Non-violent communication has taught for decades that compassion works so much better than judging, bullying, intimidating, and coercing. The former is a we-based or win-win way of communicating, while the latter is me, self-interest and win-lose based.
Charles Eisenstein just released a very short essay on why our approach to environmental protection and activism in general, and the Amazon forest decimation in particular, has not worked too well thus far. Our present approach has been to threaten us with the dire consequences of our inactions, but people just don’t respond well to that. Fear-based communication results in cowering in protection, anxiety, freezing into inaction because it’s all so overwhelming, and not understanding how an individual could even make a difference in the face of the immensity of our problems.
Remember when your kids would jump around on your bed in sheer joy, and you’d say something like “Don’t do that” with a stern voice, and then would try again more insistently “Stop it immediately, or else!” Your kids probably kept happily jumping once you left the room. Adults are no different. We respond better when someone appeals to our cooperation with compassion. Eisenstein writes, “Nobody can be scared into falling in love.”
He makes a case for a shift to a life affirming vision of a beautiful healthy planet instead, one that is also service and community based. There are many breathtaking nature documentaries out there (I like those without ominous narrative and music) that show our planet’s grandeur and sheer unending beauty, and which move my heart to tears and love for this amazing jewel in the universe we live on and are privileged to experience. If you have travelled, you may even have been to such awesome places yourself. That is the vision from which to heal our planet. While it is something we need to envision and enact together, it needs to come from within each of our hearts. Your heart.
When you begin to tread carefully to avoid stepping on a slug, not because someone said so but because it feels natural, when you begin to save all your trash for the trash can, when you are awed by an unfolding leaf or dew drop on the grass, when a waterfall’s scintillating magnificence makes you smile, when you can truly see how exquisite this planet is, your energy will shift to life affirming causes. That’s home, that’s the place from which to start healing our planet and yourself.