Here's some food for thought from Noam Chomsky on how we need to provide a consistent and powerful flow of messaging to create a more sustainable human civilization that lives in balance with our environment (and each other):
Repetition--if not always truth--is precisely how Corporate America does it...the same messages pounded into our brains until we submit. Such indoctrination is not easily challenged and it often requires the same brand of replication to do so. Thus, the Chomsky-inspired message for the green movement:
Speak the truth. Speak it loudly. Speak it often.
"All over the place," he explains, "from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume."
The green movement is here to create a constant counter-pressure (so to speak) to stop all this acquiescing to political power and corporate marketing. Leading by example, we each can demonstrate how much power we have and how urgent it is that we think for ourselves and exert this influence...now.
I particularly liked how Chomsky summed up the need for the New Green Economy and Sustainability Revolution that we work to advance here at CV notes:
"Modern industrial civilization has developed within a certain system of convenient myths. The driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain. Now it's long been understood--very well--that a society that is based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist--with whatever suffering and injustice it entails--as long as it's possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited, that the world is an infinite resource, and that the world is an infinite garbage can. At this stage of history, either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community issues guided by values of solidarity and sympathy and concern for others or--alternatively--there will be no destiny for anyone to control."
Yep, that's pretty much our mission -- and choice -- right now. Either we get it right, or, as Jared Diamond's Collapse reminds us, Mother Nature will get it right for us...
The good news is that from sustainable, secure sources of clean energy, to healthy organic foods, to walkable communities interspersed with networks of open space that dazzle us with their rejuvenative power and biological diversity, there is so much hope in the solutions offered by the Green Economy movement...
Read the full post at Planet Green>>
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