The Efforts of People You May Never Know About

If you are reading this, dear ones, it means that humanity matured in time to not go the way of the dinosaurs.

Please know this did not come to pass without massive effort on the part of people you may never know about.

Hundreds upon thousands of us woke up and worked frantically to avert the ‘asteroid’ of our own care-less creation.

Each in our own way, we faced our horror at what was happening to the planet, reached down through our grief into layers of gratitude for all life, and touched-in with the cosmic grace at the core of being; then we transformed our sense of hopelessness into activism on behalf of all that we cherished.

Personal responses (rooftop solar, electric cars) quickly became political response--ability as we strove to move public policy away from extracting and burning greenhouse-gas emitting fossilized sunlight. But we not only envisioned a more sustainable future, we relentlessly struggled to create it.

Yet as we began to change how we fed ourselves, heated our homes, moved around, invested, communicated, and lived more simply, the consumerist system we were embedded in undermined our efforts by denying and outright lying about the problem. Anger that could have destroyed us empowered us instead! Rather than remaining isolated, we joined together.

Children and elders, students and retirees, scientists and clergy, mothers and fathers, authors and activists, indigenous peoples and environmentalists, we the people studied, testified, organized, formed coalitions, lobbied, wrote letters, petitioned, demonstrated, marched, prayed, preached, tweeted, voted, sued, protested, got arrested…and escaped into Nature to cry with the thinning columbine. Then we came back and kept at it.

The 2015 Paris Climate Talks should/could/would have been the fruition of our concerted efforts to secure and ensure a viable future. The rest, as YOU will see and say, is history.