​Making the Fool Care
​

Puncturing middle-class indifference
to climate change and other problems
​
​

​Dear Ageless One, please touch our minds and hearts with the facts about climate change. Encourage us to act before we destroy the Earth you created. Help us to change our ways so that poor people, animals, and plants may not become collateral damage of climatic changes.

- Frederic Brussat, Spirituality and Practice (spiritualityandpractice.com)


A friend once commented, "Any fool can see that we are in a global ecological crisis. The question is, how do we make a fool care." We make a fool care by encouraging the wise one living within the fool to come forth. The wise one already cares. All that is required is that we honor and live by that shining wisdom which, despite our foolishness, passionately exists within us.

- Catherine Ingram, Compassionate Presence
​

The present trajectory of life on this planet is unsustainable, and the underlying causes of our environmental crisis are inseparable from our social and economic systems. The massive inequality between the rich and the poor is not separate from our systems of unlimited growth, the depletion of natural resources, the extinction of species, or global warming. Social and environmental movements require an orientation that is neither too narrow and short-term, nor too abstract and long-term to offer concrete guidance. Formulating the requirements for the flourishing of life in all its forms ― an ecological civilization ― will provide the roadmap that leaders need and will ground a hope that stimulates the necessary reforms.

- Institute for Ecological Civilization (www.ecociv.org)​

​Don't Look Up

Film review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat

reposted from Spirituality and Practice
​

Writer and director Adam McKay has hit the jackpot with this sci-fi thriller, cutting-edge satire, and thought-provoking parable about climate change. He has called this ambitious film "a dark satire in the school of Wag the Dog, Dr. Strangelove, and Network."

Considering the challenge of dealing with the end-of-the-world consequences of climate change, McKay asked himself, "How do you tell this story, the biggest story is 66,000 years, without exaggeration? How can we be looking at the greatest story in human history but most nights I'm not hearing it talked about -- or when it's being talked about, it's in the fourth block, or the ninth story down."

Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), an astronomy grad student at Michigan University, and her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), make the astonishing discovery of a comet zooming within our solar system. The problem: it's on a head-on collision course with Earth. Its impact in just six months would be an extinction level event for all life on the planet.

There's another major problem. No one really seems to care. Turns out warning humankind about a planet-killer the size of Mount Everest is a tough sell. People who do not know much about astronomy figure the experts will take care of such complicated things. Other people deny that it is happening or assert that it is some kind conspiracy.

Kate and Randall's spirits are lifted when they get a meeting with U.S. President Orlean (Meryl Streep), but this conservative politician is more interested in the upcoming midterm elections than anything the two Midwestern astronomers have to say. Her sycophantic son and Chief of Staff, Jason (Jonah Hill), is even more indifferent than his mother. Told they need to mobilize every possible way to divert the comet from its path, the President says she will sit tight and assess. "You cannot go around saying to people that there's a 100% chance that they're going to die," she says.

Appalled at the officials' attitude, Kate and Randall, with the help of a NASA official, Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), embark on a media tour to tell the American public about the impending disaster. Their first stop is "The Daily Rip," a very popular and upbeat morning show. The host, Brie Evantee (Cate Blanchett), is immediately sexually attracted to Randall and cannot keep her hands off him. Her co-host, Jack Bremmer (Tyler Perry), is not really interested in the comet catastrophe (unless it will take out his ex-wife's house in Florida) so he asks whether or not Randall thinks there is life on other planets. The hosts are just following the code voiced by a producer of "The Daily Rip": "Keep it light and fun."

Trying to break into the 24-hour news cycle and gain the attention of the social media obsessed public proves to be shockingly comical. When Kate erupts on television suggesting that if people only realized that the end of the world is coming, they would stay up all night crying, the image of her angry face goes viral as a meme.

What will it take to get people to just look up? Two rock stars (Ariana Grande and Kid Cudi) put on a benefit concert urging people to face the truth. But already a counter-movement has emerged fed by people who are convinced that the comet, which is composed of valuable minerals, will bring new jobs after impact. Others place their hopes in a solution offered by the third richest man in the world, Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance) of the Bash company. He finds a way to amalgamate runaway capitalism, corporate power, and self-centered mysticism into a passport for the "cool rich" to escape the comet.

Don't Look Up telescopes the predicted disasters resulting from climate change into a six-month period of watching an approaching comet. The public polarization and denial it depicts is also similar to what we have seen and continue to see in response to the COVID pandemic.

The cultural criticism here is actually even broader than those two specific developments. In an era when most of the media has muted their criticism of what is happening around the world, McKay brings to the surface the twisted logic and the power plays of the rich and the famous. Here is a list of the cultural warps that are touched on in this film:
​

• Media cynicism
• Science denialism
• Hollywood gossip
• Political cronyism
• Big Tech greed
• Oval Office nepotism
• The quest for happiness and the avoidance of difficult emotions like sadness
• The inability to communicate uncomfortable truths
• The gap between the rich and the poor
• Polarization by party, class, race, and age
• Selfish and narcissistic individualism
• Money as the ultimate source of value

​In an interview, McKay stated:

"I've been really terrified about the climate, the collapse of the livable atmosphere. It seems to be getting faster and faster. Yet for some reason, it's not penetrating our culture."

Hopefully, this film will help puncture the cultural ignorance.

In our Topic on Climate Change, for which we collected our quotes, books, films, and other resources on this subject, we affirmed this prediction from an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change." We also noted:

"The indifference of large segments of the American public are illustrative of what Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics, calls 'loss aversion.' Climate change is seen as too distant a problem that requires sacrifices now to avoid losses far into the future. Many people do not want to take a gamble on the future. Another reason for avoidance of climate change is that it brings us into a close encounter with our own mortality and the possible collapse of the world we love and cherish."

So where does this leave us? Again, from our Topic:

"We have seen a shift toward greater climate change awareness among spiritual people of all stripes, and we are hopeful that those who are still in denial about it will turn themselves around and join us in tackling this environmental, economic, and social problem as a central element in our spiritual activism."

THE WISDOM TO SURVIVE: Climate Change, Capitalism & Community from Old Dog Documentaries on Vimeo.

​The Wisdom to Survive:
Climate Change, Capitalism & Community

Directed by Anne Macksoud, John Ankele

By far, the best and most inspiring, enlightening,
​and creative social issue documentary on climate change.


​film review by Mary Ann and Frederic Brussat
reposted from Spirituality and Practiice
​

"If you want an adventure, what a time to choose to be alive — to get a chance to find out what you have inside you in terms of vitality and alertness and courage — what you have to discover in terms of what we can do together. . . . You are born into this. And you are here to love it and see that it goes on."

— Joanna Macy


The Wisdom to Survive offers the most inspiring, enlightening, creative, and practical overview of the spiritual dimensions of climate change that we've seen. With rare clarity and depth of insight it reveals the challenges and the new possibilities that this ever-expanding tragedy bestows upon the sons and daughters of God. We are called to be co-creators and caretakers of the good Earth. All the major religions advise us to do no harm, to mend the bent and broken world, and to love our neighbors — humans, animals, plants, waters, soil and rocks — as ourselves. To do so, we are going to have to face climate change and all its ramifications.
​
We love it that this social issue documentary by John Ankele and Anne Macksoud begins with a salute to the beauty of all creation and ends with the bold words of Joanna Macy quoted above. The filmmakers know in their hearts that there is a deep connection between creativity and sacred activism to save the planet. That is why they have included poems by Wendell Berry and Rainer Maria Rilke in this 56-minute documentary....more

The New Possible
​

Will pandemic, protests, economic instability and social distance lead to deeper inequalities, more nationalism and further erosion of democracies around the world?

Or are we moving toward a global re-awakening to the importance of community, mutual support, and the natural world? In our lifetimes, the future has never been so up for grabs.

The New Possible offers twenty-eight unique visions of what can be, if instead of choosing to go back to normal, we choose to go forward to something far better.
​
Assembled from global leaders on six continents, these essays are not simply speculation. They are an inspiration and a roadmap for action.
​
Now available in print and audio form.

With essays by:
​
Kim Stanley Robinson, Michael Pollan, Varshini Prakash, Vandana Shiva, Jack Kornfield, Mamphela Ramphele, Justin Rosenstein, Jack Kornfield, Helena Nordberg-Hodge, David Korten, Tristan Harris, Eileen Crist, Francis Deng, Riane Eisler, Arturo Escobar, Rebecca Kiddle, Mike Joy, Natalie Foster, Jess Rimington, Jeremy Lent, Atossa Soltani, Mark Anielski, Ellen Brown, John Restakis, Zak Stein, Oren Slozberg, Anisa Nanavati, and Fr. Joshtrom Isaac Kureethadam