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materialist Western lifestyle and learn new survival skills. What has worked for us: getting out of debt, cutting up our credit cards, de-cluttering our house, spending less, saving more, shopping as locally as we can, downsizing our lifestyle, limiting the time we stare at screens, working fewer hours, taking a permaculture design course, putting in an organic garden and backyard food forest, learning how to cook locally and seasonally from our garden and the farmers’ market, working with neighbors to share the bounty, and enjoying the good (sustainable) life.

Move your work life toward sustainability. Now that you are awake to the import of the historical moment, it may be difficult to continue working in a profession or job that is either part of the problem or doesn’t speak to your soul. There are a number of possible moves here:

Transform your own job and profession. Perhaps you can continue to do what you do but more mindfully and compassionately … or perhaps you become active in changing things in your field. For example, if you’re a physician, you might explore alternative or integrative medicine, a rapidly growing field. If you’re a teacher, you might want to learn more about Waldorf education or the home-schooling movement. If you’re a carpenter, you might consider salvaging local trees that have been cut down and milling them yourself to create local lumber.

Continue in your present career, but use it as a “day job” to support your true work in sustainability. Your current job may pay for further education, or let you save up money to build a new sustainable business, or support you while you volunteer in an activist organization. A friend of ours does window-washing as a day job that allows him to engage in his true vocation as a cutting-edge publisher/editor of an alternative magazine and a political/environmental film exhibitor. Another friend does elder-care as a day job while he’s preparing to transition into permaculture design as his “next career.”

Transition now into a new, more sustainable profession that calls strongly to you. Perhaps you’ll return to school full-time, or maybe you’ll start a new business offering goods and services that will be needed in the sustainable future and emerging green economy. Sometimes you just need to take the leap.

The result of all these changes is a life full of joy, new friends, good food, and lots of time spent in nature, with loved ones and on deeply meaningful activities.

The hour is late, and a growing number of us daily become more aware of the necessity of transitioning quickly to sustainable society and building local and global communities that truly support their members. The sooner we begin to reshape our own lives to fit the new times, the happier and healthier we will all be.

RESOURCES

Linda Buzzell and Craig Chalquist, editors. 2009. Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books. www.ecotherapyheals.com

Sarah Anne Edwards and Linda Buzzell. 2009. “The Waking-Up Syndrome,” from Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books.

Rob Hopkins. 2008. The Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience. Totnes, Devon: Green Books. www.transitionculture.org

Joanna Macy. 2007. World as Lover, World as Self: Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press).

Psychotherapist Linda Buzzell is the editor with Craig Chalquist of Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind (Sierra Club Books, 2009), an anthology of writings on healing the human-nature relationship that includes essays by Joanna Macy, Andy Fisher, Richard Louv, Ralph Metzner, Bill McKibben, and Richard Heinberg and a Foreword by David Orr. She is the founder of the International Association for Ecotherapy and editor of its quarterly publication Ecotherapy News (Online at www.ecotherapyheals.com). She is an official blogger about ecotherapy at online newspaper The Huffington Post: www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-buzzell.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Meditations on Living in These Times

Eden Is a