image by Jimee, Jackie, Tom & Asha

We at The Sunny Way believe that the future can be fairer, cleaner, and more beautiful than anything we can imagine right now. We also believe that it is up to us to create this magnificent future, and therefore we need to grow so that we can think and create in new ways. Of course, nothing changes us on the inside like trying new things on the outside, so we think of this process as a lovely, virtuous, experimental circle, where internal awakenings lead to external efforts lead to more internal awakenings and on and on and on.

In honor of Earth Week, today I’d like to point you to one of the most compelling articles on this way of thinking that I have ever read, “A Brighter Shade of Green: Rebooting Environmentalism for the 21st Century,” by Ross Robertson, a senior editor at EnlightenNext magazine. When I first read this article, I could barely sit still for days—it so perfectly expresses and addresses the dissatisfaction with old models of environmental thinking that I and so many others are experiencing. Laying out his own life as an example, Robertson points to where environmentalism next needs to grow if it truly intends to throw its arms around the entire world and change it for the better.

As we discussed a few weeks ago, it’s impossible to go back in time to a smaller, simpler civilization. There are too many of us now, and we are too powerful to continue pretending that our actions have no consequence. As Stewart Brand said in The Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.”

Taking on this responsibility, each and every one of us, is what the Bright Green movement is all about, and I can’t think of a better way to get Earth Week started.