Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays. In search of a better way to live and make a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works.
First time you visit
the new site you can resubscribe to How to Save the World's posts (RSS
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My brilliant brother
Alan has moved the entire archive of 2,500 posts, and 14,000 comments,
to the new site, so everything can be accessed on
the new site right back to the start of the blog in 2003.
In the transition,
some font sizes came out a bit wonky (my old text editor used some old
html conventions that are no longer supported) and there's a bit of
clean-up to do, but if you notice anything terribly wrong, please let
me know by e-mail.
Thanks for your
patience during the reconstruction period, and for putting up with the
old comments server -- the new one is much better.
I've been travelling, so
my weekly update links have piled up for three weeks. There is some
important reading here, and as usual the must reads are in the first
section.
This is a first notice that, as of December 31, this blog will be
moving to a Wordpress blog at http://howtosavetheworld.ca
since Radio Userland, which has hosted this blog since its inception
nearly seven years ago, is ceasing its collaborative operations with
Salon. If you change your bookmarks to the new link now, it will take
you back here until the official switchover. Thanks.
this
hilarious bit of 'systems thinking' is from holytaco.com; thanks to fer_ananda
(Fernanda Ibarra) and Amy Lenzo
for the link
PREPARING
FOR CIVILIZATION'S COLLAPSE: UNDERSTANDING WHO WE'VE BECOME
Walking
Away from Our Colonial Culture:
Derrick Jensen explains that the first step in understanding and
preparing ourselves to end the damage of civilization culture is to deprogram
ourselves from the colonial cultural indoctrination that makes us
afraid to bring it down, and
reconnecting with all-life-on-Earth, starting with just doing something
effective that we are particularly good at doing.
Copenhagen
is a trip to hell for those who truly and most sincerely grasp the
scope of the problem. In Hell, whether your kids and grandkids have
enough to eat, whether we have resource wars over the remaining water
are treated as distant tertiary (if that) issues, over how much money
we can get for not burning the last bits of rainforest. In Hell,
politicians who view this as a purely political issue - they will be
long out office before their constituents suffer much - puff themselves
and their nation, making small commitments they probably won't keep,
with no real grasp of what is needed, while the people who are already
paying the price get hosed again. And good people, who actually really
do give a shit and are watching their life's work be ignored in every
meaningful respect get to describe future suffering, and watch people
shrug and move on.
My
friend Pat Meadows, a very, very smart woman, has a wonderful idea she
calls “The Theory of Anyway.” What it entails is
this – she argues that 95% of what is needed to resolve the
coming crisis in energy depletion, or climate change, or whatever is
what we should do anyway, and when in doubt about how to change, we
should change our lives to reflect what we should be doing
“Anyway.” Living more simply, more frugally, using
less, leaving reserves for others, reconnecting with our food and our
community, these are things we should be doing because they are the
right thing to do on many levels. That they also have the potential to
save our lives is merely a side benefit.
Learning
to Live in Now Time: Many
biologists hypothesize that wild creatures, and perhaps some
prehistoric human cultures, live/lived "outside of time" as we know it,
the linear progression from past to future -- without the sense of time
as a constraining dimension at all. In times of stress these creatures
do suddenly snap into our linear "clock" time, but in times of leisure
they lose that sense of time, and their joyful moments are essentially
eternal. We apparently lost this capacity -- in part because our modern
civilization's stress is ever-present, and in part because our brains
form in response to what we are taught in infancy, and what we are
taught is that clock time is "real". We can no longer think otherwise.
This, I think, is what Presence is all about, and why it is so elusive
to us. Two recent articles touch on this:
If
I don’t like the answer the
Magic Eight Ball gives, I turn it over and try again. Eventually,
“It
is certain” shows up in the inky window, and I know
“Will I be able to
write something good?” or “Am I to find
love?” will have the outcome I
desire. Surely one can trust the Eight Ball to know these things. I can
sleep.
If I don’t like the way these cards tell my future,
I’ll do it two more times. Isn’t this a
best-of-three game?
I can reason my way around anything, even the opening
“Caution about
the present” card. Of course I am being cautious.
Aren’t I? Well, yes,
in my usual incautious manner of approaching anything. It is the last
card that tells the truth, however. I do not need to shuffle the deck
again, hurrah. “A good augury.” I will take it. I
can live on auguries
in the absence of proofs. It is all I need, along with all I already
have.
Personally,
I think it far more important for those who have surplus resources to
put those resources into obtaining as much control as possible over the
essentials of their own existence. There are many hard assets one could
buy now that may not be available later - assets that you could use to
feed yourself, keep yourself warm or provided clean water. This is a
much more important use for your wealth than owning something you
intend to bury in a hole in the ground and sit on.
Yes
Men and Accomplices
Make Canadian Government Look Like Idiots:
That's not hard, since our right-wing minority PM is a climate change
denier, but the
Yes Men outdid themselves with a triple-barrelled spoof of Canada's
absurd climate change inaction:
They faked a "change of heart" Canadian Government press announcement,
then they faked the Canadian Government's response to their own fake
announcement, and then they faked a third-world country's heartbroken
response to learning the initial announcement was a fake. Absolutely
brilliant.
The
Amazing Intelligence of Crows:
Like humans, crows and other corvids developed larger brains (and hence
tools) because, if they hadn't they would not have survived. Look
at some of the things they do.
Thanks to CreatvEmergence
(Michelle James) for the link.
Light
unmitigated by leaves can change in an instant.
This is what makes deserts both so alluring and so unforgiving
— that lack of moderation. Sharp contrasts appeal to the eye
as well as to the moral imagination
The condition of the snow can change by the hour: what held you up at
dawn might crumble under your boots at ten. The only constant is the
need to walk and walk and walk, for warmth more than exercise and for
revelation more than warmth.
In a radically simplified landscape there are fewer places to hide, and
things that had been hidden are selectively revealed, in strong light
and with maximum contrast: that’s what I mean by revelation.
Nothing mystical about it. And the extreme conditions should serve to
remind us that revelations are not necessarily pleasant; a preference
for pleasant news and comforting beliefs can be a real obstacle to an
accurate perception of reality.
The desertedness of deserts is of course another big part of their
appeal. You can be alone with your demons. The wintertime desert is
barren, devoid of fertility — but as anyone who has chosen to
remain child-free will tell you, this can be a gift, too. All sorts of
things need open space to flourish. Biologically speaking, the extreme
environments known as barrens in the eastern U.S., like the western
deserts, often accommodate species found nowhere else.
So what seems barren to most might be for some the most fruitful
country imaginable, the moment-by-moment mutability as welcome as the
phases of an unpredictable moon.
We revisit other memories. Then the male nurse comes in with two
hypodermics. This is something he remembers how to do; like riding, it
is in his muscle memory, not the shriveled synapses of some tiny
portion of his brain that has taken away everything he is--his past.
So, while he's in the bathroom, I ask, with my eyes, cocking my head to
one side, and the nurse knows what I want to know. "Oh, it's always
this way. He'll get it back, don't worry."
So that he has something to do--he is a person whose worst fear is not
moving, not having somewhere to go--I ask him to walk me to the
elevators. Slowly, in his sock feet. The door opens; a quick hug, and I
back in. The door closes.
On the dark highway I move forward into space. Random songs on the
radio speak only to me, as they have been doing for a couple of years
now. I wonder how it is they can be so specific, then I realize: they
are only ever about two things, love, and loss. Both of which are
behind me, down the hospital corridor, and ahead of me, in a place
called home.
Probably,
Then: From Christian Anton
Gerard, in Orion:
If
I lived in a forest and you lived somewhere else, maybe in the forest,
maybe not, no difference, just somewhere else, with a different
language, and you found me in my forest and we had to talk, had to find
out if the other was dangerous, I would point at a waterfall and say,
maybe, waterfall and you would say, la fin du monde. We’d
stand there looking at each other as if we were talking about the thing
or maybe what we wanted from the other. We’d probably point
to a few more things. It would feel important. Like the end of the
world or maybe like the world itself. Probably, then, we’d
realize the world is big. Much bigger than either of us had
anticipated, and one of us, without doubt, would walk away.
This is a continuation,
as the year draws to a close, of a set of short vignettes I wrote as
the year began.
IV
a couple with urgent, anxious looks in their eyes
enter a vegan cafe;
their basset hound companion lies down in front of the cafe
to wait, as if she were accustomed to this routine
the couple brings in a wheeled baby carriage
piled high with old, worn plastic bags full of what i guess to
be used clothes
they sit, squeezed together, in one huge overstuffed chair by the door
and kiss, then order, carefully, from the menu;
he pulls out a newspaper with a bunch of ads circled
and they talk about them, pointing in various directions at the street
to show where, relative to the cafe, the addresses in the ads are
located
the cafe worker who brings their food knows them
and they chat for a few moments;
he proudly puts his hand on his partner's stomach
and she smiles and blushes
he is wearing a pair of sad, threadbare gloves
as he counts out the coins for the bill
reaching twice into his pocket to ensure he has enough
as they leave, the worker congratulates them;
they feed the leftovers to the basset, who eats them enthusiastically
and then the woman takes the newspaper with the circled ads
and walks off in one direction
and the man takes the basset's leash
and walks off in the other
V
at a table near the back of the cafe
a young woman sits reading;
she is wearing a cap with cat ears, and a striped jacket with a cat's
tail,
and a giant black felt hat with a slip marked "5 1/2" tucked in the band
at the next table a woman and her young daughter are eating vegan nachos
and the girl laughs and points at the cat-woman
and is shushed by her mother
the cat-woman smiles and winks at the little girl
and then signals her in mime -- a raised finger "wait"
and then the finger curls in and wags slowly "come over here"
as she pulls an ocarina out of her bag
and begins to play a haunting tune
and the little girl, delighted, begins to dance among the tables
VI
a man with a sad smile comes into the cafe
and sits, alone, at a table for two,
pulling out his laptop, logging in,
tapping the keys slowly, hesitantly
a kris delmhorst song
comes on the cafe's music system
and he quietly sings along:
after
all of these years, look at me here
with a love song stuck in my throat
got the weight of the world on my shoulders, i won't let it go
how can i dive right down in the deep blue sea
and still hope to find my way home
when i stumble on my way to the shore,
when all of the airplanes, all of the cars,
and all the miles in the world
are still not enough to quite reach your door
after all of these years, will you look at me here
with this love song stuck in my throat
got the weight of the world and there's not too much else i can hold
he's smiling broadly now, a giant grin from ear to ear
but if you look closely, you can see
his face is streaked with tears
Last
evening I had an astonishing discussion with three of my colleagues in
our Second Life community. The topic was love, and whether we have any
control over who we love (whether it is at least in part a "rational"
decision, or strictly a matter of chemistry). People in Second Life
fall in love (very seriously, and sometimes traumatically) all the
time, which would seem to suggest that there's a lot more to love than
pheromones. But that doesn't mean that what we call "love" isn't still
a construct of our body chemistry, informed by our intellectual and
sensory perceptions about the object of our affections. Or so I thought.
My skepticism is rooted in a belief that we love who we imagine someone to
be, not who they really are
(we can never really know who another person really is). Our body
chemistry's response is to this imagined persona, which may or
may not be a close approximation of who that person "really" is. To
that extent, Second Life avatars can either amplify or distort our
perception of who the person we love "really" is, depending on a host
of factors. Avatars are (in the opinion of most, anyway) usually
"younger" and more "physically" attractive than the "real" people they
represent, and surprisingly few Second Life people communicate with
those they love in voice, rather than text. This would almost seem to
imply that people feel the need for the artifice of the text interface
(the opportunity to "compose" what they say and disguise their voice)
to be more "lovable". Is this a form of dishonesty, or is it just play,
and what is our responsibility when it gets serious?
This is not really new -- "pen pals" have often fallen in love with
each other before they've met or even spoken in real time with each
other, and, as with Second Life, some of these affairs make the
transition to real-time, face-to-face relationships, and others don't.
What is it, then, that drives us to fall in love with someone,
especially someone we have never physically "met"? This is, of course,
a complex process, but my assumptions about this process were shaken to
their roots by my colleagues last evening. I had always believed it was
evolutionary -- that we are "programmed" to fall in love with those our
body believes would be excellent biological and genetic mates. But what
they told me is that what is often most important is security
-- which has two components:
Physical/Financial
Security: "Does this person
bring to the relationship the skills and resources that complement my
own, such that we will be significantly more comfortable together than
separate?"
Emotional Security:
"Will this person be here for me when I need them?"
As obvious as this is, I confess that, when my colleagues articulated
it, it blew me away. I had never really thought of this as being a
critical criterion in determining whether love blossoms, and lasts.
This myopia is probably due to the fact that, having a large ego and
never having had to worry about my own security, I was oblivious to how
important it is to many people.
It never occurred to me that someone could "choose" not to fall in love
with someone who did not offer them security (or actually made them
less secure) ot "choose" to fall in love with someone who did offer
them security, even if the "chemistry" was less than ideal. Initially I
shrugged such "choices" off as cold-blooded or opportunistic, but then
I realized how unfair this judgement really was.
The emotional (far from cold-blooded) desire for security in a loving
relationship is every bit as evolutionary a development as pheromone
chemistry. Falling in love with someone because they're strong, tall,
healthy or beautiful is no more "instinctive" than falling in love with
someone because they're financially independent, or a "good provider",
or, most important of all, committed and caring -- willing and
able to be there through thick and thin. These are all prescriptions
for survival, and hence it is not surprising that the intuitive desire
for such qualities in a lover has been selected for in our evolution
since we appeared on the planet.
Sara told me last night, sometimes "silly men can't process their own
feelings so they rationalize them to death instead." She's exactly
right. That's why, once I acknowledged the importance of security in
"deciding" who we love, it explained a whole raft of behaviours, needs
and wants that I had always found inexplicable, "irrational", and even
unseemly:
Why people put up with
so much grief from relationships, as long as the person causing that
grief clearly still loves them (or at least says they do).
Why young women hook
up with men who one would think are too old for them, and who wouldn't
seem to have anything in common with them -- provided those men are
very secure and/or healthy, and genuinely and deeply care for these
younger partners.
Why, all other things
being equal (which they rarely are) women tend to love men slightly
older and more secure than they are (they want them to be around for
them when they get older -- so many women outlive their male partners)!
Why polyamory works
(the security sought can be spread among several lovers, so if
something happens to one there is still security from others); why it
often doesn't (with no primary relationship, there are constant doubts
about whether any
of the people one loves will, when push comes to shove, be there for
them); and why relationships between poly and monogamous people are so
difficult (very different expectations and needs for security).
Why, for people secure
in themselves, being in love is more important than being loved (it
gives their lives purpose, and a good chemical buzz, while they don't
need the security of being loved in return). And hence, why people who
lack security in their lives need to be loved more than they need to be
in love.
The possibility that
people (like me) who are very secure in themselves in this terribly
insecure, attention- and affection-starved world are just disconnected
from their real feelings and needs -- and why we tend to find some
other people distressingly "needy", while they find us cold, smug and
distant.
To the extent we bring factors such as security into the
"decision-making" on who we love and don't love, this would suggest
that we do
have some "choice" in the matter. But I'm not so sure this isn't all
part of the involuntary instinctive and emotional assessment we make
when we do, or don't, fall in love. I don't think we really "think"
about it. It isn't "rational". Though it makes enormous evolutionary
sense.
I think I tend to fall in love with women (plural) who:
are unusually
intelligent, imaginative, creative and articulate,
are emotionally strong
and
emotionally sensitive (not an oxymoron),
are physically
attractive, and
know themselves
-- self-knowledge is not the same as intelligence or emotional
strength, and it is, I'm finding to my dismay, relatively rare (most
people just don't have the time/inclination for it).
I'm always candid about my belief in polyamory -- as soon as I meet
anyone that there is even a chance of me having a relationship with. I
don't look for (and rarely find) physical/financial or emotional
security in those I love.
This creates a bit of a paradox for me. While I'm physically attracted
to younger women, I'm emotionally attracted to self-assured,
self-knowledgeable women, and intellectually attracted to dangerous
women who walk the line between genius and madness. These rarely come
in the same, er, package. And while being polyamorous allows me to seek
all of these things in different, simultaneous, partners, I'm not sure
that I am able to offer what women with each of these qualities would
be looking for from me.
The younger woman I want a physical relationship with most likely wants
security and commitment from me. The smart, self-knowing woman (or man)
I want an emotional relationship with most likely wants time and
attention and emotional sensitivity from me. The mad artist/genius I
want an intellectual relationship with most likely wants -- what,
grounding? -- from me. I have no idea.
I'm not sure I can, or necessarily even want to, provide what each of
these people would want from me in an enduring, loving relationship.
And, if I attempt to give them each what they want from me, will I run
out of both security and time by spreading both too thin, and
lose everything by trying to have everything? And worse, will I hurt
them, let them down, in the process? That's a prospect I cannot bear.
This has, of course, been covered a million times in the movies and
romance fiction. It's just taken me, the perpetual slow learner, a
while to pick up on it.
Well, I guess this silly man has analyzed and rationalized the
unanalyzable and irrational to death. Time for me to shut up, turn off
my brain, and trust my instincts and emotions, and those of the women
I'm attracted to, to tell us what to do, and not to do,
and whether we're meant to love each other or not.
For
over five years I have been
working on a novel tentatively called The
Only Life We Know. The novel
is
set in the year 2200, a century or more after the crash of our
civilization. It presumes that in 2009 we are at or near "peak
everything", and
that all of the activities that have accelerated up an every-increasing
curve since 1800 (or in some cases before) -- consumption of land and
natural resources, human population, pollution emissions, and
production of more and more stuff, most of which ends up in landfills
or worse -- will soon follow a similar sharp drop down the other side
of the
normal curve, such that in 2200 we will be back to pre-industrial
levels, 90% below today's. So in my setting in 2200 there are only 500
million people left on the planet,
a population that continues to drop gradually. The economy is
subsistence and local, since there is no cheap oil to enable
significant long-range transportation of goods or people.
But it is the opposite of the popular, violent "Mad Max" scenario of
post-civilization collapse. A study of history indicates that, unlike
inter-civilizational wars, post-civilizational collapses are generally
quite peaceful, although they do entail in their early-collapse stages
a lot of death (mostly from
starvation and disease), suffering and turmoil. Most civilizational
collapses (read Jared Diamond or Ronald Wright) have been
mass exoduses, as people flee fragile, unsustainable centralized
locations in search of land, food and water to make a new,
community-based beginning. They are, on a mass scale, a "walking away"
from complicated systems that simply no longer work.
My novel presumes that, as a decreasing number of humans fan out into
the countryside, they find much of it degraded, but (especially in more
Northern areas) they discover plentiful unused land suitable for small
collaborative
settlements, with solar power and permaculture providing a new
sustainable way of life (I am hoping these recently-rediscovered
technologies will not be lost along with our civilization's
soon-to-be useless oil-dependent technologies).
And, as the buffers between communities get
larger (with diminishing population) and transportation and other
social interaction between communities become rarer, I sense that what
will happen by 2200 is what we discover in most isolated
gatherer-hunter societies: A staggering degree of cultural diversity,
with a de-homogenization of language, adornment and behaviour, to the
point that adjacent communities may be so different as to be nearly
unrecognizable to each other.
The principal driver for this will be
de-urbanization, a hollowing out and abandonment of cities (also very
common in civilizational collapses), since cities are inherently
dependent on outside resources and hence are inherently unsustainable.
We
won't go back to the Wild West or slavery or feudalism, though; instead
we'll go forward to a world that combines ancient indigenous wisdom
with today's and tomorrow's (to the extent they can be tweaked to be
sustainable) innovations -- gliders, hot-air balloons, grafting of
plants, straw-bale construction, human- and solar-powered looms,
cameras, recordings, and other creative, artistic and scientific
devices.
The original plan was to bring this out in a series of short stories
within the novel, each about one such culture, narrated by a
young nomad travelling between them, and interspersed with a
gradually-revealed story about the civilizational collapse that
preceded this new beginning. I envision a proliferation of new local
languages by 2200, completely
different forms of art, wildly divergent spiritual beliefs etc., in
each community, and I had intended to present these in the novel
through conversations
between the travelling
nomad and the citizens of each community, and her observations and
reflections about
these communities.
But I recently started thinking about another way to do this, that
would get around the challenges of trying to depict such completely
alien cultures and languages using written text in our very limited and
culturally constrained 21st century languages.
What if, instead of presenting this future in a novel, I presented it
in a film? And what if, instead of writing a screenplay with dialogue
that has the same problems of language as a novel, the screenplay had
no words? What if, in other words, it were presented as a kind of
two-centuries-later update of the cultural documentary Baraka
(a Sufi
word meaning "the weaving of life together")?
For those not familiar with this film, or with the films that inspired
it -- Koyaanisqatsi
(Life Out of Balance) and Powaqqatsi(Life
in Transformation) -- Baraka is a set of twenty sequential visual
vignettes, of about five minutes duration each, set in places around
the world, depicting different aspects of the human condition. It has
no plot, no actors, no script (in the conventional sense) and no
dialogue.
The picture above from this film is of a girl from the Kayapo tribe in
the Brasilian rainforest. It could easily, I think, also be in my film
set in the year 2200.
I have been working with a cinematographer friend, Danielle Seville, to
scope out how we could make this film. What I envision is starting with
a set of premises about life in 2200 -- mainly, that it would be
peaceful, joyful, sustainable, and diverse, a world where (like humans
did before the invention of tools and technologies) we scavenge much of
what we need -- except that in 2200, we will scavenge largely from the
abandoned relics of the "civilized" world. It will be a world of
sufficiency but also one of great comfort and spiritual rediscovery, as
we will have re-learned how to live in the natural world, in concert
and in balance with the rest of life on Earth.
image
of post-civilization
world from afterculture
To try to imagine such a diverse future world is, I think, beyond the
capacity of any one person (I've certainly tried, as hundreds of pages
of discarded text from my novel attest). So instead, what I
intend to do is to bring together a group of very imaginative people in
a Creation Event
and have us work collaboratively to develop the imagery, future
cultures, music and sound the film would capture. I envision
having artists and anthropologists and students of indigenous cultures
past and present among the collaborators. I can see us sketching out
and improvisationally acting out the scenes in real time, wordlessly,
in Open Space. We'd have make-up artists and henna artists and tattoo
artists and body-painters and animators and photoshoppers developing
models of what we would look like and how we'd behave, using the
participants as their canvasses. The Creation Event would itself be
filmed.
And then it would be my job, working with Danielle and her team, to
craft a screenplay with "scenes from the future" that captures all of
these ideas, and then to assemble a team of improvisors (not actors,
really) to wordlessly act out these brief scenes.
Part of the challenge will be to capture the reconnection of the human
species with all-life-on-Earth, with scenes (like the image above from
Baraka) that position us in the context of a rediscovered natural
world, one that envelopes and welcomes and towers over us (rather than
one we try to control), and offers us food, shelter, water,
meaning, love -- everything we ever needed. Much of the film, then,
will not portray humans at all, but rather the natural places where we
will then live, and the creatures we will share those places with, in
sacred balance.
MY GRAVITATIONAL COMMUNITY People
who have inspired or informed me frequently over the past few months.
For my full blogroll/online reference library, see
here. [* indicates
people I've met f2f]
The thoughts expressed herein are strictly those of the blogger.
I'm listening to:
WHAT
THE BLOGOSPHERE WANTS MORE OF
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trust your
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