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from Natural Life
Magazine, July/August 2007 The Times They Are A-Changin' One of the premises behind this magazine for the past 30 years is that helping readers to rethink, reimagine and rework the way towards sustainable, healthy lives is a better use of paper than reciting a litany of the environmental and social problems we have collectively created. For about 29 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. The Canadian government seems 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 new book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice, and Beauty to the World 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. Read Editor Wendy Priesnitz's Weblog
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(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.”
