What's Practical? by Susan Meeker-Lowry
Monday, November 16th 2009 @ 2:01 PM (not yet rated)
The other day I was having a conversation with a dear friend about politics. Something she and I often talk about. Given my overriding concern about the Earth and climate change in particular, the conversation drifted in that direction and how disappointed we both are with Obama’s decidedly unimpressive record so far in sticking to his campaign promises. Then there’s the fact that people in the U.S. are even less concerned about climate change than they were ten years ago despite the increasingly alarming information that reveals it’s progressing faster than anyone ever believed possible. Personally I feel we’ve hit some tipping points and now we’re along for the ride.
The economy came into it, of course, and I said something about how we can’t simply stimulate the economy and hope that things go back to normal, that the Earth can’t afford it, there aren’t enough resources, etc., etc. And of course there’s the issue of jobs, which is a real concern. Absolutely.
“What would you have us do”? she asked. As anyone who’s read Gaian Voices knows, and so does she as we’ve known each other for over 40 years, I have a totally different vision of what needs to happen. As for jobs, there are so many useful and decidedly necessary things that must be done it’s hard to know where to start. But I picked transportation and the need to switch from big, gas-guzzling trucks to get stuff from point A to point B to rebuilding the nation’s rail network. To me this doesn’t seem like a really radical or even unrealistic idea and plenty of others have proposed the same thing. Jobs would be created, we wouldn’t need to keep adding to the interstate highway system, maybe we could depave some of it, and think of the fuel we’d save. (Of course we also have to take a serious look at all the stuff we’re carting back and forth. How much of it is crap that wastes resources and ends up in landfills? How much of it is needed that we could grow or produce closer to home? That kind of thing.)
Anyway, she looked at me and said, “That’s just not going to happen? Come up with something else.”
I admit I was dumbfounded. How can such an obvious solution be dismissed so easily? “What do you mean? It’s not that radical, it can be done, we have the ability, the materials, the skills, we’ve done it before.”
“No one is going to take such an idea seriously. It’s not going to happen. So don’t even go there.”
“But how can I not?” I replied. “It only makes sense. We can’t keep on doing what we’re doing. We have to be willing to change. And how do you know it’s not going to happen? It needs to be on the table. A real option. You can’t discard a practical idea because it might be dismissed. You have to fight for it, convince people, show them it can work.”
“No one is going to listen to you,” she replied. “You have to figure out something else to say. Something more practical, more realistic.”
Well, duh. Of course they’re not going to listen to me. “They” don’t even know me. "They’ve" never read my books, "they" sure don’t look at Gaian Voices. They don’t know I exist. My voice doesn’t travel all that far. But that’s not the point.
Certainly I want to be practical. But to me practical means that something is doable, that it makes sense, that it solves (or moves in the direction of) solving a particular problem. It may not be perfect and it certainly won’t be the end of the line for anything. But we need to move in the direction of sustainability, of simplicity, of becoming more integral with the Earth (as Thomas Berry would say). And for myself, I don’t have a choice. I was born this way and if I gave in and said, “Okay, you’re right. Rail won’t happen so instead we have to work for more fuel efficient trucks, we have to keep building roads, we have to come up with a way that we can continue our present lifestyles because people in this country aren’t ready to change,” then I’m selling out. There are plenty of people already doi ng that. People, by the way, who should know better.
If I, and others like me, don’t voice real alternatives because “they” aren’t into them right now, then how will change ever happen? I’ve heard arguments similar to my friend’s all my life. And they only make me more convinced than ever to keep on putting more visionary ideas out there.
