Emotional Resilience & Climate Crisis

We believe in building community strength through nurturing psychosocial aspects of climate resilience, which include emotional processing, connection to place, community ecological heritage & memory, traditional ecological knowledge, art, embracing differences, empowerment, ethics, values, and worldviews. 

There is a growing body of research emerging from the exploring community resilience of indigenous communities that points to the significance of cultural aspects of connection to place, land, ecosystems, more-than-human species, interpersonal harmony, communal coherence, place-based governance systems, and livelihoods. 

We believe that focussing on these elements of resilience in local communities (urban, peri-urban, rural, mixed) as part of nurturing community-led climate resilience and adaptation programs could lead the way in birthing regenerative cultures for the future of all species on the planet. 

We are engaging with the global community, to bear witness to, and collectively engage in deep introspection about ecological loss that is ongoing at an unprecedented level on our planet; and to find pathways to emotional resilience, collective strength, and active hope.

The Great Work before us, the task of moving modern industrial civilization from its present devastating influence on the Earth to a more benign mode of presence, is not a role we have chosen.
It is a role given to us, beyond any consultation with ourselves.
We did not choose.
We were chosen by some power beyond ourselves for this historical task…We are, as it were, thrown into existence with a challenge and a role that is beyond any personal choice.
The nobility of our lives, however, depends upon the manner in which we come to understand and fulfil our assigned role.

– Thomas Berry (1999). The Great Work: our way into the future.