Nurturing Activism
Kelpie Wilson
I’ve been an environmental activist for fifteen years, and I constantly struggle with feeling overwhelmed. The need for activism seems endless. How can the average person who wants to help begin to cope with all there is to do? Because each of us has limited time, we want to know what the priorities are. So when people ask me, “What can I do?” they are really asking, “What’s the most important thing to do?”
What follows is a brief guide on how to organize your personal activism. Think of it like a Chinese menu. You can take one from column A and two from column B, but for a balanced meal, you need at least one from each group described below. The four groups work together synergistically to help you be a more effective activist and build a more balanced life.
Reduce Your Personal Greed Index. Greed is the number one problem in American culture. Always Hungry, Never Greedy, a book about a New Guinea village describes people who live a subsistence life of farming and fishing based on sharing. Every holiday ritual, song, story and dance emphasizes sharing. To be seen as greedy is the most shameful thing in the culture. Although everyone has enough and no one starves, it’s OK to be a little hungry.
Being hungry means having that edge that keeps us alert and creative. As Americans, we can spend all our free time as couch potatoes and mall rats. Everything in our culture today encourages greed and sloth. Unless we actively resist it, our closets will be choked with things we don’t use, our minds will be sucked into TV land, our butts will spread out to fill the couch and our credit cards will dig us into a pit of debt.
Reduce and reuse are the first principles of greed management. Learn the pleasure of not spending money, of considering and deciding: what I have at home is good enough. Thrill yourself with your own creativity when you discover that you can reuse something old to do a new job. I was going to buy a special mat to protect the floor from my office chair, when I realized I had a nice piece of linoleum out in the garage that works just fine.
Greed control is harder than it sounds. It’s a daily struggle because every cultural message we get tells us to consume. Talk to your friends and family about it. Reinforce each other for not buying, not driving, not watching TV. Teach the children.
Build Alternatives. We need to create a sustainable economy, where every bit of waste and pollution is recycled. Our energy systems and raw materials must from come renewable sources. This is possible, lacking only human will to achieve. Bend your will to the task: recycle and buy recycled products; buy organic food; use alternative energy if you can; grow a vegetable garden; plant a tree.
Building alternatives can also build community. Join a tree planting or riparian restoration program. Get your hands in some dirt and your feet in the creek. It’ll remind you of how precious our natural ecosystems are. Working with others helps reinforce everyone’s commitment to change. The culture of restoration is the opposite of the culture of greed.
Some of us have created alternatives as builders and inventors of new agricultural, energy and manufacturing systems, either as hobbies or as careers. Who’s that guy who’s got the greenhouse and solar panels on his house at the end of the block? Stretch yourself and learn. Maybe you could do it too.
Before becoming
a full-time forest activist, I wanted a career as an inventor. I had a degree
in mechanical engineering and I won a national prize as a student for my paper
on alternative engines. But when I graduated during the Reagan years, my only
job offers were for Star Wars research. Frustrated, I came to Oregon and joined
a non-violent civil disobedience campaign in the Siskiyou National Forest.
I realized that before society would commit to alternatives, we would have
to do some political organizing.
Petition the Government. Many people are much more comfortable with
the first two activist food groups than with this one. Government is dirty.
Any involvement with it will make me dirty too. Can’t we solve our problems
without government through building alternatives and voting with our dollars?
This is exactly what the sixties generation tried to do, and failed. Alternative energy isn’t enough. We need alternative power as well: political power, that is. The nature of political power changes radically, depending on the size of society. We tend to romanticize a vision of tribal or village life where everyone is equal and there is direct democracy, but the fact is, with 300 million people, some form of government is a necessary evil.
Here’s a lesson we need to learn. The sixties generation took a pass on political organizing and built food coops instead. Meanwhile, the right wing organized the religious fundamentalists and gave us Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush ad nauseum. They have brought us to the brink of the total destruction of democracy. Most fundamentalists aren’t activists, busy building alternatives. All they do is vote. Votes still have power in this country and we need to start getting them.
So, what you can do is vote; write letters to your elected officials; come to town hall meetings when your senators and congressmen hold them in your area. Help get out the vote on Election Day; work for or give money to good candidates; run for office yourself.
Many people voted for Nader because it made them feel clean and not dirty. Someday, if we’re smart, we’ll get in the position to clean up our politics, but we’ve got to get a better grip on this filthy hog first. My advice is: in national elections, hold your nose and vote for the lesser evil. Build third parties from the bottom up, running candidates for local office where they can win.
Be the Media. In 1987, I was arrested for chaining myself to a logging yarder to protest the destruction of ancient forests. Our defense was that our activities were protected under the First Amendment because we were petitioning our government. Our objective was to get the news media out to the remote wilderness to film the destruction of the ancient forests.
Earth First! actions got the word out about what was happening to our forests. Today’s massive globalization protests are doing the same thing, but something scary is happening with the news media. It seems that the bigger the protests get, the less media coverage there is. The corporate controlled media is shutting out all other viewpoints. The Nation magazine has an excellent expose of the latest media mergers in their edition of January 7, 2002. You can find the information on their web site: www.thenation.com.
My solution to media mergers is to turn off the TV and turn on my computer. The problem with Internet information is the sheer massiveness of it. Most people stick with Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw because they provide a filter. Who has time to sort through the Internet? Fortunately there are good places to get started. The Nation website is one. Pick three or four and check them regularly, or sign up for an email newsletter.
Lots of people don’t have Internet access, so those of us who do must share the information. Sharing information is another opportunity to build community. Join a discussion group or start one through your church or school. Write letters to the editor sharing information not covered in the local paper. Talk politics with your family, friends and co-workers. Don’t start by giving your opinion, start by sharing information: “Did you hear that Enron gave almost $2 million to the Texas state attorney general and a total of $134,000 to Texas Supreme Court Justices? Did you know Enron has rarely lost a court case in the state of Texas?”
There is so much to know about our problems. No one can stand to hear all of it, and we have to tune out part of the time in order to stay sane. But you’ll find that if you pick one or two issues and try to learn about them and understand them, you’ll start to feel empowered. You’ll have the tools to write letters to your legislators and the newspapers. Democracy can’t exist without good information.
So, you’ve made a good attempt to include some of the four food groups of activism in your daily life, but you’re getting heartburn anyway. The number one reason most people avoid political activism is because it brings up feelings of anger that they can’t handle. The first way to deal with anger is to reach out to others. If you’re part of an activist community you’ll feel less anger because you’ll feel more empowered. You’ll feel hope that things can change.
Anger is a physical reaction to danger, but because we’re not in the jungle anymore, “fight or flight” is not a useful reaction to the very real danger we’re in. So find ways to physically release anger through exercise, yoga, deep breathing or meditation. Then sit down and write that letter to the editor.
Anger can arise out of direct confron-tation with people in our community who believe differently than we do. Because the corporate power structure has been so successful in controlling information, there are many folks who feel threatened by the changes we advocate. As we attempt to build more sustainable systems, there are also winners and losers as the economy adjusts.
If you have the opportunity, reach out to a member of your community who disagrees with you. Find something that you both have in common. Maybe you love cats or baseball. Make a human connection and take a deep breath. Release your anger and learn to fight fair and fight non-violently. Conflict is a part of life, so don’t be afraid of it. Nurture your soul with creative acti-vism and remember: if you’re active, you’re alive. If we’re good activists we’ll pass on a living earth to future generations.
Kelpie Wilson is a forest protection activist and writer living in the Illinois Valley in southern Oregon. She thanks the Ashland Unitarian Universalist humanist discussion group for suggesting this article.
April/May 2002
Terrorists
and Saints:The Wisdom of Ubuntu
Eric Sirotkin
US
House and Senate Legislation Banning Space-Based Weapons
Should
America Put Aside Guarantees of Constitutional Justice?
Representative Dennis J. Kucinich
Nurturing
Activism
Kelpie Wilson
Challenging
Corporate Power Enacting Campaign Finance Reform
Why
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Who
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Making
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Why
a Loser Gets To Run The Country: The Case For Instant Runoff Voting
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Military
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John Darling
Book
Review: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
Ben Sekora
The
Globalizer Who Came In From The Cold
Greg Palast
Pipelineistan
Pepe Escobar
To
the Victors Go the Markets
Jordan Green
When
the Army Owns the Weather
Bob Fitrakis
Water
Water Everywhere, But Which One Should I Drink?
Awnee
A
Homeopathic Perspective on Strengthening the Immune System
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Rogue
Valley Dharma Groups Present "Change Your Mind Day"
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A
Call to Rediscover the Intelligence in Nature
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Deep
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Cosmic
Calendar
Salina Rain
