Hope Beneath Our Feet

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It's hard to be optimistic about humanity's ability to pull ourselves out of our current global environmental mess - especially when we're barraged daily with more bad news from the mainstream media. It's also hard not to succumb to discouragement and despair and to feel that our rather pitiful individual attempts are way too little, way too late.

I've just started reading  Hope Beneath Our Feet: Restoring Our Place in the Natural World,  a collection of essays by thinkers and doers including Paul Hawken, Frances Moore Lappe, Michael Pollan, Vandana Shiva, Alice Walker, Wendell Berry and others.  The essays all speak to one question:

In a time of environmental crisis, how can we live right now?

Here's an excerpt from the Commencement Address to the Class of 2009, University of Portland by Paul Hawken
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"When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same; if you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand the data.  But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse.  What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice and beauty to this world.  The poet Adrienne Rich wrote:

So much has been destroyed / I have cast my lot with those / who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, / reconstitute the world.

There could be no better description.  Humanity is coalescing.  It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refugee camps, deserts, fisheries and slums.

"You join a multitude of caring people.  No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights and more.  This is the largest movement the world has ever seen.  Rather than control, it seeks connection.  Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power.  Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done.  Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement.  It provides hope, support, and meaning to billions of people in the world.  Its clout resides in ideas, not in force.  It is made up of teachers, children, peasants, businesspeople, rappers, organic farmers, nuns, artists, government workers, fisherfolk, engineers, students, incorrigible writers, weeping Muslims, concerned mothers, poets, doctors without borders, grieving Christians, street musicians, the president of the United States of America and, as the writer David James Duncan would say, the Creator, the One who loves us all in such a huge way."

"The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer.  Hope only makes sense when it doesn't make sense to be hopeful."

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Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even if you can't prove that it will.
~ Michael Pollan
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