Vladislav Davidzonthe art of doing the impossible – thoughts on the great turning

This weblog began on March 26, 2003 with the beginning of my commitment to working full time for social change. I’ve since traveled to the Middle East and walked the olive groves of Palestine and the streets of old Jerusalem, biked across the country learning about food security and later worked to support the Green Party. Lovers came and went, many new friends came into my life, and I’ve lost some old friends.

As I walked my path I grew and changed. Although I’ve seen friends get brutalized by the police and murdered by the brutality of the occupation, I also discovered that the solutions we seek are often all quite simple. As one of my teachers, Bill Mollison, says “Though the problems are increasingly complex, the solutions are embarrassingly simple.”

This post marks the turn of this blog towards looking at those solutions. The problems we face are no doubt staggering — global warming, dramatic extinction, massive political corruption resulting from the perfect storm combination of the corporate military-prison-industrial complex, and the list goes on.

And yet the solutions are stunningly simple. After all, global warming is a direct result of deforestation; obviously we can plant trees. Apathy is a direct result of disempowerment, and addressing the causes of that disempowerment has become my life’s work. After all, leadership is about empowering others to lead.

The fact is that most problems we face are nothing more but a massive failure of imagination. The suicidal path we’ve chosen has thus far been the best we could imagine. We could do better. Imagination begins here.