Having been tracking atmospheric science since the days of acid rain from my perch halfway between Harvard and MIT, I can tell you that once you realize the enormity of climate change it takes about six months to go through the despair and hopelessness that realization gives you. I experienced it myself in the mid-1990s and have seen it in quite a few others as they hit that wall and then slowly go through it.
You come out of the despair by recognizing that we’re all gonna die anyway so you might as well do what needs to be done in order to diminish the losses and the suffering for yourself, others, and the ecosphere.
Lately, I’ve been going to Extinction Rebellion meetings (international actions scheduled for the week of April 15 so mark your calendars) and see that most of the people (about half under 30 and half way over, all ostensibly “white” and middle class or better) are going through the initial despair stage.
In the past few years, I’ve found that the practice of geotherapy, using existing ecological systems to repair the damage homo sap sap (the sap) has done, holds out great promise of drawing down the carbon from the atmosphere back to pre-industrial levels (270 ppm) by the end of the century IF we use the known techniques consistently and globally. Geotherapy will also improve our soils and waters and expand the biosphere. However, geotherapy is not even on the radar of the institutions and policy-makers. If the subject comes up at Harvard, MIT, or the other universities around Boston, it is because I bring it up in the Q and A, as I did the other day to the President of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
This is strange to me as Boston is a hotbed of geotherapeutic action with one of the leading proponents, Tom Goreau, a graduate of both Harvard and MIT, living here. I’ve also been suggesting to boingboing for a couple of years now that they at least look at the principal geotherapy text (see below).
Resources for geotherapy include
https://www.crcpress.com/Geotherapy-Innovative-Methods-of-Soil-Fertility-Restoration-Carbon-Sequestration/Goreau-Larson-Campe/p/book/9781466595392
http://bio4climate.org
http://soil4climate.org
http://drawdown.org
Lastly, ecological design pioneer John Todd, has written a new book which covers his whole career of building “living machines” which clean water of the worst toxics through ecological methods. It is called Healing Earth: An Ecologist’s Journey of Innovation and Environmental Stewardship (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2019 ISBN 9781623172985) (https://www.northatlanticbooks.com/shop/healing-earth/). It is also a fine resource for geotherapeutic thinking. My review is at http://solarray.blogspot.com/2019/03/healing-earth-through-waters.html in case anyone is interested.
