How to Save the World

Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.

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February 5, 2003

ON WRITING
I've noticed that most blogs seem to be focused exclusively on non-fiction (news, personal anecdotes etc.)
I write, and read, both fiction and non-fiction, and recently re-discovered a wonderful, perceptive and hilarious essay on writing fiction, called the 39 Steps (http://www.mississippireview.com/Center/the39steps.html). It's not entirely inappropriate for writing non-fiction as well, including blogs. Some of my favourite 'steps':
1) Step one in the great enterprise of a new and preferable you in the house of fiction is: Mean less. That is, don't mean so much. Make up a story, screw around with it, paste junk on it, needle the characters, make them say queer stuff, go bad places, insert new people at inopportune moments, do some drive-bys. Make it up, please.
12) We can't care about sand mutants; if you do, or think you do, kill yourself.
13) Coherence is a big part of the game. Make sure the story is coherent, that the scenes flow each from the last, that the reader has the clearest sense at all times of what is going on. Err on the side of clumsiness to start with; back away later.
21) If you write a sentence that isn't poignant, touching, funny, intriguing, inviting, etc., take it out before you finish the work. Don't just leave it there. Don't let anyone see it.
22) To repeat, there is no place for rubbish & slop in the highly modern world of today's fiction. Every sentence must pay, must somehow thrill. Every one.
23) Also: Obscurity is not subtlety; intentional obscurity is pinheaded and unkind.
29) Apropos the big issues, note that parents don't sit around getting heartbroken about abortion, they get heartbroken because they killed the baby.
30) Or, because the baby was born with fins for hands. It's the particular.
33) No characters named Brooke or Amber.
This essay was written by the gang at USM's Center for Writers, which is headed by my favourite author, Frederick Barthelme. A couple years ago I wrote to Frederick and asked him how he made his characters' dialogue so realistic, and he told me he dictated it first, had his secretary transcribe it verbatim, and then tinkered with it as little as possible. Try it -- it works.
If you're interested in reading some great fiction, here's a link to Frederick's bio and bibliography and some of his on-line works: http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/ms-writers/dir/barthelme_frederick/index.html His short story collections are all wonderful.
And in the unlikely event you're interested in reading my fiction, it's here: http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/stories/2003/02/22/aboutTheAuthor.html
11:24:21 PM  trackback [] comment []

GETTING DOWN TO THE ROOTS
In Canada we're going through another wringing-of-the-hands exercise about the decrepit state of our 'socialist' health care system. A recent report (http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/english/care/romanow/index.html) has called for the spending of CA$15 billion or so (Americans, multiply by 10 for scale adjustment, and by 2/3 for currency adjustment) to fix the problems. What amazed me about this process is that during the public consultation phase, most of the people who called in (both health care practitioners and patients) said the focus should be on preventative health care instead of treatment: consensus was this was not only cheaper, but would reduce lost workplace productivity by more than the cost of the investment, save lives and reduce suffering. Despite this, the commission and and its experts focused 100% on upgrading hospitals and treatment facilities and staff.
That got me thinking about our propensity to spend all our time and energy on how to fix problems (corruption, war, famine, crime, disease, terrorism etc.) and none of it on preventing the root causes of these problems. My nomination for the Top Root Causes of Everything Wrong With the World, in no special order:
1. Bad/Inadequate laws (including tax laws) - that permit/encourage pollution, waste, and corporate abuses and fail to protect the environment, animal and human rights or encourage
2. Excessive and anti-democratic concentration of power and wealth
3. Organized religions and groups that promote hate, discrimination, violence, overpopulation and intolerance
4. Ignorance, complacency and lack of critical thinking - especially ignorance of history, other cultures, ecology, and the value of community
5. Proliferation of abetting technologies - weaponry, polluting technologies, fertility technologies, irresponsible biotech etc.
6. Too many people having too many babies
7. Political and economic systems that misfocus human effort on corporate goals (growth, profit etc.) instead of human problems (i.e. wealth instead of well-being)
8. Lack of 'good' technologies - that enable energy efficiency, community self-sufficiency, etc.
9/10. This is a blog that others are supposed to comment on. What's missing from my list?
I was tempted to add two items to this list, but decided they didn't belong:
(a) War, crime, political instability and sense of individual helplessness - but not being a member of any organized religion, I can't buy that these are evidence of, or caused by, some basic flaw in human nature; although violence begets violence and these things are self-perpetuating, I think they're mostly fundamentally caused by 1.-8. above
(b) Excessive food production - if you've read Ishmael or Story of B by Daniel Quinn, you may accept that this is also a root cause of many human problems, but the argument for this is too complex for a blog, so I decided to leave it off the list (but please, read these books!)
Whenever I get really discouraged about the state of the world, I refocus on the root causes instead of the symptoms. And I think, neither George Bush nor Saddam Hussein is the real enemy, the real enemy is our 30,000-year-old inability to address the root causes of the Earth's problems, such as the 8 listed above, because we're always too busy trying to save the patient from dying to develop a vaccine for the disease.
10:13:24 PM  trackback [] comment []

WHY BUSH IS REALLY GOING TO WAR
Well, we've heard the speeches from Powell and the replies, and I haven't found anyone, leader or layman, who has changed his or her mind as a result. What seems to be lost in all the rhetoric is that the reason Bush wants to go to war with Iraq is he thinks he can 'win'. The moral and humanitarian issues, the alleged threats of WMD, even the economic (oil) issues are all smoke. Bush's hawkish advisors have told him that, thanks to amazing improvements in technology since Desert Storm, a fast, decisive win is possible, the end result of which will be unconditional surrender and regime change. I think he believes that 50,000 civilian Iraqi deaths are politically manageable if they all occur within 48 hours. I think he believes that the previous unsuccessful U.S. military efforts (like Vietnam) failed due to length and attrition rather than bad strategy and immorality. I think he believes Americans and Middle Easterners alike will be stunned into silence by the speed of the war, and that the 'success' will cow totalitarian regimes everywhere into becoming democratic, placid and capitalistic. And worst of all, I think he believes that once he's 'showed Saddam', the fear of such American 'preemption' (love that word) in other areas will compel enemies to set aside millenia of hatred and drive them to coalesce and evolve to produce, presumably by magic, modern U.S.-style regimes. In short, he believes in the Hiroshima Gambit, that the end not only justifies the most unimaginably horrifying means, but that the 'end' can be accurately predicted by people who are utterly ignorant of the lessons of history, the realities of geograpy and economics, and the diversity and motivations of different cultures. That he can believe these things is what is truly terrifying, and probably why, in a recent poll, more Canadians thought he was a threat to world peace and stability than Saddam.
7:37:13 PM  trackback [] comment []

CANADA MOVES POLITICALLY FURTHER AND FURTHER FROM U.S.
If you want to see just how stark the difference is between American and Canadian foreign policy (and for that matter the difference in policy on just about everything else) take a look at this exercise in participatory online democracy! http://www.foreign-policy-dialogue.ca/en/discusspaper/index.html In the past year, I've seen the Canadian government make a 180 degree turn and endorse Kyoto, introduce truly radical electoral campaign reform ( here) and distance itself more and more dramatically from the Bush administration's positions on foreign policy, trade, civil liberties, and just about everything else. I've never been so proud to be a Canadian.
12:54:20 AM  trackback [] comment []