Dave Pollard: Environment

Three Mini Book Reviews: The Back of the Napkin, Landscape & Memory, and Edible Forest Gardens

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 03:41:23 GMT

The Back of the Napkin, by Dan Roam

"Visual thinking means taking innate advantage of our ability to see, with our eyes and our mind's eye, in order to discover ideas, develop those ideas quickly and intuitively, and share those ideas with others in a way that they simply 'get'" This book is a brilliant elaboration on Bill Buxton's idea of sketching, with a catch.

The brilliance is in the simplicity and elegance of the model:

people understand things better, and find them accessible, when they're sketched, competently and articulately, one step at a time, by hand
collect everything you can look at that's relevant, lay it all out, organize and orient it, and then do triage on it
define the problem using the 6 questions in the chart above, and illustrate it with the 6 corresponding types of graphic
explore the 5 dimensions of ways of looking at the problem: simple/elaborate, quality/quantity, vision/execution, individual/comparison, and change/as-is
when presenting the results of your problem-solving, start looking aloud, keep seeing aloud, continue by imagining aloud, and close by showing aloud (i.e. recreate the process you used to solve the problem) and then ask the audience if they agree with what you've shown (show, don't tell, and this question answers itself)
this works best for complex problems
all good pictures do not need to be self-explanatory, but do need to be explainable

This may seem a bit cryptic, but a single read through the book and this is all you need to use this powerful technique for both solving (or at least coming to grips with) problems, and getting buy-in for your solution.

The catch? The drawings in the book are simple but beautiful. Doing this well takes lots of practice, both in conveying your meaning graphically (the expressions on your stick men, and their poses, are critical to the audience's appreciation and understanding), and in using this technique to solve seemingly intractable problems. I intend to try it, but I'm so poor at drawing that it will take me a long time to get my sketches right. Fortunately, I'm really good at imagining possibilities, so my only problem with the technique will be my artwork. Really recommended.

Landscape & Memory, by Simon Schama

This hugely ambitious work was recommended to me by three friends. The notes and bibliography of this book alone are longer than some books I've read. Schama attempts to show, through a rigorous and detailed study of history and human behaviour, that we are all innately naturalists, that our bond with Gaia has always been powerful and that our sense of 'apartness' from nature is illusory. He says, at the outset:

If the entire history of landscape in the West is indeed just a mindless race toward a machine-driven universe, uncomplicated by myth, metaphor and allegory, where measurement not memory is the absolute arbiter of value, where our ingenuity is our tragedy, then we are indeed trapped in the engine of our self-destruction. At the heart of this book is the stubborn belief that this is not, in fact, the whole story.

Many of the stories he tells are rooted in his own ancestors' stories, and the book is intensely personal. He takes us through millennia of passion for nature and place, and our apparent fear and loathing of it. But right up to modern times this ambivalent relationship and "being-a-part ness" still resonates, he says:

The designation of the suburban yard as the cure for the afflictions of city life marks the greensward as a remnant of the old pastoral dream, even though its goatherds and threshers have been replaced by tanks of pesticide and industrial strength mowing machines.

I was not impressed by his arguments, which seem somewhat nostalgic to me, in this age of relentless and ruthless ecocide. But he is an amazing story-teller, and teller of the stories and lessons of history, and the book is compelling even when it is not persuasive.

Even more compelling are the stunning artworks which run through the whole book, such as the one above, that argue much more powerfully than words the inseparability of human spirituality from our love of and roots in nature. The book is an armchair visit to a vast science and history museum, and its stories of human altruism, savagery and struggle to live within and without nature, rootless and yet inexorably drawn to place, to home, stay with you a long time.

Edible Forest Gardens (Books 1 & 2), by Dave Jacke with Eric Toensmeier

What is most remarkable about this exhaustive and practical course in temperate climate (zones 4-7) permaculture is that only about 40 of its over 1000 pages are about the work of planting and maintaining an "edible forest garden" ("a perennial polyculture of multipurpose [native] plants"); the rest is understanding what to plant, when, and why. The whole idea of these gardens is to enable you to harvest an abundance of varied foodstuffs with almost no maintenance.

The theory takes up the whole first volume and needs every page. The challenge, you see, is that even what we might perceive as 'wilderness' is in fact nothing of the sort. Humans, right back to First Nations thousands of years ago, have utterly altered the vegetation that now looks so wild and 'natural'. On top of that, climate change has, since the ice ages, been continuously changing what grows where.

In order to allow nature to provide you, effortlessly year after year, a harvest of abundance, you first need to discover what naturally grew and what naturally will grow where you live. You need to study the botanical history of your home. Then, since it cannot be quickly 'restored' to natural, sustainable state (succession goes through many long intermediary stages and can take centuries to achieve equilibrium), you need to be smart enough to plan for a 20-30 year 'hurry-up succession' that will chivy the process along. You have to plant in stages, knowing that early stages are just preparing the soil, the ecosystem and the ground cover and canopy for later stages, and that some of the first things you plant won't be around at the end of the succession at all if you've done your job right. This takes serious knowledge and study, a lot of patience and relearning what our ancestors learned as a matter of course. It's in many ways a course in what Derrick Jensen has called "listening to the land".

There probably isn't anything you could learn that would be more important, for your soul, for your community, for your resilience in the coming age of climate change and other disasters that will require us all to become much more self-sufficient than we are today. Start now, and when cascading economic, social and ecological catastrophes hit us in the 2030s and bring existing food production and other systems to their knees, you'll be ready to gather the fruits of your labour.

Category: Activism: What You Can Do

Making the Transition to a Natural Economy

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 01:49:34 GMT

I've written before about the idea of creating a responsible, sustainable, joyful, Natural Economy, and about how difficult it is to 'get there' because the brutal industrial economy we live under is The Only Life We Know.

Most of the prescriptions for getting there require (or involve entirely) top-down, government actions. Yes, ideally we should have import duties that prevent products produced by slave labour in ruined environments from coming in. Yes, ideally we should have a tax regime that taxes bads, not goods, and redistributes wealth. Yes, ideally we should have land ownership reform that prohibits absentee ownership and speculative trading. Yes, ideally we should have laws that break up monopolies and oligopolies, and that put megapolluters and corporate criminals in prison with the rest of the mass murderers and thieves.

But we're not going to get them. If we wait for them, we'll wait forever.

Also, ideally, if we were to create working models of a better way to live and make a living, they should attract enough attention that others would emulate them, in sufficient numbers to undermine the old economy. But as my friend Flemming says, sometimes you have to wait for the old deadwood hogging all the sunlight to collapse before the new seeds can germinate (or else you need to be a fungus).

So what can we do while we're waiting?

Here are a few ideas:

Get the facts out: Let people know that the real inflation rate is closer to 10% than 2%. That businesses with over 500 employees are actually destroying more jobs than they're creating. That over the last 30 years the real income and net wealth of 90% of the population has actually declined (it's just exploding levels of debt that have created the appearance that people are better off). That affluent nations have produced half of the world's environmental destruction while paying only 3% of its costs. Tell people what's really going on with a combination of real (little known or misunderstood) information and clever presentation. Ask people provocative questions. Tell compelling and illuminating stories. Don't just listen to the misinformation, oversimplification, and propaganda, say something! Most people are capable of critical thinking with a bit of a nudge: They're just out of practice.
Learn (and then teach) how Natural Enterprise works: We are desperately short of the skills needed to create our own responsible, sustainable, joyful enterprises. You won't learn it in high school, or business school, or executive training courses, or MBA programs. Unschool yourself. Go out and find and meet with successful entrepreneurs who've discovered you don't have to work 80 hour weeks, mortgage your assets or sell your soul to succeed. Read my book, and/or any of the books listed in its bibliography. Discover the competencies that any enterprise needs. Seek out and partner with people whose unique skills, passions and competencies dovetail with your own and who share your purpose. Learn how to do real, world-class business research, to find out what unmet needs you can fill. Learn how to innovate rigorously, continuously, and effectively. Learn how to make your enterprise powerfully networked and resilient. And then teach all this to others in your community.
Start a grassroots campaign to get people to buy local, buy organic, buy durable quality, and buy less: Be willing to pay more, but expect more for it. Tell the owners (not the sales clerks) of the stores you visit that you won't buy from them if they sell poor quality crap that takes jobs and dignity away from local workers. Patronize, celebrate, and start businesses who sell only 100% local/organic products. Be patient with new local businesses -- quality craftsmanship and quality service are lost arts, that will need to be relearned.
Learn and help others become self-sufficient: Work where you live, even if that means creating new, local, community-based enterprises, so you're not dependent on cars and oil. Grow your own food. Learn to make and fix your own stuff, including your own clothes. Make your own entertainment (games, music, art, theatre, films, sports), instead of depending on expensive canned entertainment from studios and extravagant commercial establishments. Create local cooperatives for community energy self-sufficiency (renewable of course). Unschool yourself and your children -- teach them how to learn for themselves and with and from each other. Value your time more than your money.Do all of these things collectively, in collaboration with those in your community. Trade the products of your know-how for theirs, for free, generously. An economy of self-sufficiency is a Gift Economy, and unlike one based on competition and growth, it's sustainable.
Extinguish your debts and don't take on any new ones: Debt and consumption are addictions, and the corporatists are determined to keep you addicted. Break the habit, as quickly and completely as you can. That will probably require you to own less. Are you ready for that? If you judge yourself and let others judge you by how much you own, breaking the habit is going to be doubly difficult, and doubly necessary.
Create local networks: Use technology to organize, trade among your community, and share information. Use these networks to create relationships, and trust, to collaborate and partner, to help find what is needed and ensure it's of high quality, to innovate together, to keep each other healthy, to create consensus, and to establish Peer Production.
Eat well and look after your health: The industrial health system is approaching total collapse, and the sooner we wean ourselves off it the better. Learn how to research health matters, how to prevent disease and how to diagnose and treat it yourself, as much as possible. Become a vegetarian: Eat food, mostly plants, not too much. Stay fit. And be good to yourself -- you're doing all the right stuff!

If enough of us do these things, will it be enough to transform our economy into a responsible, sustainable, joyful, Natural Economy? Probably not. But it will put us in good stead when the industrial economy runs out of steam (and oil).

While we can work now to starve the industrial economy of the four things it values from us (our tax dollars, our cheap and obedient labour, our consumption of cheap imported crap, and our attention to its political and commercial propaganda), the scourges of climate change, constant ever-expanding wars, overpopulation, the End of Oil, the End of Water, the Death of the Seas, the Death of the Forests, human pandemics, pandemic diseases of farmed animals and monoculture plants, and bioterror, will collectively bring that economy to its knees.

It won't go easily, however, and as it slowly collapses it will be the poor and the young who will suffer the brunt of its struggle to keep going -- desperate and indiscriminate drilling in the oceans and arctic, strip-mining for dirty coal and bitumen sludge, privatization of scarce water, massive incarceration and curtailment of civil freedoms, more cities written off like New Orleans, ghastly famines and floods in struggling nations, the eradication of life savings and pensions, the collapse of health systems, expropriation of property, soaring suicide rates, and unimaginable ubiquitous poverty.

At that point those who have started the transition to a Natural Economy will be able to withstand the collapse of the industrial economy, and will be the pioneers of its replacement. The transition is likely to be a painful one for most, unfortunately -- all 'normal curves' have a sudden and precipitous downside, and studies of past overheated economies and civilizations suggest our economy's will be no exception. We never seem to learn the lessons of history.

Category: Creating an Alternative Economy

Friday Flashback: Save the World Reading List

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 03:58:56 GMT

In April 2006 I published the latest edition of my Save the World Reading List. It's probably due for an editing and revision, but, unlike the last revision, the next edition is likely to be only modestly different. Here are the books and articles I've read over the past two years that might make worthy additions to the list:

The Great Depression, by Pierre Berton. In 1929 we thought the good life would go on forever, and eventually everyone, not only the upper classes, would benefit. We were wrong, and this book explains why, and shows us what will happen when the US dollar crashes.
Figments of Reality, by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. We are a complicity of the separately-evolved creatures in our bodies organized for their mutual benefit; our brains are their information-processing system, not 'ours'.
The Two Income Trap, by Elizabeth Warren. Families now need twice as many members each working twice as hard just to have what their parents had.
The Idols of Environmentalism, online essay by Curtis White. How the very nature of our work mitigates against our environment.
Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt. Correlation analysis dispels many of the cause-and-effect myths that underlie much of our modern society's and economy's behaviours.
The Megacity, online essay by George Packer. A portrait of Lagos, Nigeria, the world's fastest-growing city, an endless sprawl of slums in a ruined country, whose people survive only on their wits, workarounds and the propaganda of hope it might somehow one day get better.
The Other Side of Eden, by Hugh Brody. What we can learn from the world's aboriginal cultures.
The Idea of a Local Economy, online essay by Wendell Berry. Why relocalization, bottom up, is the only way to reform our economy.
Waiting for the Macaws, by Terry Glavin. Stories of the dawning of the sixth great extinction.
A Theory of Power by Jeff Vail. A free downloadable book. How we can overcome the Frankenstein monster of our industrial corpocracy through a revolutionary rhizome (network) social structure based on self-sufficient, egalitarian non-hierarchical communities.
The Logic of Sufficiency, by Thomas Princen. A set of principles, assumptions and connecting theory for rationally and collectively self-managing complex adaptive systems (like societies and ecosystems).
Heat, by George Monbiot. A specific plan to reduce CO2 emissions by 90%, but it requires everyone's cooperation to work.
Deer Hunting with Jesus, by Joe Bageant. Why the working class of the US, and perhaps of all nations, suffers quietly and resists all calls for action to deal with the outrages of our time (of which they are the primary victims) and the crises that threaten is.
Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert. What it means to be human, explained through the author's personal stories.
Life is a Verb, by Patti Digh. Say yes, Be generous, Speak up, Love more, Slow down, and Trust yourself.
The Anglo Disease, by Jérôme Guillet. How corporations, governments and citizens have become co-dependent on a dysfunctional economy built on five fraudulent deceptions.
Finding the Sweet Spot: The Natural Entrepreneur's Guide to Responsible, Sustainable, Joyful Work, by Dave Pollard. My new book on how to discover the work you were meant to do, and then start an ethical enterprise to make it reality.

I'm probably missing some important additions -- books or articles or maybe videos I've read in the past two years but forgotten, which belong on this list, but until I get my Table of Contents updated I won't know for sure. Here's the 2006 list:

How to Save the World Reading List - Revised and Updated (April 2006)

In Beyond Civilization, Daniel Quinn says:

People will listen when they're ready to listen and not before. Probably, once upon a time, you weren't ready to listen to an idea than now seems to you obvious, even urgent. Let people come to it in their own time. Nagging or bullying will only alienate them. Don't preach. Don't waste time with people who want to argue. They'll keep you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to something new.

Five years ago, I became ready to listen, and, starting with Full House and Ishmael, began to learn the truth about what is happening to this world, and what we can, and can't do, to save it from civilization's excesses.

Here's the updated list -- 80 books and articles that have forever changed my worldview and my purpose for living. The fifteen most critical readings have a numbered triangle in front of them, with the numbers reflecting the order that, I would suggest, it makes most sense to read them in.

What Life was Really Like Before Civilization: Revisionist History

[1] Full House, by the late Stephen J. Gould. The presence of man on Earth was an unlikely and random occurrence, and after the next Extinction Event life on the planet is likely to evolve very differently. We are not the Crown of Creation.
The Wealth of Man by Peter Jay. The life of pre-historic man was easy, idyllic, and very pleasant. Hunt big slow game an hour a day, relax and enjoy the rest.
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, (online) essay by Jared Diamond Why the adoption of agriculture was 'a catastrophe from which we have never recovered'.
[4] The Story of B and Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Also the IshCon discussion forum. The first two of these three books are fictionalized stories about human history from a different, anti-civilization perspective, with penetrating, astounding analysis and insight. Ishmael is more popular but I prefer The Story of B which recapitulates the entire theses in a series of 'lectures'. The two critical lectures are online here.
Original Affluence, by Marshall Sahlins. If you wanted to defend a new society that featured rigid hierarchy, agonizingly hard work, suffering, frequent starvation and slavery, wouldn't you try to portray the alternative life as 'short, nasty and brutish'?
Extinction, by Michael Boulter. Our planet's history is one of cycles punctuated by massive extinctions and new beginnings. Our only choice is whether to end this one sooner (a century) or let it end later (several millennia).
The Axemaker's Gift by James Burke and Robert Ornstein. How innovativeness has been increasingly corrupted to concentrate and retain power, instead of making the world better.
[12] A Short History of Progress, by Ronald Wright. A survey of past civilizations makes clear that savagery and short-term thinking are responsible both for humanity's evolutionary success and its destruction.
[13] Straw Dogs, by John Gray. While we have a responsibility to try to make the world better and joyful, for those we love and leave behind, we cannot be other than what we are: a fierce, brilliantly adaptable species destined to bring out the next great extinction, and annihilate ourselves in the process.

What's Going On Under our Noses: The Real News

The Unconscious Civilization, by John Ralston Saul. How and why we've become helpless slaves of the political and economic system we built.
Ockham's Razor, by Wade Rowland. What's wrong with our modern values, and where to look for new ones.
Beginning Again, by David Ehrenfeld. A biologist's plea for a new partnership with nature, and prediction of the mechanized world coming apart like a broken flywheel if we don't heed his advice.
[5] A Language Older Than Words, by Derrick Jensen. A profound and disturbing argument for why moderate answers to our current predicament won't work.
[6] The World We Want, by Mark Kingwell. Why we are best served by trusting our instincts rather than what we are persuaded is moral or rational.
People Before Profit, by Charles Derber -- How rampant corporatism ravaged the vast majority of people worldwide in the 1800s, and is doing so again.
State of the World, by WorldWatch Institute, The 7 trends that most threaten eco-collapse: population growth, rising temperature, falling water tables, shrinking cropland per person, collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, and the extinction of plant and animal species.
World Scientists' Warning (online), by the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished. A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated."
Dream of the Earth by Thomas Berry. "We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story."
Healing Time on Earth, by David Brower. An argument that life without wilderness is meaningless and unsustainable.
The Future of Freedom, by Fareed Zakaria. How cultures change, and why they don't.
The New Rules of the World, by John Pilger. A devastating portrait of how the world really works.
The Demon in the Freezer, by Richard Preston. How vulnerable we all are to individual acts of terror, chaos and sabotage.
[10] Against the Grain, by Richard Manning. How and why grain monoculture evolved, and how it's ruining the Earth.
Population Projections, by US Census Bureau. They're no longer assuring us that US and Global Population will level out at 300 million and 9 billion. Would you believe 1 billion and 12 billion by the end of the century, and still rising?
Global Warming, by NOAA. An online synopsis of US scientists' consensus on the causes and consequences of global warming.
This Overheating World - Worried? Us? (online essay) by Bill McKibben. Article in the UK journal Granta explaining the psychology, and cynical political expediency, of denial.
Are Cities Changing Local and Global Climates?, (online) by NASA. Studies of urban microclimates and how they contribute to local climate change and instability.
Restoring Scientific Integrity (online) by Union of Concerned Scientists. The Bush regime's distortion of scientific research to forward its own political agenda, and how it threatens our planet.
Climate Collapse, by David Stipp (online article) from Fortune Magazine. The possibility and chilling implications of global warming producing sudden drastic climate shifts.
Conservative Myths on Global Warming (online) by Blogger Carpe Datum. A brief but thorough explanation of the science behind global warming, and the reasoning behind scientists' connecting it to human activity and worrying about the risks of resultant instability
The Empire Strikes Out, by Kenny Ausubel. Corporatism and acquisitiveness run amok are ruining our world, but nature always bats last.
The Tragedy of the Commons, by Garry Harding. The commons, that which belongs in common to all of us, is disappearing -- Why nobody really cares.
Elizabeth Costello, by JM Coetzee. Why we tolerate a holocaust against our fellow creatures on Earth.
The Machine in Our Heads, by Glenn Parton. How the ecological crisis is rooted in a human psychological crisis.
Rogue Primate, by John Livingston. How anthropocentric cultural prosthesis has led our species astray, and how we can find our way back by rediscovering "the sweet bondage of wildness".
In Defiance of Gravity, by Tom Robbins. An (online) essay that argues we must "insist on joy in spite of everything."
The Slow Crash, by Ran Prieur. An (online) essay that explains how civilization will end, not with a bang, but with a series of whimpers.
[15] The Long Emergency, by James Kunstler. The story of our dystopian future, caused by our cultural incapacity for preparedness, and sparked by resource scarcity and cultural conflict.

About Gaia: What Nature is Really About

[2] When Elephants Weep, by Jeff Masson. Compelling scientific evidence that animals feel deep emotions.
Mind of the Raven, by Bernd Heinrich. Compelling scientific evidence that animals are intelligent, complex, rational and communicative.
The Sacred Balance by David Suzuki. A passionate explanation of James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis, the need to redesign how we live, and the importance of spending more time in nature.
The Hidden Dimension, by Edward Hall. We need space and a natural environment to be healthy and human. When we're deprived of them, we get mentally ill.
[7] The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram. How to reconnect with nature, and rediscover wonder.
The World is Dying, by Richard Bruce Anderson. Online essay about our instinctive grief over knowing what we are doing to our beleaguered planet, and our feelings of helplessness about how to remedy it.
The Weather Makers, by Tim Flannery. A scientific explanation of global warming, how we are causing it, and the possible consequences.
The Truth About Nature, by Dave Pollard. My own essay, synthesizing the ideas in this reading list.

Toolkit for Change: Knowledge We Can Use to Save the World

[3] Freeman Dyson's Brain (online interview), in Wired Magazine. The twin keys to building a better world are (a) establishing viable self-sufficient local communities to replace big centralized states and governments, and (b) selective more-with-less technologies like solar/wind energy coops and biotech medicines.
The Developing Ideas Interview (online) with economist Herman Daly. An economic and tax program that favours communities and commons instead of corporations, and a 'contract' to reduce our population and ecological footprint.
Tools for Conviviality, by Ivan Illich. "The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. Otherwise man will find himself totally enclosed within his artificial creation, with no exit." Full book is online.*
Beyond Civilization, by Daniel Quinn. A prescription for creating a post-civilization world, starting with preparing yourself.
The Unconquerable World, by Jon Schell. Why non-violence and consensus-building are the only viable way forward.
The Support Economy, by Shoshana Zuboff A model for a post-capitalist economy.
Unequal Protection, by Thom Hartmann. The case for denying 'personhood' to corporations.
When Corporations Rule the World, by David Korten. The need to get corporations out of politics and create localized economies that empower communities within a system of global cooperation, overcoming the myths about economic growth and the sanctification of greed, and focusing instead on overconsumption, poverty, overpopulation, and reining in untrammelled corporate power.
Radical Simplicity, by Jim Merkel. How to free yourself from possessions and wage slavery without sacrifice.
The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. What makes things change.
The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki. Why collective wisdom is better than accepted wisdom and expertise at solving problems, and how to tap it.
Ten Ways to Make a Difference, by Peter Singer. A pragmatic recipe for change.
[8] The Truth About Stories, by Thomas King. The truth about stories is that that's all we are. Want a new society? Write a new story.
The Boycott List, by Responsible Shopper, and Good Stuff, by the WorldWatch Institute. What not to buy, and what to buy instead.
The Corporation, by Joel Bakan. An action plan for undermining corporatism.
[9] Humans in the Wilderness, by Glenn Parton. How we might reintroduce humans, well-spaced-out, into a primarily wilderness Earth.
At Home in the Universe, by Stuart Kauffman. How self-organizing, self-managing systems work.
EarthDance (entire book online), by Elisabet Sahtouris. Eleven steps to cultural metamorphosis (my summary is here)
eGaia (entire book online), by Gary Alexander. How to achieve peace, cooperation and sustainability (replacing war, competition and growth, the fuels of our current culture) and a future state vision with vignettes from individuals' lives in a balanced and harmonious future world.
[11] The Commonwealth of Life, by Peter Brown. A 14-point plan for stewardship of the Earth based on an accepted set of duties, responsibilities, and universal rights.
Cradle to Cradle and The Hannover Principles, by Bill McDonough. Cradle to Cradle outlines a 5-stage design and materials usage approach to sustainability. The principles should drive the way we design, develop and operate cities.
[14] Creating a Life Together, by Diana Leafe Christian. How to create and sustain model Intentional Communities.
The Growth Illusion and Short Circuit, by Richard Douthwaite. A blueprint for creating Sustainable Local Economies. Short Circuit is free online [my summary is here].
Biomimicry, by Janine Benyus. Lessons and approaches from nature that could transform and inspire our processes for food production, harnessing energy, manufacturing, health care, education, collaboration and entrepreneurship.
The Cellular Church, by Malcolm Gladwell. An online essay that suggest cellular organization principles might allow us to accomplish, bottom-up, what political entities cannot.
Is Your Genius at Work?, by Dick Richards. A guide to deciding how your talent and passion (your 'genius') can be applied to your purpose, and hence how you can best help to save the world.
To Be Of Use, by Dave Smith. A sustainable entrepreneur's explanation of why creating natural, sustainable enterprise is essential to our planet's survival, and hence to our own peace of mind.
Sustainability Within a Generation, by the David Suzuki Foundation. Eleven public policy programs that could achieve this extraordinary goal. This essay, by me, explains how these programs, along with my own four proposed programs (a sustainability information exchange, sustainable enterprises, personal sustainable living programs, and sustainable intentional communities) could bring both top-down and bottom-up synergies to achieving sustainability.

Peter Block's Community

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 00:58:08 GMT

Most people know Peter Block as the consultant's consultant -- he wrote the book that many consultants use as their methodology. Since then he is best known for his book Stewardship, that I reviewed two years ago, and his more recent spin-off The Answer to How is Yes.

Stewardship was about how to convert hierarchical organizations into flat, responsible, sustainable, entrepreneurial organizations, something like what I have come to call Natural Enterprises.

His new book, Community, proposes, analogously to convert isolated, hopeless neighbourhoods into dynamic, self-directed communities. I have the same general concern about the new book that I had about Stewardship: Why struggle to transform a dysfunctional corporation, or neighbourhood, into one that works, when it's much easier to create a new one, a Natural Enterprise or an Intentional Community, from scratch? And has anyone effectively, and sustainably, re-formed a corporation or community? Are Savannah, Boston, Chicago and Portland really now communities that work?

Block starts with a series of theses about what's wrong with modern neighbourhoods and with our ways of trying to better them:

Every community is different, and things that work in one don't necessarily work in others.
We try to solve problems through individual persuasion and action, instead of collectively.
When cities start to decay, too often those with money, energy and ideas flee to suburban or exurban areas instead of staying to deal with the problems.
The cult of leadership lets citizens off the hook and breeds dependency and entitlement.
Engagement of citizens is negative: "Many citizens get engaged in community only when they are angry".
Social service organizations are stigmatized as inefficient, compassion is marginalized, and the only news reported is crime and scandal.
The preoccupation of those working with the challenges of cities is on coping with fear and finding fault. In this worldview, he says:

We are a community of problems to be solved. Those who can best articulate the problems and the solutions dominate the conversation. The future is defined by the interplay of self-interests, dependent on the accountability of leaders, and controlled by a small number of wealthy and powerful people, we categorize as "they". Community action is aimed at eliminating the sources of fear. We aim at a set of needs and deficiencies. To eliminate fear and respond to neediness, we try harder at what we've been doing all along, what isn't working. We lock down neighbourhoods, build more prisons, reduce tolerance to zero. We call for better programs, more expertise, more funding, better leadership, stronger consequences, and more protection.

Block's framework for genuinely improving communities has six components:

The engagement and convening of a broad cross-section of the community to explore issues and ideas collectively.
The creation of small groups within larger groups as the basis for exploratory conversations focused on possibilities, not problems.
A focus on questions that open rather than rushing to answers, that encourage learning and exploration rather than giving and getting advice.
The creation of several types of conversation:

Conversations of invitation: invitations that declare the possibility of collective resolution and action, frame the choice to attend or not, describe the hurdle and expectation of participants, stress appreciation for those who choose to attend, and are delivered personally.
Conversations of possibility: surfacing/exploring the crossroads that each participant is at that gives him or her passion about the subject
Conversations of ownership: surfacing/exploring what actions each participant is prepared to commit to
Conversations of dissent: surfacing/exploring doubts, reservations, and reasons for lack of commitment
Conversations of appreciation: surfacing/exploring the value, learning and connection each participant has received from others

The creation of an atmosphere of hospitality, welcoming strangers.
The creation of physical and social space that supports belonging.

After describing how this framework has worked in several communities, including his own (Cincinnati, which he describes as "like most of our urban centers, like New Orleans without the flood"), Block concludes with a list of pressing urban issues and intractable problems the methodology could be applied to.

If you notice a lot of similarities between this methodology and Open Space, you're not alone -- Block acknowledges Open Space as one of the techniques that he draws on.

What I liked most about the book was the diagnosis of what hasn't worked. These failed approaches are almost instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever worked on an urban renewal or community improvement project.

And of course I liked the fact that Block's approach boils down to Love, Conversation and Community.

Category: Building Community

The (Nearly) Impossible Challenge of Creating a Sustainable Economy (Part Two)

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:34:09 GMT

Yesterday I explained what Jérôme Guillet in the European Tribune calls The Anglo Disease, and how it has produced a completely dysfunctional economy in many affluent nations (and co-dependence with struggling nations). I used the example illustrated above of a fictitious national economy that generates its wealth entirely by printing money, persuades other nations to accept that money in return for real goods, and addicts its citizens to living off a stock market Ponzi scheme believing, because the price of their shares is ever-increasing (giving them additional borrowing collateral), that they are somehow well-off despite not producing anything of value.

I also explained the five deceptions necessary to perpetrate such a fraud, and how vulnerable the economy is to the public's (and other nations' citizens') catching on to these deceptions and refusing to go on stoking this phony and worthless economy.

Part Two of this article, today, is a possible prescription for how such an economy could be transformed into a real, sustainable economy,

Before I begin, however, I want to deal with three issues that several readers raised in response to Part One. The first is the power of innovation and the capacity of affluent nations to generate real value and make their economy more sustainable through innovative products, processes and technologies. The second is the argument that the existing phony economy, through printing and distributing funny money, is actually redistributing wealth from rich to poor. And the third is that it is somehow possible to perpetually enhance wealth and well-being of all people in the economy without increasing the use of resources, without 'growing'. Here are my responses:

Innovation only really occurs when people with desperate human needs can afford to pay for solutions to those needs. The great innovations of civilization generally followed either a great equalization of wealth (e.g. the printing press, the assembly line) or a huge crisis (e.g. modern 'catastrophic' (monoculture) agriculture, nuclear power). For the last 50 years neither has been present and innovation has arguably almost completely ceased. It is far easier and safer for corporate oligopolies to 'create value' for themselves by using lawyers to hoard intellectual assets and eliminate competition, and propaganda to brainwash customers into overpaying for their product, than to innovate. When it comes to real, essential goods (food, textiles, construction, transportation, health care, education) there have been almost no important innovations since before the boomers were born, and the number of innovative companies can be counted on one hand (WL Gore, Apple, a few others). The real innovators in this period have been the poor, who have learned ways to 'work around' the oligopoly economy and make anything that can be transmitted in bits essentially cost-free. Companies like Google and the file-sharing pioneers have supported this free-bits innovation, but unfortunately it has had little impact on innovations around real goods. This kind of innovation will have to await a crisis, such as when our house-of-cards phony economy collapses.
It is true that inflation can effectively redistribute wealth from rich to poor, since debts become repayable in 'cheaper' dollars than those originally borrowed. Unfortunately the current economy is in complete denial about the true inflation in our economy (driven by soaring health, insurance and education costs). So while large corporations can borrow money at the "official" inflation rate of almost zero, citizens are paying rates even higher than the real rate of inflation (the book The Two-Income Trap reported that average working class borrowing rates were about 16%) to subsidize the artificially-suppressed rates being paid by the rich (and by governments). So the rich borrow at 3% and earn 15% on Ponzi stock market returns, while the poor borrow at 16% to buy real goods whose value is not rising at all. The result is a massive redistribution of wealth from poor to rich, which is exactly what the rich and powerful (who realize that the whole economy is a house of cards and are busy secreting away wealth in durable goods, often offshore, to protect themselves) want.
You cannot create material wealth out of nothing; to do so defies the laws of physics and thermodynamics. We have reduced costs by using automation to mechanize, but this depletes non-renewable resources and reduces the value of labour -- if you pay people less, or pay fewer people, to produce something automated inexpensively, then the people you want to sell it to have less money to buy it with, so you are ultimately no further ahead. The so-called 'green revolution', which applied industrial factory methods to agriculture, suffers from the same problems -- ever-increasing use of chemicals (made from oil) and automated methods, lowering the need and value for farm labour and depleting the soil so it becomes, like its tillers, addicted to oil which is in ever-diminishing supply. You can make information free, but when it comes to hard goods, you really can't make more out of less, and you certainly can't continue to do so indefinitely.

So how might we transform the phony, house-of-cards economy into a truly sustainable one? As I suggested yesterday, to do so would be extremely difficult, require unprecedented cooperation and collaboration of all of us, and entail a great deal of sacrifice by people (us included) who (to put it mildly) have historically not been inclined to give up what they have so others can share. But if were able to achieve these conditions, here's how we might be able to do it:

First, we would have to be honest with ourselves and with all the citizens of the world about the five deceptions and about the abject failure of the current economy to create real value or well-being for more than a tiny minority of citizens. There is no chance of working together on a solution as long as we remain in denial about the problem or what, and who, has caused it, and why, selfishly, they did so. This would be extremely unpleasant for the rich. There would be a widespread desire to bring the perpetrators to account.
Secondly, we would have to redistribute wealth -- assets, money, and position -- from rich to poor, both within and between nations. To become self-sufficient, struggling nations need to be given back the resources we stole from them, and retrained how to manage their own economies and provide for themselves. Within both affluent and struggling nations, power and wealth would have to be ceded and decentralized. Corporate charters would have to be revamped to mandate responsibility to local community, to employees and to the environment, rather than to shareholders. It would probably help in this effort to do away with the concept of share ownership entirely and to convert all corporations to cooperatives, broken down into autonomous self-managed units. Oligopolies would be outlawed (as they used to be) and the corporations belonging to them disbanded, with assets redistributed to the cooperatives. If you're a shareholder, you would be out of luck -- but then, you're going to be out of luck anyway when the existing economy collapses, so you will be no worse off. Governments (which are really another form of oligopoly corporation) would likewise have to devolve, their assets and authority redistributed to self-managing communities. This is what happens in economic depressions anyway -- when central governments go broke, citizens are left to look after themselves. Without a central government, how would we defend ourselves from outside invaders? We'll have to work that out collectively. Scary? Of course. Would governments, either in affluent or struggling nations, ever do this willingly? Probably not; they'd have to be persuaded. If this plan was easy, we'd already have done it.
Third, we would need a program of massive re-education of citizens on how to make a living for themselves, in small, locally-focused cooperative enterprises. No one is teaching this now, but we do have a lot of good teachers who, if we taught them, could teach the rest of us. This would not be classroom education. In rich nations and poor it would be learning by doing, the way the Argentinian workers learned when they seized their padlocked factories after their economy collapsed and the factory owners had fled. It would be a very difficult and immensely valuable education. We would figure it out though -- we know what we need, and we'd relearn how to provide it for ourselves.
Fourth, we would need infrastructure to share what we know and what we learn openly with others. This would not be a competitive economy; it would be a collaborative one. We would use this 'knowledge infrastructure' to work around problems and to identify and cut off those who attempted to hoard or gouge. We would use it to develop Peer Production, to identify needs and to co-develop innovative solutions to those needs. We would use it to virally market, to microfinance and organically finance enterprises, and to develop the enterprise partnerships, alliances and relationships essential to creating and sustaining true business value. The line between producers and consumers would disappear, and the very concept of unemployment would become meaningless.
Fifth, to nurture this economy, we would need fair trade laws in place of pseudo-'free' trade laws. These laws would protect local industry but enable the importation of goods and services that cannot be effectively produced locally. These laws would conserve scarce natural resources and the environment. We would need laws and taxes that would require all enterprises to be indefinitely sustainable, cradle-to-cradle. These enterprises would not need to grow in order to thrive and be of use in their communities as creators of well-being. Their mandate would be to get better, not bigger.
Sixth, we would need to pledge, both as entrepreneurs and as citizens, to take collective responsibility for the well-being of all life on Earth. There is no room for greed, waste, or heartlessness in this economy. It must be, in large part, a Gift Economy, where money becomes unimportant, and might fall into disuse entirely.

This is, of course, a tall order, and perhaps, without a massive global economic crisis at least, impossible. My only claim, based on my knowledge of history, economics and business models, is that it would work if we all wanted it to work.

We may, some day in the next couple of generations, have no choice but to find out.

Category: Alternative Economies

The (Nearly) Impossible Challenge of Creating a Sustainable Economy (Part One)

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 02:51:39 GMT

(Chart from http://www.eurotrib.com/files/3/050619_financial_profits.gif )

Over the past year, Jérôme Guillet of the European Tribune has written an extensive series of articles about what he calls The Anglo Disease:

Describing the interest rates set by the bond market as the "cornerstone" for valuing equities and other securities, [Albert Edwards, Dresdner Kleinwort's well-known global equity strategist] cautions that if the bond market has truly entered a new era of steadily rising long-term rates, "all investment portfolios will be shredded to ribbons".

Increasingly cheap money, underpinned by ever more optimistic prognoses about inflation and, more generally, future returns on financial assets, has fuelled the massive financial boom we've been in for most of our lives and which has so transformed our economic landscape. By making high returns possible, it has generalised the requirement for such returns in all economic activities, and thus the need for constant restructuring of businesses, for cost-cutting, offshoring and, often, for the wholesale dismantlement of whole sectors of activity that could not generate the required profitability.

There is something happening here, and it's been going on for a long time, driven by greed, political expediency, and a sustained and sophisticated campaign of misinformation about how a healthy economy is created and measured. It is quickly coming unglued, and the consequences of this deception are going to wreak havoc on us all for decades. It is possibly the greatest fraud and theft in the history of civilization. Here's how it works:

The government has to lie about the real increase in the cost of living, and the real levels of unemployment and misery among its citizens. This is in its interest, since admitting bad economic news is hazardous to politicians' health.
The government then has to artificially suppress interest rates, so that they, and corporations, can borrow money virtually free. As a consequence, since borrowing has no cost, there is no need to repay it; it can be refinanced indefinitely, and left for future generations to worry about.
To keep money supply high enough that it is freely available to all borrowers, the government needs to print masses of new money. To conceal this, it needs to stop reporting the true money supply, as the US government has done.
To lock in foreign suppliers of cheap goods and services in struggling nations, the affluent nations need to develop co-dependent relationships with these countries, such that they are forced to accept payment in an essentially worthless currency.
To lock in citizens, the government and large corporations need to work together to enable the large corporations to generate staggering profits, increasing by double-digits every year. So-called 'free' trade agreements, massive subsidies and tax breaks, the continued availability of essentially free money, deregulation, liability indemnification, allowing price-fixing oligopolies, union-busting and massive offshoring etc. all allow this. As a result, stock markets soar, and citizens (unable to obtain any return on risk-free investments while the real cost of living is rising by 7% or more per year) are forced to pump all their investments into these stocks, including their pensions.

So now you have all the players in the economy -- corporations, governments, and citizens in affluent and struggling nations alike -- codependent on this house of cards and its continuation. The chart above shows the results for the US -- an economy whose profits are entirely paper, not the result of work or production of anything of durable value.

To get the idea, imagine a country where everyone sells insurance, and where, in order to get reciprocal benefits from others, everyone agrees to buy $100k worth of insurance from an insurance company every year. Imagine further that in this country the government prints an extra $100k per capita of money every year, and sets interest rates at zero. People borrow money, free, from the banks, and use the proceeds to buy shares in insurance companies, which, because everyone is buying so much insurance, are amazingly profitable, and generate enough profits to the citizens every year to allow them to import things of real value (like food, clothing, and oil). This is illustrated as follows:

In this idyllic country, the government prints $100k per capita each year (or borrows it abroad at zero interest rate), which costs it nothing. In return it gets $10k per capita in taxes, which it can spend to buy campaign contributors and votes to get re-elected, and/or to spend on their pet project (a war for conservatives, a social service for liberals). Doesn't matter who's in power, they're happy.

The banks get this $100k at zero interest rate from the government, and loan it to citizens. They get zero interest, but they do get $10k per capita in service charges, late fees etc. So they're happy.

The insurance companies get $100k in premiums per capita, and only have to pay out $20k in claims, so they can give their employees, the citizens, a little folding money, and pay huge salaries to executives, and still have so much left over that the shares leap in value on the market. So they're happy.

The citizens get their small salaries, and the $20k in insurance payouts, and make $100k on the soaring value of their shares in the insurance companies, $20k of which they invest in additional shares (pushing demand and hence prices even higher), and $80k of which they spend on imported food, clothing, oil and other 'consumer goods'. So they're happy.

Everyone in this country is happy, and feels affluent, despite the fact no one is producing anything of any value whatsoever. No one wants to rock the boat, or know the truth about what is really happening. as long as everyone keeps believing this is a healthy economy, it can keep going. This is exactly what the top chart above portrays.

This lovely cycle is, of course, completely unsustainable. What is keeping it going now is that the foreign countries accepting the worthless currency of the US and similar non-producing affluent nations are utterly dependent on exports to the affluent nations to fuel their own fragile economies. If they, in Asia and the Middle East, were to insist on being paid in a currency or product with real value, or insisted on a reasonable rate of interest on their holdings in these risky, worthless currencies, the whole house of cards would collapse.

Likewise, if the investors began to realize that the Ponzi scheme that is the modern stock market was not sustainable, and started taking their money out of it, then the fictitious wealth created by the expectation of eternally-increasing double-digit rates of profitability would instantly dry up. In fact, if any of the five deceptions listed above were no longer accepted by citizens, the world would be plunged into an economic depression as serious as that of the 1930s.

As Jérôme Guillet puts it "it is not possible to generate 15% per annum returns on capital forever when the underlying economy is growing only by 3%".

This is the precipice on which we now sit. We can either keep on perpetuating the deception, and fooling ourselves that it can go on forever, or we can try to transition our economy to one that is durable and sustainable and based on real value (and real values, like well-being instead of wealth). The latter would require enormous, sustained, coordinated effort to move the house of cards to a stable foundation, one card at a time, taking great care not to let the rest collapse.

In the second part of this article (within a week), I will lay out a scenario for how this might happen. It's an almost impossibly difficult prescription, and it would require a great deal of honesty about what we have been doing wrong, including possibly putting the perpetrators of the deceptions in some place where they can no longer wreak havoc on our world.

To give you some hints, it would require a massive redistribution of wealth both within and between nations. It would require a complete rebuilding of local economies around production of goods of real value. It would be an economy built on knowledge sharing and know-how, not on funny money, or oil or other non-renewable resources. There would be no room in this economy for large hierarchical companies, the hoarding of wealth or knowledge, or acquisitions or divestitures that (as most do) inhibit competition and innovation and destroy value. It would be a hands-on economy where everyone's time would be comparably, highly valued, and where people in the economy would collaborate because it makes economic sense, and produces better products, and makes work more fun. It would be a steady-state economy, with no growth (and initially, absolute reductions) in the amount of resources or energy consumed or waste or pollution produced.

We could get there, though I doubt we have the will or capacity to sacrifice and admit failure and work together to do it. Stay tuned for Part Two.

Category: Why Civilization is Unsustainable

Practice: Learning to Be Nobody But Yourself

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 01:06:54 GMT

I've been thinking more about my Mid-Year Intentions, the things I intend to get done in the next six months, and intentions I failed to realize in the last six months, in the context of some recent discussion about our obsession with doing rather than being. Viv McWaters said:

I’ve been pondering the need to be seen to be DOING, the need to produce OUTPUTS or PRODUCTS and the dilemma of the intrinsic worth of simply BEING with others and having conversations. This situation often arises when I talk about or facilitate open space meetings. “It was good to talk, to have some time to explore, to slow down, but what did we achieve?” I wonder why talking, exploring and slowing down are not generally seen as achievements in their own right?

I think this is what was wrong with my New Years' Intentions list six months ago -- I was totally fixated on measurable results and achievement, on Getting Things Done, on getting there, getting finished. Those intentions were very ambitious -- lifelong goals that were, mostly goals of direction (love more, live simpler, converse better, be more present, move more, be more self-sufficient, be bolder, help entrepreneurs more, have more fun). These intentions were, in fact, not really about accomplishment or objectives. Rather than intentions to do, they are intentions to change the way I am (what I've called Let-Self-Change) -- intentions to be something different. To be what I was intended to be, to be more authentically myself. To be nobody-but-myself.

In a remarkable synchronicity, Evelyn Rodriguez just twittered a link to her 2005 article about Conrad's and Joyce's comments on this same subject. She quotes Gandhi as saying "My life is my message." (he also famously said "Be the change you want to see in the world" -- Be, not Do). She quotes Joseph Conrad as saying that real art -- infinitely present art, that is created for its own purpose, a simple representation of what is -- has the enormous power to astonish, to extinguish the ego. By contrast, he says, 'art' that intends to persuade other people to feel or believe or do something is mere marketing, propaganda, pornography. Real artists, she quotes Tom Asacker as saying, "live worldview-disrupting lives". And, she concludes, "if we draw from inspiration, our lives themselves can be works of art".

Regular readers know I've been conversing with Siona and Patti about this whole issue of being vs doing and what we're meant to do and our responsibility to the world, and to ourselves.

As I thought about all this, I suddenly had an Aha! moment: Is my Purpose, generalist that I am, to simply be a model for others of how to be, in this terrible world where there is only so much any one person can do? And if that's so, I wondered, how can I be better?

Then I began to completely rethink my intentions list and put them in terms of getting better, of being better. This would require that I engage regularly in practice to move towards being better. For the most part these things can never be done -- there is only the striving to get better at them, a bit at a time.

What's more, practicing getting better at these things requires that I do less of something else (there are only so many hours in a day). So I decided to take a look at how I spend my time now, and how I would have to spend my time to allow myself enough regular practice to steadily get better at these things. When I realized that I currently spend almost no time practicing these things, and that my current workload almost precludes me finding time to practice these things, I realized why I have made so little progress in achieving these intentions.

The chart above shows how, on average, my day is spent. Much of my time is taken up in the activities shown in grey, activities that do not involve practicing the things I need to in order to achieve my intentions. Embarrassingly little is spent in the activities shown in red, yellow, orange, blue, green and purple -- the six activities that I get greatest satisfaction from and which will best equip me, if practiced regularly, both to achieve my intentions and to be more useful to others and the world in the years ahead. And to be more authentically myself, to be nobody-but-myself.

My intention now is to increase the time I spend practicing these six activities from 5.6 hours a day to 11.6 hours a day, as illustrated in the chart above. Here's how I might spend that time:

Practicing Being Better at	Additional Time/Day	Examples of Practices
Playing and Learning	0.7 hrs	Creating my Centre for Sustainable Entrepreneurship; Writing about why business should care about climate change; Listing to, composing and playing music; Exploring Intentional Community; Drawing (take course); Puzzles; Making furniture (get coach); Subsistence forest permaculture (self-study)
Conversing	1.4 hrs	Listening and speaking; Story-telling (take course); Improv (take course)
Giving	1.7 hrs	Appreciation, love and attention, generously; Provoking with Aha! ideas & insights through stories; Facilitation (take another course); Environmental activism?
Self-Discipline	0.3 hrs	Meditation (guided); Exercise (varied)
Writing	1.0 hrs	More short stories & poetry; Novel: The Only Life We Know
Reflection and Being Present	0.9 hrs	Wilderness hikes; Candles and aromatherapy; Making vegan meals; Attention skills (self-study)

In practicing these things, I intend to learn to be more myself. These are long-term intentions, totally unlike a Getting Things Done list, and I intend to practice from now on, just keep getting better. The only 'results' will be the self-change in me (greater competencies, self-sufficiency, self-knowledge, presence, and happiness) and being more useful (perhaps even a model) to others. The very thought of spending most of my waking hours practicing these things is exhilarating. This is what I used to be, when I was very young, naturally. This is what, I think, I am meant to be. How did I lose my way?

Category: Let-Self-Change

Now What Am I Going to Do?

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 01:55:38 GMT

Now what am I going to do? That's a question that millions of people ask themselves every day. In struggling nations the question is about how to get enough to keep the family alive for another day. In the working classes of affluent nations the question is often about how to cope with a layoff, an uninsured or underinsured illness or loss, or costs of living that are soaring. Among those who are educated but unemployed, underemployed, or exhausted by their employment, the question is about finding meaningful work. But in every case the answer is not easy, not obvious, and immensely stressful.

A year ago I produced a list of Mid-Year Intentions, and by six months ago I had substantially completed them all. My book had found a publisher. I'd changed jobs to one that promised to let me make a living doing what I'd always wanted to do. I'd made a lot of self-changes for the better, and was healthier, happier, more loving and more productive. I was really on a roll.

By intentions I meant more than resolutions...these were things I had already begun and fully intended to finish within six months. This list was my answer to the question Now what am I going to do?

At the start of this year I created a second set of New Years' Intentions, to be completed by the end of this month. But despite an incredibly busy and full six months, my success this time around has been much more modest. What went wrong? I intended to:

Love as many as people as possible.
Live simpler.
Engage in more conversations and practice to become a better conversationalist.
Create community.
Breathe, be present, be still, in those moments when I am alone.
Move more.
Be more self-sufficient.
Be bolder.
Help entrepreneurs more.
Have more fun.

My accomplishments from completing the first six-month intentions list continue to bear fruit, and I'm very proud of them. Sustaining them takes some continuing work, but it's worth it. I'm in the best physical shape I've ever been. The book gets better and better and will soon be in the bookstores. I'm doing more facilitating and less telling, and instead of telling people what to do I tell stories and let them draw their own conclusions. I've become 100% vegetarian and 80% of my meals are now vegan. My health is excellent.

So maybe adding another ten intentions was asking too much? This may be partly true -- I constantly feel I'm not getting everything done I should, constantly feel like I'm letting people down, and letting myself down as well. And I'm allowing myself to get sleep-deprived too often.

But it's also true that the second list was more ambitious -- more of a stretch, a self-change challenge, including things that I have never been good at. In trying to love as many people as possible, for example, I've learned that I don't even like most people very much. Thanks to Mia's efforts, not mine, our Second Life Intentional Community is up and running, but I'm impatient with the struggle to find people who share our intention and are willing to invest some energy and time to make it work. And as delightful as the people I've met from real-life Intentional Communities are, I just can't see myself in any of these communities -- it's not what I'm looking for.

So I've decided to make my next list of intentions -- my Mid Year Intentions 2008 list, which I'll post in about two weeks -- shorter, perhaps 5 items instead of 10. And beside each broad intention will be One Thing that I will do specifically in the next six months to realize that intention, to get at least measurably closer to achieving it. Each of these 'One Things' will be my answer to the question Now what am I going to do?

So preparing the Intention List becomes a three step exercise:

What is your intention, in order to become who you really are, and be and do what you were intended to?
What's holding you back? What obstacle is blocking you from realizing that intention?
What One Thing will you do remove or work around that obstacle?

So, for example:

I intend to learn to be present, live in the moment, be aware, attentive, appreciative.
I am blocked from doing this by my inability to quiet my mind and avoid distractions.
The One Thing I will do to remove that obstacle is to study and practice meditation, regularly and diligently.

In order to realize my top 5 intentions for the next six months, I'm going to have to be selective, and put my list in order of importance. And I'm going to have to be realistic about how many of those One Things I can expect to do, on top of all that I am already doing. Or else I will have to stop doing some things in order to make room for others, more important. After all, we may only have 37 days to realize our really important intentions.

What do you think? Could this simple three-step process help us to let ourselves change, and really realize our intentions?

What is your most important intention, to be achieved in the next six months, in order to become more who you really are, and be and do what you were intended to? What's holding you back? And what One Thing will you do to remove or work around that obstacle?

Now what are you going to do?

Category: Let-Self-Change