So all of these strategies—the activist, the reformer, the innovator—are actually working together, and we shouldn’t be overly concerned if others are utilizing a different strategy than ours. In fact, we should welcome it. The Greenpeace activists on the ship are incredibly courageous and bold, and they’re just as valuable as the people teaching environmental education, and those pressuring corporations to be more responsible; and the innovators creating the alternative technologies that can replace fossil fuels and industrial agriculture and all the other harmful practices on which our current economies are based.
The MOON: That’s great. I think people sometimes get tired of the spiritual warriors, though. I have a friend who says, “Can you keep it to yourself? You’re lowering morale.”
McLaughlin: Only if they focus solely on their own approach and only on what’s wrong. If they combine their protests and consciousness-raising with news about some of the things that are going well, that are happening positively, they’ll be more effective. Psychologically, people have to believe that change is possible. The success stories reassure us that it is.
People also need bridges to get from where they are to where we want them to go. If you’re in a mindset that says that everything is bad and we’re all hopeless victims, you’re not going to attract people to your cause. You have to clean up your own mental outlook so that you don’t turn people off. We each have to do our own personal development work so that our political activism doesn’t become a place for our personal issues to hide.
The MOON: I’ve been talking with Tim DeChristopher, founder of Peaceful Uprising, who served eighteen months in a federal prison for disrupting an auction of drilling rights in the Utah wilderness, and he says that learning the hopeless truth about our climate change situation was what motivated him to take action. First he had to go through the despair of realizing that the Earth he loved was already set on a trajectory of climate disaster and that it was too late to avert some of the worst consequences. But then he realized that, since his desired future was already foreclosed to him, he essentially had little left to lose. That freed him to take action.
He said that he doesn’t think it makes evolutionary sense for people to not focus on imminent dangers. If you were a primitive human who chose to focus on the positive when a saber tooth tiger was poised to attack, your genes would not have been passed on. You’d have been lunch.
McLaughlin: Yes. I think it’s very important to see reality clearly. We have two eyes for a reason: to see the positive and the negative. We have two ears for the same reason. Practically, politically, environmentally, our situation regarding climate change is dire. However, I also know the impact that human creativity, ingenuity, activism, prayer, and meditation can have—and the good news is that so many people are focused inwardly on addressing these issues so that there won’t be more and more disasters.
My first experience of cooperating with the forces of Nature was at Findhorn, where we grew huge, incredibly healthy vegetables on sandy soil in a harsh northern climate. All the local gardeners and even the British Soil Association said that what we were doing was impossible; they attributed it to “Factor X.” What they called “Factor X” was actually two things: the inner, spiritual, meditative connection with the forces of Nature, which some call the devas and the Native Americans call the kachinas; and it also was helped by the smart, sustainable approach of organic compost.
To address climate change we need to work on all levels: the consciousness level; the political and governmental—getting companies to stop creating greenhouse gases and divesting from fossil fuels and other pollution-generators. In addition we need to keep developing the alternative technologies that will transition us into a sustainable economy. One of the most exciting technologies I’ve just become aware of is the research by Paul Stamets to use mycelial technologies—basically mushrooms—to clean up toxic environmental wastes.
The MOON: Would you share with us the spiritual purpose behind one or more recent well-known events?
McLaughlin: I would say that the spiritual purpose of catastrophic climate change, for example, is to wake us up to how interconnected we all are. We thought we could create an extreme consumerist society, take all the resources we wanted, create all the waste we wanted, pollute as much as we wanted, and now we’re seeing the consequences of our behavior. An incident like the typhoon in the Philippines is a very in-your-face example of the extreme weather caused by climate change. It’s a tragedy that society’s most vulnerable—the poorest of the poor—are the most affected by it, but that is another wake-up call: to open our hearts, to donate, to give, to feel our interconnection. These extreme weather events are also incredible cleansing and purification events where weather forces are literally moving energy, shaking things up, purifying the air, washing the earth. Powerfully destructive events also teach us to let go of everything and trust in the Universe. I remember in the aftermath of a tornado that destroyed a town in the Midwest , a woman looked at the rubble that had once been her church and said, “That’s not the real church. The church is inside us.” That’s the lesson an event like that can teach us.
The MOON: What do you see as the most urgent spiritual/political issue facing us at this point in time?
McLaughlin: For all of us, it’s the need to be more compassionate, to recognize our interconnection, and to bring that awareness to action in small ways in our daily lives, even if it’s “only” appreciating people, thanking people. In addition to praying and meditating, we can invoke the soul of our nation, and of other nations, calling upon them to live up to their highest ideals and purpose. We can adopt an elected official—someone we think has the capacity for good but needs our support. We can send them our prayers and positive energy to align with their highest purpose. We can practice forgiveness—of ourselves and others.
Outwardly, I think it’s really key to do something each day that symbolizes your commitment to a better world. That is so important. Write a letter to the editor, or to an elected official, or to a corporation. It doesn’t take many letters to get a corporate executive’s attention. Also, and this sounds almost saccharine, but it’s so important to vote. Sometimes our choices are limited and may seem hardly meaningful, but it’s important to make our voices heard. And if no one is running that reflects your beliefs and values, consider running for office yourself. You may not be able to run for a statewide or national office, but you can run at the local level and change the conversation there. When people absent themselves from government, it leaves the field open for the very worst tendencies and forces. After all, as Thomas Jefferson wisely said, “In a democracy, people get the governments they deserve.”
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