“You don’t understand, the United States will not be making cars.” The film Climate Refugees quotes President Roosevelt speaking to auto executives at the outset of World War II. Most of us know about the mobilization of American industry to build a war machine capable of defeating the Axis Powers. Fewer of us understand what it took. Read More
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|Photo by bitzi took his umbrella and left|http://www.flickr.com/photos/bitzi/193922475/|
My wife and I are wrapping up our annual winter vacation to visit family in Florida. Each year this proves to be something of a spiritual practice for me, and this trip has been no different. As wonderful as it is to slow down, un-hunch shoulders, and wear fewer layers, the focus of my practice tends not to be the natural surroundings and climate so much as what I find to be the challenging social environment.
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|Photo by bitzi took his umbrella and left|http://www.flickr.com/photos/bitzi/193922475/|
My wife and I are wrapping up our annual winter vacation to visit family in Florida. Each year this proves to be something of a spiritual practice for me, and this trip has been no different. As wonderful as it is to slow down, un-hunch shoulders, and wear fewer layers, the focus of my practice tends not to be the natural surroundings and climate so much as what I find to be the challenging social environment.
3 CommentsOf course we can! It’s what we do! But can we evolve at will? Can we be a conscious part of our evolutionary process? I’m not trying to get trippy here; it just seems to me like we have to evolve and we have to do it fast. A few weeks back Nicholas Kristoff wrote a piece titled “When Our Brains Short-Circuit,” he tells us that “evolution has programmed us to be alert for snakes and enemies with clubs, but we aren’t well prepared to respond to dangers that require forethought.” His point is that we might be quick to freak out about terrorism (things blow up right away), but terribly slow to act when it comes to global warming (it unfolds over decades) – but which is more deadly?
And our big problem is that the political process we have forces lawmakers to move swiftly on whatever is freaking out the most people, even if it is at the expense of the long-term, or civil liberties for that matter.
We were intelligently designed to run from a saber-toothed tiger, but we have not yet evolved to deal smartly with the massive problems our own “advancement” has created –seems that we evolved unevenly, very fast industrially but very slow morally. And this is where my question comes back in. Is there anything we can do to advance our own evolutionary process? Are there modes of engagement with our selves that might help to catalyze radical shifts in our awareness? Alarmist communications only take us so far. Technical fixes are moving too slowly. Global warming can only be stopped by a radical shift in what Ron Haifetz would call the level of our values, beliefs and assumptions. I call this an evolutionary shift.
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