My Generation's Task

I find myself on the cusp of two very distinct periods in time. I am growing up at the end of the industrial age, an age whose exploitation and excess cannot continue indefinitely, as we are rapidly discovering. I am not sure what the next epoch will bring, but I know something different is coming. I have a sense that it will be something better. The task of forming this new era will belong primarily to my generation, as well as our children and our grandchildren.

Like all previous generations, my peers tend to follow in their parents’ ideological footsteps. Parents are an unavoidable influence in life. They are the primary object of one’s interactions early in life, the primary sustainer of one’s physical, mental and emotional being, and the people who never stop loving and caring for you. Because you view them favorably in so many ways, you are inclined to believe that what they think and do is right. However, all generations of youth also tend to rebel against their parents in that challenging time of adolescence. However, the universal teenage rebellion is taking on a new significance as looming catastrophes, largely the doing of previous generations forebode great destruction. Global warming, depletion of the fossil fuel supply, genetic manipulation, the threats of nuclear technology, and a host of other ills are defining my generation’s historical setting, and are affecting many teens’ attitudes towards the previous generation and towards the world around them.

I probably will not live to see the end of the industrial mode of civilization, but I hope to see it transform into something more sustainable and more human. As I write this, things certainly don’t seem to be moving in the right direction. The unprecedented anti-environmental action of the Bush Administration is causing a backlash that will only grow larger as long as they remain in power. If history is any guide, the pendulum of social thought should swing more towards human survival in the coming years and progress will be made. If events transpire that truly awaken us to our momentous historical opportunity to set the forces of society to work for the long-term benefit of all Earth’s creatures, I am confident that my generation will meet the challenge. In the process of doing so, we will instill our values in the next generation to prevent the pendulum from swinging back again. The political leaders of my generation, like all previous ones, will be of all political stripes. Both sides, however, will have an enhanced environmental and social ethic never before seen in America’s history.

True change will take many generations to affect the most crucial areas of our society: the state of the planet, our relationship with the wider community of life, and the escalation or reduction of violence and war. The wheels of change are starting to turn and the collective mind of our society is starting to think differently, cell by cell, as each individual is exposed to a new paradigm. We are only beginning to see other forms of life as subjects rather than objects and to see that the myth of violence and hatred as redemption against the same is not going to make the world better in the long run. It will not happen overnight, it will certainly take many years, but it will happen nonetheless.

People who are working towards peace, towards animal rights, towards sustainability, towards equality and human rights, et cetera, are all working towards essentially the same goal: a more fair, just and peaceful world. If we could all realize this and begin to work together, in unison, it will come about a lot more quickly. My generation is beginning to see the commonality inherent in all these issues, and that bodes well for our future.

E.F. Schumacher offers practical ways to move forward in his groundbreaking book, Small is Beautiful. He comes from the angle of an economist who is trying to inject a sense of the greater world and the struggle to make it better into Western society’s rigid view of economics. He is trying to induce a shift from an economics where only profit and efficiency matter to one where the well-being of people and the Earth matters. The Greek root of the word economy means “world order,” so naturally, a method of ordering the whole world based on individual profit as the sole objective is disastrous for every human, not to mention nonhuman beings. Schumacher wants to create this shift by looking at economics on a smaller scale. In the large, purely numerical view of the economy, the state of the world is rosy as long as the bottom line is in the black. But on the small picture, in human and bioregional communities, the world looks broken and in need of repair. The ideas presented in Small is Beautiful, when coupled with others aimed at shifting our traditional views of the pillars of our society, provide a great guidebook for such repair.

I am a 20-year-old college student living in North Carolina. I am majoring in Environmental Studies and Political Science at Guilford College. My main interests are environmental and animal protection activism, politics music, baseball, computers, and reading and writing.