I saw this woman on Bill Moyers last night and she totally inspired me. She's a cancer survivor, cancer that she believes was a result of environmental toxins. . She's fighting to identify and eliminate carcinogens in our air, water and
food, and to stop fracking, that controversial extraction of natural gas from
deep beneath the earth.
But what really inspires me is her refusal to be "nice" and "polite". She believes (and I agree) that it is too late for polite petitioning of the powers that be. That what is required is assertive action. At the link below you can see her refusing to give ground to a "suit" at an EPA hearing, she refuses to be cowed by his disrespect of her, and ends up being forcibly removed from the hearing.
at the end of the interview she discusses the idea of "well-informed futility":
"Well-informed futility is an idea that psychologists hit upon in the 1960s,
specifically to explain why the people watching television news about the
Vietnam War came to feel more and more futile about it. Whereas people who
watched less television felt less futile. So it seemed like a paradox, right?
The more informed you are, you think of knowledge as power.
But in fact, there is a way in which knowledge can be incapacitating. And so
the psychologists went further and now have applied this to the environmental
crisis and point out to us that whenever there's a problem that seems big and
overwhelming, climate change would be one, and at the same time, it's not
apparent that your own actions have any meaningful agency to solve that problem,
you're filled with such a sense of despair or guilt or rage that it becomes
unbearable.
So I try to take well-informed futility as my starting point and let
people know that there is a way out of this. I can't
honestly tell you that the problem is less bad than it is, the response has to
be that we scale up our actions. So the problem is huge. And so our actions have
to be huge as well."
transcript:http://billmoyers.com/segment/sandra-steingrabers-war-on-toxic-trespassers/
or you can watch the entire segment online.
And see a beautiful video about bees.
