This Earth Day, Go "Bright Green"
It's EARTH DAY, 2008, so please take the time to be inspired by a new environmentalism that I find very exciting: THE BRIGHT GREENS.
What is Enlightenment magazine Associate Editor Ross Robertson writes in A Brighter Shade of Green: Rebooting Environmentalism for the 21st Century, "Bright green environmentalism is less about the problems and limitations we need to overcome than the “tools, models, and ideas” that already exist for overcoming them. It forgoes the bleakness of protest and dissent for the energizing confidence of constructive solutions." [click here to order the whole back issue - highly recommended; it's beautiful!]
The Bright Green movement has an incredible book and blog, both called WORLDCHANGING. Executive Editor Alex Steffen writes, “We need, in the next twenty-five years or so, to do something never before done. We need to consciously redesign the entire material basis of our
civilization. The model we replace it with must be dramatically more
ecologically sustainable, offer large increases in prosperity for
everyone on the planet, and not only function in areas of chaos and
corruption, but also help transform them. That alone is a task of
heroic magnitude, but there’s an additional complication: we only get
one shot. Change takes time, and time is what we don’t have. . . . Fail
to act boldly enough and we may fail completely.”
The Bright Greens give me hope, and for more than the health of our world. Their's is an empowering way to look at any concern (and may I suggest the spiritual health and evolution of LGBT people?). Remember Philip K. Dick's famous dictum that "To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement... Whoever
defeats the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus...
thereby it becomes its enemies."
Instead, as Buckminster Fuller said, "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
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