Mobilizing the Green Imagination - Week 2 #BookaDay

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Being an activist can be draining work.  Maintaining your enthusiasm, optimism and dedication is an important part of the art of activism.  The second week of our Win a Book a Day for the Month of May in support of #occupy movements everywhere starts today.  This week's book, Mobilizing the Green Imagination: An Exuberant Manifesto, by Anthony Weston is just the antidote you need to keep those creative juices flowing. 

Postcards from beyond the leading edge of today’s green thinking that are bold, audacious, extravagently hopeful and profoundly inspiring – the perfect antidote to the despair brought on by today’s “doom and gloom” scenarios.

 Many of us in the environmental movement strive to offer some real hope: small steps that, with some serious resolve and luck, may at least get us to what Bill McKibben calls a “soft landing” rather than a crash. Understandably, though, the project merely of mitigating disaster is not highly motivating or inviting. Such vast efforts, sometimes, just to paint ourselves into a smaller corner! 

Is there nothing more we can offer? No wider view and genuinely inspiring vision of the future? Is there something that might re-energize us, with the sense that we are not so much in the Last Days of an old world but the First Days of a new? Yes, there is! We’d like to point out to you a new book that offers such a vision. In Mobilizing the Green Imagination, philosophical provocateur Anthony Weston urges us to move beyond ever more desperate attempts to “green” the status quo toward entirely different and far more inviting ecological visions, like:

• Life after transportation – decentralized work, inventive infill and self-sufficient micro-communities to facilitate life in place
• Adaptation with attitude – cities that welcome the rising waters
• A Great Second Chance – moving beyond exploitation of the whole natural world
• “The World’s Great Liturgies” – a sense of awe and belonging common to all and re-invoked by the natural world itself.
• A Cosmic Ecology – why not a green space program?

 Mobilizing the Green Imagination works on many levels. Hope – and the fascination of unexpected and off-the-scale but compelling alternatives – is a great start, but there is more besides. By provoking thinking toward a much wider range of options than those usual visible, the book highlights the power and promise of a new range of skills and attitudes: ways to be more inventive and creative, encouragement to be more imaginative and venturesome. The book also mobilizes not only imaginations but critical thinking as well. (How, for one thing, does the way in which we have traditionally defined our environmental problems actually closed off whole categories of options from even emerging into the imagination?)

 Explore further at the book’s new website: http://www.mobilizingthegreenimagination.com/.