Keep going, David!

Is it my imagination or are you undergoing a spiritual transformation?

Looking for new Joneses? Brilliant. Now we just need more people to provide some good role models. Could use a bit more input for that thread.

Enjoying delicious environmentally-friendly food? Brilliant. Sort of funny how the most delicious and satisfying food is also the most natural, least processed, and quite simple. Please post more comments about this. How's the vegetarian thing going?

Motivating people by promoting the benefits of living in harmony with Earth's ecological webs rather than laying on the guilt trip? Damn obvious, but why aren't more eco-pundits using this strategy? Show people there is a better way and they will discard the old ways. Lay a guilt trip on them and they will cover their ears and hunker down in their bunkers. By the way, recent studies showed that felling guility weakens our immune systems. How are folks going to win converts by making them ill?

I'm looking forward to seeing more pieces of the puzzle you appear to be assembling.

THANKS!

Please explain.  Who is "guilty"?  Guilty of what?  Who brings the charge?  Who condemns?  I do not understand anything of this.

As for "desire" vs. "fear," there is no desire not motivated by fear.  So there is no point in distinguishing them.

Well, OK, save in the single rare case of desire motivated by love.  Love fears nothing.  And Love conquers all things.  Omnia vincit amor.

Cf. a song obliquely referred to in a recent post, "The Ballad of Love and Hate."

Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.

Its a long way from this environmentally responsible love fest Nirvana down here in East Kentucky. Living in a "vibrant walkable community" are we on the same planet here or have you been smoking your hemp spun shirt. The ground is vibrating down here from Mountain Top Removal. Its walkable if you like trudging around in the mud. Its gonna be hard to pivot from global warming when we are stockpiling enough coal to sink China, who by the way we just started selling to. I liked the little inspirational talk but before you go tripping off down the environmental yellow brick road you need to solve a couple of big in your face issues. You may all hold hands and start singing its easy being green and try to sidestep the big issues. We got a growth industry down here in nitrate fertilizer, thousands of tons of the stuff used to blow the tops off mountains. I can hear you over the nitrate polluted springs bubbling by my house but the blasting from the Mountain Top Removal makes it a little hard to hear where you are coming from. We would all like to be reading aspirational green poetry down here while skipping through fields of clover. All we got is some damn weed field that the coal corporations call reclamation. As for the next post, more delicious carrots, what in the hell are you talking about"feeling guilty weakens our immune system" my immune system is weakened by the heavy metal runoff into an Army Corps of Engineer flood control lake that we get our water from. Plus the chemicals from Console Coal corporations coal preparation/washing plants that dump into the river that feeds Fishtrap Lake. I doubt if the coal corporations are feeling guilty about doing to us legally what no other civilized country will allow. I don't see this stuff in England or France, Germany or any other industrialized country with coal deposits. I doubt very damn seriously if the Army Corp of Engineers is feeling very guilty or weakening their immune system from the guilt of letting them stip coal on a federal flood control project.  Guilt trip,"love fears nothing" and "love conquers all" the Ballad of Love and Hate, excuse me but this is the biggest crock of horse dung I have ever seen on a serious environmental site. When you live under a silt dam that has already failed once it is hard to tell a coal corporation you love them, especially when they buried a whole damn valley directly behind your house. Litigation conquers all along with heavy fines and convincing congress congress to change the laws that allow a whole region of this country to be utterly destroyed. I hope while you trip the light fantastic on that asteral plain or other dimension you are in you check the Co2 levels you guys are getting a little light headed.

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.

Just a slim majority of Americans consider global warming "a very serious problem,"

Versus

In the survey, 62% considered global warming a serious danger.

Carrots:

I'm just suggesting that if someone creates a way for corporations to make more money pushing alternative energy vs. blowing the tops off mountains, we might see more alternative energy and less blowing the tops off mountains.

People might require a more-attractive alternative -- which, if they enjoy blowing the tops off mountains, they probably are incapable of figuring out on their own -- to replace and bring an end to their destructive behavior.

Guilt:

I should not have mentioned the research. It simply shows that those people feeling guilty are more vulnerable to illness. Now this won't bring an end to fossil fuel anytime soon, but at least there is the possibility that those responsible might die sooner. Perhaps environmentalist should find a way to make such people feel more guilt? Will enough guilt not only weaken their immune system, but render them mostly harmless?

But that wasn't the major point of my mentioning "guilt". When folks do not try to change my behavior by offering practical alternatives, but try to motivate me via shame or guilt, I'm less inclined to change. I think it is a general human response, if someone criticizes them and leaves them to find their own way to correct their behavior, to become defensive and cling more firmly to their destructive behavior. I'm not a psychologist. Just throwing it into the thread for discussion.

Geez:

I try to set aside my pessimism, negativity, doom and gloom, cynicism, despair, angst, et cetera for just a moment and support DR's effort to discuss a different path -- since the current methods are not really working so well -- and all I receive is another layer of condemnation and guilt.

That said, keep trying, David!

Lead by example!

Be the change!

I'll be the one hunkered down in my bunker for a bit, watching others knock you down.

WiscIdea,
I was certainly not criticizing you for using the word "guilt," which anyway you were not the first to mention.  I was asking only for information, out of curiosity, because guilt and feeling guilty are important ethical concepts, and righteous indignation and the feeling of blameworthiness are important emotions related to ethics.  How exactly they are supposed to relate to our conduct regarding, say, our consumption of this and that, from an environmentalist perspective, is not quite clear (though I have some ideas).

It is really the old Confucianist challenge of "rectifying the names."  For the same reason, I found that reference to "desire" and "fear" to be not obviously the best way to close that fine catalogue of good environmentalist actions, which when practised so often as to become habitual, may actually be considered virtues.

By the same token, I like very much the adjective "aspirational" in the post's title.  It gets across very nicely the temporality and direction of a movement such as environmentalism.  Really, it would be great if "aspirational" and "aspirationality" could be switched for certain highly unsatisfactory applications of "sustainable" and "sustainability."

Pompey Road,
horse dung is not as objectionable a substance as, say, bat guano.  And there are all sorts of organisms that are very happy that horse dung exists.

Also, the more you read Gristmill, the more you will observe that some of the best thinking arises from the greatest episodes of playfulness.  "Serious" is such a grumpy, stodgy, grown-up word!

And anyway, what were you expecting from an organization whose sobriquet is, "A beacon in the smog"?  Have you any real appreciation of the vision of Chip Geller?

As for your shocking, alarming dismissal of love: you should tell your stories about the nitrate fertilizer industry and the coal companies; they are clearly important ones.  But it certainly does not follow that "litigation conquers all."  Sure, the sorts of remedies that can come only through litigation are both just and necessary.  But you are getting off mighty chintzy and cheap, if you think that that ends your relationship with those polluters and earth-destroyers.

Litigation by itself is just the beginning.  And litigation, by itself, with no follow-up, is meaningless.  Do you really think that that is all that life is about, a sort of children's game, in which some players follow the rules and others cheat, and the ones that follow the rules get screwed by the ones that cheat, so they squawk, "You cheated!," until they get their way?  Is that all there is?  What does it matter to you, if a mountain has its top or not, or if a river valley and its ecosystem are buried by discarded mountaintop or not, if you do not care to learn what it is, really, to live upon this Earth, as a human being?

Consider this curious paragraph, from the linked article:
<<
Children often nudge parents to use less energy, says Katherine Shea, a pediatrician and adjunct public health professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Kids just 'get it,' " she says, "and they have the science on their side."
>>

I am not sure what Dr. Shea means, and what it is that kids "get."  Children are very strong on issues of fairness; they tend to be quite willing to play by the rules, so long as they get appropriate rewards, and nobody else cheats or gets unfairly rewarded; being mostly innocent victims of injustice themselves, they love justice, and hate mercy.  So is that supposed to be the model for all of us?  One based on narrow, thoughtless, childish self-regard, jealousy and vindictiveness?

I submit that we should have little trouble in recognizing that those gross, selfish polluters and mountaintop removers are, not only unspeakable villains, but also, and more importantly, profoundly miserable people, among the most miserable people on the planet.  And recognizing them as such, we owe it to them to show them compassion, and to love them.  NOT to tolerate or ignore their villainies -- that is not at all the same thing.  But to love them.  For they are ourselves.  "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."  And unless we do that, unless we love them, nothing finally of much worth can be accomplished.

Obviously, that is very hard.  Love is not easy.  Love is not soft.  And you are wrong to dismiss it as some gossamer fantasy.  Love is steel.  Love is diamond.  It is far harder than your puny litigiousness.  And if you think that love has no real substance, and only the low level of your litigiousness is real, then I respectfully submit that you are the one who is dreaming, you are the one who is breathing unwholesome vapors.

But, good news!, you do not have to!

Aficionados of children's books may enjoy the recent "Samsara Dog" (La Jolla, CA: Kane/Miller, 2007), by the Australian Buddhist Helen Manos, on the function of love/compassion in breaking the sentient being free of the cycle of rebirth -- the character "Dog," drawn as one or another sort of dog, lives through one unfulfilled life after another, until the last one, which is special.  Hopefully Ms. Manos will write a sequel, in which Dog returns as a bhodisattva.

Her epigraph is a quote "adapted from the 8th-century writings of Shantideva":

<<
For we are all travelers on the wheel of life.
We halt, we pause and take new births.
Take comfort, then, you beings wandering in weary Samsara,
And hear in every footfall the sound of blissful compassion.

For compassion is the tree that shelters all beings.
It is the universal bridge
That dispels the misty ignorance of the world
And leads the weary traveler out of Samsara into Nirvana.
>>

Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.

I get a bit tired of "the government must do this" and "the government must do that. " We are, at least ostensibly, a government OF the people and BY the people. If we, (the people) want the government to effect change, we must do it: it may take time, and it will likely not be easy, but WE can effect change. The difficulty, IMO, lies in deciding what change we want, and communicating that change in one voice, with the power of numbers behind it to make those in positions of control in our government powerless to do anything BUT change.

I think the bottom line of David's statement was a bit of frustration in that, although the majority of we (the people) think that global warming is a dangerous problem, the minority of we (the people) are actually willing to do something about it.  So, he suggests that an alternative method of motivation - desire for the wonderful things that may come from changes necessary to combat global warming (walkable cities, relationships with your neighbors, delicious carrots) - may be more useful a tool in convincing the majority of we (the people) to act than fear - fear of waters rising, fear of erratic weather patterns, fear of high oil prices, etc.  Similarly, inspiring joy (happy, healthy families, prosperous, beautiful communities, clean air & water) may be more productive than inspiring guilt and shame (how dare you drive an SUV??  Don't you know what you are doing to Mother Earth?)

As the old saying goes, you catch more bees with honey.

I can appreciate manure when I see it, I also have a compost heap that I swear by, but when you have topsoil depleation or it gets scraped off by a coal strip job it takes mother nature some great amount of time to build it back up. This is the main point of my little tirade, time. How can you side step large issues like MTR and Co2 emissions and go straight to lets make nice and hope the coal corporations come around to your way of thinking. It was the main difference between John Edwards who was supported by the trial lawyers association and Obama. Obama also wants to break the corporation control of congress. He also wants to get the coal corporation lobbyist foot off our throat, but he wants to sit across the table and reason with them. I like John Edwards because he was already lawyered up. You have to get coal corporations attention just like they are doing to Massey at this time, you hit them where it hurts in their bottom line. I believe in Karma, but I will take my chance in another life. The only sewing and reaping I see going on at this time is coal corporations sewing destruction on a whole region and reaping obsene profits, all the while pumping enough Co2 into the atmosphere to make some of our future reincarnations to be on a planet that looks more like Mars. We may not have been transfigured into a spiritual being by then, we may still need oxygen. Hitting the time thing again, my situaltion is more imediate, it will not do us much good down here in coal country if we do not stop the MTR now. I do not really think you realize how much destruction has already been done and how the advanced "bigger equipment" has speeded up the process, especially with the new demand for coal since oil hit $100 dollars a barrel. A little levity is good in all seasons, and for the most part calmness and serenity is good for the soul.  It is just so hard to do transcendental meditation with the blasting in the background. I just witnessed a MTR stopped in Leslie County Ky. on a Corps Of Engineer controlled area and it was done with a law suit brought about by the Sierra Club. When the vibrational state of the planet hits it sweet spot during the next center of the universe and planetary alignmnet and we all elevate to a higher plain of existance we may be able to make nice with the coal corporations. But just in case we all don't get beamed up in 2012 lets use the methods that work in the 3rd dimension and attack these people where they are the weakest, Co2 and MTR.

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.

Pompey Road,
I agree with everything you have written, minus the tendentiousness and the blinders.  I have been a strong supporter of John Edwards since early 2003, and am miserable at being bullied by the cool kids to work up some emotion for Obama, for reasons identical to your own.

You are absolutely right, to insist on the urgency of dealing with coal mining, etc.  I certainly do not recommend anything like delay, or anything like tolerance of injustice and indulgence of villains.

But it is important, for the sake of the health of activists such as yourself, not to confuse urgency with frenzy, or panic.

Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.

I hate the term we won the west, in my view we lost it. The indigenous people's of this continent lived here for hundreds of years without harming the environmnet. They were in harmony with it. I know a modern society can't go back to that time but it still gives them the right to say I told you so.

Their only faults were they forgot to invent gun powder and learned to late about banding all the tribes together for the mutual good.

The first has caused the rest of us great sorrow over the generations but maybe we can learn from thier second mistake.

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.

"The indigenous people's of this continent lived here for hundreds of years without harming the environmnet. They were in harmony with it."

Was that before or after they exterminated over 40 species of megafauna -- including several species of camel, wooly rhinos, mammoths, mastadons, various large sloths, three genera of horses, giant armadillos, glyptodonts, the giant shot-faced bear, a large beaver, the American lion, dire wolves, the stag moose, numerous other antlered species, the saber-tooth tiger, the American cheetah, a giant species of bison -- and all of the plants, mammals, birds, insects, and other organisms dependent upon them, from the Arctic Circle to the southern tip of South America, and the islands of the Caribbean?

   While I don't agree with everything Pangolin says, the part about needing government action is right on target.  Same applies to Pompey Road and the need for litigation NOW.  

   While individual action is nice and feels good, the numbers aren't there, nor do they show any sign of increasing without major prodding (shotgun to the back) from the government.

   If Hansen is even close to right, the world is going to have a difficult time.

   I always suspect Americans think "Hey, it will be the rest of the world, we'll be okay."  But, hey, the rest of the world supplies not only finished goods but raw materials that America uses.

   And America will need to figure out what to do with 150 Million (or more) environmental refugees.

   Ironically, those who survive will look back, and wonder why the "terrible sacrifices" being asked now were seen as so terrible.

patrick in Beijing