For those of you who don't read ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) yarrowkat, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) sunflowerriver, or didn't get an e-mail from me: we've recently had Joy Slagowski, a reporter for a Phoenix area paper called the Daily News-Sun, write an article about Sunflower River for Earth Day:
Foursome enjoys connection with Mother Earth
In that article, I credit Dave Pollard's blog, How to Save the World, with being a turning point in my ecological awakening:Post said his path began as a personal transformation a few years ago, after reading the "How to Save the World" blog of David Pollard, a writer and environmentalist.
"He was doing a lot of writing on intentional communities, social justice, and ecological issues," Post said. "And it struck a chord with me and I decided to manifest the kinds of changes he was advocating in my own life." I wrote Dave Pollard telling him about the article when it was published:Hello Dave,
I've written you once before, a year or two ago. It was from a different e-mail address than this message.
Roughly three years ago, I started reading your blog and as a result have radically changed my life: changed jobs (out of the financial industry), changed partners (my ex-wife and I were part of consumer culture, and I've distanced myself from it.), and changed the way I look at and relate the world to incoporate a far greater understanding of how my actions impact the environment.
As part of that, I purchased land with 3 other people, formed an intentional community, and began raising livestock and practicing organic gardening.
In that time, I have repeatedly mentioned your blog as my turning point, as the thing that woke me up and set me on the course my life is now on.
Today an article was published about my farm, and in it I credit you with inspiring me to the life changes that caused me to start it. I thought you might be interested to read it:
http://www.yourwestvalley.com/news/food_5888___article.html/water_day.html
Even though you and I have come to different conclusions about what one can or should do about the state of the world, You continue to inspire me with your writing, years past the day I read "The Truth About Nature and How to Save the World" and realized that everything about my life needed to change.
-Alan Today he wrote me back: Wow! Thank you Alan. I'll mention this in my next 'links of the week' article. Hope we'll meet some day! Cheers from Australia.
/-/ Dave I'm excited to get a mention in his Links of the Week article, which I always look forward to reading. It is a look at what is going on around the world, and is often extremely inspiring.
I'll post a link to it after he publishes it, but I'll be out of town this weekend, so it will be a bit late.
Color me excited.Current Mood:  content |
![[campfire]](http://www.arkie.net/~eara/images/Campfire%20Band.jpg) two unrelated articles have come across my feed reader in the last few days. the first is written by jim scarantino, the chairman for the coalition of new mexico wilderness. it is called thoughts on the dona ana wilderness. i enjoy reading jim's blog because it covers a *local* topic (new mexico wilderness) by a person who is actively involved in wilderness preservation. he also posts photos of the places he hikes to. ^_^
he is also disappointed by the progress made on wilderness preservation in the last several decades in new mexico. of all our environmental progress in the last half century, designating wild land is *way* out in front of things we're able to make happen. yet we've not made any progress here in new mexico. jim blames a shift in tactics--a radicalization of the environmental movement.
i would clame that radicalization is (also?) a broader cultural phenomena. that our tolerance for people and views not in line with our own has gotten lower. or perhaps the number of views and/or people enspousing them has grown larger?
whatever the cause of the trend, jim's article dovetails nicely into a short article written by david pollard[1], a world of uncertainty. it discusses the increasing amount of complexity/uncertainty in the world, and that our unfortunate response to it has been to increase our demand for certainty and absolutism.
it *feels* so much better to have an idea, stick to it, not compromise, and "win." i suspect, however, that the world actually functions (i.e. "things get done") much closer to the model implied by jim scarantino. that if you want to change the world, you sit down and talk to your "opponents" (i.e. those living life with a different playbook), figure out where they are coming from, even empathize with them. and discover you have more in common that you have in difference.
[1]: david pollard is one of my personal heros. reading his article the truth about nature and how to save the world was the opening event that would eventually dramatically change my life (quit job, get divorced, live simply/simpler) and set me on a course to explore sustainability, ecovillages, and other environmental issues. i don't claim the article will have the same effect on you, i was in exactly the right place at the right time.
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