A story about the importance of dialog, values and trust in climate action by Chloé Bernardino, 24 yr, Paris, France.
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Chloé is managing the youth program at Mouvement Colibris, a French citizen movement. She is also a Earth Charter Young Leader, ReGeneration Activist, and Co-founder of garden of futures. Chloé wants to review, deconstruct and unlearn harmful ways of relating to others while building new ways of relating to our environment and to all beings, together and with care.
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Climate anxiety is a normal reaction from your body telling you there is something unsafe about the environment you’re evolving in. Your body is sending you a message that needs to be listened to. How you react to it is where your power lies.
As a human being, I like to first locate the feeling in my body, breathe and remind myself that I’m just human and I don’t need to have figured it out right now. To be honest, it all started with stars exploding and crashing, creating the atoms we are made of today. We’re just stardust. I embrace it and come back to the feeling coming up, to embrace it as well. We came on Earth to live life and do our part, not to be perfect and save anything. I can build safety in this : the more I lean into who I am, the more I can be aligned and be an example of the values I care about, like the Earth community’s well-being, open mindedness, curiosity and courage.
This is what led me to organise intergenerational dialogue days, between citizen collectives and young volunteers on taking action where you live, and corporate experts in sustainability and young europeans volunteers on sharing ideas and visions. The main goal was to meet each other, and come back to what I think is the root cause of the crises: we don’t care because we don’t know each other.
Active listening, sharing from one’s own perspective, and judgement suspension are key to dialogue. It really matters to me as it allows me to feel connected and empathetic, and realise the beauty of the complexity of human contradictions, while leaning into the potential of human revolution. I truly believe we need to trust again human capacity to heal ourselves and around us.
At the end of the day, what matters to me is that I came closer to myself and the values I commit to embody. There are no failure success criterias, but a consistency in showing up, even in the smallest way possible. One breath after the other, I’m alive and I’m here, I can trust the process.