This is not a low stakes endeavor.
Currently, we are losing the capacity to maintain the conditions that sustain life for multitudes of species, but are we allowing the emotional resonance of that fact to guide our endeavors?
Maybe we should. tUrn invites all to spend one hour talking about nothing else.
Take in only one sign if you will: the collapsing of the bee population, a dead coral reef zone, accelerating glacial melt, a burning arctic or amazon, the oppression of vulnerable peoples for the purposes of consumption-driven resource extraction.
The tragic first act is over and we need to change the plot.
We need to make a u-turn
and drawdown global warming.
Grab your friends and make some new ones.
It's our turn to step up and lean into solutions.
Turn up and turn out for the efforts you believe in, whether grassroots or global, corporate or community, street or state level, in your family, on your farm, in your faith community.
(Most readings of history reveal that grassroots efforts, even if at first not successful, lay the groundwork for future success, and usually precede massive paradigm shifts.)
This is a rehearsal for the performance of saving the planet's ability to support life systems as we know them.
Your university, and your universe, might depend on this notion of activism.
There are solutions. At this point an overlapping system of solutions is the only way forward. Planting trees is no longer sufficient on its own, but we must nevertheless plant like our lives depended on it. Curricular changes are no longer sufficient on their own, because everyone living now has a part to play, especially non-specialist adults, but we must teach about climate science in the classroom or the next generation, even in their compromised world, will unwittingly do what we did.
For a beginning step please go to SCU's Center for Sustainability
Read the PLAN. Take an ACTION.
The u-turn depends on U working with others for the common good.
Youth are stepping up in unprecedented unity, but to pass this one on to the youth to solve is to shirk our responsibility and ignores the timeline for the u-turn which is very short. Technology is making some gains, but waiting for a technological solution does not teach us to work together any better, or change the attitudes and behaviors underlying overconsumption of energy and goods and untenable extractive practices.
The natural world has given us all the clues. Use your art, science, engineering, business, technology skills and spiritual grounding to get with others and follow her lead.
The more we educate about solutions and lean in to the situation, the better chances we have of turning this rig around.
Thank you for your creativity.
Go create.
For more information, to create your own tUrn event, or for any questions, please contact us at
tUrnproject@scu.edu
408.554.5542
