“The Revolution Will Not Be Handmade” is one of the most refreshing things I’ve read in a while. I spent Monday night listening to classmates discuss new green buildings and whether plastic bag bans and recycling are a necessary, sufficient, or even worthwhile condition to satisfy environmental needs. Once you learn a certain amount about just how screwed we are vis-à-vis atmospheric CO2, finite hydrocarbon resources, and ecological resilience, and you’ve picked up enough knowledge of science/engineering and geopolitics to avoid being a useful idiot to anyone, you become a bit jaded about the possibility of our society making any changes necessary to avert eventual emergencies. Compare our responses to predicted events which may happen on a certain date (eg. Y2k, or elections) and which will definitely happen on an uncertain date (eg. financial corrections as we just experienced, technological obsolescence, peak oil).

The ‘manifesto’ manages to at least articulate the urgency and the scale of the changes needed to ensure that my great-grandkids and their contemporaries around the world enjoy a better quality of life than I do – which is one of my basic definitions of a ’sustainable’ civilization.

A concise snippet:

We can no longer afford to mistake the symbolic for the effective, or put our hopes in the mystical idea that if enough of us embrace small steps, our values will ripple mysteriously out through the culture and utterly transform it. We’ve been saying that for more than 40 years, it hasn’t happened and we need to stop lying to ourselves that it will. Live the life that fits your values, but don’t mistake that for changing the world.