Our words will be elemental

This morning we sat on the dock here in Maine, and through the filters of my sunglasses I watched the sun reflected a thousand times in little waves that danced at the lake's inlet. Now, sitting in front of a stone fireplace, looking over my shoulder at a rising, nearly full moon reflected in the waves at that same inlet, I get the added bonus of the chorus of a hundred crickets, Beethoven on my laptop speaker, and our neighbors wrapping up conversations as they say their goodbyes. And this is after stepping from a magical, little, wooden restaurant/bar with an old dude playing his 12-string and singing a complement to the camaraderie among strangers. Topping it off was the look in my son's eyes and the creativity of his sentences as we played cards waiting for dinner to come out.

I'm pretty moved right now thinking about these moments from today, all fairly short and wholly wonderful. So it's partly with reluctance and partly in defense of those moments that I now turn again to The Dithering:

"Despite 50 years of growing scientific consensus, the warming of the earth continues unabated. Well-funded lobby groups have sowed doubt among the public and successfully downplayed the urgency of the threat. Meanwhile, geopolitics has impeded the development of an effective global response."

- Stefan Rahmstorf, Professor of Physics of the Oceans

For a month or so now I've written that I think the most important step that we can take for the future of life is to talk about climate change. I've also mentioned a couple times that the source of the issue is our exploitative, extractivist, consumerist culture.

With a concern for seeming to over-simplify large and challenging issues, I want to express three things:

1. Our ecological and social problems result from our exploitative consumerism. 
2. Avoiding dealing with present problems carries them into the future.
3. We could solve all our problems by building our individual and collective integrity to a level of impeccability.

A plan of action: talk about climate change and other social and ecological issues as being results of industrial capitalism (it's inherently exploitative); vote for candidates who will build momentum in the right ecological direction (like Clinton) while knowing that extremely little gets accomplished on election day. 

"We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental."

- Uncivilization, the Dark Mountain Manifesto