• Quakers helping sow seeds of 11th Hour video.
• Swing Semester gets young people to work on progressive issues.
• Clerk's message: What differentiates QEW from other organizations?
• Is public control of the monetary system crucial to a sustainable and moral economy?
• UN report: It's time to be allies in Indigenous Peoples' struggles.
• Earthcare flourishes among Western Friends.
• Earthcare Center celebrates spirit-led activism at the 2008 FGC Gathering.
• "Peace with Earth" spirit resonates at the 2007 FWCC Triennial.
• The right to dry: Hanging it all out.
• NYYM regional gathering explores Earthcare in depth.

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Quakers helping sow seeds of 11th Hour video

by Louis Cox

Someone once wrote, "The only person in the world I can change is myself." But that is only half true when it comes to global climate change: After changing yourself, you can start spreading the alarm and stirring others to action.

Here's one simple but powerful step you can take right now: Order a copy of the new documentary, The 11^th Hour, for only $5.00 plus postage from <http://wip.warnerbros.com/11thhour/> . Invite everyone you can think of—family friends, neighbors, or Meeting members—to watch. Follow up with discussion or worship-sharing.

Then give the DVD to one of the grouppreferably someone seems very enthusiasticwith the understanding that they will soon hold their own group viewing and discussion of The 11^th Hour, then pass it on to someone else, etc. Within weeks your little mustard seed of concern could grow into an outwardly branching tree of people getting informed and energized on this vital issue. You would be flying under the radar to fight the corporately controlled climate disinformation and denial industry (Warner Bros., Inc. apparently being a hopeful exception).

To multiply your impact, buy additional copies of The 11^th Hour in order to send even more viewings and discussions rippling through the national psyche.

In fact, that's how I got copy #26, from Rhiana Levy, a woman in Iowa who recently bought more than 100 of the DVDs and has been sending them to prospective allies across the U.S., including about 40 Quakers. (Three of them turned out turned out to be members of the QEW Steering Committee!) Levy says she trusts the Quakers because they had provided a lot of support when she was giving a live one-person performance called "Creating a World Beyond War" before thousands of people in England over a ten-year period, starting in the early 1990s.

Over the past several years Levy has had a leading to embark on a similar campaign to deepen and broaden the national conversation about climate change. Illness now prevents her from traveling, but after watching The 11^th Hour (which she found to be even more powerful than Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth), she got the inspiration for spreading the word chain-letter fashion. A friend helped her set up an Internet blog <hundredthmonkey.wordpress.com> that invites recipients to help her track the movements of her 100 copies. If this overture is successful, other people may be inspired to make their own multiple-copy purchases and start DVD "viewing trees" of their own. They would be welcome to go to her blog for instructions on how they can piggy-back on the same tracking system to follow the spread of any DVDs of The 11^th Hour they buy and distribute.

The name of Levy's blog, by the way, associates her DVD project with the "100^th monkey effect" that became buzz word in the 1970s and 80s: An isolated group of wild monkeys reportedly started learning a new skill that at some point made a "quantum leap" to a larger, distant population. Although skeptics love to slam this unconfirmed account as an urban legend, it still makes an important point: Everything in the world is in fact interconnected as a dynamic whole, in ways we are only beginning to understand. Even small actions are known to have dramatic effects on larger systems that defy physical cause-and-effect explanations. Just as there is a feared tipping point for greenhouse gas emissions, there is also a corresponding hopeful tipping point in the general public's awareness of the crisis and their role in it, Levy says.

That answers another criticism often directed at "100^th Monkey" enthusiasts—that they are encouraging a dangerously passive mindset, believing that "raised consciousness" is all that is needed to change the world. Levy and The 11^th Hour are clearly about getting people organized to take action.

It's interesting to note that Leonardo DiCaprio, who produced and narrated The 11^th Hour, also starred in a 1997 movie about the "unsinkable" ocean liner RMS Titanic, which went down with most of her passengers in 1912 after hitting an iceberg. The Titanic's tragic end—blamed mostly on human arrogance and recklessness—can be an uncanny metaphor for what seems to be happening ecologically and socially to spaceship Earth. But there is little we can learn from such a grim and hopeless example. Initial hopes for containing the damage and resuming the journey were in vain, since the ship's fate was sealed the moment it struck the iceberg.

The 11^th Hour, on the other hand, picks up with the icebergs still on the horizon. It warns us to slow down to buy more time to maneuver. It assures us there's still time to change course. It shows that we have the knowledge and resources to do so. Now, if we can just wake up from this dream that all is well.…

(Continued on page 2>>)

BeFriending Creation • September-October 2008