The sacred in the science - Dekila Chungyalpa, Loka Initiative

In my attempts to connect with people on some of our most important issues like climate change, I have been missing a huge pathway - faith. These issues need hard conversations, and hard conversations need us to tap into more than facts and fears. My conversation with Dekila opens the door to bringing the sacred back into science. THE IMPACT. Dekila Chungyalpa: - is the founder and director of the Loka Initiative, an interdisciplinary capacity building and outreach platform at the University of Wisconsin - Madison for faith leaders and culture keepers of Indigenous traditions who work on environmental and climate issues. Its mission is to support faith-led environmental and climate action efforts, locally and around the world, through collaborations on project design and management, capacity building, training, media and public outreach. Their vision: that inner, community, and planetary resilience are interdependent and that we cannot achieve any one of these goals without working on the other two. To sign up for their quarterly newsletter: https://go.wisc.edu/lokanewsletter - founded and led Sacred Earth, a faith-based conservation program at the World Wildlife Fund; at WWF-US she was also Director for the Greater Mekong Program - serves as the environmental adviser for His Holiness the 17th Karmapa, head of the Karma Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism. - received the prestigious Yale McCluskey Award in 2014 for conservation innovation - recently published in Psychology Today on how to cope with eco-anxiety THE JOURNEY. In our conversation, we explore: - Her path to wholeness: bridging her spiritual heritage growing up in Sikkim in a Tibetan Buddhist community and her environmental conservation background, after being “an environmentalist by day and a person of faith by night” - Eco-anxiety amidst success: her own path through the urgency and panic while being externally “successful” at the World Wildlife Fund - People and planet: why faith leaders are uniquely positioned to lead us in spiritual truth-seeking on some of our toughest issues