The Opportunity of our Climate Change Crisis

Deforestation continues at unsustainable scales; The great barrier reef is experiencing back-to-back bleaching events; Biodiversity is declining at extremely alarming rates; Monocrops are rampant; We are now being warned of food shortage due to deteriorating Soil health…

We are clearly in a time of crisis.

Most think of crisis as entirely negative.

But the Chinese word for crisis — wei chi — can expand our understanding.

The first symbol here means ‘danger’ or ‘beware’, while the other two symbols mean change point — the opportunity for something new to emerge. If we only see crisis as danger, as a threat to our accustomed ways, then we may spend all our energy resisting it. We need to also look at the opportunities inherent in the crisis.

From an evolutionary perspective, crisis means something has gone wrong. The patterns of the past are no longer working. Crises offer us a challenge, the challenge to adapt. They are the challenge to let go of the old ways of thinking and move on to a new way of seeing.

Thus humanity’s current crisis may not , at its root, be an economic crisis or an environmental crisis. It may well be a crisis of consciousness. A crisis in the way we see ourselves and the world around.

Many of the ways we abuse and mistreat our environment stem from our seeing the world as separate from ourselves. But on closer inspection, we are a part of a delicate and complex system. One that we cannot survive without.

“If this, meaning this me vs the world attitude, if this is your estimate of your relationship to nature and you have an advanced technology, your likelihood of survival will be that of a snowball in hell. You will die, either from the toxic byproducts of your own hate, or simply of overpopulation and overgrazing.” Gregory Bateson

We don’t see that we are killing the very thing that we rely on to survive. If you were to think about your internal system and its health, you might start to take your diet and activities very seriously. The earth is no different. Internal vs External is merely an issue of perception, the skin encapsulated ego — as Gregory Bateson dubbed it — is the cause. Once we let go of this way of thinking and begin to see beyond the boundaries of our individual selves we can rectify this crisis.

“..the whole of our thinking of what we are and what other people are has to be restructured. The most important thing today, is to think in a new way.” Gregory Bateson