Environmental Consultation & Infrastructural ReDesign

For example, bioregional Learning Centers such as my eco-action, gift-economy model S.O.U.L. (Shared, Opportunity, Used, Local) electrifies

• * individual,
• * community,
• * corporation,
• * infrastructure, and
• * policy

paradigm changes as a collective practice of environmental justice, ethical consumerism, and community action. Equilibrium means galvanizing a constant shift and re-balance among these five components.

A practice of environmental justice and community action through S.O.U.L. supports equity and justice while developing resilient communities through local infrastructures that promote ecological and human health, enact reparative justice, and support local food and farming, arts, and resource use.

Through an urgent commitment to creative collaborations that focus on S.O.U.L., we can transform industrial-capitalism’s everyday tyranny and violence—entitlement. S.O.U.L. engages five place-specific strategies that create a bridge between

• * individual response-ability (behavioral changes),
• * community action-based creative collaboration (ex: Resource Tree: demonstrates the skills and creative possibilities among members of our community so that when an individual or an institution (school or library, for example) need something, rather than purchasing it (online or at a big box store) they will have abundant access to a series of local resources and go-to advisors),
• * infrastructural re-design —personal support (ex: parenting-accountability forums, deprivatized-shared transportation) and structural systems (ex: building energy audits, landfill regulations, waste management, QR codes not required = no assumption of smartphone ownership),
• * corporate accountability (ex: local grocery stores banning single-use plastic bags, restaurants banning Styrofoam, safe-drinking water hotline), and
• * policy transformation (Town Public Works maintaining water pipe system to avoid lead poisoning in water).

These five interlocking spheres connect the private with the public, the personal with the political. Many people feel their actions honestly don’t count, but when we approach our individual actions within the context of collective behavioral change, we can impact our entire society—our entire planet. Just as all toxins accumulate, all positive actions accumulate. As all forms of oppression are interconnected, all forms of emancipation are equally interconnected.

How can we cultivate spiritual intelligence by implementing symbiotic wisdoms as we transition from our hyper-industrialized techno-euphoric culture to a decolonized sacred economics? How can we—individually and collectively—teach and embody the intricacies of the social scientific concepts of supply chains, true cost, life-cycle analysis, and embodied energy designating both the local and global cycles of

• * extraction >
  • * transportation >
    • * manufacture >
      • * assembly >
        • * production >
          • * installation >
            • * distribution >
              • * consumption >
                • * disposal/decomposition?

Ecoliteracy and health, racial, economic-equity literacy begin at home; it begins with parenting; in every room of the house; in the classroom, through the media. In “The Truman Show,” Ed Harris’ character, the billionaire televisionary, exhorts: “We accept the reality of the world we are presented with.” Every institution (ranging from compulsory education to industrial technology, transportation, entertainment, housing, healthcare, how we eat, excrete, bathe, etc.) breeds habituated obedience. “Consumer-reduction” has become an unpopular approach to environmental crises because it falsely implies sacrifice. I suggest we redefine “convenience” and taken-for-granted normative infrastructures. S.O.U.L. moves beyond excuses/ misinterpretations of self-sacrifice, overwhelm, exhaustion: “I’m already doing enough.” S.O.U.L. can enliven each of us as we redefine and fulfill our “needs.”

My interactive workshops encourage participants to brainstorm S.O.U.L. possibilities that will hopefully enhance our greater community by using storytelling as a vehicle for educating the public about how to shift our ecological and humanitarian crises to a biocentric, mutually response-able world.