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Doing your part can improve our future

“Marching won’t change anything,” my friend said. “It won’t change anybody’s mind about climate change, or anybody’s habits. It won’t change government policy or the carbon-based economy.”

He was talking to two other friends who had been to the “People’s Climate March” held in September in New York City. They had joined more than 400,000 others to protest our government’s failure to curb the greenhouse gas emissions that are rapidly driving us toward a dangerous “tipping point” in global climate change – the point beyond which there will be no return to a stable, beneficial climate system.

On the surface, my pessimistic friend was right. Four-hundred thousand people walking with signs, chanting and beating drums in and of itself is unlikely to change how much people drive, China’s industrialization policies or the influence of fossil fuel lobbyists in Washington.

But that’s only if the People’s Climate March and all the other ongoing protests, writing, talks, classes, campaigns and initiatives aimed at changing our current “energy regime” are considered in isolation. Taken together, they have the potential to rewrite what one pundit called “the end of history.”

How?

By creating a gestalt, a whole system of beliefs from which a new paradigm can emerge.

If your response to that is, “Huh?” or “Whoopee! What’ll that do?,” let’s look at an example of an emergence from a gestalt in action.

The institution of slavery once dominated much of America’s economic and social life. To eradicate slavery, its opponents had to create a major shift in public morality. They needed to convince enough people of the merits of their cause to elect a president and congress that would outlaw bondage.

To an observer in the 1820s, building an adequately strong abolitionist movement probably appeared impossible. Powerful economic interests including cotton and tobacco farming, shipping, English dry-goods manufacturing and the slave trade itself grew more entrenched and influential by the year.

Their paid apologists ran a polished propaganda machine that spun the economic, “natural” and even “moral” virtues of slavery to the press, much of which they controlled. Widespread indifference to slavery’s immorality in the “free” Northern states appeared to suppress any hope of change.

But the abolitionists persisted. Their movement grew and, of equal importance diversified. It came to include churches, communities of escaped slaves, business associations and startup political parties. They wrote and published, discussed and lectured, marched and prayed, agitated and aggravated. They established underground railroads and built havens and schools for escaped and freed slaves.

And in so doing they created a new gestalt, a complex whole of related ideas, sentiments and their proponents which, taken together, became stronger than the sum of its parts. Once that gestalt became broadly and deeply established in American culture, it gave birth to even stronger expressions: the bestselling autobiography of the escaped slave Frederick Douglass; the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; the Republican party of orator Abraham Lincoln.

In a few short decades, these emergences won enough hearts and minds to turn the tide against slavery, and the rest is history.

Today, the climate-awareness movement is growing apace. A decade ago, who would have thought 400,000 people would march in New York – and millions more around the planet simultaneously demonstrate – in defense of the environment?

And the environmentalists don’t just carry signs. They write, lecture, form alliances, lobby, pressure institutions, practice civil disobedience. They explore and discuss proposals ranging from levying a carbon tax to building clean-energy smart grids to reducing atmospheric carbon with organic-farming practices. They are everywhere, and each concerned citizen is using the time, energy and resources at his or her disposal to make a unique contribution to the new gestalt of climate awareness – which can lead to meaningful climate action.

Each contribution is needed, because there is no telling which one will spur the next major emergence – the book, speech or political platform that could become a major tipping point in the struggle to keep the planet intact. So if you’re doing your part, no matter how insignificant it might seem, no matter how overwhelming the odds against success appear, take heart, because you hold the key to the future of your ecological house.

Philip S. Wenz, who grew up in Durango and Boulder, now lives in Corvallis, Oregon, where he teaches and writes about environmental issues. Reach him via email through his website, www.your-ecological-house.com.



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