|
The Times They Are A-Changin'
By Wendy Priesnitz
One of the premises behind Natural Life Magazine since we launched it in 1976 has been that helping readers to rethink, reimagine, and rework the way towards sustainable, healthy lives is a better use of paper and, later, bandwidth, than reciting a litany of the environmental and social problems we have collectively created.
For the first 30 or so of those years, we often felt quite lonely in that mission. But not now! Everywhere you look or listen, someone will be eagerly providing you with information, advice, or products designed to help you green the Planet, or at least your shopping cart. Even so, the unprecedented public demand for green and organic products is, as we report in this issue, far outstripping supply, reminding us that we have just started along the path to true sustainability, in spite of the green giddiness we’re currently experiencing.
And there are still some who don’t get it. North American automobile manufacturers are still making gas-guzzling behemoths that some nose thumbers are still buying. North American governments seem to have no sense of the urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, no sense that they’re flirting with disaster by playing their cynical game of politics with climate change. And there is a huge element of greedy greenwashing involved with many of the corporate environment-friendly claims.
But the dinosaurs and bandwagon hoppers notwithstanding, a profound paradigm shift is underway that will create – perhaps already has – fundamental and permanent change in the way we live on this Earth, even after many people’s attention has moved on to another flavor of the day.
Green entrepreneur and writer Paul Hawken certainly thinks so. In his book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World (2007, Viking Press), he writes that something earth-changing is afoot. And that, he says, is the newly cohesive and burgeoning collection (he hesitates to call it a movement) of tens of millions of individuals and groups worldwide who are creating a sustainable and just society. Hawken writes that the principles and goals that underlie this “movement” will soon “suffuse and permeate most institutions. But before then, it will change a sufficient number of people so as to begin the reversal of centuries of frenzied self-destruction.”
The next step in that reversal involves capacity building. We must create the new infrastructure that will meet the needs of a green society. Each one of us has the responsibility to work within our respective communities of interest to ensure the principles of sustainability become embedded at the deepest levels of our collective psyche.
Wendy Priesnitz is the co-founder and editor of Natural Life Magazine, where an earlier version of this appeared as an editorial in 2007. She is also the author of 13 books and a contributor to many more.
|
