We’ll thrilled to have a new blog post to share with you from the delightful Zoe Weil, author of Most Good, Least Harm.

You’re making all the right choices. You’re an organic locavore. Whenever possible, you bike, take public transportation, or walk instead of drive, and when you drive it’s a hybrid. You choose cruelty-free, toxin-free personal care products. You’re a member of a dozen different organizations all with missions you wholeheartedly support. Compact fluorescents? Of course. Bottled water? Never. Yoga and exercise? Regularly. A positive attitude? Absolutely.

But perhaps you, like me, have those dark nights of the despairing soul when you worry whether we really can turn things around on our beleaguered planet. You present a sunny disposition, but deep inside, you sometimes struggle with your own hopelessness. And then you head to your Zumba or Pilates class to sweat away your anxieties and have a shot of wheatgrass to give yourself a boost. You focus on your good choices to stave off any bad feelings lurking below the surface.

But there’s a way to truly lighten your soul, and that is to take all that passion that drives your healthy, humane and sustainable choices and put it not only toward your daily decision-making but also toward your active participation in affecting change.

Mahatma Gandhi was once asked by a reporter, “What is your message?” Gandhi had a big message, of course. He was trying to free his country from British rule using only nonviolent methods, and he was rarely averse to sharing his beliefs with others. But on this particular day, he responded to the reporter by jotting down on a piece of paper, “My life is my message.”

When I first read this, I was stunned by the universal truth of Gandhi’s statement. If Gandhi’s life is his message, I surmised, then my life is my message. Each one of our lives is our message, whether we like it or not. The real question then becomes, “Am I modeling the message I most want to model?” “My life is my message” became a mantra for me, and I sought to make sure that the choices I was making modeled the message I wanted to spread. Readers of this blog know all about this because you do it every day. And that’s fantastic.

But, and this is the hard (gelatin-free) pill to swallow: in today’s world with the huge problems we face, from global warming to escalating worldwide slavery to the horrifying rates of species extinction to unimaginable institutionalized animal cruelty, etc., modeling one’s message isn’t enough. We must also work for change.

There are myriad systems that need transformation: food production, electronics production, energy, schooling, conflict resolution (can’t we come up with an alternative to war?!), architecture, suburban sprawl, transportation, and so on. Even if our individual daily choices do have a positive impact, that isn’t enough to fully transform unsustainable, destructive, and inhumane systems into ones that are restorative, healthy, and just.

But here’s the great news: when we not only harness our energies toward making healthy daily choices, but also uncover our most creative and viable solutions to solve systemic problems, we discover that we have never felt more alive, joyful, and purposeful.

So, what issues do you care about most? What skills and talents do you have? What great ideas do you carry around inside of you that, if enacted, could actually help change an unhealthy system and create a wonderful new avenue for peace?

Here are some ideas others have enacted:

Dara O’Rourke got to thinking as he rubbed sunscreen on his 5-year-old daughter that he should look into what’s in it. When he found out that he was smearing toxins on his daughter, he decided that more people needed to know what he knew. With a team of scientists and researchers he launched www.goodguide.com, creating a business that now allows each of us to learn all sorts of important information about our products. His work enables us to make more conscious choices aligned with our beliefs.

When Katie Redford was in law school, she visited Burma and discovered the horrifying human rights violations perpetrated on the Burmese by a military dictatorship in cahoots with a U.S. oil company. She then wrote a paper invoking an obscure law, the Alien Tort Claims Act, arguing that U.S. citizens have the right to sue American companies for their human rights violations abroad. It took nine years and a group of fellow lawyers to win her case, which set a precedent and thereby changed a system.

Mohammad Yunus was an economics professor in Bangladesh during his country’s terrible famine in the 1970s. He wondered what all his education was for if he couldn’t help his own people, so he went into the village and asked 42 people what they needed. Their answer? A combined $27 to bring rice to market. This launched the microcredit movement, which has since lifted millions of people out of poverty. Yunus created a new banking system so that people with no collateral at all could borrow small amounts of money. He has since won the Nobel Peace Prize. (Notice he didn’t win the Nobel Prize for Economics, but rather for Peace, because lifting people out of poverty creates peace.)

Joan Baez once said, “Action is the antidote to despair.” If ever those dark nights of the soul threaten your peace of mind, remember that your efforts to harness your imagination and creativity on behalf of meaningful, systemic change will not only make a powerful, positive difference in the world but will also bring you incredible satisfaction and sense of accomplishment.

What a wonderful combination: model your message and work for change, two sides of the same coin, one that will fund a peaceful, healthy world for all.

This was first posted on Kris Carr’s blog “Crazy Sexy Life.”

Zoe Weil is the president of the Institute for Humane Education where the world becomes what you teach. She is the author of “Most Good, Least Harm: A Simple Principle for a Better World and Meaningful Life,” “Above All, Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times,” and “The Power and Promise of Humane Education.” Visit her blog.

I love traveling, even though I’m well aware of the carbon footprint I leave when I fly far from home. Traveling is one of my less-than-MOGO (most good) choices, although I do try to minimize my impact, stay in eco-friendly places, and take some comfort knowing that I am positively affecting those who rely on tourism for their livelihoods. Where I live near Acadia National Park I’m reminded all the time that, without tourism, many of my friends and neighbors would have little income, so I try to be a “good traveler” when I leave Maine and support local economies even as I leave my own for awhile.

I went on vacation to Belize a few weeks ago, because for years I’ve wanted to explore the coral reefs to see the incredible undersea life that abounds there. What I didn’t expect, or plan for, was the amazing day I spent with two Mayan brothers in a jungle preserve.

I had half a day and an evening after I left the small atoll island where I’d stayed for 5 days before my flight home, and I decided to head to a somewhat remote national park where there was a single lodge that housed those who wished to explore this beautiful jungle and its myriad waterfalls. I was the only visitor, and the cook was ill, so when I arrived, the only people at the lodge were two young Mayan men, the lodge caretakers.

I spent the afternoon hiking up to the waterfalls with one of them. I asked lots of questions about his life, and he introduced me to lots of edible jungle plants, while asking questions about my life. When we returned to the lodge, his brother told us that the power was out, so we spent a couple of hours that evening talking by candlelight, eating the nuts and papaya I brought to share and talking about our lives. Although I had spent a week reveling in the eye candy of the coral reefs, this day and night may well have been the highlight of my trip.

In the end, my favorite part about traveling is usually not the great sights, the ruins, the flora and fauna, or learning about the history of another place, but rather truly connecting with other people and learning from and sharing with them. This is when I usually laugh, and sometimes cry, and always grow the most. I make new friends and feel like I am giving back a part of myself after all I’ve received.

by Zoe Weil, author of Most Good, Least Harm and Above All, Be Kind

From Zoe Weil, co-founder and president of the Institute for Humane Education and the author of Most Good, Least Harm: A Simple Principle for a Better World and Meaningful Life. Humane Education is more than just ethics and environmentalism. It’s about choosing the Most Good—MOGO—for every interaction you do. Here is Zoe’s most recent blog post from her Humane Connection website.

I was reading Sy Safransky’s Notebook in The Sun magazine this morning. I love this page of my favorite magazine, in which the editor, Sy Safransky, shares short thoughts through individual paragraphs about a range of ideas and experiences. Sy’s writing is always thought-provoking and often moving, and today’s page was so much so that three of his paragraphs will serve as the topics for this week’s blog posts.

Sy wrote this:

As we lay in bed this morning, Norma asked what I was going to do today. “Save the world,” I replied in a deadpan voice. “Did you say ‘save,’” she asked, or ‘savor’?” I laughed. “Try savor,” she said.” (The Sun, January 2010)

This got me thinking. My work is of the “save the world” sort. It’s not as if I have so much hubris as to think that I am going to be instrumental in “saving the world” (and I’m not sure what that means anyway), but I do believe that I have a responsibility to use my skills and knowledge toward creating a more humane, sustainable, and peaceful world as far as I can. And sometimes the weight of this responsibility is heavy, and I feel guilty if I don’t put in what I consider the right amount of “save the world” hours. The truth is, though, that I relish savoring the world, and I do so regularly. I snowshoed this blizzardy morning up our small mountain and savored the incredible beauty of the carpet of fluffy, star-like, sparkling snow thickly coating even the tiniest of branches and turning the evergreens into a Dr. Seuss book.

But often I feel like my life is divided between savoring and saving, and I strive for a balance I can live with.

After my hike this morning I returned home and logged onto the MOGO Online Commons on this first day of our month-long MOGO Online course at the Institute for Humane Education. Today’s exercise for the course comes from my book, Most Good, Least Harm. Participants imagine and then share what they would say to a child who comes up to them on a park bench at the end of their long life and asks what they did to help create the better, safer, healthier, more peaceful, and restored world that the child now lives in (and that the exercise presupposes will come about).

One participant, Kathy Hally, a friend of mine and a local elementary school teacher, wrote this:

“What I would want to be able to say to this child on the park bench:

“My role in helping to change history was easy and enjoyable. It was painless to give my time to animals left in shelters who had been abandoned and/or abused and were lonely and scared. It was easy and fun to pat a cat or throw a ball for a dog and take them for a walk in the woods. It was comforting to have a lonely pet lean up against me and show me how much they liked a little friendship and affection.

“It was satisfying to find ways to spend my money on food that wasn’t sprayed with chemicals or mistreated with cruelty and/or shot up with awful antibiotics and other chemicals. It was painless to buy things I knew were not being made by children your own age in sweat shops and/or other inappropriate child labor means.

“It was interesting to find ways to decrease the amount of pollution I created by knowing how and where things were made all over the world and the impact they had on local people and the globe. It made me appreciate and care about nature more and more.

“It was painless and enjoyable to grow my own organic vegetables to eat and share with friends and family.

“It was fun. Try it.”

I immediately thought how wonderful it was to read a response that was about simultaneously saving and savoring. No distinction. No need to “find balance.” No separation. No either/or. No “now” and “later.”

I know I, like Sy, will continue to distinguish between “saving” days and “savoring” days, but how comforting it was to read Kathy’s response and realize that a shift in attitude, attention, and awareness can meld these two into one.

~ Zoe Weil

From Zoe Weil, co-founder and president of the Institute for Humane Education and the author of Most Good, Least Harm: A Simple Principle for a Better World and Meaningful Life. Humane Education is more than just ethics and environmentalism. It’s about choosing the Most Good—MOGO—for every interaction you do. Here is Zoe’s most recent blog post from her Humane Connection website.

Flying home from Portland, Oregon, on October 12, I sat diagonally across from a woman who became increasingly disruptive, belligerent, and aggressive. I’d missed the initial altercation between her and the man sitting in the chair in front of her, only tuning in when the flight attendant attempted to get her attention (she was masked and hooded with eyes closed and head down) to ask her to move her legs from pushing against the back of his seat. Apparently, she’d been kicking his seat incessantly.

Her reaction was intense and hostile, accusing the man of pushing his chair against her legs, bruising and assaulting her. She would not remove her legs from his chair. She was emotionally out of control and began yelling at the flight attendant, who calmly backed off. Then she began jabbing her neighbor in the middle seat quite hard with her elbow. She clearly knew this woman (who was also masked and hooded). At this point I was watching her attentively, and she was alternately crying, pushing the seat in front of her violently with her legs and hitting her companion.

Eventually a man came to talk to her, showing her his FBI badge and explaining that she needed to settle down or there would be trouble for her at our destination. She just became more enraged, threatening, hostile, and practically begged to be arrested, putting out her arms to be cuffed and saying, “Go ahead, arrest me – I want you to arrest me.” She said she had restless leg syndrome and was on medication for it and that’s why she moved her legs a lot (but this, of course, was no explanation for her violent kneeing of the seat in front of her), and she denied knowing the woman next to her, who was practically mute and kept putting her head in her hands and shaking her head. She also wanted the man seated in front of her, whom she was now accusing of assault, to be arrested. The federal marshal did speak to him separately (he’d been moved to the seat across the aisle). She also began taking pictures of all of us around her.

By the time we landed, she simply refused to follow basic regulations. She wouldn’t put her seat up for landing, and when the flight attendant did so, she pushed it right back. She wouldn’t store her bag under the seat in front of her, and kept taking it out and putting it on her lap.

And so when we landed, we were all told to remain seated, and a police officer came on board and escorted her off the plane. As she was walked off, she yelled at the man who’d been sitting in front of her, “Wife beater!”

The whole time I was observing this situation unfold, I kept thinking, “What’s the MOGO thing to do here? What would the Dalai Lama or Mahatma Gandhi do if they were sitting diagonally across from this woman as I was?” I thought about asking the woman if she needed help because she was clearly suffering, but I didn’t feel that I had the skills to confront her mental illness, and I worried that I could make the situation worse. Each time she was spoken to – by the flight attendants or the federal marshal – the situation briefly escalated.

So I think the MOGO thing for me was to do nothing, which was what I did, and leave the interventions in the capable hands of the crew. I was impressed with how well they handled the situation. They remained calm, professional, and clear and found a good balance between efforts to de-escalate while still imparting the urgency of the situation in demanding that she calm down. Bravo to the crew on United flight 250.

On my second flight home I sat next to a psychologist, and I described what had happened and asked his opinion. What would he have done? It was interesting to hear his thoughts and to know that he would not have intervened either (nor did he think the Dalai Lama would). He made the point that she had some motivation that was unseen to the rest of us. Perhaps, for example, she wanted to be arrested to avoid something at her destination.

At any rate, I learned a few things. First, I learned that others behaving in a MOGO way (as the crew was doing) is enough. One doesn’t necessarily have anything MOGO to add. Second, I learned that I really lacked any skills or knowledge to intervene anyway, but that I was ready and willing to – which was good to know. In the face of the Kitty Genovese horror, when no one called the police as she was killed in a courtyard, despite her desperate cries — which dozens heard — I’m glad to know that my first inclination is not to do nothing, even though in this case it was the MOGO choice in the end. I also learned that we owe a lot of respect, admiration, and appreciation to flight crews. Yes, I’ve experienced the occasional surly flight attendant, but I was so impressed with this crew and their response, and I have a new gratitude for them, given the challenges they face.