As I am reminded by that cute little red flag down below, it’s been a solid third of a year since my last post. It’s not that my hands and mind have been idle during those months (slaving in the fields of an organic farm helps one keep busy), but I simply find it very hard to distill the interrelated issues that plague our postpostmodern world into pithy, easy-to-digest nuggets of wisdom for the internet public.
However, while on distro duty at the very White “eco-friendly general store” one weekend, I came across the following comparison in a book titled “The Transition Timeline: For a Local, Resilient Future”, a passage that neatly explains my difficulty in making regular postings.
Conventional environmentalism:
-individual behavior
-single issue
-methods: lobbying, campaigning, protest
-‘sustainable development’
-fear, guilt, and shock as drivers.
Transition Approach:
-group behavior
–holistic
-methods: public participation, eco-psychology, arts & culture
-resilience/relocalization
-hope and optimism as drivers.
I had to laugh when I first read this, because the ‘conventional’ approach perfectly describes the tactics of TU’s environmental club, with which I was involved for four years. While they had good intentions (save the whales, save the snails, save the bees, save the trees!, etc.), their focus on one issue at a time (usually mountaintop-removal mining) combined with this worn-out approach generally just resulted in a campus/public that writes off environmentalists as ‘hippies’, not wanting to be told what they shouldn’t do or what they should care about.
News from the Front 