Social Change is Enlightened by Love

People care more deeply about our social and environmental challenges than we realize.

One of the reasons our initiatives don’t have the impact we’d like is because there aren’t enough people falling in love with them.

There are three possible reasons:

  • We aren’t in love with the issue ourselves – its mystery, its brokenness its contradictions, its beauty and ugliness. It’s in our heads more than our hearts.
  • We haven’t found a way to tap into what it is about an issue that people care deeply about.
  • We haven’t found a way to make our issue loveable.

The necessity to do something is usually clear. The challenge is to enlighten necessity with love.

Without that love we are more likely to ignore, walk away, get distracted or eventually give up.

EH!

I document landscapes that, whether you think of them as beautiful or monstrous, or as some strange combination of the two, are clearly not vistas of an inexhaustible, sustainable world.

My hope is that these picture will stimulate a process of thinking about something essential to our survival; something we often take for granted – until it’s gone.

Edward Burtynsky, on his exhibit Water. See also Artsy’s Edward Burtynsky Page.

If you listen, you will careen through a panorama of the contradictions of existence. You can hear the living land, and the land under assault. You can hear children being born and conceived. You can hear the torture of the innocent, and the glory of the tenacious, unstoppable force of life. If you listen you can actually hear the sound of a people defying genocide to rise, wounded but alive, strong, and ready to fight.

Geoff Berner on Tanya Tagaq’s album Animism

Listen here to an amazing live performance by Tanya Tagaq in the Glen Gould studio with Jesse Zubot and Jean Martin.

Recent Posts

Singable Songs for the Young at Heart

Beautifying Social Change

Social Innovation – A Definition of Opportunity

Impact 6 is Ready to Make a Dent in the Conversation

The Spark that Ignites the Social innovator’s Journey

 Share with others

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>