Beyond Ownership
Its a universal agreement in every developmental-integral community, that caring for the environment is a byproduct of one’s expansion of identity.
Many of us, have come to the point where the planet’s pain is partly our pain, as recognising the interconnectedness of our ecosystem is one of the most apparent systems to practice a holistic approach to life.
What comes after is not always that straight forward. How should we go about our daily lives to do best for the turtles, the tress, the bees, or unborn humans? Do our tiny actions even matter for the whole? Am I a bad person for not liking paper straws?
In other words, how can we make sure that actions for outer nature are aligned with our inner nature?
That being said, it’s our honour to announce the keynote of Gail Hochachka titled “Finding one’s own soul-centric climate action” at IEC 2023 in May. A researcher of climate change and the meaning crisis, she is an expert of the human side of environmental affairs. She will not only calm all our hesitation of the right action, but also simplify the trends, outlooks of how it all connects in the integral framework.
Gail’s Abstract:
Facing the climate crisis—intermeshed as it is with complex social, political and economic crises—can leave a person feeling incredibly small and ineffective in creating positive change. Such a large collective challenge like climate change—vast, complex, heavy, and reproduced by the systems in which we live—can feel simply overwhelming.
Global warming can provoke feelings of with fear, loss, despondency and lack of agency. In what ways do we, as individuals, matter? What can we do now? And how can seemingly small solutions to sustainability scale across the planet?
Although it was the sum of individuals’ action that created the problem of climate change in the first place, we tend to underplay or not fully acknowledge the role that we as individuals play in solutions.
Also, it is not the biosphere that is the ultimate victim of an unchecked climate change; rather it is the noosphere—the realm of ideas, knowledge, awareness, poetry, and complex emotion. Climate action is a profoundly humanistic response to existential threat, and therefore we need to more fully center human dimensions in the search for solutions.
In this presentation, we will reframe this global ‘problem’ as in fact a global ‘symptom’ of our current action logics and ways of being, now enshrined in systems worldwide. We will then consider how climate change can be held as an opportunity to wake up, clean up, grow up, and show up, trusting in the profound nonlinearity of change dynamics.
Stepping aside of the typical linear ways that scaling sustainability is understood—namely, small to big, local to global, now to later—we will consider the nonlinear ways that every action matters, as you bring your whole self in this present moment to that which affects us all.
Gail’s Background:
Gail Hochachka works with the human dimensions of climate change using a transdisciplinary, integral approach. Her work focuses on understanding how people make meaning of climate change and how to engage with diverse groups towards a shared sense of the climate challenge.
Her research has been published in various academic journals and has been used to support non-profit, private, and city actors in advancing climate action.
Prior to this, Gail did her PhD at the University of Oslo on how climate change adaptation can account for meaning-making stages in diverse social groups and be carried out in a transformative manner, with fieldwork in Guatemala.
Gail also has substantial previous experience working in sustainable development in Latin America and Africa, and co-founded Integral Without Borders Institute.
She lives in Vancouver with her daughter and their bunny rabbit.
With Love
The IEC Team