In my post last week I described Gil Fronsdal’s meditation on intentionality, and the value of setting both long term (What do you intend to do with what’s left of your life?) and short term (What do you intend to do, now, today, this week?) intentions, and getting them somehow aligned. Intentions are more than aspirations or resolutions, they are “stretching toward” commitments, directions toward something one hopes to achieve or at least move consistently and steadily closer to.

But what do you do when you’re following a model (the one I adapted from Joanna Macy, pictured above) that has nine steps, and you have work to do in all nine areas? Can you have nine life intentions and nine short-term intentions, and really hope to accomplish more than a couple of them?

Patti Digh and David Robinson talk about “split intentions”, when your actions are diffused, confused or distracted from achieving your intention. In workplaces these are rife — one set of personal actions is called for (in the mission statement or personal goals statement), while a very different, often incompatible set of actions is actually rewarded. Many large corporations, hoping to attract talent but keep that talent in thrall to the corporation’s more mundane objectives (constant growth and increased profitability for shareholders at any cost), recruit and internally propagandize on the basis of one set of behaviours, but quietly (or not so quietly) promote and remunerate employees for a very different set of behaviours. Ultimately, the true talent of the organization (those with vision, creativity and balance) catch on to the ruse and quit, leaving behind the bullies, the witless, and those too desperate, dependent or overextended to get out. Hugh McLeod has a brilliant cartoon depicting this:

If you’re caught in this wage slavery hell, you will be living and breathing split intentions every day — not only between what the corporation says it wants and what it really rewards, but also between what it wants and what you want. The inevitable results are frustration, anger, self-hatred, disappointment and despair.

Once your work day ends, more split intentions appear. You may aspire to do your part to combat climate change and become less dependent on our rapacious and unsustainable modern economy, but how can you do that when you and your partner need two cars to get to work from the only house you can afford, which is miles from your workplaces?:

image from Deborah McLean

And when you get home, you have things that have to be done (mowing the lawn, paying the bills) that prevent you from doing the things you intend to do (spending time with those you love, learning or practicing doing something you love, or just sitting down and thinking about what your real intentions in life are). If you’re like many, your personal life turns into the second job you always swore you would never let it become. And suddenly thirty years pass and what you always intended is unstarted, or even forgotten.

If you’ve escaped this hell, both in the corporate world and in your personal life, you still have the challenge of focusing in on one or two lifelong intentions, and really “stretching toward” them, and making sure that what you do each day moves you closer, while contributing at the same time to a lot of smaller but still important intentions, through actions that make the world a little better, for those you love, for strangers, and for all-life-on-Earth.

In my personal “scorecard” at the top of this article I’ve scored myself (green/yellow/red) on each of the nine steps in the roadmap to reconnecting and acting that are needed to help the world cope with the coming collapse of civilization. My intentions towards each of these nine steps are the words around the outside of the circle: exploring appreciative enquiry, practicing presence, learning to let go, improving my presentation, demonstration, conversation and creative writing skills, becoming more grace-full, balanced and empathetic, stopping the tar sands, keeping this blog interesting and useful, helping develop useful working models of natural enterprise and unschooling, while saving some time to pursue my less ‘purposeful’ passions and find the places I’m meant to live. Several lifetimes’ worth of activities! And this is just a partial list of my intentions. After meeting some fascinating new people at a drum circle yesterday, I realized that one of the intentions missing from the Dismantle Civilization step for me is smashing industrial agriculture and specifically ending the atrocity of factory farming. Add that to my list of intentions.

All my life I have struggled with having too many objectives, too many projects and intentions, and making far too little progress on any of them. I’ve tried the Getting Things Done approach, but concluded that my problem wasn’t (dis)organization or lack of focus, as much as an inability to say no.

I’ve also become more sanguine about achieving measurable ‘results’ and ‘objectives’ as I’ve learned more about the nature of complexity and come to appreciate that most systems and challenges we face today are complex ones that don’t lend themselves to achievable objectives. The only sensible way to work on complex challenges is collaboratively, with others, and to see the work as continuous, work of learning and discovery, of coming to understand the ‘problem’ and possible approaches to it, simultaneously and iteratively. There is no mastery, there is only the practice.

It’s been said that it takes 10,000 hours of practice at something to become highly competent at it. So how do I choose among fifteen or twenty intentions, all of which are important to me, when I will never have the time to learn and practice towards each of them, enough to be of any use to others at all? My intentions aren’t split, they’re fragmented.

Ironically, my reluctant answer is the answer that I have been saying for the past six months is not enough: helping people imagine a better way to live and make a living, principally through my writing. That’s what I’m most competent at. I need to work on appreciation, presence and letting go — letting my heart be broken and showing that broken heart to the world — but that is only (as Joanna Macy explains) the prerequisite work, the work of reconnecting, that must precede the work that really makes a difference.

I should not wait to start the work of helping people imagine a better way to live and make a living, until I’m fully ‘reconnected’, though that reconnection will undoubtedly help the quality, value and accessibility of my work. I should also strive to improve my presentation, demonstration, conversation and creative writing skills because all of these will help improve and promote my work. And I do want to help dismantle civilization and help create new real-world models of natural enterprise, permaculture, transition culture and unschooling — but I’ve already acknowledged that my sweet spot is not creating these models but imagining and writing about them — telling stories about what is possible that others can realize.

Last week Sharon Astyk, who is busy doing what I’ve been calling the ‘real work’ of creating these models (she’s working hands-on in permaculture and is connected to the transition movement and several activist causes) wrote about the importance of imagining a better world, rather than just rushing out to create it:

Perhaps, in those words, I should find my marching orders. Of all the things I keep thinking and hoping are the things I’m meant to do, her words suggest that what I’m meant to do is to practice and get better, much better, at doing what I am already doing.

So I just dusted off the outline of my novel of a post-civilization utopian culture The Only Life We Know. Five years since I started it. Still barely begun.

Time to begin again. Sign up for workshops and practice lots of things that will make my work better, but spend time, every day, on my principal intention, what I want to be remembered for — helping people imagine a better way to live.

How about you? Do you know what you’re meant to do? What’s your one intention, for what’s left of your life, something that you want to be remembered for, something that will be of use to others after you’re gone? What’s holding you back?

fun with figures:

• the top chart shows historical levels of atmospheric CO₂  (180 to 300 ppm) back through the last half million years until about 1850, and the current unprecedented level of 386 ppm (and still rising); 
• the second chart shows the International Panel on Climate Change’s model of the worst (1100 ppm) and the best (just under 500 ppm, if we work immediately and furiously at it) we can expect/achieve by 2100; 
• since the consequence of not reducing levels to below 350 ppm by 2020 is runaway (self-reinforcing) global warming and massive, catastrophic climate change, it’s game over folks (but thanks for playing)
• meanwhile, James Lovelock, father of Gaia theory and reluctant supporter of nukes to tide us over until renewable energy technology improves, warns against the recklessness of geo-engineering to address climate change
• and at a UN summit this week, politicians agreed on nothing in talks preparatory to December’s Copenhagen meeting
  
• oh, and today (Sept. 26) is Earth Overshoot Day; so far this year, we’ve used up as much resources as the Earth can generate in a whole year. If we were to allow 1/2 of Earth’s resources for non-human creatures, we’d reach Overshoot Day by mid-May each year. Thanks to Cheryl for the link.

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S COLLAPSE

What Would a Better World Look Like?: Sharon Astyk says that we need a realistic vision of what a sustainable future would look like, and makes the argument that we need viable alternative working models — now:

Learning to be Present: Drawn from Nature: From Lorianne DiSabato (thanks to Dave Bonta for the link):

A Guide to Unschooling: This week’s Yi-Tan conference call on unschooling featured some people (including PS Pirro and me) describing their experiences and challenges with unschooling. Host Jerry Michalski has a ton of unschooling resources in his Brain. One of the participants, Sandra Dodd provides some comprehensive resources to learn about, and start, unschooling. Example: Marin Holmes’ Principles of Unschooling:

Beyond Talk: Upcoming events to protest government and corporate inaction on climate change. I’ve taken the pledge, but acknowledge it’s not enough.

LIVING BETTER

Home in the Jungle: This Hawai’ian permaculture community looks like a wonderful place to live. Great music too. Thanks to Tree for the link, and the one that follows (and also for the Butterfly Nebula link later in this post).

Mali’s Gift Economy: The economy of Mali, consistent with that of many indigenous cultures, is based on paying gifts forward, not on exacting a ‘market value’ of exchange for every transaction. Meanwhile, Melissa Holbrook Pierson shows that some communities in our mercenary world understand the gift economy too.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

image from Deborah McLean; thanks to Natalie Shell for the link

The Disease of Death: Rob Paterson talks about the elephant in the room in the health care debate: That we treat dying as if it were a curable disease, and lavish half of all health care spending on patients in their final year of life, mostly to prolong the inevitable, uncomfortably, in a cold, clinical institutional environment.

GE Pushes Coal as Clean and Sexy: You’ll have to suppress your gag instinct when you watch this pro-coal commercial for GE, which Keith Farnish says stands for Greenwashing Experts. The ad was pulled not for its barefaced deception but because viewers found it in bad taste. I’ll say.

Get a Permit, Stay Way Over Here, Don’t Get Out of Line, and We’ll Let You Protest: Pittsburgh offered G20 protestors a sandbox to demonstrate in, miles from the G20 summit, where they could be safely ignored. When the protestors declined, they were gased and arrested. Nothing new here. Thanks to Malik Datardina for the links.

with the rush to the ’safe haven’ of the US dollar during the Great Recession now over, the world’s most overvalued and fundamentally worthless currency has resumed its race towards zero; two years ago I said it would plunge below 60, and, as usual, I’ll be proved ultimately right but not as fast as I’d expected (I now see it falling below 40 by 2012)

NYT Belatedly Warns of Dangers of Corporate Personhood: It only took them a century, but the NYT has finally acknowledged that the court decision that gave corporations the rights of personhood, without the commensurate responsibilities, was a mistake. The statement came as the extreme right-wing US supreme court is about to extend corporate rights even further.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

the butterfly nebula, 4000 light-years away; photo by the hubble telescope  
THOUGHTS OF THE WEEK

My last few posts have been part of my process of deciding what I’m going to do next, as I prepare to move, to retire, and to become more active in living the ways I have been writing about for six years, my “trying on” different models of the me that I’m becoming.

My post on What You Can Do (graphic above) is my attempt at a roadmap of possibilities. My post yesterday (graphic below) drills down Step 7 of this roadmap (the step I’m most unfamiliar and anxious about) in greater detail.

And my personal “scorecard” on the 9 steps was in my post at the end of last week:

I gave myself a “some progress but a way to go” (yellow) score for Step 5 (Know Yourself and Discover the Courage to Act). I was listening yesterday to a talk (recommended by Chris Corrigan) by Gil Fronsdal on Intentions. In it, Gil makes the point that, before acting, we should know what our intention is for what’s left of our life, and then also for today. The word “intention” comes from the Latin meaning “stretch toward”. An intention is not a hope, dream, plan or aspiration. It is something we are actively working towards, now. So by thinking about our true intention for what’s left of our lives (which may be 37 days, or 37 years), and then about our true intention for today, and aligning those intentions, we can begin to actively “stretch toward” realizing both intentions.

My life has been through so many remarkable changes in the past five years I keep having to cycle back with what I’ve just learned about myself, and about the world, and revisiting these intentions. Looking at the 9 steps in the What You Can Do chart, and my progress in each of them, I have to acknowledge some continuing unease and trepidation. Is this really what I want to do with what’s left of my life? Is this really what I’m meant to do? Like my friend Pete McGregor, I keep doubting myself as soon as I think I’ve decided anything.

So I thought I’d go back to my Step 5 standby, my “what you’re meant to do” three-circle chart from my book Finding the Sweet Spot:

My latest effort at “filling in” the three circles looks like this:

My Passions are the things I love doing, copied from my personal scorecard, with the ones that I also do well (I think) shown in the overlap with my Gifts (area 2). I tried to think if I have other Gifts, things I’m uniquely good at, and decided that I’m actually pretty good at “playing” (although non-human creatures seem to appreciate this more than humans), so I moved it to area 2 as well. The three things I put in my Purpose circle (what’s needed that I care about) are the things described in Steps 6-8 of the What You Can Do chart.

So then I asked myself: Do any of the things in any of these circle areas (1, 2 and 6) actually belong in area 4, 5 or (ideally) 3?

I think there are a few, but not many:

• My Gifts/Passions for imagining possibilities and writing could be applied to dismantling civilization (specifically the undermining and innovating activities), if I would apply them collaboratively instead of individually
• These same Gifts/Passions might be applied to writing fiction about what might be (utopian depictions), something to inspire and guide the creation of natural working models, but does the world really need more idealistic utopian fiction (I’m not sure — if it’s needed I don’t know that it’s recognized as a need)?
• If I could increase my competency at conversing and showing (and move them from area 1 to area 2), then they could probably be applied to dismantling civilization (undermining, innovating, influencing and educating activities), but am I too old to finally become highly competent at these things — I’ve been working on them for years?
• Just about any if the Passions in area 1 could arguably be applied to any of the needs in area 6. But if I’m not highly competent at them, they’re still not in my sweet spot (area 3), only in area 4 — the area of disapppointment and self-disappointment. And that’s the last thing I need.
• Besides, I don’t really want to build the working models (transition communities, permaculture gardens, natural enterprises, unschooling environments) — I’m more interested in (collaboratively thinking and writing about) the ideas than the actual implementation, which to me is messy, risky, political and fraught with difficulty.
• Likewise, it’s the ideation involved in the innovating component of dismantling civilization that I’m most competent at and interested in, not the dangerous activities of physical obstruction and sabotage (as much as I admire those who do this, as long as no one gets physically hurt), nor the exhausting political aspects of activism (demonstration, debate, organizing and persuading). I try to psych myself up into wanting to do these other things, but so far at least, I honestly can’t.

So here I am, still perched on the edge, still not entirely sure what I want to do, what I’m meant to do. But I’m getting close, I think. A little more thought on the intention part, on envisioning what I want to “stretch toward”, what I want to give, and I’ll be there.

Here’s an explanation of this framework:

There are six categories of actions that Keith suggests we can make:

1. Finding better ways to live: These are personal actions that you can take that will help starve industrial civilization of the consumer dollars and labour hours that it requires to continue: 
• Consuming less (and strategically)
• Eating better (local, organic, small-farm, organic, self-prepared, unpackaged and GMO- and chemical-free)
• Traveling less and using non-air, multi-user public transport
• Living in more modest, more durable, homes (using less power/heat/air conditioning)
• Working for ourselves and not big multinationals (either as employees or as consultants to them)
• Unschooling/deschooling ourselves, our peers and children (i.e. self-directed, not institutional learning)
• Having at most one child
• Doing what we can to restore some of the damage to land, environment and society wreaked by industrial civilization
2. Undermining industrial civilization: As Keith points out, the above personal activities by themselves are not enough. Unless we work actively to undermine and dismantle industrial civilization, it will just keep destroying and exhausting our planet until we’ve passed the point of no return on climate change, and exhausted the planet’s resources. Keith outlines four rules for this ‘undermining’ work, whose objective is to slow down the machine so that growth (and hence industrial civilization’s viability) ends, so that citizens realize its (and their) vulnerability and the damage it causes, and so that alternative models of living and making a living have a chance to flourish:
• Focus on the tools of disconnection and their perpetrators
• Only act if the rewards outweigh the risks (that generally means avoiding harm to people and other creatures)
• Plan carefully (don’t let your emotions get the better of you)
• Don’t get caught (the book explains how)

3. Innovating and pioneering: My personal opinion is that activists are mostly (like most other people nowadays) pretty unimaginative. The lists and sites that describe how to bring about change tend to focus on measures to create media buzz rather than bring about any real behaviour change (Keith hasn’t much use for environmental groups of this ilk). Because of the effectiveness of the tools of disconnection, media attention rarely generates much more than feelings of learned helplessness and frustration. I’ve stopped reading the news and press releases about environmental destruction and loss, because they rarely offer suggestions beyond voting, petitions and writing cheques (which generally change nothing, other than perhaps keeping some environmentalists employed).

4. Influencing others: Part of any change initiative is to engage others and get them involved in the change activities as well. Keith describes Gladwell’s Tipping Point methods for doing this through “connectors” who spread the message to others outside the current group, and through “salespeople” who persuade others of the value of changing behaviour. Most importantly, this influencing effort needs to be targeted at people who are ready to listen and ready for a behaviour change. Keith also asserts that we need a clear and compelling, positive statement of purpose to explain why we advocate change. Here is his:

5. Educating others: Even more important than influencing others is educating others — helping to debunk the misinformation they’re getting from the perpetrators listed above, by presenting factual knowledge, new ideas, and different perspectives. We need to have the courage and patience to speak up when we hear misinformation, no matter how awkward, political and radical that may come across.
6. Relearning capacities and competencies: Keith identifies both survival skills and social/collaborative skills that we need to re-learn, in his book. His list is not that different from the list I have published on this site several times, which is reproduced again below.

What do you think? Other than that this is a lot of work, is this a viable framework for undermining, disrupting and finally dismantling industrial civilization, before it can do too much more damage?

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S COLLAPSE

Moving Beyond Hope: From Sharon Astyk, fine words of inspiration for those of us who are past debating:

The Long Descent Begins: From John Michael Greer, on what comes next:

And Each Place is a State of Mind: The author of Spell of the Sensuous says we need to become aware that “we are bodily immersed in an awareness that is not ours, but is rather the Earth’s“. David Abram’s descriptions of natural places and phenomena are poetic, transporting.

Farmageddon and #2 Corn: Guy McPherson rants about what industrial agriculture has done to us. Thanks to Dismantle Civilization for the link.

Once Again The Animals Were Conscious of A Vague Uneasiness: Another rant, about our unwillingness to acknowledge that Obama is only marginally less awful than Cheney-Bush. (If you’re wondering, the title of the op-ed is from the book Animal Farm.)

What Is Your Life Dedicated To?: Chris Corrigan points us to a great Gil Fronsdal talk on unselfish intention (also available as a podcast).

Leadership in a Self-Organizing World: Harrison Owen of Open Space fame says that leadership in complex systems isn’t about telling people what to do, or showing them what to do, or facilitating their self-organization; it’s about inspiring with ideas, passion, personal intention and commitment, hard work, creating space and opportunity, and inviting in ways that cannot be refused. Thanks to Tree for the link.

“There is No Reason for a Confinement House Anywhere”: The Bay Area Video Coalition is using videos to show what’s possible, starting with the local, organic food system, networked with Harvest Cloud, a collaborative of farmers who offer healthy local food, and Leave it Better, photo stories of individuals using the system. Thanks to Cheryl for the link.

LIVING BETTER

Better Measures of Economic Health and Well-Being than GDP: The long-awaited Stiglitz-Sen report on measurement of economic performance and social progress is out. Good recommendations, likely to be ignored by everyone except the Sarkozy government that commissioned the report. The rest, afraid of citizens knowing the real truth about the economy, will continue to report GDP, stock market indexes, and fictitious inflation and unemployment data, as measures of economic health, through the compliant mainstream media to a gullible public. Thanks to Andrew Tilling for the link. Summary:

1. There is significant evidence that large segments of the population do not believe that reported government economic measures (e.g. inflation, unemployment) represent reality, because they don’t correlate to perceived and observed changes in actual personal experience and because there is significant motivation for governments producing the data to overstate it (conflict of interest). This has led to great public skepticism of GDP data.
2. Government decision-making often overuses and misuses GDP data. This was a significant factor in aggravating and failing to cope with the recent, ongoing economic crisis, and is hampering efforts to combat climate change.
3. GDP measures must be significantly reformed to remove distortions (e.g. economic events currently reflected in GDP that do nothing to create wealth, or actually negatively affect wealth), and should be shifted from a production to consumption focus.
4. GDP measures should include measures of the equal/unequal distribution of wealth among the population (Gini index factors), not just a single ‘average’ number.
5. Reformed GDP should be presented alongside two additional measures: National Well-Being, and Wealth/Well-Being Sustainability. (Some specific proposals for these new measures are included in the report, though it calls for more research.) All these measures should be included in a standardized national “Annual Report”, analogous to a corporation’s annual report.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Tar Sands Told to Step Up Propaganda: Right-wing corporatist apologist Diane Francis tells Big Oil they need an all-out greenwashing spin war to prevent Canadians (and their foreign customers) discovering the truth about the Alberta Tar Sands holocaust. She cites the success of the American Petroleum Institute’s use of phony “citizen” websites broadcasting deceptive, PR-crafted pro-drilling messages on Facebook and Twitter, and urges Big Oil to do the same to greenwash the Alberta Tar Sands. You know, just like the Big Oil and HMO-funded Republicans have done in the US. Of course, that’s not how she puts it. Thanks to Malik Datardina for the links. This is a knee-jerk reaction of the right to Greenpeace’s success at briefly shutting down the Tar Sands, and accurately labeling Canada a “global carbon bully“.

Carter Tells Progressives to Not Stand for Bigotry: The former US president says right-wing extremists are exploiting the left’s reverence for freedom of speech and the press as cover for racism, hate-mongering and other behaviour that no constitution was meant to protect, and we should not put up with it.

Don’t Risk the Swine Flu Vaccine: The squalene-based swine flu vaccine you’ll be asked to get injected with this year, not only causes auto-immune diseases but also nerve diseases according to neurologists.

Half Million Clean Water Violations in US Ignored: The NYT, using public records of violations that state enforcement agencies and the EPA have ignored, have created a national database of the violations.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

rock balancing success in Oz by Viv McWaters

THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK

• Show up, be real.
• Take people with you.
• Look inside for answers.
• Ask why, not how.
• Don’t pretend it works.
• Surprise them with presence.

In my previous post I provided a framework for making the world a better place. Today I’m going to ’score’ myself using that framework, and admit that despite all the work and energy I’ve put into learning how the world really works and imagining how it might be made better,, I’m still not far along this journey. My ’scorecard’ is shown above. Red squares represent areas of my journey where I’m stuck or barely underway; yellow squares represent areas where I’m making some progress but still have a long way to go; and green squares represent areas where I’m well advanced. Here’s what this scorecard says:

1. Appreciating: I’m trying hard, but not succeeding. Despite my belief that as our civilization unwinds later in this century, life is going to be pretty awful, I’m basically happy, centred, determined, and ready to live every minute of my life with joy and purpose. My problem is that I have difficulty appreciating (most) other people. I am an incorrigible misanthrope. I need to explore what to do about this. 
2. Presence: I’m still stuck. I understand being present, living in the Now, the same way I understand meditation and playing music — my head gets the concept, but my body won’t play. I need to keep practicing. 
3. Opening My Heart: I’m making progress. I’ve come to acknowledge my grief for Gaia, for all the suffering in the world. I’m beginning to show the world my broken heart. You’ve seen the change, I think, in my recent writing. I’m still learning to let go, however, and I still have a lot to let go.
4. Understanding the World: It’s taken the reading of 500 books and the writing of 2500 pages of blog articles, and my own book, but I think I’ve got this covered. I know what’s going on, and why, and why what all the politicians and business leaders and economists and social scientists and educators and activists and gurus and social networkers are doing isn’t making much of a difference, and won’t. 
5. Knowing Myself: I’m getting a lot better at this, but I am still procrastinating at the intersection of knowing and doing. What’s holding me back? For all the self-knowledge I’ve acquired, especially over the last year (my Self-Portrait in Words, in the centre of the graphic above, is, I think, a more complete and honest self-portrait than most people would be able to produce), I still have more self-questions than answers. But despite my rather miserable scores in these 5 reconnecting steps, I’m ready for the action steps (6-8).
6. Building Capacity & Competency: I have acquired some important new skills in the past year, and already had a few, but I still have at least the 7 shown in the lower left of the diagram above to acquire (here’s an explanation of SSUQIOC, the method for approaching challenges that I’m continuing to practice).
7. Dismantling Civilization: Barely begun. The blog has been important, and will continue to be part of my contribution to taking down this civilization as gently as possible to reduce the amount of further damage it will do. But it’s not enough. For a Canadian, the Alberta tar sands are an obvious target. What my role will be I’m still sorting out.
8. Creating Natural Working Models: Also barely begun. Lots of ideas on Intentional Community, on unschooling, a good (but not very popular) book Finding the Sweet Spot published to show what Natural Enterprise can do. But it’s time to move beyond writing about these models and start actually building them, and living them.
9. Being a Model: I think I’m a long way down this path. I am spending more and more of my time living my principles and practicing what I preach, and my message is getting more coherent and more compelling. And I really am getting rid of all of the gunk that had made me too much everybody-else, and am now much closer to being nobody-but-myself. I still need to find my ‘places’, the warm forests and beaches that call to me, and I need to keep making time and space to do the things I love doing, the things that manifest this nobody-but-myself, and keep me joyful, but I’m well on my way.

Not a great scorecard — 2 A’s, 3 C’s and 4 D’s — but I’m making progress, and I know what needs to be done.

It’s been a couple of years since I tried to provide a comprehensive answer to the question of many of my readers: “What can I do?” in light of all the suffering in this world, and the looming collapse, some time in this century, of our unsustainable, teetering civilization. Past versions of What You Can Do have been mostly checklists, and I thought this time I’d try to provide a model, a process that each individual can tailor to her or his own capacities, abilities and passions. It’s illustrated above, and it’s fairly ambitious, but I think it makes sense. It draws heavily on the work of Joanna Macy I wrote about last week (and I hope to attend one of her workshops later this year). It also draws on the work of Richard Moss, Otto Scharmer, and my book Finding the Sweet Spot.

Here’s a walkthrough of the process, which to some extent I’ve applied in my own life. I won’t pretend I did any of this in this order, or with this much focus or rigour, but if I knew then what I know now perhaps I would have. Here we go.

STEP 1: APPRECIATE

If you’re going to start on this journey, you need to be positive, “yes…and” affirmative, grateful, self-accepting, and appreciative of the astonishing joys of living. As long as you’re negative, always working against The Man, you will find that as soon as your energy is fed by anger, it is exhausted by frustration and despair.

Kenny Ausubel and Nina Simons explain it this way: This work, as important as it is, depends on us being true to ourselves, self-appreciative, giving ourselves permission to take risks, learning to accept compliments, “smelling fear and heading straight for it”, and managing our own and others’ expectations. We have to balance idealism and realism, perseverance and pragmatism, masculine aggressiveness and feminine perceptiveness and resilience. We must see that the glass is half full and half empty. We have to get past the internalized oppression that we carry inside us, the fear of saying and talking about what we most care about, even though doing so makes us vulnerable and may expose us to disbelief and even ridicule.

Tom Robbins lives by the principle of “crazy wisdom”: “the wisdom that evolves when one, while refusing to avert one’s gaze from the sorrows and injustices of the world, insists on joy in spite of everything.”

Joanna Macy describes gratitude as a revolutionary act — it contradicts the relentless message of the industrial growth society that we, and what we have, are never enough, so we are made to be perpetually dissatisfied. Gratitude breaks this hold on us, showing us that we are sufficient, and hence liberates us from industrial growth society’s propaganda, mindset and entrenched behaviours.

Your journey will be a long and challenging one, and for you to usefully complete it, it must be rooted in indefatigable appreciation, gratitude and joy. Are you ready for this?

STEP 2: BE PRESENT

You’re going to have to bring all your attention to this journey, all your focus. Changing the world in any meaningful way doesn’t lend itself to multitasking, distraction, or living inside your head, or in your dreams.

Richard Moss argues that most of us envisage ourselves through the stories we tell ourselves, about our past, our future, about ourselves and others and the world, and that these stories and the emotions they evoke (fear, hope, guilt, regret, nostalgia, insecurity, self-importance, self-hatred, anger, jealousy and bitterness) are a mere shadow world, an invention of our minds, that keeps us from being in and living in the Now.

David Abram shows us how to rediscover the spell of the sensuous, and hence how to reconnect with our instincts, emotions, senses and all-life-on-Earth, by spending time in wild places, and paying attention. Once reconnected, we come to know, intuitively and viscerally, with our heart and body and senses, not just our head, what needs to be done. Time disappears, we remember who we really are, freed from the stories and all the gunk that’s been attached to us. And we can then bring that attention and presence to everything we do, and we’re going to need it!

We are Gaia.

STEP 3: LET YOUR HEART BE BROKEN

When we are disconnected from our feelings, our senses, and our instincts, and live in our heads, we act (intellectually) as if everything is all right, while we know (emotionally, viscerally) that something is terribly wrong. It is as if there are two highly dissonant people inside us: an active one that goes about our daily work, engaging in normal relationships; and a passive one that suffers silently from a profound, unnamed and unexpressed grief and a deep but unexplored sense of anxiety.

Richard Bruce Anderson describes the process of working through this disconnection: “At the heart of the modern age is a core of grief. At some level, we’re aware that something terrible is happening, that we humans are laying waste to our natural inheritance. A great sorrow arises as we witness the changes in the atmosphere, the waste of resources and the consequent pollution, the ongoing deforestation and destruction of fisheries, the rapidly spreading deserts and the mass extinction of species. All these changes signal a turning point in human history, and the outlook is not particularly bright. The anger, irritability, frustration and intolerance that increasingly pervade our common life are symptoms associated with grief… Grief is a natural reaction to calamity, and the stages of grief are visible in our reaction to the rapid decline of the natural world. There are a number of steps that people go through in the grief process. The first stage is often denial: ‘This can’t really be happening,’ a feeling common among millions of Americans… We know the facts, but we’re ignoring them in the interests of emotional survival.” When we acknowledge this pain we can begin to move forward through the remaining stages of grief — anger, despair, and finally “a peaceful accommodation of reality.”

Nick Smith explains: “Here’s an alternative to [endless] effort and struggle:  Instead of living in hope of a better life or anyone coming to make it feel better, we can elect to allow everything to be exactly as it is… and then welcome whatever angst or despair or other form of fear appears, so that we can really face it.  Instead of following the mind’s need to move, we can choose to sit still in the middle of it all and allow it, consume it, regardless of the consequences.  This can feel like death itself, but by letting our heart be broken like this, what we discover in the rubble can never be lost.  What flows free from an heart that’s been broken open is an unimaginable love that could never be put back, and which envelops everything.”

Joanna Macy explains that the pain we feel for the world (what I have described as “our unbearable grief for Gaia”) is universal; we all sense it, and that this pain is unprecedented; never since the start of our civilization have we faced the possibility of the end of our society and a massive life extinction event. We tend to block or repress this pain, for fear it will deeply depress or paralyze us (or be socially unacceptable to express); the consequence is that we end up suppressing our instinct for the preservation of life. We need to reframe the “silent scream” of these emotions as our deep capacity to hear within ourselves the sound of the Earth crying, and hence as a feeling of deep, instinctive compassion in which we “suffer with” all-life-on-Earth. When we let our hearts be broken, she explains, the grief and sorrow we feel for the world is transformed into love, the fear and dread is transformed into courage and trust, the anger and outrage finds expression as passion for justice, and the feelings of ignorance and helplessness yield to glimpses of opportunity.

Show the world your broken heart.

STEP 4: UNDERSTAND HOW THE WORLD REALLY WORKS

Our world (like all ecological and social systems) is inherently, staggeringly and wonderfully complex, but everything we are taught about the world and how it works (in schools, and in the mainstream media) is reduced to simplistic, mechanistic terms. We continue to believe that “the environment” (something that is portrayed as somehow apart from us) is just facing “problems” that need “solutions” (political, economic, scientific, technological, or spiritual). In complicated systems (like your car), “problems” can be fixed. But in complex systems there are no problems, only predicaments, unintended consequences of actions that cannot be undone. Nature teaches us (if we will only listen) that you don’t fix a predicament, you adapt to it. The reason so many of our modern crises are so wicked and intractable is that they are not problems, but predicaments, unintended consequences of (mostly) well-intended human actions. To understand how the world really works, and how we can start to learn to adapt to our modern predicaments, we need to understand complexity.

With that context, of adaptation rather than futilely chasing “solutions”, my blog and my Save the World reading list can help you understand how the world really works. If that’s too much reading for you, at least read these seven books, in this order:

1. Full House, by Stephen J. Gould. The improbable emergence of humans on Earth.
2. Story of B, by Daniel Quinn. A radical revisionist history of civilization, in fictional format, and an explanation of how we got to where we are now.
3. A Language Older Than Words, by Derrick Jensen. A dark explanation of the reason for the core of grief at the heart of the modern age.
4. A Short History of Progess, by Ronald Wright. Why all civilizations collapse. A survey of past civilizations’ savagery and short-term thinking. Jared Diamond but shorter.
5. Against the Grain, by Richard Manning. Why Jared Diamond said monoculture agriculture was the greatest mistake in human history, and what it’s come to now.
6. Straw Dogs, by John Gray. While we have a responsibility to try to make the world better and joyful, for those we love and leave behind, we cannot be other than what we are: a fierce, brilliantly adaptable species destined to bring out the next great extinction, and annihilate ourselves in the process.
7. The Long Emergency, by James Kunstler. What the near future will look like when this century’s looming ecological, economic, political and resource crises begin to cascade.

You should also study and meet with people from indigenous cultures, to appreciate there are many ways to live that are different from (and arguably superior to) the ways of living that our industrial growth society would have us believe is the only way to live. A great primer on this is Hugh Brody’s The Other Side of Eden, a personal study of several indigenous cultures around the world.

Now you know what really happened, and what’s really happening. Cycle back to steps 1-3, take a deep breath, and fare forward.

STEP 5: KNOW YOURSELF; DISCOVER THE COURAGE TO ACT

At this point you should be reconnected with your heart, your instincts, your senses, and all-life-on-Earth, and prepared to bring appreciation, presence and openness to the work you will be doing. And you should have a reasonable idea of what needs to be done. The next step is to connect with yourself, to learn what you are meant to do, what your role in making the world a better place should be. My book Finding the Sweet Spot describes how to do this in the specific context of making a living. But the same principles and approach can also help you learn what you are meant to do in the broader context. This involves self-exploration to discover (a) your Gifts (what you are uniquely good at doing), your Passions (what you love doing), and your Purpose (what is needed in the world that you care about, and which resonates with who you are). Where these three things intersect lies what you are meant to do.

David Robinson describes a method for discovering these three things:

• Practice (doing what you can) is the means to discover your Gifts, what you have the capacity and competency to do.
• Intention (doing what you want) is the means to discover your Passions, what you love doing. 
• Autonomy (being nobody-but-yourself, in spite of everything) is the means to discover who you really are, and hence discover your Purpose.

The only way to know, he suggests, is to do. Until you try things, you can’t know if they are your Gifts, or your Passions, or your Purpose. My book has lots of exercises for finding this intersection, what you’re meant to do.

Through self-knowledge comes the courage to act. When you know what you’re meant to do, that’s a huge step towards doing it. When this is who you really are, what you want, and what you can do, how can you not do it? There is still, of course, the fear of change, which is mostly the fear of the unknown. These first five steps are the reconnecting cycle; the last four are the actions, which you will take in collaboration with others to realize what you’re meant to do. As you go through these four steps and determine precisely what actions you’re meant to pursue, some of the fear of change and of the unknown will dissipate. When you’re ready to act, you’ll know.

These first five steps are a cycle, or as Joanna Macy describes them a spiral. They’re never done and forgotten. They’re a continuous process, a set of practices to keep you reconnected.

The final four steps are a balance, a set of actions you do more or less together, because each informs and enriches the others and keeps you from being ’stuck’ in one type of action.

STEP 6: BUILD PERSONAL AND COLLECTIVE CAPACITY AND COMPETENCY

These are the ‘head’ actions, the ones rooted mostly in intellectual (thinking and learning) activity. Knowing who you are, and what you know and need to know, will direct and inform these types of actions, at the personal level. You may conclude that some of the things you believe to be in your sweet spot are not currently Gifts (distinctive competencies) of yours, or you may be lacking the capacity to do them, so you’ll need to open space and time, and study and practice, until they are.

At the collective level, you will need to connect, communicate, share, teach and show what you know with others in your community. You will also need to collaborate with others in your communities to develop collective capacities and competencies. That doesn’t mean everyone needs to have these qualities, just that someone in each community needs to have them, and others in the community need to recognize and draw on them. This is done as part of a collaborative process that, at a high level, follows this flow:

1. Passion: Individual reflection on the subject at hand. 
2. Conversation: Collective reflection, through a collective engagement of the collaborators.
3. Consensus: Collective decision, though the understanding that emerged from the conversations.
4. Action: Individual decision, through the acceptance of personal responsibility by individuals.

This process of “letting go” of personal perspectives and “letting come” of consensus is an application of Otto Scharmer’s ‘theory U‘. The acceptance of personal responsibility by individuals is part of Chris Corrigan’s teachings of Open Space and the collaborative processes of indigenous cultures.

STEP 7: DISMANTLE CIVILIZATION

These are the ‘hands’ actions, the ones rooted mostly in physical activity. This is the hard, thankless work of blockading, obstructing, boycotting and otherwise preventing the unsustainable industrial growth society from functioning. It will collapse under its own weight, given time, but we cannot wait: by acting to undermine it now we can lessen its damage and shorten its longevity, so that the collapse, though still devastating, will be less disastrous than if we allowed industrial civilization to pollute and enhaust resources to the bitter end.

Of course there are also many personal actions you can and must take to live simpler, more responsible and sustainable lives. They are not enough, however; much more radical action is needed.

Keith Farnish’s book Time’s Up! provides a blueprint for achieving this type of radical action effectively and safely (Derrick Jensen’s recent books also provide some excellent ideas). Here is Keith’s key message:

STEP 8: CREATE NEW, NATURAL STRUCTURES AND MODELS

These are the ‘heart’ actions, the ones rooted mostly in creative activity. The most notable right now are the Transition Network, Permaculture, Unschooling, and Intentional Communities movements. Each proposes a radically new way to live, and models this behaviour through real-world activities, networks and communities. There are some who hope and believe that such models will serve, eventually, to render those of the industrial growth society obsolete and cause them to crumble. There are others who believe that these new models will only scale and flourish once industrial civilization has collapsed. Regardless of which you believe, these natural, alternative models are the future, and the more work done to make them more resilient, adaptable and diverse, the better our chances of mitigating the suffering that will come with the collapse of industrial civilization, and providing options for new beginnings once that occurs.

Find the type of structure, network, model or community that works for you, that fits with what you’re meant to do. Whether it’s alternative energy, art, or social media, be creative, and find other people who share your vision and purpose to collaborate with in model-building.
.     .     .     .     .

It is important that we each participate in all three (step 6, 7 and 8) activities. Each informs and enriches the others. Do only the first (step 6) and you’ll be stuck in abstraction, never ‘realizing’ anything. Do only the second (step 7) and you’ll be depressed and angry and subject to quick burn-out. Do only the third (step 8) and you’ll be isolated and stuck in small-scale activities, invisible to those doing work in other areas. Just as you should eat a balanced diet, your actions as a responsible citizen of Earth should likewise be balanced. And all of these actions should be collaborative. The cowboy culture is dead… this is the time for collaboration culture.

STEP 9: BE A MODEL; BE (NOBODY-BUT-)YOURSELF

There’s one kind of model that doesn’t fit in step 8, and that’s the model of you. By modeling all the things you have learned in this process: appreciation, presence, openness, knowledge of how things work, self-knowledge, courage, unique capacities and competencies, radical activism, responsibility and creativity — you show others who may be ready to take action themselves the way. That’s far more powerful and effective than writing or teaching. Don’t tell, show.

At the same time this journey, this work, cannot be that of self-sacrifice. The movement to make the world a better place needs its workers to be healthy, whole and energized for the long haul. So it’s important to create time and space for you. In step 5 you identified, among other things, your Passions. Some of those Passions won’t be in your step 5 sweet spot — never mind, slot them into step 9, and create time and space for them. It’s a long journey, and you need to allow for recreation and re-charging.

You must remain faithful to yourself, or this work will consume you. Remember to be authentic, and to love yourself. We need you healthy and happy. And to be, as ee cummings said, nobody-but-yourself:

Feel and work and fight till you die. That’s what this work is about.

.     .     .     .     .

Whew! I told you this was ambitious. This framework will continue to evolve as I apply it and as others contribute to it. I welcome your comments. The idea, again, is that instead of prescribing a checklist of ’save the world’ activities for people to do, to provide instead a framework/model that will allow each individual who is ready to do this important work to devise their own personal plan of reconnection and action.

Thanks to all the contributors to this model, especially Joanna Macy whose Work That Reconnects models are the backbone and inspiration for much of what I’ve outlined above.

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S COLLAPSE

Not a Problem, a Predicament: Sharon Astyk introduces some complex adaptive systems thinking in her post on approaches to problems (complicated challenges, that can be ’solved’) versus predicaments (complex challenges, that we must adapt ourselves to). Most of the critical civilizational collapse challenges facing us (economic, social and economic) are inherently complex, while we continue to try to ’solve’ them, fruitlessly. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.

US Economy Teetering: Ilargi and Stoneleigh continue to argue, compellingly, that it will be economic collapse, led by the collapse of the US dollar and economy, that will precipitate the collapse of our civilization, the first domino to fall (before the effects of climate change or the End of Oil). These two writers (formerly the Canadian correspondents for the Oil Drum) have done an extraordinary amount of research and written volumes of commentary (they reply patiently to all comments on their blog, explaining complex issues in understandable terms) on why this will happen. Their arguments are more reasoned and better supported than anything I’ve read from mainstream economists. Thanks to Eric Lilius for the link.

At the Gates of Ecological Hell: My friend Mushin, at the precipice of letting his heart be broken over the inevitable and horrific collapse of our unsustainable human civilization, blinks and retreats to the comfort of belief in the “emergence of collective consciousness”, which John Gray describes as the humanist equivalent of the Rapture. Give him time, though, he’ll come around.

David Abram on Living in the Now: The author of the extraordinary Spell of the Sensuous explains that we have to be present, not future-oriented, before we can start to change the world. (And no, despite the similarity of appearance, he and I are not related.) Thanks to Siona for the link.

The End of Money: Thomas Greco in his book The End of Money argues that fiat money issued by governments that citizens are forced to accept at their stated value acts to corrupt the political and economic system and concentrate more and more wealth in fewer and fewer hands, and that it is unsustainable. His prescription: “A multi-stage plan involving diverse segments of the community. It is designed to accomplish the following: (1.) Institute measures that promote import substitution;  (2.) Provide an alternative payment medium, independent of any political currency and banking establishment; (3.) Issue a supplemental regional currency; (4.) Develop basic support structures that strengthen the local economy and enhance the community’s quality of life; (5.) Develop an independent value standard and unit of account. The keystone of this plan is the organization of a mutual credit clearing association in the second stage. I also describe the emergent web based exchange systems and slight modifications that are required to make them fully functional as non-governmental exchange and finance alternatives.” This is not an easy book for novices, but it is an essential component of any new community-based economic model, so it’s must reading. Full disclosure: I provided a critique of the pre-publication version, and recommended that Chelsea Green publish it. Thanks to P2P Foundation for the great online summary.

The Logic of the Barbaric Heart: Success is Virtue: Curtis White’s June Orion article on the Barbaric Heart is now online. “All of this is a roundabout way of saying that there is no need for environmentalism. Environmentalism has no victories to win. The very notion of environmentalism is not much more than a way of isolating a problem from its true context. The crisis of a degraded natural world is a part of the larger problem of the crisis of thought, the crisis of faith, and the crisis of the relation of human beings to Being.” Synopsis: three basic principles have driven human economic activity worldwide since the dawn of our civilization (and they need to be replaced with an ethos with the opposite principles):

• Prosperity is dependent on violence
• We are motivated most by the self-interested Ego, the pursuit of the personal
• There is no need or place in our culture for self-examination, or regret for or rectification of ill-conceived behaviour; a society can never be punished for its excesses or learn from its mistakes

LIVING BETTER

Another Alternative Lighting Solution: Expect to hear more about (and start seeing) OLED lighting over the next few years.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

North America: Still the Growth Wasteland: A couple of great posts from Chris Corrigan: One lamenting Obama’s sacrificing of his only real progressive Van Jones, and the other lamenting the growth at any cost agenda of Canada’s so-called Liberal party. I keep saying it: Expect no help from North American governments in the work we need to do.

How US Politics Really Works: A great speech by Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, Van Jones’ lieutenant at Green for All, that explains how politics works. She dismisses the mainstream environmental organizations, describes the progressive movement as “pathetic”, and explains how to organize to get and leverage power (the Green for All message is: millions of new, good, green jobs right in our communities). Brilliant and ruthless. The fact that organizations led by women like this still can’t get any kind of environmental or health care legislation passed in the US shows how hopeless achieving any real political change is. The system is utterly broken. Thanks to Jerry Michalski and Sheri Herndon for the link.

Why Cap-and-Trade Can’t Work: A study by Friends of the Earth concludes that carbon offset schemes will be fraught with error and fraud, and won’t reduce carbon emissions anyway. So in the meantime we’ll have wasted years without introducing programs that can actually combat climate change. Climate SOS agrees.

Historic Shifts in US Labour Market: Women now outnumber men, and boomers unwilling or unable to retire are preventing Gen Y from entering the labour force. Thanks to Kim Martins-Sbarcea for the link.

Why Congo Matters: Emily Troutman provides a photo-essay and some horrific data about a failed and mostly forgotten state, the Congo. This reality coming soon to a country near you.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK