Pills to swallow

Ugh, we made a big mess. Climate crisis. Biodiversity loss. Ecosystem collapse? Extinction? The prospects, from scientific assessments, don’t look too good. In fact, they look pretty scary. It seems the pill is too hard to swallow and people hop between being in panic or denial. Makes a lot of sense, but unfortunately this does not get us anywhere.

Let’s face it: We did not take care of our home. Our earth. We did not take care of our animals, plants and land; of our fellow living-beings on our home. And almost most devastatingly, we did not take care of our people. Our human fellows. (Well, to be intirely clear, with “we”, I specifically mean the group I identify with, which are, more generally spoken, white Europeans). I often forget, that we Europeans, have a pretty destructive history of colonising big parts of the world, forming a new normality of violence and superiority along the past centuries and therewith setting the scene. The modern world was built on these structures and most of us still carry this notion of being better, stronger and more entitled to land, claiming ownership over ressources, people and land. This often happens completly unconscious and is just another pill to swallow.

The prevailing dominating violence towards our lands, our environments and natural worlds is not harsher than our violence towards other people. This is why environmental justice movements are clear about the hypothesis, that environmental sustainability cannot be achieved without social justice. We strongly stand with them. Justice for the earth means justice for all people. All of our methods try to bring these spheres together and make this connection comprehensible.

We say, we need to face the truth of our crises and lives today, the history behind them and the many – often unconscious – ways it has impacted us. Feeling all the feels. The time for the luxury of denial has run out and coming out of denial can be a beautiful journey. If we let the truth touch our hearts, we can learn a nonviolent way of relating with the earth, ourselves each other and transform our feeling of powerlessness into feelings of joy and wholehearted activism for life - or into what we call regeneration. When we regenerate ourselves, we regenerate the world around us.

Superiority carries the notion to be and feel above the rest rather than a part of it, which brings a sense of disconnection and a non-belonging to the whole. To move away from superiority actually means moving towards connection, and we cannot think of a more beautiful goal or motivation than that. We like to move it move it – we like tooooo MOVE IT!

We try to make this whole journey of regeneration as fun as possible, because caring for the earth, others and ourselves should feel AMAZING and not like homework from our least favorite class.