Riot

Have you seen these "new" climate activists?  

A group of young people from Germany have decided that fossil fuels are bad (no shit!) and destroying the world (really?  that's news?), and to bring attention to these facts, they are throwing food at priceless works of art as a form of protest ... or as a way to shine light on the issue of climate change, which, I can only assume, they believe that everyone else is ignoring.  Their rational is that due to continued use of fossel fuels, the human population is doomed to extinction, and since we're all going to die, anyway, and no will be around to appreciate the art, they should just destroy it, because, you know, that's the logical and useful way to deal with the issue.

My question, to them, is what are THEY doing about it?  Well, other than trying to destroy priceless and timeless works of art as a form of protest.

Several years ago, I joined a group of thousands of other "activists" in a form of protest to bring to light the issue of climate change, and I dragged (a mostly reluctant) Deus Ex Machina and our daughters into the fray with me.  We were writers, bloggers, authors, civic-minded individuals, who saw what was happening in the world and wanted to change things before it was too late.  

We didn't march on Washington wearing oddly shaped hats, or visit museums and throw soup or mashed potatoes at centuries' old paintings.  We didn't call on our leaders to pass laws and make policies that forced others to make changes, we, ourselves, had not, yet, commited to making. 

No, what we did was attempt to follow the sage advice of Mahatma Gandhi, who believed that true change can only come from within.  We change.  We BE THE CHANGE, we want to see in the world.  That's what he said.  That's what we did.

The movement was called the Riot for Austerity, and our goal and our practice was to change our own, personal, footprint with the goal of reducing our consumption to 10% of the resources that the average "westerner" (mostly calculated by American standards) used.    There were seven categories we were attempting to reduce: gas/oil (for heating and cooking); transportation; water; garbage; consumer spending; food; and electrical usage.

Here at Chez Brown, we cut our electrical and water usage to one-third average; our food consumption was 80% locally sourced; garbage was 5% of average; consumer spending was 40% of average.  Because we were homeschooling and I worked from home, getting our numbers any lower was difficult, and whereas other members of the community might not count their personal consumption of electricity, water, etc. at their jobs or at their children's schools, I didn't have that luxury.  

At any rate, we rioters thought the best way to fix the climate issue was to make changes in OUR lives, and so we did.  

We cut our own consumption.  We wrote books and blogs and magazine articles.  We went to the Mother Earth News Fairs and the Common Ground Fair, and we spread the word as far and as wide as we could.

It was a different mind-set, I guess.  One of *I* can DO something, and *I* SHOULD do something.

Rather than, someone else needs to fix it, but let me tell them how.

The onus was on us, rather than us pointing the finger and demanding someone else do the work to make things better.

I don't disagree with the intent of the protesters who are tossing potatoes at paintings.  We do need more people to be thinking about climate change and ways they can mitigate it. 

And really about resource scarcity and depletion, in general.

I do disagree with their tactics, and I wonder what they are, personally, doing to make things better so that there is someone here far into the future to enjoy that Monet they just tried to defile.