California/Oregon Roadshow

From September 2nd -12th Beth Sawin and Phil Rice, co-developers of Our Climate Ourselves, will be traveling through northern California and Southern Oregon, offering their tools and approach through a series of workshops and informal meetings.

We offer three types of workshops, to meet the needs and interests of a variety of groups. To inquire about hosting us for a workshop, please contact us at the email addresses listed above. All workshops are free of charge and supported by our grant funding, especially via grants from the Morgan Family Foundation and the Hidden Leaf Foundation.  We (and our two school-aged children) also welcome offers of meals and lodging along the way.

The three workshops we are offering are listed below, all we require is a group of 8-30 people, a room to meet in, and a screen or blank wall suitable for showing slides.

1. Our Climate Ourselves Introductory Presentation (2 hours)

A non-technical exploration of climate change for concerned citizens of all backgrounds. Part presentation, part small-group conversation it begins with the basics of the climate system and the pressing need to reduce greenhouse gas pollution. Moving beyond understanding climate change, the session also draws on participants’ personal values and ethics as they explore their own power to respond to climate change. Finally the presentation offers tools for expressing personal concern about climate change in ways that help build societal will to address its fundamental causes.

2. Four Capacities for Leadership On Climate Change (1.5 to 2 hours)

This session will provide an introduction to and practice with four kinds of skills that we all can cultivate in order to be more effective leaders in the response to climate change:

  • understanding the dynamic complexity of the climate system,

  • transforming our despair about climate change into empowerment,

  • cultivating and communicating a vision of our communities in the post- fossil fuel age, and

  • opening ourselves to the lessons of climate change.

The session is largely interactive, with conversation and exercises playing a prominent role.

3. Listening to the “Voice” of Climate Change (Flexible – 2 hours to one day.)

The most commonly asked question about climate change is probably: what should we do? This is a critical question, of course. But a second, much more rarely asked question is worth our attention as well: what does climate change show us, about how our home, the Earth, works and about how we might fit into that home? If we could thoroughly open ourselves to their reality, what do melting glaciers, disappearing species, and threatened coastal villages have to say about who we are, and what we are a part of? When pollution produced in one part of the world can devastate the harvest of a farmer on another continent decades later what does that mean for our picture of ourselves and our conception of our community and our neighborhood. And when a forest saved in one place can improve the odds of species and communities thousands of miles away, what does that mean? What does it mean to realize that everything we depend upon depends upon a stable climate.

This workshop will explore such questions through a combination of reflection and experiential work. Our goal is not to offer answers, rather to create the opportunity to use the reality of climate change to sharpen our perceptions and take in our reality with as much clear vision as we can muster.

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