Green Dance

I'm illustrating today's blog with a scale model of a large outdoor sculptural work titled "Green Dance." This work explores a dialog concerning the relative value of the green mentality as awareness versus the stark reality of the green planetary mass extinction going on now.

I have often said that people would not mind doing the right thing if some one would just show them what that is.

The trouble is that our human culture does not have a component that can let us know what is the right thing. And, since the best we can do at the moment (worldwide) is to agree to disagree about what may constitute the right thing, we are nowhere.

Now, this is not the only stumbling block to any significant progress. Add to it the fact that even if we happen to overcome this impasse and finally agree on something, we would not know what to do next beyond that point. This is so because, we would have spent so much time and energy building up a better argument to support our opposing views, rather than using our time and resources to actually identify and try out workable solutions, particularly on a global scale.

That is why I called this piece the "Green Dance." For the most part our green intentions are just that, "green intentions." Because even if the solution is right in front of us, we either fail to recognize it or are not sufficiently motivated to see it. Humanity is simply not culturally equipped to take advantage of new outside-of-the-rut ideas contemporaneously.

History can back-up what I'm saying with dozens of examples of breakthrough ideas that today are commonplace. Almost all of these ideas were ideas that were summarily dismissed in their own day. Often they were dismissed because they threatened the hegemony of a status quo that was controlled by the short term ambitions of lesser contemporary models.

Now, none of what I've said is new. However, what is new is that we no longer have the luxury of waiting ten, twenty or more years to accept a solution as valid or as workable and then to begin the long process that will eventually lead to its adoption and implementation. That is a kind of waiting that we or the environment do not have anymore.

This futile "green dance" is at best a diversion that poses as progress in the face of the real urgency of the issues. Most of what needs to be done to arrest this trend is to simply accept the fact that what most of humanity has done was misguided and that what it is doing now is wrong.

Furthermore, the solutions that will come forth to deal with these problems cannot be expected to suit the life-style nor the culture which created the problems in the first place.

Therefore, the dialog becomes not so much about what we can do for us now. Rather, it is about what we are going to do to empower the next several generations so that they can come into a world where they can find the foundations of a new culture uniquely suited to them and their challenges. They will need this new culture to be solely theirs. This way they can grow up fostering first-hand those ideas that we find impossible to accept today, but that we know will be right for them and right for the world.

Planet Earth 2.0 is an idea that is taking form and that is drawing its social organizing principles from lessons already learned. These include the lessons learned from our abandonment of our relationship with the natural world, the lessons learned from our human arrogance that assumes that we are the sole proprietor of this planet and the lessons learned from our insatiable appetite to consume for profit everything including even our own children's future share.

The most profound thing that we can know for sure at this point in our history is that we cannot stop ourselves from running the planet into the ground. But, our children's children can if only we decide to allow them to do so.

Now that is the kind of Green Dance of which we can all be proud to be a part of because, as strange as it may seem at first, it is the only green dance that makes sense. And, we know it!


If you desire a printable image of "Green Dance," click here or on the image above.


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