THIS iz "whatz up"

what followz iz a message we found on myspace a couple yearz back..........we blogged it @ thee time, and now will bee Re: posting it again thru thee blogosphere az we az hear.........

Green is the new black. No buzz-phrase better sums up both the excitement
many of us
feel about the blooming environmental and social consciousness around us
and the
essential hollowness of the answers being promoted by many newly-minted
eco-pundits.

The flood of environmental magazine cover stories, documentaries and
advertisements
has pushed us over a public-opinion threshold, which is great. But the
solutions being
touted by many of our new-found allies are themselves creating a new kind
of problem --
people who should know better are selling a muddle-headed,
style-over-substance, "lite
green" environmentalism at a time when we need to be rebuilding our
civilization to avoid
disaster. To be blunt, we're being sold out.

People are being told to buy organic cotton T-shirts, keep their tires
inflated and recycle
their beer bottles. But the reality of the situation is that the impacts
of these sorts of
actions are totally out whack with the magnitude of the planetary problems
bearing down
upon us. Those of us who care about the future of the planet need to
reclaim this moment
from those who would have people think that our biggest challenge is
picking the most
stylish vegan shoes.

With every passing day, we are discovering that things are worse than we
thought. Our
climate is ripping apart at the seams at a rate that's surprising even the
so-called
alarmists. Natural systems are collapsing. The ocean seems headed towards
a series of
catastrophic tipping points. Economic inequity is producing a planet of
billionaires and a
billion desperate people. Our political systems are suffering a massive
crisis of legitimacy,
while insane fundamentalists, violent criminals and two-bit dictators
(wearing both
uniforms and Armani suits) are stealing or destroying everything they can
get their hands
on. Everywhere on the planet we find an empty consumer culture so accepted
we barely
speak of it, except perhaps to make an ironic joke. We have placed a Great
Wager on the
future of humanity, and the odds are getting worse.

In the face of this reality, recycling a bottle is an act so insignificant
as to be merely
totemic. Paper or plastic? Who the hell cares?

In the developed world, few of us, essentially none of us, currently live
a "one-planet life."
The vast majority of us, even of those of us who have committed ourselves
to change,
consume more resources and energy than our sustainable share: indeed, it
is very, very
difficult to live an individually sustainable life, because the very
systems in which we are
enmeshed -- which enfold and make possible our lifestyles -- are
themselves insanely
unsustainable. We're driving our hybrid SUVs down the highway to the
Collapse.

Most of the harm we cause in the world is done far from our sight, created
through the
workings of vast systems whose workings are often intentionally hidden
from us, and over
which we have very little influence as single individuals. Alone, we are
essentially
powerless to change anything that matters. We can't shop our way to
sustainability.

I believe we are bombarded with messages encouraging us to take the "small
steps"
precisely because those steps are a threat to no one. They don't depress
sales of
fashionable crap we don't need. They don't bring people into the streets
or sweep corrupt
politicians from office. They certainly don't threaten the powerful,
entrenched interests
who are growing fantastically rich off keeping us locked into the systems
that make our
lives such a burden on the planet and impoverish our brothers and sisters
elsewhere.

Buying a hemp hoodie is not a blow for better world, it's at best a mere
gesture towards
the idea that the world ought to better. And, here in the Green Spring of
2006, we must
finally admit to ourselves that gestures are no longer enough. That to be
focused on
lifestyle tweaks and attitudinal adjustments at this moment in history is
like showing up
with a teaspoon to help bail out a sinking ship. If the New Green
degenerates into handing
out more stylish spoons, we're screwed.

We don't need more carpool lanes. We need to eliminate fossil fuels from
our economy. We
don't need more recycling bins. We need to create a closed-loop,
biomimetic,
neobiological industrial system. We don't need to attend a tree-planting
ceremony. We
need to become expert at ecosystem management and gardening the planet. We
don't
need another unscented laundry detergent. We need to ban the vast majority
of the toxic
chemicals upon which our livestyles currently float and invent a
completely non-toxic
green chemistry. We don't need lite green fashions. We need a bright green
revolution.

To really change the world we need to hand out real tools: rugged, free,
collaborative tools
for understanding the world and our role in it, for seeing the systems in
which we are
trapped; tools for learning how to work together to either transform those
systems or
destroy them completely and bioremediate the rubble. Tools that help us as
people make
meaningful changes in both our own lives and the world. We need to make
people
participants, not consumers. We need answers that address peoples' lives,
not their
lifestyles.

We need to take back the ballot box. With the exception of a couple small
nations like
Finland, most governments on earth are now seething messes of corruption,
oppression
and entrenched privilege, and our government here in the U.S. is worse
than many. We
need transparency, accountability, genuine equity, real democracy and
human rights. No
environmental or social issue transcends the need for worldwide political
reform, and none
of our huge planetary problems can be solved without it.

We need to seize the trading floor. Most large corporations, and most of
the markets we've
established through regulation, incentive and tradition, demand that we
participate (as
employees, consumers or investors) in ecological destruction, unfair labor
practices and an
assault on the public realm. We need to grab hold of these economic
systems, strip them
down to their component parts and rebuild them anew. That means supporting
(or
becoming) clean energy entrepreneurs, green builders, sustainable product
designers,
socially-responsible investors, and so on. We need a new generation
uncompromisingly
innovative and determined regulators, planners, bankers, insurers. We need
to take back
business as a realm of service and do away with the dinosaurs who dominate
it today, and
we need an army of people ready to put their careers and investments on
the line to do it.

We need to share. There is no sustainable future without a vigorous and
lively public
realm. We need to defend the commons, from the air we breath to the
culture we create
together. That commons is everywhere under attack from those who would
privatize it for
profit and stifle innovation to protect the status quo, the way, for
instance, that the music
and film industries are trying to take away our ability to freely (and
legally) share our own
music and videos, because they're worried not only that someone might
illegally share
some of their music or videos, but because the explosion of free music and
video we're
seeing threatens their out-of-date business models. We must
counter-attack, supporting
open culture and public ownership, and working everywhere to redistribute
the future.

We need better mousetraps. The stuff that surrounds us is crap: toxic,
wasteful, unjust,
ugly. We need innovation everywhere, real innovation, stuff that isn't
just marginally better
or superficially green, but stuff that is actually, right now or as soon
as possible, an order
of magnitude more efficient, completely non-toxic and closed-loop. We need
to support
the folks out there trying to design these things. We need to laud their
efforts, invest in
their inventions, and generally do everything we can to get better design,
technology and
thinking applied to every aspect of our lives. Then we need to help
regular people separate
the bright green from the greenwashed.

We need to grow new systems. The systems which surround us are awful. Some
of them
we can hack. Some of them simply need to be replaced. Suburban sprawl, for
instance, is
simply wrong: there's no way to make it sustainable. We should simply
bring it to a halt.
Farming, on the other hand, needs to be reformed -- and through conscious
buying,
political activism and ethical leadership, we can help steer agriculture
away from
petrochemical factory farming and towards innovative local sustainable
farms. Some of our
choices nurture changed systems -- those are the choices we need to show
people how to
make.

We need to help each other. Consumer-based approaches and "simple things"
lists tend to
reinforce our sense that the only sphere in which we can act is our own
little private lives,
and that isolates us. But the isolation we all sometimes feel in the face
of the magnitude of
the problems is itself a major part of the problem. None of us can change
the world
single-handedly: as Wendell Berry says, "to work at this work alone is to
fail." We need to
organize, mobilize, join together, act in concert. We need to seek out our
allies and get
their backs when they need us. That happens through applied effort, not
impulse buying.

We need to admit that we're at war over the definition of the future.
There are a lot of
powerful interests spending a lot of money to keep people ignorant, make
them uncertain,
postpone action, encourage cynicism and apathy, and lock them in the
mental prison of
thinking that no better future is possible. To the extent they are
successful, nothing we
advocate can happen. We need to fight back. We need to speak clearly,
intelligently, and, if
possible, with humor and passion. We need to label our opponents (from
climate denialists
to apologists for the status quo) what they are -- enemies of the future.
We need to make
the nature of our times crystal-clear for all to see. We need to hew to
the demanding
standards our actual real situation imposes on us -- that we achieve
measurable
sustainability, honest-to-goodness one-planet living, for everyone, within
our lifetimes --
and scorn the mental tyranny of small goals. We need to break through the
meaningless
chatter around environmental and social issues, and point to genuine
alternatives, hold
real conversations, and create a culture that speaks to the soul of our
times.

We need, above all else, to show that another world is possible, indeed,
it's here all around
us, though we do not see it. We need to inspire not only our fellow
citizens but ourselves
with visions of what we're beginning to accomplish together, visions of
what a planet
brought back to sanity will look and feel like, visions of how we will
live in a bright green
future. That future should be beautiful and stylish, dynamic and creative,
but it must
before all else be genuinely sustainable, or it's not much of a future at
all, is it?