Forms and Opportunities for Engaged Practice
Despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth. Environmental despair is a poison every bit as destructive as the methylated mercury in the bottom of Onondaga Lake. But how can we submit to despair while the land is saying "Help"?
— Robin Wall Kimmerer
No small part of our challenge is the pervasive poverty of agency. How often do we hear, including from ourselves, “but I’m just one person”? Yet both Dharma and sociology disagree. Our words and actions matter so much and indeed they are all we have.
Yet whether or not our actions make a big difference that we can actually see, feel, and touch is, in a way, none of our business. Our opportunity is to meaningfully respond. We can speak in ways that actually help. We can act in ways that are deeply rooted, skillful, strategic, and unattached to specific outcomes.
- Nikayla Jefferson
Current Action Opportunities
International
- Sign: A petition to demand an end to the tech industry’s support for genocide and apartheid with Fight for the Future.
- Act: The July 2025 Waves of Action with Extinction Rebellion
- Read: “Soaring global military spending threatens climate action”
- Sign: Europe, Break Free from Trump Gas! with WeMove
- Enter: NYU Climate Change Film Festival
United States
- Act: “Sun Day is a day of action on September 21, 2025, celebrating solar and wind power, and the movement to leave fossil fuels behind” with Third Act.
- Read How to Build a Survival Program: insights, tools and practices for communities to build their own survival programs and other strategies for climate resilience
- Sign: If you’re in California, add your support for AB 1243 The Polluters Pay Superfund act with Interfaith Power & Light.
- Write: Tell you Senators to “Fight for All of Us and the Environment, Not Billionaires” with Earthworks.
- Read: “A world built on fossil fuels is loud. Here’s how advocates are defending peace and quiet,” from Grist.
Canada
- Enter: The Tibet Eco-Awards in the categories of visual arts, poetry, song, and the youth award.
- Write: Tell Prime Minster Carney “No Golden Dome!” with Just Peace Advocates.
- Sign: “Don’t let the Canada Pension Plan abandon its net-zero commitment“
Australia
- Join: The People’s Blockade 2025 with Rising Tide
Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive creative relationship with the more-than-human world, meeting responsibilities that are simultaneously material and spiritual. It's not enough to grieve. It's not enough to just stop doing bad things.
— Robin Wall Kimmerer
Stories of Engagement
Buddhism, Social Change, and Skillful Means
- Melvin McLeod, David Loy, Mushim Patricia Ikeda and Joan Sutherland
A Community Renounces Fossil Fuels
- Steve Seigan Miron
Demand for Statehood and Ecological Protections in Northern India
- Justin Whitaker
