Sharing What I Gained from a Care of the Environment Workshop
In February I attended the Care of the Environment Workshop led by Wytske Visser1 in the Basque Country. Afterward I led a class meeting of our Area2 community class in which I reported on the workshop.
I said what an uplifting experience it had been to make my way across Europe by train and receive such a warm welcome from the members of the Basque RC Community, our hosts.
I said that Wytske had talked about class and how the capitalist drive for profit coming before people’s health had affected her own family. She had also referred to the article “All for One and One for All,”3 which I read (it is on the RC website). The article says that working-class people have, by necessity, a better understanding of what it means to support other people and campaign together and that people from other classes can learn from this. My experience as a middle-class white woman has been that people of my background do not ask or expect anyone from outside the family to support them, that people outside the family are not to know about personal matters. This has to change if we middle-class people are to be effective world changers. We need each other. In the class, I got people of the same class identity into pairs to discharge about getting close.
I also told the group how Wytske had asked people at the workshop to share their fears about climate change and how everyone had had a different fear. She had said that this is useful, that we can say to our clients, “Oh, you are scared about that? Well, I’m not!”
I talked about how capitalism makes us feel inadequate and how we are forever striving for more and more. We work harder and harder. We are occupied with striving so that we can buy more and look more “beautiful.”
We worked with the new RC goal on the environment.4 It reminded me how everyone can use this goal to discharge whatever they need to and how it is old distress that keeps us fearful and rigid.
I will lead another class soon. I have asked everyone to research one good fact and one bad fact about the environmental situation and bring them to the class (part of the goal on the environment is to inform ourselves). I am looking forward to it!
Kathy Taylor
London, England
1 Wytske Visser is the International Commonality Reference Person for the Care of the Environment.
2 An Area is a local RC Community.
3 An article by Harvey Jackins on pages 3 to 4 of the April 1990 Present Time
4 A goal adopted by the 2013 World Conference of the Re-evaluation Counseling Communities:
That members of the RC Community work to become fully aware of the rapid and unceasing destruction of the living environment of the Earth. That we discharge on any distress that inhibits our becoming fully aware of this situation and taking all necessary actions to restore and preserve our environment.
Distresses have driven people to use oppression against each other and carry out destructive policies against all of the world. A full solution will require the ending of divisions between people and therefore the ending of all oppressions.
The restoration and preservation of the environment must take precedence over any group of humans having material advantage over others. We can and must recover from any distress that drives us to destroy the environment in our attempts to escape from never-ending feelings of needing more resource.