Joanna Macy's "Working through Environmental Despair" from Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, eds. Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner.
Power, which is the ability to effect change, works from the bottom up more reliably and organically than from the top down. It is not power over, but power with; this is what systems scientists call "synergy." Here power, far from being identified with invulnerability, requires just the opposite---openness, vulnerability, and readiness to change. This indeed is the direction of evolution. (256)
How does power as process---"power with" rather than "power over"---operate in our lives? We don't own it. We don't use it like a gun. We can't measure its quantity or size. We can't increase it at our neighbor's expense. Power is like a verb; it happens through us. (257)
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