A few weeks before he passed away I had the pleasure to speaking with Larry Bloch. Our conversation focused mostly on his activism and life after he departed New York and Wetlands Preserve for greener pastures of Brattleboro, Vermont.

Here’s what he had to say about social media and physical gathering spaces…

“There’s a benefit of having places where people gather and are deliberate and can share in a human contact kind of way, and I think you get more investment from people, making sort of a commitment to something or group kind of dynamic, it’s a little different, it’s easier to click online to make an intention, or to say something electronically, in a spur of the moment kind of way, but it doesn’t necessarily represent a follow through. Part of my activism has grown to learn that without the necessary elements of identifying your goal, of being able to visualize the steps that you can take that will predictably achieve your goal, and making sure that you have the necessary energy to take those steps are crucial in getting what you want, achieving your goal, making the world a better place, you can fill in the formula yourself. And I think that there’s a tendency, and has been for awhile now, where that formula is not well-followed by activists, whether it is that they don’t initially identify their goal, or whether it is that they don’t move forward on goals that are predictably achievable. Or that they do the first two, but don’t consider properly what the individual or the group’s energy to recognize whether or not the goal is achievable, because there’s enough time and whatever you fill in to take those steps.”

More to come…

Later days and peace,
Dean