ABSTRACT
Resorting to positional litigation can feel safer and easier than entering into a collaborative process of uncertain outcome in which one must take responsibility for the conflict and its resolution. Mediation promotes the concurrent legitimacy of different points of view, when each wants to believe that they are right and the other is wrong. Mediation asks parties to move from an either/or to a both/and approach and to relinquish their perception of the other as the enemy. There is a parallel or consonance between confronting climate change and confronting destructive conflict in our human social relations. Both climate change and conflict are symptoms of human psychologies. The struggles to implement democratic processes for public decision-making, to foster gender equality, to create a fair justice system and a just economic system characterized by an absence or minimization of the abuses of unfettered free-market capitalism or centralized, despotic oligarchy reflect aspirations to live less violently or abusively together.
