Hopeful Naivety

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 …

Climate Change and the Sugar Maples

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzI1SbSpBZc&feature=youtu.be I like this beautiful video, produced by Climate Desk, because it brings climate change home to us. Martha Carlson: “Anyone can see a picture of the polar bear but what does it look like in *my* backyard with *my* animals or *my* plants?” Bringing it home, where it has been all this time, of course, …

New Year’s Resolution(s): Friends and Self Care

We have a few plans for the new year. Just a few. But I think my most important aim is to connect meaningfully with someone, every day. That could be a phone call with a  friend who is far away, an impromptu  lunch with an acquaintance, a meeting with fellow activists, a speech to strangers …

Priorities in our Activism – Part 1

Lately I’ve been in several situations and conversations that have brought home for me an important shift in how I as an activist (and many other activists) consider my priorities and view my task. I stumbled into The Situation some months back. With the Green Team we have been focusing on recycling. At the beginning of …

The Dreadful Public Speaking

I was never a confident public speaker. I used to be a TA at the university where I did a lot of teaching, mostly to groups of 20 student, occasionally to an auditorium of 250. I would rehearse those hours meticulously, often to the point of learning the whole thing by heart. It was exhausting, …

Empower *Everyone*: Leaderless Movements

Today I read this article about leaderless movements like Occupy Wall Street. The article itself doesn’t quite deliver on its promise (“The history of leaderless movements”), but it got me thinking. 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”? …