, there only seemed to be one choice. On one level, the cognitive dissonance was tortuous. At a deeper level, though, I knew I was being invited to become something greater.

Within weeks I had left my midtown Manhattan law firm job and begun volunteering with a small climate nonprofit, supporting myself with my savings earmarked for Paris.

In the years since, I’ve learned a whole lot about what it takes for someone to effectively answer their climate call.

As I see it, there are five critical elements to it: we’ve got to tend to our minds, create from the future we want to see, build community, get political, and just say no to Earth-killing systems.

1. Tend to our minds.

Fear and anxiety really only beget more fear and anxiety — and they don’t produce effective planning or action. That’s why tending to your mind is the necessary first step toward answering your climate call. It’s really from a tended mind that the rest will flow. 

Tending to our minds means first committing to a daily spiritual practice. That might sound a bit woo woo, but we can think of it as training our brains for the future. I practice mindfulness, compassion, and interbeing or interconnection meditation. 

Tending to our minds also means seeing our thoughts clearly and then choosing wisely. That’s because we recognize that our thoughts create our feelings, which create our actions, which create our results. 

As gardeners of our minds, we have the ability to weed out the thoughts that no longer serve us and to water the thoughts that do. When we do this, we can watch beautiful flowers bloom.

2. Create from the future we want to see. 

We are working to create something that has never existed, a regenerative future. If we look to our past and our current moment, though, this future might seem pretty damn near impossible. 

That’s why we’ve actually got to go into our imaginations and feel into what that future would be like. We’ve got to hang out there, in that regenerative future, to allow it to become tangible to us. 

What does this regenerative future look like? What does it feel like? What are you thinking as you walk around in this future? It probably isn’t something like “we’re fucked,” or “God, I hope we’ll be okay.” It’s probably something like “we did it!” “We’re okay!” 

Test it out for yourself. Which thought feels better: “we’re fucked” or “we did it”? Which energy would be more helpful for your work?

It’s from this energy — this knowing that we made the impossible possible, that it is already done — that we can then start asking how we got to our regenerative future. Put differently, we ask “how did we get here from there?” as opposed to “how do we get there from here?” 

When we ask how do we get there from here, we’re stuck with all the evidence around us that points to our goal not being achievable, with all the ideas and solutions that already exist and clearly haven’t succeeded. 

When we ask, from the future, how did we get here from there, we’re opening ourselves up to much more creative ideas and solutions — ideas and solutions that don’t yet exist. 

We simply can’t create the future we want to see from the same thinking that created the current moment, to paraphrase Einstein. 

3. Build community.

In order to answer our climate call, we must build community around us. At base, we must unlearn our hyperindividualism. We must actually begin to see and think of ourselves as part of the greater whole again, and to moderate our choices accordingly. 

Our whole culture is built on the lie that we are separate, and that as separate beings we must compete with each other for scarce resources, a lie that finds ostensible support from the way in which evolution is thought of and discussed.

But if we look to nature and events from our collective past on this planet, when singular organisms experienced environmental stress, it’s the ones that came together and worked cooperatively that actually survived and eventually thrived. 

An interesting example of this is the Great Oxygenation Event, way back ~2.4 billion years ago. During this period on Earth, blue-green algae (called cyanobacteria) was having a heyday. These little one-celled organisms were living their best lives, reproducing like crazy (asexually, of course), and doing what they do best, creating oxygen through photosynthesis. 

But all that oxygen was too much to bear for the other organisms that existed at the time, leading to the mass extinction of as much as 99% of life on Earth and making way for the dominance of multicellular organisms. 

And that’s just one example. Relationship and community are actually the sine qua non of evolution. As cosmologist Brian Swimme wrote in a chapter of Order of the Sacred Earth, “The universe gives birth to itself by assembling communities with the capacity to awaken the creativity of their members. If a hydrogen atom finds itself in an interaction (relational) community called a star, it discovers it has the power to transform itself into the elements that give birth to life.”

4. Get political!

There’s just no getting around it: in order to act on our climate call, we must return to community, to civics — and yes, to politics. 

We have become consumers, relegated to making decisions about which cereal or laundry detergent to buy; no longer are we citizens, making decisions about the functioning of the political bodies of which we are a part. 

Make no mistake, this has been purposeful, as evidenced by the systematic dismantling of the public sphere in the past generation. As long as we’re worried about what to buy next, we’re not going to worry about whom our government is bombing or how much money they’re extracting from us upwards (this is not a trickle-down economy but rather a siphon-up economy).

We must shed our consumer identities and acquaint (or reacquaint) ourselves with our political identities, because it is through our collective assertion of political power that we will give ourselves a fighting chance. 

What is more, as we’re reengaging at the political level, we must recognize the interrelatedness of the many other ongoing crises (e.g., racism and white supremacy, democracy, housing, police violence, income inequality, just to name a few). 

At the core of these crises is a voracious economic system that exploits people, other animals, and planet for profit and a story of humanity as separate from Nature and from each other. While the climate may seem the most pressing of these crises, the other crises are no less important, and it’s only by viewing them as part and parcel of the same underlying wrong that we’ll be able to overcome them all. 

5. Just say no — to Earth-killing systems. 

There’s a lot of debate in and out of climate circles about personal choices, like going vegan, eating local, and stopping shopping and flying. Do they really matter? Shouldn’t we be focusing on collective change?

In my view, the answer to both questions is yes. It comes down to a key concept in nonviolent resistance and the shift of power from the few to the many: withdrawing our consent to be governed.

But really, who is governing us? Is it our respective national governments? Or is it a rogue economic system that has actually overtaken our governments?

An evil system is an evil system. And an Earth-killing system is Earth killing. Our continued economic support of Earth-killing systems (like the animal agriculture industry, big ag in general, the gas and oil industry, plastics, fast fashion just to name a few) at the personal or collective level is acting in tacit agreement with it.

Could you imagine Gandhi and his followers seasoning their food with salt bought from the British during the Salt March?

Or what if there were a few Black Montgomery residents during the bus boycott who said, “Look, I’ve got to get to work, and personally I can’t handle this walk anymore” and decided to take the bus?

Nevertheless, because of the pervasiveness of Earth-killing systems in our world, we’ve got to do the best we can, adjust when necessary, and forgive ourselves (and each other) when we fail.

To close, I’d love to hear from you, dear reader.

• Have you received your climate call?
• What was it like for you?
• Have you accepted the call?
• If you haven’t yet, what’s stopping you from accepting it?

If you’re alive on this planet at this moment in history, you’ve got sh*t to do. Whether you’re just awakening to this fact or you’ve known it all along, you know it’s time to get down to business. You simply can’t afford to be held back by negative thoughts or emotion, paralyzed in climate fear or spinning in climate anxiety (or regular anxiety, for that matter!). That’s why — for the love of Earth — learning to tend to your mind is critical. 

Tending to your mind is all about calling upon your prefrontal cortex (PFC). Situated right behind the forehead, the PFC is often called the CEO of the brain. Put another way, “if the brain is one big village, the PFC is its mayor.” Better yet, we might call the PFC “our gardener.” As you might be able to guess from these metaphors, the PFC plays a huge role in what’s called “executive function,” or the mental processes we use to get things done. These include skills like controlling attention, managing time, planning and organizing, setting goals, and regulating emotions. 

Ultimately, the PFC allows us to think about thinking — and it’s what allows us to uncover our unconscious patterns of thought that might be sabotaging our best efforts to actually use our executive functions. And what’s really amazing is that our brains never stop changing their physical structure as we continue to experience life and all its ups and downs, thanks to what’s called “neuroplasticity.” But we can use neuroplasticity to our advantage: we can actually use the PFC to change the way we think and therefore consciously change the way our brains work. 

Two main ways we can use our PFC to tend to our minds are by changing what we focus on and by changing what we think about what we focus on. So first, we’ve got our attention and what we do with it. You might have heard the phrase, “what you focus on expands.” The neuroscience correlate to this is “neurons that fire together wire together.” What this means is that as we continue to focus on something, the neurons sparked to focus on that thing begin to link up. The longer we focus on that thing, the deeper the neuronal pathways get. The deeper the neuronal pathways get, the more efficient those pathways become, and the more habitual our focus becomes. 

We can use our PFC to change what we focus on through a number of different methods, mindfulness and other meditation practices key among them. Cultivating mindfulness, or nonjudgmental awareness, of our thoughts, feelings, and actions is really the first step in changing our focus. It’s by noticing our thoughts, feelings, and actions that we can begin to recognize what we’re focusing on. From this point of understanding, we can interrupt any unhelpful focus and turn our attention elsewhere. We can also employ focused-attention meditation practices, which train our brains to focus on what we purposefully choose instead of what our brains have focused on out of habit.

Second, we can use our PFC to tend to our minds by changing what we think about what we focus on. The term I’ll use for this is “thought work” (borrowing from The Life Coach School), which is the work we do to purposefully uncover and change our thoughts and beliefs. At its core, thought work is based on the truth that our circumstances do not create our feelings, actions, or results — it’s really what we make those outside circumstances mean that creates those things. As Marcus Aurelius put it way back in the second century in his Meditations, “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” In the end, by changing our thoughts, we can actually change both our brain structure and our results out in the world. 

It sounds simple: just change your thoughts! But there’s a lot more to it. Before we can even get to thinking about new thoughts, we need to process any negative emotion resulting from the negative thought we’d like to change. It takes only 90 seconds for the emotion to process through our bodies, and any negative emotion after that period is because of a story we’re telling ourselves. Nevertheless, we often resist processing emotion and act it out instead (think about anger, for instance), or we “buffer,” or numb out, through behaviors like drinking, overworking, or Netflix. But once we do process it and do the work to uncover the thoughts that led to the negative emotion in the first place, we can set about changing those thoughts. And when we change our thoughts, we begin to show up in the world in a different way. 

You’ve done something amazing. 🎉 By becoming vegan, you’ve unleashed a curative force — not just for your own body, but for the entire world. That’s because going vegan can slash your carbon “foodprint” by more than half. In fact, according to The Vegan Calculator, over the course of just 30 days, one vegan saves:

• 33,000 gallons of water
• 1,200 pounds of grain
• 900 square feet of forest
• 30 animals’ lives and
• 600 pounds of carbon.

Indeed, above and below, there’s healing going on.

But what if I told you that there’s a way to supercharge the restorative powers of your vegan diet, that following a few simple steps will go even further in protecting you, your loved ones, our human family, and the beautiful biosphere in which we live, move, and have our being? You’d be all over that, am I right?

Well, there is a way to do just that, to turn your plant-based lifestyle into a planet-based lifestyle (as I like to call it!), and it’s as easy as the three Rs, plus two! (Thanks to Bea Johnson of Zero Waste Home for this framework.)

1. Refuse what you do not need.

The first step is to say “thanks, but no thanks” to what you don’t need.

I became a vegan because I realized we’ve come to a point in human history in which we don’t need to use animals (And who wants to be the cause of unnecessary suffering anyway?) I also decided to do my best to cut out single-use plastics — ’cause, yikes, have you seen what plastic does to our bodies and our world? Basically, I try to say no to anything I know I’m just going to toss. The less we bring into our house, the more we keep out of the landfill!

Of course, a little preparation can go a long way, so I often carry my own reusable bag, utensils, drinking cup, glass straw, and handkerchief (they’re coming back, y’all). Tip: you can even DIY these items. For instance, I carry a cleaned-out jam jar so I’m never without water! It’s super light and it seals tightly, so my purse stays spill free. Here’s a snapshot of what I keep in my purse, so I’m always prepared to refuse the waste but not a taste. 😉

2. Reduce what you have.

The mantra for this step is simplify, simplify, simplify! And to do so, ask yourself: What brings value or joy into my life? Then put back into circulation whatever doesn’t.

I like making my reduction efforts into a game to see just how far I can go. And it goes without saying that cleaning out the closet or garage can be fun and cathartic! But bottom line, I’ve learned that going back to basics is not just cost effective, but more effective period.

You see, I used to have a bit of a beauty product addiction. But when I started washing my face with just water and using a healing oil such as argan or rosehip as a moisturizer, my skin cleared up right away. Getting rid of those chemicals was the best thing I could have done for myself, not to mention my pocketbook…. Now as general rule, if I can’t eat it, it doesn’t go onto my body. (I break that rule for a small bag of makeup, ’cause, well, I’m vain.)

And speaking of effective, did you know that diluted white vinegar can replace your household disinfectant, stain and grease remover, grout cleaner, bathroom cleaner, kitchen cleaner, and more? Add a few drops of your favorite essential oil and you’ve got an all-in-one product that will rival the entire Mrs. Meyer’s line at a smidgen of the cost! And you won’t have to keep this cleaner locked up away from the dog or kids.

3. Reuse what you consume.

Reusing what you consume means ditching disposables all the way to the bank. It can also mean getting a little creative with things that have reached their intended end, like repurposing an old t-shirt as a rag or turning coconut pulp into flour after making coconut milk.

One of my favorite reuse hacks is making my own apple cider vinegar from apple cores. You wouldn’t believe how easy it is — you can practically set it and forget it. If you like apples and ACV, you’ve got to try the recipe.

4. Recycle what you cannot refuse, reduce, or reuse.

I used to think that recycling was enough. But then I learned the truth. First, only a portion of the things we think we recycle actually gets recycled! Second, an immense amount of energy (resulting in greenhouse gas emissions) goes into the recycling process. Just think: First the material to be recycled is transported, then it’s mechanically and manually sorted, then maybe transported some more, then the material is actually broken down and processed. Plus, some things we recycle are toxic and endanger the lives of those who process them. What’s more, recycled plastic is usually downcycled. So recycling is not enough, but it is necessary! That’s why it’s number four in this process.

5. Rot (compost) the rest.

The final step toward a planet-based, zero-waste lifestyle is to rot, or compost, everything else. Lots of locales are moving toward collecting compost curbside along with recycling (and trash, but let’s forget about that!), and if that’s not yet happening in your neck of the woods, you might find a drop-off location or consider creating your own backyard compost heap. Just think of how happy your garden will be! 🥰

So there you have it! By following these simple steps, you’ll magnify the benefits of your plant-based lifestyle at all levels, from the personal to the planetary. Keep in mind though that this is a process, so as always, treat yourself with love, compassion, and forgiveness. And remember, what you’re giving up is nothing in comparison to what you’ll gain.