Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy.



 

  Saturday, December 19, 2009


BLOG Links of the Week/Month -- December 19, 2009
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.


what religion to follow
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

Are We Civilized Humans a Broken People?: Bruce Levine psychoanalyzes the despair and demoralization of Americans in the face of the horrific challenges facing us, but his analysis applies to everyone in our globalized civilization. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.

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.

Nopenhagen: Sharon Astyk explains why the process currently underway in Copenhagen is hopeless:

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.

The Theory of Anyway: An old post, also from Sharon Astyk, which she calls her favourite, and which explains that the best argument for activism is that many of the things that caring, thoughtful people are doing to make the world a better place are things we should be doing anyway, for other, personal reasons such as looking after our own health:

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:
The 7 Principles of Improv: Michelle James suggests the 7 basic principles of Improv are also the 7 essential principles for effective collaboration in any complex environment or situation:
  1. "Yes and..." (accept and add forward)
  2. Make everyone else look good
  3. Be changed by what is said and what happens (adapt and evolve)
  4. Co-create a shared agenda (not consensus, co-creation is real time and ever-changing)
  5. Mistakes are invitations (justify and grow from it)
  6. Keep the energy going (move, make something up, don't stop to analyze)
  7. Serve the good of the whole (how can you best serve this situation, with what you do best?)
The Faith and the Love and the Hope Are All in the Waiting: Melissa Holbrook Pierson talks about how we hope, beyond faith, and keep asking the important questions until we get the answer we already knew:

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.

Thinking Differently: Chris Corrigan is facilitating a First Nations strategizing event and is using three principles of the culture of the members to 'frame' the event: balance, respect and kindness. Can you even imagine our culture using these principles to underpin a 'problem-solving' event?


LIVING BETTER

What Matters Now? Generosity: Seth Godin's new free e-book with some of the best (unradical) ideas of the year. Thanks to Colleen Wainwright for the link.

The Story of Cap & Trade: From the makers of The Story of Stuff, an explanation of why cap-and-trade systems can't work. Thanks to Raffi Aftandelian for the link.

Democratizing and Conversationalizing TED: The TED talks are wonderful but terribly elitist, expensive to attend in person, and very much 1-to-n bums-on-chairs affairs. TEDx promises to change that. Thanks to Bee Dieu for the link.

Vegan Comfort Food: Prad points us to a list of thousands of vegetarian and vegan restaurants and markets, while Dave Smith gives us a recipe for vegan smoothies.

Combatting Death by PowerPoint: Chris Lott asks why, despite the immense dissatisfaction and time-waste of traditional conference 'presentations', they are still the standard we can't seem to break free from. "I’d often prefer a speaker simply pull up a chair and have a conversation with the group."

The Theory of Anyway, Continued: Ten reasons doing the right thing is also doing what's good for you. Thanks to my Second Life friend Rayah for the link.


POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Unemployment's Emotional Toll: Heartbreaking data from interviews with America's soaring ranks of unemployed.

real unemployment

If You Think the Economy is Improving, or is Collapsing Slower Than Expected, You're Not Looking at the Data: Ilargi describes our inability to distinguish short-term trends from long term trends and how this may lead us to make foolish decisions or come to foolish conclusions. We have seen this most obviously in the climate change debate -- the minute there is a short term negative anomaly in temperature, an outcry occurs that climate change is solved, or is a myth. We're also seeing it in the trends in the value of the US dollar, which in the long-term will be seen to be worthless, but in the short-term is rallying for some very substantive reasons. His partner Stoneleigh elaborates on this with some sound investment advice for those looking to buy gold as a hedge for the longer-term US dollar collapse:

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.

Tar Sands Worse Than Feared: New research shows the amount of pollution and devastation created by the horrific Alberta Tar Sands is much worse than even environmental groups had estimated. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.


FUN AND INSPIRATION

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.


THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK

Chimonophile/Chimonophobe: Dave Bonta rhapsodizes about the joys of winter, which I am seeking soon to escape forever:

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.
What the Songs Say: From Melissa Holbrook Pierson, after visiting a dear friend in hospital:

He sits and looks at his feet, for a long time.

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.

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  Friday, December 4, 2009


BLOG Raw
broken egg shell
I think you have to feel secure before you can feel anything else.

When I was a child, before I knew that people could be dishonest, hurtful, sociopathic, I remember feeling everything. I was completely open. And then, at age 7, when I learned the terrible knowledge of our civilized society, and had my heart broken, I stopped feeling so much. It hurt too bad. It wasn't a conscious decision, just something my body did, to protect me. I just shut down, hid away in an imaginary world where people were themselves, authentic, undamaged. I ceased to belong to the 'real' world, became disconnected from it, ceased to be able to function in it.

Then, when I was 17, I fell utterly in love, and I became invulnerable, and let myself really feel again. I wrote about what I felt and it was, although incompetent, wonderful writing. My self expressed itself. I wrote poetry on the walls of tunnels with the pseudonym "SAM", and young women were so moved by it that they wrote me love letters under the poems.

I saw myself then as a synergy, a complicity of my physical/sensuous (S), emotional (A, for analogic/resonant) and intellectual (M, for Kubrick's monolith) selves. When I was in my most relaxed state I was also at my most aware. I was reconnected, open, raw. I was at once astonished and terrified. I was completely present.

And then, mostly through my own foolishness and idealism, I lost that love, and with it I lost everything. I lost myself. I went through a roller coaster decade during which I alternatively felt unbearable grief, brief joyful relief, and nothing at all. Finally, I froze over. I created a persona that could function in the terrible world, and for almost thirty years that comfortable persona took my place. Still, this persona, as successful as it was, sensed that there was something wrong, that it wasn't me, that it was a fraud. It became anxious and easily angry.

gaping void scared
drawing by hugh mcleod at gaping void

I was empty. A shell.

And then, slowly, over the last few years, I cracked open and something I'm not quite sure of emerged. It was a kind of child, reawakened, unfrozen, but still a bit numb. I was blocked by my stories, my myths, and the emotions of fear and anger those stories evoked. But I was determined to become real again, to reconnect, to be open and raw and let my heart be broken, to show my broken heart to the world.

I was and am drawn now to places that allow me at once to be broken and to heal, to get rid of all the gunk that has accumulated around me for decades, stuff that is not me at all. Those places I'm free to be broken and healed are wilderlands -- forests and beaches where life existed, as it has for millions of years, without people, without being crowded and stressed and made anxious by the invasive species homo rapiens.

I am not at home in such places. I am not self-sufficient or knowledgeable of how to live in the forest or by the ocean, without the trappings of modern civilization. Yet I am drawn to these places, if a little fearfully, by something larger than myself, by this yearning to reconnect with all-life-on-Earth, what John Gray calls biophilia. And when I start to open myself to these places the real me begins to emerge again, this complex, damaged creature so full of grief, love, and loneliness. Lost for so many years, so long dead to the world.

And in these moments SAM awakens again, and I begin to begin to find again that stillness, that Zero Time, of infinite relaxation and awareness, when I become sensitive again to what is going on within, and what is going on without, and they become one current. And the fear and anxiety and anger subside and my senses become alert to these amazing things happening all around me and inside me that I had forgotten how to notice -- the catch in a young woman's voice, the astonishing colours of dusk, and the breath of lamplight and new-fallen snow, the scent of berries and of rain, the look within the look of faces of people that somehow I had forgotten how to see.

The humming resonance between me and some other creature, a resonance that makes us one, singing together, completely "I am you and you are me and we are altogether" connected.

The songs of birds, plaintive or joyful or, like me, now, responsive, a harmony, alive, breathing, there, here, this moment, this magical place. Shouting, tweeting, moaning, I love you.

This is what's really important, this feeling, this connection. This knowing what is and what to do and who to be. This fullness and emptiness and being just a part. Present.

Raw. Nobody-but-myself. No body. Every body. Our self. One.


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  Wednesday, December 2, 2009


BLOG Gaian Institutions
critical life skills

A recent e-mail message from Sheri Herndon prompted me to think about Step 8 of my What You Can Do (to make the world a better place) process -- "Create New Structures and Models".

My initial thoughts on this were to focus attention on helping with the creation of new model communities that:
  • are intentional (i.e. members have a shared purpose, vision and set of values),
  • embody the principles of permaculture, unschooling and the transition movement, and 
  • incorporate Natural Enterprises (sustainable, responsible, joyful co-operative businesses where people do the work they're meant to do).
Sheri prompted me to dig deeper and be more specific about what institutions such communities would contain. Joanna Macy's book Coming Back to Life has the following list (the last six items are my own additions):
  1. teach-ins and peer study groups
  2. think tanks and Gaian learning institutions (where you would learn improvisation, story-telling, and some of the other critical life skills in the graphic above)
  3. groups that would maintain measures of genuine well-being to replace GDP, stock markets, phony inflation & unemployment numbers as the gauges of our society's health 
  4. consensus and conflict resolution services, to replace lawyers
  5. non-violence 'genuine defense' institutions, to replace the military
  6. renewable energy 'transition' co-ops
  7. land trusts and conservancies, replacing land ownership with community stewardship
  8. community-based co-ops for gardening/permaculture, CSA, tool-sharing, skills banks
  9. community-based repair, recycling, composting and re-use programs
  10. holistic health institutions based on self-management and prevention
  11. local currencies and gift economy programs
  12. unschooling (natural/self-directed learning)
  13. collective, independent, non-commercial information sharing and communications media
  14. clothing co-ops (like Mondragon's)
  15. community theatre
  16. community-based scientific research, idea and innovation centres
  17. facilitation 'collaboratories' (where skilled facilitators would help you resolve challenges both local and global)
  18. well-being centres for personal growth, relationship management and self-learning
  19. artist and crafts co-ops
I think it would be interesting to visualize how such communities, working from a kind of 'blueprint' that would be adapted to suit local needs and preferences, could be entirely self-organized. This would require a lot of learning (and relearning) how to do things for ourselves that we have come to rely on governments, professionals, corporations, 'experts' and foreign workers to do for us. We are, most of us, so used to having things designed and organized for us that we have lost the essential skills to do this for ourselves.

That's why I think we need good working models, that show others how and why each of these institutions works. Equally important, they would demonstrate the co-operative form of collective work self-organization, as contrasted with the modern hierarchical command-and-control form of top-down work organization. It takes practice to learn to make decisions with others, instead of (as we have been trained to do) making decisions for others or acting on decisions others have made for us.

Likewise, most of us expect jobs to be designed and created by others, that we can then try to fit ourselves to, rather than creating our own -- self-employment is considered too difficult, too stressful, and too much of a commitment for most. We need to learn (that was one objective of my book Finding the Sweet Spot) that sustainable entrepreneurship is not difficult or stressful, provided we don't try to do it all alone.

One purpose of my novel/film will be to create a vision of how such communities could be formed, and operate, and how much better they would be, by every measure, than the wasteful and toxic industrial systems we rely on today. If you read the list of 19 community elements above, you probably think creating a community with these elements is hopelessly idealistic. My objective is to work with others to create models that will show such communities are entirely possible.

What do you think? Can you imagine a community with these 19 elements, working effectively, sustainably, responsibly, joyfully? How big could it get before it started to come apart, get disconnected? Can you envision the world after the collapse of civilization, with a human population only 10% of the size of today's, starting over and building a community-based society that looks like this? Or do you think it's in our nature to create hierarchy, hoard power and wealth, wage war, and grow until we're stopped by some outside force?


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  Tuesday, December 1, 2009


BLOG What We Want From Others
what you can do 2009

In my thinking about activism, I keep reassuring myself that people will listen when they're ready, and that by working with those who are ready to initiate change, we are more likely to make a difference collaboratively than in isolation. What I want to understand better, though, is what motivates others to do what they do, and believe what they believe. If I understand this, I hope, I'll be able to find and recognize others who are ready to work with me to do the radical work that must be done to make the world a better place.

Much has been written about what humans need, physically, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually. I'm more interested in the moment in what people want, and specifically, what we want from others (rather than from ourselves and our environment). We are, after all, inherently social creatures, and that quality has proven to be a tremendous evolutionary success. In my recent article on empathy, I identified forty emotional needs, of which these 26 were "needs from others":

Security Needs:
the need to be
Belonging Needs:
the need to be
Self-Esteem Needs:
the need to be
free
helped
private
reassured
safe/secure
supported
treated fairly
understood
accepted
acknowledged
forgiven
included
trusted
worthy
admired
appreciated
approved of
believed in
heard
listened to
loved
needed
noticed
recognized
respected
valued

What we want from others, I think, is what we believe, if we get them, will fulfill the above needs. In my observation, most of us particularly want six things from others, which map very well to the three lists above:
  • In order to meet our security needs, we want authority, control, and knowledge
  • In order to meet our belonging needs, we want purpose (what Dave Smith calls "to be of use")
  • In order to meet our self-esteem needs, we want attention and appreciation
These are the six means to the 26 ends of fulfilling our needs from others. By giving these things to others, authentically, we are most likely get people to learn, understand and appreciate what we want them to, in order for them to become part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Let's look a bit at the motivations for these six wants.

We desire attention and appreciation because we cannot know ourselves well without the context of seeing ourselves as others see us. Their perspective, and our conversations, are essential to understanding who we are and what we believe, and, more importantly, why we are here. In my experience (and this is a somewhat dangerous and changing generalization) most men seem to crave attention more than appreciation, while most women seem to want appreciation more than 'mere' attention. I think this probably has more to do with cultural conditioning than biology. It's a cliche that 'women give sex (attentive) to get love (appreciative), and men give love to get sex'. And both genders want lots of both attention and appreciation.

When we get attention it tells us "what I think and feel matters" and "what I say and believe is important". When we get appreciation it tells us "what I do has value" and "what I say and believe makes sense". We get these assurances through others -- no amount of solitary rationalization is sufficient to do this (which is perhaps why some unappreciated artists suffer so much).

We desire authority and control because we believe that it will give us comfort, freedom and security. Authority can be bought (with money and/or influence) or it can be earned. Unfortunately, earned authority usually comes with a catch -- responsibility. If you're rich and powerful you can wield authority irresponsibly, but the rest of us have to accept responsibility before we are given commensurate authority -- and often we get caught, stuck with the responsibility but not the authority.

Authority can give us some control, but less than we might think. People are remarkably adept at ignoring decisions and instructions from authorities when they don't think they're optimal. Bullies and sociopaths are expert at controlling other people, but it's usually coercive, manipulative, and resented, and rarely sustainable. With authority can come wealth (and vice versa), which can buy a measure of freedom and security. But for the most part, the only thing we can really control is ourselves (and there are some arguments, well hashed-out in these pages, that our bodies control our minds, not the other way around).

We desire knowledge for the same reasons -- comfort, freedom and security. Unfortunately, most of what we are offered today is not knowledge, because it is unactionable and useless -- it does not enable us to increase either our capacities or our competencies. The only means to achieve these is practice, and our modern frenetic society provides us with neither the time nor the process to practice effectively. Instead, we are forced to buy into a civilization that is fragile, overextended and dependent on others we don't know. Paradoxically, our knowledge of this lack of self-sufficiency, capacity and competency actually reduces our sense of security.

We desire a sense of purpose because it gives our life meaning and direction and enables us, through a shared meaning and values, to belong to our communities. We instinctively give to and share with others, because it's a bonding activity.

When I think of all the relationships in my life, I recognize the extent to which my interactions with others are mutually motivated by these six wants, and the 26 needs that underlie them. I can see how salespeople, seducers and sociopaths learn to cater expertly to these wants (by both satisying them, and instilling fear that we don't have enough of them) in order to get what they want and need from us in return. And I see how gullible most of us are to these ruses, in our almost indiscriminate hunger for these six things.
What we have created as a result is a dreadful scarcity of these six things. We live in an attention-deficit society, and we are bombarded with propaganda telling us that if we don't buy X or do Y we won't be beautiful enough, strong enough, smart enough, interesting enough or anything else enough to be appreciated.

We have pyramidal hierarchies where authority and wealth are hoarded at the top and meted out stingily to others. We are bombarded with terrible news and cynical lies that persuade us that everything is out of control, to the point we need to arm ourselves with guns and duct tape to protect ourselves. And we have to cede control over everything -- what we eat, where and how our clothes are made, where and how we live -- just to keep a job, to keep what Derrick Jensen calls "the fear of never having enough" at bay.

We have a firehose of information, but we don't have any of the essential knowledge that allowed humans in previous generations and other cultures to life a healthy and decent life -- how to grow our own good food, how to fix things, how to prevent illness and accident and self-diagnose and (for most illnesses) self-heal when we are sick.

We have no sense of our purpose because we are too busy doing what we must to think about why we are here at all, or about what the world really needs (in place of whatever junk commodity or overhyped service our employer has us offering sixty hours a week to customers as dumbed and numbed as we are), or even about what we love doing or are uniquely good at doing that would, if it were known and applied, allow us to be of use effectively, and learn what we're meant to do and hence why we're here.

I have always been blessed with exquisitely good fortune, and I now have a surfeit of all six things (or, in the case of the security-driven wants, their most useful surrogates -- financial independence, self-control and self-knowledge). But I recognize that these are not things I can give to others to enable them to join me in my activist pursuits. And now, what I most want from others that I do not have is the companionship of those who have, by fortune or hard work, reached the same place that I have, and who are able and willing to dedicate themselves, with that terrible knowledge, to doing what we must do to make the world a better place.

Our journey is the nine-step one above that I have been showing on this blog for months now -- the reconnection, action, and reflection steps that will tell us where we have come from, where we are, and what we must do now.

Joanna Macy would have us believe this is a journey that anyone can take, if they have courage. But I'm not sure. If your life is preoccupied with the needs of the moment, and driven by a terrible lack of time/attention, appreciation, authority/independence, self-control, self-knowledge, and understanding of your true purpose, how can you possibly have the presence of mind to pursue, or even see the value and urgency of, this journey?

I guess this is my way of saying that, perhaps arrogantly, I'm still feeling very much too far ahead. I'm impatient to find those who are with me, ready -- not to follow me but to journey with me, as peers, as collaborators, as radicals determined to take back the Earth from those who have stolen and desolated it, and return it to the collective stewardship of all-life-on-Earth.

Not that I'm looking for attention or appreciation, you understand.

Category: Self-Change

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  Sunday, November 29, 2009


BLOG Links and Tweets for the Week -- November 29, 2009
hicks-jenkins mari lwyd
"Stumble" from the Mari Lwyd series by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION'S COLLAPSE

The Transition Movement's Founder at TED: "What is most distressing when I speak with climate scientists is the increasingly terrified look I see in their eyes as each new study that is published." Rob Hopkins explains the astonishing energy efficiency of oil, and how our lives have come to be utterly dependent on it. "The [absurd] idea that prevails at events like these TED Talks is that technology can somehow solve everything, and get us through this completely, that we can invent our way out of a profound economic and energy crisis." A good summary of the Transition Response as a movement that shares its successes and learns from its mistakes, and adapts to the unique situation of each community. Thanks to Sheri Herndon for the link.

Medicated America: Melissa Holbrook Pierson: "In the line we desultorily watch four white-coated employees beyond the counter scurrying to fill the prescriptions, click-clicking little tablets by the hundreds into bottles and then white paper sacks. In a mirror image beyond them, another white-coated employee tends to the cars that have pulled up outside in the dark to a window with a microphone in it. The only money changing hands this night is doing so over drugs."

Guerrilla Software: John Robb describes the essential attributes of software that helps activists get things done. What he describes sounds amazingly like Google Wave. Thanks to David Parkinson for the link and the one that follows.

Cellular Organization Can Work for Activists Too: The kind of cellular organization used so effectively by churches (and terrorists) can also help coordinate and encourage grassroots activism, according to a new book.

Pollution Now Causes 40% of Deaths: The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, now cause diseases that ultimately kill almost half of us. Overcrowding, malnutrition, poor sanitation and unhealthy diets, combined with the industrial agricultural system and inadequate and unenforced pollution laws underlie this high and growing mortality rate. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.


LIVING BETTER

A Plea to Become Vegan: As a result of the ADA study I reported on recently (that vegan diets can be perfectly healthy diets), and some other persuasive articles readers have sent me, I'm now taking the step to become vegan. This is a challenge: A recent shopping trip to buy two weeks' worth of food took me over an hour, most of it spent reading labels. It also means sometimes foregoing local and organic foods to get enough variety in your diet. Gary Steiner's recent piece in the NYT has encouraged me -- it's a straight-forward, unemotional explanation of why, if you care about animal cruelty and suffering, vegan is the only way to go.

A Lesson on Improvision: In the New Yorker, a brief story of how a librarian exemplifies improvisation in the kitchen. Thanks to Chris Corrigan for the link.


POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

How the US (Still) Funds the Taliban: If you read this and can still understand why Obama isn't immediately withdrawing all troops from Afghanistan (let alone proposing to increase troop levels), please explain it to me. And Malalai Joya, the country's bravest politician, says US troops are just making the situation worse. Thanks to Eric Lilius and Raffi Aftandelian for the links.

Tar Sands Water Waste Ignored: Another study shows that Canada's federal and provincial governments are ignoring the laws designed to protect the country's fresh water, and allowing Tar Sands developers a free pass to pollute. More evidence we cannot rely on Canada's "bought" Conservative governments to police or limit this atrocity.

Greed Stifles Innovation: Greedy corporatists, preying on obsolete and fuzzy intellectual property laws and corruptible officials, are copyrighting and patenting everything, and then sic'ing armies of lawyers on anyone encroaching on their 'property rights'. The effect is to discourage and penalize innovation and increase costs for everyone. Thanks to Jerry Michalski for the link.


FUN AND INSPIRATION:

An amazing presentation by Colleen Wainwright, that, as a fellow auto-immune disease sufferer, sent shivers right through me.

The stunning artwork of Clive Hicks-Jenkins (sample at the top of this post) is generously shared and described on the author's "art-log". Thanks to Dave Bonta for the link.

Great spoof of Amazon for buy-nothing day. Read the whole thing. Thanks to Keith Farnish for the link.


THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK:

From Christopher Isherwood back in 1966 (thanks to Dave Smith for the link):

To live sanely in Los Angeles (or, I suppose, in any other large American city) you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should fear, what you should wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should think and do and be. They have planned a life for you — from the cradle to the grave and beyond — which it would be easy, fatally easy!, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience to the hypnotist’s command. Wake up, wake up — before you sign that seven-year contract, buy that house you don’t really want, marry that girl you secretly despise. Don’t reach for the whiskey, that won’t help you. You’ve got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.

From my friend Sara in Second Life: "I have to hide me at work."

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bc 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]

Artists:
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Tree Bressen (US)*
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Cheryl Long (AU)*
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Jerry Michalski (US)*
John Graham (NZ)
Miranda Weingartner (CA)*

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Dale Asberry (US)
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Guy McPherson (US)
Ilargi & Stoneleigh (CA)
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Paul Heft (US)*
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Vera Bradova (US)

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Beth Taggart (US)
Janene Smith (US)
Joe Bageant (BZ)*
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