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.

Awareness and concern about climate change exists. Yet, when we move through our daily lives, our actions often don’t match that concern. In this experiential workshop, we will slow down what is going on in that values-to-action gap. Using an integral voice dialogue process, we will dance around the poles of awareness and unawareness, attachment and indifference, hope and grief, responsibility and guilt, exploring how these show up in our body, heart, and mind—individually and with others. We will explore how modern life takes our attention, narrowing our salience landscape and diverting our focus from actions that are in support of the greatest depth of consciousness, for the greatest span of sentient beings.  The majority of the session will consist of awareness practices and dialogue with a closing reflection on how this impacts your sense of leadership and agency in conscious climate action.