Emotional energy rises when people come to grips with their personal responsibility for environmental problems. There is, I suspect, a general principle at work here, one proponents of the New Economy (Post Peak Oil) need take seriously: “in numbers there is strength”.

- Taking responsibility for our non-sustainable acts can be liberating IF people subsequently join their individual efforts to create the New Economy in their local community. This is what “empowerment” is all about. (See footnote 1 for experimental evidence of the beneficial effects of control over an aversive situation.)

- Empowerment, once initiated and well canalized into productive projects, can be highly self-reinforcing. This aspect of empowerment is especially important today where it provides a way out of the soul deadening, vacuous, herd mentality indocrinated by consumer society (the “Old Economy” based on cheap fossil fuel energy and which is now ending). (see footnote 2 on the social nature of empowerment)

We must begin to unite people to create the New Economy at the level of the local community NOW. The New economy will be nothing if not “local” and “decentalized”.

http://www.cmaq.net/en/node/37197

discusses some of the POSITIVE potentials of the emerging New Economy.

Action NOW is critical. Heel dragging will only assure that the internal contradictions of the Old – non-sustainable – Economy will prove fatal to our vaunted “civilization” and its puported “humanism”. (Are we really so humanistic? Why then do we collectively prepare an anti-human future through our inaction on environmental challenges..)

Unfortunately, contemporary history – the post World War II decades – shows that the forces of reaction learned early on how to grab the popular consciouness by employing paranoid social and political programming (with strong ethnocentric, racist, anti-egalitarian, and proto-fascist currents): the “Red Scare” of the 1945 – 1970 early Cold War era. The forces of reaction have emerged victorious from the Red Scare and we must ask ourselves “why?” and “how?”.

They masterfully captured, molded and shaped the “popular consciousness” at the grass roots level of community organization, thus assuring their success through a form of pseudo-empowerment of the “masses”. In the long run, of course, it was a scam and the people are the worse off. I think of those suburban housewives and their coffee klatsches organized by the John Birch Society..

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7031.html

chronicles the rise to power of the New Right in the early Post WW II years.

All we can say today is that the Right got it right! Now why can’t we? The stakes today are, realistically speaking, vastly higher than war between geopolitical super-powers (with feet of clay as the fall of the Soviet Union showed).

I have tried for several years to get people to join “writers’ circles” to promote alternative energies in their local communities – in effect, the green equivalent of the Bircher inspired “patriotic” coffee klatsches of the 50s and 60s. I have tried in both English and French on the internet, to no avail.

I am now wondering if a public faith-based, faith-inspired commitment, a communal binding together in a shared vision, is possible, desirable, is capable of turning things around before it is really too late.. And how would this be done?

footnote 1:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WY2-4NP4VHT-5&_user=10&_coverDate=05%2F31%2F1973&_alid=1097761747&_rdoc=113&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_cdi=7174&_st=18&_docanchor=&view=c&_ct=123&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=f5da4ac9796c8d8d95e4dce4b244abc8

footnote 2: Empowerment, especially in the present context, needs to be seen holistically, as a set of realations between people and the community in which they find themselves, its power relations, psychodynamics and so on. Empowerment, I am begining to realize, seems to have strong – and possibly dominant – culturally determined elements..

Serge Latouche: Décoloniser L’imaginaire (Parangon, Paris, 2003, page 74, my translation): “Is what the French call ‘development’ desired by the villagers.. No. What they want is.. ‘bamtaare’.. the striving of a highly cohesive, convivial society for harmonious, social well-being in which each of its members, the poorest to the richest, finds his place and his personal realization.” Note that in this (rather alien) concept of social well-being the pair “individual” / “community” are not opposed, but actually complement each other in a synergistic “figure” / “ground” relation. The healthy individual is nutured within a a healthy community which, in turn, depends upon the existence / co-operation of healthy individuals.