Tuesday there's a big protest for climate change in Washington DC. I have no plans to engage in civil disobedience for the climate next week, and it's not because I don't care to act.
Action about climate change is imperative. And 21st Century Plowshare, if everything goes the way I want it to, is going to evolve into a resource hub and action multiplier for climate do-gooders all over the world--a virtual place that seduces and tickles a large number of individuals to physically make the leap from the science and concept of climate change to the cultural truth of living with a changing climate. We should all be figuring out not just how to mitigate climate change, but how to wrap our minds around the fact that we are dependent on the climate in the first place.
I'm not talking about CFL lightbulbs and composting here. It's not that I think those choices are unimportant, it's that they are not easy choices to make until you're already inspired. I'm in the inspiration business. I want everyone who reads about the actions that will unfold on 21st Century Plowshare to do something that includes and inspires the woman I sat next to in the Ikea loading zone last weekend. The woman who idled her Lincoln Navigator for thirty minutes in an enclosed parking structure on a perfectly warm day.
Actions that matter will reach the woman in the Navigator and those like her--people who just aren't thinking about their surroundings. Navigator Woman probably isn't going to respond to education, or shame, or anger at her Navigator, or long lists of maths about consumer purchases, or anything else the environmental movement in its current state is ready to give her. Actions that matter will empathize with Navigator Woman and invite her to the party instead of making her an enemy.
Actions that matter will trade in joy, not judgement.
This is why I am not going to DC this week--why I am going to do something else instead. A protest by definition gets its rhetorical strength from opposing something. And actions that matter have to be inclusive, not oppositional. There can be no losers if we are going to really turn climate change around. It can't even be a conflict, because the moment anything becomes a conflict then people start seeing what they want to see--they start seeing their side of the argument instead of what is really there. That's what's going on with Al Gore and George Will lately. George Will is not a retard. He's just seeing climate change as something that it's appropriate to argue about. Actions that matter will move our collective discourse about the environment past argument by focusing on what we all agree on. Plants and breathable air are beautiful things. Pollution is bad. Heat waves are bad. Fighting urban heat island effect is good. Using fewer petroleum products is good. Green jobs are probably not a myth.
I live in Bed Stuy, a very large neighborhood in Brooklyn that has a particularly rich history of supporting community gardening. So what I want to do this spring is turn Bed Stuy into a meadow. There are a lot of vacant lots and lonely tree pits here. I want to get every single one of them planted with native, non-invasive wildflower seed and at least minimally tended all season long by an army of interested folks. I think that the wildflowers are going to dovetail nicely with the gardening efforts in people's yards and in cared-for tree pits, and create a portrait of a relationship between gardening and nature, the built urban world and the earth. I think that the way it (ideally) will go on and on and on without end because the streets in this part of Brooklyn are so long is going to produce a sensation of light ecstasy, and that this kind of joyful connection to your environment is exactly what we need if we are going to push environmental discourse.
Planting will happen in mid-to-late April, and so in the next week or two I will be getting a detailed proposal up on this site with information about joining in the fun. If you don't live in Brooklyn that's no problem. I'll be using the site in a few different ways to raise money for seeds and you can give a few bucks to the effort. You can also go make your own meadow, or riff on the idea and do something similar and send pictures back so that I can post them with a write-up. Or help me press Google Earth to come take new pictures of Bed Stuy this summer if it works and flowers really do grow.
Look forward to more information and specific ways to participate.
The photo that you posted in the top of the article is so nice and your post too is very interesting.
Posted by: Cazare Bran online | 10/26/2011 at 08:46 AM