Editorial: It's Not That Easy Being Green

How People Matter

By Muriel Strand, Co-Coordinating Editor for this issue

As I write my first BPM editorial, my mind wanders back to when I helped start the Sacramento Greens, before the Green Party, when we met in Dale Crandall-Bear’s New Society bookstore. Why the Greens? Because the integration of social and ecological sustainability is a key Green principle.

A few years later this newspaper was created Because some Sacramentans believe People Matter. People can make a difference, and people deserve consideration from others.

But how much do people matter?

Well, we (usually) matter more to ourselves than to each other, or to other species, let alone to the planet. (Although now what probably matters to the ecosphere would be recovering from the infection.)

There’s no denying that the more people there are, the less each one matters. That’s the reality of diminishing marginal returns, a fundamental of economics. Scarcity makes things more valuable, ceteris paribus, and abundance can make them invaluable, like water or air that we generally take for granted. Excess can turn anything into a nuisance or a hazard, like plastic trash or corn syrup.

So people will matter more if they are in proportion, which is another way of saying when social and ecological sustainability are in harmony, when we are living as we were evolved to live.

Then, fake dilemmas like jobs vs. environment will fool no one. We will realize that our true needs—clean air and water, healthy food, and shelter—are more important than jobs or money, that money can only buy what’s for sale. Only Mother Earth can provide for our survival; people can simply share.

But huge forces oppose ecological and social harmony. One force is cheap gasoline. We are addicted to our oil ‘energy slave,’ who works for less than 1% of the minimum wage. We are spoiled, hence the petulant comments provoked by higher energy prices. The fear and anger voiced by many reflect our addiction.

The institution of advertising is an underappreciated and formidable opponent of the clear thinking and non-attached compassion that social and ecological harmony calls for. News media’s addiction to advertising income has contaminated public discourse, and we are so marinated in public relations’s breathless miasma of psycho-social manipulation that the boundaries between virtual and reality, between fact and fiction, are fading fast.

Another opposing force is within us. It is the "dominator culture," a concept named and described by Riane Eisler in her book, The Chalice and the Blade. The dominator culture is the centralized, hierarchical, authoritarian worldview that we are all somewhat infected with. This toxic mindset is, I believe, more fundamental than our fossil fuel addiction.

So it’s really simple. Do you want to be someone who matters, who makes a difference? Then do unto others as you would have them do unto you, a policy recommended unanimously by world religions. Put yourself in other people’s shoes, and don’t be mean. Be kind if possible, but definitely don’t be mean. Now put yourself in the shoes of people who look different, talk funny, and/or live on the other side of the world, such as those who are homeless, foreign, refugees, terrorists, etc. And also behind the eyes of wolves, mosquitoes, trees and our other nonhuman kin. They all have natural and rational reasons for their feeling and actions.