Meditating – Literally – on Climate Change

Our dependence on burning fossil fuels is a seemingly intractable social problem.   It’s hard to even fathom the vast timescales of impacts the greenhouse gasses we emit today will have far into the future, let alone act now to alter them later. Yet in far-flung communities across the country and around the world, people are acting.

Neither the actions nor the impacts are monolithic.  Our 2013 Climate, Mind and Behavior (CMB) symposium focused on the rich diversity of cultures that weave the complex tapestry of humans’ relationship with the earth, each utterly dependent on the environment, and each experiencing and responding to climate change in their own way.  Researchers from across the social and bio-physical sciences gave presentations on current climate science and on climate change adaptation and mitigation work being done in countless communities from Chicago to New Zealand.  You can watch some of them here.