Winds of Change, Rays of Hope

The change will not come from social media "activists," busy fingers on the keyboard, heads in cyber space, posting internet visions of planetary doom.

The revolution will not come from the angst of the Left or the dogmas of the Right.

The new earth will not be the work of neo-liberal globalists, multi-national corporations, or bureaucrats of the centralized socialist state.

The environment will not by saved by the slogans and applause lines of Republicans or Democrats, posturing under cable tv lights in Congressional hearing rooms.

These myths must all vanish in the awakening of the small and the local. Alchemy happens, but we fail to notice it, because it happens in our own backyard.

Miracles unfold on the scale of the infinitesimal. The word "radical" comes from the word for "root." Radicals have dirty hands, fingers down in the loam.

Check out this town in Texas , already off the fossil fuels grid, not as a result of federal or even state programs, but the creativity of the local. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/texas-town-future-renewable-energy-180968410/

The green renaissance will be bio-regional: the synergy of small-business entrepreneurs and municipal governments. The politics of manure, the sacrament of organic strawberries, the temple of your neighborhood farmers' market.

Growers and green energy makers not twenty miles from your town. A solar farm on the roof of the abandoned factory. Windmills sprouting from a desolate meadow. The crazy man in his dilapidated barn, turning chicken poop into tractor fuel. The goatherd crone, selling milk for your baby.

The winds of change and rays of hope are already here. Have a little faith. In the little.


Photo: New York City, Smithsonian Magazine.