It's no wonder, James Hillman the eco-psychologist pointed out at a national environmental conference last week at the Omega Institute, that half the people in this country are depressed, medicated, in therapy or chasing some form of enlightenment. They're in despair about the state of the world and know that it is being destroyed; that would depress anyone. The withdrawal from the world that results from depression is, Hillman says, a simple way of opting out of the destructive process. If your legs don't get you out of bed, you can't do too much damage to the planet.

Hillman's tonic was not more therapy, better medication or more meditation, but action. If you show up at your therapist's office tense and angry, because you just drove sixty miles through horrendous traffic, avoiding raging drivers and viewing ugliness, you're not angry at mommy and daddy for some long ago hurt. You are angry because of what you've just been through.

One prescription Hillman had was not Prozac or Saint John's wart, but to sit in the morning and practice, not meditation but letter-writing to elected officials about what you're outraged about. Rather than walking aimlessly for exercise, walk or run or bike to the post office and mail your letter.

The conference speakers were international environmental heavy hitters including chimpanzee advocate Jane Goodall, food policy guru Francis Moore Lappe', and Anita Roddick, iconoclastic founder of the Body Shop. Many of them are now grandparents and all remain passionately active, for their children, their grandchildren and the earth.

This conference, held at the Omega Institute in New York, was not a "feel good" or "feel bad" meeting, but a real call to action. There was laughter when Amory Lovins, droll guru of energy efficiency, spoke of "Suburban Assault Vehicles". Tears flowed freely when Jane Goodall talked of forty years of watching the world's chimp population decline from two million to two hundred thousand and watching the desperation of local people increase as their environment degraded at the same time. Goodall brought the house down when she confessed to always having wanted to be Tarzan's Jane. Then she asked us all slyly, "Don't you think I would have made a better Jane?"

The meeting brought cross-fertilization of ideas between artists, spiritualists, scientists, activists, writers, corporate types and bureaucrats. An ecological whole of human interests realizing there was only one challenge with many forms -- to save the planet. Considerable animosity was expressed towards the World Trade Organization, George W. Bush and genetically modified foods. Debate raged throughout the meeting about the possibility of changing corporate thinking versus the need to limit corporate power so it could not continue destroying the earth in a blind quest to satisfy the bottom line. The new guerilla tactics are not based on guns but knowledge.

Frances Moore Lappe' told of one village in India that had catalogued and registered all its indigenous plants to prevent corporate grabbing of their genetic stock. Visionary economist Hazel Henderson said, "It's time to export the recipe, not the jam." Amory Lovins continued to insist as he has for over twenty-five years, that waste reduction is very profitable and the corporations will get on board as soon as someone shows them how. He used the example of Interface Carpets whose stock went up 127% while its overall waste decreased more than 90%. He alerted us to look for the 100 mpg "Hypercar" designed at his Rocky Mountain Institute, to be on the market by 2005.

There were many gray-haired activists who'd been at this battle since before well before the first Earth Day. Eve, dubbed herself a "Frog and Fern Lady". She sported a name tag with the title "Earth Elder". Silver rings with frog and fern emblems adorned her fingers, reminders of a successful fight with a Chicago area politician, who had told her, "You frog and fern ladies won't be able to save that grove of linden trees". At the other end of the spectrum, the whole senior class of a local high school was there, invited on scholarship to partake in this ecological knowledge feast.

The conference started with the unconventional postulate posed by World Watch Institute founder Lester Brown. If you believe the ecological systems that support life on this planet are damaged and failing badly, the question of whether we are too late to do anything about it is irrelevant. "Why isn't that question important?", Brown asked the audience rhetorically, and answered himself, saying that if you think we have time to turn the ship around, you become complacent and do nothing, but if you say the ship is irreparably damaged and she's sinking, then you despair and do nothing.

Gunter Pauli's story on the final day about the heart of the whale shows the way to a hopeful future. A very cheap solution to irregular heartbeat has been found, not in the manufacture of smaller, better cheaper pacemakers, but in the chemistry of the whale's bloodstream. A medical scientist has observed the way whales combine potassium and calcium to create the internal electricity they need to drive their giant hearts to pump over 100 gallons of blood a minute through their massive bodies. This knowledge caused him to replace a man's failing pacemaker with an adjusted combination of these two common elements delivered on a skin patch. The patient thrived. Now NASA is funding the research so when we send people to Mars on long space flights, they won't experience the predicted heart failure by electrolyte imbalance.

"You've got to fall in love with the world to save it" were the words from Hillman that resonated as I left Omega to return to earth.

This article originally appeared in the Chapel Hill News on September 16, 2001. Blair Pollock lives in Chapel Hill and firmly believes that the future can be the one we envision.