NVC and social change at Rainbow Mill camp

I'm looking forward to camp and I'd like to give advance notice of a request for a workshop on NVC and social change. I have initiated discussions about this at each of the past Rainbow Mill camps. I'd like to clarify what I’d like from such a discussion this year, should we find the time and space and willingness to do it again.


The most important thing in the world for me, outside of pressing matters like my family and my job, is human-made climate change and what it will mean for future generations, possibly as soon as our children’s children’s generation. My greatest fear is that polar ice caps will melt and sea levels will rise and this will put most of the world's cities, along with most nuclear power stations, underwater, making the cities uninhabitable and irradiating the oceans.

From time to time I feel huge despair as I find it hard to cope with this apocalyptic vision of the future. This is incidentally where I was at last year's camp. But right now it is mainly frustration that I feel. It’s about how we – I mean you and me and society and the media – on the whole ignore the problem, as we proceed with business as usual in our work and play. It is about how people around me generally avoid the problem in order to avoid their own despair. There is frustration also about the facts and the remedies. As to frustration about the facts, it's incredibly helpful for me to talk about the problem because, as well as learning from others, it sharpens my understanding when I articulate the things that I have read and heard. As to frustration about the remedies, I'm sceptical about the Joanna Macy approach called The Great Turning, and about another recent guru-like approach, Charles Eisenstein's Sacred Economics. To put it another way, I'm still searching for a solution or a worthwhile way forward or something I can do that would make a difference.

In the past my workshops or lunch tables on NVC and social change at Rainbow Mill camp have looked at things like now NVC can help people achieve desired social change goals. That's still important of course but this year I would really like to focus on the question, "What are you doing about human-made climate change?” To put it another way I'm asking that we focus on the social change more than on NVC in this meeting or workshop.