Where does the heart of transformation lie?

This past week, I attended two meetings in the same day which focused on environmental initiatives towards more sustainable environmental practices. What I took away from those meetings (besides a mixed-bag of emotions of frustration and inspiration) was a reflection on the way we humans communicate our values and messages to other humans and the difference between resorting to shame and control as an impetus for change rather than inspiration and love.

I am reading The Moral Imagination by peace practitioner, theorist, lecturer, leader, etc. John Paul Lederach. The book is rich with insight and will likely inspire a future blog, but one of the central questions of the book is how does transformational change take place within an individual, a community, a country, and ultimately our world? I have come to view our relationship as a human community to our world as essentially a broken one in need of a transformation and restoration. I have come to this perspective through personal studies, encounters with others, and also most significantly through my year-long involvement as a teaching assistant for the Global Conversation Course. The principles of peacebuilding, which is essentially an endeavor to repair broken relationships at all levels, seem to me to apply to the way we approach a change in our thinking as it relates to how we live on this planet. A discussion on these connections and peacebuilding and The Moral Imagination for a later time, perhaps.

The first meeting involved a group of people from the local and university community of varying ages, influence, and experience with environmental research and activism. The primary goal of the meeting was to explore ways to take action steps to making SUNY New Paltz more energy efficient, touting the phrase 'Save Energy, Save Jobs' with both short and long-term goals. Simple common sense things like 'turn off your power switch in addition to your lights', motion sensor lighting, renovations to make our buildings more energy-efficient, and so on and so forth were proposed. Longer-term goals were obviously more involved and required more significant buy-in from administration and the community.

There was a tension in the room about such and such a point and its feasibility and the usual discussion about how to get the word out. But the REAL tensions underpinning these somewhat superfluous conversations, if I sensed correctly, were competing ideas of priorities in combination with a sense of urgency undercut with a layer of hopelessness that even if we could make people enact these changes it would be a small victory in comparison to what is actually needed. To sharpen the edge, it was clear that several individuals in the room were on the warpath. I try to use war language intentionally these days, or try not to use it at all, and I say this individual was on the warpath because their ideas revolved around ways to force people to make changes against their will that were consistent with their own belief about the way things should be.

I sat there vacillating between asking myself questions like 'is any of this relevant?' (beyond simply the merit of attempt) and 'is this the best we can offer our community?' and to unbridled frustration. My mind was racing. Save Energy Save Jobs may at some level be rationally correct: New York State does pay for utilities and in theory if everyone on 64 SUNY campuses made significantly better energy choices that would free up enough money to not cut as many people as proposed. But, in reality, this feels like utopian propoganda! Everyone knows that if they are vigilant in turning their lights off or sharing a refrigerator that SUNY will NOT translate those savings into fewer job cuts! Why do we bother with this message?!?!?! Another way that we turn to individual choices to try to solve systematic problems. (Click here for an intelligent exploration of this topic.http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4801/)

However, my frustrations crystallized when the comment was made to 'include delivery men in the policy to force vehicles to turn off rather than idle when they are on campus.' I thought about the imaginary scenario of some university official knocking on the window of my truck-driving/delivery grandparents (yes plural, my Grandma Martin has been cross-country truck driving with my Grandpa Martin for decades and they continue to do so into their 70's) and demanding they turn off their engines after a long and often grueling treck and with the stated rationale that "Energy efficiency, maa'm, Save Engery, Save Jobs!". I thought about how my father, who has also throughout periods of his life driven trucks to deliver produce to different vendors and how he would receive such a message from such a person. Not favorably, I'll venture.

Will the shared goal of educating people about how we can live more equitably with each other and our planet will be conveyed in such a scenario or the like? I think not. Shame* was the game here and I can smell that rat a mile away. Like most of you, I have prominent memories of how people tried to make me behave in a way they saw fit through shaming. I made some comments to the meeting participants (which in some ways felt like dissent but were honest, if that is still a virtue) and left feeling disappointed with our vision, or lack thereof.

In contrast, the second meeting was a smaller group of people and all of us have volunteered to plan a conference with the theme of 'Women and the Environment' for next year. One of our discussions revolved around the 'mood' we hope to create at the conference. We agreed that whatever structure and workshops we choose for the conference, we want to avoid shaming people. No smug declarations, no one-upping each other on who's carbon footprint is less, no making someone feel bad who walks in with a certain type of coffee or mug or brand of clothing. One of the attendees summed it up nicely when she shared about an experience she had at a similar conference where she felt people stood up and said 'Here is my farm. Here are my chickens. Look at how sustainably I am living.' She aptly exclaimed, "But there was no analysis! Everyone just sat around feeling good about themselves."

We decided that the following is our goal for this conference: We are hungry for a constructive dialogue. We want to celebrate the many different ways that people are striving to live in a more equitable way on this planet. We want people to evaluate their own lives as a part of a larger picture, one in which individual action AND political action are real conduits for change and transformation, whether internal or global. We want a deeper academic analysis as well as a more comprehensive analysis from community activists about what the issues are and how we are affected and can be involved. We want diversity to be visible, artists to be present, and the details to be well-thought out and appropriate. We will make the tensions of our lives, our world, and the systems we both criticize and utilize transparent as best we can. We will not shame. I left feeling inspired.

As one of my mentors says, I have just 'connected the dots' this week. Where does the heart of transformation lie? People, institutions, and societies make long-term changes when they are invited into and inspired by a different story than the one they have been living in. The sharing of the message never guarantees any particular response. Such is the nature of relationships. However, if the means/process is one of inspiration and love, there are possibilities for that to be re-produced. But if the means/process is one of control, blame, and shame any 'changes' will be made out of guilt or with contempt and bitterness and will likely disintegrate at the first chance of free choice in any case. Nonviolent activists for millenia have known this. Spiritual leaders have conveyed this message throughout recorded time. People who have inspired and challenged me to change had enough faith in the truth of their message (which is their life) that they presented me with opportunities to imagine a way different than the one I had known and in many cases made it clear that our relationship remains the same whether I follow a similar path or not.

I am guilty as the next person of trying to 'fix' someone, or to use shame to get someone to change, or to present an idea with passion and measure its success based on its receipt rather than to be content that my spoken truth alone was all that was required. What a joy and a paradox to live life with the hope but not the expectation that the world will become a better place.

*Shame has a place in the life of an individual and in a community as a response to something that is shameful like the Holocaust, the recent US teenage suicides, or our continual needless destruction of our environment. However, shame is useful when it takes the form of remorse or repentance rather than being used as a weapon by a person or group with an agenda for control. What do you think?


P.S. I do not suggest that we invite murderers and war criminals and the like into a world of transformational change without measures of control that we call 'law and order'. However, they too stand within and among these processes of transformational change.