A fresh start
In the Environmental Change-Makers (ECM) of 20 years ago — yes, it’s really been that long! — we focused a lot on the little things: taking your cloth bags to market, learning to compost, using real reusable dishes and cloth napkins. We held bike rides through the local neighborhood, we taught organic vegetable gardening classes, we had hands-on solar cooker-building workshops, in part so that people could experience these different lifestyle habits.
In ECM’s middle years, 10 or so years ago, the focus was on community-building. We joined the International Transition Towns movement, a network of communities around the world who were strengthening their local neighborhood connections — yes, practicing the skills of an eco-friendly future, but also diving much deeper. Such as acknowledging that the mainstream patterns around us weren’t going to last long-term, they couldn’t for so many reasons, and beginning to examine the possibilities for whatever comes next. ECM helped connect LA people to the ideas of David Holmgren, Rob Hopkins, Joanna Macy, and so many more. (Yeah, I know they’re all white and mostly all male – more on that in later posts.)
Meanwhile, other groups were now teaching the little things, and doing a great job at it. ECM built bigger projects like the Emerson Avenue Community Garden, and the Westchester Community Oven, and mentored community gardens throughout So Calif.
These days, it feels to me, the broader society has caught up to some of the ideas (ok, some parts of the ideas) that ECM nurtured in its early and middle years. Plastic bag bans are a thing — yeah, they come and go with political shifts, but most people understand what they are and why they’re important. In some areas compostable containers are in vogue — although most people still don’t get that Reuse is a far stronger imperative than the flawed “Recycle.” There’s an interest in EV’s — although LA is slow to break off its abusive romance with the personal automobile.
Yet we still have much work to do. Most people think we can still “solve it” with a few surface-level tweaks. Most have never heard of Permaculture. Few know what The Great Turning is. Very few understand the broader context of the Shattering or the Great Unraveling, some terms used for what Western society is going through right now.
While many people, especially younger generations who grew up through the Recycle-oriented California education system, get that “go greener” is essential, what has yet to happen is the radical (meaning root-level) Shift in Consciousness we need, in order to make the huge big sweeping changes we need in order to make a meaningful difference. That’s precisely what I plan to write about over the coming weeks.
