Recently, my book No Impact Man -- about my little family's one-year carbon fast -- was released in France. During my many interviews with French journalists, I realized that there was a bashing of the American people going on. The American people were being blamed for the failure of the climate treaty talks in Copenhagen last year.
That American-bashing wasn't fair. People are people and American people, per se, are no less generous and love their children no less than the French, the Germans or the British.
And it is not the American people who have stopped worthwhile climate legislation from passing through the United States legislature. It is corporations. The corporations -- multinational corporations -- whose bottom lines would be affected by a higher price put on fossil fuels.
So the problem is not the "American" way of life. It is that the American way of life has sadly become the corporate way of life. The way of life in the United States is largely under the control of corporations. Even our food is grown on industrial mega-farms.
To blame the American people for the failure of meaningful international action on climate is to miss the point -- and dangerous. Because let's not forget that there is now a Starbucks on the Champs-Elysées in Paris. And check out the number of American-style fast-food restaurants you can now find in British city centers.
In other words, the American way of life, if that's what you want to call it, or the corporate way of life, is moving to Europe. Corporations, sadly, are unlikely to lead us to meaningful change when it comes to climate or any other major social issue if it turns out that it will affect payments to shareholders.
Failing to draw a line in the sand when it comes to corporatization is not only to lose ground on climate change, but it is also to allow a culture to be run on the basis of what is best for shareholders instead of what is best for people.
This is why, as part of my No Impact year, I bought from local farmers, who I knew cared about the land they farmed and the animals they tended. It is why I always advise people that campaign finance reform (the drive to get the corporate money out American politics) may be a necessary precursor to meaningful movement on energy reform.
But the question remains what else "we, the people" (as we say in the United States) should do, beyond our shopping choices. Waiting for the politicians to do something is not the answer, because, as my friend David Korten writes in Agenda for a New Economy, "The leadership for institutional transformation rarely comes from those who depend on existing institutions as their base of power." Real change comes from the grassroots.
So what can be done?
We must counterbalance the corporate/political power axis with citizen power. For starters, this means not abandoning the political system but flooding it. Citizens must become civically engaged until voter numbers outweigh corporate dollars in political decision-making.
But citizens must also exercise their power independently of the politicians. At its simplest, this is a matter of citizens acting to nurture the cultural institutions that support human rather than corporate values -- local farms, community banks, independent merchants, renewable energy -- and starving institutions that don't, i.e. Wall Street and City banks, petrochemical and military industries, etc.
Examples of explosive citizen power can be found throughout history. Think of nonviolent independence and civil rights movements. Many of them started in the same way.
People begin by reflecting their values in how they live their lives, by changing the businesses they patronize or adapting their lifestyles. They search for people who share their values and support their choices. Eventually, they realize that their power increases exponentially when they work together in groups.
In large numbers, we can starve the cultural cancers and enliven the societal healthy tissues more quickly. So it's also a matter of seeking out, or even starting up, organizations that network people with shared values together. And then moving beyond conversation to action.
This may sound onerous, but things are not changing fast enough. And we will get much in return, including the feeling of lives fully lived in a world where we are not victims of the system, but leaders of it.
Cross-posted from the Guardian.