Forward on Climate Rally, Washington DC, 2013
I was living in New York at the time Occupy Wall Street
began, and I was in school at Columbia University getting my master’s degree in
Sustainability Management. I’d say I was two years into my awakening from a
life lived in consumerville. I left the corporate world in 2008 after working
there for ten years doing IT consulting. It didn’t have any meaning for me. Over
time, I began to become aware of issues like peak oil and the impact of our
lifestyle on people around the world and realized that this wasn’t sustainable
and wasn’t something that I wanted to be a part of. This lifestyle didn’t
provide any meaning or value for me. I didn’t know what else was out there. I
just knew that this wasn’t it, so it became a search. When Occupy happened, it
showed me that there were other people like me who were searching as well. People didn’t know exactly what they were searching for, which was present with
a lot of the lack of specific demands from the Occupy Movement. People were
just saying, “No, this whole thing isn’t right. There’s something about the whole
thing that is corrupt. We can’t just point to this or that because
it goes deeper than that. It goes all the way down to the bottom, to the soul
level.” That attracted me to Occupy because I found solidarity with a lot of
the people down there who were looking for the same kind of answers that I was
looking for.
I was there the first two nights that it was there. I lived
in New York, and I worked in the area. Actually, I remember receiving the
original Adbusters invitation on Facebook saying that this whole thing was
going to happen. I remember thinking, “Hmm, I wonder what this is going to be
like?" It was an invitation to gather around inequality and everything
that’s wrong with the world, and a bunch of people showed up. I remember
thinking, “You know what, this thing could get big.” I remember being down there with Michael Moore, who
I think was one of the first celebrities to go down there. I remember being
right there in the background when he was being interviewed and just feeling
the energy of all of these people not knowing exactly where we were headed, but
knowing that we were going to be part of something that was going to make a
difference. I just remember feeling the buzz and excitement of the whole thing.
What it felt like was a different process of coming to a
decision or agreement about where we should go. Yes, it was democratic, but it
was also one where the minority opinions could be heard. Everyone could be
heard. Sometimes what happens now in our government is
that the minority opinion is disregarded, and the majority do what they want to
do. That’s where democracy really gets a bad name. I think democracy means
including the wishes of the minority, so that no one feels left out or
abandoned. I felt like that was what was going on at Occupy. Everybody had a
chance to speak what they felt was right and the truth that they had inside.
What’s great about that is that it creates this different way of coming to a
decision. It’s an emergent decision that comes out of the collective will of a
bunch of individuals who are concerned about their future. This is different than
somebody being elected and then making all of the decisions from above. Some
people like those decisions, some don’t. It causes friction and division, but
the way that Occupy was coming to decisions was really organic, and it was
creating something out of the collective intentions of everybody that was
there, in a very beautiful way.
I lived in New York, so I didn’t sleep out in the park, but I
visited it almost every day, a least for a couple hours when I wasn’t in
classes. A lot of my Columbia classmates were down there from time to time. I was down there
checking in all the way until it got busted up. One thing I would say about it
getting busted up is that I don’t think it was actually busted up. I think it was
dispersed, but that’s not busted up. I think that what
happened after it got dispersed is that everybody then went on and did the most
important action that they could take after that. Some people joined Occupy
Sandy and said, “You know, what we need to do is show people that we’re there
for them when times are tough. We build community in that way and resiliency in
our community because we’re all there to look after one another.” That was
great. That was awesome. Some people went on to join the divestment campaign to
divest from fossil fuels. They felt that we shouldn’t be profiting from the exploitation
of the natural world. Some people decided to create movies. Occupy Love was
created. Everybody has their own unique set of talents, and I feel like when it
got dispersed, they said, “Okay, well I’m going to apply this unique set of
talents to what is important to me and important to my community and to those
around me." That’s what people are doing right now. I think the movement is
growing, and I think it will come back in some other form of collective
protests given the right environment.
After the occupation, I was still trying to figure out what I was
going to do. I was going to school. I was still thinking within the old
paradigm. I thought, “In order to do something else, I’m going to have to get
trained before I can actually go and do that.” I was like, “Okay, well I should
go get a degree in sustainability, and then I’ll go and work in sustainability,
and it will all work out.” What I found was that what they were talking about
in terms of sustainability, I didn’t agree with. They were talking more about
sustainable development, which was still working within this economic growth-based
paradigm. They were saying, “Well, we’re not going to change consumer
culture, so we’re just going to have to figure out a way to make it
sustainable. We’ll have to use less plastic and less Styrofoam, but we’re not
going to change this growth economy. We’re not going to change the system.”
That just was hollow for me, but I kept going to school, and I got the degree.
The movie that
woke me up to the whole thing was Zeitgeist: Moving Forward. I was
finally exposed to how the monetary system actually worked and how growth was
imperative. We can’t not grow the economy, or we will go into recession, and
everybody will lose their job and suffer, so growth is inherent in our current
system, and that is obviously in conflict with a planet with finite resources.
We can’t grow forever. I would bring that question up at school, and it would never be
answered. They couldn’t give me a good answer for that, so I started working on
a blog to try and explore what sustainability really was, and that led me
to create Sustainable Man, where I explored the work of Charles
Eisenstein and many others.
What I found is that I believe what we are missing is what I call sustainable values. What is the value system that will lead us
towards a sustainable, just, harmonious life with the planet? That’s the
question we should really be asking. Our society preaches values of
individualism, of competitiveness, of taking as much as you can for yourself. I don’t think that those values will lead to a sustainable outcome. I
think that the values of gratitude, the values of empathy and compassion and
kindness, these are the values that can create a harmonious world in the
future. We need to be asking ourselves how we can express those values? What are positive
ways that we can get in touch with those values? I think that we all have them
down deep.
My brother helps me with Sustainable Man. He has all
of the video editing skills and graphic design skills, and I write the blogs
and interact with the community. What I’m trying to do is tell stories of ways
that we can interact with each other and the natural world that exemplify those
sustainable values that I was speaking about. That’s the goal of Sustainable Man.
It’s really not to impose any kind of view on anybody, but to create a place where
dialogue can happen. It doesn’t happen in the media. It doesn’t really happen
as part of our social discourse. People are generally talking about consumer
ideas and consumer culture. They're not talking about ideas that matter. There’s
really not a place where those who care about those things can gather to talk
about these issues. That’s what Sustainable Man is supposed to be about—a place
where this can happen. I try to curate a bunch of content around what would create a sustainable world. Some
people want to have some actual ideas rather than fluffy talk, so I try and do
that on the website and gather ideas around urban farming, around reduce and
reuse, and if we have to, recycle, as well as ideas around our interconnection to
all of life, sustainable values and inspiring stories that can help teach us
the way to live these values that will bring about a more beautiful world.
It’s important because the future of the human race is at
stake. We will not survive carrying on the way that we’ve been carrying on. I
think almost any child that you explain the situation to inherently gets it, “Oh,
my ball is this big. I can only put this much stuff in it. I can’t keep growing
it.” The world is this big. We can’t make it any bigger. The resources are
finite. We’re going to have to learn to use them in the best, most efficient
ways that we can, and I don’t think we can say that we’re doing that right now.
These are changes that I think we all know must take place. No one sees exactly how that could happen, but in crisis moments, possibility increases. Things that
we would never have considered to be possible, all of the sudden, become common
sense. All the work that we do helps, incrementally, to bring the collective
consciousness of humanity to the realization that we have to change our ways,
and that’s why all of this work is incredibly important.
I envision a world in which access trumps ownership, where access to resources and access to the things that we want to use is more
important than owning it. For example, there are fifty million power drills in
the United States. Each one is used for an average of twelve minutes over its
entire lifetime. Here’s a devise that could easily be shared amongst hundreds
of people in a local community in a tool library because we barely ever use it.
Even our cars, which most people are incredibly attached to, we only use for an
average of an hour a day. This means that it sits idle for twenty-three hours a
day. I see a world in the future where ownership doesn’t make any sense because
the resources are finite. We’re going to have to learn how to share them.
There
are much more efficient ways through the internet now to make sure that
everybody gets a ride to where they need to go, whenever they need it. As you do that, you don’t need as many
cars on the road. You can now reclaim some of the streets. The streets can
become gardens, so we can grow our food right outside on our streets, in our
cities, and we can create vertical gardens. We can create urban gardening, and
we can grow food in our apartment windows. I’ve seen a TED talk on that. There
are countless ways to create and sustain ourselves locally, which is where we are going to be going. We’re not going to be transporting bananas all
over the world in the future. We will be growing them in greenhouses next to
where we live. I see that as part of a shift to localization.
We are definitely going to be more creative in the future.
We’re going to reuse things. On Sustainable Man each month, we have a creative
reuse contest where we give away a t-shirt to the person who posts the most
creative reuse idea, so taking something that would be thrown away and reusing
it to serve some other purpose. I think that 3D printing will be a huge part of
the future, where we will have replicators in our neighborhoods. If we need to
print a part to something or need a wrench, we can print it. We can download a
design from the internet that somebody volunteered, and we can print whatever
we need and share those items. The future is going to be less about stuff, and
it’s going to be more about relationships.
I think that reputation is going to
be much more important in the future. Even now, through sites like Air B&B
and eBay, it's allowing us to share our stuff with each
other more frequently and more easily. Those sites are creating
feedback mechanisms. You host someone on Air B&B, and at the end of the
visit, you rate the person who stayed, and they rate you as a host. Now, if you
can aggregate all of this feedback from all of these different sites that we use,
it could form the basis for a reputation score. That could replace the
credit score that we use today, so now It’s in everyone’s best interest to make
sure that they are helping each other versus being placed in a situation where
taking from each other is what the goal is, trying to get as much as you can
from them. Now, you want to give to them, so that they have a great experience
as well, so that they will give you a good review. That will increase your reputation
score, and that will allow you more access in the future because you have such
a great reputation. I think that these are the kinds of changes that we’ll see going forward in a more sustainable society.
The short of it is that I hope it will bring about a world
without war, a world without poverty, a world where everybody has the ability
to find their unique gifts, and is encouraged to find them and to give them to
the world. If you go back to the root level, our life is a gift. Can it be
anything else but a gift? I mean, we’re alive, and we have these bodies that
can sustain us, so that we can create in this world. We can go out and create
whatever we want to create. To me, it's so important to encourage people to do that,
and to create an environment where people have the ability to do that. Some people have that ability now. Most people
do not have that ability yet. That is what the goal ought to be.
I can’t wait
to find out what it’s going to look like then or what our potential is at that
point. I think it will be an amazing place. It’s hard to fathom, really, because
we’ve been living in this world with so much chaos and destruction. It’s really
difficult to imagine that, but if I were to close my eyes and dream of it, I
think the best way to understand it is if you watch a child interact with his
or her environment at the ages of one and two, and the way that he looks at, say, this CD. He’ll start turning it and seeing that it makes all of these patterns
and these bright colors and thinking, “Look, there’s a rainbow in there.” So he’s
looking at everything around the world as this inquisitive child. To me,
I think that would never go away. We’d learn more, and we’d be constantly fascinated
by what else is out there, what else we could learn, and we’d wonder how we
could contribute to make this world even better than how we found it. I think
that’s a little glimpse of what we’re building toward.
You can view the Sustainable Man website and Facebook page through the following links:
http://sustainableman.org/
https://www.facebook.com/SustainableMan
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/
You can view the Sustainable Man website and Facebook page through the following links:
http://sustainableman.org/
https://www.facebook.com/SustainableMan
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/