Critical Mass
How many Swiss citizens does it take to change a light bulb? (As you may know, we recently shot down a law involving CO2 that should have helped us on the way out of our environmental misery.) Now I wonder: how many active citizens does it take for a society to change? Really only six percent? Is that how many of us need to jump on our bicycles, take to the streets, demonstrate, march, hold up banners and call for international solidarity until we can make our demands more concrete? How many people would have to agree among themselves? And could they? (If two conservatives meet, they are happy; if two lefties or greenies meet, neither is left or green enough for the other.) And even if they agreed, would they be capable of creating the consensus needed for change to happen? The climate is everyone’s headache. Coastal cities, mountain villages and arid areas are bracing themselves, African and Asian climate refugees are on the run. Homeowners are worried, storm follows storm, heat wave follows heat wave, fire follows fire, flood follows flood, landslide follows landslide, eruption follows eruption, earthquake follows earthquake and still there is no jolt going through our society. I go on vacation by train (flying is even more ineffective now) and try to keep my footprint small in other ways as well. I express my love of nature and of the environment in many ways, but it is not enough, even if hundreds of thousands of us behave this way. Change doesn’t just happen bottom up, it must also come from industry, from government, from businesses, from manufacturers and farms. Is the climate perhaps not sexy enough? How critical is the mass? Where and how can people be turned around? Where are the advertisers and public relationists who’ll give the fight for Mother Earth and against mass extinction a more winning image? One that creates in us an urgent desire to invest large sums of money in the environment and to earn money from this project. Repeat after me: My weather, my climate, my world!
Heatedly, yours
Susanne G. Seiler
A Vendor of Dreams
(After Ben Okri)
Vendor of Dreams
You are a recorder of rag-ridden destinies,
a pimp-impressario.
You sell us phantasies in cloud-packets.
Our favourite dreams are of incidents at
The shrine, masquing with masquerades,
Placating the jealous gods
After all, it is only Lactogen,
a quiet hallucinogen.
Night, and you must pay for the
murdered sleep of the world.
In your best nightmare
you unscrew your head
and hide it under your armpit,
to escape the wrath of creditors.
But you can’t keep away the flies.
Niran Okewole