Greenpeace V: part 1

so i feel like i owe something in reflection of these past two weeks. and what better time for it than a 16 hr. van ride back to DC. cleaning out the hotel room this morning, being on the beach these past two full days, and just generally - people are so wasteful. it's on such a gigantic magnitude - and it's nearly inescapable as an American. at a hotel, everything is single-serivng; everything is temporary, transitory, with little regard for the future. i called the hotel's corporate office and left a message with my phone number asking about their recycling program (they don't have one). no one's called me back yet. it seems that we try so hard not to waste specific resources (i..e.time and money) but we end up wasting profusely in other areas. even we "environmentalists" are often too focused on other goals and we end up running the conversion van for 5 minutes not moving, run the air conditioning all day in an empty hotel room, taking 30 minute showers, spending $200 on clothes. we literally just passed what i suspect was a garbage dump. a swarm of seagulls larger than i've ever seen with hundreds of turkey vultures circled overhead.

i'm starting to realize that it's hard for people to respect the criticisms of someone also stuck in the same system ( i.e. not living any solutions). i'm beginning to feel disconnects within myself - hypocracies that i notice and need to fix within myself. i'm tired of being lax and letting the situation dictate the things which are important to me. it's like saying i might as well shave my legs because it's easier. i want to create situations (or find them) where it's easy to be me, where i'm not constantly swimming against the flow. we just drove by a giant plot of land with bare, exposed soil - a future subdivision.

i hate seeing animals and birds by the road. i hate to think they have to live next to us. i hate to think that i am to blame. i use these roads, i use the subdivisions, i use the garbage dumps. this is what i'm beginning to realize - that it's hard to respect a dissenter if he/she is part of and this encouraging the continuation of that system. this is the concretion of the thought that i've been having here a lot at greenpeace.

it's kind of summed up in one of the lunches i shared with one of the guys from the research team. he helped make a website which is basically a map of different oil companies, think tanks, individuals and their relations to the us gov't. we started admiring their efficiency and effectiveness (i.e. telling people that global warming / climate change isn't real) and at once strategizing. we wondered if theses institutions had training programs like ours. he said they probably did. we joked about one of us signing up for that program.

this is my point. for every one there is an equal and opposite. (newton) yin and yang. greenpeace exists as a response. it works in a system to negate its opposite. like chasing a shadow. but don't get me wrong - greenpeace serves and noble purpose and a lot of times does it in ways we haven't seen. with yin comes yang. i think greenpeace started off well, radically, showing people what they haven't seen - making waves. i think, now, in a lot of ways gp needs to step it up. i think the framework and intent are definitely there. still part of the system where [we] should be creating new systems. i think we need to continuously be improving, training people ot think outside the box. i probably think this way because iv'e heard the message so many times that i'm ready for the next step. repetition works insofar as it creates a space of monotony to be filled with creative solutions. i'm beginning to think this is one way to look at change - create the space and then give people the tools to fill it. (which is what someone at gp said about what gp does.)

hopefully this all isn't too abstract, detached, and philosophical to understand. creating these spaces seems really cool - providing opportunities. it's the fundamental underlyng principle in culture jamming and somewhere in the resolution of cognitive dissonance. this program's made a lot of spaces for me. a lot of spaces to get pissed off, to question, to propose creative, new solutions.