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Don’t Rush It. Dig In: Defining Advice for the Possibilities Ahead
Paige Doughty, Common Dreams
Let’s face it things aren’t going well “out there.” California is in flames, the Southeast is in horrible drought and the title of the Common Dreams e-mail that I got on Thursday October 27 th was “Earth is Reaching Point of No Return.”
… In short this is how I spend most of my crazy “environmental” life. Everyday I work, in my own small ways, to create a more sustainable world; but I oscillate constantly between the practicality of these small daily actions, and the need for large-scale change with the greatest urgency.
On the one hand I wake up everyday with pressing urgency. “Go, go, go, there is not much time.” And there isn’t. There is not much time in a day, or in a life, or in ten years, which is the amount of time we have to “stop increasing carbon and start decreasing it,” according to Bill McKibben in an October 19 th speech at the Great Turning Conference.
McKibben stressed that we are at a unique moment in history, racing against a global deadline.
… On the other hand, we cannot act hastily. Large scale hasty responses to climate change thus far, include nuclear energy and ethanol. Both of these “solutions” add to the unsustainable use of dwindling water supplies…
…So this is the point in the article when I am supposed to give you alternative solutions. Excitingly I have many. They are not original, most have nothing to do with large-scale national solutions to environmental problems, and they require an active imagination:
- Turn your lawn into a garden.
- Quit your job if you hate it and start doing what you’ve always wanted (after all if McKibben is right you’ve only got about a decade).
- Look at what you do on a daily basis and ask yourself is this harmful to me, to others, to the planet? Act accordingly.
- Learn how to can and preserve to eat locally year round.
- Turn off your T.V., Computer, cell phone.
- Read a book, play a game, dance around a bonfire.
- ….
- Do not try to do this all at once. I did and it wasn’t pretty.
Finally, I end with two of wisest pieces of advice I have ever received about how to change the world.
The first is from a man named John Francis, also known as the Planetwalker. He spent 22 years walking all over the country, 17 of them in silence. His advice, also at the Great Turning Conference, was this:
“Ask yourself: what is your dream, say it out loud, and then begin taking steps towards it. Don’t rush it.”
The second is from Winona LaDuke:
“Get some place. Stay there. Live in a way that is peaceful to that place. Dig in.”
(27 October 2007)
Enviro-Conscious Apartment Living: Creating Urban Wildlife Corridors
Emily Gertz, WorldChanging
My outdoor garden is my fourth-floor fire escape. It’s a highly illegal place to grow plants, since the law worries, with reason, that they may block my escape (or a fire fighter’s access) during an actual fire. Still, before the super caught me and evicted the planters, I grew herbs on mine for several weeks this summer. Given the height from the ground and the overall uninviting metal and stone environment, I was surprised that some birds and insects managed to find their way to my tiny bits of soil with their flowering basil plants. Their presence led me to consider how I might make my building’s stony facade a more inviting rest stop and snack bar for critters trying to commute between the 585-acre Prospect Park, across the street, and the woodsy Green-Wood Cemetary about a mile to the west — the largest green expanses in Brooklyn.
Wildlife corridors: they’re not just for bears and wolves in the wilderness anymore. Urban wildlife need wildlife corridors between green open spaces in cities, ideally stocked with native plants that have evolved to flourish in local soil and climactic conditions, and feed the local animals.
(29 October 2007)
Bioneers to the Rescue
Kelpie Wilson, t r u t h o u t
The annual Bioneers conference has a reputation for creative and deep thinking about sustainability and the environment, but during all my years as an environmental activist, I never managed to attend. On October 19-21, I finally made it to the conference in San Rafael, California. It was an opportunity to feel the pulse of the environmental movement today and reflect on how it has grown and changed since Bioneers began in 1990, the same year that I became a full-time environmental activist.
…At the Bioneers conference, I heard from courageous people who have moved mountains to make the connection between environmentalism and civil rights. Van Jones, of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, is spearheading what he calls “social uplift” environmentalism. His Green for All campaign promotes training of inner city workers for green collar environmental jobs. One program, based in that same low-income town wedged in around giant petroleum refinery tanks where I saw Jesse Jackson speak 17 years ago, is called Solar Richmond. Solar Richmond just graduated its first class of underprivileged youth trained to be solar electric installers.
Van Jones wants to connect “the people who most need saving with the jobs that most need doing.” But when he testified about green jobs before Congress recently, he was told that because it can cost up to $10,000 to get an inner city youth “job ready,” his ideas were not cost effective. Van Jones wants us to think about how much it costs to deal with the social disruption of unemployment that leads to violence, drugs and prison. Green jobs are the future, he says, and we can’t afford to leave anyone behind. We can no longer accept “throwaway” species like the polar bear, “throwaway” people like poor blacks, Latinos and Native Americans, or “throwaway” communities like Richmond, California.
Speaker Majora Carter grew up in the South Bronx, another “throwaway” community. She described the difficulties of growing up in a community abandoned to garbage dumps, prisons and asphalt. But she did not abandon her community. She started Sustainable South Bronx, and has raised $30,000,000 to build the South Bronx Greenway and other green projects in her neighborhood. “My folks are from down South,” she said; “they always used to talk about the crick – that means the creek – and how nice it was. That connection to nature is our birthright, but we have less access to green spaces than any other part of the city.”
Carter is fighting plans for another prison in her neighborhood. She wonders why government can’t invest in green jobs instead: “Why are we still building monuments to our failure when we could be building monuments to hope and possibility?”
While these two speakers were highlights, Bioneers had much more to offer. The Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers was present, along with many other indigenous speakers. And there were women. Alice Walker, Eve Ensler and Joanna Macy were high on my list of admired women. This was one of the few conferences I have attended where I did not leave thinking that women didn’t get equal time at the podium. To the contrary, there was a strong acknowledgement everywhere that a revival of the feminine principle in politics and life is essential for building a new culture that can live with the earth without destroying it.
Bioneers makes connections between culture and environment. It also encourages a new approach to technology, using a concept called “biomimicry.” Biomimicry is technical innovation inspired by nature’s designs. One example is new tough materials that are created with a low-temperature process inspired by abalone shell. Another is identifying new medicines by observing what plants a sick chimp or monkey chooses to eat from the forest. Still another example of biomimicry is designing gardens that mimic natural ecosystems for improved productivity in a small space.
…As the planetary environmental crisis grows more threatening and impacts more people, the environmental movement will continue to evolve. The idea that we are all one people on a small planet has, like Jay Harman’s water tank mixer, been stirring the heart of humanity for some time. This, more than any particular technical innovation, is what will solve our ecological crisis.
If we feel a quickening now of this idea of oneness, it is no surprise. Perhaps, before we know it, individuals, families, companies, states and nations will align in a galaxy of highly functional networks and spin us into a green future.
One can always hope.
Kelpie Wilson is Truthout’s environment editor. Trained as a mechanical engineer, she embarked on a career as a forest protection activist, then returned to engineering as a technical writer for the solar power industry. She is the author of “Primal Tears,” an eco-thriller about a hybrid human-bonobo girl. Greg Bear, author of “Darwin’s Radio,” says: “‘Primal Tears’ is primal storytelling, thoughtful and passionate. Kelpie Wilson wonderfully expands our definitions of human and family. Read Leslie Thatcher’s review of Kelpie Wilson’s novel “Primal Tears.”
(29 October 2007)
