From Hawaiian Wisdom, to Climate Justice and Quantum Social Change
Our Climate Consciousness Summit 2023 will nourish, inform and inspire.
Calling all Men: Building on our Power to Relate course, myself and Daniel Simpson will be hosting monthly men’s groups, starting on Sunday, December 10. Check out the details here and drop me a line if you have any questions. Hope to see you there!
Resonant World #56
As Liam Kavanagh and Rupert Read, co-directors of the Climate Majority Project, noted in a commentary for DeSmog this morning:
“Faith in UN climate conferences is at a new low. If we wanted a final straw, the appalling and yet somehow unsurprising revelation that the United Arab Emirates had planned to use its position as host of the latest annual gathering, known as COP28, as a platform for making new oil deals should suffice.”
Yet Liam and Rupert have not lost hope. Far from it: They argue that we’ve now reached a point where the failure of the machinery of climate diplomacy is so glaring that the stage is set to galvanize the kind of democratic pressure needed to force governments to take action commensurate with the scale of the crisis.
Let’s assume for a moment that they’re right.
For that pressure to emerge, it’s going to take a mass movement of people ready to step out of our culturally-induced trance of denial, disavowal and distraction, and inhabit a newfound sense of agency.
Collective Intelligence
And then I’d argue that something else needs to happen, too: By coming together in intentional ways, adopting simple relational practices to speak more authentically, and listen more deeply, in ever-larger groups, we can begin to align with a collective intelligence that’s always waiting to guide us back into alignment with a wiser, more compassionate and creative version of ourselves.
I have felt that intelligence palpably at work in spaces practicing large-group processes under the guidance of the facilitator Thomas Hübl and his team over the past few years. It’s just that we’ve largely forgotten about our innate capacity to activate this intelligence, thanks in large part to the culture of fragmentation, competition and insecurity that passes as normal in our phase of late capitalism, and that represents the accumulation of centuries of unprocessed collective and inter-generational trauma.
Recovering these subtle capacities, and exploring the many paths we can find to deploy them, is a big theme at the Climate Consciousness Summit 2023, which runs from December 1-10, were I’m serving as a co-host. (DeSmog’s UK editor Hazel Healy will providing a live update to the summit from COP28, which opens today in a vast expo centre in Dubai, and runs for two weeks).
Quantum Conversations
Summit speakers include Christiana Figueres, Bayo Akomolafe, Steffi Bednarek, Deb Dana, Ruby Mendenhall, Jojo Mehta, Vanessa Nakate, Angaangaq, Satish Kumar and many other figures whose powerful analysis of our predicament, and what to do about it, is grounded in the heart.
I was delighted to interview three of the most inspiring people I know:
Karen O’Brien, is a professor at the University of Oslo, who has contributed to many crucial U.N.-backed scientific reports on the climate and extinction crises, and whose book You Matter More Than You Think: Quantum Social Change for a Thriving World has helped me view the climate crisis through an entirely new lens.
Karen spoke about her pioneering work to midwife new paradigms in the climate world, harnessing concepts from quantum physics to explore the possibility (likelihood?) that we may be radically underestimating our capacity for social change.
Aunty Puna Kalama Dawson, is an elder with Coherence Lab, a Kaua’i-based nonprofit mobilising “applied coherence” (another term for evoking collective intelligence) to tackle earth’s most pressing problems. The Coherence Lab, in turn, inspired the creation of Kaiā-ulu, a global community blending modern science and Indigenous wisdom to protect earth’s remaining primary forests (for which I have given some pro bono communications support).
Aunty Puna shared a deep transmission of Hawaiian cosmology that to me seemed to form a perfect complement to Karen’s work, elaborated in the beautiful language and concepts of Aunty Puna’s lineage — including a breathtaking account of the role of the Pleiades star system in Hawaiian culture.
Prajna Horn, is the founder of Coherence Lab, a social change strategist, social entrepreneur, business consultant, and community organizer, with long experience in the Rights of Nature movement. Prajna is also a contributing author to the The Rights of Nature: The Case for a Universal Declaration for the Rights of Mother Earth.
Prajna spoke about how the Coherence Lab and Kaiā-ulu are working to blend all of these new ways of thinking and knowing into actionable initiatives to support people working to address the climate and nature crises, and source solutions from a radically different state of consciousness than our conventional patterns of linear thought.
Synchronized Indigenous Ceremonies
Beyond watching the Climate Consciousness Summit 202 and supporting the Pocket Project, the host organisation, there’s another avenue to easily engage with this work:
Aunty Puna and Prajna extended an invitation to participate in Synchronized Indigenous Ceremonies that Kaiā-ulu is supporting at the request of the Council of Indigenous Sages of Colombia, which represents 115 Colombian tribes.
Earlier this year, the Council extended an invitation to Indigenous communities around the world to stage synchronized ceremonies at sacred sites, to raise the vibration on earth, and help bring people and nature back into balance.
You are warmly invited to participate in the New Moon ceremonies Kaiā-ulu is supporting elders to host in-person and online — in preparation for a major ceremony on the Winter Solstice on December 21. To register for updates on how to join the ceremonies virtually, click here.
As Colombian elder Pacha K’anchay, who the Council deputised to carry their invitation to the world, put it to us at a New Moon ceremony earlier this year:
“Our mother Earth is preparing the way for you to move forward. You are not alone, you are in the company of all your ancestors: You carry the purpose of your whole lineage. Your grandmothers and your grandfathers are working on you; inside of you; with you, and you have their support.”
A Celebrated New Voice
The importance of extending our sense of ourselves beyond the here and now to encompass those who came before, and those who will come after us, also infused a conversation Kosha Joubert, the chief executive of the Pocket Project, and a fellow summit host, had with Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate, one of the world’s most celebrated youth climate justice activists. You can watch their powerful conversation by registering for the summit, and we ran edited highlights earlier today in a story for DeSmog you can find here.
Vanessa summed up a message delivered in diverse ways by many summit guests when she told Kosha:
“And I think the world really needs to move to that place of unity, that place of togetherness, to really understand that at the end of it all, when I bleed, my blood will be red, and your blood will be red as well, if that happens to you. We as human beings, we really need to understand that what really makes us sacred is that we are all the same, we are all rooted from the same thing.”
A labour of love, Resonant World is written in the gaps between work I get paid to do, notably editing investigations at nonprofit climate news service DeSmog, and my Tarot reading practice (to find out more, or book a session, drop me an email). It’s a huge boost when people become paid subscribers, and support of any amount affirms that my mission to support the global community of practitioners engaged in supporting people to integrate individual, inter-generational and collective trauma has value. Thank you!