As soon as I moved back to Pittsburgh in February, we got an enormous amount of snow that ground the city to a halt, and I was stuck at home for a few weeks. This was OK, cause I had a lot of painting and unpacking and rearranging to do. That was all done within a month, around the time the snow started to melt. Then I went to Colorado for a week to attend the (very awesome) Integral Incubator at Boulder Integral. I came back with my sails full of wind, ready to start my new blog and activist project, Bright Green Burgh, dedicated to creating a future for Pittsburgh that is both bright and green.

My first BGB act was to speak at a really fun event last weekend, put on by dear friend/professional bellydancer/community-builder extraordinaire Amethyst Azhar, where local artists created bellydance costumes out of recycled stuff. I was excited to talk to a bunch of environmentalist-leaning folks in such a merry atmosphere, hoping to connect with some and start to build a team. And I worked hard on what I would say—practiced it and clocked it and edited it and practiced some more.

By the time I got to the event, I felt ready. But I was in the middle of a conversation with a fellow speaker when heard my name being called, and I hurried to the mike. And then, as my demure friend Matt likes to say, I shit the bed.

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In this short talk, Derrick Jensen imagines what Star Wars would look like if written by environmentalists—would they file lawsuits against the Empire ... sell free-trade coffee to its citizens ... sign petitions against Darth Vader?

Now, it is a bit simplistic to characterize the messy real world of 2010 as the evil Galactic Empire. And of course I believe more in redemption/building on what is than revolution/blowing shit up. But he is right about one thing: most of us who want to change the world are thinking far too small.

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YERT is “an environmental anti-depressant in film form.” Mark Dixon, Ben Evans, and Julie Dingman Evans drove around to every state in the US for a year, covering ideas to move us toward sustainability and the people who are working on them—from the Solar Roadways guy to the guy who lives in a cave.

Right now they are hard at work putting the film together and trying to get it exposure (Sundance!). Check out the trailer below—this is going to be a blast, and I wish them all the best. So much so that I just gave them some cash to help them finish it up. You can, too, at this link.

image courtesy of jurek d.

A few weeks ago, Seth Godin blogged about enormity:

If you’ve got a small, fixable problem, people will rush to help, because people like to be on the winning side, take credit and do something that worked. If you’ve got a generational problem, something that is going to take herculean effort and even then probably won’t pan out, we’re going to move on in search of something smaller.

Now, Seth is a smart guy, and I don’t doubt that he is right about this. But at the same time, we actually are facing a generational problem that is going to take herculean effort. The jury is out on whether or not it will pan out. So if Seth is right, and people simply don’t have the capacity to respond to enormity at this level, even if that enormity is Reality, then what’s our next move?

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image courtesy of Lucius Kwok

This is a guest post from Marianne Luhrs, an Urban Planner and Disaster Preparedness Specialist currently working as a research assistant at John Jay College. She can be found online at LinkedIn and at her Google page.

Recently, there has been a “new” movement sweeping the nation and Europe. Well, maybe sweeping is too strong a word. “Popping up” might be more appropriate. The Transition Towns movement emerged four years ago with Rob Hopkins, a British ecologist. An April 19, 2009 New York Times article held that the movement, while it shares certain principles with environmentalism, actually regards itself as “deeper” and “more radical.”

The thrust of the Transition sales pitch is that escalating oil prices and worsening climate change impacts will eventually result in industrial society’s catastrophic collapse. To sidestep this “eventuality”, the group says we must foster community resiliency by embracing sustainability. Transition claims to be a new way to react to the problems of our time, but if you read a history of urban planning, you would find that there have been many such movements over the years.

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image courtesy of torres21

The to-do list to get us from where we are to the clean, just, beautifully designed future we want is extremely long. Lots and lots of things need to change—everything, in fact. Which is quite overwhelming.

It’s so overwhelming that a sensitive, concerned person could easily get lost in wondering where to start. Ask me how I know this! I can’t even begin to count the hours I’ve spent daydreaming about the best way to contribute. Should I install solar panels in poor communities, teach workshops to kids, create an urban homestead like the Dervaes family? What would be the most impactful? Where could I do the most good? What would I enjoy the most?

The result of all this? I’m sure you guessed it. Nada mas. And, oddly, contemplating all these options not only didn’t help anything—it also made me feel like crap. Every discarded idea actually made me more helpless. If I couldn’t even figure out what to do with myself, how could I help change the world?

Eventually I realized that it’s not really possible to sort all this out on paper. It requires action. For many reasons, any project is better than no project.

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image courtesy of David Paul Ohmer

This week I’m getting ready to move, and so I’ve been focused on small, mundane details and plans. Rushing around getting everything ready, I realized that I tend to see the day-to-day minutae of my life as somehow separate from the larger mission of creating a lovely, fair, functional future, like I have to choose between attending to what needs attention right now and what needs attention in the larger sense.

Silly, right? I think most of us do this, though. We focus on the everyday demands placed on our time, and we lose the thread of our larger desires and goals. How do we stitch the two back together? How do we live each day, and make each choice, in the context of creation and responsibility?

It depends on where we put our focus, and how we spend our time. Here are some things to keep in mind as you decide where to apply these precious resources each day.

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What if you could do some good while waiting on line at the grocery store? The Extraordinaries want to help you help the world by giving you chances to volunteer via their iPhone app.

The project is still in its infancy right now—there were only about 10 active projects when I looked at the app the other day, and most of them were requests to tag photos in big image libraries. And of course there are limits to what can be done in a few minutes on an iPhone, but there’s tons of potential here. I envision volunteers answering questions from school kids, documenting buildings that need to be weatherproofed, reporting on neighborhood meetings for community sites, assisting non-profits with online research ... No doubt as The Extraordinaries build their pool of volunteers and tasks to be done, more and more good opportunities will emerge.

Crowdsourcing has produced some of the best resources available today—like Wikipedia itself—so why not apply the same idea to doing a bit of good? In this short video, co-founder Jacob Colker explains what The Extraordinaries are up to. Want to be a part of it? Get the iPhone app here.

Happy Friday, friends!

Today I wanted to point you to a “Can Do,” a great piece on Ben Franklin from And the Pursuit of Happiness, Maira Kalman’s blog on the NY Times site. In it, she looks into the genius of Ben Franklin, which was as much about pointed self-improvement as it was invention.

This part made me particularly happy: “I don’t think he was ever bored. He saw a dirty street and created a sanitation department. He saw a house burning down and created a Fire Department. He saw sick people and founded a hospital.”

And this: “Everything is invented. Language. Childhood. Careers. Relationships. Religion. Philosophy. The Future. They are not there for the plucking. They don’t exist in some natural state. They must be invented by people. And that, of course, is a great thing. Don’t mope in your room. Go invent something. That is the American message.”

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Yesterday I spent some time catching up on my RSS feeds and came across a beautiful piece by sustainability consultant, writer, and musician Alan Atkisson about the Tällberg Forum, conference that looks into the question “How on Earth can we live together?” I read his six-part account and felt myself very moved by his experience. The problems we thought were very bad are actually much worse. And yet so many people are creating new solutions, new ways of seeing, and new methods of working together in response. Even with the incalculable challenges we face, the attitude toward making it right was, as one speaker said, “I certainly think we can, we must, and we will.”

In his speech, Amory Lovins made reference to a TED talk entitled “Willie Smits Restores a Rainforest,” which I’d like to share with you today. Using an integrated plan of clever plantings, high-tech monitoring, permaculture, and co-operation with local peoples, Smits and his team have been able to revitalize an almost-barren area in Borneo. Not only is the land now thriving, full of wildlife and biodiversity; it also supports the food, water, and economic needs of hundreds of families in the area. This reminded me of a speech given at the 350 Conference by Kevin Conrad, Special Envoy and Ambassador for Environment & Climate Change, in which he said that slowing climate change depends largely on increasing the economic value of a standing forest so there is no incentive to cut it down.

Smits’s story is compelling. The most amazing thing to me is the sacred responsibility he took upon his shoulders to care for the land, the animals, the people, and the planet all at once. I hope you enjoy it, and that it sparks ideas for you, as it did for me, about how much more responsibility you can take on, and how much useful, integrated beauty you can create in your own part of the world.

There are marathons and bike-a-thons and walk-a-thons, but on Sunday, June 22, Riverbrook Residence in Stockbridge, MA hosted what may be the world’s first Piano Improv-a-thon!

Riverbrook, the oldest facility for women for developmental disabilities in New England, is where I teach music. In collaboration with Riverbrook director Joan Burkhard and the many wonderful people on the staff, this event helped fulfill my aspiration to show that, no matter who we are, beauty is inherent to us all by virtue of being human.

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This is a guest post by Esther Kassovicz, updating us on the progress of her project to build bridges between Israeli and Palestinian women, which she first told us about a few months ago in an 11 Questions survey. Fill out the survey and let us know what you are up to! We look forward to featuring your good work soon!

We’ve had a few meetings since my last update, both separately in our respective places and together. I’d like to share with you about a couple of them that I believe can illustrate the complexity of the larger scale situation and also why I’m convinced more than ever that holding space for communication is our best ‘strategy’ forward.

A couple of weeks ago we had our West Bank meeting scheduled. We were all very excited and nervous. For us Israelis crossing the check point into the West Bank is against the law, through there is a way to do it if we get stopped that’s pretty much safe and straight forward. We were however bracing for the unpleasant experience of witnessing ourselves the often humiliating and frustrating experience Palestinians endure daily in using the check points. We wanted to experience it ourselves to possibly understand what it’s like for the Palestinian women.  Also the Palestinian women who are Israeli citizens from the North of Israel were all excited as they don’t get to be in direct contact with Palestinians across the ‘green line.’

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It’s not every day that the Vice President of the United States stands less than a foot away from you, gives you a disarmingly warm hello and a very firm handshake!  Thanks to a dear friend, Bernard L. Jones, that’s exactly what I experienced a few days ago.

Bernard, a Democratic State delegate from Colrain and Vietnam combat veteran, had invited me to a special reception in Boston for Vice President Joe Biden. Together with several hundred other people on the roof deck of Fenway Park, I listened to the Vice President speak about the issues confronting this new administration. He described his visits to hard-hit industrial communities throughout the United States and the economic necessity for health care reform. His speech was sober, personal, and finally…uplifting. Not in an impractical or hyperbolic way. His optimism was authentic, real.

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image by Maximum Mitch

This is a guest post by Nancy Fisher, a healer and dear friend from Long Island, NY.

On Monday May 18th, The Alliance for a New Humanity (ANH) and Intersections International hosted the Be the Change Community Outreach Program at the Marble Collegiate Church in New York City. For those unable to attend the event was streamed on the web.

With presentations by Deepak Chopra, president of the ANH, and the Rev. Robert Chase, Director of Intersections International, the evening promised to be a passionate and interesting ride. And it didn’t fail to deliver.

The ANH mission is to ‘connect people, who, through personal and social transformation, aim to build a just, peaceful and sustainable world, reflecting the unity of all humanity’. Inspired by a shared intention to create a critical mass to effect the change needed to create a better world, Be the Change is a world-wide movement presented by the Alliance for a New Humanity in Cooperation with Intersections International. It hopes to inspire individuals in local communities to actually participate in co-creating change. Deepak Chopra advises “it is a process that provides guidance, tools and support systems necessary to insure sustainability and success”.

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No Impact Man tells the story of Colin Beavan and his family’s attempt to live for one year without negatively impacting the environment. Starting with a firm conviction that this is a worthwhile pursuit, meaningful to the culture at large, Colin’s vision is both challenged and developed over the course of the year-long experiment.

The film makes parallel points. As much as it illustrates concrete actions toward no-impact, it also demonstrates, sometimes just by virtue of taking place in New York, just how inhospitable dominant American culture is to a “no-impact” lifestyle. As Colin and family cruise on bikes through Times Square, their smiles cannot obliterate the sea of cabs and huge flashing lights that surround them. Though at the end of the film Colin may be changed, the viewer is also forced to reckon with the fact that his changes don’t begin to touch the existing super-structure in which the well-meaning individual toils to evolve.

In one of the best moments of the film, 60’s anti-war activist Mayer Vishner, who shares his vegetable garden with Colin, points out to Colin that his wife Michelle works for Business Week which promotes the American corporate capitalist system (a blatant wrinkle in their family’s new virtue). Vishner says that if Colin thinks his individual efforts are going to do anything to knock out that system, he’s delusional. However, as a film about the individual’s challenge to live in tune with his or her evolving values, No Impact Man provides a whole lot to like, question and ponder.

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