As a process of reckoning, experiential learning and reflection, the CUHF facilitates understanding both ecological changes and societal conditions as symptoms of and context for the collapse into which we are living.
The steadying context of Council encourages participants to hold the reality of climate disruption at the forefront of consciousness, to grieve the losses underway, and to begin to live and act from that awareness. It supports insight, compassion and community at this time of profound and unprecedented challenge.
Through a process of slowing down, becoming present, and being with the truth of what is taking place, the Council experience may nurture insight, individual and collective, beyond the contributions that led to it.
Objectification (based on a separation from nature and the paradigm of problems / solutions) is at the heart of the Western worldview through which this crisis resulted; the CUHF offers opportunities to transform these assumptions, so that integrative perspectives and insights may develop.
As a non-hierarchical form, Council challenges traditional power relationships; the integrative and holistic knowing that emerges includes not only empirical scientific facts, but direct embodied experience of climate-related events, and/or awareness of one’s relationship to others and the natural world. Participants may directly experience a deep sense of connection with each other, and be reawakened to a sense of human interdependence with the ecological systems being disrupted by climate change.
This awareness, over time, can transform traditional Western concepts of humans as separate from the ecological systems necessary for survival, and facilitate a recognition that human survival depends on our ability to reorganize our societies in a manner that reflects our interdependence with the natural world.
Council draws from different modes of communication, integration of experience, and deliberation/decision-making. The process values emergent, collective understanding over individual expertise, and, through its structure, values contributions equally, regardless of participants’ relative professional or educational achievements. In that regard, it is a practice of radical democracy.
The CUHF process can provide support for being/living in this time of abrupt transformation, and for work to be of benefit. In this way, it is a powerful tool that complements other capacity and movement building work. Council can serve a network weaver function, connecting and building networks among individuals and groups across a range of disciplines, orientations, and professions.
Council often serves as an incubator from which ideas for action may emerge. Such ideas may include community and network building to strengthen resilience, systems change (e.g., educational and social), political action to achieve policy objectives, and artistic and creative expression.
