You've probably seen - and possibly experienced - some of the headlines. In the U.S.,140+ municipalities saw and are expecting to see record highs. 200,000 people lost power in NYC. In Europe, the WHO estimates that there were over 1,300 "excess deaths" since June 21. Heat records are being broken all over the place. So too are other forms of climate chaos: 15-18 inches of snow in the Rockies; unusually cold weather in Japan; the warmest ocean temperatures on record in June.

This climate chaos is proving challenging to many of the long-planned Fourth of July/the country's 250th birthday celebrations. Multiple cities, from Richmond, Virginia to Colorado Springs, CO, are cancelling, postponing, or in some way altering their fireworks and other celebrations out of concern for public safety. Not the U.S. President, though: he is planning to go ahead with the biggest ever fireworks show (they are aiming to break the world record of 850,000 shells), and he is promising to deliver an extra-long speech, just to prove he can. He's running on that old domination code, which entails dominance over heat/nature/climate change//world records, regardless of the cost.

And there will be a high cost to the explosion of those 850,000 shells: the National Park Service has issued warnings this week that people should consider avoiding the capital's metro area because the air will be "hazardous".

In other words: this "celebration" put on by very powerful people will make it so that regular people will struggle to breathe. And the cause of climate change? The very fossil fuels that fueled this country’s ’development.’ The consequences of this ‘development’ include, this week, suffering for the people it was supposed to help.

In the Gathering I was at, inside an AC'd room, we were talking about the land - both histories and contemporary realities. To talk about the history of land in those mountains is to talk about the causes of climate change-caused the causes of the heat done we were all wading through.

You might be familiar with this historical arc. First, the Indigenous peoples were forcibly, violently removed from their mountains. Then, a few decades later, came the forced and violent removal of some of the mountains' insides via coal mining. Currently, they are forcibly - violently - removing the tops of the mountains.

We were lucky enough to get a chance to listen to a local anti-coal activist, Junior Walk, with Coal River Mountain Watch. He grew up in the mountains; his father worked in the mines, and, after working for the coal plants himself, has dedicated his life to bringing an end to coal. He shared images and stories of Mountaintop removal and some of the fights against it. If you've seen images of Mountaintop removal, it is eerie. It doesn't really look like a mountain at all. Especially mountains that are part of some of the world's most biodiverse regions. (Walk gives a lot of talks - here's a talk he gave at Bioneers.)

Coal contains more carbon than oil or gas, so it is one of the leading causes of climate change (it accounts for over 30% of the historic global average temperature increase).

Given that the current administration is planning to give a lot more money (at least $800 million) to revamp and open new coal plants, I asked Junior if he had noticed any change in the last year or so.

"No," he answered.

Here’s my sense of what he and others in the room who know this issue far better than I do said: This mountain was getting destroyed long before this current administration. The larger environmental movement seemed to have forgotten about us - acting as if this wasn't happening, as if coal was dead. But it has been happening. The mountaintops are being destroyed. The rivers are being grossly polluted. And we can't wait for someone else to save us - because they won't. They haven't.

Part of what I took away was: don't get fooled by just asking what’s "new." Pay attention to the deeper pattern here. The pattern of a particular form of power and structures of wealth. A pattern that has been perpetuated, quietly, in places you may never have seen or gone to, hidden in plain sight in these mountains- and it is impacting all of our lives.

In his book, "Pagans in the Promised Land," Indigenous scholar Steven Newcomb argues that the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, which was so critical to the formation of what we now call the U.S., holds within it a domination code: a pattern that repeats itself in many guises in this country and in our world.

It's the pattern of a code that permits a coal company to forcibly remove a house or a church or anyone they want to if that dwelling/person is in the way of that "resource" … the use of which ultimately hurts everyone; the pattern that permits a president to put as many explosive materials in the air as he wants to even if it makes it hard for local people (especially vulnerable people) to breath; the pattern that says you should push yourself in the heat in order to continue "business as usual" even though that "business as usual" is actually worsening the heat itself; the pattern that permitted a president, in 1820, to enact the Indian Removal Act even after the Supreme Court said it was illegal and to forcibly remove many peoples, including the Cherokee peoples, from their homelands. It's the pattern of extraction, of separation, of windigo, of not being able to stop actions even though those actions cause suffering, that leads to the continued burning of "valuable mineral resources" even when scientists issue, again and again, clear evidence that it would lead to exactly the kind of suffering, danger, and death that people all over the world have been suffering from this past week.

I've been arguing for a long time that climate change comes from colonization, and today, as my country celebrates 250 years of being its own colonial entity, independent from its colonial parent, I feel particularly aware of how that code of domination continues to cause and exacerbate suffering.

AND: The code of domination is not the only code that lives in this country. Let us also ReMember these other patterns; these codes that are closer to our true source as earthlings, as people of mountains and hollers and deserts and rivers and cities and villages and neighborhoods and even open roads.

As climate change challenges planned celebrations, perhaps this is the time to inquire into what patterns and what histories we are celebrating and seeking to regenerate.

There are codes that always have and still do enable life. Patterns of love: love of land and water and ocean. Love of country - not (just) as a political entity but "country" as in the land itself. Love that leads white and Brown and Black and Indigenous and Asian and people of all sorts of ancestry to keep reaching to the earth. To learn and relearn. To write and speak and hold circles. To foster communities and to attend to Spirit who offers continual revelation. To create - art and music and stories and multicultural wonder and ceremony. To repentance. To make meaningful apologies. To rituals of recovery and remembering. To truths.

Love that led our friends at the Interdependence Project to release an updated version of the book, ‘Indigenous Roots of Democracy,’ bringing together essays from Haudenosaunee thinkers and leaders. That book is now available here.

Love that led to the kind of gatherings that I was just at in Tennessee: multiple organizations and people coming together to tend to one another, to learn, to engage in deepening their shared understanding of truth, historical and contemporary ... even amidst a lot of falsehoods and a wide myriad of distractions. I told stories of some of the Indigenous roots of democracy. Of how ideas such as "freedom" and "independence" and equality - were freedom is not just one person doing whatever he wants to whomever he wants - were (and often still are) Indigenous practices; ones that initially repelled European missionaries ... and eventually inspired Europeans (as beautifully shown in the book, 'The Dawn of Everything,' the European Enlightenment might never have happened without the Indigenous critique of European hierarchical social structure).

Of how, if you think about it for half a minute, you realize that independence is never really possible without first being in a condition of interdependence. Of how close freedom is to responsibility, and how responsibility can never be fully understood without roles, and how roles are better defined when formed within community. Of how on the eve of the Revolutionary War, at least 21 leaders from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy stayed alongside the Continental Congress for several weeks and were available to witness and to support the fumbling founding fathers (whom the Haudenosaunee Confederacy frequently referred to as "younger brothers")

Peace, which is such an important part of the ethos of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy's Great Law of Peace, is also part of the heritage of this land. Not, mind you, pax Romana - the peace of the Roman Empire, which basically is a form of domination and subordination.

But 'peace' that is closer to "shalom", or "samanvaya" in Sanskrit, which is often translated to harmony.

That is also part of our collective inheritance, in whatever country we may live in.

That is also possible.

Even now.

Even here.

Even with us.

So much remains possible. We can - and in my travels these last few weeks I find it in often small but significant ways - create cultures of ReMembering and rejuvenation, of revitalizing languages and cultures and traditional ecological knowledge; of finding ways to, once again/continue to gather around the sacred fires and listen and learn.

May we (keep) enter(ing)a time of ReMembering and Rejuvenation.