We have brought forth a centuries-long shift in the planet’s life-sustaining systems. This changes our goals a bit. What choices are now opening to us? I’ve had the great gift of time to explore paths which resonated on a soul-level, and powerful experiences working my heart and hands the last ten years. I’m looking to add more minds to the mix. A primary artery of all my work has been orienting people to our Earth. Every day humans come into new, sacred relationships with the natural world. I would like to facilitate more of these engagements. An immediate goal for the summer is to begin editing my footage from sacred sites around the globe. But art is only one delivery system for a larger purpose – preserving and creating sacred space and relationship.
As we build new communities, I want to establish medicine wheels, gardens, parks and protected wild alongside the other essential sustainable systems. The river system where I was born is tattooed on my back – I hope to help neighborhoods engage with their genius loci. I continually find myself in conversations that sound like despair work. I accept these heartbreaks as part of my responsibility. I know firsthand how trauma can hold in the body, and am very interested in the somatic arts, not to mention rhythm and dance. I’m also compelled by the potentials of shamanism in the 21st century. And I imagine that while helping our transformations at home is necessary, I’ll also want a voice in the larger global discussions – maybe as a solastalgist for climate refugees, or something involving biodiversity, or water. The only place that can integrate all of these yearnings is CIIS.
An earth community is being born in each of us. CIIS is providing our first midwives. The integral ecology track, and the redwoods, pull me to San Fransisco. I leave my burgeoning community at home to apprentice at the hub of the environmental and global justice movements. And I continue to trust the universe that has brought me to you at this time.
outsidejosh 
So if an island nation is submerged beneath the ocean, does it maintain its membership in the United Nations? Who is responsible for the citizens? Do they travel on its passport? Who claims and enforces offshore mineral and fishing rights in waters around a submerged nation? International law currently has no answers to such questions.
United Nations Ambassador Phillip Muller of the Marshall Islands said there is no sense of urgency to find not only those answers, but also to address the causes of climate change, which many believe to be responsible for rising ocean levels.
“Even if we reach a legal agreement sometime soon, which I don’t think we will, the major players are not in the process,” Muller said.
Those players, the participants said, include industrial nations such as the United States and China that emit the most carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases. Many climate scientists say those gases are responsible for global warming. Mary-Elena Carr of Columbia University’s Earth Institute said what is now an annual sea level rise of a few millimeters will increase dramatically by the year 2100. “The biggest challenge is to preserve their nationality without a territory,” said Bogumil Terminski from Geneva. International legal experts are discovering climate change law, and the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu is a case in point: The Polynesian archipelago is doomed to disappear beneath the ocean. Now lawyers are asking what sort of rights citizens have when their homeland no longer exists.
t present, however, there appear to be at least three possibilities that could advance the international debate about ‘climate refugee’ protections and fill existing gaps in international law.
The first option is to revise the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees to include climate (or environmental) refugees and to offer legal protections similar to those for refugees fleeing political persecution. A second, more ambitious option is to negotiate a completely new convention, one that would try to guarantee specific rights and protections to climate or environmental ‘refugees