These are all good suggestions for what we can do personally. But personal consumer choices can never add up to enough to make any serious difference in the global crisis, especially since the vast majority of people are brainwashed day and night by corporate advertising and act from impulse rather than from forethought.

Nor, for that matter, can personal political actions like voting or writing letters to politicians or corporate leaders, since these guys get millions of letters and email messages from all sorts of vested interest groups. Which ones do you think they pay any attention to? Of course--those who pose the greatest benefit--or threat--to their own bottom line, or their campaign funds.

So if influencing the global climate crisis through personal choices AND political activism are both necessary but ultimately futile, what's left?

The middle path here is relocalization--growing community. And the best way to do that is to start where you are, growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness. And even if we cannot stop the big guys--the corporations and the politicians they control--from trashing our planet, we can slow them down by withdrawing our financial support from them, and by relearning the lost arts of growing our own food, collaborating with our neighbors, and a lifetime devoted to collectively learning, teaching, healing, and creating. So that if anyone survives the inevitable collapse of our global market economy, it will be those of us who have planted the seeds of regeneration right where we are--through Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share.