Blog Action Day

If you don’t already know, October 15 is Blog Action Day around the blogosphere: today bloggers worldwide are lighting up the Internet posting on a single topic, the environment. My sensibilities as a spiritual activist lead me to direct people to the efforts of Humanity’s Team (labeled “a civil rights movement for the soul”) or the lobbying going on for a US Department of Peace on a day like today. But I’ll make do with a quote from a favorite activism book of mine (featuring essays by the likes of bell hooks, Stanley Crouch, Deepak Chopra and many more), Imagine: What America Could Be in the 21st Century, and the words of essayist Sam Daley-Harris:

“I believe that a friend of mine had it right when he said that one of our principal jobs in life is to leave the campsite cleaner than we found it. Imagine what America would look like if each and every American were seriously engaged in his or her own act of cleaning the campsite. Some might take on healing our fragile environment, and others might take on ending hunger and homelessness. Still others might focus on transforming our schools, especially for those who are most often left behind. I really believe that if every American embraced this idea, there wouldn’t be enough problems to go around.

“So why don’t we? Why does it seem that there are too many problems to tackle and that one individual can’t make a difference? Is it that we don’t know much about the problems we face and the opportunities that exist to solve them?”