Photo by Jamie Templeton on Unsplash

🔊 Listen to This Story

It’s tempting and easy to rail against the fools who are willfully destroying the climate of the planet we all live on. After all, they are exhibiting deadly and astoundingly stupid behavior. I rail against them all the time.

But this is the wrong focus. This is focusing on a few thousand foolish people on a planet with 8 billion. It makes more sense to focus on the vast majority, on what we can and should be doing.

Yes, we need to stop the evil acts by that foolish yet terribly influential minority. But that could be like swatting a fly before quickly getting to the big job — cleaning the house. The fly is annoying but we can stop the buzzing. We are bigger. In the same way that 8 billion people (or a tiny fraction of 8 billion people) can easily overwhelm a few thousand miscreants.

Ah, but what to do?

A Plan Coming Into Focus

I’m looking for a way forward, for both humanity and the health of the planet, that taps into what people are already thinking and feeling. In my view, we need to focus and guide what’s already there into some sort of action plan. What do we need to do as individuals and as communities — both local groups and the entirety of our species?

We have already begun online events called Virtual Climate Parties. Although we are very interested in the climate crisis — we must handle this NOW or it’s game over — we see dealing with that crisis as part of dealing with a crisis of humanity itself. We see that people are atomized, that community seems dead, that we are alienated from Nature and from each other. We see the need to reverse this.

We understand that economic, political and cultural forces that benefit a few at the expense of the many are central to the problems we face. And we understand that we must disobey and replace those forces with more humane ways of being and doing.

We must do concrete specific things to save the planet and to overwhelm and supersede the forces that are brutalizing our climate. We also must overcome the dehumanizing forces in media, social media, politics and business that block our sense of community, that put us in competition with each other, and that reduce us to mere consumers and “human resources.”

We can do this, but we can’t do this alone. We need to band together.

Our early Virtual Climate Parties began to bring a tentative plan into focus. We need to formulate a vision that’s an attractive alternative to what we have now, we need to publicize that vision, we need to model it with our own behavior, and we need to build a broad movement of people who have different views (our differences are part of what makes us human) but share the broader view and objectives of restoring the Earth and our sense of community.

Find the Others

My belief is that I am not unusual in sensing that something is incredibly wrong. I feel certain that literally billions of people feel fear and foreboding, that we share a sense that the people in charge are leading us to climate catastrophe and a more mechanized and less humane world. Indeed, we are already in a very sad and desperate state.

I sense that these billions of people are anxious and fearful but don’t know what to do. They feel lost and helpless. And they feel very, very alone and perhaps defeated.

Our first urgent job is to show all of these latent activists, these people who are deeply dissatisfied with the world as it is, that they are not alone, they are not helpless and that there are billions like them ready to do whatever is needed to fix things. We need to show them that they can band together and start the needed changes right now.

We need our first virtual climate parties to model the way, and allow copycats to improve on that model or just revise it to match the attitudes and vision of each new group. We need to be visible to each other so that this movement grows quickly and uncontrollably. We need to overwhelm the failed systems that are still controlling things.

We need to be visible so we can find each other. We shouldn’t be too hard to find. I’m pretty sure we number at least a billion people, and perhaps many billions.
YOUR Next Step

The next virtual climate parties are coming up. Find out about them, when they will be, and how to join. These are not meant to replace other related movements — they are meant to provide a way for those who are not yet taking action to join in. You might want to attend one or two meetings of the existing group — and then form your own.

Stop predicting the future or despairing over it and start MAKING THE FUTURE. Won’t you?