The Climate Challenge Manifesto

We find ourselves at a unique moment in history. The rallying cry of many is, “Save the Earth.” But the reality is that no matter what we do to our home planet, it will regenerate itself. It may take a few million years, but the Earth will heal itself.

The real challenge facing us is this: Can we save ourselves from ourselves?

We are not talking about a pandemic or nuclear annihilation. We are talking about the slow, grinding work of our economies emitting gigatons of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere in support of growth and progress. But to what end?

Yes, this challenge is so large and so daunting that the initial response is to acquiesce to its gigantic nature. We want to simply ignore it and hope that someone else can find the answers at some point in the future.

But somewhere deep in all of us is a murmur that says, “Yes, but what if?”

What if we, the generations currently occupying this planet, began to embrace this as a challenge that we can rise to meet so that our kids, our grandkids and our great-grandkids could look at us with pride and say, “They did it.”

We believe that first and foremost that the climate challenge is spiritual in nature. We have somehow convinced ourselves that we are separate from nature and that this planet is so vast that whatever we do as humans couldn’t possibly have an impact.

Science tells us otherwise.

We need to give ourselves a roadmap to understand the spiritual nature of the climate challenge that we are facing. As we begin to learn, we can begin to heal our spiritual beliefs, and that will allow us to begin to heal our relationship with our planet and with ourselves.

– Timothy Fredel, October 15, 2020