It’s easy to find a metric ton of literature on any number of topics that will tell you exactly what’s wrong with the current system, and just how fucked we really are. From environmental, to social, to political issues, everything pretty much sucks. This is, after all, one of the most common critiques of the left - it’s a lot easier to pretend that nothing’s wrong than it is to hear about how much really is wrong but not know what to do about it. I think environmentalists suffer from this kind of burnout a lot less than social activists, since it’s actually easy to make money with efficiency and sustainability, so it’s much simpler to get the backing of businesses. If you’re an anarchist (or interested in any sort of social justice, really), you can read a ton of theory on why it’s great (”Gramsci is Dead,” “Change the World Without Taking Power,” and plenty more) but nothing to tell you how to kickstart any sort of social current. Everything out there is descriptive…what we need is prescriptive, something that’ll tell us what to do.

Obviously you need to have some basis in the theory so you can make critical decisions about your actions, but that’s the easy part. There need to be more concrete examples of groups that are affecting genuine change, and more importantly, how they’re doing it. It’s a lot easier to feel empowered when you know that something can be done in the first place (and a lot easier to feel guilty because you’re too damn lazy to do anything about it, but that’s another story).

One really good example of a book that blends both descriptive and prescriptive is Worldchanging. It’s essentially a 600 page tome of case studies about living more sustainably. It’s got the easy stuff, the hard stuff, the local stuff, and the international stuff, all in one compendium with suitably bite-sized entries. The writing style be a bit overly bubbly with optomism at times, but that’s certainly better than being overly pessimistic. Cynicism is obedience.

If anyone has good resources, post ‘em up.