Ukrainian War impacts LIVING BRIGHTLY4

War is ecocide. Conflict affects climate. Without peace the damage done to Earth is dramatic. The International Criminal Court is currently investigating crimes against humanity by the Russians against the Ukrainian people. Ecocide, destruction to Earth, and damages include the release of toxins into the air, water, and soil from bombed-out buildings, broken waste management systems, exploded pipelines, and damaged industries like fuel and chemical storage. What may happen if Russia targets hydro dams, mine tailing ponds, or nuclear sites? 15 nuclear sites, including Europe's largest, are located in Ukraine.  Militaries use massive amounts of oil & gas to move their armies and machinery to foreign lands. An aside, if the US military were a country, it would have the 47th highest emissions globally. Bombings directly destroy habitats and animals and landscapes themselves. Entire areas of water, land, and air become toxic and no longer safe for humans or animals. 

With that as a background, on August 3, TRUST Climate Action Strategists hosted what was supposed to be an all-day climate activation with 2 Ukrainian refugees: Valeria, 16,  is a writer on World Pulse and Nastya is a 25-year-old Ph.D. student. They both fled Ukraine as the war broke out and were in Poland, Greece, and Austria since February. They both have recently returned to Ukraine. LIVING BRIGHTLY4 was designed to inform them and 3 elders of the urgency of taking personal responsibility for our climate-impacting daily decisions. Both young women needed to leave at the 2-hour mark, so we condensed the material into the various impact levels between 1.5 degrees to 4 degrees. That made the case for urgency and the cost of inaction.

Then we calculated our individual carbon footprints online. Lynelle, an elder retired World Bank facilitator, was shocked that her footprint was so high and what was contributing to her high number, which she never revealed.  An average American has a footprint of 16. Westerners need to rightsize our footprint to 2. Most of her impact came from living in a rural area requiring car transportation, housing, flying, and food. 

We Xplored a series of mini clips from Kate Raworth's doughnut economics for a circular economic next system. Instead of take, make, break linear economics that destroy intact landscapes from mining, Xtraction, harvesting Earth's bounties, doughnut economics is an ever regenerating way of honoring the people, plants, animals, in their places. This is the first of 8: 

We did a 15 minute Xcercise to imagine our finer futures. Making the possibility of our finer futures real and easily felt. I wrote these called Inner Resonances:

"Are you allowing the part of you, your all seeing longview to vision your finest future, with moist & pure air in your nearest city, cleansed by urban forests, hanging gardens, & vertical farms? Electric high-speed rail & hyperloops replace air travel. Are you walking city streets filled with people instead of cars? Are you noticing homes, schools, & businesses generating their own electric power using solar paint & micro turbines?

YES!!!

Are you allowing the part of you, your all-knowing head/heart/hand connection to feel your finest future with cheap, clean electricity for circular ways billions manage waste & health care & raising millions out of poverty? Are you among the people living a longer, healthier life on a principally plant-based diet? Can you feel the astonishment of children that humans once ate animals?

YES!!!

Are you allowing the part of you, your braveheart, your finest future of profound changes for the physical world to reflect an equally profound shift in values: away from the single individual, away from consuming & away from inequality & shifting towards collaboration, towards stewardship, & towards generous equity?

YES!!!

Are you allowing the part of you, your super sourced selves, your finest future of good stories about individuals to abound: characters living their lives in a climate-altered world, meeting these new challenges & moving forward?

YES!!!

Are you allowing the part of you that overflows with energy & creativity, to Xpress your finest future of positive climate solutions - the privilege of being powerful writers & artists & influencers & researchers, bringing you to life—a thrilling creative challenge that helps shemanity find a path to mutually assured survival?

YES!!!"

We ended on an up note empowering the young women to see/think/feel their finer futures before they both head to Scandinavia for school soon. Valeria to Norway and Nastya to Sweden. We played these two clips and then I boosted their Can-Do Attitudes. 

Ultimately, the goal is to create a community activated and mutually supporting each other in keeping current with climate solutions while modeling change in their communities. These would be the outcomes of a longer-term coaching program: 

6 tangible actionable TO DO's as deliverables

1. Calculate your Carbon Footprint

2. Xpand your mindset

3. Provide accountability for climate actions

4. Toolkit for climate justice strategies

5. Invest your climate values

6. Celebrate your personal Climate Action Plan Blueprint

This is the 4th time I've done this training. Each iteration is quite different. The first had many guest speakers. We raised $10,000 for the Yawanawa Amazon Tribe. The second was targeted for global teens in a program called Moonshot Pirates. The third was for a subset of the Pirates supposed to be 3 days turned into one. This is the most recent scheduled to be one day and shrunk to 2 hours. The question we continue to ask is how to make this fun, something previous attendees look forward to? Climate is an urgent crisis. How to transform the emergency into a celebration of solutions is our ongoing quest.  The social channel for youth is Tik Tok. So next I'll Xplore that language. Not being a native there, I wonder who I might be able to include in this Xploration? (FYI, as a TEDxVail organizer, which is why the capitalized X's.) I am looking for the sweet X spot in climate coaching.