Joe Jenkins guest blogs for #YesAllMen and reflects on the importance of our personal responsibility in taking action
A few years back, a couple of close friends shared their master plan with me. They would save enough money to buy some land, away from any major cities or towns; build a small wooden house self-powered by natural resources and tend the land to provide enough plant-based food to both live and trade locally. Within a few years they would be totally off-grid, no longer complicit in a society they viewed as fundamentally unfair, unsustainable and unsuited to flourishing life. I admired the simplicity and purity of their ambition. They would no longer have to make any compromises in the way they lived, no messy trade-offs, no moral conflict. They would live lightly on the planet, their individual footprint contained, doing no harm. And yet they would also be doing very little to change society itself. The world would continue on its unsustainable path. My friends could feel satisfied that it wasn’t their fault; but they couldn’t claim to be m...