If you’re out there trying to change your neighborhood, community, city, country, or the world then this is for you. In moments when everything seems hopeless, read this to get your hope on. 1. Hope can co-exist with other feelings. Grief and hope can co-exist. Fear and hope can co-exist. Disappointment and hope can co-exist. Sadness and hope can co-exist. As poet Yehuda Amichai writes, “A man doesn’t have time in his life to have time for everything. He doesn’t...
“For me, one of the key things that needs to underpin our work and our movements over the next 4 years is empathy. According to Roman Krznaric in his book ‘Empathy: why it matters and how to get it’, empathy is: “The art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of another person, understanding their feelings and perspectives, and using that understanding to guide your actions”. …it is clear the empathy needs to come from us. As does the rebuilding of...
Sustainable activism has what (Antonio) Gramsci called a ‘pessimism of the intellect’ which can avoid wishful thinking and face reality as squarely as possible. However it also retains an ‘optimism of the will’, an inner conviction that things can be different. By holding optimism and pessimism in tension, sustainable activism is better able to handle despair, and it has less need to resort to binary thinking as a way of engaging with reality. It can hold contradictions so that they...
To me, getting to the heart of inner transition is about understanding our own dual nature: if we feel threatened we are likely to get in a mode of fleeing the scene, aggressively fighting for what we want or just freezing. But absent the feeling of threat we are calm, relaxed, loving and often generous. The prospect of having less fossil fuel or money to go round puts most people into threat mode. But in threat mode we are not...
Rebuilding families and neighborhoods around the gifts each of us offers. Consumer society has put an end to the functional family. We normally think of consumerism as buying stuff we want but don’t need, but it runs deeper than that. The essential promise of consumerism is that all of what is fulfilling or needed in life can be purchased—from happiness to healing, from love to laughter, from raising a child to caring for someone at the end of life. What...
One question has cropped up repeatedly: In a world filled with melting ice caps, war, species extinctions, and economic peril, how can I possibly argue that the small-scale actions I write about can transform the bigger picture for the better? Belief in the possibility of change is a huge if intangible positive. So, too, is the proliferation of new social and economic models – from commoning, transition, and sharing, to local money, off-grid energy, and maker spaces. These are the infrastructure of...
College students tell me they know how to look someone in the eye and type on their phones at the same time, their split attention undetected. These days, we feel less of a need to hide the fact that we are dividing our attention. In a 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, 89 percent of cellphone owners said they had used their phones during the last social gathering they attended. But they weren’t happy about it; 82 percent of...
5. MISSISSAUGA, ONTARIO A Community Renaissance is Easier Than you Think It doesn’t take much to start a Renaissance in your neighborhood. In fact, as Dave Marcucci discovered, a simple bench can do the trick. After attending a PPS (Project for Public Spaces) training course in 2005, Marcucci came away inspired by the idea that every neighborhood should have ten great places. He returned home to Mississauga, Ontario determined to make his house, which occupies a prime corner lot, one...
by Annie Leonard, YES Magazine, August 2013 Consumerism, even when it tries to embrace “sustainable” products, is a set of values that teaches us to define ourselves, communicate our identity, and seek meaning through acquisition of stuff, rather than through our values and activities and our community. Today we’re so steeped in consumer culture that we head to the mall even when our houses and garages are full. We suffer angst over the adequacy of our belongings and amass crushing...