Comments on: 8.7 seconds http://westnorth.com/2007/10/29/87-seconds/ an irregular view on cities Mon, 14 May 2012 18:15:36 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: paytonc http://westnorth.com/2007/10/29/87-seconds/#comment-15456 Mon, 12 May 2008 07:59:38 +0000 http://westnorth.com/2007/10/29/87-seconds/#comment-15456 Michael Pollan in the Times Magazine‘s 2008 Earth Day issue:

The “cheap-energy mind,” as Wendell Berry called it, is the mind that asks, “Why bother?” because it is helpless to imagine — much less attempt — a different sort of life, one less divided, less reliant.

Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can’t prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of individuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik resolved that they would simply conduct their lives “as if” they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that, in time, expanded to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the Eastern bloc.

So what would be a comparable bet that the individual might make in the case of the environmental crisis? Havel himself has suggested that people begin to “conduct themselves as if they were to live on this earth forever and be answerable for its condition one day.”

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