Welcome Fellow Activists!

My name is Margaret Emerson, and I'm pursuing a masters degree in Ecopsychology from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado.

I started this blog because I can no longer sit on my hands and watch as we plummet even further into global crisis as a nation and as a species. The information and concepts that I'm studying and learning about deep ecology, peak oil, the new cosmology and the psychology of our relationship with the natural environment is something I can no longer simply keep contained to my small circle of friends, families and fellow classmates.

We are on the cusp of one of the most important moments in human history. I know this is a term the media likes to use for just about everything, from a new movie opening in the theatres to the cliché speeches that presidential candidates use in every single speech in every single election year that I've been paying attention to, since the Ronald Reagan era. We have become numb to such terms as "most important" "most critical" "the single most relevant idea" ...blah blah blah. They are certainly overused and overexaggerated.

But this is not an exaggeration. We are on the knife's edge of a turning point in human history. If we change our paradigm and learn how to live sustainably on this Earth, we will have succeeded in entering a new and prosperous "Eco-zoic" era. If we do not move to action to change our current paradigm, we will become as extinct as the dinosaurs and we will pull down most of the world's species along with us.

What is a paradigm? And what is it that we have to change about what we think and believe about our lives and the way the world works?

A paradigm is simply-put, a worldview. It is what we understand about how the world works, and how we structure our lives according to that worldview. Ever since man had begun to domesticate animals and grow crops and mine for minerals, we developed the worldview that the EArth and it's "resources" are here to serve man, and that man is here to use the Earth for our own proliferation and benefit. That is a paradigm that is still alive today. There have been other paradigms that developed from other changes in worldview, depending on what had been discovered.

We used to believe the sun revolved around the Earth until we learned otherwise. We used to believe the world was flat. We used to think that matter was the basis of physics, until we discovered quantum mechanics. The list goes on...

Our current paradigm in the United States and indeed in most developed countries is that value is placed on progress, on growth and on doing better and having more "stuff" than the generation that came before us. It is the corporate paradigm and it is the political paradigm. This is most obvious when we hear about "retail spending" and how it's slumping, and we sense that it's a bad thing. It's obvious when we sit in meetings at work and we hear about how we need to make more and more profit, use more resources, drive the endless machine toward bigger, better, faster.

The world cannot sustain endless growth. It is a fact that we are not only running out of resources like oil, but we are destroying vast areas of habitat in order to proliferate our current paradigm. How many thousands of acres of rain forest are we cutting down each day to make farmland? How many species are being wiped out (and putting ecological systems completely out of whack) for the sake of PROGRESS?

It is not progress. It is a false progress. We are not happier as we continue to acquire more, as we continue to do more, as we continue to work harder for larger profits. It is not progress that we are so disconnected from nature that some children in this country have never seen where their food comes from, or been in a forest, or experienced the cleansing silence of wilderness.

This is not progress.

It is insanity.

Our paradigm needs to shift so that we consider the values of sustainability and respect for ALL life, not just human life. Like it or not, we are tied into our environment in such a way that isolating ourselves from it cannot sustain our lives, neither physical, emotional nor spiritual.

It is no coincidence that our increasing isolation from nature correlates almost identically with our increasing discontent, violence, psychological problems like anxiety or depression, and our feelings of emptiness.

I will be posting here and around the internet in the weeks and months ahead to share the shocking, eye-opening things I've learned about the reality of our current global situation and more specifically, how we can ACT to jump off that knife's edge on the side that has the better, brighter future for all beings.