The Slow-Cooked Sentence

Toward a future filled with stretch and stability

Rachael Conlin Levy
Seattle Green New Deal float at Fremont Solstice Parade. Photo by Alan Berner for The Seattle Times.

Shared goal. Seattle Green New Deal’s float at Fremont Solstice Parade. Photo by Alan Berner for The Seattle Times.

 

With clipboard and pen, I worked the parade,
seeking reversal of climate, man-made.
Support a solution
to all the pollution
that’s cooking Earth one-degree centigrade.

 

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Team effort. My youngest joins cousins in reconstructing a model of Seattle’s Amazon spheres, which are open to the public.

Resilience and security are two sides of the same coin, and, as the Earth heats up, so does our need for this skill set, said cooperative culture pioneer and author Yana (formerly Ma’ikwe) Ludwig. In “Together Resilient: Building Community in the Age of Climate Disruption,” Ludwig explains why they’re closely related concepts.

“To be secure means to have your core needs met and to feel some degree of certainty that those needs will continue to be met. … Being resilient means that you can roll with changes as they come, with (relative) ease. … “While it is questionable for a lot of people right now whether climate disruption and resource scarcity will allow us to ever have the kind of security many people enjoyed in the US for the last 50 years of the 20th century, there will always be more and less secure ways to set up our lives. What is certainly true is that resilience will become more and more of a key component of security.”

 

A truck delivers water to residents of Chennai, India, which has run out of ground water. Photograph by Associated Press.

Ludwig suggests that resilience is built three ways: developing hands-on skills, understanding history and culture, and thinking creatively and critically. Additionally, she proposes that people understand basic emotional and physical healthcare, as well as live in community and connection with others.

“One of the key elements for building personal resilience is other humans,” Ludwig wrote. “We need to learn from others, we often need help maintaining our health, and friends are incredibly important for dealing with emotional challenges. It is very difficult to be resilient in isolation, and yet that’s what many people do when they are having a hard time–we isolate ourselves, afraid of being ‘a downer’ or ashamed of what is happening inside us. To be resilient, we need a strong does of humility to ask for help, to be willing to pursue further learning … and to risk admitting when our health is suffering.”



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