Dear New School Friends:

Awareness of the global polycrisis is spreading everywhere now. Most often people tie the polycrisis to climate change. Fewer realize that the real challenge is the unpredictable interaction of all the global stressors—environmental, social, technological, and financial/economic.

Climate, COVID, and conflicts without end are the three emblematic issues for the polycrisis. But the emblematic issues keep morphing. The Ukraine war was for months in the headlines—now it has faded in the news (though it continues in reality). COVID, once a constant headline, has now moved into the background and monkeypox takes its star turn, though COVID remains a far greater danger. Continue reading →

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Dear New School Friends:

The great writer and naturalist Barry Lopez participated in a Commonweal retreat a few years before he died. That is where I came to know him. On May 31, Ben Ehrenreich, himself a great writer and naturalist, published this New York Times review of the last book Barry Lopez left us—a book of essays with this unforgettable title: Embrace Fearlessly This Burning World. Rebecca Solnit, another great writer, wrote a beautiful introduction.

I dedicate this post to Barry Lopez.  Here are some quotes from Ehrenreich’s review that touch me most deeply:

“The central project of my adult life as a writer,” [Lopez] says, “is to know and love what we have been given, and to urge others to do the same.”

“Throughout this book, Lopez considers his calling in terms that are unabashedly spiritual. Raised a Catholic, he was “fixated” in high school, he wrote, on emulating the life of the Jesuit paleontologist and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Even after drifting away from Catholicism, he took time off from a New York publishing job for a retreat at the Kentucky abbey where the mystic and writer Thomas Merton lived. Fortunately for us, he didn’t stay. But years later, Lopez still relied “on the centrality of a life of prayer, which I broadly took to be a continuous, respectful attendance to the presence of the Divine. Prayer was one’s daily effort to be incorporated within that essence.”

“We must invent overnight,” Lopez concludes, “another kind of civilization.” He offers no details, only fundamentals: “It is a good idea to love each other, and to love the Earth.” Continue reading →