S.O.U.L.

As an example, I teach and live such a model that represents the intersection between cultural diversity and biodiversity: S.O.U.L. (Shared, Opportunity, Used, Local). Using only locally produced or reused/reclaimed/repurposed “resources” that lead to surprising, coalitional practices rooted in ethical and equitable relationships, S.O.U.L. guides us to directly engage our communities.

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 violence—consumption and 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), corporate accountability (ex: local grocery stores banning single-use plastic bags, restaurants banning styrofoam, safe-drinking water hotline), and policy reform (Town Public Works maintaining water pipe system to avoid chemical 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 the reality is collective behavioral change does 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.

Even within the 99% (referring to the Occupy Movement), consumers are capitalism. Without convenience-culture/ mass consumer-demand, the machine of the profit-driven free market would have to shift gears. We can’t blame oil companies without simultaneously implicating ourselves, holding our consumption-habits equally responsible. How can we insist government and transnational corporations be accountable, when we refuse to curb our purchase, use, and disposal habits?

How can we cultivate spiritual intelligence by implementing symbiotic wisdoms as we transition from our hyper-industrialized petroleum-pharmaceutical-addicted techno-euphoric culture to a decolonized economics-of-solidarity? 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 define 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 responsible world.