 Jared Diamond, Pulitzer prize-winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel, recently gave a lecture on the collapse of societies, and how bad decision-making contributes to such collapses. Edge.org has the complete transcript . Diamond is working on his next book, due out at the end of the year, entitled Ecocide. It’s not unheard of for writers to foreshadow the message of an upcoming book in their lectures. Here’s an interesting, and perhaps prophetic, story from his lecture that you can bet will make its way into the book.The Easter Islanders, Polynesian people, settled an island that was originally forested. The Easter Islanders gradually chopped down that forest to use the wood for canoes, firewood, transporting statues, raising statues, and carving and also to protect against soil erosion. Eventually they chopped down all the forests to the point where all the tree species were extinct, which meant that they ran out of canoes, they could no longer erect statues, there were no longer trees to protect the topsoil against erosion, and their society collapsed in an epidemic of cannibalism that left 90 percent of the islanders dead. The question that most intrigued my UCLA students was one that hadn’t registered on me: how on Earth could a society make such an obviously disastrous decision as to cut down all the trees on which they depended? For example, my students wondered, what did the Easter Islanders say as they were cutting down the last palm tree? Were they saying, think of our jobs as loggers, not these trees? Were they saying, respect my private property rights? Surely the Easter Islanders, of all people, must have realized the consequences to them of destroying their own forest. It wasn’t a subtle mistake. One wonders whether ? if there are still people left alive a hundred years from now ? people in the next century will be equally astonished about our blindness today as we are today about the blindness of the Easter Islanders. The lecture also talks about the impact on social collapse of the tragedy of the commons (our selfish neglect of the value of shared resources), which thanks to Marie has been much discussed in the blogosphere of late, and about the folly of Lomborgian eco-holocaust denial. The lecture’s worth a complete read while we wait for the book to come out. |
April 30, 2003
WHY SOCIETIES COLLAPSE
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WINNIPEG, SUMMER 1962: THE SMELL OF RAIN
 (this memoir was prompted by David’s and Rayne’s childhood memory posts)97 oF, fifth day in a row, and in those days no one had air conditioning. We’d go down in the basement with the Zenith portable radio and the fan, and then, restless, try to round up the neighbourhood kids for baseball or tag. And if no one was around we’d throw the India rubber ball against the front steps — you had to throw it just right, so it would pop up into the air. You’d get ten points if you caught it before a bounce, five for a one-bouncer, three for a two-bouncer, one for a grounder. Whoever got the ball threw it the next time and the first to 100 won the game. Sometimes we’d play tackle, to prevent the other player from catching it, and it would roll out onto the street and the cars going by would honk and we’d laugh if they actually ran over the ball, and run to stop it rolling down the curb into the storm sewer. On a clear day the prairie summer sky is a deeper, purer blue than anywhere else on Earth. The very hot days were usually windless, motionless, as if everything had stopped. You could always hear the crickets, though, and the mourning doves. We’d have checked the weather forecast but we knew even before we heard it what was coming: “severe late-day thunderstorms”. You knew from the silence, you could smell it, the intense dry heat that could not be sustained. First there’d be a thin dark line on the distant horizon and a few gusts of wind, and then it would come fast. You’d hurry to finish the last game and then head to someone’s house to get ready for “the show”. The wind would pick up quickly then and there’d be the smell of rain in the air. Our mothers would be out hurriedly taking the clothes off the clotheslines, and we’d chase the clothes that blew away and help with the last few items when the sudden cold, large droplets of rain started. Now the sky would be menacing, black, the line of nimbus moving rapidly forward like a blanket covering everything, something out of an Edvard Munch or Van Gogh painting and we’d be sitting in someone’s kitchen and listening to the radio, all crackling now with static from the storm, and just for fun because it got so dark so fast we’d turn on the kitchen lights which was somehow comforting, and watch out the window, saying “bet there’ll be a tornado or a hurricane or something”. We’d usually go to the house of whoever’s mother was baking or making something we liked for supper. Then the rumble of thunder in the distance would give way to the first dazzling lightning strikes and we’d be running around the house trying to get the best window view and shouting “wow, did you see that one”, and counting the seconds as thousands of feet: “one thousand, two thousand”, and then the thunder would be coming within a second of the lighting flash, over and over and we’d be cheering it on with our hearts racing, and feeling sorry for the cat that was hiding under the table with its hair standing on end. Then with the crack of lightning striking trees the rain would suddenly pick up and the breeze through the window screens would suddenly change direction and drop twenty degrees. We’d be closing the windows now, at least on the side of the house the rain was coming in, inhaling the smell one last time as we closed each window, the amazing crisp fresh smell of rain and it would be pounding down, in sheets so strong you could hardly see the street. The windows would fog up and if we felt bold we’d strip off our shirts and run outside in the downpour, jumping up and down on the waterlogged lawns splashing each other. Then we’d take cover, foolishly under the trees or in the hide-and-seek hiding places we knew about. The rain would have soaked through our shorts and our clothes would be sticking to our skin, and if there was a girl with us in our chosen hiding place we’d have a funny feeling and maybe try to kiss her, and if there wasn’t we’d wish their was and save the feeling for when we were alone in bed that night. And then as fast as it began it would be over. The sheet of black clouds would race on and the blue sky would return as rich as ever, and the sun would now be low in the horizon and reflect off the water droplets on the leaves and the grass. Even after they were over, these storms were a continuous light show. We’d wander back to whoever’s house we’d been visiting and their mother would have towels for us to dry off and would invite us to stay for dinner if we got permission from our mothers first. With the lovely sunset and the renewed calm and the smells of grass and flowers in the air and soaked into our hair and clothes, and exhausted from the excitement of the storm, we’d feel this incredible mellow feeling. All the terrors of childhood and adolescence would briefly fade away and we’d be more relaxed and yet more exhilarated than we ever were in the rest of our mundane young lives. We’d sit out on the porch watching the sunset and eating hot dogs and potato chips or ice cream, making fun of each other when we caught someone singing along with the Four Seasons or Trini Lopez on the radio. I’d head up to bed feeling kind of cheerful and sad at the same time. I’d sit at my bedroom desk staring out the back window, all my senses alert. Then I’d pull out the bedroom window screen and climb out onto the sun porch roof, carrying the cat with me, and with him nestled in my lap I’d sit out there in my pyjama bottoms looking at the moon, peeking in the neighbours’ windows, and listening to the sounds of the neighbourhood until I could hardly keep my eyes open, and then drag myself back in to bed and sleep the sleep of the dead. |
April 29, 2003
DAVE POLLARD’S CREATIVE WORKS: TABLE OF CONTENTS
A premature obituary About the Author (March, 2003) |
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An explanation of what motivates me to write in public for free Why I Blog (April, 2003) |
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True stories, here and now Exurban Tale #1: Lessons from Chelsea (March, 2003) Exurban Tale #2: Leaders Out of Place (April, 2003) |
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Short stories Terrible Knowledge (2000) about living with too much information Living in Our Sleep (2000) about dreaming with too much information The Box (March, 2003) about the perpetual darkness of depression The Light Creatures (April, 2003) about living in the shadow of a negligent superpower |
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Poetry Five Unfinished Canvasses (1969-1980) Lament for Earth on the Eve of Yet Another War (March, 2003) Reconnaisance: A Sonnet (March, 2003) The Only Thing (April, 2003) |
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Satire A Subversive Announcement (March, 2003) |
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Fable Losing the Game (April, 2003) |
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WHAT WE NEED YOU TO DO
 As its title implies, one of the purposes of this blog is to lay out a specific action plan to restore ecological balance to our planet. This entails dealing with the fundamental cause of the imbalance (i.e. the behaviour of our human culture) in a multifaceted and comprehensive way, instead of just dealing with the ever-more challenging symptoms of it.
If you agree this is a worthwhile (if somewhat ambitious) objective, I would ask you to please do four things:
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THE SEVENTEEN PROJECTS EXPLAINED
| (this is reference material for the post immediately above)
Primary (Big Hairy Audacious) Goals:
Indirect (G3, G4) and By-Product (G5) Goals:
Technology & Innovation Projects:
Social & Educational Projects:
Economic, Legal & Political Projects
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April 28, 2003
PEEPER
 at night
sitting out on the back hill with Chelsea looking down toward the South pond everything sounds like this  |
April 27, 2003
BUSINESS THOUGHT LEADERSHIP: A PRIMER FOR KNOWLEDGE MANAGERS
 Knowledge managers define knowledge as something that gives you the capacity to do something better than would be possible without it. In business, knowledge is further delineated by its position on the knowledge value chain – ‘raw’ data, information that has been distilled and had context added, insights that analyze the information to assess what it means, and actions that prescribe what to do about it. At the upper (insights and actions) end of this value chain, there are six main types of business knowledge:
Unlike the other five types, Thought Leadership is generally the result of an inductive (creative), rather than a deductive (logical, analytical) process. If you have access to deep knowledge about a company’s inner workings, culture, business processes and key people, you can produce any of the other five types of knowledge, but Thought Leadership requires more: an ability to think ahead and laterally, to ask creative and even serendipitous ‘what if’ questions, and an ability to take knowledge and learning gleaned in some completely different domain and context and apply it to solve a burning business problem. Here’s an example: It was recently discovered that butterfly wings have absolutely no pigment in them, since the aerodynamic requirements of wings cannot tolerate the weight of pigment. What gives the wings their illusion of colour is the way the cells of the wings are layered, so that light reflects from them prismatically. A Thought Leader could take this esoteric discovery and apply it, practically and economically, to ideas for producing more lightweight, and hence efficient, airplane wings, say, or ideas for creating un-counterfeitable currency. What makes a Thought Leader? Clearly it requires some deep, specialized but un-myopic subject-matter expertise, some right-brain core competencies, an extremely broad range of interests and readings, and networks and tools that filter and feed the firehose-volume of daily news and information into a manageable stream. I think there are three main Thought Leadership styles, that are pictured in the chart at right, and which depend on individual temporal orientation and knowledge processing behaviour:
Life isn’t easy for thought leaders. They are often seen by management as intimidating or impractical. They may be culturally out of sync with the company for whom they work. To do their job right takes a lot of time and resources that must compete with the day-to-day resource needs and priorities of the company. They need permission to be wrong, since a lot of new ideas and predictions that look right on paper don’t pass the market test. Some companies have been much more successful at innovation, at remaining agile in the face of market changes. Such companies tend to attract thought leaders, to give them the roles and resources they need to capitalize on their skills and knowledge and bring them to fruition. They also tend to have business processes that encourage and enable gurus to come up with breakthrough ideas and products, visionaries to steer the company into the future profitably ahead of its competitors, and facilitators to capture, build on and act on others’ leading-edge ideas. Until very recently, knowledge management has been about capturing employee knowledge and know-how, and because of the practical difficulties of codifying and leveraging such knowledge, has fallen on hard times of late. KM may have a second chance if it can design the enabling architecture for business innovation and thought leadership. That will require knowledge leaders to refocus their attention from the bottom line, where KM was expected to have the greatest impact, to the top line and to the connection with customers, where its greatest promise always lay. |
April 26, 2003
EXURBAN TALE #2: LEADERS OUT OF PLACE
 Our neighbour raises alpacas. Our dog Chelsea likes to go over to visit them, sticking her nose through the fence. Alpacas are insatiably curious, and today they charge over to see us, babies in front, adults warier, moving to surround the youngsters, protect them, until they’re all bunched up, eighteen of them, right in front of us, lovely graceful creatures with enigmatic smiles, as if the world were not a terrible place.
In the back pen, the alpha alpaca cries out its warning, with the improbably high-pitched squeak of the species. The alpha is always kept separate, apart from the rest of the alpaca community. The keepers know that, unlike in the wild, the bullying leader of the herd is a liability, not an asset, unnecessarily trying to steer the herd out of non-existent danger. In captivity, the aggressive leader is just a nuisance, best kept away from the flock in the interest of peace. I wonder, though, if the alpha’s forlorn cry is maybe not a needless warning, but instead a plea: “Hey, me too, don’t forget about me…” The visit complete, Chelsea and I meander on, into the hills, the thousand acres of semi-wilderness behind our farm-surrounded subdivision. The trees aren’t yet in bloom, so I get careless, paying too much attention to avoiding thorns and swamp and not enough to where we’re going. Chelsea is in sensory heaven, the odours in every twig, every tree-trunk telling her stories of who was here, when, and where they were going. She keeps looking back at me, knowing I can’t be trained to bend down and inhale the scent, share the story. At the top of a hill in a clearing we sit and rest, looking down over a pondful of squawking Canada geese, the much more skittish ducks, and the hopeful chorus of Spring Peeper frogs. We do, of course, get home at last. The conservation area’s criss-crossed with colour-coded walking trails, and once we reach them I sheepishly follow the arrows until the familiar turn-off home looms into view. Disheveled and exhausted, I tell my wife we felt adventurous and took the long trail around. During the greeting ritual, Chelsea goes along with the incomplete story, though I’m sure I see her cast a sidelong glance at me and wink. (Link to Exurban Tale #1: Lessons from Chelsea) |
And then I realize I’m not sure of the way back. I try to go in a straight line, but in the forest it’s easy to get off track, and soon I find we’re back on the hill where we rested. In desperation I tell Chelsea “Let’s go home”, and look to follow her, but Chelsea knows her place and waits for me, the leader of her tribe (at least in the absence of my wife) to show the way. She would follow me all day, around in circles, yards from the path that would quickly take us home, and still she’d wait for my direction.
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April 25, 2003
HOUSE OF CARDS
 Now get your set of US regime change playing cards ( .pdf format ) from the satirical TRO. Absolutely hilarious pictures of the entire Bush regime, neocon wingnut advisors and corporate cronies. Fun! Educational! A great reminder to keep tabs on your elected (and unelected) reps and to vote next year.[Thanks to A Blog Doesn't Need... ] |
WHY CANADIANS FEAR AMERICA
 The title of this essay alone is likely to get me into trouble with both Canadians (“We do not!”) and Americans (“You ingrates still don’t get it.”), but someone ought to talk about this. Let me start by dispensing with two myths: That most Canadians and Americans are really very similar, and that Canada couldn’t exist without American support and forbearance.
I spend half of my work life working with Americans and half with Canadians. While there are dangers in generalizing, recent opinion polls illustrate fundamental differences between American and Canadian worldviews and value. Here are three major differences:
Put aside for a moment the Bush administration’s bullying and threats of retaliation against Canada for its non-support of the war. Put aside the hypocrisy of Bush’s claim to support free trade while his trade negotiators are reneging on every existing trade agreement that restricts American companies. Put aside Bush’s refusal to sign Kyoto and his attempt to undermine the World Court of Justice. I think most Canadians see these actions as Bush/neocon excess, and not representative of the views of Americans. The only thing frightening about these particular actions is that the US political system allows one small group of mostly (entirely?) unelected people to wield this much power so undemocratically. The only Canadian prime minister that expected that kind of blind trust from the electorate (Brian Mulroney) almost destroyed the country when Canadians refused to be bullied into accepting his reckless plan for constitutional reform. He was ousted in disgrace and his Conservative party has never recovered. Americans seem to like arrogant, swaggering leaders; Canadians loathe them. Most Canadians also think the ‘average’ American (not to mention the average Republican president) is woefully ignorant of world history, geography, culture, and current events outside the US and Iraq. That may or may not be a fair assessment, but it underlies the Canadian perception that Americans see Canada as somehow utterly dependent on US largesse. By every standard except GDP, Canadian living standards are higher than those in the US. The trade interdependence is two-way: to a significant degree the 1990s US economic boom was sustained by handy access to Canadian labour that is more productive and 30% cheaper than their US counterparts’, and by Canadians’ willingness to sell them raw materials at bargain prices and then buy back the finished goods at a premium. And while Canadians would clearly be unable to defend themselves from an attack by a larger enemy, they also believe that no one else could or should defend Canada either, and that the best defence is hence neutrality, negotiation, consensus-building and a global reputation for peace-keeping and fairness. Ironically, Canada’s very proximity to the US seems to reinforce these differences and the fear they elicit among Canadians. Those Canadians who are conservative, materialistic, entrepreneurial and religious are far more likely to move to the US, widening the Canada/US worldview gulf further. Twice the proportion of Americans vs. Canadians believe in trying to convert non-Christians, and three times the proportion describe themselves as evangelical Christians or as ‘born-again’. Twice the proportion of Canadians believe the government should guarantee adequate health, education and welfare for all citizens, but Canadians are even more opposed to government restrictions on civil liberties than Americans. Canadians opened their hearts and wallets to help America after 9/11. They fought side-by-side with Americans in Afghanistan. It was Canadians who liberated the American hostages from Iran. But now 70% of Canadians fear retaliation from the neighbour with whom they are economically joined at the hip. They read that 30% of Americans would like to annex Canada. They hear about US boycotts of Canadian goods, and US demonstrations whose leaders propose to ‘nuke Canada’. And they read that 70% of Americans support an administration that stands against almost everything Canadians stand for. They don’t understand, and they’re afraid. Postscript: Lovely quote from (Canadian) Robert MacNeil of PBS MacNeil-Lehrer Report fame: Canadians view America with a little kind of ironic distance. It’s part of the Canadian psychological mechanism for asserting its own identity in the face of the overwhelming force of the American economy and popular culture. |
