In December 2008, Tim DeChristopher attended a protest at a federal auction of drilling rights to Utah wilderness lands. He found a better way to disrupt the auction when he picked up a paddle and began bidding on the leases as “Bidder 70.” He won $1.8 million worth of parcels and inflated the price of many others. When it was discovered that he had no money
to back his bids, the auction had to be shut down.

Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to two years in prison for his actions, but his boldness stopped the sale of 22,000 acres of scenic wilderness and highlighted government misconduct. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar scrapped a rescheduled auction because the Bureau of Land Management had skimped on its environmental analysis and inadequately consulted with
the National Park Service. In January 2013, a federal court denied an energy industry appeal to reinstate the leases. DeChristopher was released from prison in April. Photos by David Newkirk

Love and the Apocalypse: Click here to view the table of contents from the Summer 2013 issue.

Feeling anxious about life in a broken-down society on a stressed-out planet? That’s hardly surprising: Life as we know it is almost over. While the dominant culture encourages dysfunctional denial—pop a pill, go shopping, find your bliss—there’s a more sensible approach: Accept the anxiety, embrace the deeper anguish—and then get apocalyptic.

We are staring down multiple cascading ecological crises, struggling with political and economic institutions that are unable even to acknowledge, let alone cope with, the threats to the human family and the larger living world. We are intensifying an assault on the ecosystems in which we live, undermining the ability of that living world to sustain a large-scale human presence into the future. When all the world darkens, looking on the bright side is not a virtue but a sign of irrationality.

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In these circumstances, anxiety is rational and anguish is healthy, signs not of weakness but of courage. A deep grief over what we are losing—and have already lost, perhaps never to be recovered—is appropriate. Instead of repressing these emotions we can confront them, not as isolated individuals but collectively, not only for our own mental health but to increase the effectiveness of our organizing for the social justice and ecological sustainability still within our grasp. Once we’ve sorted through those reactions, we can get apocalyptic and get down to our real work.

Perhaps that sounds odd, since we are routinely advised to overcome our fears and not give in to despair. Endorsing apocalypticism seems even stranger, given associations with “end-timer” religious reactionaries and “doomer” secular survivalists. People with critical sensibilities, those concerned about justice and sustainability, think of ourselves as realistic and less likely to fall for either theological or science-fiction fantasies.

Many associate “apocalypse” with the rapture-ranting that grows out of some interpretations of the Christian Book of Revelation (aka, the Apocalypse of John), but it’s helpful to remember that the word’s original meaning is not “end of the world.” “Revelation” from Latin and “apocalypse” from Greek both mean a lifting of the veil, a disclosure of something hidden, a coming to clarity. Speaking apocalyptically, in this sense, can deepen our understanding of the crises and help us see through the many illusions that powerful people and institutions create.

But there is an ending we have to confront. Once we’ve honestly faced the crises, then we can deal with what is ending—not all the world, but the systems that currently structure our lives. Life as we know it is, indeed, coming to an end.

Let’s start with the illusions: Some stories we have told ourselves—claims by white people, men, or U.S. citizens that domination is natural and appropriate—are relatively easy to debunk (though many cling to them). Other delusional assertions—such as the claim that capitalism is compatible with basic moral principles, meaningful democracy, and ecological sustainability—require more effort to take apart (perhaps because there seems to be no alternative).

“Apocalypse” need not involve heavenly rescue fantasies or tough-guy survival talk; to get apocalyptic means seeing clearly and recommitting to core values.

But toughest to dislodge may be the central illusion of the industrial world’s extractive economy: that we can maintain indefinitely a large-scale human presence on the earth at something like current First-World levels of consumption. The task for those with critical sensibilities is not just to resist oppressive social norms and illegitimate authority, but to speak a simple truth that almost no one wants to acknowledge: The high-energy/high-technology life of affluent societies is a dead end. We can’t predict with precision how resource competition and ecological degradation will play out in the coming decades, but it is ecocidal to treat the planet as nothing more than a mine from which we extract and a landfill into which we dump.

We cannot know for sure what time the party will end, but the party’s over.

Does that seem histrionic? Excessively alarmist? Look at any crucial measure of the health of the ecosphere in which we live—groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of “dead zones” in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species, and reduction of biodiversity—and ask a simple question: Where are we heading?

Remember also that we live in an oil-based world that is rapidly depleting the cheap and easily accessible oil, which means we face a major reconfiguration of the infrastructure that undergirds daily life. Meanwhile, the desperation to avoid that reconfiguration has brought us to the era of “extreme energy,” using ever more dangerous and destructive technologies (hydrofracturing, deep-water drilling, mountaintop coal removal, tar sands extraction).

Oh, did I forget to mention the undeniable trajectory of global warming/climate change/climate disruption?

Scientists these days are talking about tipping points and planetary boundaries, about how human activity is pushing Earth beyond its limits. Recently 22 top scientists warned that humans likely are forcing a planetary-scale critical transition “with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience,” which means that “the biological resources we take for granted at present may be subject to rapid and unpredictable transformations within a few human generations.”

That conclusion is the product of science and common sense, not supernatural beliefs or conspiracy theories. The political/social implications are clear: There are no solutions to our problems if we insist on maintaining the high-energy/high-technology existence lived in much of the industrialized world (and desired by many currently excluded from it). Many tough-minded folk who are willing to challenge other oppressive systems hold on tightly to this lifestyle. The critic Fredric Jameson has written, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” but that’s only part of the problem—for some, it may be easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of air conditioning.

We do live in end-times, of a sort. Not the end of the world—the planet will carry on with or without us—but the end of the human systems that structure our politics, economics, and social life. “Apocalypse” need not involve heavenly rescue fantasies or tough-guy survival talk; to get apocalyptic means seeing clearly and recommitting to core values.

Never in human history have potential catastrophes been so global; never have social and ecological crises of this scale threatened at the same time ...

First, we must affirm the value of our work for justice and sustainability, even though there is no guarantee we can change the disastrous course of contemporary society. We take on projects that we know may fail because it’s the right thing to do, and by doing so we create new possibilities for ourselves and the world. Just as we all know that someday we will die and yet still get out of bed every day, an honest account of planetary reality need not paralyze us.

Then let’s abandon worn-out clichés such as, “The American people will do the right thing if they know the truth,” or “Past social movements prove the impossible can happen.”

There is no evidence that awareness of injustice will automatically lead U.S. citizens, or anyone else, to correct it. When people believe injustice is necessary to maintain their material comfort, some accept those conditions without complaint.

Social movements around race, gender, and sexuality have been successful in changing oppressive laws and practices, and to a lesser degree in shifting deeply held beliefs. But the movements we most often celebrate, such as the post-World War II civil rights struggle, operated in a culture that assumed continuing economic expansion. We now live in a time of permanent contraction—there will be less, not more, of everything. Pressuring a dominant group to surrender some privileges when there is an expectation of endless bounty is a very different project than when there is intensified competition for resources. That doesn’t mean nothing can be done to advance justice and sustainability, only that we should not be glib about the inevitability of it.

Here’s another cliché to jettison: Necessity is the mother of invention. During the industrial era, humans exploiting new supplies of concentrated energy have generated unprecedented technological innovation in a brief time. But there is no guarantee that there are technological fixes to all our problems; we live in a system that has physical limits, and the evidence suggests we are close to those limits. Technological fundamentalism—the quasi-religious belief that the use of advanced technology is always appropriate, and that any problems caused by the unintended consequences can be remedied by more technology—is as empty a promise as other fundamentalisms.

If all this seems like more than one can bear, it’s because it is. We are facing new, more expansive challenges. Never in human history have potential catastrophes been so global; never have social and ecological crises of this scale threatened at the same time; never have we had so much information about the threats we must come to terms with.

It’s easy to cover up our inability to face this by projecting it onto others. When someone tells me “I agree with your assessment, but people can’t handle it,” I assume what that person really means is, “I can’t handle it.” But handling it is, in the end, the only sensible choice.

Mainstream politicians will continue to protect existing systems of power, corporate executives will continue to maximize profit without concern, and the majority of people will continue to avoid these questions. It’s the job of people with critical sensibilities—those who consistently speak out for justice and sustainability, even when it’s difficult—not to back away just because the world has grown more ominous.

Adopting this apocalyptic framework doesn’t mean separating from mainstream society or giving up ongoing projects that seek a more just world within existing systems. I am a professor at a university that does not share my values or analysis, yet I continue to teach. In my community, I am part of a group that helps people create worker-cooperatives that will operate within a capitalist system that I believe to be a dead end. I belong to a congregation that struggles to radicalize Christianity while remaining part of a cautious, often cowardly, denomination.

Don't Let the Apocalypse
Get You Down
The climate crisis is spinning out of control, and the gap between the rich and poor continues grow unabated. It's time to let the radical uncertainty of this moment enlarge our sense of possibility.

I am apocalyptic, but I’m not interested in empty rhetoric drawn from past revolutionary moments. Yes, we need a revolution—many revolutions—but a strategy is not yet clear. So, as we work patiently on reformist projects, we can continue to offer a radical analysis and experiment with new ways of working together. While engaged in education and community organizing with modest immediate goals, we can contribute to the strengthening of networks and institutions that can be the base for the more radical change we need. In these spaces today we can articulate, and live, the values of solidarity and equity that are always essential.

To adopt an apocalyptic worldview is not to abandon hope but to affirm life. As James Baldwin put it decades ago, we must remember “that life is the only touchstone and that life is dangerous, and that without the joyful acceptance of this danger, there can never be any safety for anyone, ever, anywhere.” By avoiding the stark reality of our moment in history we don’t make ourselves safe, we undermine the potential of struggles for justice and sustainability.

As Baldwin put it so poignantly in that same 1962 essay, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

It’s time to get apocalyptic, or get out of the way.

Robert Jensen wrote this article for Love and the Apocalypse, the Summer 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Jensen, a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, is the author of Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialogue and We Are All Apocalyptic Now: On the Responsibilities of Teaching, Preaching, Reporting, Writing, and
Speaking Out. Jensen can be reached at rjensen@austin.utexas.edu.

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Melina Laboucan-Massimo stands next to logs from clearcuts at a proposed tar sands site north of Fort McMurray, northern Alberta, Canada. Photo by Jiri Rezac.

There’s a remote part of northern Alberta where the Lubicon Cree have lived, it is said, since time immemorial. The Cree called the vast, pine-covered region niyanan askiy, “our land.” When white settlers first carved up this country, they made treaties with most of its original inhabitants—but for reasons unclear, the Lubicon Cree were left out. Two hundred years later, the Lubicon’s right to their traditional territory is still unrecognized. In the last four decades, industry has tapped the vast resource wealth that lies deep beneath the pines; today, 2,600 oil and gas wells stretch to the horizon. This is tar sands country.

In 2012 testimony before the U.S. Congress, Lubicon Cree organizer Melina Laboucan-Massimo, then 30, described witnessing the devastation of her family’s ancestral land caused by one of the largest oil spills in Alberta’s history. “What I saw was a landscape forever changed by oil that had consumed a vast stretch of the traditional territory where my family had hunted, trapped, and picked berries and medicines for generations.”

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“When we’re at home, we feel really isolated,” says Laboucan-Massimo, who has spent her adult life defending her people’s land from an industry that has rendered it increasingly polluted and impoverished. The Lubicon are fighting a hard battle, but their story—of resource extraction, of poverty and isolation, and of enduring resistance—is one that echoes in indigenous communities around the world. Today, Laboucan-Massimo and others like her are vanguards of a network of indigenous movements that is increasingly global, relevant—and powerful.

This power manifests in movements like Idle No More, which swept Canada last December and ignited a wave of solidarity on nearly every continent. Laboucan-Massimo was amazed—and hopeful. Triggered initially by legislation that eroded treaty rights and removed protection for almost all of Canada’s rivers—clearing the way for unprecedented fossil fuel extraction—Idle No More drew thousands into the streets. In a curious blend of ancient and high-tech, images of indigenous protesters in traditional regalia popped up on news feeds all over the world.

A history of resistance

To outsiders, it might seem that Idle No More materialized spontaneously, that it sprang into being fully formed. It builds, however, on a long history of resistance to colonialism that began when Europeans first washed up on these shores. Now, armed with Twitter and Facebook, once-isolated movements from Canada to South America are exchanging knowledge, resources, and support like never before.

"When you destroy the earth, you destroy yourself,” says Melina Laboucan-Massimo. This is “the common thread in indigenous people all over the world.”

Idle No More is one of what Subcomandante Marcos, the masked prophet of the Mexican Zapatistas, called “pockets of resistance,” which are “as numerous as the forms of resistance themselves.” The Zapatistas are part of a wave of indigenous organizing that crested in South America in the 1990s, coinciding with the 500th anniversary of European conquest—most effectively in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Mexico. Certain threads connect what might otherwise be isolated uprisings: They’re largely nonviolent, structurally decentralized, they seek common cause with non-natives, and they are deeply, spiritually rooted in the land.

The connections among indigenous organizers have strengthened through both a shared colonial history and a shared threat—namely, the neoliberal economic policies of deregulation, privatization, and social spending cuts exemplified by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization. Indigenous organizers see these agreements as nothing more than the old colonial scramble for wealth at the expense of the natives. In a 1997 piece in Le Monde Diplomatique, Marcos called neoliberalism “the totalitarian extension of the logic of the finance markets to all aspects of life,” resulting in “the exclusion of all persons who are of no use to the new economy.” Many indigenous leaders charge that the policies implemented through organizations like the World Bank and the IMF prioritize corporations over communities and further concentrate power in the hands of a few.

Uprising in Ecuador

The mid-1990s saw a massive expansion of such policies—and with it, an expansion of resistance, particularly in countries with significant indigenous populations. In 1990, CONAIE, the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, staged a massive, nonviolent levantamiento—an uprising—flooding the streets of Quito, blocking roads and effectively shutting down the country. Entire families walked for days to reach the capital to demand land rights, fair prices for agrarian goods, and recognition of Ecuador as a plurinational state, made up of multiple, equally legitimate nations. In the end it forced renegotiation of policy and created unprecedented indigenous representation in government; many hailed CONAIE’s success as a model for organizing everywhere.

CONAIE’s slogan, “Nothing just for Indians,” invited participation from non-indigenous allies around larger questions of inequality and political representation, creating a political space that was big and inclusive enough for everyone. Dr. Maria Elena Garcia, who studies these movements at the University of Washington, says that non-indigenous support has been “crucial” for success across the board. In the case of CONAIE, she says, there came a tipping point when “most Ecuadorians … said, ‘Enough. This organization is speaking for us.’”

Idle No More clearly exists in the Zapatista tradition, but it goes further in incorporating the language of climate justice. In December as many as 50,000 masked Mayan Zapatistas marched into cities across Chiapas. Differing from the 1994 armed indigenous uprising, this one was done in complete silence.

The Zapatista Army

Meanwhile, in Mexico, the Zapatista movement was busy building a different kind of revolution. On January 1, 1994, the Zapatista Army took its place on the international stage. It was day one of NAFTA, which Subcomandante Marcos called “a death sentence to the indigenous ethnicities of Mexico.” More than any other movement, they linked local issues of cultural marginalization, racism, and inequality to global economic systems and prophesied a new movement of resistance. The media-savvy revolutionaries used their most potent weapon—words—and the still-new Internet to advocate a new world built on diversity as the basis for ecological and political survival. Transnational from the beginning, the Zapatistas made common cause with “pockets of resistance” everywhere.

Then, a curious change occurred: for nearly 10 years following their initial insurgency, the Zapatistas maintained a self-imposed silence. The world heard little from Marcos, but the autonomous communities in Chiapas were very much alive. They had turned inward, building independent governments, schools, and clinics. As journalist and author Naomi Klein observed, “These free spaces, born of reclaimed land, communal agriculture, resistance to privatization, will eventually create counter-powers to the state simply by existing as alternatives.” Embodying, here and now, the society they seek to create is a powerful manifesto; for those who cared to listen, their silence spoke volumes.

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Victory in Bolivia

Most of these movements have used nonviolent tactics, including blockades, occupations of public space, and mass marches—combined with traditional political work—to varying degrees of success. In Bolivia these tactics yielded an extraordinary outcome: the election of Evo Morales, in 2005, as Bolivia’s first indigenous head of state.

Five years later, Morales convened 30,000 international delegates for the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. A response to the repeated failure of international climate negotiations, the gathering was rooted in an indigenous worldview that recognized Mother Earth as a living being, entitled to her own inalienable rights.

The resulting declaration placed blame unequivocally on the capitalist system that has “imposed on us a logic of competition, progress, and limitless growth.” This unrestrained growth, the declaration says, transforms “everything into commodities: water, earth, the human genome, ancestral cultures, biodiversity, justice, ethics, the rights of peoples, and life itself.” Significantly, the declaration also extended the analysis of colonialism to include climate change—calling for “decolonization of the atmosphere”—but it rejected market-based solutions like carbon trading. It’s a holistic analysis that links colonialism, climate change, and capital, a manifesto for what has come to be called “climate justice.”

Idle No More

Fast forward to December 2012, and two things happened: The Zapatistas staged simultaneous marches in five cities, marking a resurgence of their public activism. Anywhere from 10,000–50,000 masked marchers filled the streets in complete silence. The march was timed to coincide with the end of the Mayan calendar—and the beginning of a new, more hopeful era—and demonstrated the Zapatistas’ commitment to the indigenous cosmology of their ancestors.

That same month, a continent away, Idle No More emerged on the scene. While it began as a reaction to two specific bills in Parliament, it has gained strength and momentum in opposition to the network of proposed pipelines that will crisscross North America, pumping tar sands oil from Alberta to refineries and ports in Canada and the U.S. These pipelines will cross national, tribal, state, and ethnic boundaries and raise a multitude of issues—including water quality, land rights, and climate change. The campaign to stop their construction is already unifying natives and non-natives in unprecedented ways.

Dr. Garcia, whose own ancestors are indigenous, believes that indigenous movements offer something vital: hope, and what she calls “the importance of the imaginary. Of imagining a different world—imagining a different way of being in the world.”

“We’re a land-based people, but it goes further than that. It’s a worldview. When you destroy the earth, you destroy yourself,” says Melina Laboucan-Massimo. This is “the common thread in indigenous people all over the world.”

Don't Let the Apocalypse Get You Down
The climate crisis is spinning out of control, and the gap between the rich and poor continues grow unabated. It’s time to let the radical uncertainty of this moment enlarge our sense of possibility.

It is this thread that goes to the heart of our global ecological crisis. While indigenous cultures differ widely from one another, what they collectively present is an alternative relationship—to the earth, to its resources, and to each other—a relationship based not on domination but on reciprocity. Any movement that seeks to create deep, lasting social change—to address not only climate change but endemic racism and social inequality—must confront our colonial identity and, by extension, this broken relationship.

Laboucan-Massimo has spent a great deal of time abroad, studying indigenous movements from Latin America to New Zealand and Australia, feeling the full weight of their shared history under colonialism. These days, though, she’s more likely to be on the road, educating, organizing, and building solidarity among natives and non-natives. It was understanding the connections between movements, she says, that gave her “all the more fervor to come back and continue to do the work here.”

Recently, she traveled from Alberta  to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., where she and her elders stood at the forefront of the largest climate change rally in history. And she’ll keep organizing, armed with a smartphone, supported by a growing network of allies from Idle No More and beyond, connected in every possible way to the rest of the world.

Kristin Moe wrote this article for Love and the Apocalypse, the Summer 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Kristin is a writer, farmer, and graduate of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. She writes about climate justice, grassroots movements, and social change.

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How did American nuns move from the traditional confines of convent life to the social activism that has them under Vatican investigation for being too radical and feminist?  Blame (or credit) Vatican II in the early 1960s, which instructed Catholics to take their religion out into the world and make it relevant. According to Mary Fishman’s new documentary, Band of Sisters, American nuns eagerly took up the call to serve where there is greatest need. That work led them to seeing the causes, not just the symptoms, of injustice.

Going out into the world brought more than just a change from the black and white nun’s habit to ordinary clothing. There were intellectual, emotional, and spiritual transformations too, as the numerous sisters interviewed in the film explain. Many of the interviewees are old enough to have experienced the changes of role and attitude over the decades since Vatican II. Their testimony gives this film authenticity and gentle authority.

The work of Sisters Pat Murphy and JoAnn Persh is one example. Fishman shows them as they prepare to go out into a dark Chicago winter morning to hold a vigil outside an immigrant deportation center. They want the authorities to let them inside to bring support and comfort to the deportees. In successive scenes, we see that they eventually do get inside the center, even though it takes time, organized lobbying, and a change in state law. Their determined action achieves results.

The radicalizing effect of focusing on the physical world and the equality of all humans is most obvious in the scenes where we see nuns running an organic farm and environmental center, or presenting a cosmology that is as much indigenous as Genesis. No wonder they’re in trouble with the church’s patriarchy, even under a new pope. But you can’t put this genie back in the bottle—or the Sister of Mercy back in the cloister.

Valerie Schloredt wrote this article for Love and the Apocalypse, the Summer 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Valerie is associate editor of YES!

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Photo by Derek Bruff.

Undocumented young people in Georgia are fighting for access to higher education with support from the ACLU and a group of professors who have volunteered to teach college-level courses for free.

Georgia’s Board of Regents adopted a policy in 2010 that prevents undocumented ­students from attending the state’s top five public universities. The policy “is based on a misunderstanding of federal immigration law,” according to a letter from the ACLU to the Board of Regents.

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Georgia is one of three states that exclude undocumented students from full access to higher education, even when the federal government recognizes the student’s right to be in the United States under Department of Homeland Security regulations. The other 47 states either apply no exclusion policies to such students or require them to pay out-of-state tuition.

Students and professors protested the state’s policy at a March 6 rally on the University of Georgia (UGA) campus. The rally was organized by Freedom University, which provides college-level classes for students who can’t enroll at UGA because of their undocumented status. Named after the “freedom schools” of the civil rights movement, Freedom University was started in 2011 by a group of professors at the request of undocumented students. It operates on the principle that “you can stop me from going to a UGA classroom, but you can’t stop a UGA professor from teaching me,” said Melissa Padilla, a 22-year-old Freedom University student who also serves as a representative on the organization’s board.

Freedom University doesn’t receive official funding, but donations of books and money poured in from all over the country when the group was launched. Every week, volunteers drive students to Freedom University classes. Padilla says that sort of support, and the determination of the students, makes her confident that Freedom University will keep going strong as the legal battle over education for the undocumented in Georgia continues.

Chris Francis wrote this article for Love and the Apocalypse, the Summer 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Chris is an editorial intern at YES!

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Cards, television commercials, and print ads all trumpet a value system in which mothers look and act in narrowly defined ways, a saccharine world where a hardworking mama’s only wants and needs are a bit of recognition and perhaps a spot of chocolate once a year.

Shen is hopeful that the cards will be downloaded 15,000 times this year; a worthy target for a message in need of wider audiences.

But the reality bears little resemblance to the myth. According to the 2010 census, only 20 percent of households in this country reflect the traditional nuclear family norm, with two heterosexual parents and two children who are their biological offspring.

There are some folks out there who think there’s more to motherhood, and they’re issuing their own set of mother’s day e-cards to get their message out there.

Forward Together, an organization based in Oakland, Calif., recently launched their third annual Mama’s Day Our Way campaign to change the narrative around motherhood and families. Mama’s Day Our Way features an e-card series and outreach campaign designed to shine a spotlight on mamas often left out of mainstream Mother’s Day celebrations, including low-income moms, young moms, immigrant moms, single moms, incarcerated moms, queer moms, and moms struggling with substance abuse issues.

“I am the daughter of Chinese immigrants, raising my own daughters along with my partner and our dog Pumpkin” says Eveline Shen, Executive Director of Forward Together. “I know that if my kids ventured into the aisles at the neighborhood drugstore, they would not find images that reflect our multiracial, two-mom family.”

Radically readjusting perceptions isn’t without its share of hurdles. A May 2 article about the campaign in the New York Daily News generated a slew of negative comments that ranged from bafflement to outright anger.

“The message we want to send is that mamas need more than flowers or a box of chocolates once a year.”

Regardless of what Daily News commenters might say, the popular conception of motherhood no longer matches what’s out there. More than 80 percent of the 12.2 million single-parent families in the United States are headed by a mother. Mothers make up almost two-thirds of all women in prison. Nearly half of all lesbian women under the age of 50 are raising a child. And 1.7 million grandmothers are the primary caretaker for their grandchildren. Yet the dad-at-work mom at home with two kids is still the outdated notion held as standard.

And for all moms, regardless of where they come from, the challenges to raising a healthy family are legion. That’s why the work of Forward Together also seeks to address the structural problems facing moms throughout the country. One component of the campaign, for instance, involves putting pressure on members of the Senate to alter the comprehensive immigration reform package to protect the integrity of family units.

“The message we want to send is that mamas need more than flowers or a box of chocolates once a year,” Shen said. “They need access to health care, a living wage, safety in their homes and on the streets, and self determination over their bodies.”

The e-cards appear to have struck a chord. With greater media attention than in years past, Shen is hopeful that the cards will be downloaded 15,000 times this year; a worthy target for a message in need of wider audiences.

For more information on this campaign and complete listing of all e-cards, visit mamasday.org.

Corey Hill wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. He is the Membership and Outreach Coordinator at Global Exchange. Follow Corey on Twitter at @Newschill.

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• “You Have My Permission to Wear a Hoodie Every Day”
  In the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death, what advice should a mother give to her young, brown son? Rasha Hamid pondered that question, and wrote this poem to her son Jibreel.

Photo by Lenneke Veerbeek.

"If it bleeds, it leads." Ever hear that maxim of journalism? If you want readers, go with the scary, gruesome story—that's what gets hearts pumping and grabs attention. But what grabs our attention can also scare the heck out of us and shut us down.

Remember, what we do and say doesn't just influence our friends, but also our friends' friends and our friends' friends' friends.

Scary news might "sell," but we can also feel so bombarded with the negative that our "why bother?" reflex kicks in. Fear stimuli go straight to the brain's amygdala, Harvard Medical School's Srinivasan Pillay explains. But, he adds, "because hope seems to travel in the same dungeons [parts of the brain] as fear, it might be a good soldier to employ if we want to meet fear."

So let's get better at using hope. It's a free energy source.

Hope isn't blind optimism. It's a sense of possibility—delight in the new and joy in creativity that characterizes our species. So let's break the good-news ban and become storytellers about real breakthroughs. (Below, don't miss my top ten go-to's.) I'm convinced that in the process, we will strengthen our capacity to incorporate and act on the bad news as well.

After all, it's only in changing the small stories that we change the big, dangerous story—the myth of our own powerlessness. Remember, what we do and say doesn't just influence our friends, but also our friends' friends and our friends' friends' friends (yes, research shows it goes three layers out).
That's power! Here are some recent items that have made my day.

1. Renewables ramping up. With news of Keystone and tar sands and coal-crazy China, it's easy to think that renewable energy is going nowhere, but we'd be wrong. Between 2008 and 2012, the U.S. nearly doubled its renewables capacity. And in the first three months of this year, 82 percent of newly installed domestic electricity-generating capacity was renewable. Plus, installed capacity of new solar units during the first quarter of this year is more than double that of same period last year.
   
   Globally, thirteen countries now get 30 percent or more of their electricity from renewable sources. And Germany—with cloud cover worse than Alaska's—gets 21 percent of its electricity from renewables. In 2010, Germany, which is slightly smaller in size than Montana, produced about half the world's solar energy. That could depress you, or, it could remind us of the vastness of untapped potential. In April, at the first Pathways to 100% Renewables conference in San Francisco, I heard scientists declare that there's absolutely no technical obstacle to our planet's reaching 100 percent renewable energy in a few decades.
   
   Abetting the process, the cost of renewables is plummeting worldwide—that of electricity from large solar power plants fell by more than half, from $0.31 per kilowatt-hour in 2009 to $0.14 in 2012.
2. Wind wows. Denmark's wind energy alone provides about 30 percent of the country's electricity, making it the world leader as ranked by the share of a country's electricity that wind power provides. And U.S. wind power? We're second only to China among the world's wind energy producers, with wind power equal to about 10 nuclear power stations or 40 coal-fired power stations.
   
   Growing up in oil-centric Texas, I would have been the last person to predict my home state's leadership. But in the 1990s eight utility companies brought groups of citizens together to learn and to think through options. By the end of the process, they'd ranked efficiency higher than when they began, and the share of those willing to pay for renewables and conservation increased by more than 60 percent. Apparently, the utility companies listened: If Texas were a country, it would now be the world's sixth ranking wind energy producer.
3. Cities, states, countries pledge to go clean: Eight countries, 42 cities, and 48 regions have shifted, or are committed to shifting within the next few decades, to 100 percent renewable energy in at least one sector (like electricity, transportation, or heating/cooling). In California, San Francisco, Lancaster, and San José have officially set their goal at 100 percent renewable electricity within the next decade. And if you're thinking, "Oh yeah, that's just California": Greensburg, Kan., set its goal at 100 percent renewable power for all sectors after the town was wiped out by a tornado in 2007.
   
   Colorado's target is 30 percent renewable electricity by 2020, a standard that's helped spur success—especially when it comes to wind. And Vermont's energy plan is set to get the state to 90 percent renewable energy in all sectors by mid-century.
   
   And whole countries? Iceland already gets 100 percent of its electricity from renewables—three-quarters from large hydro and 25 percent from geothermal. In Costa Rica, it's about 95 percent—mainly from hydroelectric (which it's working to diversify), along with wind, biomass, and geothermal. Costa Rica's sights are set on becoming the world's first carbon-neutral country in time for its 2021 bicentennial. Absorbing more carbon will speed it along, so Costa Rica's forestry-financing agency is working with landowners to plant 7 million trees on cattle and coffee farms in the next few years.
   
   Monaco, Norway, New Zealand, and Iceland are also shooting to become the first carbon-neutral country. And Ethiopia unveiled plans to become a middle-income carbon-neutral country by 2025.
4. Citizens clobber coal. Just since 2005, as part of Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign, citizens across the country have stopped more than 165 coal plants from opening and successfully pushed for the retirement of more than 100 existing ones. The campaign aims to retire one third of America's remaining 500 coal plants by 2020. And if you're not registering how important this is, consider that coal accounts for more than a third of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
5. Forests forever. In India, ten million families take part in roughly 100,000 "forest-management groups" responsible for protecting nearby woodlands. Motivation is high, especially for women, because firewood still provides three-fourths of the energy used in cooking. Working collaboratively with the Indian government, these groups cover a fifth of India's forests; and they're likely a reason that India is one of the few countries in the world to enjoy an increase in forest cover since 2005.

And if you're not excited yet, try these two final tales:

Could Our Deepest Fears Hold the Key to Ending Violence?
Feelings of fear and powerlessness are driving the cycle of violence that surrounds us. To change that, we need to recognize that we need each other to thrive as individuals.

Close to home: Four years ago in Magnolia Springs, Ala., the conservative town government passed the toughest land regulation in the south. It's spending a quarter million dollars on a comprehensive plan to restore and protect its charming river from agricultural chemical runoff. "I'm a tree-hugging, liberal—I mean a tree-hugging conservative Republican! Which I know some people may say is an oxymoron," said Mayor Charlie Houser of this small town near Mobile. Brown pelicans are showing up again, says Houser, and he adds: "Cormorants up in the treetops ... Beautiful sight!"

Around the world: Three-fourths of Niger is desert, and news headlines focus on hunger there. But over two decades, poor farmers in the country's south have "regreened" 12.5 million desolate acres. In all, Niger farmers have nurtured the growth of some 200 million trees—discovering that trees and crops are not competitors but are complementary. The trees protect the soil, bringing big crop-yield increases, and they provide fruit, nutritious leaves, fodder, and firewood. Now young people are returning to villages in Niger, and school kids are learning to care for the trees, too.

Are you willing to step up as a solutions-news ban breaker?

Neuroscientists tell us our brains are "plastic," with new neuronal connections being created all the time, forming new "streambeds" in our brains that shape our responses to life. So isn't actively choosing what shapes our brains perhaps the most powerful ways to change ourselves, enabling us to change the world?

Facing unprecedented challenges, we can choose to remain open to possibility and creativity—not mired in despair. Surely, the latter is a luxury that none can afford. We can create and enthusiastically share a solutions story today, every day. It is a revolutionary act.

Here are my top picks to help you "break the ban":

Small Planet Institute
Yes! Magazine
Solutions Journal
Ecologic Development Fund
Handprinter
Sierra Club
ZERI (Zero Emissions Research Initiatives)
Your Olive Branch
World Future Council
OdeWire: News for Intelligent Optimists

Frances Moore Lappé is a contributing editor to YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. This article is adapted from EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want.

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One of Lopi LaRoe's designs that uses Smokey the Bear to promote environmental action. Image courtesy Lopi LaRoe.

Smokey the Bear thought he smelled a fire in the woods. But as he approached the clearing and saw a giant derrick jutting out into the sky, he realized that what his nose had picked up was the scent of hydrocarbons. It was another piece of evidence suggesting that the increasingly widespread method of oil and gas extraction known as fracking was poisoning the environment. He decided something must be done.

“This is Smokey waking up and saying, ‘Oh you didn’t do that to my environment.’”

At least that’s the way that artist, Occupy Wall Street veteran and environmental activist Lopi LaRoe sees it. But last week she received a letter threatening her with jail time and thousands of dollars in fines for enlisting Smokey to the anti-fracking cause.

In the fall, LaRoe created an image of Smokey that altered his famous invective “Only you can prevent forest fires” to “Only you can prevent faucet fires”—a reference to the phenomenon of flaming taps that occasionally occur near where fracking takes place. The adjustment seemed to her in line with the message of conservation Smokey has come to embody.

One of LaRoe’s designs that features Smokey the Bear. Image courtesy Lopi LaRoe.

“This is the radicalization of Smokey the Bear,” said LaRoe. “This is Smokey waking up and saying, ‘Oh you didn’t do that to my environment.’ Smokey wants to fight the corporations and protect the air and the water and the plants and the animals and the people.”

Her parody went viral. She began printing T-shirts at the insistence of friends on Facebook, but demand quickly surpassed those in her immediate circle of contacts. Soon she was packing Smokey in FedEx envelopes and sending him off to Australia and other far-flung terrains. There are also tote bags and patches with the Smokey meme available at LaRoe’s website. (The tote bags, she advertises, are “great for dumpster diving.”) LaRoe says she’s not out to become rich and the money she charges customers goes toward covering her costs so that she can keep spreading the message of faucet-fire prevention far and wide.

“It spread like wildfire,” she said, grinning ear to ear.

Not everyone is amused. LaRoe received a cease-and-desist letter from the Metis Group, which serves as legal counsel for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service division. The letter informs LaRoe that Smokey, his character, and his slogan are property of the U.S. government and warns that she has until May 2 to halt the use of Smokey on her “products” and to stop distributing electronic copies of the meme. Otherwise, she faces up to six months in prison and a penalty as high as $150,000.

“Any time anybody uses Smokey’s image for anything other than wildfire prevention,” said Helene Cleveland, fire prevention program manager for the Forest Service, “it confuses the public. What we’re trying to do is keep Smokey on message.” Cleveland added that the 1952 Smokey the Bear Act takes the character out of the public domain and “any change in that would have to go through Congress.”

Despite the warnings in the cease-and-desist letter she received, LaRoe has not ceased or desisted.

Two other entities besides the Forest Service claim joint rights to Smokey. The National Association of State Foresters—a nonprofit organization consisting of directors of U.S. forestry agencies—and the Ad Council.

Remember “This is your brain on drugs”? Or the Indian weeping over pollution? They were the Ad Council’s handiwork. A nonprofit, it describes itself as a promoter of “public service campaigns on behalf of nonprofit organizations and government agencies” with a focus on “improving the quality of life for children, preventive health, education, community well being and strengthening families.” Smokey the Bear was born at the Ad Council, on the desk of abstract expressionist and Marx-influenced art critic Harold Rosenberg, who had a part time job there in the mid-1940s.

The Ad Council’s board of directors is a conflagration of representatives of the world’s wealthiest corporations, including such companies as General Electric, which announced plans last month to spend $110 million on a research lab devoted to the study of fracking, and finance giants such as Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase. On its website, Citibank advertises an “extensive array of deposit, cash management and credit products” for oil and gas drillers, while a JPMorgan Chase subsidiary boasts its “Oil & Gas Investment Banking group covers the complete oil and gas value chain, which includes exploration and production, natural gas processing and transmission, refining and marketing, and oilfield services.”

LaRoe believes that those who claim to own Smokey “don’t care that I’m selling a few T-shirts. They’re out to crush the meme.”

Both the Ad Council and the Metis Group declined to comment for this story.

Despite the warnings in the cease-and-desist letter she received, LaRoe has not ceased or desisted. Instead, she enlisted the help of her own legal counsel, who fired back with a letter to the Metis Group on Friday. In it, attorney Evan Sarzin argues that LaRoe ‘s culture-jam appropriation of Smokey is permissible under the fair-use exemption to exclusive copyright ownership and chides the the Forest Service for attempting to infringe on LaRoe’s First Amendment rights.

Sarzin also points out that this is not the first time the Forest Service has sought to silence environmentalists for appropriating Smokey’s image. In the early 1990s, the Forest Service demanded reparations from the Sante Fe-based conservation group LightHawk after it used Smokey’s likeness in ads critical of the agency’s practice of auctioning off land to timber companies. (The Forest Service, as part of the Department of Agriculture, makes its land available for commercial use.) Unlike LaRoe’s Smokey, LightHawk’s black bear appeared angry and wielded a chainsaw. “Say it ain’t so, Smokey,” read the ads.

Smokey the Bear T-shirts are printed in LaRoe’s studio. Photo courtesy Lopie LaRoe.

With legal funds provided by the Sierra Club, LightHawk sued the Forest Service in 1992 for infringing on its freedom of speech. The court eventually sided with the plaintiffs, noting that “the satirical use of Smokey the Bear to criticize Forest Service management techniques is unlikely to cause confusion or to dilute the value of Smokey the Bear to help prevent forest fires. Thus the Forest Service cannot have a compelling interest in prohibiting such use.”

Sarzin also calls attention to the fact the Forest Service’s own research points to environmental degradation caused by fracking. A 2011 study published in the Journal of Environmental Quality by Forest Service researchers linked frack fluid to the death of 150 trees in West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest. Despite their findings, the Forest Service is considering approving fracking leases in the nearby George Washington National Forest. The Southern Environmental Law Center, which opposes the plan, says it represents a threat to local wildlife—including the black bear.

“When we were little kids we were taught that there is this bear out there that wants to protect our forests.”

A report released last month by the the National Parks Conservation Association warns that fracking for oil is decimating the ecosystem surrounding Theodore Roosevelt National Park, named after the Republican president who founded the Forest Service. “Unless we take quick action,” the report warns “air, water and wildlife will experience permanent harm in other national parks as well.” Thus, Sarzin writes, LaRoe’s Smokey meme “is a message that the Forest Service should endorse.”

LaRoe hopes that by gaining publicity she can force the Forest Service to take a stand against fracking. In order to continue the fight, however, she says she needs the support of groups whose mission it is to defend civil liberties or protect the environment to provide legal defense funds—just as the Sierra Club did for LightHawk.

“This about more than me as an artist,” LaRoe said. “This is about everybody’s right to freedom of speech and a healthy environment.”

Her childhood memories of Smokey, she explains, are compelling her to keep raising faucet-fire prevention awareness despite the threat of jail time. “When we were little kids we were taught that there is this bear out there that wants to protect our forests. Smokey is our bear. He belongs to the people.”

Peter Rugh wrote this article for WagingNonviolence, where it originally appeared. Peter is a writer and activist based in Brooklyn, New York.

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A century ago, industrialists like Andrew Carnegie believed that Darwin’s theories justified an economy of vicious competition and inequality. They left us with an ideological legacy that says the corporate economy, in which wealth concentrates in the hands of a few, produces the best for humanity. This was always a distortion of Darwin’s ideas. His 1871 book The Descent of Man argued that the human species had succeeded because of traits like sharing and compassion. “Those communities,” he wrote, “which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.” Darwin was no economist, but wealth-sharing and cooperation have always looked more consistent with his observations about human survival than the elitism and hierarchy that dominates contemporary corporate life.

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Nearly 150 years later, modern science has verified Darwin’s early insights with direct implications for how we do business in our society. New peer-reviewed research by Michael Tomasello, an American psychologist and co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has synthesized three decades of research to develop a comprehensive evolutionary theory of human cooperation. What can we learn about sharing as a result?

Tomasello holds that there were two key steps that led to humans’ unique form of interdependence. The first was all about who was coming to dinner. Approximately two million years ago, a fledgling species known as Homo habilis emerged on the great plains of Africa. At the same time that these four-foot-tall, bipedal apes appeared, a period of global cooling produced vast, open environments. This climate change event ultimately forced our hominid ancestors to adapt to a new way of life or perish entirely. Since they lacked the ability to take down large game, like the ferocious carnivores of the early Pleistocene, the solution they hit upon was scavenging the carcasses of recently killed large mammals. The analysis of fossil bones from this period has revealed evidence of stone-tool cut marks overlaid on top of carnivore teeth marks. The precursors of modern humans had a habit of arriving late to the feast.

However, this survival strategy brought an entirely new set of challenges: Individuals now had to coordinate their behaviors, work together, and learn how to share. For apes living in the dense rainforest, the search for ripe fruit and nuts was largely an individual activity. But on the plains, our ancestors needed to travel in groups to survive, and the act of scavenging from a single animal carcass forced proto-humans to learn to tolerate each other and allow each other a fair share. This resulted in a form of social selection that favored cooperation: “Individuals who attempted to hog all of the food at a scavenged carcass would be actively repelled by others,” writes Tomasello, “and perhaps shunned in other ways as well.”

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This evolutionary legacy can be seen in our behavior today, particularly among children who are too young to have been taught such notions of fairness. For example, in a 2011 study published in the journal Nature, anthropologist Katharina Hamann and her colleagues found that 3-year-old children share food more equitably if they gain it through cooperative effort rather than via individual labor or no work at all. In contrast, chimpanzees showed no difference in how they shared food under these different scenarios; they wouldn’t necessarily hoard the food individually, but they placed no value on cooperative efforts either. The implication, according to Tomasello, is that human evolution has predisposed us to work collaboratively and given us an intuitive sense that cooperation deserves equal rewards.

The second step in Tomasello’s theory leads directly into what kinds of businesses and economies are more in line with human evolution. Humans have, of course, uniquely large population sizes—much larger than those of other primates. It was the human penchant for cooperation that allowed groups to grow in number and eventually become tribal societies.

Humans, more than any other primate, developed psychological adaptations that allowed them to quickly recognize members of their own group (through unique behaviors, traditions, or forms of language) and develop a shared cultural identity in the pursuit of a common goal.
“The result,” says Tomasello, “was a new kind of interdependence and group-mindedness that went well beyond the joint intentionality of small-scale cooperation to a kind of collective intentionality at the level of the entire society.”

What does this mean for the different forms of business today? Corporate workplaces probably aren’t in sync with our evolutionary roots and may not be good for our long-term success as humans. Corporate culture imposes uniformity, mandated from the top down, throughout the organization. But the cooperative—the financial model in which a group of members owns a business and makes the rules about how to run it—is a modern institution that has much in common with the collective tribal heritage of our species. Worker-owned cooperatives are regionally distinct and organized around their constituent members. As a result, worker co-ops develop unique cultures that, following Tomasello’s theory, would be expected to better promote a shared identity among all members of the group. This shared identity would give rise to greater trust and collaboration without the need for centralized control.

Moreover, the structure of corporations is a recipe for worker alienation and dissatisfaction. Humans have evolved the ability to quickly form collective intentionality that motivates group members to pursue a shared goal. “Once they have formed a joint goal,” Tomasello says, “humans are committed to it.” Corporations, by law, are required to maximize profits for their investors. The shared goal among corporate employees is not to benefit their own community but rather a distant population of financiers who have no personal connection to their lives or labor.

However, because worker-owned cooperatives focus on maximizing value for their members, the cooperative is operated by and for the local community—a goal much more consistent with our evolutionary heritage. As Darwin concluded in The Descent of Man, “The more enduring social instincts conquer the less persistent instincts.” As worker-owned cooperatives continue to gain prominence around the world, we may ultimately witness the downfall of Carnegie’s “law of competition” and a return to the collaborative environments that the human species has long called home.

Eric Michael Johnson wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Eric is a doctoral student in the history of science at the University of British Columbia. His research examines the interplay between evolutionary biology and politics.

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The idea of fulfilling work—a job that reflects our passions, talents and values—is a modern invention. Open Dr. Johnson's celebrated Dictionary, published in 1755, and the word “fulfilment” doesn't even appear. But today our expectations are higher, which helps explain why job satisfaction has declined to a record low of 47 percent in the U.S., and is even lower in Europe.

Instead of thinking then acting, we should act first and reflect later by trying out jobs in the real world.

If you count yourself amongst those who are unhappy in their job, or at least have that occasional niggling feeling that your work and self are out of alignment, how are you supposed to go about finding a meaningful career? What does it take to overcome the fear of change and negotiate the labyrinth of choices, especially in tough economic times?

Here are six pieces of essential wisdom drawn from some of the best brains in the field.

1. Confusion is perfectly normal

First, a consoling thought: being confused about career choice is perfectly normal and utterly understandable. In the pre-industrial period there were around thirty standard trades—you might decide to be a blacksmith or a barrel-maker—but now career websites list over 12,000 different jobs. The result? We can become so anxious about making the wrong choice that we end up making no choice at all, staying in jobs that we have long grown out of. Psychologist Barry Schwartz calls this the “paradox of choice”: too many options can lead to decision paralysis, and we are like rabbits caught in the headlights.

Then add to this our built-in aversion to risk. Human beings tend to exaggerate everything that could possibly go wrong, or as Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman says, “we hate losing twice as much as we love winning,” whether at the casino table or when making career choices. So our brains are not well calibrated for daring to change profession. We need to recognize that confusion is natural, and get ready to move beyond it.

2. Beware of personality tests

Many people are enticed by personality tests, which claim to be able to assess your character, and then point you towards a job that is just right for you. It's a reassuring idea, but the evidence for their usefulness is flimsy. Take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the world's most popular psychometric test, which places you in one of sixteen personality types. Despite its ubiquity, the Myers-Briggs has been widely criticised by professional psychologists for over three decades, partly due to its lack of reliability. If you retake the test after five weeks, there is around a 50 percent chance that you will be placed into a different personality category than you were the first time.

Moreover, according to Marshall University psychologist David Pittenger, there is “ no evidence to show a positive relation between [a person’s Myers-Briggs] type and success within an occupation...nor is there any data to suggest that specific types are more satisfied within specific occupations than are other types.” He advises “extreme caution in its application as a counselling tool.”

So don't let any anyone tell you what you can and can't be on the basis of a personality pigeon-hole they want to put you in.

3. Aim to be a wide achiever, not a high achiever

For over a century, Western culture has been telling us that the best way to use our talents and be successful is to specialize and become a high achiever, an expert in a narrow field—say a corporate tax accountant or an anesthetist.

But an increasing number of people feel that this approach fails to cultivate the many sides of who they are. For them, it makes more sense to embrace the idea of being a “wide achiever” rather than a high achiever. Take inspiration from Renaissance generalists like Leonardo da Vinci, who would paint one day, then do some mechanical engineering, followed by a few anatomy experiments on the weekend.

Today this is called being a “portfolio worker,” doing several jobs simultaneously and often freelance. Management thinker Charles Handy says this is not just a good way of spreading risk in an insecure job market, but is an extraordinary opportunity made possible by the rise of opportunities for flexible work: “For the first time in the human experience, we have a chance to shape our work to suit the way we live instead of our lives to fit our work. We would be mad to miss the chance.”

Ask yourself this: What would being a wide achiever encompass for me?

4. Find where your values and talents meet

The wisest single piece of career advice was proffered 2,500 years ago when Aristotle declared, “Where the needs of the world and your talents cross, there lies your vocation.” And he would surely endorse contemporary research findings showing that those pursuing money and status are unlikely to feel fulfilled: the Mercer Global Engagement Scale places “base pay” as only number seven out of 12 factors predicting job satisfaction.

The best alternative, says Harvard's Howard Gardner, is to find an ethical career, focused on values and issues that matter to you, and which also allows you to do what you're really good at. That might sound like a luxury when there are long lines at job centers. But consider that in the 34 countries of the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, the social enterprise sector, in which organizations strive not only to make profits but also to improve social and environmental conditions,is growing 250 percent faster than the rest of the economy.

So imagine yourself in three parallel universes, in each of which you can spend next year trying a job in which your talents meet the needs of the world. What three jobs would you be excited to try?

5. Act first, reflect later

The biggest mistake people make when changing careers is to follow the traditional “plan then implement” model. You draw up lists of personal strengths, weaknesses, and ambitions, then match your profile to particular professions; at that point you start sending out applications. But there's a problem: it typically doesn't work. You might find a new job, but despite your expectations, it is unlikely to be fulfilling.

Ask successful career changers how to overcome the fear and most say that in the end you have to stop thinking and just do it.

We need to turn this model on its head. As I explain in this video, instead of thinking then acting, we should act first and reflect later by trying out jobs in the real world, for example by shadowing, interning, or volunteering, testing out careers through experiential learning. Laura van Bouchout gave herself the thirtieth birthday present of spending a whole year trying thirty different jobs—a kind of “radical sabbatical.” She was manager of a cat hotel, then shadowed an Member of the European Parliament, and found that working in advertising was unexpectedly exhilarating.

But don't think that you have to resign on Monday morning to try this. Rather, you can pursue “branching projects”—what organisational behaviour expert Herminia Ibarra calls “temporary assignments"—on the side of your existing job. Disenchanted with banking? Then try teaching yoga or doing freelance web design on the weekends. Such small experiments can give you the courage to make big—and well-informed—changes.

Challenge yourself: What is your first branching project going to be? And what is the very first step you can take towards making it happen?

6. Discover a little madness

Changing careers is a frightening prospect: of those who want to leave their jobs, around half are too afraid to take the plunge. But ultimately, there is no avoiding the fact that it is a risk.

Ask successful career changers how to overcome the fear and most say the same thing: in the end you have to stop thinking and just do it. That may be why nearly all cultures have recognized that to live a meaningful and vibrant existence, we need to take some chances—or else we might end up looking back on our lives with regret.

"Carpe diem," advised the Roman poet Horace: seize the day before it is too late. “If not now, when?” said the rabbinical sage Hillel the Elder. Personally, I like the way Zorba the Greek puts it: “A man needs a little madness, or else he never dares to cut the rope and be free.”

It is only by treating our working lives as an ongoing experiment that we will be able to find a job that is big enough for our spirits.

Roman Krznaric is the author of How to Find Fulfilling Work, published by Picador on April 23, and teaches courses on career change at The School of Life. His website is www.romankrznaric.com.

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George Takei at the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Pride. Photo by Zesmerelda.

I was a relative latecomer to Facebook—and a skeptic, too. Well into the Obama era, I was parroting the standard criticisms that people who haven’t actually spent time on the platform like to recycle: chiefly, “Why would I want to know what a bunch of my old classmates and distant acquaintances just had for breakfast?”

Takei’s kitschy cat photos are not themselves of political interest, but their popularity has given him a platform for his online activism

I’ve come around. It’s always unnerving to be hooked to a giant corporation, and I still keep my guard up a little. But once I got to using Facebook it quickly became clear why it has a mass following. It’s a fun way to keep in touch with friends, a useful source of interesting links (link up with some media-savvy users and you’ll have a customized news feed that’s hard to beat), and an effective means of affectionately razzing extended family members (when a cousin’s March Madness bracket started doing far worse than mine, I somehow made time in my busy schedule to gloat).

And then there’s the joy of seeing posts from George Takei.

Takei—a seventy-five-year-old actor most famous for playing Mr. Sulu on the original Star Trek—is friendly and warm-hearted, matter-of-factly out of the closet, always ready with a pun, and unabashedly nerdy (items that combine or conflate the Star Wars and Star Trek universes are a subspecialty of Takei’s). If there is a more beloved personality in the world of social networking, I haven’t met him or her.

It’s likely that you don’t need me to tell you any of this. I’m merely one fan out of the 3,789,097 that Takei has amassed on Facebook. Admittedly, those aren’t Justin Bieber or Rihanna numbers. Yet Takei manages to stock the online world with more cartoons, humorous memes, and cheeky quips than pretty much anyone else. Even more so than people with larger followings, his fans respond to and re-circulate his content in droves—whether the posts are merely frivolous, heart-warming, or politically pointed.

Takei describes his approach to promoting LGBT rights as “combating idiocy with humor.”

Takei’s kitschy cat photos are not themselves of political interest, but their popularity has given him a platform with exceptional reach for his online activism. This past week was the two-year anniversary of the launch of his Facebook page; it also witnessed several developments that highlighted Takei’s commitments as an engaged public figure.

One development was the national discussion of same-sex marriage, precipitated by the arguments taking place before the Supreme Court. (A useful and funny summary of last Tuesday’s oral arguments about the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8 is available here.) The debate is directly relevant to Takei, who in the past decade has become an outspoken advocate of LGBT rights. He and his partner Brad were among the earliest and most prominent same-sex couples in Hollywood to obtain a marriage license in 2008, and they were the first gay couple ever to appear on the Newlywed Game.

As an online advocate, Takei describes his approach to promoting LGBT rights as “combating idiocy with humor.” This was on display during his “It’s OK to Be Takei” campaign in 2011. That year the Tennessee state legislature considered a “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which would have prohibited teachers from discussing homosexuality with their students. In response, Takei helpfully offered his last name (which rhymes with gay) for use by schoolteachers who needed a handy substitute for any words forbidden in the classroom.

While his status as a spokesperson for LGBT rights is relatively new, Takei has long been involved in other civil rights issues, such as raising awareness about the government internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. As a child, Takei was held with his family for four years in prison camps. Last week, TED made available Takei’s talkabout the experience and how it motivated him to create a forthcoming Broadway musical, entitled Allegiance.

Social media holdouts may have good reason for their wariness. But if you are going to cave to Facebook, Takei’s distinctive combination of politics and meme silliness—what he describes as “talking about the internment of Japanese Americans, mixed in with some cute kitties”—is a pleasure worth indulging.

Mark Engler is a consulting editor YES! Magazine, a senior analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus, and author or How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008). He can be reached via the website www.DemocracyUprising.com. You can follow Mark on Twitter (@markjengler) or on Facebook.

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A 700-member time bank in Central Vermont from Olivier Asselin on Vimeo.

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Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History
by Florence Williams
W.W. Norton, $25.95, 338 pages

When Florence Williams was nursing her second child, she had her breast milk tested: It was a cocktail of synthetic chemicals, from flame retardants to BPA. This experience started her research into what exactly is in a breast and how that body part connects us to our children, our past, and our surroundings. The result is her compelling, highly readable, often funny, but also deadly serious book, Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History.

The human breast—unique in nature for its size and shape—developed early in our species’ life, for the suckling of infants with bigger heads and flatter faces. Now its augmentation is the number one plastic surgery, and breast milk is sold online for 262 times the price of oil.

The breast is the organ most sensitive to chemicals, especially to the synthetic endocrine disrupters present almost everywhere—in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the cars we drive. As a result, breast cancer is the number one fatal cancer in women worldwide—and it’s increasingly becoming a problem in men. Rather than responding to these dangers with fear, Williams inspires us with thoughtful, well-researched consideration of what others may only want to ogle or avoid thinking about altogether.

Williams adds her strong voice to two connected and important, growing movements: for the regulation of chemicals, and for cancer prevention, not merely treatment. This book is an impassioned cry for a more holistic vision and more collective action to safeguard not just body parts, but the whole body—not just the individual, but also the species and the world that supports us.

Editor's note: This story initially claimed that Florence Williams' breast milk contained "inorganic" chemicals. Alert reader djanick pointed out in the comments that toxins such as BPA are, in chemical terms, organic. The word has been changed to "synthetic" to correct this error.

Nadia Colburn wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Nadia is a writer and teacher of writing living in Boston.

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A tiny, free library in Memphis, Tenn. Photo courtesy of I Love Memphis.

1. Send your books on a journey

Books introduce us to fascinating strangers; they take us to places we would never visit alone. So why not send them out into the world, to share stories with new readers? Better yet, why not follow their adventures? That’s the idea behind BookCrossing. Put a tracking label on your book, leave it in a public place, and wait to see where it turns up next. The labels encourage new readers to release the books they find, and to enter where they found them on the website: train stations, park benches, and cafes across the globe. Part social networking, part world library, bookcrossing.com connects book lovers, anonymously, to the pleasure of sharing a good book with a stranger.

2. Make your library mobile

Most public libraries make a point of giving away books that have been withdrawn from circulation. But two Portland women have a new spin on library outreach with Street Books, their bicycle-powered mobile library. Using what looks like an ice cream cart, Street Books brings a fresh rotation of great books to people who live in Portland’s streets and parks. Patrons do not need to provide an ID or proof of address, and they return their books on an honor system. Readers are invited to submit book reviews and share stories from the road on streetbooks.org.

Mobile libraries vary according to the countries they’re found in. The coastal town of Port Philip, Australia, keeps a lending wheelbarrow traveling down its beach during summer months. In Colombia, grade school teacher Luis Soriano brings a children’s library to remote villages on the backs of his two donkeys, Alfa and Beto. His Biblioburro project serves children inland from the Caribbean coast, and the idea has been adopted in other regions of Colombia.

3. Build a tiny library

The Little Free Library movement inspires bibliophiles to plant bookshelves in unexpected places: on front lawns, city sidewalks, against tree trunks and beside bus shelters. These colorful handmade libraries, as small as mailboxes or as large as vending machines, invite neighbors and passersby to browse and borrow, lend, and linger. Some of the boxes are rustic, while others are whimsical. Some repurpose containers like newspaper dispensers or reuse materials like old license plates. Many are supplied with a reading bench, and all are free to anyone. No check-outs required.

Todd Bol built the first of these libraries in Wisconsin as a tribute to his late mother, a librarian. People loved it, so Bol and a friend started a web site, littlefreelibrary.org, to help people build their own libraries. Aspirants can find instructions on building, weatherproofing, and mounting libraries. They can also read about the movement’s goals: to promote literacy, the love of reading, and a sense of community. And to build more than 2,510 (tiny) libraries around the world—more than Andrew Carnegie!

4. Have a book exchange party

Introduce friends to good books, and each other, by throwing a book exchange party. Set the tone with party decorations and treats on a literary theme: giant letters, book banners, quotation cakes. Ask guests to bring a wrapped book to exchange. The names of givers and recipients are picked out of a hat, and the book swap, which can involve several exchanges, begins.

Talking about books provides an icebreaker at parties for adults. And a simple book exchange for children (bring one, take one) is a break from the usual emphasis on presents and party favors.

Fabien Tepper and Signe Predmore wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Fabien and Signe are editorial interns at YES!

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The view from the deck of Hinman and Wilcox’s sailboat, the “Velella.” Photo by Wendy Hinman.

Every free spirit probably dreams about it at some point: trading a life of modern cares for the adventure, beauty, and self-sufficiency of the high seas. And it may be more of a possibility than you think.

Wendy Hinman and her husband Garth Wilcox are living proof that escape by sailboat can be affordable—and ecologically sustainable, too—as long as you’re willing to go slowly. As in, at the pace of a brisk walk.

It took them seven years to circumnavigate the Pacific at that speed. They sailed in a great circle around the Pacific Ocean, first down the coast of North America and then across to New Zealand, the Philippines, and Japan. In doing so, they visited 19 countries, and traveled 34,000 miles on little more than wind power and nautical savvy. During the journey, their days were filled with swimming, hiking, whale-watching, tacking the sails, and baking, as well as the occasional argument. They did it all while spending less than $1,000 a month.

Hinman describes her life at sea as a distillation of sorts, an existence pared down to the essentials.

It was the realization of a lifelong dream, says Hinman, who chronicles the experience in her book, Tightwads on the Loose: A Seven-Year Pacific Odyssey. She began sailing at age six while living on islands like Guam and Hawai‘i, enjoying the fringe benefits of having a father in the Navy.

“Sailing has always given me this incredible sense of freedom,” she said. “You’re out there on the water, sometimes for days and days and days, navigating under the stars. As a kid I read lots of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on The Prairie and stuff, and I wanted to be self-sufficient like they were.”

Finding simplicity

The couple’s 31-foot wooden sailboat, named the “Velella,” was designed to be spartan and spry. Its fuel tank carried only ten gallons of diesel. Electricity was provided by solar panels, a wind turbine, and a propeller-based generator trolled behind the boat. Two 10-pound propane tanks powered a modest galley. There was no refrigerator or hot water. The cabin was so small, Wilcox couldn’t even stand up straight inside it.

Hinman cooking in the galley. Photo by Garth Wilcox.

But the lack of amenities didn’t diminish the experience. Hinman describes her life at sea as a distillation of sorts, an existence pared down to the essentials. “I would enter this meditative state, with the sky and ocean surrounding me day and night,” she says. “I realized that most of the decisions we were making were pretty important ones: where to find water, where to find food, how to stay on course. On the ocean, there was a different sense of priorities.”

She and Wilcox would sleep in 4-hour shifts, so that one person was always awake. Their longest stretch without coming ashore was 49 days, as they traveled from Japan to British Columbia on only two gallons of diesel. For more than six weeks they saw no other humans, just shipping traffic and the occasional whale.

On avoiding mutiny

That isolation was trying at times. “There were days when I felt like it was an endurance test,” Hinman says, “like a period of solitary confinement.”

They found entertainment in reading, snorkeling, preparing food together, and watching for wildlife: whales and dolphins on the open ocean, sea turtles and pelicans along the coast of Mexico. Some days, the water was too rough for cooking, so they ate Powerbars for dinner. They learned to find peace in what Hinman calls “spending alone time together.”

Living in such close quarters, arguments inevitably cropped up. Eventually, a certain shipboard diplomacy took shape. “I would sometimes ask myself, ‘Would you rather be right, or happy?’” Hinman says.

They traveled from Japan to British Columbia on only two gallons of diesel.

Informed by this dynamic, she’s become something of an expert on shipboard love. She gives a presentation at boat shows entitled, “How to Keep Your Relationship Off the Rocks.”

“When we stopped in New Zealand, we heard about couples that were selling their boats and buying plane tickets home,” she said. “It was sad, but in some ways this is the ultimate test for a relationship.”

On returning home

Despite the numerous challenges at sea, the most difficult part of the journey was coming home.

“Honestly, it was hard transitioning back into society,” Hinman says. “The consumerism, the fast pace of life, the stress we inflict on ourselves for what are mostly just annoyances.”

The journey opened Hinman’s eyes to alternative, equally valid ways to live: lifestyles not dependent on material goods, nor structured around acquiring wealth. She says that she’s become more conscious of her impact on the environment since returning, and devotes more of her time to growing food, conserving water, and using less fossil fuels.

But Hinman and Wilcox won’t stay land bound for too long. What’s next for these scrimping seafarers?

“We’re thinking about sailing around Cape Horn, maybe go up into the channels around Europe,” she said. “But first Garth wants to build a bigger boat for us, one he can actually stand up in.”

Peter Pearsall wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Peter is an online reporting intern at YES! and a freelance science writer.

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