image by Jimee, Jackie, Tom & Asha

I was thinking about what I wrote yesterday about becoming Bright Green from the inside out, and realized I had more to say! Shocking, right?

First off, it’s not that we have to change ourselves before we change the world. That wouldn’t work very well, would it? It’d be like if the Karate Kid never entered a tournament, just waxed on and waxed off forever. No, training and engagement go on at the same time, each supporting and informing the other. As we open up to a new point of view, we automatically start to engage differently in the world. Meanwhile the experiences we have while engaging with life in new ways cause our ideas and values to shift even more. Internal and external evolve together.

Secondly, reading over yesterday’s post, I was reminded of a point made by the brilliant Daniel Quinn, who wrote the Ishmael books. He says something like, “We can’t base our hopes for the future on human beings suddenly being better than they are right now.”

This is an important idea to remember, but I think it is also not complete. Sure, it’s unrealistic to expect a new consciousness to magically descend upon humanity and make us all into compassionate and environmentally-minded people. But we must also realize that development itself is very real. Human civilization has come a long way. We have a long way still to go, and those of us with the education/resources/leisure/privilege to see further absolutely must push ourselves as much as we can to create new and better ways to live that will benefit everyone.

We also have to recognize that our problems are at least as much about consciousness as engineering. Every great leap in the history of freedom—from the Enlightenment and the American Revolution to the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage—came out of a small group of people expressing a moral conviction that the way things were wasn’t right, envisioning how it ought to be, and leading others toward that possibility. Our movement needs that small group of people, too, with that kind of vision and responsibility and moral clarity. It may as well be you and me.