Six Ways That Changing Your Life Can Prevent Global Warming

By Peter Michaelson, BuzzFlash. Posted December 9, 2006.

All of the reasons for our failure to address global warming are known. But they are not known widely and deeply enough to send us rushing down the street on bicycles or even in four-cylinder cars.

Still, we want something to be done. Are we waiting for Al Gore? Is it possible it all depends on our own little selves?

A very simple axiom is at play: The better we understand our own contribution to the paralysis, the freer we become to act effectively.

Six reasons or conditions that facilitate global warming are presented here, and each is related to the others.

Reason number one is the indifference that so many of us have for our own health. When we don't care about our health, we won't care about the health of the planet.

We eat and drink food that has the life manufactured out of it. We become sedentary and avoid exercise. We trash our minds with trivia and commercial rubbish the way we trash the planet with garbage. We don't know how to protect ourselves from negative influences such as cynicism, dissension, and dogmatic belief systems. If we don't regulate our appetites, desires, and addictions, the planet's suffering becomes secondary to our own.

Problem number two is our fear. Irrational fears abound in the psyche and are projected into the world. We have many kinds of fear, including fear of fear itself, along with fear of change, of loss, of helplessness, of abandonment, and of death. Courage is admired because it moves us through our fear.

We need passion and courage to address global warming. To generate this, we often have to move through a fear left over from childhood -- the lingering impression that we're powerless and helpless against the authorities who rule our world. This emotional association also generates a fear that if we go up against them we're in danger of being rejected, unloved, or even annihilated.

The male values of power and domination constitute problem number three. Supreme gratification and egotistical aggrandizement reward man for his conquest of nature. Globalization is, in part, his quest to extend his "triumph" to all peoples and cultures.

The feminine mystique is the antidote. Symbolized by Rachel Carson in her book, Silent Spring, it awakened us in the 1960s to the male-engineered poisoning of the earth through the misuse of chemical pesticides. Women's sensitivity and their alignment with nurturing gave birth to the environmental movement.

The male propensity for power and domination has moved from the infantile level to the adolescent. It needs to be unstuck once more. We need to understand that the possession of true strength and power depends on our having wisdom and compassion, which come to us through the balance of the feminine and the masculine values.

Reason number four finds us plagued with an overabundance of political leaders who won't lead. These men and women tend to be followers. They follow the polls that guide their re-election priorities as well as the economic elite's signals in favor of the status quo.

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Peter Michaelson is a psychotherapist in Pasadena, CA. He is author of Democracy's Little Self-Help Book, and he can be reached at PeterMichaelson.com.

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