We are not your typical Climate Solution. We don’t have CO2 or tree planting metrics to share. Yet we firmly believe, that as facilitators and culture designers working with groups dedicated to earth and cultural regeneration, that we’re building the capacity in ourselves and the groups we work with to actually discern false climate solutions from true climate solutions, and to shed the cultural conditioning which has produced humans capable of considering themselves separate from nature and eroding our ecological basis of survival.
Many of us were drawn to create Samara Trust after years of devotion to the climate activism world and cleantech industry. We fought for and built what we’re trained to think of as “climate solutions”: Laws, taxes, tax breaks, pipeline bans, the Green New Deal, energy saving gadgets, CO2 markets, solar farms, battery energy storage, EVs, etc…
Yet, deep down, we felt an uneasiness that only grew over the years; despite the powerful narrative around these “solutions” and their obvious impact on our climate, there was something insidious we carried in our efforts. As we’ve gathered in Samara Trust to practice new perceptions and heart-based embodiment of interconnectedness, wholeness, and unconditional love, we can see with greater clarity the ways in which our immature solutioning carried harmful perceptions, metaphors, and strategies based in separation: (Human vs Nature), conflict (Us vs. Them enemy creation), and fear-mongering tactics. Furthermore, many of this prior solutioning was based on viewing nature itself as a complicated machine to be fixed by more machines, rather than considering what in the mind, hearts, and culture of us machine designers might have produced our ecological crisis in the first place.
Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi speak to this precisely in their preface to their book, ‘The Systems View of Life’:
“As the twenty-first century unfolds, it is becoming more and more evident that the major problems of our time – energy, the environment, climate change, food security, financial security – cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are all interconnected and interdependent. Ultimately, these problems must be seen as just different facets of one single crisis, which is largely a crisis of perception. It derives from the fact that most people in our modern society, and especially our large social institutions, subscribe to the concepts of an outdated worldview, a perception of reality inadequate for dealing with our overpopulated, globally interconnected world.
There are solutions to the major problems of our time; some of them even simple. But they require a radical shift in our perceptions, our thinking, our values. And, indeed, we are now at the beginning of such a fundamental change of worldview in science and society, a change of paradigms as radical as the Copernican revolution. Unfortunately, this realization has not yet dawned on most of our political leaders, who are unable to “connect the dots,” to use a popular phrase. They fail to see how the major problems of our time are all interrelated. Moreover, they refuse to recognize how their so-called solutions affect future generations. From the systemic point of view, the only viable solutions are those that are sustainable…. sustainable society must be designed in such a way that its ways of life, businesses, economy, physical structures, and technologies do not interfere with nature’s inherent ability to sustain life…
We believe that such an integrated view is urgently needed today to deal with our global ecological crisis and protect the continuation and flourishing of life on Earth.”
It is this crisis of perception that we are primarily focused on.
The founding members of Samara Trust hold a very particular perspective and ambition: We believe that any true solutions to our wicked planetary and social crises must decode and supersede the
that currently drive the entropic extraction of humanity and our ecological basis of survival. We are advocating for new perceptions and protocols for human sovereignty capable of running economic exchange that serves all life in unconditional love and wholeness - something we call the
We practice and prototype in Samara Trust, knowing that true systems transformation must first occur inside each of us via our own learning, unlearning, and human and spiritual development, as there is no such thing as separation from the systems we live in and generate.
As specific examples of how our work touches soil, water, and climate:
community to help facilitate inquiry around regenerative culture and regenerative project design. ER has thousands of members around the world, with many prototyping land-based projects to regenerate soil, waterways, culture, and local sustainable economies. One project in Barichara Colombia is attempting to regenerate an entire bioregion at risk of ecological collapse through the establishment of an Ecoversity bringing indigenous wisdom around ecological stewardship to a modern community and economy.
We’ve committed our heart-based listening and facilitation to offer healing and cultural deconditioning for the local leadership team of a land-based project serving ecological and cultural regeneration alongside indigenous family cacao farmers in Guatemala. The project was bringing local farmers into economic and cultural empowerment, yet were having fears, miscommunication, and distrust on topics of power, authority, and value recognition disempower leaders inside the organization and fuel conflict that ultimately hindered the project’s ability to heal the land and extractive culture.
Both these efforts are not only helping these projects put more carbon in the ground through regenerative agriculture and reforestation, but they are helping build out organizational, educational, and economic models that can support rather than compete with nature and a livable planet for humanity.
Originally Published 8 June, 2022
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What is a Climate Solution?