Yesterday I stood on a bridge. With others. With a sign.

The sign said that since I was three years old, 60% of the animals on this planet have been wiped out – and the pace is accelerating. In a moment at the microphone I spoke my heart to the crowd. My emotions hit as a stranger hugged me after I spoke. But it was not enough.

A guy stood off the bridge to one side with a megaphone, beeping it loudly to interrupt us and our speakers. Why I wondered.

I looked at the news reports last night. There we were along with the heroes who blocked a bridge in Edmonton and faced the anger and rage of people inconvenienced by their stand. It is an imperfect protest. People were arrested in Australia, the UK, Toronto. A founder of Extinction Rebellion in the UK is now 22 days in Jail. But it is not enough.

The orange clown dominates news cycles with his narcissistic stupidity, amplified by a megaphone that should never belong to one who has failed to graduate from infancy. Distractions. distractions.

What is it going to take?

The cognitive dissonance of arguments that question underpaid overworked ranks of scientists who plough their passion for understanding into long days and nights for no reward, to sound the alarm. To alarm themselves and nonetheless strive to tell the truth through paper after paper – impacting their own mental health as they understand all to well the implications of what they are writing.

The same cognitive dissonance that tries to persuade that the only reason the tar sands shit oil is cheap now is that it cannot be piped to the market – in violation of everything a grade 5 student understands of how supply and demand works.

Have we collectively switched off? Do we not get it?

This morning I woke from a dream where a mentor of mine seemed to be trying to send me a message. I looked at the message confused as I woke, trying to make sense of it. It took me a few minutes to realize the message itself was confused garbage. It was the distraction of authority showing itself, and slowly my intellect cutting through to see its hollowness. I Love that Man – and he always spoke in riddles.

It is not enough to say ‘Electric Cars’ will solve it. It is not enough to switch to LED lightbulbs and eat less meat. It is not enough to stand on a bridge to be counted as a mere hundred people out of 250,000 that live in this city – and therefore to be dis-counted.

All it takes is one person to see things as they are to save everyone.

But it seems, everyone has got to want to be saved.

Saved from the endlessness of Netflixed distractions, Facebook pseudo-friends, Texting across a room, Consuming to try and fill the yawning gap. This is what the authority of our culture is saying. Nothing to see here. After 9/11 George W. Bush said it perfectly – the way to save the country is for everyone to go out and shop.

We have been sold a myth. That growth is the only thing that matters. We have built a system based on the idea that growth can continue forever. As I realized years ago when a former girlfriend shared her university Economics texts with me – the only reason that it can work is by ignoring limits. Limits make the mathematics more difficult. Far easier to wave it off to a supposed infinity and write a nice concise formula.

We were warned. The Limits to Growth were published in 1972 and were villified by the surging Neoliberal myth of the 80s. It showed us that, right now, we would be hitting tipping points. The prediction was imperfect but it clearly and elegantly showed that the growth myth was a non-starter. However Regan and Thatcher sold it to us, supported by the hedge-fund class of priests and magicians of fictitious wealth. They have boomed, busted, boomed, busted and every time it is ‘just the way the market is’. Even the market has been trying to tell us something. I think the message is ‘stop listening to me, I do not actually know what I am doing.’

And so now – we have been warned again. We are on a path to extinction. Our own – in our lifetimes or the lifetimes of our children. Let that sink in. The same science that has bought us cars, computers, aeroplanes, nuclear power, heat, light, smart-phones, long-distance food deliveries, advanced cancer drugs, got us to the moon has predicted, with the best information available that we are really close to being totally fucked. Soon.

The best we can hope for right now is that we can halt the destruction before we loose too much more, and build a world that can recover from the unfolding horror movie of what our actions have done to the beautiful, unique blue marble that is life’s only home we know of. That is our home.

As this unfolds – areas of the planet will become uninhabitable. The heatwave that hit europe this summer broke all records from Spain to the UK. In some of those heat extremes, working outdoors becomes impossible – literally beyond human limits. And these are becoming more regular. Wildfires in the Amazon, the Arctic… In BC we were lucky this year – and the fire-fighting budget was still broken.

And you probably want to start thinking about food security. Seriously. European harvests were down 20% last year.

Hurricanes, Typhoons, Cyclones – the same thing – megastorms are becoming more powerful and longer lasting as the available ocean energy to drive them rises. Extreme rainfall events. Flooding. Our river systems have adapted to the last 12,000 years of rainfall patterns. We put our towns and cities close by assuming stability. We foolishly built on floodplains. These old certainties are rapidly becoming uninsurable. Yes – the insurance companies know exactly what is going on. The survival of their businesses depends on them predicting this better than anyone else.

I keep catching myself. There is part of me that shrinks from staring at this stuff and thinking it will all be okay. A scared part of me is waiting for Dad to banish the monsters and come and tuck me in.

I am an intelligent man. I have lived from leveraging my smartness. And now I am crossing a gulf between the space of my head and heart with an unimaginable weight. I keep shrinking back from the task – as if small fuses keep blowing to protect me. Getting monumentally depressed and hopeless is a cliff-edge I am aware of as I carefully tread, in the dark.

There is a light. I see it reflected in the people around me. It is in the tears in the eyes I saw looking back at me yesterday as I was speaking on the bridge. It is in the waves from people on busses as public transport alone passed across the bridge as we held it. It is in the eyes of strangers that I held for that moment longer than normal in this unusual event, space and time.

The thing is – we are all in this together.

And as humans we have something that seems to have been left out of the text books. It is not taught or trained. It is so obvious as it is the water in which we swim. What makes us different is not our use of tools (crows are pretty smart), or language (there is lots out there – we are learning more all the time). The whole reason we can organize on the scale we do at all is that as Humans – we lead with Compassion, and we lead with Trust. Those qualities of the human heart are what make all of this possible.

There are those individuals, and whole industries designed to manipulate and ‘hook’ us, bend reality and distract us for long enough to change our behaviour and hijack our good will. Advertising and Fascism are not that different really; only in terms of scale and impact but the mindset is the same. Feeding the sensually consumed immature lover, the inferior us-and-them warrior striving to ‘get ahead’ and prove dominance, the trixtery magician trying to always ‘pull a fast one’ and the laboured, burdened sovereign consumed by his own reflection and that of death.

We are so much more than that. We are so much better than that. In awakening – we are so much beyond that. As sovereign, we hold it all together. As lover we find value and meaning in beauty; participating in and creating it. The magician recognizes and rescues us from illusions, creating new and beautiful patterns for living. The warrior recognizes and protects – holding us in integrity within ourselves and with others.

We are many.

Those that would divide us are few.

There is time to make a change. To realize and build a future that works for all. There is much to be done. We can see a lot of it. There is a lot to dismantle and de-power. There is a lot to empower and build. I choose to believe we can do it. There is not much time.

I do not know how. I am making this stuff up as I go along. There is a whole new world to create.

The old way of doing things is going all on its own.

It just does not inevitably have to take us with it.

Join with me. Please.