Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.
In search of a better way to live and make a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works.


August 31, 2007

carnal

Filed under: Creative Works — Dave Pollard @ 09:32
alan & morva's cat
One of the cats to whom my brother and sister-in-law belong, overseeing travel arrangements

movement and stillness:
the cat is the master of masquerade
s/he will appear to be what s/he is not
intersecting with our lives to the extent such adaptation
is necessary for comfort, and mutual appreciation

s/he understands the importance of play
and will demonstrate each game, and then
to the extent we cannot learn the rules adeptly
will play down to our level

the purpose of the game is not to win or to impress
but to learn,
to perceive, to practice, to achieve mastery
effortlessly

the cat’s self-sufficiency is far from antisocial,
its purpose is to maximize resilience,
the essence of responsibility to community:
not to be a burden to those one loves

a life of joy and purposefulness
of grace and imagination
in now time —

where stillness and movement
are one

August 29, 2007

Stewarding the Land, a Quarter Acre at a Time

Filed under: Preparing for Civilization's End — Dave Pollard @ 00:33
Noah's Garden
There’s a sense, for those who live in the suburbs, that trying to ‘renaturalize’ their small lot, surrounded by manicured lawns soaked in chemicals, swimming pools soaked in chemicals, pressure-treated decks soaked in chemicals, large areas of asphalt and concrete, and invasive species, both cultivated and wild, is a hopeless undertaking.

The late Sara Stein wrote two books a decade ago, Noah’s Garden and Planting Noah’s Garden, that showed not only that it is not hopeless, but that it is our responsibility, as stewards of even small patches of land, to do so. I’ve just finished the former book, which provides the rationale for this responsibility and the grim history of how we in North America have ruined and impoverished our land, and I’ve ordered the latter, which explains in some detail how to rectify the damage we have done.

These books are not easy going. Ms Stein was an earnest and scholarly writer, and a ruthless debunker of well-intentioned behaviours. Many readers will be inclined to give up trying to implement what she recommends before they start, because most of what we’ve been taught to do, or intuitively seek to do, to restore a level of natural life to our altered landscapes, seems to do more harm than good.

Here are some of the key messages and data she conveys in the first book:

  • Our children, brought up in artificial environments and exposed to nature only in “stay off the grass” managed excursions, may never appreciate or realize what they’re missing once natural environments are forever gone.
  • Our suburbs, notwithstanding how green they are, are dreadfully impoverished landscapes, supporting a tiny fraction of the diversity of life natural landscapes do.
  • Our assault on the natural environment in North America has been going on relentlessly for four centuries, and is so effective that there is virtually no native landscape left anywhere: even parklands and conservation areas are dominated by invasive species and severely depleted of biodiversity, what Ms Stein calls “an appalling blankness” concealed by “a mask of naturalness”.
  • The succession process by which a devastated landscape returns to balance, richness and diversity involves many successions of one species with another, and cannot be rushed or leapfrogged.
  • Our clearing and mistreatment of land is causing excessive erosion of topsoil across North America at an average rate of 4-7 tonnes per acre per year.
  • Invasive species, some introduced to try to ‘naturally’ restore imbalances, have negative effects on biodiversity that linger for decades and even centuries.
  • The average American suburban lot is 10,000 sf (about 1/4 acre), about twice that of the average suburban lot in other affluent nations, including Canada.
  • Even small lots can, with some diligence, be ‘restored’ to allow a substantial improvement in biodiversity using a combination of native species (lists here) to create (a) meadows, with sedges, grasses and wildflowers, (b) artificial ponds, (c) wetlands for bog plants, (d) hedgerows of berries and other species, and (e) woodlands. The diagram above shows how these areas can be integrated, while still leaving some ‘lawn’ in the area most visible to neighbours.
  • Wild animals in our temperate ecosystems need large areas to stay in balance: 5 square miles per fox, 9 per coyote, even more for larger predators, and a substantial amount even for herbivores like deer. Excessive numbers are generally encouraged by our monoculture, which hugely upsets this balance and devastates species lower in the food chain, causing overpopulation and hardship to the predators. Our unnatural behaviours have severe and usually unobserved consequences on whole ecosystems.
  • So-called ‘natural’ herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers introduced to try to restore health or balance aren’t really natural and can do more harm than good. Ironically, occasional restricted burns can be healthier than ‘organic’ products.
  • The loss of wetlands across North America is barely visible to us, but is massive and has had dreadful consequences to most amphibian and songbird populations.
  • A lawn is the opposite of a natural meadow or prairie; a replanted monoculture ‘tree collection’ is the opposite of a woodland or forest.

In sum, renaturalization takes enormous restraint, learning, patience and hard work. The natural gardener’s job is best limited to planting appropriate native species the right way in the right places at the right times, being patient, trusting the soil and otherwise not interfering. It entails responding to what Mirabel Osler calls “a gentle plea for Chaos”, to achieve in time what Ms Stein calls “a humor of richness and meaning”.

Half of the property of our community is protected wetland, which we are not permitted to touch (though some of our neighbours have stupidly ignored the law and done considerable damage trying to ‘clean up’ their property). At first I was ashamed of the green algae cover on the kettle ponds, alarmed at the dozens of trees felled sloppily each year by our resident beavers, distressed by the bare drowned trees and windfalls that made us look like messy caretakers. Now I realize how essential these untouched elements of the rich local ecosystem, replete with amphibians and songbirds and wild turkeys, are, and I have pledged never to disturb them, except to harvest a small number of windfall trees for firewood. I worry that the growing warmth and drought may mean the end of these fragile wetlands, perhaps within a decade. I am determined to gradually introduce native species on the rest of our property, and to persuade my neighbours to do likewise.

This involves generally doing less each year to meddle with nature’s struggle to recover from centuries of human destruction, disguised by the “mask of naturalness” that, to my unschooled eye, makes our community look so lovely, so unspoiled. Somehow, that is hard, but it is getting easier as, together with my neighbours, we learn to be humbler and modestly better stewards.

Ms Stein writes: “I’ve made the apple jelly and harvested the squash in the same spirit that squirrels have stashed their nuts and ants have dragged their grain. Our hearth is stacked with logs, our land is stocked with plants. I close my window against the frosty evening satisfied that ant, and mouse, bee, bird, squirrel, bloom and seed know well how to get from scary autumn to the next brief summer as long as we, bearing a shovel and a holly, can fill the gap-toothed faces of ourland and make the seasons’ smile complete.”

We do what we must, and sometimes, what we can.

Category: What You Can Do

August 28, 2007

The 26%

Filed under: Preparing for Civilization's End — Dave Pollard @ 05:50
environmental and social responsibility
Well, I’ve looked everywhere, but I cannot find a pair of articles I read earlier this month that asserted:
  1. That 26% of North Americans consistently spend significantly more for socially and environmentally responsible products, even if that caused them some financial hardship, and
  2. That this percentage was modestly U-shaped against income — lowest for middle-income earners.

In the process of trying to find these articles, I reviewed some two dozen surveys dating back to 1992. They revealed the following information:

  • The percentage who claim to be socially and environmentally conscious in their behaviour has been rising (from about 40% to 60%); the percentage whose actually buy socially and environmentally conscious products has stayed flat (about 4%).
  • Depending on how the question is phrased, the percentage who claim to ‘buy green’ varies from 10% to over 90%.
  • Actual buying behaviour studies suggest that price, quality and convenience still outweigh ‘green’ in the majority of buyers’ decision criteria: “people do noy actually buy the products they claim to prefer”.
  • While a majority claim to be willing to pay more to buy ‘green’, studies suggest that a price difference of more than 5% discourages the vast majority of buyers.
  • A third of people surveyed say they don’t believe social and environmental product claims.
  • Few people surveyed were aware of which companies had reputations as socially and environmentally responsible, or irresponsible.
  • Surveys were wildly inconsistent in assessing which demographic groups were ‘greenest; some said the oldest, others the youngest, some said the richest, others the poorest.
  • Surveys in the 1990s suggest that 18-20% of all people (and more women than men) consistently shop for socially and environmentally responsible products, even if they cost considerably more.

So whether the number is 18% or 26%, it does seem to represent the percentage of people who are willing to put their money where their mouth is, and invest some time and energy to research and seek out green products.

I think it’s an encouraging number, and as information increases, the population ages and the middle class disappears, it’s likely to rise. The popularity of my Boycott List is a sign, I think, that these people really give a damn.

Suppose the number is 26%. Who are the other 74% that we still need to inform or convert? My guess, judging from the cross-section of people I know, is that they fall into five groups:

  • The problem deniers: Those who think there is no need to be socially or environmentally conscious, because if there’s a problem ‘the market’ will take care of it. (My guess: 20%)
  • The uninformed: Those who have no idea what’s going on in the world, or that there is any reason to be socially or environmentally conscious. (My guess: 14%)
  • The disengaged: Those who are too busy to think about social and environmental issues (including those who never shop, and get others to shop for them, with specific instructions). (My guess: 10%)
  • The cynics: Those who think all the consciousness claims are a con, and that it doesn’t matter what you buy. (My guess: 10% and rising)
  • The well-intentioned: Those who think it’s important to be green, but get sucked in or distracted or pressured by other priorities (“No Mom, we have to buy this brand”) so their actions don’t match their values. (My guess: 20%)

Each of these five groups requires a different approach:

  • The problem deniers: Ignore them: you’ll just waste time trying to persuade them. Wait until they’re ready to listen.
  • The uninformed: Tell them, gently, a better solution. No lectures, no horror stories. Don’t harp on what’s wrong with what they’re buying, tell them what’s right about the green alternative. High road.
  • The disengaged: Get to the people who do the shopping for them. Fortunately, those people are probably women.
  • The cynics: Cynics are often romantics and idealists at heart. Tell them a story about a company that’s doing something positive that makes a difference. You can argue about data, but you can’t argue about a good story.
  • The well-intentioned: Make it easier for them. Help green companies get shelf space, add value (recipes with food products) and convenience. Show this group by example that there’s no hardship in buying green.

If we could win over the second, third and fifth groups and half the cynics, we’d have three quarters of the buyers buying green. The suppliers would have no choice but to listen and adapt.

Of course, we’d still have to do battle with the greenwashers. But in an age of increasing information and connectivity,propaganda is an expensive and risky way to keep customers.

We have the power. It’s time to use it. 26% is an army large enough to change the world.

Category: What You Can Do

August 27, 2007

The Paradoxes of Growth: The Economic Argument for Natural Enterprise

Filed under: Working Smarter — Dave Pollard @ 20:50
paradoxes of growth
I‘ve written before about the Natural Economy and why it would be so much more effective and sustainable than the existing Industrial (‘market’) Economy. And though I’ve read and written a lot about the fact the Industrial Economy is dysfunctional, and most large corporations have become pathological and hugely vulnerable to change, I’ve never explained how I think they got that way. This article is an attempt to rectify that situation.
 
If you go back to the earliest days of enterprise, when groups of artisans, farmers or other producers got together to make a living, the model of equilibrium of such enterprises was simple: The more people in the enterprise, the more relationships you have with potential customers. The more relationships you have, the more you sell (most entrepreneurs will tell you their revenue and the ‘face time’ they spend with customers is highly correlated). The more you sell, the more cash you have, and the more borrowing capacity (if you desire to use it) you acquire. The more cash and borrowing capacity you have, the more people you can employ.

It’s a virtuous cycle, or, when it goes south and something causes your sales to fall, a vicious cycle. For the most part it achieves a certain equilibrium based on how much intrinsic need there is for your product in your local market. Growth is not an essential ingredient of the enterprise’s sustainability, and sales decline is not fatal — you simply expand or contract the size of your enterprise to match the needs in the community for what you are uniquely capable of providing.
 
This is represented by the four green boxes in the chart above. This is a Natural Economy model — it is almost infinitely flexible and sustainable through good times and bad. Just as the number of birds that overwinter in a community (rather than migrating or hibernating) is an adaptation to the availability of food, so does the number of people that stay in an enterprise adapt to the number of customers.
 
So far so good.
 
Humans being a very creative and ambitious species, designed for problem-solving, we don’t seem to know how to leave well enough alone. So as the world began to shrink through trade, some entrepreneurs realized that they could increase sales, and hence employ more people, by exploiting cheap foreign oil and commodities, and selling back into overseas markets. This is the essence of ‘globalization’ and for many companies it has been very profitable. It is however, subject to two vulnerabilities:

  • C1: The Finite Resources Constraint — No matter how much the technophiles and believers in the American Dream try to deny it, there is a limit to the amount of cheap resources the planet can produce. Eventually we will run out.
  • C2: The Finite Market Constraint — Ultimately there is a limit to how many people will be able to afford your product, and once those people all have it, the market for your product will inevitably plateau and (unless you innovate new products) decline.

So resourceful entrepreneurs, with the best intentions of employing lots of people and growing prosperously, began to exhibit some decidedly pathological behaviours to keep the growth cycle moving in an upward direction. The first of these pathologies was greed (P1 on the chart). Entrepreneurs noticed that the more cash (and other assets) the enterprise had, the more it was able to borrow. What’s more, if you promised people that the company would grow forever, they would give you money interest-free, in return for a share of the future incremental profits. This is called financial leverage, and it works as long as you are able to continue to grow profits at a rate faster than the rate lenders would charge for ‘risk-free’ loans.
 
Thus begins a cycle of addiction that introduces six new vulnerabilities into the enterprise:

  • C3: The Ponzi Suckers Constraint — The stock market is essentially a Ponzi scheme, which relies on more and more people investing in stocks in the expectation that large (double-digit) profit growth will continue more-or-less forever. As people learned in 1929, and to a lesser degree a number of times since, no growth continues forever. 

In order to try to keep the profits growing as long as possible, you do a number of things: You cut costs. You lobby governments for tax breaks, concessions and subsidies. You externalize costs by getting taxpayers and future generations to pay for your waste and pollution. You offshore labour to wage-slave countries with no social or environmental regulations. You automate and hollow out what’s core to the business and outsource what isn’t. You cut quality. You standardize everything. Then you run into:

  • C4: The Government Debt Limit Constraint — Eventually, even the friendliest corporatist governments exhaust their treasury rewarding you with tax breaks, concessions and subsidies, so they can’t pay you anymore.
  • C5: The Finite Earth Constraint — The planet can only absorb so much waste and pollution before it begins to fight back, with storms, floods, droughts, and global warming.
  • C6: The Race-to-the-Bottom Constraint — Ultimately you will run out of countries willing or able to allow you to exploit their labour at ever-lower wage rates, and you will run out of suppliers willing or able to cut costs every year.
  • F1: The Wal-Mart Dilemma — Eventually your customers, deprived of reasonable paying jobs by your and other corporations’ cost-cutting and offshoring, will become unable or unwilling to pay for the crap you produce, even at ever-lower costs.
  • F2: The Customization Paradox — While your business model depends on one-size-fits-all products and flogging lame ‘new improved’ sequel products, customers will ultimately revolt and look for innovation and imagination, even if that means they have to sacrifice and cut other spending to pay for it.

At this point, you’re getting pretty desperate to keep the wheels from coming off your enterprise. Pathology is now not an option. You conspire with a few competitors, buy up the rest of them and create an oligopoly (P2), threatening, bribing or buying off all new competitors, and using your oligopoly (and oligopsony) power to fix prices you charge customers, and fix prices you pay to suppliers. Uh oh:

  • C7: The Consumer Debt Limit Constraint — Soon, no matter what you charge, your customers are maxed out, and they can’t buy any more. They find workarounds — they share media files, borrow tools from neighbours, make their own stuff, fix stuff instead of buying new from you. 

Time to abandon ‘face time’ and crank up the propaganda (P3) to brainwash people into believing your ‘brand’ is worth a premium. So you blanket the airwaves with commercials — who cares if they’re lies? But you’re just getting in deeper:

  • F3: The Counterculture Paradox — It’s easy to become ‘too’ trendy, over-hyped, and then people will desert you in droves for the No Logo alternative. Yes, you can co-opt it (Wal-Mart Organics) but lots of your customers are wise to you by now. Your brand is now a joke.

Meanwhile, to ratchet up all this activity, you’ve had to create a huge and hierarchical organization (P4) so you can stay in (what you think is) control. Your investments in legacy systems are massive. Trying to change anything is impossible. Economies of scale turn out to be diseconomies. You at the top are so disconnected from your customers you have to hire consultants and experts to tell you what they think your customers need. You can’t adapt to changing needs anyway — you have to grow profits by 20% again this year with zero-risk new products.

  • F4: The Strategy Paradox — By the time your massive hierarchical organization’s strategy can be implemented to respond to the changing market, the market’s already moved on you again. You’re too big to improvise, and you have no resilience to unforeseen changes.
  • F5: The Innovator’s Dilemma — The more you try to focus on your core customers, the ones that kept you in business last year, the more vulnerable you become to disruptive innovators, lean, hungry little organizations unafraid to take risks, that eat away at your organization’s sales from the bottom up, until you start losing your customers in droves.

In his book Beginning Again, David Ehrenfeld uses this analogy to discuss what happens when all these vulnerabilities combine to stretch the Industrial Economy to the limit, and then beyond: “It is like a massive flywheel, spinning too fast for its size and construction, coming apart in chunks as it spins”. This is the economic world that James Kunstler portrays in The Long Emergency, as the fragilities of corporate growth combine with the constraints of unsustainability.
 
What will happen when we run out of cheap oil and other resources, and cheap labour, and borrowing capacity to buy anything more? When we run out of customers for the shoddy junk we produce, and investors for wildly overpriced houses and stocks? When the IMF tells the US Government it’s in default and has to pay back what it owes, knowing it can’t? When natural devastation produces more social, political and economic crises than we could ever afford to repair or hope to cope with? When customers can’t and won’t buy what we produce, and we are unable to change and produce what they will buy?
 
It’s a grim scenario, and the wild volatility in today’s markets foreshadows its inevitability.
 
But suppose instead of getting caught up in this madness, you and your partners operate a Natural Enterprise? Instead of having to cut quality to keep profits growing, you can provide products of high quality, because there are no shareholders telling you you have to keep growing. Instead of standardizing and mass producing, you can customize everything to the individual customer’s requirements, and the customer is right there to help you do so. Instead of having to hype your brand, you can hype your proximity to customers and the value of personal service. Instead of having to plan for every unforeseen problem, you have the resilience and improvisational ability to adapt to changes on the fly, easily. Instead of being the victim of disruptive innovators, you are a disruptive innovator.
 
You don’t have to worry about finite non-renewable resources because the only ones you use are renewable. You don’t have to worry about running out of customers because your customers are so close to you they’re your customers for life, and they’re all you need. You don’t have to worry about increasing your profits to keep shareholders happy because you don’t have any shareholders — you control your own destiny. You don’t have to worry about government handouts running out because you never had them or depended on them in the first place. You don’t have to worry about cleaning up your pollution and waste because you don’t produce any. You don’t have to worry about finding cheaper and cheaper labour because your enterprise does just fine paying its people what they need. You don’t need to worry about customers not being able to afford what you offer because you’ve designed it so they can afford it and because it meets a need that no one else can fill.
 
When the massive flywheel of the Industrial Economy comes apart in chunks, Natural Enterprises will be there to help people get what they need and make a living for themselves, and to replace the collapsed economy with a new, sustainable, responsible, Natural Economy.
 
It won’t happen any other way. We can’t rely on the ‘market’ or on politicians or consumer movements to fix the Industrial Economy in time, even if they wanted to — it operates on its own momentum, massive, fragile, vulnerable and already beginning to shake apart.
 
And the business model of this sustainable, responsible, Natural Economy will be simple — just the four green boxes in the chart above. Adapting andresponding to human needs, in equilibrium. No growth necessary.
 

August 26, 2007

Sunday Open Thread – August 26, 2007

Filed under: Our Culture / Ourselves — Dave Pollard @ 11:29
cat map by hilary price
Cartoon (via StrangeMaps) from Rhymes With Orange

What I’m thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon:

The Paradoxes of Growth and the Causes of Corporate Pathology: There is a series of paradoxes and constraints that leads corporations to act in ways that are pathological and unsustainable. I’ve put together an outline of a major article on these paradoxes and constraints, analyzing why ‘good companies go bad’, how their resultant excesses make our economy fragile and ever-extended, and how responsible, sustainable Natural Enterprises can avoid the pathological missteps and provide the foundation for a healthy replacement — a Natural Economy.

We Are 26%: I read recently (and am trying to find it again) that 26% of North Americans say they would buy products that are socially and environmentally responsible, and locally made, or would do without, rather than buy cheap imported junk, even if this involved considerable extra expense, or some self-sacrifice on their part. More interestingly, the economic demographic of this 26% is apparently U-shaped — it is the poor and the rich who would do so, while the lower-middle to upper-middle classes remain mostly addicted to consumption.

Book Reviews: Noah’s Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Back Yards, by Sara Stein, and The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman.

Vignettes: Coming up soon, vignette #5.

Blog-Hosted Conversations: Starting September 3rd, once a week, this blog will feature 30-minute conversations, initially on the subject of “What is your model of a better way to live, and what capacities do we need to develop or re-learn to live that way?”

Open Thread Question:

How can we effectively “de-school” the world – replace the dysfunctional education system (and its bums-on-chairs lectures, classrooms, teachers and textbooks) with a voluntary, self-managed learning process based on discovery, apprenticeship, coaching and facilitation out in the realworld?

August 25, 2007

Saturday Links for the Week – August 25, 2007

Filed under: Our Culture / Ourselves — Dave Pollard @ 21:29
100 miles
100 mile radius from my home. About 60% of what I eat, and buy, comes from inside the circle. Not enough.

Globally, Things Keep Spiraling Out of Control…

Canada’s Cops Continue to Slide into US-style Corruption and Brutality: For the last year, starting with the report of how the RCMP was complicit in the US arrest and deportation to Syria for torture of Canadian businessman Maher Arar, there has been a depressing litany of reports of bad police behaviour at every level: the beating and murder of First Nations people, widespread corruption, kickbacks, theft and extortion, the use of excessive force in making arrests and extracting confessions, and more. This week we learned that the Quebec police planted masked agents impersonating demonstrators to try to foment riots at the anti-SPP-North-American-Union protests there. One informant said this is ‘normal’ police practice across North America — riots allow the cops to discredit peaceful protests, demoralize the protesters, and ‘try out’ their anti-riot equipment. Shameful, but alas, not surprising.

The US/China Conspiracy to Keep Standards Low: Probably news to no one, but there’s overwhelming evidence that the government of China is incapable of cracking down or even modestly regulating the flood of poisoned, dangerous and flawed goods being produced there, and that the government of the US (its co-dependent economy) has no intention of stepping in to protect Americans from the growing mountains of Chinese crap. Meanwhile, the widespread slavery and employee abuse that fuels Chinese industry continues unhindered.

DDT Re-Emerges as Anti-Mosquito Poison of Choice, Despite Dangers: Yes, it’s toxic, extremely persistent, poisons everything it touches, and, as a destroyer of nerve cells, probably contributes to the epidemic of chronic environmental illnesses in our world. And yes, as soon as and wherever it is widely used, mosquitoes build up immunity to it. But despite this, DDT has re-emerged as the insect toxin of choice in Africa, and a heavily-financed campaign from several industries is lobbying for restrictions on its use to be lifted. When will we ever learn?

…but There’s Some Good News on Sustainable, Responsible Living…

Powell River BC’s 50-mile diet challenge: HtStW reader David Parkinson, who heads the food security project in Powell River on Vancouver Island BC, points to a recent write-up on their community’s success working towards buying almost all their food from responsible local producers. We need to get working on such initiatives in every community in the world. Get your 100-mile diet map here.

Cowichan BC’s Caregiver Society: Already 8% of North Americans are looking after ill or disadvantaged adult family-members. This percentage is expected to quadruple in the next generation, as the population ages. Most of us have no idea what we will do if/when we face this situation, and some of us won’t be able to cope with the stress. A great model is Cowichan BC’s caregiver society, which provides materials and resources and peer-to-peer connection to help caregivers of adults and seniors handle the challenge. Thanks to Prad for the link.

A Personal Story of Radically Simple Living: Tyra and James Arraj’s online book Radical Simplicity and the Fourth Step is an engrossing read, full of first-person anecdotes of home schooling, building simple forest shelters, growing their own food, etc.  The resource guide link at the end of the book is also valuable, especially the intriguing resources and links to natural building. The book conveys, without preaching, the philosophy of simple, responsible, natural living, and how to live true to that philosophy.

…and in the same vein, here’s a letter from HtStW reader Paige Porter, for those looking for inspiration to move from thought to action:

My name is Paige Porter. I’m seventeen and from Connecticut, and want to save the world. I’m doing a world-wide community service program next summer, and have multiple Greenpeace and Habitat for Humanity volunteer work experience, but I know it’s not enough. When I grow up, I want to be a cardiothoracic surgeon, working as part of Doctors Without Borders. I’m planning on adopting as many kids as I can afford, and as many animals as I can afford and house comfortably. I don’t eat meat, and because I have Celiac disease I can’t eat many manufactured or dairy based products, so I’m basically on a vegan diet. My family uses only earth-friendly products, and nothing in the house is tested on animals. We’re sponsoring kids from all over the place and take in animals whenever the need arises, but I don’t feel like I’m making a big enough impact. I started wanting to save the world after winning some high school debates on bio fuels, global warming, immigration, etc., and graduated high school early so I could continue doing as much as possible to help the world. I finished high school in February of last year, and am now doing a prep-pre med program in a homeschooling program based out of PA. I’ve listed all the things I’m doing so you could possibly suggest more? Are there any other ways to help? I haven’t looked into anything other than what’s listed above, because I don’t know of anything else. If there is any organization or anything more I can do, please let me know.

Wow.

August 23, 2007

The Sixteen Essential Capacities of Community

Filed under: Preparing for Civilization's End — Dave Pollard @ 22:01
Capacity for: Actions:
1. ATTENTION sense, probe, observe, listen, find patterns
2. INSTINCT perceive, intuit, let come, know subconsciously
3. APPRECIATION discover, play, learn, laugh, understand, thank
4. REFLECTION suspend, consider, open, let go, entertain, explore
5. INTENTION love, have passion. persevere, follow through
6. CRITICAL THINKING question, infer, deduce
7. ELICITATION incite, provoke, draw out
8. IMAGINATION conceive, ideate, let emerge
9. COLLABORATION facilitate, help, connect, cooperate, co-develop
10. RESPONSIBILITY care, nurture, cultivate, mend, sustain, groom
11. RESOURCEFULNESS bring to bear, supply, give, equip, prepare
12. CREATIVITY model, recreate, innovate, realize
13. COMMUNICATION relate stories, convey, converse, explain, describe
14. DEMONSTRATION offer, show, exhibit
15. IMPROVISATION respond, decide, try, experiment, perform
16. RESILIENCE/GRACE self-change, adapt, self-manage

Last week I mentioned that the seven qualities needed to be an excellent collaborator and those needed to be an exceptional sexual partner were surprisingly similar. It occurs to me that the capacities needed to be an ideal member of a Natural Community or Natural Enterprise are likewise similar to those needed to be an exceptional life partner.

I think there are sixteen such capacities, listed in the table above. Try this experiment:

  1. On a scale of 1-10, rate yourself on each of the sixteen capacities. Circle the 3-5 capacities you rated yourself lowest. 
  2. Using the same scale, rate your life partner or significant other, and your best friend or favourite work colleague. Circle the 3-5 capacities you rated lowest for each of these people.

If you’re like me, you’ll probably find that (a) your weaknesses (and strengths) and those of the people whose relationships you value most are complementary, and (b) areas of mutual weakness are real problem areas in your relationship.

The paradox is that we pick our life partners based on mutual chemistry, not on the complementarity of their strengths. Sometimes the chemistry is strong enough to keep the relationship together despite mutual weaknesses (which often result in incredible fights, especially when both partners are weak in capacities 1, 3, 10, 11, 14 or 15). At least when it comes to selecting partners with whom to make a living, or with whom to live in an Intentional Community, we tend to be relatively objective.

All creatures are born with most of these capacities, and in natural environments they get practice strengthening them, joyfully, from the moment they are born. These capacities are selected for in nature because they help us to survive. In natural environments the requirements of life are simple: make a living with those in your community (discover, harvest and share food and shelter), and work around obstacles that nature sometimes puts in your path (storms, floods, fires, droughts, diseases etc.) The sixteen capacities equip you brilliantly for these tasks, as anyone who watches birds or wildlife can attest.

Humans decided a few millennia ago to live an artificial life in self-constructed artificial environments instead. The sixteen capacities are still enormously advantageous in these more difficult environments, but our artificial environments create new challenges — overpopulation and overcrowding, and the resulting scarcities of resources, wars and poverty and pollution and epidemic diseases. Workarounds for these human-created obstacles to a joyful, natural life are much harder to find. I continue to believe that these artificial environments, and our excess numbers and consumption, are unsustainable and will lead to the inevitable collapse that has befallen every previous civilization. And I believe the best models of sustainability for those who survive that collapse will be natural, intentional communities whose members have worked to increase their own capacities and create a life together with those with complementary capacities.
My intention is, one day, to find the people I was meant to live with, and to create with them a natural community. In the meantime, I’m working on improving my own capacities. I suspect I’m like a lot of males in that I need to work most on capacities 1, 10, 11, 14 and 15. All it takes, I think, is practice.

I watch young birds and wildlife practicing doing these things and I’m amazed at how easy and fun it is for them. I watch young children, even before the school system starts to brainwash them, already starting to lose these capacities, already being told to spend their time doing other things, competing with each other, their curiosity and imagination atrophying from lack of practice, their self-confidence under siege, being desensitized and made into everybody else. Imagine an education ‘system’ that taught and encouraged thesesixteen capacities exclusively!

Imagine a world where we helped each other get better at these things. Imagine what might then be possible.

August 22, 2007

Finding the Work You Were Meant to Do

Filed under: Working Smarter — Dave Pollard @ 19:55
what to do - v3
The first part of my upcoming book on Working Naturally and Natural Enterprise focuses on gauging your readiness for natural work, an explanation of how it differs from the kinds of work most people do today, and the challenge of finding your ‘sweet spot’, where your Gift (what you do uniquely well), your Passion (what you love doing) and your Purpose (what’s needed) overlap — the work you were meant to do.

Since I developed this model, which is an extension of Dick Richards’ ‘Genius’ model explained in his book Is Your Genius at Work, I’ve used it to help a lot of people find what might be their sweet spot. I’ve learned a number of things from this process:

  • For some people there is no sweet spot, at least not yet: I know some people whose Gifts and Passions simply do not overlap at all, and I know others whose Gifts and Passions do not intersect with any recognized, affordable need. Some people would assert that they just have not yet discovered these intersections. I would counter that there is a reasonable chance that some people never will.
  • The sweet spot moves: Just as the strike zone in baseball has changed as both pitchers and batters have gotten better, so too does the sweet spot for many of us, as we learn more about what we’re good at, and what we love, as we acquire new competencies and lose our edge in others, as we develop new passions and grow disenchanted with others, and as the recognized, affordable needs of the market evolve over time. Resilience in Working Naturally requires a constant attention to these changes, and a constant stretching for greater self-awareness, so that as the sweet spot moves your Natural Enterprise can move with it.
  • Discovering your sweet spot is a complex process: Intuition may tell you where to start, but probably won’t get you there. The approach is iterative — you can start with your Gifts and try to discover which of them you love doing, and then research how those Gifts might in part address an unmet need, and then discover other people whose Gifts complement yours in meeting that need, people you know you’d love to work with. Or you can start with unmet needs that you care about and then figure out which partners you would need to bring together to address it. Or you can start with a group of people you think you’d love to work with and inventory your collective Gifts and figure out what unmet needs you could collectively meet. And as all of these things are constantly changing, the dynamic of establishing and evolving a collective Natural Enterprise becomes an extremely complex one that requires you and your partners to become skilled at improvisation, and sometimes, when that doesn’t work, to change partners. In that respect it’s a lot like that other type of partnership, marriage.

After thirty years, I’ve honed in quite precisely on what is, at least for now, my sweet spot:

The capacity to be a sounding board, observing, listening, imagining and interjecting relevant possibilities, and showing tools and methods that might improve effectiveness, to help people let themselves become who they really are and do what they were meant to do.

This is a curious combination of Gifts and Passions — attending, imagining and demonstrating. I’ve indicated that they involve more active intervention than facilitation or provocation, but less than coaching, catalyzing, or guiding. The word ‘advice’ means ‘how it appears’, so perhaps I’m an advisor in the original sense of the term, a reflector, or even, in its original sense of ‘one who brings forth’, a parent. An emerger.

Enough about me. 

The three-part website accompanying my book will contain tools to help people (a) find their sweet spot, (b) find people to make a living with, and (c) expose needs, ideas and innovations to ‘the wisdom of crowds’. I need your assistance to design these tools. How might theywork? Help me imagine the possibilities.

August 21, 2007

Spare Struggling Nations from Executives Without Borders

Filed under: Working Smarter — Dave Pollard @ 18:41
blood diamonds
An article in this month’s S+B by Economist writer Jon Ledgard suggests that business executives in the affluent nations should be spreading the gospel of globalization, ‘free’ trade and the ‘market’ economy in Africa to save it “from total collapse”.
I hope struggling nations will have the good sense to say “no thanks, you’ve ‘helped’ us enough already”. It’s bad enough that so many in affluent nations have been caught up in the cult of leadership and the wildly inflated sense of executives’ and consultants’ value and infallibility. We don’t want to export our myths to countries where it can do real damage. The missionaries we’ve sent in past have wrecked enough lives.
There is no question that the economies of most struggling nations are in ruins. This has been caused by a combination of interrelated factors:
  • The near-total destruction of soil, water, forest and other resources, due to pillaging by corporations from affluent nations, the loss of connection and respect for the land, overuse, wars supported by affluent nations’ weaponry, and horrific poverty thanks largely to overpopulation (when the only ‘asset’ you can ever hope to own is children for labour, you tend to have a lot of them)
  • The loss of knowledge of how to make a comfortable, sustainable living locally in each unique ecosystem, thanks to social disintegration and massive dislocation and migration to the cities
  • The scourge of diseases due to overcrowding
  • Government and corporate corruption, thanks to the increasing disconnection between centralized governments and the people they supposedly represent, and between business owners and workers
  • Attempts to impose affluent nations’ political, social, economic, legal, technological, educational and other systems on struggling nations where they simply don’t work
The answer is not to export more affluent nation ‘answers’ to struggling nations in the person of well-meaning ‘executives’. The proponents of such ideas would be well advised to learn from the horrible example of the religious missionary groups, who continue to send well-intentioned born-again volunteers to build schools and churches and hospitals for (instead of with) the people of struggling nations, and then wonder why the locals are disinclined to maintain them when the volunteers go back to their comfy homes.
What is needed instead are efforts to help the people of struggling nations undo the damage that we have caused:
  • Giving them the resources they need to relocalize their economies and relearn lost skills and knowledge that produced healthy, self-sufficient communities for millennia before we disrupted them
  • Giving them back their land and resources
  • Offering (not imposing) innovations like microlending and permaculture and pharmaceuticals, at no charge
  • Forgiving indebtedness that was mostly incurred to enrich despots, not the people
  • Cessation of the sale of arms and armies
To believe that we have any more ‘solutions’ that will work for these people is the height of arrogance. Rather than ‘executives’, the businesspeople who might have some value to the people of struggling nations are entrepreneurs in small, sustainable businesses — Natural Enterprises. Entrepreneurs have learned how to work around problems instead of paving them over. They know how to scrounge. They know how to live within their means. They know the value and skill of resilience and improvisation. This is knowledge the people of struggling nations could get some value from. And the learning and value would definitely be reciprocal. In fact if we were to be fair, we should probably pay the people of struggling nations for the experience, since the value we receive will almost certainly exceed what we have to offer them.
So, please, spare the struggling nations the scourge of self-important, deluded, well-meaning executive missionaries. We have done more than enough harm already. It’s time to give back what we stole, and realize that our flawed, devastating, ruthless and unsustainable big-business models work badly enough here, and have no place in nations whose people have forgotten more than we have ever learned.
We need to clean up our own act before we presume to take it on the road.

August 20, 2007

Toxins for Fun and Profit

Filed under: How the World Really Works — Dave Pollard @ 20:01
tar sands
Alberta Tar Sands sludge mining, in what used to be pristine boreal forest. Photo: Melina Mara, Washington Post .
In a recent speech, a former premier says Alberta will have to go to the Supreme Court to defend the oil industry’s right to pollute when it accelerates tar sands development next year, because the environmental damage will be like nothing Canada has ever seen or imagined.

Paul Blanc’s new book How Everyday Products Make People Sick: Toxins at Home and in the Workplace was nothing like what I expected. I thought I would get a laundry list (heh) of household and workplace products to avoid, why, and what to use in their place.

But this book is essentially a history of how corporatists — big corporate oligopolies, ‘bought’ politicians and meek ‘regulatory’ agencies — have colluded for over two centuries to poison workers and consumers with products and processes deadly to human health and the environment, and keep them ignorant of those dangers, all in the interest of profit. In the process, perfectly safe and environment-friendly alternatives have been suppressed and belittled by advertisers. And information on the dead, diseased, poisoned, injured and ruined people and communities as a result of these toxins in the air, water, soil and food has been ruthlessly suppressed.

The emphasis in the book is on workplace toxins, because that is where the cause-and-effect connection between contact with these chemicals and health problems is possible to establish, despite the hundreds of denials, cover-ups, and transfers to anonymous numbered companies to reduce corporate liability. Public disasters like Bhopal, Chernobyl, Minamata and Exxon Valdez are just the tip of the iceberg. What the book can only suggest is the chronic effect of these chemicals in our homes and the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. We know that the corporatists have caused the massive suffering that these chronic diseases have inflicted on billions of people, but we also know it will never stand up in court.

The list of products connected to chronic diseases runs the gamut of virtually everything we have in our homes and offices, including substantially all man-made chemicals and plastics. For example:

  • Adhesives: glues, cements, furniture adhesives
  • Automotive Products: fuel additives, rubber
  • Cleaning Products: dry cleaning products, soaps and detergents, turpentine, ammonia, bromine and chlorine bleaches, muriatic acid, fumigants, phosphates, formaldehyde
  • Coatings: paints, dyes, wood preservatives (creosote, aresenides etc.), varnishes, sealants, tars, latex, leather sprays
  • Food Additives and packaging: preservatives, colourings, flavourings, dietary supplements, cellophane, microwave popcorn, microwave containers
  • Garden and Agricultural Products: fungicides, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, DDT, 2-4-D, 2-4-5-T,
  • Fibres: acetate, asbestos, viscose, rayon, vinyl, cellulose wool, flame retardants, polypropylene, neoprene
  • Industrial Chemicals: mercury, benzene, resins, cellulose derivatives, brass, zinc, cadmium and manganese products, cyanides, coal combustion wastes, cotton dust, photographic chemicals, welding gases, electroplating and galvanizing chemicals, hydrochloric acid, radium and other radioactive trace elements, potash, manganese-treated steel, toluene, sulphuric acid
  • Other Household Products: aerosols, refrigerants, artificial leather, rubber products (balloons etc.), heating briquets and oils, products containing lead, polyurethane, insulation, PVC and other plastic containers
  • Other Products: animal euthanasia products, chemotherapy substances, explosives
  • Personal Care Products: artificial nails, nail polishes and polish removers, condoms
  • Pharmaceuticals: antibiotics, anaesthetics

The list of diseases these poisons are associated with is almost as long, and includes just about all chronic and non-infectious diseases (and even some infectious diseases such as tuberculosis are aggravated by poor working environments):

  • Respiratory diseases: sick building syndrome, asthma, inhalation fever, asbestosis, silicosis, lung diseases
  • Neurological diseases: parkinson’s disease, ALS
  • Organ diseases: skin diseases, allergies, kidney diseases, cirrhosis of the liver, cardiovascular diseases, eye diseases, tuberculosis, hemochromatosis
  • Cancers: all types, notably angiosarcoma, leukemia
  • Blood diseases: anemia, lead poisoning
  • Mental illnesses: dementias

And of course environmental toxins are also suspected in the spiraling epidemic of 40+ autoimmune diseases.

Kind of a sad story about industrial society, isn’t it? This is what ‘our troops’ are fighting for in Iraq and Afghanistan — the corporatist interests and the Bushies and Harpers in their back pockets, who need oil to continue to poison our world and sell us toxic junk that kills us and causes devastating chronic illnesses.

Blanc’s depressing stories are accompanied by an edgy explanation of how the corporatists have pulled off this scam so successfully for so long. He identifies eight strategies:

  1. “More data are needed”: Characterizing scientific evidence about the dangers of these products and processes as limited, exaggerated, insubstantial, or inconclusive, as Big Oil has done hiring Lomborgian pseudo-scientists to produce junk science as propaganda to counter damaging legitimate research
  2. “It must have been used incorrectly”: Blaming the victim
  3. “We can self-regulate as needed”: Arguing that regulation is overly costly and ineffectual
  4. “The Precautionary Principle would bring the economy to a grinding halt”: Labeling opponents as unrealistic, idealistic, or reactionary
  5. “We stopped CFCs when they were proved dangerous; workplace safety is in employers’ interests too”: Insisting the ‘market’ will intervene to require any corrections to corporate behaviour that may be necessary
  6. “We still haven’t had what we consider a fair hearing”: Foot-dragging using armies of lawyers, as with Exxon who still haven’t paid for the Valdez disaster
  7. “We settled, without acknowledging fault”: As Koch Industries has repeatedly done, bargaining with political friends for slap on the wrist penalties while continuing to poison workers and the Earth
  8. “We want an industry-friendly rep running that Agency”: Twisting the arms of politicians to have regulators run by those who simply refuse to enforce the law against corporatist wrongdoing

They’ve been doing this for centuries, and it’s still going on. They’re still getting away with murder.

PS: Today, a coalition of health and labour groups issued a report saying Ontario is steeped in chemicals and the province needs to take immediate action in reducing toxic emissions and cancer-causingsubstances in the environment. Yeah, like that’s going to happen.

Categories: Corporatism and Health
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