Resources for becoming an eco-citizen
Here you will find articles categorised using the model I have created for becoming an eco-citizen. They cover topics help me understand how I might make a useful contribution to a changing world. I hope they help you similarly; please let me know if there are other resources you think are worth including.
Coaching Community Collaboration
How might I, as a coach and facilitator, contribute more helpfully to the climate and societal challenges the world is facing today. And what might that require of me and my coaching practice? These are the two questions that have occupying much of my time this year and so I’ve decided to organise a coaching community collaboration, made up of unlikely bedfellows – a retreat in nature and an on-line book club.
Climate Crisis Coaching
“As groups self-organise around the world to process this collective anguish, virtually all experts agree on two therapeutic components: sharing the grief with others and transforming it into collective action on behalf of life” (Joanna Macy, Active Hope. How to face the mess we are in without going crazy)
Energy is Everything
Increasingly we’re all experiencing storms. We’re all leaders all of the time apparently. It was with these two propositions that I began an exploration of leading through storms at the fantastic St. Ethelburga’s. Where I ended up was an unexpected and welcome surprise (if not a neat and tidy set of answers).
Nature Immersion For Climate Distress
The eagle-eyed among you will notice I’ve not published any articles on the environment for a few months. I tell myself it’s because I’ve become busy with work and life in this post-pandemic period. Or that perhaps I’m distracted by more imminent crises. The truth of it though is that I’ve got stuck in my own enquiry about what it means to be an ordinary person fully present to, and in service of, a changing world – a term I call being an eco-citizen.
Rethink X
In the 2020s we stand at a crossroads. In one direction we face collapse, caused by resistance to change and a clinging on to the age of extraction as it falls apart around us. In the other we see a breakthrough to the Age of Freedom, where embracing new, largely technology-led, ways of being takes us to a bright future we can barely imagine. So speaks James Arbib and Tony Seba, the authors of the ambitiously titled Rethinking Humanity, published in June 2020.
There Is No Planet B
“When the challenges are so global, and each one of us so small, it can be tempting, but wrong, to think there is nothing an individual can do to help humans get a grip. To do so is a cop out.” I was so happy not to have read this book before I thought up the section of Still Waters on becoming and eco-citizen. And I was even happier to read it almost immediately after my new website went live.
A Promised Land Not Promised
I have just finished reading A Promised Land, Barack Obama’s first presidential memoir. Weighing in at a hefty 700 pages, it tells the story of his life before the presidency (in summary) and most of his first term (in detail). The presidential action starts in 2008 with the financial crisis and finishes with the killing of Osama Bin Laden in 2011. I am not reviewing the book here, but rather focusing on something right at the end that I found sad and confirmation, if any were needed, that the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible is not going to be delivered conventionally by the establishment, even when the most powerful leader on the planet is charismatic, progressive and on the side of a fairer, greener, more sustainable world.
A New And Ancient Story
I have been a fan of Charles Eisenstein’s writing for a long time now and actually attended one of his courses at Schumacher College in 2015. I guess I would describe him as a thinker and a dreamer; someone who applies intellectual rigour to some pretty radical ideas. While I accept that he won’t be to everyone’s taste, his words resonate deeply with me. And so when I was invited to join his new on-line community, called A New And Ancient Story, I didn’t hesitate.
The more beautiful world…
The Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible is a 2013 book by Charles Eisenstein that had a profound effect on me by describing something that I sort of knew in an unspoken, physical/spiritual way but at the same time had not thought about, let alone said. It’s in the tile really – what Charles describes is known to our hearts more than our brains.
Singularity
I’ve got this underlying belief going in my work and life that is based partly on a primary school knowledge of quantum theory and, more importantly, an innate feeling that it is true. The belief is that we are all somehow totally connected to each other and everything. It might sound a bit ‘out there’, which is when I reach for the quantum theory language. Something like the universe being made of energy more than cells.