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Standing behind the familiar surfaces of everyday life – our family, our work, the travel we undertake, our preferred recreation and so on – a single question confronts us all, rich and poor, in every country in the world – how should we respond to a world slipping deeper into crisis each and every year? It’s a question that vast numbers of people are aware of and to which there are at least two fundamental responses that we can label ‘passive’ or ‘active.’ Perhaps the former is most common and it is commonly expressed through denial and / or avoidance. Here the issues appear so challenging, so difficult to understand and respond to, that they are simply set aside allowing people to get on with the kinds of close-up and personal things they can have some influence upon. The clear drawback of such responses is that they lead to widespread disempowerment. We also know that denial and avoidance don’t really work at any level. All they do is to defer issues, to shove them aside for a while. This leads me to speculate that the repressed knowledge of this failure to confront reality may be among the root causes of the ‘depression epidemic’ noted in recent years…