![]() How many of us can have a big voice that reaches millions? By necessity, very few. Furthermore, when we buy into bigger-is-better, most of us must live with the disheartening knowledge that we are smaller-and-worse. For one thing, the ruling elites who are wedded to the status quo have far more force-based power - more money, more guns, and through concentration of media a much bigger voice - than any activist organization ever could. Thus we sometimes see an ambitiousness among NGOs and activists that eerily mirrors that of CEOs and celebrities: a race to compete for funding, for members, for Facebook likes, for mailing lists, for consumer attention.Ī force-based causality in which bigger is necessarily better is a recipe for despair, paralysis, and burnout among those seeking social and ecological justice in the world. But if you can coordinate the actions of millions of people, perhaps by becoming a president or a pundit, or by having lots of money, then your power as a change agent is magnified as well. ![]() As a single individual, the amount of force you have at your disposal is quite limited. At its root it is a Newtonian cosmology that says that change happens only when a force is exerted upon a mass. ![]() Here we come to what some call the “theory of change” that underlies the ambition to do a big thing, to scale it up, to reach millions. Certainly my message will have a bigger effect if a million people hear it than a thousand, or one, or none at all? Certainly, if the gardener puts a video of her soil regeneration project on social media, it will have a much greater potential impact than if she practices it invisibly on her small piece of land? Because if no one finds out about it, it will affect only a few square meters of soil, and nothing more. It devalues the very same things that global capitalism, patriarchy, and technology have devalued. It devalues the feminine, the intimate, the personal, and the quiet. It devalues anything that seemingly could not have much of a macrocosmic effect on the world. The logic of bigness devalues the grandmother spending all day with her granddaughter, the gardener restoring just one small corner of earth to health, the activist working to free one orca from captivity. That valuation is, you may notice, nearly identical to the dominant culture’s allocation of status and power - a fact that should give us pause. It values the activities of people who have a big reach, a big platform, a loud voice, or the money or institutional power to affect thousands or millions of people. You’d better make sure it can go viral, because otherwise its impact will be trivial.Ĭontained within this logic is an implicit hierarchy that values the contributions of some people - and some kinds of people - more than others. Therefore, whatever you do on a local level, you’d better make sure it is scalable. There is no time to indulge in small, insignificant solutions that will be swept away by the tsunami of climate change, economic meltdown, nuclear holocaust, resource-scarcity fueled wars, and so forth. ![]() Let me present a logic that has immersed me ever since I became aware of the state of the planet as a teenager: The world has some big problems right now. ![]()
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