EDITORIAL COLLECTIVE – It’s because without “a fire burning within us,” we despair.
The energy, passion and urgency that ignites action on the climate crisis tragedy will not come from the passivity of despair or giving up.
When your house is burning, it’s impossible to remain passive. And since there’s nowhere to run on the planet to get away from the fire that is climate change, we each must find the inner stance and place to deal with it. Hopelessness lets the fire burn us up. Remaining present to it, moment by moment, is action.
That is a spiritual stance. Writer Ron Rollheiser, in The Holy Longing, (Random House, 1999) calls spirituality “what we do with the fire that burns within us.”
This stance takes not only courage but community. And this is what the Greenzine aims to support.
We can turn to David Suzuki or Greta Thunberg for inspiration. But we also have such people among us. They are in the pages of this magazine. They live right here in Nogojiwanong and its watershed. They are each of us doing actions big and small because we care about each other and the Earth. Caring is an act of faith in a future.
The stories in the Greenzine are also acts of caring. They come to us from out of our local community − people and groups with an inner fire that compels them to work, speak out, protest, make art, run for office, form organizations and enterprises related to climate action, write poetry and songs, research and teach ecology, open locally-based businesses.
This kind of community has a spirit, a ‘fire’ burning in it, draws people to it. It gives off energy, an eros of life, a disquiet that moves things (like Parkways and bridges and class barriers.)
We may not know what the future will look like but we know now who we want to be with as we enter and go through it.
The Greenzine aims to provide oxygen to that fire of love and action.
We invite you to keep it burning with your comments, subscriptions, submissions for publication and sharing our website.
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