By Bob Belinoff
The American Environmental movement as we’ve come to know it has largely run its course. It suffers from a lack of imagination and, despite the fact that its been right at least 50% of the time, a certain amount of shrill paranoia that has alienated, according to a poll recently reported in the “New York Times,” about 40% of the voting public.
Al Gore was scared stiff to even mention the environment in the 2000 election, despite the fact that he authored one of the great tracts in defense of it, “Earth in the Balance.” And currently President Bush, having walked away from the Kyoto Accords, is set to begin drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge.
We have branded movements, organized coalitions, packaged dissention and intellectual certitude while legions of groups have signed ad after ad, with decidedly mixed results. And over time the environment’s most visible marketing strategy, eco gangsterism – featuring such tactics as chaining oneself to bulldozers and redecorating Hummers with spray paint, has become increasingly unforgiving and, in a post 911 world, considerably less endearing, even to environmental radicals.
When it comes to the environment, groups, movements and organizations might help but they won’t get us where we need to be. A strange thing happens when you create a brand or a movement. Such organizations become, well, organizations with hierarchies and bureaucracies and investments in their brand. Often they become internally contentious while people on the outside do nothing, thinking the problem is being taken care of by the folks down at the brand.
Clearly the time has come to do the saving ourselves. One by one. This means everyone will have to stop protesting a favored vanishing species and the damage we’re doing to the environment and do something positive instead, on their own, alone, when no one is looking. And do it over and over. As this activity becomes unconscious and enters a community of like-minded energies it creates an interconnected world of energy and intention embraced by ancient cultures and described so enduringly in the Hindu Vedas.
It is just such a community consciousness that produces the force field that drives the advertising and the public clamor that creates the policy that encourages investment in alternative energy. It’s how the Hybrid car came to be, and now with the help of high oil prices, it’s how the Hybrid is going to be a major player in our driving future.
Along with the grass roots, connections at the highest level are getting us where we need to be. There is an interconnected invisible world that exists in the ether and in the consciousness of each of us. This is truly God’s world. It is full of variety, excitement, chance, and out of a mess of impossibilities – an exquisite order. The systems in place are massive, antiquated and possibly unstoppable in time. We need new ones. One place to find them is through this invisible community of interconnected mind sets. It is self organizing, and arguably the most powerful force on earth, especially when it comes to orchestrating small benevolent acts into a cohesive benevolent whole.
Does it exist? Of course it does. You know it as a palpable change in the atmosphere after a group meditation. You demonstrate the existence of this invisible community every time you get in the car and drive twenty miles of ten lane freeway while talking on your cell phone, without, for the most part, hitting anyone. As much as driving on the road you are driving in a field of other-minds-driving. It is a community of road people interconnected by an often unconscious intention – the general idea of getting somewhere without anyone getting hurt. Other invisible fields connect our thoughts to our body organs, our dreams to the future, and acts of love and kindness to each other and the eco system.
Appealing to these invisible forces through our personal practice is what each of us does when we meditate or practice yoga and what everyone should be doing a good part of the time. Making an interconnected world visible is also something the media and advertising can do. Kaiser Permanente is running a radio campaign in Southern California that talks about the unseen connections between knee bones, white blood cells, sleep, stress, cancer and relationships.
And the Los Angeles Storm Water Public Education Program has broken new ground when it comes to making connections a priority in our consciousness. Several years ago it began a campaign which put the cause of the environment squarely on everyone’s doorstep. The Program started stenciling signage into the curb above 35,000 city drains reading “This drain leads to ocean.” In doing this it initiated a courageous environmental campaign that acknowledged the power each of us have to make a difference and honored us with having the goodness at heart to make the right choice. It also pointed out in letters carved on stone a connection people might not otherwise make.
City dwellers have come so far from the natural order that it’s easy to forget the connection to the places food comes from, where waste goes, and the interconnectedness of everything around us. One reason we want to save the endangered Cassowary is because the life of this beautiful bird is connected to the survival of the rain forest which is connected, invisibly, to the survival of us all.
Many ancient societies were intimate with the invisible world day in and day out. They lived in the world of nature, God’s world. It was a world influenced by ritual, nuance, uncertainty and faith in serendipity and happenstance. Now we live in environments of asphalt, steel, fiber optics and a perpetually elusive quest for security.
Being so far removed from God’s world we forget what it is that God does, the incredible patterns woven by God. We forget God’s ever-changing structures and put our faith in things made by our hand, which are, by and large, three-dimensional objects, which we move around, sit in, watch or buy in a store.
When the President makes plans to invade one of the last pristine wildernesses in the United States on a ten-year search for two years worth of oil, what he is really doing is eliminating a part of God from the environment. It doesn’t matter that it’s hidden away in Alaska; that Northern outpost is as connected to the collective mindset as the Larchmont storm drain is connected to the ocean. Drilling in the Artic Refuge steals one more reference point to who we really are, and instead of finding God in nature it drives us to seek God in man made structures – like the church and the mall. We are forced more and more to believe in a three dimensional world, an interesting world but one that hardly asks us to live up to our potential.
Manipulating this three dimensional world or even contemplating other dimensions takes up only a small portion of the potential of our brain. People who study brain waves and consciousness say that everyday living requires about ten percent of our brain’s capacity. The other 90% remains in cold storage.
Despite the fact that we can manipulate genes with bio-machines made out of custom designed molecules and watch movies from Mars, there are some very obvious accomplishments of ancient civilizations that have no explanation - other than perhaps the use of a world of invisible connections in concert with some portion of the other 90% of our brain capacity. For example there is no consensus on how the text of the Hindu Vedas anticipates algorhythyms of a sub set of quantum physics called string theory, or how the Pyramids or Stonehedge were built. If we were operating at full capacity we might be able to move mountains to save the environment – which may indeed be what the other 90% of our brain is for.
For now I suggest we take the issue of saving the environment into our own hands with simple but continual individual acts of reclamation and redemption. And when it comes to marketing – let’s follow instead the lead of our most enlightened corporate and public service advertisers by making very clear the role connections play in our lives.
There are Friends of the Egrets, Friends of the Earth and Friends of the wild Kokako. I propose we have a marketing campaign called Friends of the Invisible World, and teach people about connections in places high and low. A veteran of Madison Avenue myself, I would make some adjustments to standard advertising practice. The campaign should have no brand, no slogan, no expectations, no evaluation, be blessedly short lived and die a graceful death. At which point someone else should start a new campaign – completely different , but spelling out in simple words the idea that we are connected up down and sideways to past present and future and each other.
The invisible world is a massive old growth forest of powerful energies, submerged, as far as most of the getting and spending world is concerned, under a sea of material objects and antiquated ambitions. While more and more attention is being paid to this world in some quarters of popular culture, the question remains: Can we take this invisible world seriously enough, employ its powers fast enough to save our planet or ourselves?
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