We’re excited to present this special edition of Fired Up! dedicated to the urgent issue of climate change. Our focus was galvanized by the Climate Change & Consciousness Conference, a gathering of thought leaders at the Findhorn eco-village in Scotland in April, with talks and workshops streamed to hubs of concerned folks all over the world.
As you’ll see when you browse this edition, people responded in many ways to our call for submissions—the 30+ poems, essays, images, songs and skits run the gamut of passionate emotion from grief and anger to zany humor.
Many of the pieces were presented at a community reading at Deb Koffman’s Artspace in Housatonic MA, which is available to us on Vimeo through the good offices of our local community TV station, CTSB.
We hope you’ll be energized and inspired by this special edition of Fired Up! And there’s much more coming up!
You can find out more about how we’re thinking about and planning for climate change here in western Massachusetts by connecting with the South Berkshire Climate Change & Consciousness Hub, a nodal point for a number of local groups including the Alliance for a Viable Future and Living the Change Berkshires.
Convened by Rosa Zubizarreta and Jennifer Browdy, the SBCCC Hub will be hosting more climate-changed related events in the Berkshires this fall, including a Deep Adaptation Dialogue gathering featuring the influential environmental leader Jem Bendell and a workshop presentation of Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects, led by Aravinda Ananda. Stay tuned to our Hub Facebook group for registration information about these Great Barrington-based events.
The archive of Findhorn conference talks–including presentations by Vandana Shiva, Charles Eisenstein, Bill McKibben, Pat McCabe, Joanna Macy and more–is available to the Hub for public screenings; if you would like to hold a screening and facilitated discussion at your organization, school or place of worship, you can get in touch with Rosa or Jennifer through the contact form on the Hub website.
There are also on-going opportunities for communication with Climate Change & Consciousness groups around the world through the CCC Hub network.
Climate change is upon us. It is high time for us to bring our hearts and minds together, through arts activism like you’ll find in Fired Up!; through community organizing and local planning; and through global networking, including the high-profile protests of groups like Extinction Rebellion, YouthStrike4Climate, Sunrise Movement and more.
As has so often been said, but never gets old: Now is our time, and we are the ones we’re waiting for!
