After continuing to speak to many colleagues about these issues, and after experiencing a total communications breakdown among some of my conservation role models, I have realized that I should make a crucial qualification on our recommendations, which we perhaps didn't stress enough in our paper. In recognizing and appreciating the successful strategies of the Right, we must remember those things that make the Right different from progressives and accept these barriers to the application of their lessons to our own movement. The Right is undeniably authoritarian and hierarchal. We are not. Even more than that, we refuse to become so, and we should continue in this refusal. The authoritarian hierarchal meta-structure we attribute to the Right is not a good model for us as progressives. We need to find a way to harness the power of horizontal organization and synchronized communications without creating a single Big Daddy.
Of course this is a tremendous challenge, and one that we cannot even be sure we can even accomplish. Nonetheless, I believe it is crucial to the success of environmentalists and progressives. The need for unity is still present, as are our common values. I do believe our next steps must include learning how to communicate with each other in all of our diversity, coordinating ourselves to speak a common language, and developing an intense awareness of the values that motivate us, so that these become inseperably apparent in everything we do and say. It is up to the next generation of progressives and environmentalists to create and strengthen this process, and to develop a new style of political coalition for this country.
If anyone has any suggestions, or interest in working on this, I would be grateful to hear from you.
Thanks,
dahvi
