Discuss: 50 Simple Ways to Get Off

Wow! Thanks for putting this out so forcefully and clearly.

This is a good short answer to “What do you mean, listen to the land?” It starts by listening to yourself, to what you like doing, what you feel is important, what you get off on. DO SOMETHING! Action will help guide you to more action.

I think a lot of long-time activists would feel more confident in their work if they really saw themselves as part of a resistance movement. They could see, if they didn’t already, that what look like scattered efforts do build up to something. Long-term worriers might also find a way out of their paralyzing fear that nothing they do will matter.

Decolonization is a mental shift that puts everything else in perspective and spurs us to action. The future exists only in what we do right now, and part of that is redefining for ourselves who and where we are.

I haven’t read it, but some reviews I’ve read of Paul Hawken’s new book “Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming” say that he pooh-poohs, or at least ignores, both first-world and third-world groups who are taking illegal physical action. He’s solid on a lot of other things, but this is a big hole. Legal/illegal and nonviolent/violent are so often imaginary distinctions that we allow the state to impose on us, and we mistake their very different consequences for differences in morality or effectiveness.

Being a carpenter as well as an activist, I know the value of a good foundation.  The industrial/capitalistic economic model is built on a weak foundation and is collapsing on its inherent weakness.  We can speed it up by not participating, by creating new models of sustainability and fighting further incursions of this flawed monster into the air we breathe, the water we drink and the land on which we stand.  Thanks Derrick for yet another excellent piece.

I am so delighted to see the next generation taking up the fight that we of the sixties generation have been waging for almost fifty years now!

It was my generation that stopped a war, shut down the building of nuclear power plants in this country, and laid the groundwork for the contemporary environmental movement with groups like the Planet Drum Foundation who defined “bioregionalism” and Ernest Callenbach’s “Ecotopia.”

My grandmother was an activist who helped organize support for the Aransas Wildlife Refuge which saved the Whopping Crane from extinction in the 30’s.

We need to decolonize from the aberrant culture who left this good path and became corrupted by greed for power, but we need to embrace our inheritance from the people who cared for the earth -  in all kinds of weather - and learn from them, what they did wrong, what they did right and what is still ours to do to save this beautiful blue pearl of a planet in the vastness of space.

Beautifully written Derrick, as always.

Thank you,

Christine

Right the F on!

Decolonisation is the key issue that often fails to get much space in discussions, so thanks Derrick for the article. Our minds ARE colonised by the machine, and it is so hard to remove ourselves from it, since it has weaved its way into the core of our being.

The mainstream enviromnental groups also adopt a colonial ideology of nature. The idea that we can “manage” nature, that we can protect nature through seperation and “reserves”, that there is a concept such as wilderness, are all colonial in their intent and practice.

The mainstream environmental movement, with its ethos of utilitarianism and management, is just another part of the machine. It is another thing we need to surgically remove from our minds.

Peter - I beg you to consider. If we surgically remove our minds from sustaining the Aransas Wildlife Refuge, the last few remaining endangered Whooping Cranes will not survive. This transition requires that we gracefully transition from where we are now to where we want to be with as little collateral damage as possible!

I challenge you to consider that many, if not all, of the people who set up the refuges were aware of their limitations and the unsatisfactory nature of creating “refuges” for what should be freely thriving species.

But in reality, we did what we could and we hope that the next generation will have the wisdom to do everything you can with all your heart. It’s not a matter of surgery, in my opinion. It’s a matter of staying awake, being aware of the pitfalls and going forward with courage and passion.

Thank you for this article. My desk probably looks worse than yours. Sometimes I go to demonstrations other people organize, but what I do well is write songs, and I absolutely agree that the important thing for each of us to do is what we do well and love to do. I just this morning sang solar power songs with first and third graders who, when I asked where solar panels were besides in the song, said “On the roof!” because their school is solar, thanks in part to the organizers at Kyoto USA.