Baker - Love in the age of ecological apocalypse: cultivating the relationships we need to thrive

Carolyn Baker has done a marvelous job reminding us of the central place of relationship-building in our times of dire crisis and collapse. Through her work we explore how love is the source of our wisdom and the path to experience beauty amidst chaos. With words of great acuity and clarity, Baker stirs the mind and comforts the heart.

Chris Saade, author of Second Wave Spirituality: Passion for Peace, Passion for Justice

Love in the Age of Ecological Apocalypse discusses the myriad relationships humans are capable of forming and demonstrates why they are crucial at this time in our evolution. As catastrophic climate change threatens to eliminate many species, including our own, our relationships may determine how we live our lives and what we value most when we are surrounded with loss and confronted with the possibility of our own demise.

Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution

Reclaiming the Dark Feminine: The Price of Desire

The Journey of Forgiveness: Fulfilling the Healing Process

U.S. History Uncensored:
What Your High School Textbook Didnt Tell You

Coming Out of Fundamentalist Christianity:
An Autobiography Affirming Sensuality, Social Justice, and the Sacred

Sacred Demise:
Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilizations Collapse

Navigating the Coming Chaos: A Handbook for Inner Transition

Collapsing Consciously: Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times

Extinction Dialogs: How to Live with Death in Mind , coauthor with Guy McPherson

Copyright 2015 by Carolyn Baker. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

North Atlantic Books
P.O. Box 12327
Berkeley, California 94712

Cover art by Chris Kaplan
Cover and book design by Mary Ann Casler

Love in the Age of Ecological Apocalypse: Cultivating the Relationships We Need to Thrive is sponsored by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit educational corporation whose goals are to develop an educational and cross-cultural perspective linking various scientific, social, and artistic fields; to nurture a holistic view of arts, sciences, humanities, and healing; and to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature.

North Atlantic Books publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 8007333000.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Baker, Carolyn, 1945
Love in the age of ecological apocalypse : cultivating the relationships we need to thrive / by Carolyn Baker, Ph.D.
pages cm
eBook ISBN: 978-1-58394-900-9
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-58394-899-6
1. Love. 2. Mind and body. 3. Spirit. 4. Environmental degradation. I. Title.
BF575.L8B22 2015
158dc23 2014036164

v3.1

To my earthly mother, Olive Elizabeth Hess,
and to the Divine Mother ,
with gratitude for the lessons both have provided me

Resisting or postponing the collapse will only make it worse. Finding new ways to grow the economy will only consume what is left of our wealth. Let us stop resisting the revolution in human beingness. If we want to outlast the multiple crises unfolding today, let us not seek to survive them. That is the mind-set of separation; that is resistance, a clinging to a dying past. Instead, let us shift our perspective toward reunion and think in terms of what we can give. What can we each contribute to a more beautiful world? That is our only responsibility and our only security.

Charles Eisenstein, Sacred Economics

T he book in your hands poses and responds to a deceptively simple question: How are we to love in an apocalyptic time?

The public tends to associate apocalypse with right-wing End of Times zealotry, but the word bears deeper implications. Derived from the Greek word apokaluptein , it means to reveal in the sense of uncovering what has been hidden. In the mythologies of many cultures, a time of decadence and alienation ends in universal collapse. Hindu lore calls this the Kali Yuga, Sami legends, the end of the Great Celestial Hunt. Aztec stories describe the fall of the Fifth Sun, and the Norse tell of Ragnarok, the Doom of the Gods, heralded by stormy weather and altered patterns of animal migration.

We move within ancient precedents, then, by seeing around us the imminent fall of so much of what we took as permanent. Virtually every sector of contemporary civilized lifegovernment, accelerates, as polar icecaps melt, skies darken, and computers calculate soaring temperatures and rising oceans, thoughtful people unafraid to look apocalypse in the face plan for an uncertain future in a changing world.

For the most part, however, these plans of adaptation have been limited to hard fixes and technological inventions. Dr. Bakers timely book focuses on a neglected but crucial fact: surviving and flourishing are not possible unless we tend the relationships that bind us to one another and hold our communities together. No one grows alone, wrote CG Jung. No one survives alone, either.

For it should be clear that we will either live together or perish together. No Road Warrior future awaits us because nobody would survive it for long. Fighting bands of survivalists would merely kill one another off. No, what human future is possible depends on how skillfully we craft our relations with one another, how deeply we can hear one another, how richly we can weave the fabric of inclusion. As the author asks in the ,

The real question is, How will humans in a world unraveling relate not only to partners, children, neighbors, and the community but also to resources, food, their bodies, whatever manner of work they do, animals, creativity, beauty, aging, their emotions, and deathto name only a few of the myriad relationships in which they may find themselves?

And, beyond grim images of bare-knuckle survival, what possibilities will we cultivate for meaning, joy, beauty, creativity, kindness, and love in an altered climate?

Dr. Baker brings a unique background and skill set to these vital issues. A former professor of psychology and history, she worked for seventeen years as a psychotherapist in private practice. She has conducted workshops, interviews (including radio), and speaking engagements around the world. Participants in her workshops and coaching practice receive valuable resources for facing a darkening time with renewed courage and gusto. Her book titles reflect her passion for this work: Extinction Dialogs (2014, with Guy McPherson), Collapsing Consciously (2013), Navigating the Coming Chaos (2011), Sacred Demise (2009).

You will find these and other urgent questions explored in these pages:

How do I act with a relationship partner who sees no collapse unfolding?

How might widespread collapse signal a personal and collective rite of passage?

What do we tell our children about the times we now face in an ailing world?

How should I be with friends and neighbors during such a Long Emergency as this?