Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy.

	Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Four World-Changing Questions 12 THINGS YOU CAN DO TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE It's been awhile since I updated my article on "What You Can Do (to Save the World)". The revisions depicted in the chart above reflect my recent disenchantment with idealism (which too often makes us inconsolable, inflexible, inattentive and intolerant), my realization that the world can't be saved, only made better than what it is, and my recently-acquired preference for collective action over personal self-change. On this final point, I'm beginning to believe that we cannot be, or become, what we are not, but that, particularly if we organize with others, we can bring about significant change through collective, effective, considered and focused action, even without changing anyone's mind, values or beliefs. So here's a brief summary of the 12 things you can do to make a difference, to make the world a better place: Knowing and Learning: Understand What's Happening: Before you can engage others and act purposefully and effectively you need to understand how the world really works (not what they tell you in school or in the media about how it works). The world is complex, and understanding and embracing complexity is a challenge to our culture's predilection for oversimplification and dichotomy.  Imagine What's Possible: Next, you need to be able to imagine a better world, one that is not addicted to growth and consumption. If you can't imagine it, you will never be able to decide how to achieve it. Be Pragmatic and Realistic: There are many things you can do, and many wonderful-sounding but unenforced, unenforceable and/or ineffective regulations and actions, so you need to learn what actions actually work. This takes a lot of time and energy, and to do it you need to stop doing some other things you are doing that are distracting you from learning these important truths.  Know Yourself: Then, to assess what you can do about all this, you need to know yourself, which means giving yourself the time and space to discover who you really are, what your true gifts, passions and purpose are, and therefore what you're meant to do (see graphic above).  Build Personal Capacity: And finally, once you've learned all this, you need to discover and acquire the additional capacities you need to be effective at bringing about change in the world. This doesn't entail changing yourself to be what you're not, but just learning some new skills and abilities that will equip you to accomplish more with less effort. Most of us never have the opportunity to do any of this, so we end up doing ill-informed, half-hearted, non-time-consuming, and largely ineffective things. We complain, we sign a few petitions, we feel guilty, but none of that gets us anywhere. We say we're doing our best given the other commitments on our time, resources and energies, but are we? Until we have done these five knowing and learning steps, we can't possibly know. Teaching and Sharing: Converse and Tell Stories: Once we have learned these things, we can start to engage others. Conversation, discussion, talking, explaining, showing -- these aren't 'doing' actions, but they are essential. Until we engage others in meaningful dialogue, our efforts are atomized, fragmented, isolated. The purpose of conversation is not to persuade, but to inform. And people will only listen to you if you are knowledgable, articulate, reasonable, fearless (not afraid to bring up prickly, complex, messy, controversial subjects in any social environment), authentic, enthusiastic (energy and passion are contagious and without them we have limited credibility) and persistent. As I have explained elsewhere (and others have explained better than I can), stories are usually the most effective way to convey information, ideas, and perspectives. They are subversive in their power. Engage Obstructionists: There is little point arguing with people who are not yet ready to listen to you (as Daniel Quinn has explained). If you are talking with politicians or business people, you will often find that the best way to engage them is to show you care, but not get carried away by your emotions. In my experience, these people appreciate and relate to discussions that present them with new, objective information, framed in the context of sustainability (in the broader sense of ability to continue to exist without the need for constant effort to prop it up) and risk (what could go wrong). Proffering positive ideas to make our whole society more sustainable and to assess and address risks, will general garner attention and careful consideration by most people in the political and business arena, because this approach appeals to their self-interest and areas of competency, responsibility and authority. Trying to appeal to their moral sense is, in most cases, an unnecessarily more difficult tack.  Doing: Be an Activist or Pioneer: Once the knowing and talking is done, it's time for action. I recently wrote about what activism entails and why it's important. Activism is intentional action designed to bring about political, social, economic, health care or educational reform. It generally entails confronting people (usually people with power) with information, ideas, proposals, challenges and/or demands. It is often a tactic when conversation and information-sharing (step 7 above) has proved fruitless. It is an expression of political power in the face of power, and hence almost always requires organization and force of numbers, though in some cases an individual or small group confrontation can actually galvanize others and produce the organization and numbers needed to demonstrate that the confrontation has popular support. Such individual or small group activism is a form of pioneering -- showing people the way by experimentation and example. Create Responsible, Sustainable Enterprises: Most of us spend a large part of our waking hours working, and one of the most effective ways we can bring about change is in the decision about what work we choose to do. Years of experience and work have convinced me that rather than trying to make existing organizations more responsible or sustainable, it is more effective to create new 'natural' enterprises that allow us to do the work we are meant to do, and at the same time to stop supporting, with our labour and our tax dollars, unsustainable organizations and organizational practices. Be a Model: Ghandi famously said that we should be the change we want to see in the world, to model that behaviour. Good models for a better world are sufficient (they live comfortably but not extravagantly or wastefully), loving, tolerant, attentive (they listen more than they talk), responsible (no complaining, just doing), and sustainable. These models also recognize that having more than one child in this dreadfully overcrowded world is an irresponsible, unsustainable act. Create a Model Community: Likewise, we need to create collaborative communities that are models for others, alternatives to the wasteful, ineffective, alienating, isolating 'neighbourhoods' of wary strangers living near each other solely because of a mutual proximity to their place of work. The 'development' industry treats our communities' land as an asset that has value only when it is razed, overbuilt and then liquidated. We must find better models of community, where people choose to live and work together and exercise collective stewardship of their land on behalf of all life on it and the future generations that will live there. Be Good to Yourself: Finally, it is essentially that we be good to ourselves and those we love. We cannot be effective if we allow ourselves to be consumed by guilt, or despair, or grief, or neglect our health and well-being. An essential element of making the world a better place is celebrating our achievements, our efforts, and the astonishing joy of life itself. We have to pace ourselves and look after ourselves, and each other, if we hope to continue to make a difference. So, you say, all well and good. But how do we actually get started on these 12 steps? We're sold -- the current way we live is not sustainable, and has horrific consequences for many people and other creatures suffering because of it. But we're still not doing anything, or, at least, not enough. There are all kinds of reasons for this: We have no time. We have obligations to family that take priority. We're already exhausted by the end of the work-day, and we have to give ourselves some time to relax and recover. We may know what to do, in general terms, but we really have no idea how to do it. We elected our government to do these things -- it's their job, or at least it's their job to show leadership and tell us specifically what we should do. Or we're waiting for a better government, and focused on getting rid of this ineffective one. Excuses, excuses. I'm not saying they aren't good excuses. But how do we get past them? How do we just start? As a terrible procrastinator myself, I have been giving this a lot of thought, and I've discovered that I can get some real answers to this 'how do we start' question by asking some underlying, positive, affirmational, excuse-challenging questions. I credit Patti Digh and David Robinson, who are currently offering a course on getting past the 'blocks' in our lives, for some of the impetus behind these questions. Here are the four questions I asked myself: 1. Learning Action Challenge: What one additional capacity or skill, more than any other, do you think you need to acquire or learn, to equip yourself to make the world a better place, and why? What is the single best way for you to acquire or learn (or motivate yourself to learn) that additional capacity or skill?  What's really holding you back from doing so? What can you do to get past this block? 2. Personal Action Challenge: What one additional action, more than any other, do you think you can take, personally, to make the world a better place, and why? What's really holding you back? What can you do to get past this block? 3. Community Action Challenge: What one additional action, more than any other, do you think you can take, in your community, to make the world a better place, and why? What's really holding you back? What can you do to get past this block? 4. Workplace Action Challenge: What one additional action, more than any other, do you think you can take, in your job or enterprise, to make the world a better place, and why? What's really holding you back? What can you do to get past this block? Here are my answers. I am embarrased by them, frightened by them, ashamed of them, annoyed by them. But they are having an effect: I am edging closer to the edge of the ledge of inaction on which I sit, no longer satisfied pontificating about what I or others should do. Yikes. This is pretty raw, almost too honest to admit: 1. Learning Action Challenge: What one additional capacity or skill, more than any other, do I think I need to acquire or learn, to equip myself to make the world a better place, and why? Love (compassion, empathy, genuine caring) for all-life-on-Earth, to the point I can no longer bear the thought of the massive suffering that goes on, every day, needlessly, unchallenged, so that I have to do something. What is the single best way for me to acquire or learn (or motivate myself to learn) that additional capacity or skill? Witness the suffering that goes on in the world, in struggling nations, in hospitals and old age homes, in factory farms, in barbaric workplaces, in the homes of abused children and spouses, and in a thousand other places where, to conserve my sanity, I have largely choosen not to go.  What's really holding me back? I'm afraid to do this, not sure I have the heart or stamina to deal with it.  What can I do to get past this block? I just have to go, do it, face it, witness it, confront that unspeakable horror and grief. And of course write about it. Into the buzzsaw. 2. Personal Action Challenge: What one additional action, more than any other, do I think I can take, personally, to make the world a better place, and why? Help the world imagine a better way to live, by writing about the world after the collapse of civilization late in this century. What's really holding me back? Fear of failure. I've started writing this book so many times, and it's just not anywhere good enough. What can I do to get past this block? Write the damn book. Just start. Decide on something I'm not going to do, and spend that time, every day, writing, one page at a time. 3. Community Action Challenge: What one additional action, more than any other, do I think I can take, in my community, to make the world a better place, and why? Organize. Anything I can do as an individual is multiplied when we can do it collaboratively, drawing on our numbers, diverse skills and self-support.  What's really holding me back? I haven't really found my community yet, a community that is informed and committed to take radical actions.  What can I do to get past this block? I have to get out and meet more people and invite them to commit to joining me in real community. If I remain selfish, I'm no model for anything. 4. Workplace Action Challenge: What one additional action, more than any other, do I think I can take, in my job or enterprise, to make the world a better place, and why? Quit, and create my own community-based cooperative, a small, autonomous, sustainable, responsible, connected, resilient, egalitarian enterprise that fills a real unmet need I care about.  What's really holding me back? I'm too lazy to make the jump, and also somewhat committed to my current employer, who took a big chance with me.  What can I do to get past this block? I'm seriously thinking about what that enterprise will be, and about transitional arrangements at my workplace. So much for just retiring and writing. Whew. Deep breath. This is heavy stuff. I'm looking myself right in the face and recognizing that my excuses for inaction are pretty feeble. Do I really want to make the world a better place? Unquestionably. Is there any logical reason I can't and shouldn't take the 'What can I do to get past this block' steps, right now? Uh, no. OK, then. Put it in your calendar, Dave. Make it happen. What's really scary is that I can see, for each of these questions, the next thing I can do that would make a difference to the world, and what's holding me back from doing each of those things, and the equally startling things I could and should do to get past those blocks. And so on. OK, now it's your turn, dear reader. Time to face what's really holding you back, and what you can do about these blocks. Here's a blank form for you to fill in: 1. Learning Action Challenge: What one additional capacity or skill, more than any other, do you think you need to acquire or learn, to equip yourself to make the world a better place, and why? What is the single best way for you to acquire or learn (or motivate yourself to learn) that additional capacity or skill? What's really holding you back? What can you do to get past this block? 2. Personal Action Challenge: What one additional action, more than any other, do you think you can take, personally, to make the world a better place, and why? What's really holding you back? What can you do to get past this block? 3. Community Action Challenge: What one additional action, more than any other, do you think you can take, in your community, to make the world a better place, and why? What's really holding you back? What can you do to get past this block? 4. Workplace Action Challenge: What one additional action, more than any other, do you think you can take, in your job or enterprise, to make the world a better place, and why? What's really holding you back? What can you do to get past this block? Tell me how this works for you. Go. Just start. Category: Activism: What You Can Do 11:51:31 PM  trackback []  comment []

	Sunday, June 28, 2009

2110: A Dispatch From the Future conception of post-civilization all-weather wear by mary mattingly My regular readers know that I don't expect we will be able to resolve the combination of cascading crises -- led by climate change, the end of oil, and the collapse of the unsustainable and debt-laden industrial growth economy -- that will face us in the coming decades. While I don't advocate doing nothing to mitigate the damage we are doing now, just because it won't be enough, I also think it would be useful, for our descendents who survive the end of our civilization, to imagine how they might live, with much smaller numbers and at a subsistence level, sustainably, responsibly, comfortably and joyfully. I think the crash of our culture will be ghastly, but I see no reason why life for those after the crash should not be delightful. So here is a dispatch from the future, a report from a member of one of many diverse post-civilization communities, telling us how they measure 'success': conception of art after the collapse of civilization culture by afterculture June 28, 2110: A letter to my great-great-grandfather, who died 100 years ago today: It's funny: By the measures of humans from civilization culture, our community would be described as migratory, but we think of it as just the opposite. Yes we migrate around a territory that provides us with all the food and resources we need, in a twenty-year cycle, but the whole territory is our community. We share it with many other creatures, some of which also migrate, but we do not go beyond it -- our community is defined by this territory, this land that we belong to and are a part of. By contrast, civilization culture humans could never sit still, they had to travel all over the world, to places not even suited to human habitation, and then create artificial environments to allow them to live in those hostile places. To us, they were the migrants and we are the settled ones. Our community's culture is very different from those of our neighbouring communities, even though the natural environment is not dissimilar. That's a mark, I think, of the fact that after civilization's fall we self-selected into new communities, and as we formed the differences between these communities were immediately pronounced, because of our different interests, beliefs and strengths, and as time has passed the isolation of our communities, which we have negotiated deliberately to limit our vulnerability to the plagues that wracked our species in the final years of civilization culture, has entrenched and enhanced the differences between communities. While all six of the communities in our tribal federation use sign language for oral and visual communication, we are the only one of the six to use English as our written language. The clothing, body decoration, festivals, entertainments and art of these six communities are also very different, and while we study the others, the divergence and uniqueness of how we communicate, live and interact becomes ever larger with the passage of time. We understand that this was also true among pre-civilization and non-civilization indigenous cultures in the millennia before the crash. What is also interesting, in terms of cultural diversity, is how each community here chooses to measure its 'success', or what might better be called its 'fitness', its ability to adapt to changes in the environment of which we are a part, and to co-evolve that environment in ways that work for us and delight us. We began with a 'scorecard' that was developed by an Internet philosopher (of all the things we lost in the crash, the Internet is what I mourn most) almost a century ago. We found this scorecard well-suited to us and we have not changed it very much since. The purpose of our community self-assessment is to set the agenda for our community meetings. While we have learned to adapt and co-evolve well as a community, and we take pride in the fact that we assess ourselves generally as very 'fit', there are always some areas where our self-assessment is low enough for us to discuss and achieve consensus on some options and possibilities for action. In accordance with the wisdom of our aboriginal ancestors, those who were wiser than the civilization culture leaders, we do not make decisions on what individuals should or must do. Our meetings are focused on the areas where we have assessed ourselves as not very fit, and at those meetings we tell stories that suggest why that is the case. There is no group decision coming out of the stories. The decision on what to do is left to the individual members to make; it is their responsibility. We do not tell people what to do or criticize them for what they choose to do, or not do. Our self-assessment has three sections: Individual Self-Sufficiency and Well-Being, Community Self-Sufficiency and Well-Being, and Community Sustainability. Here are the elements of each of the self-assessments, as they have evolved to date: Individuals' Self-Sufficiency and Well-Being: Attainment and learning of valued personal capacities -- is each individual in the community acquiring the capacities s/he thinks are important? Self-knowledge -- does each individual understand what drives him/her? Personal health and comfort -- is each individual physically and emotionally healthy and content? Freedom from need, stress, and anxiety -- is each individual free from unmet needs, stresses (including those caused by conflict, coercion and restriction), and physical and emotional anxieties? Freedom of choice -- is each individual free and unconstrained in being able to think, believe, do, and not do, whatever s/he chooses, provided that does not cause unreasonable harm to others? Realization of, and time and space for, personal gifts, passions, and purpose -- does each individual appreciate what s/he is uniquely good at doing, enjoys doing, and what is needed in the community that s/he cares about and the exercise of which gives his/her life meaning? Connection with others -- does each individual have deep and meaningful relationships with others in the community? Community's Self-Sufficiency and Well-Being: Freedom from reliance on other communities for essential products and services -- is the community self-sufficient such that if other communities failed, its well-being would not suffer? Quality and sufficiency of our food, clothing, recreation, security and collective capacities -- does the community live well and get what it needs, without extravagance or waste? Innovation and diversity -- does the community collectively surface, evolve and institute new ideas, and encourage and embrace diverse ideas and ways of being and doing? Egalitarianism and generosity -- is the community free from bias, discrimination, inequitable distribution of resources and wealth, and are all members of the community naturally generous and accorded equal consideration, respect and authority? Peace -- is the community at peace with and respectful of all life within its territory, and its neighbours'? Self-management -- collectively is the community competent at running its affairs and dealing with conflicts and challenges that may arise? Leisure -- does the work of the community allow generous time for pursuit of artistic, philosophical, non-essential learning and other leisure activities? Community's Sustainability: Freedom from debt -- does the community live within its means, never borrowing or taking from the land or others what cannot be immediately repaid or, within one migration cycle, replenished naturally? Permaculture -- do all gardens planted by the community consist solely of native or otherwise non-invasive species, and do they reflect permaculture principles of natural succession, variety and viability without the need for artificial fertilization, poisons or irrigation? Freedom from illness -- do the community's practices help to prevent, quickly diagnose and effectively treat physical and emotional illnesses? Simplicity -- does the community live lightly on the land, such that no other life forms or future generations are adversely affected by its presence and activities? Zero growth -- is the community's aggregate human population and use of resources substantially unchanged from year to year? Adaptability and balance -- does the community collectively know how to cope, and practice coping, with environmental changes and events, and work to stay in balance with all other life that shares the land to which it belongs? At each of our meetings there is something to discuss, something that does not fit well. Usually it is some unhappiness of an individual member, which we address by listening, empathizing, acknowledging, and telling stories that might be helpful. We generally do not proffer advice unless it is specifically requested. Sometimes the issue is a dispute or conflict between members of the community. We use the same approach, encouraging each member to hear, acknowledge and appreciate the position of the others. Usually that understanding is sufficient that the conflicted members resolve the issue themselves. In rare situations where there is no resolution, one or more members will elect to leave the community. This is a time of sadness for us, but we respect and honour the decision. Likewise, we will occasionally welcome to our community someone who has elected to leave another community in our tribal treaty area. Perhaps because of our strong focus on learning and practicing capacities, we have been much more successful at this than many other communities. These less competent communities seem to have more conflict, more anger, more dysfunction than ours, and this causes us great concern. Our study of civilization culture suggests it was this lack of individual capacity, and the related lack of community cohesion and competency, that led to the massive centralization of authority, the dysfunctional hierarchies of large, rigid and unsustainable systems, and the atomization of community. Without the strength of community, it is hard for us to even imagine how civilization culture lasted as long as it did. Category: Creating a Community-Based Society 11:57:10 PM  trackback []  comment []

	Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Break It Down and Build It Up: The Virtue of Making Things Community-Sized Nature tends to determine the right size for things. If they're too big, then they can't manoever, or they get stiff and break easily. If they're too small, then they don't have enough space for the complexity needed to sense and adapt to the environment. Evolution involves a continuous right-sizing. Everything is more or less just the 'right' size, until something changes and everything has to adapt again. We do our best, in human constructions, to make things the right size, but we don't have the billions of years of experience or the capacity to do massive parallel incremental experiments that nature does. So our constructions are usually the wrong size. For the first million years of humanity's presence on Earth, we did things pretty well, because we mimicked what nature did, and we didn't try to do anything very complicated. We learned by trial and error, with nature's help, that clans of about 50 humans worked best. We formed tribes made up of many clans, but they were loose federations -- most of political, social and economic activity was at the clan, at the community, level. Workgroups for gathering and hunting (our early enterprises) involved around 5-8 members, enough to enable collaboration, but not so many that the group couldn't self-organize, or would need some kind of hierarchy. Then about 30,000 years ago we discovered agriculture. As Jared Diamond and Ronald Wright have explained, it wasn't an invention, but rather an observation: after severe fires or floods, the first succession of new plants were monocultures, and having no immediate competition they flourished. They were not sustainable, however, and only in the presence of continued catastrophes to stunt the succession process did they continue. So, brilliant creatures that we are, we arranged for continuous burning off or flooding of the land to keep the catastrophes coming, and discovered that we could live off these prolific monocultures, and no longer needed to gather or hunt for food. We became settlers. There were a number of unintended consequences of this discovery however. The first of these was chronic malnutrition, since our new food sources lacked diversity, resilience and micronutrients (this is still true today, despite the obesity epidemic). Health became much worse, and diseases flourished in the denser concentrations of sickly humans. When the new crops failed because of weather or plant diseases, the result was a new, cruel, previously unheard-of phenomenon: famine. And whereas women previously had children only every four years or so (because of the necessity of moving them as the clan migrated), settled women could have children every year, and did. Settlements also allowed for protection against natural predators, so while the death rate from disease and starvation grew, the death rate from being eaten plummeted. In short, we created a new, artificial, man-made environment in which natural balances and evolution were taken out of the equation. We had thrown ourselves out of the garden, and now it was up to us to make our own rules. The right size for everything, in this new, complicated and fragile human 'civilization', as this man-made culture came to be called, seemed to be the bigger the better. More people meant more workers in the fields, more soldiers for the armies when the crops failed and it became necessary to steal from other settlements to live, and more police to prevent people walking away from the inevitable poverty (for all but the elite few) and hardship of settled life. Soon we had created cities, initially as fortresses but then as labour pools. Soon we had created a political system with a strict hierarchy to ensure law and order in this unnatural, crowded, scarcity-plagued, stressful environment. We had created an economic system to ensure that the power elite had the money to coerce obedience and threaten the poor with deprivation if they did not toil for the rich. And we had created an education system (working hand-in-hand with the religious elite) to brainwash everyone to believe that this was the only way to live, and to blame all the failings of these fatally-flawed systems on nature, on some outside enemy, or on our own personal inadequacy and 'sinfulness'. To survive, the institutions of these massively oversized systems have waged a continuous and brutal war against communities, the natural human structures that we instinctively seek to belong to. Aboriginal communities all over the world have been systematically exterminated, their members slaughtered or moved into institutional structures and forced to adopt the civilization monoculture constructs. Everything that could not be institutionalized has been atomized, so that communities no longer own anything; it is corporations and individuals who own everything. Our memory of the value and experience of community has been eradicated from our memories, relegated to 'prehistory' which has been rewritten to depict life in all non-civilization cultures as "nasty, short and brutish", a propaganda coup. So what we have now is a political system (nations, governments, cities, educational institutions, legal regimes) that is too big to work, and too big to be allowed to fail. We have an economic system (corporate oligopolies, industries, health care institutions, banks) that is too big to work, and too big to be allowed to fail. We have not only crop monoculture, we have human monoculture, what Terry Glavin has called "a dark and gathering sameness" all over the world. These are complicated, mechanistic structures, not the complex resilient ones that nature has evolved. They are fragile and vulnerable, constantly at risk of flying apart. The latest edition of Orion magazine describes the Transition movement as one that attempts to rediscover community, the natural 'right size' of human relationship and endeavour, between the atomized individual/family and the massive, groaning and ungovernable political and economic institutions and systems we have created that currently hold sway over our lives. We need to reframe the discussion away from big government versus big corporations versus libertarianism versus anarchism. The first two are different flavours of the unsustainably large and hierarchical, and the latter two are different flavours of the unsustainably small, narcissistic and atomized. The only structure of human relationship and human endeavour that has ever sustainably worked was and is community. As Rob Paterson wrote today, "We have to change the prevailing story from 'its all about me' to 'it's all about us'. The first step is that each of us has to take is to start to live this new story. We cannot lecture. We cannot explain. We have to live it." One way or another, we need to facilitate the breaking down of the complicated, dysfunctional and unsustainable hierarchies and systems of civilization culture, and the building up from alienated, atomized, narcissistic individuals, into community-based structures, relationships and endeavours. It is naive to believe that we can do just one or the other; we need activists breaking down the too-big and communitarians building up the too-small, until what we have is organizations of the right, natural size. Rob calls these right-size groups 'natural organizations'. I have used the terms 'natural enterprise' and 'natural community'. The right size is, usually, dense clusters of about 5-8, networked into larger communities of about 50. It is the only size that has ever sustainably worked, and it worked for a million years. What can we do to break down the too-big and build up the too-small? The whole point of this is that, as individuals, we can't do much, and we certaintly can't do enough. So while I certainly encourage everyone to live a responsible and radically simple lifestyle -- buy less, use less, get out of debt etc. -- the important actions are all ones we have to do in community. Step 1, I would suggest, is to take stock of and assess your communities, and how active you are in them. Communities aren't groups you merely belong to, they're groups you do things with. That can include learning, but it doesn't include just complaining. What communities do you belong to, how active are they, and how effective, how useful, are they? Step 2, naturally, is to mobilize your communities -- use the groups and relationships you already have, and make them more useful, and active. And remember, this is something you do collectively -- don't tell them what they should do, work with them to assess what you can do to be more effective, to carry out actions you collectively care about. Step 3 is to organize -- create new communities of passion, new natural enterprises, and new local living communities of people who share your purpose in life, and grow (within reason) existing communities so that they have more resources to deploy, and can therefore do more, and better. In both steps 2 and 3, consider using a skilled facilitator. Such a person can help provide a framework and structure for community-building, and help negotiate the challenges such as how to intervene effectively in an existing system to bring about change, and how to build consensus and resolve conflicts. What you specifically do -- which causes you embrace, from blockading mountain-top or bitumen sludge mining to creating an enterprise or a support group to meet an urgent local need -- is up to you, collectively. When you cease to behave atomically, as an individual or nuclear family member, and start to behave collaboratively, as a community member, your communities will figure out what needs to be done, and where they have the power to act in an effective way. A nation and a world of strong local communities will start to break down the too-big systems by showing the world how dysfunctional they are and by demonstrating better ways to live, make a living, and do things that are important and necessary, thus rendering these large institutions obsolete. And it will build up strong communities that will have the organization, the skills and the knowledge to take over as these too-big structures crumble, and which will show the libertarians and individual narcissists that trying to do everything yourself, for yourself, is unhealthy, ineffective, and unnecessary. Imagine a world where, when you are asked to describe yourself, you don't tell people about your personal skills and accomplishments and data, but rather which communities you belong to and what they have done. Imagine a world where, instead of feeding our low self-esteem by buying and showing off extravagant wealth, we fed our sense of belonging and love for all-life-on-Earth by creating and showing something we did together, exclaiming, We did that! Category: Building a Community-Based Society 9:29:21 PM  trackback []  comment []

	Tuesday, June 16, 2009

It's Our Turn to Eat: How Politics Works and Why Activism is So Important After the Bioneers conference last year, I wrote about the 24 steps to make political activism more effective. And, as the chart above shows, activism has long been part of my "what you can do to help save the world" list. Recently, however, I've become more skeptical in my writing about whether or not political activism really has any effect. Most of my attention has been focused on personal change, on adapting to the world rather than trying to make it better. More recently still, I've begun to think that personal change is equally futile: that we cannot be other than who we are, and that the best personal coping strategy is to know and accept yourself. My friend Janene has tempered my thoughts on this somewhat; she says that while we may not be able to change who we are, we can change what we do. To some extent this takes us full circle. If we have the opportunity and responsibility to change our behaviour, our activities, to make different choices about what we do, and don't do, what is this if not political activism? And if those actions do make a difference, then skepticism about the effectiveness of political activism is at best unwarranted, and at worst defeatist. My political activist friends have called me on this, and I promised to recant any suggestion on these pages that political activism is a waste of time and energy. So I'm doing so. As Margaret Mead said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." She was right. Social and political movements have always pushed people and institutions to make important and meaningful change that they would not otherwise make, by appealing in part to their sense of what's fair and just and reasonable (an intellectual appeal), but more importantly by appealing to human emotion, by moving them. Without such movements there would be no movement, and we would probably be living in a world with much more slavery, violence, destruction and tyranny than the one we live in now. I've been trying to figure out why this is so. I have a fairly optimistic view of human intention and behaviour, as befits an incurable idealist. But I also confess to being misanthropic -- I don't much like most people. I find them stupid, unimaginative, indifferent to the suffering of others, and conveniently ignorant and agnostic. It is easy to give up hope on people, and to blame "the system" that grinds the sense and sensibility out of them, and just give up. I believe, as John Gray has argued, that we humans, like most creatures, are preoccupied with the needs of the moment. We are myopic, both in time and space -- unable to really care about what we cannot see and feel, or about what the future consequences of our actions might be. That's not a criticism, just a Darwinian truth. That is who we are. The problem is one of scale. When something affects us, or our immediate circle, personally, it is in our nature to care about it, and, with some struggle (because in our modern world we do not get much practice building consensus, resolving conflicts, and really caring about those we haven't personally selected to be part of our networks) to resolve it congenially, fairly and effectively. But the further away something gets from those intimate circles, the less capacity we have to understand it, to care about it, or to deal with it effectively. With distance and size it becomes remote, invisible, complex, unfathomable. We introduce hierarchy (whose effect is to increase efficiency and the concentration of power and reduce effectiveness, resilience, information-sharing and peer communication). We introduce agents, brokers, intermediaries, media and 'representatives' to whom we cede power and responsibility. As we become more distant and as the circle becomes much larger, we cannot care as much. Soon it takes a massive fear-based propaganda machine just to make us vote, or fight a foreign 'enemy' thousands of miles away. Likewise, when politicians are far removed from their constituents, they cease to know or care what those constituents individually want or feel, and focus instead on how to broadcast messages to get re-elected. If they're business leaders, likewise removed by many layers and floors and oceans from the front line people, they cease to care about those people, and begin to think of them merely as 'resources' to be managed. There's a new book out about government corruption in Kenya called It's Our Turn to Eat. The title refers to the appeal of each elected government to its own tribal supporters that they have to seize power and gorge themselves quickly because after the next election some other tribe will be in power and they too will look after 'their own'. The twist is that the elite in Kenya, across all tribal groups, exploits this tribal animosity and fear to distract the electorate from the fact that, whoever is in power, the elite still pull the strings, pay off the politicians, and hoard the resulting wealth. The objective is to subjugate and discourage the people, because that allows the elite to continue to rule unopposed. Then it all becomes a game of perpetuating power and wealth -- stealing elections, ever-increasing disparity, police state laws, bribes, pork, subsidies and payoffs, propaganda, intimidation, media control, divide and conquer, and massive corruption. US 2000, Kenya or Iran 2009, it doesn't matter. To think that this is a struggling-nation problem only is pure conceit. Thanks to distance, size, and scale, the benign inclinations of human nature are coopted, perverted and corrupted. Everything that works at a community level fails at the level of corporation and nation. We have shown, all over the world, again and again, that once we reach a certain size we become depraved, ungovernable. The role of the activist is to act as a counterbalance to this perversion, to speak truth to power, to bridge the distance, to hold those who are irresponsible and unaccountable, responsible and accountable. To intervene. To break down what is already broken. To enable what the people really want to be realized, despite everything. A step forward for every step back. A holding action. This is thankless work. So I want to say thank you. Without activists, the Republican neocons would still and forever control the US government. Without activists, the world would be full of gulags, torture prisons, brutalized, silent spouses and children. Without activists, the forests would all be gone, the air fouled, the oceans dead, the glaciers and ice-cap and permafrost melted into a brown sea. Without activists, women would have no vote and no right to choose, and people of colour would have no freedom. Without activists, the books with the most important ideas in human history would be banned, or never published. Without activists, the world's children would be working in mines, and the world's adults would be working in chains. Without activists, we would all be addicted to the poisons that Big Tobacco and Big Agribiz and Big Pharma and Big Energy try to convince us we cannot live without. Without activists, the only non-human animals would be farmed animals. Without activists, the world would be awash in billions of unwanted children. All of us must be activists, if we are to give this world a fighting chance. What should you do? Picking your cause is just like picking the work you're meant to do, as I explain in my book Finding the Sweet Spot. This is not work for the half-hearted or easily-discouraged. So, just as in choosing the paying work that gives your life meaning, you need to identify and choose a cause that's in your 'sweet spot' -- something you love doing, and that you're good at, and that is needed in the world, and that you care about. If you are no good at it you'll get discouraged or burned out. If you don't love the cause, you'll end up disengaged. If it's not really needed, if the world's not ready for it, you'll be unappreciated and frustrated. To find this, you must learn something about yourself, and then do some research about the world, about what's really going on, about the points of intervention that will allow you to make a difference. There are a few ideas in the brown box in the top chart above, but it's only a tiny segment of the work that needs to be done. Whether your cause is health or corruption or energy or pollution or water or food or conservation or animal welfare or urban despair or suburban sprawl or power or inequity, the process is the same: Find partners, a community of people who share your purpose and your cause and whose work and strengths complement your own, so that you get to do what you love and are good at and so that the sum of the team's work is greater than its parts. Next, you need to be for something, not just against something. Always fighting against, as important as that work is, will drain your energy unless you also have a vision of a better way, something to replace what you're battling. So you need to be not only an informed warrier but also an innovator, an entrepreneur, a visionary. And you need to be prepared to search insatiably and undogmatically for the truth, because ultimately that is your most powerful, and sometimes your only, weapon. Without it, your belief and passion are not enough. You also need to be able to articulate, simply, clearly and honestly, what you believe and why. There is power in intention and strength in numbers, but you will be unable to achieve either unless you are able to convey what is, and what needs to be done, to those who are ready to listen and to make common cause with you. You cannot do it alone, and you have to pace yourself. You need to understand too that many people will not be ready for your explanation, and that your response when you meet them is to be polite and to move on, not waste your energies trying to make them believe what they are not ready to believe. You must have faith that they will come around, in time, and you or one of those you have joined in common cause will be there, then, to welcome them. And at times you need to be ready to fight. You might think this would require courage, but if you believe in the cause, and you know it's right, fighting for it will not be hard; in your mind there will be no choice. (What else, activists? What am I missing? Lessons from the trenches? Secrets of success?) We must all be activists, and relentless, and patient, and brilliant at it, because as long as the majority are hopeless, there is no hope. And because we cannot fail. We cannot. Until the day when it's no one group's turn to eat. Until there is enough for all, and more. Category: Activism: What You Can Do Now. 12:02:09 AM  trackback []  comment []

	Friday, June 12, 2009

Slowing Down, Making Space As you may have guessed from recent posts, I'm in a very contemplative and self-preoccupied space lately. Much of my writing has been about what I call "Let-Self-Change", based on the principle that we can't really hope to change the world very much, so what we should concentrate on is adapting to the world, letting ourselves change. But now I'm not so sure on either count: I'm beginning to think we have more power to change the world than we might imagine; more on that in an upcoming post entitled Why Activism Works. And I'm beginning to think we have less power to change ourselves than we might expect: We cannot be other than who we are. Look at all the self-help books out there, and from what I can tell almost none of them has any enduring effect. I've been talking a lot about my three latest self-improvement projects: To connect better with my own (largely suppressed) emotions, to become more empathetic, and to learn to live in Now Time instead of Anxious Time. I certainly believe that practice and exercise have value, but I'm increasingly convinced that any changes they provoke are likely to be modest, and perpetually difficult to sustain. So what if I were to just slow down, make space, and pay attention to who I really am, now? And then just accept that that is who I am, already, this nobody-but-myself I keep aspiring to become? The result of my doing so (aside from some consternation and self-dissatisfaction I had to sit with for a long time to quell), is the word self-portrait above. Here's what it acknowledges: I am, and I think we all are, largely a product of two forces over which we have little control: our bodies, that "complicity of organs that evolved our brains as an information-processing and feature-detection system for their benefit", and our civilization culture, that molds us with language and socialization to behave and fit into this overcrowded world. The two lower boxes of my self-portrait list the qualities that I think each of these forces have instilled in me. I am not blaming 'them' for this, just acknowledging that they have played important roles in formng who I am. Had I grown up in a natural environment outside of civilization, the qualities in the lower left would still be present. There are some other qualities, that I list as Things I'm Not, that I've repeatedly acknowledged, but I'm not sure where they 'come from' -- they're not clearly attributable to either my body/metabolism or the influences culture has had on me. Perhaps it doesn't matter; whatever their cause, these qualities too are a part of who I am. I'd love to be present, empathetic, sensitive, patient, a fast learner, and carefree 'the space through which stuff passes', but instead I am absent, inattentive, insensitive, impatient, a slow-learner, and intense. It's not for lack of trying to change. I tell myself 5 stories, shown in the upper left box, that I believe to be true stories (to the extent any 'story' can be 'true'), that I don't think I can significantly change, and which evoke in me the flurry of what Richard Moss calls "tamed" emotions in the box connected to my box of stories (they are called "tamed" because one can learn to live with them, in contrast to the ones that eat you alive). I've tried Moss' approach of declaring such stories to be fictions to free myself from these emotions, but with limited and unenduring success. I can suppress these emotions, and perhaps it's useful to do so, but I cannot deny them, or indefinitely distract myself from them. They, too, are an integral part of who I am. Finally, since who we are and what we do are inseparable, I've listed the six 'groups' of things I love to do. Most of my time is now spent doing these things, which is distracting me from my tamed emotions and making me, most of the time, extremely happy as a result (is happiness just the absence of negative emotions and anxieties?; I don't know). The first two groups (imagining/reflecting, and writing), are my Sweet Spot: They are things that I do well, and which are needed in the world, besides being things I love doing. The rest of this list are things I love doing but confess to no particular competency at them. These things, too, are who I am. That's my self-portrait, my honest-as-possible assessment of who I am. Suppose I just accept that, and acknowledge that this rather unflattering portrait is authentic, and reflects who I have always been, and am largely fated to be for the rest of my life. And, most importantly, suppose I just accept that here, now, in this moment, this is who I am. No escape, no correction, no denying, no path to 'betterment'. Nobody but myself. Is 'knowing' this, consciously, all that is needed? If I just let myself be this, and if I let this authentic self-knowledge guide me in deciding what to do, moment to moment, can I give up all the Let-Self-Change machinations, let go of all the gunk and intentions and expectations that are not-me, and just soar? Might it even, unintentionally, make me more empathetic, more present, less anxious, more like the space through which stuff passes? Hmmm... Thanks to Nick, Cheryl, Tree, and Patti for the conversations that enabled this. Egret photo is by Eileen Nauman. 12:28:20 PM  trackback []  comment []

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