What will it take to save us?

First thing is to take it seriously.
“The beginning comes after the end” **…..the old is collapsing under its oldness. We’ve actually been trying to use the old, long sequestered, by extracting and burning, which is a maximum way of “holding on to the past”. Think “overshoot”. Taking a sequestering, balancing process of nature, and applying that invention of fire. To “see the error of our ways” is the “end” that brrings about the beginning of the new (which is actually a return to the old, pre-industrial awareness that the earth systems hold the key to that in which we must learn to survive (and even flourish if we can learn the basic truth of interdependence. How we define “flourishing” will be transformed as we discover the “better way” of an earth centered notion of “plenty”. )
** This is the idea in Rebecca Solnit’s title of her latest book (2026).

That would get us, at the least, to the motivation to reach deep and band together (the so-called World War II effort). In committing ourselves and collaborating and pooling our visions, we see how the biggest hurdle, undeniably, is the recognition; the confession that we have screwed things up. The much easier part (although it’s far from easy), is to start doing what we already know are first steps. Weve been playing the “Predatory Delay” game because too many powerful voices and forces have kept using their power (money and the hegemony it buys) to keep us in the dark while they persist , shielded from the consequences (for a time).

“TomorrowLand” was a mind-blowing story*** for me, that came out in the my first year of “living with/accepting the Ecological Crisis”, 2015). It’s major theme was the bringing together of the world’s best minds and visions, to get to work on saving humanity from itself, and restoring some semblance of balance to enable a possible fuuture. That’s a powerful thing about humanity in a global brain/noosphere reality that technology has made possible ( the “blessings” of technology that we have not really begun to harness as well as it could be, or should be.) We may be really late, but it’s really important, never more so than now (well, yesterday, or 40 years ago and every year after that — and a good number of years before the scientists finally gave up waiting for the governments to respond to what they had been warning them about for some time ) to awaken to the urgency of reorienting ourselves, as a species, to this end.
*** The story was a movie, starring George Clooney, Hugh Laurie,  available on Disney Plus/Hulu.

Ecological Civilization – The Prophetic Imagination….the visionary theology for all the marbles; it’s the ultimate/real “Pro-Life”. Because it literally is focused on HOW LIFE WORKS best. How life operates from that base of all the bases, the Gaia force. The Creation that keeps creating and always sustaining, when allowed to do so. It’s the stuff of life calling for me, since 2014, around the time I had begun reading Naomi Klein’s “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate”. She had prepared the ground in my awareness of the corruption of what we have left of leadership; or the worsening of what had been allowed to creep in.

I had previously read her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine, where she opened my eyes to the extent to which the oligarhy and their bought accomplices will go to “extract” potential profits from ANY situation, especially those where people arew in disarray (“Disaster Capitalism” she called it). It’s the induced state of blindness and denial that is brought on by the “never satisifed” nature of greed. The fossil fuel execs had hunkered down on the commitment to extracting more and more, and denying the caution about reaching depletion, the vast consequences of overshoot, and communicating that deception of denial to a willing audience through the channels of education, media, and even religious institutions who have given up on their calling to cultivate “Prophetic Imagination”.

“Still No Miracles Needed”, a title in my stack of books to be finished, by Mark Z. Jacobson, fills over 400 pages of tech advances and growth in the arena of renewable energy, all to make the point : the tech is here….let’s get with it and invest in the R&D it will take to move it toward perfection. Most of all, perfecting is done by practice and learning how to and NOT to do it. The way the Indigenous peoples of the Earth have done it for millinea, since the beginning of humanity.

The Sun and Wind are the two major sources to be harnessed. That’s the easiest part. It’s there for us, in truly unlimited quantity, to harness. We still have to take care with how we do that. But the turning ; the redirecting of our efforts to switching our energy systems over to renewable ways, across the board, must be given focused effort. We will be perfecting the sustainability and just transitioning as we go, just as we have with all advances.

We are witnessing , in the United States, at this time, the incredible and stunning hubris of an oligarchy that apparently thinks it has it all under control (because where it doesn’t, it just reaches out to find their “point man— or woman” to send in reinforcements of what amounts to a “flailing away” at any signs of recognition of anything amiss, and doubling down in the other direction of further destruction in the guise of “progress” and , most of all, “owning the libs”.) Any recognition of this vast network of evil in operation is set upon by punitive and repressive forces to attempt to squelch (“once and for all” they think) and silence and even disappear those with the vision of better things.

For us, this is “Ecological Civilization”. I first heard this term when I attended a conference that identified this in the title, and I was to find out what that meant, and how thoroughly Theological this effort was to become for my life going forward. It led to my declaring my calling as “EcoEcclesia: A Church in an Ecological Crisis”. The Church and other religious insititutions of the world (as well the “non-institutional”, the more grassroots religious communities, most of which are already with the program and have been for centuries) must undertake this project as a vast Reformation which dwarfs the Protestant Reformation in terms of orienting theology to revalue long lost purposes. This one is to recover the theme of “Creation” and deconstruct our notions of “God” by seeking recovery of the intimacy of that “being” with Creation by reimagining “immanence”. The idea of “worshipping Nature” needs to be set alongside “worshipping God” as equal, intertwined, and inextricable. It is denying neither God nor Creation, but enhancing and clarifying both by affirming their deep intimacy. It’s a theological Deep Ecology. That Deep Ecology is Real Theology. The day we recognize that is Earth Day.

Written on Wednesday, April 22, 2026, at the behest of The Climate Crisis Club’s request for contributions for Earth Day: How can we save nature?  https://climatecrisisclub.org/blog/f/earth-day-2026-how-can-we-help-save-nature