I’m, uhm, a little behind on my magazine subscriptions. I subscribe to only two: YES! magazine (quarterly) and Orion magazine (6/year), and still I can’t keep up. But today I finally got a chance to pick up the Spring 2011 issue of YES!

And there I read the column by Colin Beavan, aka, No Impact Man, about “accidental activism”. You can read the full version here.  Now, I doubt that Colin’s No Impact Project was as “accidental” as he makes it out to be, but I do recognize and admire his analysis of regular-guy-activism.

So many of us have good ideas for helping the world. But we tuck our ideas away. I did. I’d tell myself that if the idea were any good someone else would have already done it. That I’m not capable of making a difference. I’d sit on my ideas, get on with my “life,” and then feel angry at the world because the problems I cared about didn’t get solved.

I had that fear of going first.

~

The fear of looking foolish (I recommend this video) is bound up tightly with the more fundamental fear of being ineffectual.  For the majority it is an unacknowledged fear, too easily rationalized and covered up (which makes this happen). For “accidental activists” it can become the source of heart-wrenching self-doubt and paralysis.

I see this in myself and in our initiating group. I’m not talking about measures taken individually, like turning down one’s thermostat or not buying bottled water. Though those are activism too, and – speaking for myself – just as important, and though all of the below does apply to it, there are complicating matters that I’ll go into some other time. Here I’m talking about speaking up and speaking out, into the community: activism.

In our group we address these issues of futility in often fiery conversations, and I was saddened to hear that many struggle with it. It can chafe to spend so much time and energy organizing energy efficiency and nature-connecting events while right next door someone’s erecting a McMansion, or when in other parts of the world veritable carbon-bombs are exploding.

There are many factors at play here. I, for one, will not judge the McMansion builder next door, because who knows that house is more energy efficient than mine, and who knows why they are building it that way – there is just not enough information for me to judge. So I see them as a challenge, someone to get to know, to learn from. Still, though I had made up my mind about the judging others issue long ago, I did still struggle with the hopelessness of my making so small a difference, and of so much of that being negated by other people’s actions.

I wrote did…

~

I clearly remember my own turning point in this matter. In October last year several of us went to listen to Wendell Berry speak on civil disobedience in the Cambridge Forum. At one point during the Q&A, Berry said that, had he had success as his goal all these decades of fighting mountain-top removal, he’d have quit. ”No,” he said, in his Southern drawl,

You do it out of common decency, because it is only right.

I brought that home with me. It is simple but I just had to hear someone say it. Should we doubt what we do because it doesn’t seem to make a difference globally or even locally? I say no.  I still need to do what is right, even if others are spoiling the broth. I *need* to because my conscience demands it.

Beavan writes:

The question is not whether you can make a difference. The question is, do you want to be the person who tries?

~

This doesn’t mean that we don’t want to or need to make a difference. Like one of our group immediately added:

given how grave the risks are, and how much is at stake — my/our children’s future — I not only need to do these things because they’re “right,” I also feel a moral obligation to win.

Yes, of course, but first, I would argue, we need the strength of our convictions behind us, in our back, shoving us along, muttering “just keep on going,” to sustain us as we fight that good, hard fight.

Berry, who knows this, wrote the poem The Hard Work:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

We will remember within what walls we live, and understand that this level life has its summit…. and we have only to stand on the summit of our one hour to command an uninterrupted horizon.

H.D. “Thorough” (as I now properly pronounce it), “A Walk to Wachusett”

Last year, in April, we held a Transition Training guided by an experienced, trained facilitator. She worked with us for two days, from 9 to 5, with unbounded energy! At the end of the second day she and I were the last ones left, packing up, when suddenly she confessed that she was horribly thirsty.

That day she had forgotten to bring her reusable water bottle, and though she had drunk at lunch from the reusable cups I had provided, she hadn’t drunk anything since then. The reusable cups and my own water bottle had already been removed.

Worried that she would faint, I came with her to the desk to ask for a water fountain and from there on to where they directed us. It was one of those tap fountains. Next to it stood a stack of tiny paper cups. You know, the ones with the pastel flowers and the inside layer of plastic which makes them virtually non-recyclable.

She looked at it and said, “I’ll drink when I get home.”

Home was over an hour’s drive away.

I said, “But Tina, you have to drink!”

She smiled and shook her head. “I’ll be alright!”

And she was.

I didn’t understand back then, but now I do. Now I couldn’t drink from that cup either.

I think activism has done that for/to me. Going public, face to face, with one’s principles, sticking one’s neck out, has made some of these  issues (like the throwaway cup) clearer, simpler, and so easier to deal with.

Other principles (like vegetarianism, hunting), it has thrown into question and confusion. Those I was  never really clear on, of course, but I may have thought I was. Now that I am more conscious of their praxis and because I practice them out there now, I have started the thought process and until I am clear on them, I will not so easily proclaim them anymore.

Standing up for one’s principles in public – training, speaking, meeting, etc. – throws up those summits Thoreau wrote about, from which we can get an overview of the landscape of our level lives. Only I would add that the landscape changes constantly, that we need to climb those summits more than once, to keep us honest and aware.

]]> http://blog.bolandbol.com/2012/01/17/the-summits/feed/ 1 http://blog.bolandbol.com/2012/01/17/hopeful-naivety/ http://blog.bolandbol.com/2012/01/17/hopeful-naivety/#comments Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:47:54 +0000 brooklinemama http://blog.bolandbol.com/?p=6372 I liked Bill McKibben’s essay, “Armed with Naivety”,  for TomDispatch a couple of weeks ago. In it he proclaimed his New Year’s resolution:

My resolution for 2012 is to be naïve — dangerously naïve.

I’m aware that the usual recipe for political effectiveness is just the opposite: to be cynical, calculating, an insider. But if you think, as I do, that we need deep change in this country, then cynicism is a sucker’s bet.

Cynicism makes us say, “that’s how it is.”  This stops us from questioning the right or wrong of it and precludes the possibility of doing something about it. It is the ultimate powerlessness, and it is a powerlessness that we choose.

Naivety allows us to be surprised about things that aren’t right. Then it allows us to be rightfully angry. Then it allows us to know that it shouldn’t be that way. Then it pushes us to start believing that it could be different. Finally, it allows us to know that we can make it different.

That’s what McKibben calls hopeful – as against hopeless - naïvety.

If something is wrong, then we have the right to be upset about it,  the responsibility of hope that we can do something about it, and the duty to do so.

As Bill writes,

The big boys are, of course, counting on us simmering down; they’re counting on us being cynical, on figuring there’s no hope or benefit in fighting city hall. But if we’re naïve enough to demand a country more like the one we were promised in high school civics class, then we have a shot.

But I have found that my voice is the best way to move things.
And things need moving.

(This is a cross post with Wayland Voices – the Transition Wayland blog, where it’s not just me “speaking”.)

I’m reading Gura’s book, American Transcendentalism, A History, and on page 19 there it is:

Toward that end they called “for immediate application of ideas to life,” so that in this brave new world a thinker “was called on to justify himself on the spot by building an engine, and setting something in motion.”

Exactly. Let’s build this engine!

I’m reading the newly arrived Life in the Soil. Actually, I’m devouring it. And it’s not even that particularly well or passionately written.

I started wondering about this as I marveled over acellular slime molds and trichomycetes and realized that I often take refuge in books about soil and geology when I am down about the state of the world. In the first days of my “awakening” to climate change, peak oil and what have you, I fed on McPhee’s Annals of the Former World, like Henry, swallowing all 712 pages whole in the matter of a week.

Why?

Glaciers, archaebacteria: they are the kind of Earth without us. The kind of Earth that, given enough geological time, will be there after we are gone. Maybe what I am looking for in these books is perspective. I mourn so deeply what we might lose, and it seems such a shame. But these books tell me that, in another scheme of things, it doesn’t matter so much. From the perspective of the glacier, of the lichen, we don’t matter that much…

Does it work? I lose myself in the text, in the imagining of these things so utterly un-human. That’s something at least. When I read about art, about philosophy, it’s all so thoroughly human. Even a medieval religious icon or a 17th century piece of music are tainted with my sense of loss, of futility. So, losing myself in this Earth-without-us helps take my mind off things.

But then there is always the moment when I come out of the text to be reminded that it was written by a human. The science was done by humans. That knowledge and imagination, once we’re gone, will be gone as well – all that work, all that passion – for nothing! True, the real thing will still be there, the lichen, the glacier, geological time. But here I am, just holding a book, and sighing too much.

Aren’t you glad this wasn’t another “tutorial” (remember “Calcium in the Soil,” in 8 parts)?

Now here I am, an activist who needs to speak out publicly. And it turns out that public speaking is not like riding a bicycle. You don’t do it for seven years, you lose the knack.

For the first couple of Transition events I made sure I had strong invited speakers. All I had to do was the introductions. Even though I gladly followed the good advice to keep those short, I was still very nervous. I arrived at the events half an hour early, if not earlier, and over-rehearsed my three lines.

Soon the introductions became more elaborate, then  people started to notice me and wanted to hear from me – a Waylander – and not from an invited speaker who doesn’t live here. After all, that’s what Transition is about.

My speeches became longer. I love writing them, hunting for the words that perfectly describe the ever morphing idea of what Transition is. One day I hope I can distill it all into three sentences again. But for now, they’re half a page, 1 page, 2 pages…

My audience went from 2 (seriously) to 25 to 100. They are great audiences, they listen so intently. And they seem to like my accent and my voice.

But when I’m “up there,” I’m still fighting the flight-or-fight reflex, telling myself:

It’s the words that count, not the one speaking , and all she has to do is speak clearly so she can at least be understood. I am a channel.  I am merely a channel. These words speak for themselves. You’re doing the Work. It needs to be done. You’ll get better at it. People understand.

Public speaking, it turns out, is like flying. The more I do it, the more I fear it.

Why is that?

Yesterday my Transition colleague Wen (a fabulous public speaker) and I did our “Transition Talk” at the big Interfaith Thanksgiving celebration. You can hear an earlier version of that here, when we did it for the Episcopal Church on Saint Francis day.

Here’s the video I shot:

In other news, we burned our first fire in the wood stove. The perfect thing to redeem a  wet and chilly, gloomy day!

“It was the first follower that transformed a lone nut into a leader.
There is no movement without the first follower.
We’re told we all need to be leaders, but that would be really ineffective.
The best way to make a movement, if you really care, is to courageously follow and show others how to follow.
When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in.”

When’s the last time you were part of a leaderless movement? Can you remember? No guru, no one spokesperson, no one hero or “example”?

Some of you were probably part of such a movement, but you didn’t notice. That’s because we are blind to it. We think that movements need leaders, or they can’t go anywhere, right? I mean, if there is no leader then who is the movement going to follow?

But a following is not a movement. It’s a mob.

Oftentimes people regale me with stories of brilliant and wise or exceptionally good people. I always thought, hey, kudos to them. But now that I’m in this “let’s move” mode, when most of my conscious thought is driven by The Work that is Urgent,  I’ve become mentally allergic to such stories. People on the pedestal are anathema to the empowerment of the many, of all. They are the ideal we can’t attain. They also absolve us of our own empowerment and decision making, and all that comes with it, like responsibility and sacrifice.

Now I know why I am drawn to that saying: we are the people we’ve been waiting for! “We”: you and I, all of us, we’re all heroes. We should be.

All we need to do is move. Move ourselves.

I realize that when I introduce Transition, I usually invoke Rob Hopkins. Though I try to stress that he’s a normal person like you and I, I still always end up implying that he’s a saint. I’m going to quit that. I’m going to stress: Transition is what *you* do, when you volunteer to restore that apple orchard, when you grow your own food, when you walk or bike instead of drive, etc.

The movement is not in or because of Rob Hopkins. Or Richard Heinberg or Joel Salatin or Bill McKibben. Yes, they are exceptional people, or rather, they have an exceptional grasp of what is going on and what we need to do. Yes, we should listen to what they have to say.

But they must not be our leaders. If they are, then it’s not us, moving, making a movement, leading ourselves. We can adopt their ideas, their principles, but real, lasting action will only come out of that if we make them our own.