Here is an interesting group in the Bay Area. Like oneVillage Foundation the Pachamama Alliance appears to have a two pronged mission, promoting sustainable development in USA, while also helping helping the indigenous people in Equador.

Their upcoming meeting on the 14th features Lawrence Axil Comras (turns out he participated at planetwork 2004 see his bio there). He’ll be discussing what it means to be green in our consuming patterns. He will address how we can deepen the level of what we each are already doing to make changes in our everyday lives.

His background of expertise comes from his experiences as CEO of an online green products store – Green Home Environmental Store. An effort that grew out of the recognition that consumerism is one of the primary forces harming the world. However he like many of us began to realization that it was not enough to be against consumerism or the capitalist system but to cleverly redesign the systems that promotes waste and overconsumption, thus reversing those negative trends of overconsumption that are pushing the earth’s systems to the brink of failure through business evolution and innovation rather than social unrest (which is not to say that none of that will be necessary). When we recognize this paradox and respond as socially conscious consumers by buying well-designed, environmentally superior products, we can all make a difference in our own lives and in small way make the movement forward towards a better and more conscious global economy. To RSVP, click here…

This is another reminder of the good news is that the green movement has reached a tipping point and there’s a green alternative for just about every kind of product on the market.

What remains to be seen is:

• how these kinds of changes will manifest into wide scale social and economic and political changes
• what the potential implications will be on the status quo
• how those who have a vested interest to defend the status quo will react to this.

Currently critics seeing the current “green revolution” such as James Howard Kunstler can persuasively argue that the mainstream establishment has embraced green technologies because they are packaged in a relatively benign form that is not threatening to conspicuous consumption. Such a superficial, feel good green approach (often labeled as “corporate greenwashing” by progressives) as is now being packaged via the mainstream media will probably have a very limited impact in actually addressing the world urgent issue like global warming, decreasing water and oil supplies and increasing pollution.

Yet the key is in designing built environments and production system that offer a seamless approach to sustainable development that promotes relocalization in a way that is fun and exciting to the local people giving them the power to determine their destiny and to be innovators in their own lives. At the same we need to figure out how to do this in a way that provides a much higher quality of life than is the case with the mainstream lifestyle which increasingly seems to be reaching the law of diminishing returns.

The key for this to happen is for more people to make the connection between their personal health, their personal environment and the impact of those decisions on the larger world in which us 6.5 billion humans share with the rest of the world’s creatures.