image courtesy of Nesster

Last week I watched the first episode of Ken Burns’s new documentary series on America’s National Parks. It focused largely on John Muir, the Scots-born American writer and philosopher who many think of as the first environmentalist.

Muir’s outlook was based largely on his deep spiritual connection with nature, gained through epic walks in the mountains of Yosemite and other wild places in the world, and conveyed through his writings. His words touched me as they touched so many of his contemporaries. He saw nature as God’s greatest expression and worked tirelessly to protect it from the encroachments of industrial society and its half-baked notions of “progress.”

Much of the environmental movement still has this anti-progress bias today. But I wonder, is this historically inherited bias still serving us? Backing up even more, can we look objectively at the concept of progress? I’m not sure that we can, but it’s worth a shot.

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Colin Beavan, aka No Impact Man, appeared on The Colbert Report last night to talk about his year-long project to live without having any harmful impact on the environment, documented in his new book and movie. Colbert, expectedly, goofs on him—he chastises Beavan for the fact that, since they don’t have a TV at home, his daughter had to hear about Scooby-Doo at school. But it’s pretty good natured overall, and Beavan gets an opportunity to talk about the No Impact Week that his is co-sponsoring with the Huffington Post.

I have to admit that I’m of two minds about Beavan’s project. On one hand, it’s marvelous that he and his family were able to explore living in a new way, and even better that they found their new lifestyle to be healthier, more fun, and far more rewarding than their previous mode of heavy consumerism. On the other hand, lifestyle changes are a poor substitute for the full-scale soup-to-nuts transformation that we have to bring about in our culture in the next several years. On yet another hand (who’s counting?), Beavan’s project has made a great impact on a great many people, getting them to think about the way they live in new ways.

What I love about his message is that seems to be pushing these small lifestyle changes as a gateway drug to considering larger and larger ramifications of what we are here for, and how we can reinvent our culture to support human health, wealth, and security instead of mere consumerism.

Here’s the video of his short appearance on the Colbert report, as well as a link to a recent critical New Yorker article about his and other similar projects called “What’s Wrong With Eco-Stunts?” and Beavan’s response to that article. Both writers make excellent points, and rather than choosing sides, I’m inclined to think that the most important thing is that this discussion is even going on. What do you think? Let us know below ...

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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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Today’s video is from author and speaker John Marshall Roberts, who covers terrain familiar to The Sunny Way—how to use the ideas of personal and cultural development to create change in the world. He uses the work of Clare Graves (which we’ve discussed before) to show the many ways human beings think about life, and to break down what works when communicating with people with these different worldviews.

I have to admit it was a little rough for me to get past the New Age-y graphics—I have a pet peeve about them!—but I’m glad I did. Roberts has a deep understanding of how change works and is able to share it really effectively. I’m definitely going to grab his book.

image courtesy of Pear Biter

Over the last few days, we’ve had an explosion of conversation here on The Sunny Way. It’s amazing to see so many people grappling with this stuff, and so important! Lots of ideas are in the mix, but I’ve noticed that they largely seem to boil down to one major question, and so that’s what I wanted to look into today:

Is development real?

Subquestions: Have humans evolved at all? Are things really better now than they were before industrialization? What should we be aiming for: a return to the past, or a new future that we can’t even really imagine yet?

If you’ve been on The Sunny Way for more than 30 seconds, it’s probably obvious what my answers are. But my goal—really—is not to argue with people who see things differently. My goal is to share the worldview that allows me to be optimistic, in hopes that it might help others find the strength to lay aside their habitual disgruntlement, and the courage to create what’s never been created before.

In short, I want to share with you a rational framework for optimism in the 21st century. Here are the reasons why I think it’s reasonable and accurate to be optimistic. Incidentally, this also gets into the reasons why personal development is a crucial part of changing the world.

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In Derrick Jensen’s recent article in Orion Magazine, “Forget Shorter Showers: Why personal change does not equal political change,” he throws down the gauntlet for would-be activists in the 21st century in the very first paragraph:

Would any sane person think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?

He goes on to explain how our capitalist system wrongly puts the onus for protecting the natural environment on individuals and their consumption patterns, when the vast majority of waste and emissions are produced by industry and the military. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings.

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image by erin MC hammer

The other night, my dear friend N. came over to hang out for a while. She told me that she’d been fighting a lot with her mother, a born-again Christian who watches a lot of Fox News, about politics. “What I don’t understand,” N. told me, “is the vitriol. She might disagree with Obama, or with me, but why does she have to be so hateful?”

Remembering several occasions on which N. had spewed her own venom in the opposite direction, especially during last fall’s election, I gingerly asked her how her rigid stance differed from her mother’s. “Aren’t you just as much of a fundamentalist about your beliefs as she is?”

We talked through this for the next hour or so. “They don’t believe in evolution so they want to teach theology in schools! They hang out in their little enclaves and won’t even listen to anyone who doesn’t agree with them! They won’t let up on the most asinine things!”

In each case, I saw the truth in what she was saying. And I also saw, with more clarity than ever before, that each of those statements could be applied to “our” side as well. From the religious right’s point of view, random, causeless, meaningless evolution is a form of religion—an atheistic one they don’t want their kids learning. Liberals also hang out in little enclaves, and have unwavering stances. We are all guilty of the same rigid way of thinking.

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image by Orin Optiglot

Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
—Charles Darwin

And why should cultural evolution be any different? Indeed, looking at the major stages of human civilization we see that each emergence both solves problems of the previous stage and provides the “strife” needed for the next stage to emerge.

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Well, I’m back home in Brooklyn after a truly amazing month on the road. I’m still processing everything I saw—in nature and in myself—and thinking about options that hadn’t occurred to me before. Changes are afoot in so many different areas—work, home, and even in the way I think about the world. My urge right now is to clear the decks for what’s coming next and to absorb as many new ways of thinking and relating as I can. As always, I will do my best to share this with you on The Sunny Way in hopes that my experience and ideas might be useful to you.

To that end, today I’d like to share with you a presentation by designer Matt Webb, in which he explores what it can mean to be a human being right now. He believes that our special superpower at this point in time is to participate in cultural creation in a way we’ve never been able to before. I can’t say too much more about it, because he covers so much ground so beautifully. Do yourself a favor and watch this today! It will change your weekend and, possibly, the way you see yourself in general.

I got my hands on this massive, awesome tome the other day—the result of a decade-long research and analysis effort by Sean Esbjorn-Hargens and Michael Zimmerman into how to integrate all the different forms of ecology—and have been slowly working my way through it. This book feels very important so I’m taking my time, making sure to understand each paragraph rather than racing through the way I sometimes do.

I’m catching a lot of gems this way. Here’s one from the introduction, where the authors are laying out their goal for this book: to put together all the various ideas formed by the more than 200 movements within environmentalism to reveal a fuller, multi-layered, and more complete understanding of our home and how best to live in it.

“We do not assert that all perspectives are equal. Some truths are more comprehensive than others. Partial worldviews and partial perspectives reveal partial truths, which are accurate and essential but must be integrated int a larger, more comprehensive picture.”

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When I saw that Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars was available as a free Kindle download, I snapped it up (it’s still available, btw). I’d read this book several years back, and it amazed me. Reading it again now, in the context of what we’re trying to do on this website, is an even richer experience. Much of what the Mars pioneers face parallels what we Earthlings are facing right now: how do we handle ecological, political, and economic complexity? What stars do we navigate by?

Set in the near future, Red Mars tells the story of the first hundred colonists’ arrival on Mars, and the first half century or so of history to happen there. As the colonists spend time on the planet, their ideas on where it should go diverge. Some—the Reds, led by Ann—want to treat Mars as a park, studying it with minimal alteration to the landscape. But most others want to terraform the planet to make it more hospitable to life—partially for the scientific challenge of transforming the planet, and partially so that at least some of humanity can escape an increasingly tapped-out Earth. Over the first few years of Martian settlement, the argument grows in ferocity, and it finally comes to a head in an epic showdown between Ann and Sax after dinner one night.

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image by //amy//

Over the weekend, I attended the Town Hall put on by the folks who run Evolver.net, a site dedicated to conscious collaboration to create the future. Colin Beaven spoke, as did folks from the Transition movement and many other various yogis, authors, and scientists. There was an expansive and kinetic feeling of potential in the room—a hundred people in a church talking about possibility, consciousness, and evolution as colored shards of sunlight filtered in through the stained glass windows.

Within all this energy was also a crackling of tension, a feeling that each of us was here not only to connect, but to evaluate. Was this for real? How much do we agree and disagree? And how much of the each others’ worldviews would we find unacceptable?

This tension is natural and good, I think. This was the first event of its kind, and we were all kind of reading each other, seeing how we and our ideas fit in. Allowing for this natural tension, though, I found myself at odds with the sentiments expressed by some of the speakers, which I perceived as anti-modern, angry, and sometimes even smug.

As I listened to speakers decry corporatism, describe Barack Obama as part of the problem rather than the solution, and speak about the coming transformation in 2012, I started to feel tense in my body. I wanted to stand up for all the good brought about by modernity, to interject some rigorous positivity into the proceedings, and—so much—to share a developmental perspective in which we might be able to lay down our anger at The Man and see the path that’s brought us here with equanimity. For how can we consciously forge a future if we are intent upon ripping down so much of our past?

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This week was a juicy one!

• Monday and Tuesday we explored what it means to be Bright Green from the inside out.
• Wednesday, we looked into the Transition movement, and saw both the power and the unanswered questions in it.
• Thursday, we discussed how Transition might fit into Bright Green overall, and how different factions of environmentalism might organize our activities around a common set of values. (More on this next week!)

Today I’d like to share with you a video I saw on Rob Hopkins’s website, Transition Culture. “The Powerdown Show” is a series of ten 20 minute episodes, each going into a different aspect of the Transition movement. This episode is about the origins,  goals, and motivations of Transition. I found it really thought-provoking and also incredibly well-produced. My favorite part starts around 16:00, when different people involved with Transition each say what it means to them. The varied responses are all heartfelt, and the people are each glowing with inspiration—an incredible thing to see!

One more thing: Transition is having a conference this weekend, and as part of it, they will be streaming In Transition, a movie about the Transition movement, online at 1:45pm London time, which means 8:45am Eastern time in the US. You can watch the stream here.

The Powerdown Show - Transition Towns and Energy Descent Pathways from Rob Carr on Vimeo.

If you’re reading in email or RSS and can’t see this video, click here.

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image by Jeff Kubina

Have you heard about the Transition movement? The New York Times Magazine did a great piece on it a few weeks ago in their Green Issue—here’s their summary of what it’s all about:

“Transition is about “building resiliency” — putting new systems in place to make a given community as self-sufficient as possible, bracing it to withstand the shocks that will come as oil grows astronomically expensive, climate change intensifies and, maybe sooner than we think, industrial society frays or collapses entirely.”

The article goes on to say that Transition springs from a quite dystopian vision—Peak Oil and the impossibility of making a full systems switch before it hits the fan—but then takes a Utopian turn, putting new possibilities into the picture. Maybe a low-energy future can be a fantastic place to live! Maybe it’ll be better than what we have now!

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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.”

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