Erik Assadourian

And folks like comfortable Gaians, who are focused on long-term visions of civilizations that peacefully-coexist with Earth, who advocate for degrowth, who embrace planetary limits, and who would rather spend time in nature than in protest meetings, we, too, have to come together with the diverse anti-fascist coalition to fight for Gaia’s right to thrive.

Failing to stop the assault on the tools to even track our GHG emissions will mean at best the U.S. becoming a pariah state, at worst it can derail the global efforts to curb climate change and progress to transition beyond fossil fuels. Not an optimal outcome in either case, and certainly worth fighting to prevent—one public hearing at a time.

To undermine the Endangerment Finding is a breach of government responsibility, one that will not lead to an improved future for even special interests like energy producers and car companies.

And it will be up to Gaians to promote a right relationship with the living Earth, based on respect, deference, and atoning for decades of exploitation—just not as individuals, but as economic, political, and cultural systems, even as the levels of climate denial and climate disruptions crescendo and pull apart the economic, political and social realities we’ve known our entire lives.

I walk through some of the different solutions that can help address the polycrisis and post-polycrisis period and also imagine what an ecocentric civilization of the future could look like, if we actually work toward that.

If humanity is going to survive, and play a healthy role in the Gaian system, all of us will have to learn to accept limits – that certain areas of the world are not for us humans to exploit but belong to Gaia and the untold species that inhabit them.