Your Positive Steps/Strategy (participate in our reader survey)
by Jan Lundberg
18 May 2009
What is your path of action, that you can share -- particularly if it's working for you? Is it just for yourself or for others as well? For Mother Earth? We'd like to know, as would your fellow readers. This follows up the survey we posed last month -- that seemed to stimulate great ideas and vision. Now, consider:
Q.#1: Living life to the fullest means... (tell us briefly; we anticipate your answer will be "in the now" of peak everything)
Q.#2: Taking action, for solving a crisis or making a vital change, means... what?
Q.#3: When is it necessary to get angry enough or motivated enough to seriously defend yourself or your ecosystem?
Please send your answers to us at info AT culturechange DOT org.
Unlike our last survey, on our wishes or concerns for collapse, when I shared my answers to the three questions only at the end, this time I've come up with my answers already. If you think they may influence your responses, stop reading now.
As to Q.#1, I was just thinking today: living life to the fullest means minimizing pollution-output in one's life and also getting active to stop it in general. Just think of the unimaginative souls polluting us and themselves daily, mostly because they have assumed there's no other way to behave or to survive.
In cheerful opposition to such spiritual self-defeat, think of the rewarding feeling of using your body instead of the internal-combustion engine, thereby saving money while curbing greenhouse-gas emissions and oil wars!
For the activist it may not be super rewarding to endure frustration repeatedly, as one advocates a gentler impact on the Earth. But at least there's the positive feeling from knowing that one still tried; as non- or low-polluters we set an example. For the future must be made now: treading lightly.
Q.#2: I think taking action means breaking a pattern and undergoing some "sacrifice." The routine must be broken; we're not any longer in a healthy tribal Mother Earth-worshipping phase of history where stability reigned -- in comparison with today.
Q.#3: One must get angry before finding he or she is totally pushed into a corner, say on the death bed from environmentally induced illness. Getting angry about personal loss, such as losing the big old trees in one's home area, is useful and ought to be most normal. We ought to get angry also about what we don't see in front of us: e.g., the accumulation of billions of plastic bags being used every day just once and tossed. Or, just as unpleasant, think of the out-of-view offensive-weapons engineers and salesmen pursuing their business for profit -- regardless of thousands of years' radioactivity generated. The arms race and mega-trade as practiced today is intolerable because the top partiipants are not really defending themselves or their country, although the justification is attempted. Give peace a chance; in our globalized world nothing less will suffice.
Culture Change mailing address: P.O. Box 3387, Santa Cruz, California, 95063, USA, Telephone 1-215-243-3144 (and fax). Culture Change was founded by Sustainable Energy Institute (formerly Fossil Fuels Policy Action), a nonprofit organization.
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