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Do We Have To Sacrifice To Save Earth?

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Christyl Rivers, Phd.
3 min readNov 30, 2021
Photo by Vitto Sommella on Unsplash

What we give up for inevitable change

The word sacrifice implies that we have to give stuff up.

So we do. But, here are some of things you may not want to give up, but are better off without: our noisy, gassy cars, our endless consumption, our astonishing trash-making capability, our constant need to buy our way out of our discontent.

One might even say we have to “give up” our disconnection from the life-making world. But that is also a gain. Reconnecting may not happen in time to save the greatest trees on Earth, but it may happen if we plant actual seedlings — real hope — rather than continuing to harvest fake promises.

We are now living in very real change. Every change includes both loss and gain.

One thing we most decidedly have to give up is our denial.

It’s hard — it may even prove to be impossible — for us to give up our two million year old, evolutionary driven ability to invent stories that keep us psychologically comforted while we blithely destroy life itself.

What some call “hope” is false belief, you have no evidence of heaven, or the American dream, or how following an athlete or celebrity is going to…

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Christyl Rivers, Phd.
Christyl Rivers, Phd.

Written by Christyl Rivers, Phd.

Ecopsychologist, Writer, Farmer, Defender of reality, and Cat Castle Custodian.

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