Miki held these calls from July 2019 through February 2021. She offered the calls as an opportunity for engagement with others who were, also, grappling with the overwhelming information and grim prospects that humanity is currently facing, most specifically with climate change, as well as a host of other severe crises.
Why These Calls?
Our collective challenge is to find a way to turn around many millennia of patriarchal ways: negation of life; insistence that we are masters of nature and that nature is separate from us; and hubris about our ability to do so without destroying everything on which we depend. If we don’t find our way there, the scientists tell us, our days as a global, interconnected civilization are almost over, and life overall may well disappear from planet Earth.
Since December 2018, I’ve been supporting Extinction Rebellion, a global movement initiated in the UK, in a variety of ways to become more effective in their intent to change the course of human history through putting pressure on all governments to declare climate emergency, commit to reduce and eliminate carbon emissions, and create citizen assemblies to figure out collectively just how to do it.
These calls were part of my own response to the existential crisis we are facing. Specifically, they were designed to be a place to explore some pointed questions that arose in the context of a trip, in May 2019, during which a team of us engaged intensively with Extinction Rebellion activists: what would it mean for each of us to declare our own climate emergency? What would we do differently? What would we say “yes” to or “no” to with that awareness of imminent threat at the center of our life?
So many of us are facing such hard questions on our own. Even if the specific flavor of the questions is not exactly what you ask yourself, if the centrality of crisis in the human family is active in your awareness, you are invited to come together with others for this work.
We mourned, committed, thought together, and imagined futures. This is a time for togetherness, for opening our hearts, even to total strangers, for coming into awareness of our shared fate, of being on the same boat even when, as Victor Lewis reminds us, we are not on the same deck.
As context for what we looked at and engaged with on these calls, you may want to read the Deep Adaptation paper by Jem Bendell.
These calls were intended for all people who are deeply concerned about the impending collapse of our societies and possibly all life and who are searching for opportunities to have conversation, to feel, to think, and to act.
Reckoning with Collapse Call Recordings
Call recordings are stored here.