Waking Up to the Environmental Crises

Abstract

As a people, as a world, we need to wake up to the environmental crises at hand. In this essay, I name and discuss 11 of the underlying problems (and correlative opportunities through understanding them): faith/belief in the system, Baconian science, the tendency for highly aware persons to be perceived as radicals, the habit of treading lightly at times in order to communicate with others, the severity of the problem, our fragmented perception of the cycles of nature, that we are often lied to, the difficulty and/or inability to deeply perceive nature, identification with consuming and cultural artifacts, confrontation with capitalism's "forced choice," and the processes of numbing and colonization. I expand on each of these and show how we can change course. I then summarize actions of people fighting pipelines in Virginia as a brief case in point of such change.