How have we got here? The profound question we need to ask as a human family. What has led us into a crisis so monstrous it threatens our existence. Who spoke for our species, determined a worldview where ‘success’ looks like eight men owning the same wealth as half the world, where we have passed any hope of staying below 1.5 degrees heating, only a third of our rainforests remain intact, our oceans are polluted and boiling?

The answer lies in a deeply rooted patriarchal philosophy that governed over 400 years of colonisation, where Earth was stripped of her status as a sacred life-force and plundered as a source of random raw materials unleashing ecological and social disaster. The sheer brute force and violence necessary to impose this project across the globe, including genocides on a scale so horrific we still bury them from public knowledge, meant that women played little to no part in systemic decision making. Look at the line up in the ‘Family Photo’ at almost every COP to see who still makes the decisions at the end game of this disastrous philosophy. Men. Count less than 10 women in every picture out of the almost 200 world leaders that line up to represent us. With the exclusion of women has come the exclusion of the feminine worldview, of the goddesses who symbolise Earth as a self-regenerating, self-regulating living being like Gaia and Pachamama. This is as worldview we must re-embrace to understand once again how to live in balance with our own life support system.

Cindy Forde is an author, activist and on the steering committee member of SHE Changes Climate.