Hope – Apr 22

Click on the headline (link) for the full text.

Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage

An Interview with Joanna Macy
Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
… Why is it important that we honour and explore our grief for the world before we are able to respond?

I don’t know that I would make it sequential, but our grief, if we are not afraid of it, brings us into full presence to our world. That’s why I want to help people to move beyond being afraid of the despair, grief, outrage, or fear. I want us to move beyond viewing it reductionistically, as a function of some personal pathology. I want us to see the true nature, what I call the Tantric side, of these: that love is behind the grief, that passion for justice is behind the anger.

So when that happens, energy is liberated. It unblocks the feedback loop, so that we can receive the information and respond to it, it unblocks the flow through, then we can be fully there. If we’re not afraid of suffering of our world, then I fear nothing can stop us. It doesn’t mean we’ll succeed, but we can spend ourselves freely and joyously.

One of the tendencies for people involved in this work is overdoing it and burning out. What strategies have you developed to minimise the risk of this in your own work?

Systems thinking. Also seeing that the Great Turning comprises dimensions that are very different in character. We are interwoven in a much vaster response, so that our part of it is just one strand in a moving, flowing tapestry of response. That living systems are built on redundancy, which means that while it is essential that you do what you do, it is also true that there are many others doing similar things. There is not just one Messiah, there are many.

That’s been a tremendous source of resilience for me. Of course we are conditioned by top-down thinking of the Industrial Growth Society, so it’s easy to be lured into the self importance that is the breeding ground for burnout, when we think that what we’re doing is so essential that we waste ourselves. Now I’m prey to that, because we’ve all been conditioned, we’re all scared.

But actually it is becoming easier and easier and you must feel this in the Transition movement, where so many people are joining in who had never even heard of Transition Towns. You are one lovely river. You’re naming it and describing it, but it’s not dependent on you.

… What do you say to people when they say it is too late, we are finished?

I don’t take it seriously. Hopefulness and hopelessness are just feelings, you have them both at the same time. There are perfectly reasonable grounds for feeling that we don’t have a chance of a snowball in hell. But those are just feelings, they come and go, so not to put that much weight on them. Of course you feel that. Of course hope will spring. The main thing then is your intention. What is your intention? The life living through you wants to go on. I don’t think anyone really wants to give up. That might just be an excuse for sloth! (laughs)

… Do you have any last advice for people who are reading this as we stand on the cusp of the Great Turning?

To sense the enormous privilege that is ours to be alive at this time, where our lives can matter. Where we make choices. Where in the very danger and darkness of our time we grow such solidarity. Where the play of our imagination and vision can matter supremely. It is a wonderful time.

Scary, and shot through with dark and light. Such an amazing time to come alive. Feel the privilege of that. Feel the companionship of the ancestors and future beings who are there to support us because this moment is a crucial link in a very long story.
(21 April 2008)

Why Bother?
Michael Pollan, New York Times
Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it’s not an easy one to answer. I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in “An Inconvenient Truth” came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That’s when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart.

… There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule. … Have you looked into the eyes of a climate scientist recently? They look really scared.

So do you still want to talk about planting gardens?

I do.

Whatever we can do as individuals to change the way we live at this suddenly very late date does seem utterly inadequate to the challenge. It’s hard to argue with Michael Specter, in a recent New Yorker piece on carbon footprints, when he says: “Personal choices, no matter how virtuous [N.B.!], cannot do enough. It will also take laws and money.” So it will. Yet it is no less accurate or hardheaded to say that laws and money cannot do enough, either; that it will also take profound changes in the way we live. Why? Because the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle – of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.

… For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing – something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking – passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists – that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author, most recently, of “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”
(20 April 2008)

Jeffrey D. Sachs talks on ‘Economics for a crowded planet’ (video)
Jeffrey D. Sachs, Authors@Google via YouTube
Economist Jeffrey D. Sachs visits Google’s Mountain View, CA, headquarters to discuss his book, “Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet.” This event took place on April 9, 2008, as part of the Authors@Google series.

For more information about Professor Sachs, please visit www.sachs.earth.columbia.edu
(16 April 2008)
Worth listening to (72 minutes). Sachs is an economist, but ventures outside the orthodoxy – writing about ecological and social justice issues. He’s in the techno-fix camp, saying that the problem is not to decrease energy use, but to delink energy and greenhouse gases. However, he dismisses the idea that markets alone can deal with the problems we face.

Sachs seems to be a regular guest on the Charlie Rose show, with the latest visit on Apr 16. -BA