What can we do? Two brief ideas, and magic!

Posted by Benjamin on: 05.02.2007 /

Over this last week I’ve had a couple smallish opportunities to do something smallish and been encouraged in both of them. First of all I finally followed up on a suggestion from Julie Clawson, and bought fair trade sugar from Amazon. We had run out of sugar (probably not a bad thing) and so I though it an ideal time. However, I was feeling a little guilty, because this sugar costs 4 times “normal” sugar, and we are not exactly in brilliant financial straits at this time. My friend Karl (a Mennonite, interestingly), encouraged me in this. He said that I am simply assuming the full fair price of the sugar, instead of outsourcing that full cost to someone else who is actually a lot worse off than me financially. This made me feel good. I also felt stoked when I actually received the box full of 10 one pound boxes of sugar via Amazon. I read the little blurb on the back about the Alter Trade Foundation and their Alter Eco Products, and I felt rather proud of myself.

The other thing I did this last week was inspired by Anna and by something Brian Mclaren said at an event I recently went to. He said that one of the evil results of nationalism is that nobody cares about any place. That is, we think of ourselves as Americans, and thus not as a member of this little neighborhood above Nathan Hale High School. Brian said “Learn your address–not your street address–your environmental address. You live in a watershed. Something is happening in terms of water geographically and environmentally where you live. Check it out on google earth.” This got me to thinking about my particular watershed, and little old Thornton Creek down there and how stuff moves at various rates down into that, and gradually out into Lake Washington, Puget Sound, and the Pacific. And it made me notice litter. So I grabbed a plastic bag when my girls and I walked down to the park next to Thornton Creek, and we picked up litter along the way. My two preschool girls really got into. It became “It’s *my* turn to hold the bag” and “Look, there’s some more garbage–I’ll get it!”. Made me feel really good in lots of ways.

I had a bit of a discussion with my good friends Tony and John and Tracy this last week because it came up that maybe we shouldn’t just complain all the time, and was anything we were saying and doing mattering? And I found myself arguing (mostly trying to convince myself, I think) strongly that *yes*, the things we are saying and doing *do* matter, and if one person does one little thing–that’s *huge*, because it’s like magic. How does magic work? Well, it’s like magic to turn an acorn into 500 board feet of lumber. It’s a huge thing to accomplish, but really all one needs is 30 years and a tiny bit of luck, because it just adds up to a large number of incremental changes over time.