Climate change is the new disease of despair. –

Choosing hope and stepping up may not be comfortable. Sometimes, it will hurt.

You will experience the heartbreak that goes along with failure. You will feel grief at the loss of what you once knew.

But the discomfort you experience from stepping up, speaking out and advocating is minimal compared with the discomfort of unmitigated climate change.

Climate change has created a planetary emergency of really overwhelming proportions.

Active hope shows you how to strengthen your capacity to face this crisis so that you can respond with unexpected resilience and creative power.

It is not just collective action that creates hope, sometimes it is just one individual, in the right place at the right time, that can ignite something extraordinary.

Such is the case for Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg, who began her solitary protest every Friday outside the Swedish parliament with a hand-painted cardboard sign. 

You need to choose hope and not give up.

Before the Spanish came, highland Andean people gathered every autumn to honor the glaciers on Ausangate mountain.

The festival, known as Qoyllur Rit’I in Quechua, or ‘Star of Snow’, coincided with the return of the Pleiades constellation to the Southern Hemisphere and the start of the harvest.

The rituals have their roots in the belief that the glacier is alive and sentient, and that snow-covered Apus, or mountain gods, are the spiritual and physical protector of the indigenous people who rely on them for water.

The diminishing ice cover has led locals to believe that the Apus are less powerful than they once were, and possibly protective.

Some locals view the change as evidence of sick or dying gods. To some, a snowless mountain Ausangate signals the apocalypse.

People believe in the high Andes that human life as we know it will come to an end with all this melting on their sacred mountain peaks.

What they do not quite understand is, is it them who has done something wrong to deserve such punishment, or does it come from outside?