Power = to be Vulnerable

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)

A Positive Vision

David D. Kidner's Nature and Psyche: Radical Environmentalism and the Politics of Subjectivity

A positive vision of a future natural world contributes to our own psychological survival. Joanna Macy has written of the despair frequently experienced by environmental activism, a despair that is entirely authentic and understandable given the speed with which the natural order is being demolished, and our apparent powerlessness when faced with overwhelmingly powerful interests. However, as Erik Erikson pointed out, one cannot adequately define one's sense of identity by what one is not. While promoting a positive vision integrates and heals one, devoting one's life purely to opposing what one is against is an act of nihilism in which the culmination of one's own success is self-destruction. (285)