Shape your world

"It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts." -- Thoreau's Walden

Friday, March 13, 2009

Telling on Myself

I'm supposed to be working on a paper right now. But, sometimes the writing machine just needs to be primed by writing about something else.

So, I just completed a reading assignment for my Environment and Development course. It was a thought-provoking read, where the author, Ralph Metzner, advocates (and claims he observes) the emergence of a new thought paradigm: The Ecological Age. It's what in Metzner's world view needs to come after the current Industrial-Technological Age. You can read the entire article here. I promise it's not that technical.

My comment is just this -- too bad it's not as simple as defining a new world paradigm and starting to live it. Historically, we have to have some sort of paradigm-shifting event to drive us out of our old, sometimes-too-comfortable paradigms. In this way, maybe economic catastrophe isn't the worst thing that we could face right now.

Easy for me to say - our economic paradigm shift is a few years old now and I'm starting to get used to the personal economy of the smaller scale.

So, sorry all -- perhaps economic bad news isn't all bad news after all.

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