SENTIENT TIMES • June/July 2007

Editor's Note

By Deborah Mokma

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way and on
a quiet day, if I listen carefully I can hear her breathing.”
- Arundhati Roy

Although our shared experience on the planet seems to be offering more challenges than ever before, I find that the Chinese concept of “crisis” as “opportunity” feels appropriate, even comforting. A child of the 60s, I spent the 70s living a simple back-to-the-land existence, learning how to thrive with less. No power from the grid, no phone, a remote mountain homestead built out of recycled lumber, water from a mountain spring, homegrown produce, goat’s milk and eggs providing much of our food, and a community of like-minded neighbors who were there for each other in times of need. Although that idyllic experience ended after a little more than a decade, those amazing years remain with me as a testament to what our real needs are, and to what we can accomplish individually and as a community.

The word “community,” which comes from the Latin cummunere, means “to give among each other.” Bernard Lietaer (page 6) explains that according to a study done by The Cultural Creatives author Paul Ray, 83 percent of Americans believe that our top priority should be to re-build community. As we face challenges like global climate change and economic uncertainty, being aware that none of us are successful unless all of us are successful will be the key to achieving this goal.
Whether working toward re-localizing our economies, investing in local businesses and entrepreneurial endeavors (like southern Oregon’s Straw-Jet project), growing more food in our bioregions, generating energy regionally rather than remaining dependent upon the grid—keeping our focus on providing for ourselves and each other will create sustainability and, as an added bonus, more joy in our day-to-day existence.

Think this sounds too good to be true? It’s not. As Paul Hawken explains in his piece on page 9, To Remake the World: Something Earth-changing is Afoot Among Civil Society, “The promise of this unnamed movement is to offer solutions to what appear to be insoluble dilemmas: poverty, global climate change, terrorism, ecological degradation, polarization of income, loss of culture. It is not burdened with a syndrome of trying to save the world; it is trying to remake the world. … I initially estimated that there were thirty thousand environmental organizations strung around the globe; when I added social justice and indigenous organizations, the number exceeded one hundred thousand. … The more I probed, the more I unearthed, and the numbers continued to climb … Extrapolating from the records being accessed, I realized that the initial estimate of a hundred thousand organizations was off by at least a factor of ten. I now believe there are over one million organizations working toward ecological sustainability and social justice. Maybe two.”

The sound of the quiet breathing of new possibilities is getting louder and louder—I can hear it on the worldwide web as people all over the globe communicate and exchange ideas, within the greater community of southern Oregon, with the neighbors in our watershed, with my growing family on the homestead which we are stewarding together. Another world is possible, and it is happening as we speak.

SENTIENT TIMES
PO Box 1330 Ashland, OR 97520
PHONE (541) 512-1084 • FAX (541) 512-1085
dmokma@jeffnet.org