I have always considered myself a decent citizen. Recently, however, I’ve had a crisis of values. I went abroad and studied how people in Costa Rica are trying to rustle up some sustainability. I visited some national parks, some trash-choked beaches; met some farmers, milked a cow and drank what I milked; chewed some fried yucca as I ruminated on the nature of nation-wide sustainability. I came back, and I didn’t entirely believe in what I had been doing before. I saw that I had been part of an attitude at Whitman College that I shouldn’t have been a part of: that no one should be a part of.

My beef (from Thundering Hooves, mind you, the local grass-fed beef vendor) is that many people are calling loud and clear for change on a large scale, but they are waiting to change their own lives until they see the holy-grail: A golden financial incentive from their government making it easier for them to build a more sustainable lifestyle, and a moral policy telling them they should begin. I’m here to tell you to WAKE UP!! Changing the way you live won’t get any easier, bunny-slippers! You can change the way you live RIGHT NOW, and you don’t need someone to sound the starter pistol, because it has already been fired. You missed it, we all missed it, when it was fired decades ago by scientists and concerned citizens who knew they would have to start somewhere, and proceeded to do so. Remember the great thing about America? We are our own government: change starts with us. Waiting for the government to do it for us means waiting for us to do it for us, and that can turn into a very silly waiting game indeed.

Here I’m going to pluck one of the few gray hairs off of Michael Pollan’s smart-ass head and wave it around in hopes that I (and you, if you want) absorb some of his intelligence. According to Michael, we have become a society of helpless nincompoops. Most of us have no idea how to make a knife or assemble a toaster, much less build the house we live in or stitch the clothes on our backs. We obviously don’t know how to entertain ourselves without electronics imported from China. Most embarrassingly, we don’t know how to grow our own food. We need map quest to find the Whitman Organic Garden, for God’s sake! (It’s the lot with the towering sunflowers at the corner of Penrose and Pacific Streets, the one with the lush, delicious produce that anyone can pick for free.)

Did the people who invented these things (factory-made cutlery, toasters, cookie-cutter houses, JCPenny, mass entertainment, and supermarkets) foresee that we would become so dependent on them that we’ve forgotten how to live without them? Maybe the bastards did, and if so, then they’ve got us just where they want us. Regardless, our society is so specialized that we barely do anything ourselves anymore. And in the craft called citizenship, the trend is the same. Instead of imagining what a sustainable community would look like and cultivating our own lives in accordance with that vision, we protest righteously for those specially-trained in powerful decision-making (politicians) to do the work of envisioning for us, and to somehow make that vision a reality. It’s a trickle-down politics. And this we call civic engagement.

If we are really so helpless, we need to start to Do-It-Ourselves again. After learning a little about growing food for a semester, I can’t help but divulge a well-kept secret about that lost art: It’s fun. That’s right, I said the f-word. And on top of being fun, learning how to do and make things yourself: things that specialized markets would otherwise sell you: builds a sense of accomplishment and agency that being a consumer does not.

Doing-it-yourself also invariably involves other people. Believe it or not, going to the farmers market on Saturday mornings with friends is actually a form of civic engagement. So is gardening, and canning food for the winter, and brewing your own beer; so is learning how to cook, or how to recognize nearby edible plants (Grapes are in season right now), or how to ride the bus. I paid 25 cents to take Valley Transit for the first time the other day, and I made three friends: Mr. & Mrs. Arbini and Jerry the bus driver from New York City. Did you know Valley Transit provides dial-a-ride service for people with disabilities, and pickup from evening jobs? Or that there is an after-school tutoring and karate program that picks kids up in a Ninja Van? Or that at this moment one of the last Giant Palouse Earthworms, all 1.5 albino meters of it, may be burrowed 5 meters below your very feet? If we actually explored the part of Walla Walla that’s not for convenient, packaged sale, I think we’d discover we live in a cooler place than any of us realize.

So, Mr. Pollan, tell us in a witty aphorism what you’ve taught us so far. “Merely to give, to spend, even to vote, is not to do,” Michael says. But I would add: “to ask is not to get; some things you have to do yourself.” Collectively advocating a desire for change, while important, should not be confused with embodying in personal, non-consumptive decisions the change one wishes to see in their community.

Let me repeat: I am NOT saying that advocating for large-scale institutional change and changing the way you live are mutually exclusive. In fact, the one doesn’t mean a damn thing without the other, so let’s stop trying to choose between the two. This double-tasking may take some sacrifice; we may need to give up some of the activities we’re attached to (like giving your dog Fifi her weekly perm, or spending hours a day on Facebook/iTunes, or playing organized sports, or, God forbid, going to that class in political theory) in order to make it work. It’s genuinely hard to change the activities that define your person and be a citizen both at the same time; it’s like juggling tomatoes while trying to punch the right chad on a Florida ballot. This civic adventure will be hard and strange at first. But Frodo Baggins didn’t put the kibosh on the Dark Lord’s plan to make the world one big stormcloud by staying in the Shire, and neither should you.

So. Let’s stop toodling around. Let’s take the personal initiative to radically change the way we live. Let us, in Pollan’s words, “acquire the moral standing to demand changes in behavior from others: from other people, other corporations, even other countries.” Drop the shopping bag full of processed food and imported electronics. Pick up a sustainable hobby. With any luck our hands will soon be free to sow some small seeds of change.