This very astute eassy by Ran Prieur was a welcome read. Written with delightful good humor it deals with a serious subject that is difficult to even approach in our culture.
http://ranprieur.com/essays/saveearth.html
Here are just a few quotes I really liked but do go and read the whole thing....
"For thousands of years we've been going into debt and calling it 'progress', exterminating and calling it 'development', stealing and calling it 'wealth', shrinking into a world of our own design and calling it 'evolution'. We're just about done."
" ...it's not about avoiding guilt, or reducing your ecological footprint, or being righteous. It's not a pissing contest to see who's doing more to save the Earth -- although some people will believe that's your motivation, to justify their own inertia. It's not even about reducing your participation in the system, just reducing your submission and dependence: getting free, being yourself, slipping out of a wrestling hold so you can throw an elbow at the Beast... This world is full of people with the intelligence, knowledge, skills, and energy to make heaven on Earth, but they can't even begin because they would lose their jobs."
"If you can just get 10% of yourself free of habit and conformity, people will call you 'weird'. 20% and they'll call you a genius, 30% and they'll call you a saint, 40% and they'll kill you."
"You may feel like you want to do it alone, but you have never done it alone. To survive the breakdown of this world and build a better one, you will have to trade your sterile, insulated links of money and law for raw, messy links of friendship and conflict."
"Humans have the ability to go beyond sustainability, to live in ways that increase the richness of life on Earth, and help Gaia in ways she cannot help herself. This and only this justifies human survival... sustainability is only the middle of the road, and there's no limit to how far we can go beyond it."
9:02:08 PM
|