Happy Solstice 🌞
When the sun stands still
Dear earthlings,
Wishing a wonderful winter solstice to the Northern Hemisphere, and a summer solstice to the Southern Hemisphere. Wherever you are these days, we invite you to light a candle in honour of nature’s rhythms.
🗞️ In Climate News
🇵🇪 On El Niño’s frontline, drought drives Peruvian farmers off the land.
🇦🇺 Queensland floods: Airport submerged and crocodiles seen after record rain.
🇺🇸 East Coast braces for possible 'bomb cyclone' as furious storm roars in.
🌍 'Crisis upon crisis' as Kenya and Somalia go from drought to floods.
🇪🇺 Landmark EU law obliges companies to act on climate, misses chance to make banks green investments.
😞 Failure of Cop28 on fossil fuel phase-out is ‘devastating’, say scientists.
🚃 Biden Administration announces largest rail investment in generations.
🇬🇧 Climate groups in the UK begin legal actions against Rosebank North Sea oil project.
🇧🇷 Brazil’s Congress overturns Lula’s veto on bill that weakens Indigenous land rights (PL490).
Yes the bill we’ve been following since June, read up on it here.
📈 Cool Trends
✨ gifting presence
♾️ eco-musing
The Winter Solstice
The Winter Solstice has been celebrated for thousands of years, across the northern hemisphere in December and the southern hemisphere in June. In every culture, people converge to dance, feast and honour the return of light, from the peaks of the Andes in Peru, to the valleys of Iran, the temples of Rome, the canyons of Arizona, the mountains of Norway and the villages of China (just to name a few). Ancestral cultures lived in tune with nature’s cycles, honouring the year’s shortest day and longest night, and celebrating the end of harvest, by lighting candles, dancing, exchanging gifts and sharing quality time with loved ones.
As we enter into these days of family, holidays and contemporary rituals, I invite you to ponder why pre-Christian traditions across the world focused on this particular moment of each year. Their ancestral ways of being reflect how they listened to nature and learned from her wisdom. By dedicating a day to nature’s cycles, we are reminded of our own cyclical way of being, and the traditional rituals of the winter solstice encourage us to listen and live with the natural rhythms of our world.
🌏 The Culture Column
📺 What we’re watching:
📸 Profile of the week: @global_witness
📖 What we’re reading: Merry Christmas, by Anton Rivette
🤯 Fun fact we learnt this week: California horn sharks lay incredibly weird looking corkscrew eggs.