Climate Change and the Art of Self-Transformation

Climate Change and the Art of Self-Transformation

By Kurt Hoelting

It was a change that had been brewing in my soul for longer than I care to admit. As both a contemplative and an activist, I had struggled for years to make sense of the widening gap between my convictions about climate change, and the way I was actually living my life. In my hybrid career as a meditation teacher and wilderness guide, I watched with dismay as jet travel carried my carbon footprint to lofty heights, even as I worked to reign in my daily use of energy in the rest of my life. The contradiction between these two misaligned efforts cancelled out my best intentions, and injected a sense of futility into an otherwise satisfying livelihood. Bewildered by my complicity in the emerging climate catastrophe, and weary of waiting for others to change first, I reached a crisis of conscience that I could no longer ignore.

As a student of Zen, I do not consider myself a praying man. Not in the usual sense. But my desire to close this gap in my life took on the fervency of prayer. I could no longer stay on the sidelines, yet neither could I find a realistic way to untangle myself from my high-carbon lifestyle. I knew my unborn grandchildren were watching, and the day would come when I would face their questions. “What did you do, back in 2008, when the climate crisis was first spinning out of control? What part did you play in trying to save our future?

While there are no easy answers to these questions, the genesis of a personal response came unexpectedly, when I had almost given up finding any answers at all. It ambushed me one morning while I was having breakfast with a friend. Weary of the treadmill of travel I was on, and feeling dislocated from home, I found myself musing to my friend, “What would it be like if I didn’t get into a car for a year? What would it be like to spend an entire year within walking distance of home?” Just the words themselves brought a wave of relief. The resonance of an audacious possibility echoed all the way down to my bones. Rarely has an idea taken such immediate hold of my imagination. In the days and weeks that followed I could not let it go. I knew I had already set out on one of the grandest adventures of my life.

It took some time to get the pieces in place for such a major shift. I had travel commitments several months out that had to be fulfilled. I had to re-imagine my livelihood structure in more local terms, negotiate logistical considerations with my wife and family (who did not necessarily share my enthusiasm for the idea), buy a new bicycle (no simple assignment these days!), learn a complex regional bus system, and start getting myself back in shape. My intent was not only to go car-free, but to live a more radically local life. I drew a circle on the map 100 kilometers in radius with my home in the center that described with remarkable fidelity the contours of the Puget Sound basin, and vowed to stay within this circle for the entire year. I poured over local maps, and soon had an alluring list of excursions planned under my own power to every part of my circle, on foot, by bicycle and sea kayak. Even before I’d begun, I could feel my sense of powerlessness about climate change beginning to lift, transforming into anticipation and purpose. For the first time in ages, I felt fresh winds in my sails. My goal was straightforward. I wanted to turn the necessity for change into an adventure. I wanted to inhabit this year as if it were the last I had to live, and as if the very future depended upon it. Which in fact it does.

On the shortest day of the year in 2007, I parked my car in the garage for twelve months, and my adventure began. I chose to start on the Winter Solstice because of its ancient symbolism of darkness turning back toward the light. As I write these words, I am in the closing weeks of the year, and it has indeed been filled with discovery, both inner and outer. I have ridden my bicycle to every part of my circle, peddling the equivalent of a journey across North America. I have covered a thousand miles on foot exploring my wider neighborhood, and have paddled my kayak 400 miles in a circumnavigation of the Puget Sound basin. By exploring my home terrain at a human pace, I have watched the scale of my local geography literally expanding before my very eyes, taking on new dimensions and depth, while dramatically shrinking my carbon footprint in the process. My sense of intimacy with the place I call home has grown in equal proportion. I’ve watched my backlog of despair leavened with a more confident resilience and hope, and with the spiritual satisfaction of living in greater alignment with the values I most deeply care about.

Along the way much has changed in the world outside my circle too. My impulse to embrace hope and change has been more widely shared than I could have imagined. Barack Obama has been elected President of the United States, and the political climate has shifted overnight in the direction of more decisive action on climate and energy policy. Creative responses to the climate crisis have moved from trickle to torrent in the culture at large. A spirit of possibility for change has been unleashed around the entire globe, even as a concurrent financial meltdown has shaken our false confidence in the economics of limitless growth.

For all this resurgence of hope, the way forward remains as daunting as ever, on every level of our lives. The climate emergency continues to accelerate in lock-step with our rising carbon emissions. Nor do I have any illusions that my year in circumference is more than a first step in my own transformation. But I am astonished by what I’ve learned, and I know my efforts have rippled out into the lives of those I have met along the way. How else does change really happen anyway? I am filled with gratitude that I can be part of such a defining moment in our history.

Perhaps this is the hidden gift that climate change offers us. It has delivered a potent motivation to re-examine our lives, to make changes that we have resisted for too long, and to do so with a boldness we didn’t know we had. It has brought an unmistakable sense of urgency, but also of renewed hope and confidence that authentic change is possible, and that our lives can be richer and more grounded as a result. From a spiritual perspective, the climate crisis and may be our last, best chance for a broad-based realignment of values that can finally extend our ethical regard into the deepest heart of the living world.

Such a massive realignment of values is inconceivable without the leadership of the faith community. Our climate emergency is not fundamentally a crisis of technology or public policy. It is a crisis of meaning, a crisis of moral vision and courage. We cannot simply “jump the chasm” of climate change with a technological fix, leaving unchallenged our destructive habits of unbridled consumption. This crisis upends our most cherished assumptions about what it means to be human in a world of exquisitely fragile balances that now threaten to expel us from the fabric of life itself. It is in this sense that climate destabilization is a religious crisis. Our pursuit of global climate initiatives and sustainable energy technologies cannot succeed without a commensurate change of heart, one that expresses itself in the nuts and bolts of how we live. Climate change is thus an invitation for people of faith to step up as full partners in the evolution of culture by demonstrating what the art of self-transformation actually looks like. Imagine what an adventure this could turn out to be. The life of everything worthy of our love now hangs in the balance.

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Copyright by Kurt Hoelting

Published in Radical Grace, Winter 2009, Vol. 22, No. 1

Kurt Hoelting is a meditation teacher and wilderness guide. As Director of Inside Passages (www.insidepassages.com), he leads meditation-based kayak trips in Alaska and teaches meditation to activists, health care professionals and religious leaders in the Lower ’48.

In 2008 Kurt took a vow to spend the year car-free and to live within 100 km of home as a personal response to climate change. He is currently at work on a book for DaCapo Press about his Circling Home year. He can be reached by email at insidepa@whidbey.com.