“The Problem Is a Crisis” was an essay included in a small fold-out brochure that Ecology Action mailed out during their early years as an organization, as part of an effort soliciting financial and volunteer support.
In “The Problem Is a Crisis,” Ecology Action posed the question, “How much personal, household, and industrial waste can our environment absorb and still support life?” It pointed a finger not just at the logging companies, mining companies, and polluters, but also at the consumer society, and the reader who was part of it: “the ultimate responsibility rests with our own desires for more consumption at a cheaper price.”
In the section of the essay titled “A Crisis,” Ecology Action took up the problem of unmitigated population growth and advocated for a vision of limits:
In “A Unifying Idea,” the last part of the essay, Ecology Action tried to sketch the larger perspective that might address the crisis in full.
This essay was the second part of a larger flier that, in addition to soliciting funding, sketched the purpose and main objectives of the Ecology Action movement, with an emphasis on the direct-action demonstrations that Ecology Action had staged.
The symbolic filling in of money bags with mud from the bay and the taking over of a small park within a traffic island in Berkeley (the first “People’s Park”): these were the direct-action events of Ecology Action’s past, and gave a sense of what the organization might stage in the future.
