When we must pay the true price for the depletion of nature’s gifts, materials will become more precious to us, and economic logic will reinforce, and not contradict, our heart’s desire to treat the world with reverence and, when we receive nature’s gifts, to use them well.
We have to create conditions where people feel safe to feel and to care. That goes against a lot of our programming about how to make something change in the world. Sometimes you can pressure people into changing, you can force them, but the powers-that-be have more force than we do. I don't think we're going to win in a contest of force. I think we need to induce a change of heart. The narrative of "us versus them" is ultimately part of the problem. Traditional activism, which is about overcoming the latest bad guy, isn't deep enough. It just brings us another version of the same.
Sometimes people will have a heart attack or some devastating personal loss, and after that, their political views change completely, and their behavior changes completely. It's not because somebody persuaded them to look at the graph on CO2 and temperature, and they finally saw the evidence and were persuaded. Something else changed that allowed them to see and to hear. What is that something else? How can we cultivate that in people without them having to go through a heart attack? The interpersonal things we do change the substructure of our systems. They are political.
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