This morning, we feature two essays from the current issue of ORION People & Nature. They were written in response to these questions posed by the editor:
“What does the World need now? What qualities do we look for in each other, that if adopted by governments and corporations, could prove to be revolutionary in their effect. And, if there were a single impulse that might really make a difference in the world, what would it be?”
First up is Paul Hawken an environmentalist, entrepreneur, journalist, and the author of The Ecology of Commerce and Natural Capitalism. He is presently writing a book entitled Uprising about the growing worldwide movement resisting corporatization of the commons, which will be published by Viking Penguin in 2003.
LISTENING
Paul Hawken
Imagine an America that had been listening to the voices in the Middle East. Not interviews with military consultants on CNN, but traumatized Palestinian children, the Israeli whose family disappeared in a bomb blast, the castigated Afghan widow, the Iraqi father who cannot find or afford medicine for his daughter. What if we had been listening for years, no, let’s say decades? What if we had listened to the people who pay the price for oligarchic oil politics, instead of those benefiting from it? What country would we be? How much oil would we use? How stingy would our foreign aid be? Who would we believe in the media?
But we can’t truly listen to people far away. The people we can listen to are the people nearby who will talk to us. They are our children, neighbors, coworkers, spouses, or the sorrowful person we avoid on the street. We can practice by squatting on our haunches on a cold night and listening to a homeless person. The whole story.
What happens when we don’t listen? The main reason medical patients file malpractice suits is not because they believe their physicians are incompetent, but because they feel the doctors don’t listen. The failure of communication leads to disappointment, anger, and frustration. That can lead to hostility and arrogance on the part of the practitioner, which inflames the patient’s anger further. If this keeps up, the patient reaches for a lawyer.
The resentment that results when people are not listened to, especially those in need or suffering arises everywhere. Listening is as different from hearing as a live animal is from a fur coat. Listening is generosity. Listening is consciousness. Listening is alive. Functionally, listening allows us to see a world we don’t know, to understand experiences we haven’t had, to reframe or drop a belief long held. It creates distinctions and it is from these distinctions that we create new possibilities.
The language of war is the language of conflation. Concepts and distinctions are fused, nuances erased. Conflated, bellicose words masquerade as truth and dodge uncertainty. There is only good and evil. There is only us or them. Alternatives disappear, possibilities sink from sight.
Listening is the opposite experience. It doesn’t judge, know, or argue. When we listen to people, our own language softens. Listening may be the cardinal act of giving. It is a silent quality.
I think it is the source of peace.
Next up is Stephanie Mills, the author of Whatever Happened to Ecology?, In Service of the Wild, and Turning Away From Technology. A prolific writer and speaker on issues of ecology and social change, she lives in the Great Lakes bioregion in the upper Midwest. The text below is excerpted from her new book, Epicurean Simplicity, published in 2002 by Island Press.
SIMPLICITY
Stephanie Mills
Among do-gooders, it’s bad form to be a pessimist, but I can’t seem to get that extinction crisis out of my mind. Or that population explosion. Or global climate change. Can’t get those billionaires; those landless, homeless, jobless billions; those new diseases; the corporate capture of the media; those aging nuclear reactors; those crowded prisons out of my mind.
These days, most of us know at some level that consumerism is complicity in all of the above. Even ordinary lives in our society, let alone the lifestyles of the rich and famous, exploit and undermine cultures and bioregions near and far. However suppressed or attenuated, an awareness of doing harm must taint whatever pleasure might be had from material convenience or luxury.
Given the degree to which even low-on-the-food-chain types like me are implicated in the wholesale wastage of the earth, the structural aspect of the answer to “How are we to live?” must be “More locally.” The epitome of the good here would be to grow or make my own basic necessities. Next best would be to barter for necessities or purchase them from a neighbor whose practices I know and respect. Next to that would be buying from a reputable, socially and ecologically conscientious purveyor; the nadir, a fast-food burger from a global chain.
By paying attention to the small things – the wholesomeness of the daily bread, the source and state of the water, the seemliness of one’s shelter, and the well-being of all the human and more-than-human lives around us – we may be led to practice simplicity and harmlessness in tangible ways, to “be the change one wishes in the world,” as Gandhi taught. This is not to premise a life on renunciation, abstinence, and deprivation, but to enjoy, as did Epicurus and his followers, the freedom in simplicity.
After spending the first half of my adult life trying to do my bit for the macrocosm, I find myself now addressing the microcosm of my own home and the life within. Just for now, I want to sit in the garden, savor my life and my solitude, do my work, and be a good friend. One afternoon as I was sweeping my house, it occurred to me that having a philosophy really can be a help. As I rhythmically swept the sand and ash and hair and lint and leaf-legged wood bug carcasses into neat little accumulations for the dustpan, it also occurred to me that my willingness to be behind the times has been both a cause and an effect of philosophy. A keystone of mine is that life forms and life places have moral standing on par with that of any human being. The deep questioning fundamental to such a philosophy helps one to distinguish between needs and wants and to minimize those that entail getting and spending.
Having a sweeping philosophy, being able to spend an hour tidying with a broom, a technology that hasn’t changed much in several thousand years, and doing so in a handmade home, which I can see no reason to leave until the day I go feet-first, feel like such blessings! And enjoying the least things – a chill glass of water, a moment of play with the cat, the sight of sunlight caught in the frost spangling locust twigs – is a form of prayer.
Reposted from ORION People & Nature
Copyright 2002 Orion Society