A few weeks ago, I attended a new play called “Current Changes in Empire” by Sarah Moon of the NYLovesMountains project, which is working to establish connections between communities which are being impacted by mountaintop removal (MTR) coal-mining, and the cities (like New York) which get their power from that coal.

The play was fascinating, several stories juxtaposed to illuminate the historical, environmental, and personal aspects of coal mining. The story that resonated most with me was of a family living in Kentucky. The sister stays in the area as an adult, but her brother moves to New York City to go to work for a finance company that’s heavily invested in mountaintop removal. When their grandma’s house is flooded by overflow from a sludge pond (a byproduct of MTR), sister goes down to the big city to talk some sense into little brother. “You people live in La-la land,” she says to him, as he tries to defend his company’s practices. “You think you buy a piece of organic fruit and that makes all these problems go away!”

I’m paraphrasing, and of course this statement is an oversimplification spoken by a character in the heat of anger, but it stuck with me all the same. At a lot of the green events I go to in New York, environmentalism is treated as another trend or marketing ploy. I get business cards from green spas, eco-friendly house-cleaners, and while I don’t mean to knock those efforts, they feel thin to me. Building a new and better future can’t be boiled down to environmentally friendly pedicures or recycled handbags. We have much, much deeper issues to resolve. Everything has to change, not just the surface. If we allow today’s green movement to swell into a bubble like the dot-coms of 2000 or the recent housing market, we will have missed our opportunity to make necessary, fundamental changes to the way we do things.

So, I live in the big city, and for a lot of reasons, I love it. It’s very easy to be green here—I have great public transportation, wonderful food, and plenty of ecofriendly options for pretty much everything I want to buy. There are amazing people here doing innovative things. But the La-la land comment keeps coming back to haunt me. And for that reason I keep thinking about Alex Steffen’s recent article on Worldchanging called The Outquisition, as well as the amazing discussion going on in the WC community in the comments section.

This article is about the possibilities implicit in shrinking, rust-belt cities, and how dedicated activists can have a huge impact by working with these communities to take advantage of what they have—land, infrastructure, people—to build new ways of living. The discussion went a little class-warfare-wonky—how dare these city slickers think they can come and tell people what to do?—but that’s to be expected, I think. When you have different groups of people with different ideas and backgrounds coming together, there will always be friction, and that is a good thing, because resolving tension is where innovation comes from.

But the idea is certainly not for strangers to come and condescendingly start ordering people around in their new communities. I think what Steffen is questioning is the tendency of well-educated, green-concerned people to congregate in eco-friendly enclaves in big cities when they could probably do a lot more good by getting out of La-la land and engaging in places where their expertise is needed, in communities that are struggling to get back on their feet. A bit of green know-how and a lot of open-hearted listening can go a long way to rebuilding crumbling cities.

Imagine if the brother in Sarah Moon’s play came back to Kentucky with his big-city finance experience and joined the community to fight the rape of their mountains for coal. Imagine if all of us who left our hometowns because we didn’t fit in culturally came back with humility and knowledge and really tried to push things forward in a positive way, instead of shaking the small-town dust off our feet in search of a cozier and easier way to live. People all over are hurting and looking for ideas on how we can make things better. With the state of our economy, gas and food prices, and the general aura of uncertainty in America right now, I think the time is right for us to come together beyond the ideas that have driven us apart.

One of the commenters left a link to a piece the NewsHour recently did on Pittsburgh, my old hometown, and the grass roots green renaissance taking place there—from urban farms to an ingenious plan to use some of the city’s 14,000 vacant lots to grow crops for biofuel, there’s a lot of innovative and exciting things going on. I had tears in my eyes watching this video and seeing all kinds of people come together to build a new and healthy and vibrant city, one project at a time, and I found myself questioning my comfy life in my eco-friendly city enclave.

Exploring ideas on this website is great, and I love the conversation we are having here. But I wonder ... what would it be like to explore these ideas in real life? What could we accomplish if we traded life in La-la land for conversation and conflict and creation in parts of the world that are hurting and looking for options?

I’m still pondering this, and would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

(image by currybet via flickr.)