Sunday Service

Grieving as the Earth, Mobilizing for Her Healing, With Greg Harman  – The Earth has been understood as a living Being for millennia by most Indigenous peoples of the planet. James Lovelock’s Gaia Theory revived these considerations within contemporary conservation science. Evolutionary biologists have proposed that human consciousness itself is literally “the universe … becoming conscious of itself.” Together these reflections in our period of deteriorating global ecological crisis represent an invitation to allow the Earth to grieve through us. But we can also activate as the Earth’s own immune response, as the late EO Wilson once described the climate movement. This talk will guide listeners through these concepts to consider the climate shocks underway and how we can interrupt them collectively. These changes are being felt locally through rising extreme heat and humidity. Deceleration, a local journal of environmental justice, has documented these changes by reporting the recent heat-related deaths of Albert Garcia and Jessica Witzel. We will learn about Garcia and Witzel, understand their deaths as policy and climate failures, and hear a call to organize to both interpret and interrupt dire forecasts of climate collapse.