Many good people are involved in activism but on the whole it appears that the approaches activists use do not touch on the source of our problems and tend to introduce further fragmentation.  Some key aspects of David Bohm’s work for activists would be  how thought is at the source of our problems, how any plan that leaves what things mean to people unchanged may be missing the point, and how laying blame on industry, government, and elites for the current state of affairs is still missing the mark in terms of addressing our problems.

In the book Changing Consciousness: Exploring the Hidden Source of the Social, Political, and Environemntal Crises Facing our World (out of print), David Bohm states the following in a conversation with Mark Edwards:

Everyday life is pervaded with another kind of thought.  Such thought is what generally decides what is important and what is not.  For example, this everyday thought decides that it is important for you to make your loving, to have a family, to get ahead in your company, to protect your country, to back up your religion, to make money, to develop more roads.  All this contains implicit values that drive you.  That is to say, the collective thought of humanity contains values that are contrary to what we are saying here.  It’s not primarily the politicians who are doing it, nor the businesspeople.  It’s not because people have bad motives, but rather it is because of the ordinary, everyday person person pursuing his or her ordinary, everyday life, who is caught up in this web of thought.  Being caught up that way, people quickly get overwhelmed and forget what they were thinking about.  So we need sustained attention to thought.

Even if we were to take some concrete practical steps to reforest Africa and to do all sorts of other things–stop the emissions that produce acid rain, reduce the production of carbon dixoide, which is changing the global climate, and so on–still, vast numbers of poor people are going to be drive to do all sorts of things against the ecological balance unless we all feel responsible for them.  And the basic pattern of our thought is that we do not feel this way.