How to Save the World

Links and Tweets of the Week -- November 7, 2009

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 03:51:50 GMT

BLOG Links and Tweets of the Week -- November 7, 2009

What's wrong with this picture? The Standard & Poor's 500 Public US Companies' P/E ratio has historically traded at around 17, which assumes healthy growth in profits for big corporations indefinitely into the future. What, then, does a P/E ratio of 150 mean? It means that trillions of dollars of taxpayer money (which future generations will have to repay), given to financial institutions to bail them out, is being dumped into the stock market because it has nowhere else to go (bonds paying 0.5% interest, nope, real estate, nope nope nope, stock market it is then).

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION'S COLLAPSE

Lessons From the Edge: Sharon Astyk urges those of us who know, now, how urgent and seemingly impossible the task of saving our civilization from collapse is, to remember we have something most people don't:

Sometimes when I deal with people who don’t think climate change is real, or that serious, or who don’t think that peak oil will be a big deal, I forget that I have something they don’t have – dozens of backroom conversations with people who care desperately about the mending of the world, who care so much that they are willing to put their family lives, their time and energy and even physical wellbeing on the line to spread the word - even though they know they are likely to fail to protect what they care most about. Not “we’re doomed” but “we’re on a precipice, and we’re not sure which way we’re going to begin to slide.”

And what also strikes me is this – the sheer courage it takes to do this. As I say, I’m a piker – I go home to my kids and my goats and breath deep and do laundry and keep my computer between me and other people. It would be easy to take from their sense of loss the idea that we should stop trying, that it is all hopeless. But that’s not what one gets – at the end of the night the sense is this – that though the odds are increasingly small and the abyss below us increasingly vast, what matters most is that we live our lives as though we can succeed, because every bit of harm we prevent and every blow softened matters, and in the end, how you lived matters as much as the winning.

Why the Technophiles are Wrong: Bill Rees, co-inventor of the 'ecological footprint' concept, in a one-hour podcast tells one of the many blissfully unaware 'smart growth' conferences that we're already in overshoot, that today's cities are simply unsustainable and parasitical, that we've entered the "plague phase" of human population that will inevitably lead to implosion, that population growth and economic growth must stop, not just become 'green', and that the "technofix" approaches to today's crises are naive and delusional. Thanks to David Parkinson for the links.

Listening to the Land: Derrick Jensen, in A Language Older Than Words, advised us "Stand still and listen to the land, and in time, you will know exactly what to do". In his latest article in Orion, he explains what he means by this, and relates this capacity for attention to the survival, for much longer than our modern, teetering civilization, of most aboriginal cultures. Unfortunately, Derrick is a litttle overly-inclined to believe in the almost inherent sustainability of many aboriginal cultures. The sad truth is that overfishing and overhunting, and even catastrophic agriculture -- the same kind of disconnected degradation of our land that characterizes our modern civilization, also, much of the time, characterized theirs. There are, alas, no noble savages, and while we have a great deal to learn from aboriginal cultures, if we want a model to replace our modern civilization, we will have to look elsewhere, beyond our smart and fierce species.

Here Comes the Commercial Real Estate Crash: A US billionaire investor says that taxpayers have no more money to spend, and that as commercial (office and retail) vacancy rates soar to all-time high levels, a total collapse of commercial real estate values is inevitable. Thanks to Paul Kedrosky for the link.

LIVING BETTER

Wade Davis on Ancient Wisdom: The 2009 Massey Lectures series (5 hours of podcasts) explain what is being lost as the world's indigenous cultures disappear in the face of modern civilization monoculture and what might be done. Thanks to Eric Lilius for the link.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

US Court Justifies Purposeful Brutal Torture: A terrific summation by Glenn Greenwald of why the behaviour exhibited by US government officials -- leading to the arbitrary, completely unwarranted, savage torture of innocent people -- amounts to state-sanctioned terrorism. The US, under Obama, remains a rogue nation, and the rest of the world should be very afraid. Glenn is also interviewed this week by Bill Moyers.

Phony Corporate Fronts 'Negotiate' Environmental Settlements for First Nations: A disturbing expose by Offsetting Resistance reveals that some of the groups that sign up First Nations people to negotiate on their behalf capitulate to industry and government in secret closed-door meetings, and some are fronts for major polluters. What's worse, the First Nations are not even permitted to attend to see what is being negotiated away on their behalf. It appears that this has been done extensively to get cheap and unlimited oil industry access to lands for the horrific Alberta Tar Sands development, by dubious quasi-environmental groups like Pew Charitable Trusts (controlled by the family that also controls Sunoco), the 'Canadian Boreal Initiative' (a program of Ducks Unlimited), and the 'North American Tar Sands Coalition' (with the conflicted cast of characters depicted in the graphic above). Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.

Year's Best Books: Women Need Not Apply: Salon provides a tepid and unconvincing rationalization for the outrage of Publishers Weekly's list of the year's ten top books -- all by men. In the PW also-ran list, women dominate in only two categories, tellingly -- "mass market" and "lifestyle".

Obama's Wars Now: 300,000 Civilians Dead and 5 Million Refugees: A remarkable and disturbing rant by a former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell explains the impossible hole the US has dug for itself in Iraq and Afghanistan. Scroll down past the comments to "Transcript". Thanks to Raffi Aftandelian for the link.

Snitching for Fun and Profit: As public cameras become commonplace on every street-corner, it gets harder and harder to find enough people, or even 'smart' machines, to monitor them. So now, governments are planning on paying you to watch their camera streamcasts and report "any suspicious activity". Thanks to Tree for the links.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

Joni Mitchell turns 66 today. Her song Amelia is a classic. "Maybe I've never really loved. I guess that is that is the truth. I've spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitudes."

THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK

You want to get depressed about the future of our planet, just look at the most popular topics on Twitter. You want to get even more depressed, look at the most popular videos on YouTube. A billion Neros fiddling.

From David Whyte's poem 'Sweet Darkness':

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

From Margaret Atwood's poem 'Up':

Now here's a good one:
You're lying on your deathbed.
You have one hour to live.
Who is it, exactly, you have needed
all these years to forgive?

Do We Really Want to Know?

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:42:50 GMT

BLOG Do We Really Want to Know the Truth?

There's an interesting article by Elizabeth Kolbert in this week's New Yorker on vegetarianism, and specifically on the disconnect between our adoration of pets and our tolerance for the horrific, lifelong suffering of the animals we eat. It's really about human nature, Kolbert argues, and specifically that we just don't want to know about atrocities and suffering we don't feel we have any control over.

This was the subject of JM Coetzee's book Elizabeth Costello, that I reviewed six years ago. Here's an excerpt from the book:

Seven o'clock, the sun just rising, and John [animal welfare activist Elizabeth Costello's son] and his mother are on the way to the airport.

'I'm sorry about my wife', he says. 'She has been under a lot of strain. I don't think she is in a position to sympathize. Perhaps one could say the same for me. It's been such a short visit, and I haven't had time to make sense of why you have become so intense about this animal business.'

She watches the wipers wagging back and forth. 'A better explanation', she says, is that I have not told you why, or dare not tell you. When I think of the words, they seem so outrageous that they are best spoken into a pillow or into a hole in the ground, like King Midas.'

'I don't follow. What is it you can't say?'

'It's that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidence. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money. It's as if I were to visit friends,and to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say "Yes it's nice isn't it? Human skin it's made of, we find that's best, the skins of young virgins." And then I go to the bathroom and the soap wrapper says "100% human stearate". Am I dreaming, I say to myself. What kind of house is this? Yet I'm not dreaming. I look into your eyes, into your wife's, into the children's, and I see only kindness, human kindness. Calm down, I tell myself, you are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can't you? Why can't you?'

She turns on him a tearful face. What does she want, he thinks? Does she want me to answer her question for her?

In my review of the book, I asked:

Is there a point in rubbing our faces in it, in forcing people to face up to the horror of concentration camps, slaughterhouses, factory farms, chemical weaponry, mental illness, sexual assault and torture, bullying, spousal and child abuse, animal testing laboratories, political interrogations, what happens behind prison walls, the agony of those in continuous pain not allowed to die and without access to relief, the children whose entire lives are consumed in deprivation and brutality, the suffering of crack babies?

Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals, the book that prompted Kolbert's article, draws obvious parallels between the way we treat farmed animals and the way prisoners were treated in the second world war by the Axis powers. Kolbert explains:

Foer’s position is that all such arguments [those justifying 'humane' eating of animals put forth by Michael Pollan, Temple Grandin et al.] are, finally, bogus. We eat meat because we like to, and we devise justifications afterward. “Almost always, when I told someone I was writing a book about ‘eating animals,’ they assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a case for vegetarianism,” he says. “It’s a telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know that to be the case.” What we know about eating animals is that we don’t want to know. Although he never explicitly equates “concentrated animal feeding operations” with the Final Solution, the German model of at once seeing and not seeing clearly informs Foer’s thinking. The book is framed by tales of his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor.

Reading the article, I thought about the program of practices I have designed for myself once I retire in a couple of months, whose purpose in part is to reconnect me with my instincts, my emotions, my senses and all-life-on-Earth. When I discuss this with people who don't know me well, they tend to ask me either "How and why do you think you became disconnected?" or "Why would you want to subject yourself to that anguish?". These are both questions born, I think, out of subconscious grief -- the first is a denial that the life most of us live is in any way emotionally suppressed, tacitly cruel or unnatural, while the second is dismay that we could ever hope to handle that much terrible reality.

It intrigues me that the people who sign up for courses and workshops on emotional reconnection (judging by the research I have done, and on the Joanna Macy workshop videos I've watched) seem to be overwhelmingly female and over 30. Why is that adult women are more willing than males, or young people, to "let their hearts be broken"?

This is important, because one of the tenets of social democracy, and activism, is that if a majority of people feel strongly about some facet of the status quo, that this will inevitably produce change. The ending of slavery, women's rights, and other instances are offered as justifications for political awareness, discourse and activism being necessary and sufficient preconditions for bringing about important change.

But are they? As Foer says, the majority already know that factory farming is an ugly business. But they don't want to know. They quietly ignore it, turn away from it, satisfy themselves somehow that it's not that bad or that nothing can change it anyway -- it's an inevitable part of civilization. It's "natural". The rationalizations of Pollan and Grandin are music to their ears.

The same is true for what we're doing to the Earth, and to the struggling nations of the Earth. We know it's awful, unsustainable, just not right. But we don't want to know. We rationalize that it's not really that bad (hence the popularity of the wing-nut Lomborgian climate change deniers, and corporatists who assert that struggling nations benefit from globalization and that "a rising tide lifts all boats"). We tell ourselves we can't do anything anyway, we do what we can, it's up to the experts and politicians.

The problem is, these rationalizations are just untrue, and like the nonsense of technophiles in groups like WorldChanging, the religious loonies who believe in the Rapture, and the "humanist" cults that preach about a coming "global human consciousness raising" it is magical thinking, stuff that we tell ourselves because we really, really don't want to know the truth.

Regular readers are probably tired of me reciting Pollard's Law of human behaviour, but until it has been effectively refuted I'll keep saying it: We do what we must, then we do what's easy, and then we do what's fun. We have no time or energy left to do what's merely right. It is not in our nature.

Let's look at slavery. Of course the social movements against slavery were important. But I would argue they were not enough. The US civil war was not fought over slavery, it was fought over the right of one region to declare independence (this is the cause of many wars, which are almost always about power, money, control, and land). Slavery of both blacks and whites (called "indentured servitude") was legal for many years throughout the US because it was the only way to make passage of workers economically feasible. They did what they had to. Later as travel costs fell, most people could afford their own passage to the "new world", and slavery was then only essential to agriculture, particularly labour-intensive tobacco, cotton and sugar beet farming. Technology (like the cotton gin) increased manufacturing productivity and hence actually increased the need for more slaves on the farms to feed the new post-harvest automation. Slave owners acknowledged that slavery was (in the words of Robert E Lee) "a moral evil" but rationalized that the slaves were "better off here than in Africa". You know, like how Aghanis and Iraqis are better off now than they were under the Taliban and Saddam.

After the civil war, slavery was abolished, but, after the brief but disastrous Reconstruction and a severe economic depression, white supremacy was restored in the former slave states in the Compromise of 1877 as Union forces finally withdrew and left the former slave states to sort things out for themselves. Slavery was replaced by sharecropping, blacks were re-disenfranchised, and for most of the following century suffered under brutal, overtly racist, repressive white-controlled governments. Slavery was allowed for prisoners, judicial and police systems treated blacks no differently than they had during the slave era, and segregation of all institutions meant that life for most African-Americans was only marginally better than it had been.

What changed, finally? The decline in the importance of agriculture overall in the US. Access to cheap foreign labour. The Industrial Revolution. As a result, social slavery was no longer necessary. Economic slavery was just as useful, without the blatant "moral evil" that characterized social slavery. Slavery ended ultimately not because of social activism (though that was absolutely necessary), but because it was easier to automate harvesting, import foreign workers (or offshore the whole process to countries unconcerned with "moral evils"), or use the land for something more profitable and less labour-intensive.

Has all this social activism brought an end to racism? Not on your life. Wait until the economic debt crisis hits in the next decade or so and you'll see that nothing's changed. Has it really brought an end to slavery? Talk to the Mexican workers in the American fields, or the children working in the blood diamond mines in Africa, or chained to machines in the factories in China, and you'll get your answer. But we don't want to know.

I could make an analogous argument for what has happened with women's rights, but you get the idea. It was easy and profitable to get women into the workforce, for low wages, caught in the Two Income Trap, buying all those things a two-worker family needs that a one-worker family didn't. And giving women the right to vote didn't cost anyone anything, nor did it produce any significant power shifts. It was easy. Did women have to fight hard for it anyway, and should we salute them for doing so? Of course. Do women in most of the world still face horrific prejudice and oppression? Damned right. Will they too, with enough decades and centuries of struggle, achieve some reasonable equality in their societies? As long as it's easy, and doesn't cost anyone anything, sure.

Now apply this to factory farming. Ending it is not easy. It cannot be made easy. Like combatting the causes of climate change, or coping with the End of Oil and the End of Water, it is a hugely complex problem. The necessary change would be staggeringly expensive, and massively unpopular. Do we need activists to do the "holding actions" to mitigate some of the damage and to increase public awareness and affect public opinion on the need for change in these areas? Absolutely. Will that work, in and of itself, bring about sufficient change in these hugely difficult areas? Not a chance.

We will change when there is absolutely no choice (we do what we must) or when it is dead easy to change. Give us compact fluorescent lightbulbs that cost the same per kilowatt-hour as incandescents and reduce energy consumption by 2/3, and it's easy -- you can then make incandescents illegal and no one will care. Same thing happened with getting rid of the CFCs in refrigerants. No problem.

But reducing CO₂ emissions to zero in two decades (necessary to get us down to 350ppm and avert climate catastrophe) will never be easy. Reducing oil and petrochemical consumption by 90% in three decades (necessary to avert The Long Emergency) is unfathomably difficult, if not impossible. Drastically reducing debts, waste, and consumption (necessary to avert a ghastly depression that will make the Great Depression look mild) is unimaginable, even with magical thinking -- the cure might be as bad as the disease. And likewise an end to factory farming would require the nationalization and breakup of industrial agriculture, an end to the $150B annual agriculture subsidies to some mighty powerful oligopoly lobbies, and a total, mostly involuntary, change to the way we eat, that would make food much more expensive and its preparation much more time-consuming. This is the antithesis of easy.

These are wicked problems because it will never be easy to solve them. So no politician is going to impose change on the voters, because it would be political suicide. These problems will be solved politically or socially only when there is no other choice. And by then, as every previous civilization has discovered, it will be too late.

Is there a technology fix? The magical thinkers are hard at work. They're planning on blasting $30B of tiny reflective metal into the stratosphere to deflect the sun's rays, to combat global warming. It's called geoengineering. They have no idea what they're doing, but when things get desperate enough they'll do it anyway. After all, it's easy. Oh, and they're also going to put all the carbon dioxide back into the Earth in a way that it won't leak out again. That's called carbon sequestration, and the technology doesn't exist (the engineers I've spoken to say it never will), but, hey, when you're magical thinking, go for it. Obama's giving them millions to invent it. Just make it easy for us, please. Whatever the problems, we just don't want to know.

And the magical thinkers are going to give us high-efficiency wind and solar and geothermal and biomass and "clean coal" and "safe nuclear" to get us off our addiction to oil. No matter that even all of these together barely scratch the surface of what we would need just to keep consuming at current levels (China's energy use is growing 20%/year and they're building a new coal-fired power plant every four days). Hey, what happened to cold fusion? In the meantime, we'll stave off the problem for 4-5 years by turning an area of Alberta the size of Florida into a lunar landscape peppered with thousands of massive toxic tailing ponds. The kids will forgive us, right? We don't want to know.

The magical thinkers haven't even put their minds to dealing with the coming economic collapse, or the obscenity of factory farming, because they're not even acknowledged as problems, let alone wicked ones. We don't want to know.

Well, I want to know. And apparently a few others, mostly adult women, want to know too. Even if it means letting my heart be broken. Even if it means looking at a photo like the one above, which is offensive. I've been inside a slaughterhouse. I'm a vegetarian, but still not a vegan, so I'm complicit in what goes on in factory farms and slaughterhouses. I drive a car and fly too often, so I'm complicit in the Alberta Tar Sands holocaust. I know better, or at least I should. What's the matter with me, with us?

What's the matter is that we're human. These things that don't change don't hit close enough. They're not personal enough. Slaughterhouses and factory farms and Tar Sands developments are private property, and they don't want you to know what goes on there. And what would you do, anyway?

Well, perhaps you'd do whatever it took to shut them down. And perhaps, if you got together with enough other people with the same intention, you might come up with some ingenious ways to shut them down. Maybe even as ingenious as the ideas that got these "innovations" started in the first place.

Do we really want to know the truth? I don't know. We're a curious species, we humans. If something can reasonably be done to make something better, or less awful, a lot of us seem to want to know what the problem is, and how we might do that.

All I know is that, after a lifetime of turning away, of not wanting to know, I've now reached the point where I can't help knowing, and I can't turn away, and I have to do something more than the very worthy and necessary but insufficient things that activists do so valiantly and often at great personal risk and sacrifice.

I have to stop these things. How? Don't know yet. Work with me, and we'll figure it out.

Last words to Ms Kolbert, a much better writer than I:

“Eating Animals” closes with a turkey-less Thanksgiving. As a holiday, it doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. But this is Foer’s point. We are, he suggests, defined not just by what we do; we are defined by what we are willing to do without. Vegetarianism requires the renunciation of real and irreplaceable pleasures. To Foer’s credit, he is not embarrassed to ask this of us.

But is even veganism really enough? The cost that consumer society imposes on the planet’s fifteen or so million non-human species goes way beyond either meat or eggs. Bananas, bluejeans, soy lattes, the paper used to print this magazine, the computer screen you may be reading it on—death and destruction are embedded in them all. It is hard to think at all rigorously about our impact on other organisms without being sickened.

And if we're sickened, then what?

----------
(For those who tried my 'Words to the Wise' puzzle yesterday, here are the answers: 1. stripper, 2. stag, 3. feud, 4. Noah, 5. tithes, 6. insole, 7. antler, 8. EKG, 9. rioted, 10. Emir, 11. URLs, 12. Mac, 13. italic, 14. baskets, 15. dognap, 16. ethers, 17. den, 18. diet, 19. y'all, 20. coasts, 21. starboard, 22. tenure, 23. ice rink, 24. pooltable, 25. triplets, 26. ham radio, 27. tag-team, 28. Magi)

Category: Animal Welfare

Words to the Wise

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 03:17:41 GMT

BLOG Words to the Wise

The grid above is not connected to the clues below. If you want to try one of my complete puzzles, you'll find this grid, and the clues to it, and a link to the answers, here.

For many years I've been a fan of crossword puzzles, and occasionally I'll stumble across a clue that is devilishly clever. I keep scribbling them down, and today, for a change of pace, I'm going to inflict them on you. They aren't the notorious British-style 'cryptic' crossworld clues, but they're deliberately ambiguous, and witty. So here they are. An underscore indicates a letter, and to make it a bit fairer I've entered some letters, including the first one, for each clue. Answers tomorrow.

1. One whose business is taking off: S _ _ I _ _ E _

2. Six-pointer, perhaps: S _ A _ (hint: it's not "star")

3. Row between houses: F _ _ _

4. Master of double-take: N _ _ _

5. Gives religiously: T _ _ _ E S

6. Oxford pad: I _ _ _ _ E

7. Buck topper: A _ _ _ E _

8. Ticker tape letters: E _ _

9. Joined the mob, maybe: R _ _ _ E D

10. Title from which "admiral" comes: E _ _ _

11. They may be bookmarked: U _ _ _

12. Jobs output: M _ _

13. Leaning to the right: I _ A _ _ _

14. Jazz scores: B _ _ _ E _ S

15. Grab some chow: D _ _ _ A _

16. Bygone numbers: E _ _ _ R S

17. Remote location: D _ _

18. Purposely try to lose: D _ _ _

19. Contracted group: Y _ _ _

20. Ocean liners: C _ _ _ _ S

21. It's never left at sea: S _ _ R _ _ _ R _

22. Professor plum: T _ _ _ _ E

23. Place to see a camel: I _ _ R _ _ _

24. It has six holes: P _ _ _ _ A _ _ E

25. Uncommon delivery: T _ I _ _ E _ _

26. It's used with some frequency: H _ _ R _ _ I _

27. Ring duo: T _ _ T _ A _

28. Star followers: M _ _ _

(Acknowledgements: Quite a few of these come from classic NYT puzzle constructors David Kahn, Bob Tausig, Bob Klahn and Pat Berry.)

OK, just to get you started, the answer to #1 is "stripper".

The Use and Uselessness of Anger

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:55:58 GMT

BLOG The Use and Uselessness of Anger

All my life, I've had a temper, and three years ago, when the stress of anger precipitated a debilitating attack of ulcerative colitis that left me wishing I was dead, I learned the high cost of not knowing how to cope with it. Now I know, and it's easier, but it's not easy.

Anger is a natural reaction, and it's been selected for in our evolution because it's useful: it drives us to instinctively and autonomously attack, or flee, with all the energy our adrenaline can bring to bear. When the anger is prompted by an attack on us, or on a loved one, even by a larger and more lethal creature, this 'violent defence' strategy has proved to be more successful for our species' survival than rolling over or 'playing possum'.

When the cause of our anger is chronic, our instinctive and autonomous response is to flee, to put physical distance between us and the cause of our stress. This is nature's way of coping with overpopulation -- when the stresses of proximity get to a certain threshold, we naturally spread out. That's why nature creates buffer zones between 'tribes' and 'flocks' of wild animals, so there is some flexibility in the area occupied by each. When there is stress in the tribe but there is no room left to expand, nature assesses that we need to thin our numbers, and some other autonomous processes kick in: fertility drops, and if that isn't enough, suicide rises, or disease exploits the excess density, or in the worst case scenario, when all else fails, aggressiveness increases, internecine 'war' breaks out, death rate rises, and parents eat their young. Nature, the self-regulator of all-life-on-Earth, always bats last, and will do whatever it takes to restore the balance of each species to levels that are optimal for all creatures in the ecosystem.

A few species, including our own, will, under certain circumstances, wage war on neighbouring tribes instead of resolving their overpopulation (relative to available resources) problems internally. This stress response requires a high level of social communication, coordination and cooperation, and hence generally only occurs among the most 'intelligent' species. It may well be an unintended consequence of the evolution of large brains (there's some evidence that symbolic language, and agriculture, and civilization are likewise unintended consequences of the development of intelligence -- like corvids, we developed large brains because we needed them to survive in environments where we were competing with stronger, fiercer species). But although the capacity to wage war on neighbours was probably an unintended consequence of our growing brains, it was an evolutionary success, it 'worked' for the warring tribes, so it is still with us.

The problem with this evolutionary success is that it is very destabilizing over long periods of time. War, and the anger that provokes it and which it in turn provokes, can seethe and erupt again, as opposing factions remember and plot revenge. While constant competition and conquest may 'succeed' in the short term in evolutionary terms, in the long term they can lead to chronic violence and stress that is debilitating to the health of all, and can, if too 'successful', lead to reduction in ecological diversity and hence an unsustainable weakening of the entire ecosystem's resilience and evolutionary adapatability. Our modern civilization is the model of such catastrophic and fragile 'success'.

But back to anger on the personal level. Anger is often part of a complex set of emotions that includes fear and grief. Despite what some religions may say, we can't learn to not be angry -- anger is a successful evolutionary trait that has been part of us for millions of years. It is part of who we are. It's perfectly healthy, natural, and an inevitable part of living. It is often useful. We can learn to process or channel it in more constructive ways, and to realize and acknowledge and understand it, but we can't (and shouldn't) stop it from happening, and if we deny or sublimate it, we can make ourselves ill.

Here's the process that I have tried very hard to follow, since my illness, each time I get angry:

I respond naturally, immediately and 'violently' in a way that won't harm anyone or immediately escalate the situation: It is completely natural to respond instanty and viscerally to a situation that provokes anger. I don't attack the perpetrator, but neither do I sublimate the anger. I find an immediate 'violent' physical outlet -- vigorous exercise, a punching bag, yelling out loud, crying. My body is telling me to discharge the anger in a physically 'violent' way, and I listen to it and do what it advises. I'm not going to get ill again by locking the anger up inside.
I tap the energy of the anger to motivate myself to act. Even after the physical discharge of step 1 above, there is still energy. I am at heart lazy, cowardly and inclined to procrastinate. If I don't 'save' some of that energy to do something to address the cause of the anger, I will end up doing nothing. That is likely to result in a recurrence of the problem, either towards me or some other victim.
I sleep on it. I've learned that much of our 'intelligence' is subconscious, and that (once I'm exhausted from step 1) it is helpful to sleep and let my subsconscious process what has happened. I usually awake with a better understanding of what has happened and what to do about it.
I try to understand what motivated the offense. I've always believed that people do things for reasons that are often not obvious, and that you can't change behaviour until/unless you know what that reason is. Perhaps it's ignorance, or stupidity, or the influence of alcohol. Often it's been provoked by some feeing of anger, fear, pain or grief (anger is often a mask for pain and grief, I've learned) within the perpetrator, that may have nothing to do with me.
I try to protect myself against recurrence and escalation of what caused the anger in me. That usually means staying away, for a short term, from the person(s) whose actions prompted my anger, "shunning" them. Giving myself time and space to deal with the anger, rather than exposing myself to more of it too soon.
I usually talk with others to develop a strategy to get real behaviour change from the perpetrator. That involves getting the perpetrator to do three things, while letting them save face (if you rub their face in it, you'll just perpetrate, redirect or escalate the problem): (a) get them to appreciate, at least tacitly, that what they did caused you justifiable anger, (b) get them to take steps to mitigate the harm that they caused you, (c) get them to take steps to prevent recurrence of whatever caused your anger. It's almost always best to involve others in this -- they are more objective, bring different ideas and perspectives, and can sometimes be a "go-between" to achieve each of these three things.
I work very hard to avoid prolonging or escalating the problem. This is really hard to do -- we have a propensity to want to get back at whoever caused us anger, to turn the tables on them, to victimize them. Revenge is sweet, but it is usually unhelpful, and often dangerous. I also avoid the temptation to get people to 'gang up' on the perpetrator (also a natural temptation). Choosing sides is a recipe for escalation, which is usually (alas not always) a bad idea. Fortunately for me, I hate violence, lawyers and conflict, so this step is easier for me than for some.
I consider whether it makes sense, as at least part of the solution to the problem, to put physical distance between me and the perpetrator. Our autonomic anger/stress response is 'fight or flight' and sometimes flight is the wiser response. I know some people are just (to me anyway) naturally vexatious, and I try to avoid events where they'll be present. If the cause of anger is in your home or neighbourhood, it may sometimes be wise to move somewhere else.
When I have done everything that (in consultation with others) can reasonably been done to address the situation (the eight steps above), I then work to 'let go' of any remaining anger. This is the hardest step for me. I can't get the hang of meditation, and I heal slowly. But at least I'm conscious of what remains and when I tell myself I have done everything that can be done, and that to some extent I've rectified the situation and reduced the likelihood of recurrence, I am able to 'let go' of whatever anger and stress remains. My 'rational' side can usually then talk my 'emotional' side out of its remaining tumult.
Every once in awhile, I reflect on any unresolved anger in my heart and in my life. The practice I summarize above is new to me, and some of the things that caused me great anger previously in my life are still 'with me'. I carry them in the calcium in my bones, and in my exhausted and hyperactive immune system. I keep asking myself whether, in five years, these past events that still arouse feelings of anger in me will be, in retrospect, of any importance, or whether I'll even remember them. That sometimes gives me the perspective to let go of the lingering anger I feel.

I should note that this approach doesn't always work, even for me, even with practice. But I've found it useful.

Here's how I've 'worked through' some of the situations that have made me the angriest over the last few years:

Three years ago, the situation that gave rise to my colitis began when a former employer sent me a notice saying that they had 'recalculated' taxes owing on a convoluted tax deferral scheme they had put in place for senior management, and as a result I would have to write a cheque to the tax department, within a month, for a six-figure amount. They refused to acknowledge that it was their error, or provide any bridge financing to those like me who didn't happen to have that kind of cash sitting around. I just lost it. In retrospect, yes, they were incompetent and insensitive, but my recommendations to mitigate their error (step 6) were ignored. Under the circumstances, I should have realized that when you're dealing with giant corporations, you had better beware because they are utterly inflexible and often incompetent, and they protect their own. Instead of letting my stress over this ruin my health, or even thinking about suing them, I should have taken sensible steps to minimize the damage to me, and chalked it up as a learning experience. I screwed up at steps 7 and 9. But I've learned a lot in the process, including how to deal with stress, and this latent disease, much better.
About ten years ago, a neighbour (farmer) commenced an ill-conceived construction project without any consultation with any of us, and it remains to this day an ugly and divisive eyesore. This individual is basically unhappy and disagreeable, and has a history of bullying and abusive behaviour. He did not repond to reason from any of us, so we simply started excluding him from all neighbourhood activities and communications. Now that I'm retiring and moving away, I'll be able to put it behind me, but until then I still get angry every time I see it. I will have to use step 8 because I just can't do step 9.
At about the same time, a contractor who did incompetent work sent me a bill for twice the amount of the contract, and when I refused to pay (unless he corrected the mistakes in his work) he put a lien on the property. At the preliminary hearing, the judge refused to hear the case and told us to sort it out out-of-court. The lien is still there, and the work that was done has left the room in question uninhabitable for ten years. Our lawyers say it's impossible to get a lien removed without a settlement. The contractor is an extremely unhappy, unsuccessful and proud individual, and he will fight this to the end of his days, even though total legal bills to date have been twice the amount in question. My error was in realizing that with people like this, step 6 will never work. What I should have done is pay the amount in question into an escrow account, which would have allowed me to lift the lien immediately and get the work done properly by somebody else, and put the onus on him to argue that he should get the escrow account. In that way I would have shelved the problem and left it to lawyers to deal with (a form of steps 7 & 8), and then, step 9 would have been easy.
When I was younger, I got angry often and easily, and almost always felt badly and ashamed afterwards. Now, as I've evolved this process, I catch myself as soon as the impulse for anger arises, and start to work on the ten steps above. As a result I tend to get less angry, get angry less often, get less stressed by the anger I do feel, and handle it much more effectively. And some of the anger I held for many years I have let go, because I had done everything that could be done so staying angry was purposeless and unhealthy.

I want to acknowledge that this process can, I think, work well for dealing with anger that results from one-time incidents that are not deeply personal in nature. For recurring or personal incidents (such as those that trauma survivors must deal with) it is probably completely inadequate. There are some good books on coping with trauma, and the anger inherent in trauma, such as Bass & Davis' The Courage to Heal, and I wouldn't presume to prescribe any process for anger that is trauma-based.

I'm using the above process, however, to cope effectively with the anger that is part of my unbearable grief for Gaia. And it's working. It's led to the constructive projects I outlined in my recent article on my post-retirement plans.

What about you, dear readers? How do you deal with anger? Any secrets you've found that help you cope with and resolve anger in useful and productive ways?

Category: Human Nature

Links and Tweets of the Week: October 31, 2009 (Scary Hallowe'en Edition)

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 21:38:00 GMT

BLOG Links and Tweets of the Week: October 31, 2009 (Scary Hallowe'en Edition)

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION'S COLLAPSE

Here Comes the End of Debt: Stoneleigh from Automatic Earth, in an interview with The Oil Drum Europe, argues that we're in for an unprecedented and prolonged deflationary period, and that while wages will plunge, so will prices of everything, even oil and gold as demand falls faster than supply:

Credit bubbles [see chart above] are inherently self-limiting, proceeding until the debt they generate can no longer be supported. We have already passed that point and we are now two years into a contraction phase that is about to accelerate. As the aftermath of a credit bubble is typically proportional to the scale of the excesses that preceded it, we should be in for the largest economic contraction for at least several hundred years, and it will be global. Real estate, which is a major focus of the mania, should do particularly badly in the coming years (in fact the coming decades or longer)...

As demand falls, and with it prices, investment in the energy sector is likely to dry up. Many projects will be uneconomic at much lower prices, meaning that the projects which might have cushioned the downslope of Hubbert’s curve (and the much steeper net energy curve), are unlikely to be developed. In this way a demand collapse sets the stage for a supply collapse that could place a hard ceiling on any prospect of economic recovery. That is a recipe for extremely high energy prices in the future…

The scale of the problem has been temporarily concealed by a market rally and the shovelling of tens of trillions of dollars of taxpayer’s money into a giant black hole of credit destruction. This has done nothing to reignite lending, but the temporary (and entirely irrational) resurgence of confidence has restored a measure of liquidity. As that confidence evaporates with the end of the rally, that liquidity will also disappear.

Deflation is ultimately psychological. Without trust we will see hoarding of the cash which will be very scarce in the absence of the credit that currently comprises the vast majority of the effective money supply. The combination of scarce cash and a very low velocity of money will be toxic.

Money is the lubricant in the economic engine and without enough of it that engine will seize up as it did in the 1930s, when farmers dumped milk they couldn’t sell into ditches while others were starving for want of the money to buy food. There was plenty of everything except money, and without money, one cannot connect buyers and sellers…

Big Oil Says Reducing Carbon is Impossible: Some interesting quotes from oil industry executives suggest they know, better than the average citizen, and more than the politicians are saying, that the only way to reduce carbon to levels that will prevent catastrophic climate change is to end industrial civilization. Thanks to Keith Farnish for the link. Here are quotes from various oil execs:

The Copenhagen targets are basically completely illusory. There's no way to hit those targets and it would be very silly to think that we can...

The world does not have the scale, time frame or economics to devote to the complete eradication of carbon emissions from sources of fuel within the next four decades...

Nuclear doesn't have the flexibility to be a suitable option...

Globally [renewables] will be too small to make a real dent in the targets...

Just wait for one catastrophe and that will be the end of nuclear. And who really thinks biofuels will really work in the long run? You can't have food as an energy source.

Mind the Gap: Climate Interactive Scoreboard graphically depicts (see above) the gap between what governments have pledged to do to combat climate change and what is needed. What is really needed (a reduction to 350ppm or perhaps even 280ppm within two decades) is, well, off the chart. Mind the gap: over the next year it will become an abyss. Thanks to Tree for the link.

The Banks Have Just Stopped Making Loans: "The real economy is dying. This quarter is going to be a bloodbath" for the big banks, says yet another analyst. Thank to Sam Rose for the link.

And in China, Apocalyptic Growth: An extraordinary award-winning photo-essay on pollution in China shows a nation plunging into toxic apocalpyse. And this is the world's largest and fastest-growing economy, on which the global industrial growth economy now depends for cheap labour, cheap materials (no standards), and new 'customers'. Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link.

LIVING BETTER

Psst! Wanna Get Something Made?: 100k Garages will find and connect you with a job shop that will make anything you can imagine. And the Global Village Construction Set will help you design and fabricate anything that your community-based permaculture or transition project needs. Thanks to Michael Wiik for the links.

CarrotMob Green Businesses: A great international initiative organizes local progressives to "mob" green, responsible businesses with new customers. Thanks to Tree for the link and the three that follow.

"Agriburbia" Converts Lawns and Hinterlands into Gardens and Farms: A growing trend to make suburbs a little less dependent on imported food.

Japan Pioneers Peer-to-Peer Car Rentals: A step beyond commuter car-sharing, this online reservation system allows people to rent their cars to others at times they don't need them, reducing the need for so many cars to be manufactured and parked.

Free Do-It-Yourself Sustainability Books: A substantial resource of free online plans for renewable energy and other sustainability projects.

A Crash Course on the Coming Crash: A 3-hour crash course in economics covers the essentials of the pending economic (debt), ecological (climate change) and energy (peak oil) crises. Thanks to Mireille Jansma for the link.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

US Official Resigns Over Obama's War: A foreign service leader quits in protest over the impossible war in Afghanistan, and urges Obama to bring the troops home. Thanks to Raffi Aftandelian for the link.

Civil Liberties Watch: The Civil Liberties Defense Center (boy those Americans spell funny!) fights to overturn laws that outrageously restrict personal freedoms, such as the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (making it illegal to protest animal cruelty), aggressive use of tasers by police, and an Oregon law that made it illegal to protest old-growth forest destruction (they just succeeded in getting that ruled unconstitutional -- yay)! Thanks to Tree for the link.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

Visit a Third World Home, Virtually: Amazing photography and journalism lets you use your cursor to see 360-degree views of homes in slums in 5 countries, and hear their residents' stories. Thanks to Sue Braiden for the link.

Animated Credit Reform: A great new cartoon from Mark Fiore spoofs the new fees that credit card companies are rushing in before new (tepid) anti-usury rules come into effect. Thanks to Mireille Jansma for the link.

The Botany of Desire: Michael Pollan's new book explains how plants seduce us with their sweetness, beauty and intoxication. Link is to a PBS special on the book, viewable online. Thanks to Tree for the link.

"You'll get so much candy you'll have to be towed." -- a fun poem about Samhain, the celtic/wiccan sister festival to our Hallow'een.

Last Chance Texaco: Rickie Lee Jones sings one of her earliest, cleverest songs, about our dependence on cars, and love.

THOUGHTS OF THE WEEK

From Melissa Holbrook Pierson, bumper stickers from talk show host Chris T.:

Why do you love animals called pets, and eat animals called dinner?
Be nice to America, or we'll bring democracy to your country.
(perfect one for a bicycle or car, for different reasons) This Too Shall Pass

From Lydia Davis (in last week's New Yorker):

HEAD, HEART

Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again:
You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday.
Heart feels better, then.
But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.
Heart is so new to this.
I want them back, says heart.
Head is all heart has.
Help, head. Help heart.