Thinking of the climate apocalypse from a spiritual perspective

As I listened to this podcast, I couldn't help but feeling something I felt many years back as I read Unbowed - a memoir by the Nobel prize winning Kenyan environmentalist - Wangari Maathai. She was a strong woman - one who was persecuted terribly by the authoritarian regime I grew up in. What however struck me the most about her book was the spiritual connection that Wangari Maathai had with the environment and trees in particular. Flipping through the pages, I learnt things I had never known about how indigenous people and my own Kikuyu people, long before westernization felt a close bond to the world and everything in it. We asked for permission from trees to cut them down if we needed firewood, the rainmaker interceded on behalf of people when the rains failed - to understand why the raingods were angry at us, we talked to animals, plants, rocks, rivers. We knew that we all needed each other to survive. 

In the wake of the various damning climate change reports that are coming out, it's important to think of exactly what this means for all of humanity beyond a material level. As the speakers say, it's very easy for those of us who live in a bubble (middle class, not directly dependent on land for our immediate nutritional needs, not living in a shack in Bangladesh where monsoons can destroy one's home in an instant.) It's almost easy to believe that we are independent from the world we live in. 

What we really should be doing is grieving the cord we cut from ourselves, nature and other life forms, that allows us to deceive ourselves that one can exist without the other. 

Join Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown, two sisters who share many identities, as writers, activists, facilitators, and inheritors of multiracial diasporic lineages, as well as a particular interest in the question of survival, as we embark on a podcast that delves into the practices we need as a community, to move through endings and to come out whole on the other side, whatever that might be.