The Big Lie

"From the first, let us dispense with the Big Lie. You know the one we refer to: the eternally repeated claim that we cannot make real and deep and radical change in our way of living, even if it is the right thing to do. The Big Lie narrows both our perspective and our perception of our alternatives, while making our failures seem natural and inevitable. The Big Lie claims that we are cowards, that we are weak, that we are no longer the inheritors of our revolutionary past and that we lack moral integrity. it is a slander, and yet we believe it. And until we stop believing it, we cannot lift our hands, our voices or or shovels and get on with the work of change.

So let us dispense right this moment, today, now, with the Big Lie. We can be the moral descendants of those who fought back against slavery and oppression, those who overthrew unjust rulers, who marched and stood firm and said "No" and backed it with their action. We are those people - there is nothing inherent in us that makes us less courageous or less good, strong or moral than the world's ordinary, heroic people. All we need to do is to begin, to take up the courage and honor, morality and strength as our banner, and to bury the Big Lie beneath a thousand working shovels."

Promo Video

We just finished the promo video for the dance party. Feelin' goooood!

Vermont 350 Dance Party!

I'm organizing a really fun event. It's part of 350.org's international day of climate action. We're having a concert at Higher Ground with 2 great dance bands:

Spiritual Rez

and Barefoot Truth

Then the concert is getting simulcast on line and on cable so that people all around the state (and world) can have their own parties with the live feed from Higher Ground.

For more info, including finding a dance party or hosting your own, please visit our website.

Climate Justice Fast

I'm volunteering on the PR team for Climate Justice Fast, an international hunger strike taking place from November 2 through to the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen in December.

The fasters are a group of incredibly committed, engaged people from all over the world, and I'm honored to be helping out.

Transition Tabling

with Nancy Severance

I helped staff the Transition Charlotte table at the Charlotte Town Party, and it was an illuminating experience. For one thing, we learned that in order to draw more people to us, we should have either had a plateful of free snacks or teamed up with the Pug Rescue folks because those curly-tailed little snorters were getting all the love.

What was interesting about the day, though, other than coining the new adjective “pugly” (meaning gone so far around the homely bend you’re back into cute before you know it), were the responses we got from all the passers-by.

Some folks ignored us (no interest/no snacks/no Pugs), others took a flier and moved on, a number of people stopped to chat and share stories of their own eco-activism. But the really juicy encounters were with the people who wanted to challenge us, who approached with either cynicism, defensiveness, or even anger.

To be honest, I can understand where that kind of reaction might come from. Here’s the town of Charlotte, trying to have a fun little summer celebration, and over in the corner are a bunch of folks who seem to be saying, “Hey everyone! The world is sliding rapidly towards runaway global warming and serious ecological collapse, and also, we’re on the downslope of global oil discovery and production while demand for fossil fuels is going up, up, up, and oh, by the way, it’s all your fault so you better give up everything now, live in a yurt, and become a mule-riding potato farmer with no snacks and no Pugs. Have a nice day.”

While that’s not exactly what we were saying, the truth is that climate change and peak oil are real and they’re happening - which is a scary reality. More than scary, it’s overwhelming. It’s hard to imagine how we could even begin to address these problems, much less make any significant headway towards fixing things. It’s really no wonder that people would be aggressive or cynical – which I think is really just masking a sense of deep despair. Or as economist Paul Hawken said in a commencement address at the University of Portland, “If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data.”

But Hawken followed up that comment with an entirely different statement: “if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.”

That’s what the Transition Town movement is really all about. It’s about acknowledging the seriousness of our situation, but believing firmly, passionately, that we are absolutely capable of addressing the problem. It’s about building community, disseminating knowledge, and coordinating action. It’s about approaching our lives on this planet with an attitude of love and compassion and caretaking and stewardship. It’s about tackling our challenges head-on, with intelligence, creativity, courage, innovation, vision, and a gigantic bucket-load of hope. It’s about knowing that you’re not alone.

Signs of the Times?

I've been doing a bit of traveling lately, and I keep seeing some rather interesting billboards in airports and metro stations. Talk about getting a lot of media hits. I think it's rather clever - though, of course, with some of these I'm a little suspect about what the company is actually up to. But still, even using the language means they think this is the way to reach people. The rising tide floating all boats may be the seas rising due to melting ice, but at this point, I gotta think: whatever it takes to keep the conversation going.

50 Years From Now

I was asked by the Lake Champlain Quadrecentennial folks to write an essay called Observations From A Day 50 Years From Now. It will be read in early July as part of a panel discussion on imagining the future.

So I wrote a piece from my 90 year old self, talking about surviving what I believe are some serious and inevitable "troubles." It's called Observations From A Day 50 Years From Now. Here's a bit for you:

As everything we’d been warned about started to happen, as the world cracked, so did our hearts. And when your heart cracks, you can either die of grief, duct tape it together and solider on, or you can let all those cracks and open spaces get filled up by love. It’s like cracks in cement. Water gets in there, and things start to grow. Life happens in those cracks. The same is true for us, and it’s an amazing thing to see.

Things could have gotten so much worse. But we finally woke up. We finally got startled and scared by the idea that we are just a bunch of critters living on one tiny, miraculous rock in space and we have absolutely nowhere else to go. We finally realized how much we love our little rock, and we finally decided that it was worth being unstintingly selfless and heroic and creative and courageous in order to save it. And ourselves.

And in that moment, we came together as one people. You could feel it in the air. You could see it in the eyes of strangers when you walked down the street. As scared as we were, there was also a kind of marvelous, miraculous determination which settled in. We really and truly changed. We grew up. We adopted, as a global people, that beautiful old Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam – repairing the world. We made it our creed, our manifesto, our purpose.

You can read the whole thing here.