Doing What We Can

"This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius...”That’s my brother making fun of me.

I had mentioned a book by Paul Hawken called Blessed Unrest, which explores the worldwide movement for environmental and social change and emerges with a sense of hope. In the words of one reviewer, the book “invokes a heartbreak from which light pours.”I quoted Jane Goodall: “Paul Hawken states eloquently all that I believe so passionately to be true - that there is inherent goodness at the heart of our humanity, that collectively we can - and are - changing the world.”

I believe that too. I’m not sure how I would go on if I didn’t. I think it is essential to act in hopeful ways even when we feel sort of lost inside. Despair is a chasm too easy to fall into and very hard to climb out of.

“Blessed Unrest?” writes my brother, “sounds like the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Call me cynical, but world events like the Virginia Tech shooting and guys strapping explosives to themselves and blowing up innocent people always remind me of the admonition of one of my now-deceased clinical profs, a Holocaust survivor, who used to say that you must always keep in mind what human beings are capable of -- both good and evil -- or you will never be able to change anything.”

I know he's right. I’m not in complete denial, and I realize it is essential to recognize both the good and the evil in humanity. I simply believe that the evil gets an awful lot more press. Besides, there is something energizing about looking more closely at what's good -- and it's an energy enables us to move forward.

On Thursday night I went to a lecture by Elizabeth Kolbert (Field Notes From A Global Catastrophe) on climate change and the environmental disasters that loom not far ahead of us. Oh, it was disturbing, to say the least. I have the sense sometimes that we are all in the midst of falling rapidly from a cliff and must somehow stop falling before we hit the ground. We need to make some miracles happen.

“We are an organism that depends on climate stability but creates climate instability,” Kolbert concluded, “however, we are a special organism in that we are capable of understanding what is happening and consciously changing our behavior. The question is: will we?”

"This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, Age of Aquarius, AQUARIUS!...harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding...no more falsehoods or derisions, golden living dreams of visions..mystic crystal revelation and the mind’s true liberation. Aquarius! AQUARIUS!"

My husband, whose line of work involves political strategy for tangible change in a complex milieu of competing interests and conflicting points of view, often says that his job involves the art of what is possible. He’s a problem solver, and it's a messy and pragmatic business. In his world, the essential first step is to consider all sides of human nature and what really motivates people (and it is not necessarily abstract idealism or threats of pending disaster) and then design approaches that utilize those forces (greed being one realistic example) to encompass both preventative measures as well as accommodations to the problems that are inevitable, because with global warming, it’s already too late to stop some of what's coming.

I am fond of the idea that this is the issue that will finally bring the world together, but the complexities of that are daunting, as well as the vision, compromises and painful sacrifices that will be required."

At some point you have to be a Buddhist about it," Yvon Chouinard once told me, and he's a guy with credibility, an activist and hero despite his innate pessimism. "You do what you can, then let it be."So I’m not so lost in la-la land as it may seem. Some days, as I’ve said, I’m just trying not to cry.

Meanwhile the world is still sparkling from yesterday’s rain. I'm going outside.