Lately I am making a conscious choice to pay much less attention to the arena of what I call “violent and intrusive landscape maintenance operations.”
Not that it’s not loud and disruptive, just that I am making a choice to not focus my attention there. It’s a powerful choice. It’s not the same as giving up; it’s more like freeing up energy and brain space for things that will actually work.
I’ve known for a while that certain procedures are held in place by a variety of factors, and are therefore not likely a good leverage point for trying to make change. (Your mileage may vary, depending on your skills, inclinations, and personality attributes. If you feel drawn to try to make change at a certain leverage point, I say have at it, unless and until such time as you decide that it’s not working and that something else might work better.)
As for me, there are other leverage points I’m involved with that are producing better results (nationwide movements etc.) than my painful focus on extreme mowing, tree mutilation, etc. –so I will stick with those.
People don’t realize that a lot of what we see as policy handed down by government from on high, is actually the trickling-UP of social norms. I have to remind myself of that and focus accordingly.
It may seem impossible for one person to change a social norm. And it is! However, shifting the social norms is an act of transmission, and that starts from one person to another.
Further exploration:
• If you really want to dive deep into leverage points and systems thinking, please read the classic Thinking in Systems: A primer, by Donella Meadows. https://donellameadows.org