Are the Frogs Waking Up?

  Last month on this blog I labeled the 2010s the “Oh Shit! Decade” - the ten year period in which growing numbers of people start to realize that the systems upon which we rely for our survival and lifestyles – those we have designed ourselves and those natural systems which we have been abusing for so many generations – are starting to fail. After generations of taking our natural resources and our institutions for granted, we are beginning to notice there are limits to how much strain Nature and our organizations can take.

The human species, particularly the modern industrialized version, has been slowly lulled into a stupor of unconsciousness concerning the environment. This stupor is, in part, the result of having achieved such technological prowess that attitudes of arrogance and superiority over Nature came easy. Such attitudes led to abuse of so many kinds that we may have irreversibly spoiled the system upon which we humans depend for life. 

These same modern industrialized humans have also created organizational systems that are no longer capable of serving them, and people are beginning to notice this as well.

Over the years I have used the boiled frog parable frequently in my speeches, books and articles to demonstrate how humans have been lulled into a sense of entrancement. Do you recall the parable? If not, here is how it goes:

            Drop a frog into a pan of hot water and it will almost certainly leap from the pan sensing the danger             immediately. However, place the fog in a pan of tepid water and raise the temperature slowly and             the frog gradually grows groggy and finally is boiled to death.

Recently I was talking with a colleague whilst working on a new initiative, FourYears.Go, to which we have both committed ourselves. Mark Dubois is an environmental activist working on the FourYears.Go initiative, a recently-launched coalition of many organizations dedicated to social justice and environmental sustainability. Mark was the international coordinator for Earth Day in 1990 and 2000, events that involved 200 million people from 184 countries. In our conversation, Mark and I agreed that there is an urgent need to confront and deal with the many crises facing humankind at this time. I was stressing the need for us humans to come out of our collective entrancement and engage these issues before they become irreversible, using the parable of the boiled frog. I shared that I had heard more people come to that “oh shit!” moment in recent weeks than ever before, to which Mark exclaimed spontaneously, “The frogs are waking up!”

I loved it! What a great metaphor for our work. What a great saying for a movement that’s been brewing for decades and could be about to become mainstream. All it takes is a few of us “frogs” to come out of our trances and rally those still dozing, arousing the sleepy masses so we don’t all begin the perpetual slumber. After all, unlike the frog in the parable, we can’t simply jump out of the pan. We either make it together or not at all.

NOTE: frog photo by Peter Turla

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[John]

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