Given the daunting, dire predicament in which we find ourselves on this planet, what is described by social critic James Howard Kunstler as a "Long Emergency" may in fact become a "Last Emergency" for humanity. Whether we encounter a "long" or a "last" emergency, Carolyn Baker seeks to offer inspiration and guidance for inhabiting our remaining days with passion, vitality, empathy, intimate contact with our emotions, kindness in our relationships with all species, gratitude, open-hearted receptivity, exquisite creations of beauty, and utilizing every occasion, even our demise, as an opportunity to invoke and "inflict" joy in our world. Love in the Age of Ecological Apolcalypse addresses an array of relationships in the Last Emergency and how one's relationship with oneself may enrich or impede interactions with all other beings. Drawing upon her deep experience as a life coach, Baker writes of the specific need to understand our key relationships in a society in collapse, and how to navigate through differing levels of acceptance of collapse, trauma, and grief. Key relationships include those with our partners, children, friends, neighbors, as well as relationships with our work, our bodies, our natural resources, food and eating, animals, future generations, Eros, and indeed, the powers of the universe. Baker's writing is engaging, inspiring, and often beautiful in its depth and candor. She introduces a variety of spiritual practices facilitate our developing a relationship with the deeper Self. With these practices and giving and receiving support from others who are walking a similar path, we begin to live more frequently from the deeper Self, or at least are able to access it more quickly when we find ourselves becoming embroiled in the ego. Table Of Contents • Introduction • Chapter 1: Living, Loving, and Preparing With A Reluctant Partner • Chapter 2: Children And Collapse • Chapter 3: Friends, Neighbors, and The Community • Chapter 4: Work and The Creative Soul • Chapter 5: Our Relationship With Resources • Chapter 6: Loving The Body As The World Falls Apart • Chapter 7: Our Relationship With Food: Mindful Eating As A Spiritual Practice • Chapter 8: Loving The Time Of Your Life • Chapter 9: What An Animal You Are! • Chapter 10: Darkness Matters • Chapter 11: Ensconsed In Eros, Bathed In Beauty • Chapter 12: Our Relationship With The Powers of The Universe • Chapter 13: Near-Term Extinction And Waking Up To Death • Chapter 14: Empire, I Wish I Knew How To Quit You • Chapter 15: Grief And Love In A Culture Of Congestive Heart Failure • Chapter 16: Our Relationship With Future Generations

Given the daunting, dire predicament in which we find ourselves on this planet, what is described by social critic James Howard Kunstler as a "Long Emergency" may in fact become a "Last Emergency" for humanity. Whether we encounter a "long" or a "last" emergency, Carolyn Baker seeks to offer inspiration and guidance for inhabiting our remaining days with passion, vitality, empathy, intimate contact with our emotions, kindness in our relationships with all species, gratitude, open-hearted receptivity, exquisite creations of beauty, and utilizing every occasion, even our demise, as an opportunity to invoke and "inflict" joy in our world. Love in the Age of Ecological Apolcalypse addresses an array of relationships in the Last Emergency and how one's relationship with oneself may enrich or impede interactions with all other beings. Drawing upon her deep experience as a life coach, Baker writes of the specific need to understand our key relationships in a society in collapse, and how to navigate through differing levels of acceptance of collapse, trauma, and grief. Key relationships include those with our partners, children, friends, neighbors, as well as relationships with our work, our bodies, our natural resources, food and eating, animals, future generations, Eros, and indeed, the powers of the universe. Baker's writing is engaging, inspiring, and often beautiful in its depth and candor. She introduces a variety of spiritual practices facilitate our developing a relationship with the deeper Self. With these practices and giving and receiving support from others who are walking a similar path, we begin to live more frequently from the deeper Self, or at least are able to access it more quickly when we find ourselves becoming embroiled in the ego. Table Of Contents • Introduction • Chapter 1: Living, Loving, and Preparing With A Reluctant Partner • Chapter 2: Children And Collapse • Chapter 3: Friends, Neighbors, and The Community • Chapter 4: Work and The Creative Soul • Chapter 5: Our Relationship With Resources • Chapter 6: Loving The Body As The World Falls Apart • Chapter 7: Our Relationship With Food: Mindful Eating As A Spiritual Practice • Chapter 8: Loving The Time Of Your Life • Chapter 9: What An Animal You Are! • Chapter 10: Darkness Matters • Chapter 11: Ensconsed In Eros, Bathed In Beauty • Chapter 12: Our Relationship With The Powers of The Universe • Chapter 13: Near-Term Extinction And Waking Up To Death • Chapter 14: Empire, I Wish I Knew How To Quit You • Chapter 15: Grief And Love In A Culture Of Congestive Heart Failure • Chapter 16: Our Relationship With Future Generations

This work analyzes 21st-century realistic speculations of human extinction: fictions that imagine future worlds without interventions of as-yet uninvented technology, interplanetary travel, or other science fiction elements that provide hope for rescue or long-term survival. Climate change fiction as a genre of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic writing usually resists facing the potentiality of human species extinction, following instead traditional generic conventions that imagine primitivist communities of human survivors with the means of escaping the consequences of global climate change. Yet amidst the ongoing sixth great extinction, works that problematize survival, provide no opportunities for social rebirth, and speculate humanity's final end may address the problem of how to reject the impulse of human exceptionalism that pervades climate change discourse and post-apocalyptic fiction. Rather than following the preferences of the genre, the ecocollapse fictions examined here manifest apocalypse where the means for a happy ending no longer exists. In these texts, diminished ecosystems, specters of cannibalism, and disintegrations of difference and othering render human self-identity as radically malleable within their confrontations with the stark materiality of all life. This book is the first in-depth exploration of contemporary fictions that imagine the imbrication of human and nonhuman within global species extinctions. It closely interrogates novels from authors like Peter Heller, Cormac McCarthy and Yann Martel that reject the impulse of human exceptionalism to demonstrate what it might be like to go extinct.

An inspiring manual for navigating humanity’s collective dark night and enacting personal and planetary transformation • Explores how Sacred Activism--specifically, creative, wise, sacredly inspired action--offers an antidote to the crises facing our world • Reveals how to uncover and sustain joy and how to use it as fuel for continuing Sacred Activism in dangerous times • Includes practical maps of the dark night process and of the four-part path to transfiguration drawn from the secret depths of the mystical traditions Presenting a manual for navigating humanity’s collective dark night, Andrew Harvey and Carolyn Baker explore potential antidotes, drawn from mystical traditions and Sacred Activism, to help us find inspiration and take action in the face of the daunting challenges to our world. Offering a deep discussion of our global dark night in terms of the Kali Yuga, the authors examine the dangers of a growing constellation of intractable crises--authoritarianism both in America and abroad, climate change, economic inequality, social upheaval, and spiritual malaise. They then explore the antidotes to these crises: Sacred Activism--specifically, creative, wise, sacredly inspired action--and a profound understanding of our evolutionary ordeal and its potentialities. Examining the power of joy to help enact personal and planetary transformation, they explain how joy, or ananda, is a force all mystical traditions recognize as the essence of the Divine. They reveal how to uncover and sustain joy in ourselves and how to use joy as fuel for continuing Sacred Activism in dangerous times. Drawing on the visionary teachings of mystics such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo, the authors show how the global dark night is part of an evolutionary mutation process and how its very intensity makes it the potential seedbed of a new embodied, divine humanity. They offer practical maps of the crises, of the shadows that this global dark night is casting, and of the four-part path to transfiguration drawn from mystical traditions. Sharing a vision of a new and focused global moment of love in action, the authors reveal that apocalypse is not inevitable--if enough people awaken to the extraordinary possibilities of Sacred Activism.

Return to Joy is a compelling and potent invitation to the reader to consider that joy is the ultimate nature of reality and that its absence lies at the root of the current, unprecedented global crisis. In this book, Andrew and Carolyn mine the mystical wisdom of the ages that places joy at the core of our existence and purpose as a species, moving forward to consider in depth the myriad enemies of joy in our time. As we tend the fires of joy, we celebrate its seven flames and nurture its ubiquitous presence whether in the background or the foreground of our lives.

"Bailey explodes shibboleths of the environmental movement in an unsettling, thought-provoking polemic certain to stir controversy".--Publishers Weekly. Bailey has covered science as a writer for Forbes and as a producer for PBS.

The climate change is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can’t prevent it.

A collection of probing essays and weekly meditations, this book addresses how to prepare emotionally and spiritually for the impending collapse of industrial civilization. Author Carolyn Baker offers wisdom, inspiration, and a sense of spiritual purpose for anyone who is concerned about the daunting future humankind has created. The author's introduction to Collapsing Consciously articulates our current predicament of economic collapse, environmental degradation, and global conflict and expresses the confusion, anxiety, grief, anger, and despair we all experience when we take a hard look at the present-day global crisis and the likely future of the planet. But rather than showing us ways to prevent the collapse, Baker argues that the demise of our consumerist, corporate culture is inevitable, and that it is crucial to prepare emotionally and spiritually for the certain changes to come. Part 1 is a collection of seventeen essays which argue that while the collapse of industrial society cannot be prevented, its meaning extends far beyond tragedy and loss. These essays ask the reader to delve inward and discover the limitless treasures of the soul, as well as the gratification and exhilaration to be discovered in joining with community in preparing for the future. In part 2, Baker offers fifty-two weekly meditations comprised of spiritual wisdom, inspiration, paradox, comfort, humor, irony, and a persistent challenge to create and savor beauty in the world, regardless of how bleak the future may appear. Collapsing Consciously is a refreshing take on the perilous present and the grim prospects for our future. Instead of quoting discouraging statistics about our predicament, Baker offers a deeper perspective that makes sense of a world that most of the time appears psychotic or even surreal. Through inspiration and perennial wisdom she has created a manual for making meaning and generating joy, especially in situations that feel hopelessly devoid of both. An ebook containing additional meditations is also available: Collapsing Consciously Meditations: Further Reflections for Turbulent Times, ISBN 978-1-58394-758-6.

In this pathbreaking book, Pierre Charbonnier opens up a new intellectual terrain: an environmental history of political ideas. His aim is not to locate the seeds of ecological thought in the history of political ideas as others have done, but rather to show that all political ideas, whether or not they endorse ecological ideals, are informed by a certain conception of our relationship to the Earth and to our environment. The fundamental political categories of modernity were founded on the idea that we could improve on nature, that we could exert a decisive victory over its excesses and claim unlimited access to earthly resources. In this way, modern thinkers imagined a political society of free individuals, equal and prosperous, alongside the development of industry geared towards progress and liberated from the Earth’s shackles. Yet this pact between democracy and growth has now been called into question by climate change and the environmental crisis. It is therefore our duty today to rethink political emancipation, bearing in mind that this can no longer draw on the prospect of infinite growth promised by industrial capitalism. Ecology must draw on the power harnessed by nineteenth-century socialism to respond to the massive impact of industrialization, but it must also rethink the imperative to offer protection to society by taking account of the solidarity of social groups and their conditions in a world transformed by climate change. This timely and original work of social and political theory will be of interest to a wide readership in politics, sociology, environmental studies and the social sciences and humanities generally.

The Bible is full of images of God caring for his creation in all its complexity. Yet experts warn us that a so-called perfect storm of factors threatens the future of life on earth. The authors assess the evidence for climate change and other threats that our planet faces in the coming decades while pointing to the hope God offers the world and the people he made.