Small is Beautiful - Slow is Cozy

Here is an ethical problem I frequently have to face: I criticize the very companies that at least occasionally pay my bills. Here I write an article against the automobile industry, there I translate contracts or technical documentation for them, because I need money to survive. Here I campaign for a better climate-protection-policy and carry out research about environmental impact assessment, yet on the other hand I utilize airplanes to fly to environmental conferences, and I go to town by car, since there is no public transportation in my area. Here I criticize world governments, and at the same time in almost twenty years of arguing, I could not even convince my own father to look for alternatives to high-impact pesticides and herbicides in farming. And such is the truth: most street- and grassroots activists (in the West) duly use cars, when they can afford them; many duly eat fast-food and meat, many duly wear Nike shoes and quite a few forget their grand ideals as soon as they manage to grab a well paid job. Also I see little positive attitude among activists. I rarely see concrete and realistic suggestions about what a better future and what a better society should look like. Usually everyone seems to know what it should not look like, but does that help in the long run? How can reason and common sense replace greed and corporate profit interest? And what do reason and common sense look like? We do need intelligent solutions, we do need clever technology (sometimes low-tech, sometimes high-tech) to a certain extend. There is no way back to caves and grass-shacks. I think what we mainly need is a significant slowdown, away from the nonsensical fast paced continuos-growth-dogma. Small is beautiful - and slow is cozy. We need to get back to a human pace.