how to save the world, repost of sorts

How to Save the World, part 1 

Don’t do anything. Nothing. Not a thing. And I don’t mean that it is hopeless. Just that you can’t save the world by anything that you do. Only by what you don’t do.

You can’t save the world by driving a car (much less a hybrid car). You can’t save the world by using a more efficient dishwasher. Or buying Big Organic. Not by anything that you buy, even locally. Not by recycling either. Not by composting even.

If you want to accomplish something positive, all you have to do is stop doing something.

And mostly that boils down to not consuming.

It’s pretty easy, really: Every time you start to do something, don’t. Every trip a body can NOT take to town is a step toward saving the world. A leg not shaved, there ya go. From the big to the little. Every dollar NOT spent is a dollar that you do NOT need to earn (or exploit or extort from someone else, depending on how you get your cash) and thus another step out of the stream of world exploitation and environmental degradation and war and death.

So here’s the Contrary Goddess’s “How to Save the World, step one, Challenge” -- see if you can go a week, one week, without buying anything. And no, it doesn’t count to just buy double the week before.

And here is the Contrary Goddess’s hint on how to make it really worthwhile instead of a stupid and empty exercise: Always take a step out of the process and reclaim it for yourself -- whether you are eating (bake your own bread, grind your own grain, grow your own grain) or entertaining yourself (pick up an instrument or sing or paint or write) or whatever. Don’t just “not buy” but actually consume less. Feel a little gnawing consumption pain deep in your gut.

How to Save the World, part 2

Feel a little gnawing consumption pain deep in your gut. Embrace it. Become friends. Then reach for . . . even less.

Because if you are looking for hope, it is in the joy of without. Quit rationalizing why it is impossible to do without. Just do without, and practice joy. And hope it is catching. Develop skills and pass them on. Value what is really valuable, not what is fashionable, or what is easy, or what feels good.

How to Save the World, part 3

If you manage to do little enough, you might actually have to start doing something. Real. Like growing food. I don’t care where you are or what you are doing, grow (and gather wild) some significant portion of your food and eat it. You can do it. If you aren't doing it, you just don't think eating is important enough.

How to Save the World, part 4

The only chance you have to save the world is to save yourself, by which you save, maybe, your children by what you didn’t teach them.

 I wrote this in 2007. I think I took one sentence out. You CAN do it too.