I’m Done with Climate Doom

We can Repair Our Biomes from the Bottom Up, Using Water and Love

I’ve become something of a climate doomer over the past few years. Partly that’s come from listening to my smartest friends who have been studying energy, fossil fuels, timelines, the various plans for shifting to renewable energy, and the geo-engineering fantasies of the tech titans. But there’s another way of looking at all this.

What if the trajectory of global climate could be impacted instead by smaller actions? Could something like homeopathy or acupuncture work on a global level? Just how much influence can we have over the microbiomes in which we live, and how does changing them change the larger organism of which we are a part?

This is the kind of work the people at The Tamera Peace Research and Education Center in Portugal have been doing. It’s an intentional community and living laboratory for social, civic, economic, and climate experiments, and an experiential school for those who want to learn from their findings in everything from land stewardship and raising children to conflict resolution and rainwater management. They may have gotten best known for their open approach to relationships and love, for they’ve learned that the integrity and honesty with which we approach one another is a prerequisite for engaging sustainably on any other level.

The stuff they do actually works. Most significantly, they’ve restored not just the terrain and topsoil of the climate-damaged land on which they have settled; they have changed the micro-climate and rain cycle as well. Their work suggests a “fractal” approach to restoring our world, where systemwide change can be triggered through the activation of remote high leverage points. In other words, instead of trying to “fix” the world through some big top-down plan, we learn to engage in healthier ways from the bottom up, and watch as the effects ripple through the system. It’s a more indigenous approach to nature. Instead of repairing it from the outside like industrialists, we reconnect with it a bit more like mycelia — from the inside.

There’s even a hint of right-wing thinking here, focusing on local biome management practices over global climate governance as a more immediately actionable approach to climate…