this map of online communities, c.2007, definitely needs updating; thanks to Howard Deane for the link

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S END

Can Communities Collaborate?: Harold Jarche argues that in complicated environments (like groups of people in a company working on a shared objective) collaboration is possible, while in complex environments (like most social and ecological ones) the best that can be hoped for is cooperation, because in these environments there can never be truly shared objectives. In the comments thread, Nancy White says she’s not so sure. If Harold is right, is this why communities struggle to really collaborate? And, tying this back to my earlier post on individual vs. collective intentions and objectives, does this mean we’re doomed to failure because communities (the only sustainable, resilient form of social organization) will forever have their effectiveness and energy drained by squabbles over diverse personal intentions and objectives? This is an important question I intend to write more about.

Sovereign Nation Defaults in 2010?: Jim Kunstsler predicts that after 2009, the year of “extend and pretend” we will see 2010 as the year of realization of the functional bankruptcy of the US, with consequences including the Dow at 4,000, anti-government rioting by mostly right-wing elements culminating in a resurgence of Republican strength in Congress, and massive sovereign national financial defaults including almost all of Europe (except Scandinavia, Germany, France and perhaps UK). He also sees crises in China and Mexico. My prediction is that Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, is right in his forecasts but wrong in his timing — what he sees happening in one year will, I think, take five, or maybe even ten, and occur in waves not all in one collapse.

How to Prepare for Collapse: Keith Farnish and Carolyn Baker discuss how they’re preparing for the collapse of industrial civilization. Excerpts:

What I will be doing as collapse takes hold is what I’ve been doing for many years. The first activity and the one that started my awakening was and is to become and remain informed about what is actually happening as opposed to what the media of civilization is telling us is happening. I have done many things logistically to prepare–things like food storage, creating a community of allies around me, and of course, relocating to a more sustainable and conscious part of the United States. My most significant relationships are with people who are collapse-aware and with whom I am able to talk about the inevitable–people who are also preparing. Above all, I see the world these days through the lens of collapse which causes me to appreciate all of the modest comforts I have, the supportive people in my life, the food I eat, the clean water I drink, and the health I’m privileged to enjoy. I am consciously preparing myself emotionally and spiritually for the unraveling… Civilization has robbed us of our intimate connection with our own humanity–something that I sometimes call our “indigenous self”, and like indigenous people revolting against colonization, collapse is offering us the opportunity to uncolonize and reclaim the indigenous self within us.

Another part of preparation – and it is of course fundamental to the reconnection of which you speak – is my connection with nature. That connection, if deeply felt and viscerally experienced, will inform our priorities, our relationships, our parenting, how we eat, travel, spend our time–virtually every aspect of our lives.

Transition Training: Transition US is now offering training in the transition to post-civilization culture. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.

Confronting Collapse: Collapse, the movie based on Michael Ruppert’s book Confronting Collapse, is now out. Watch for it in your area. Ruppert’s prescription for coping with the collapse of oil is radical, and improbable, but he has an almost unblemished record of being right.

Bill McKibben on Copenhagen: McKibben acknowledged what everyone except the mainstream media already knew: Copenhagen was a total disaster, producing essentially nothing. What I am hoping for now is a radicalization of the scientists and environmentalists, combining to work for non-political change to combat global warming, now that political action is clearly not going to happen (thanks to David Hodgson for the link):

The Guardian quickly declared the whole thing a Failure, in large point type, followed by most of the world’s other newspapers, though the American press was a little kinder. Kumi Naidoo, the wonderful head of Greenpeace International, said Copenhagen was a “crime scene.” The leaders of the global youth movement gathered under the Metro station outside the Bella Center to chant: “You’re wrecking our future.”

James Hansen, the great climate scientist who started the global warming era with his 1988 testimony before the U.S. Congress, and whose team provided the crucial 350 number that now defines the planet’s habitability, refused to come to Copenhagen, predicting it would be a charade. He was correct. On Sunday he predicted a greater than 50 percent chance that 2010 would be the warmest year ever recorded. If you want to bet against him, you can. If you want to argue that this non-agreement will help Obama get something through Congress, it’s possible you’re right. If you want to despair, that’s certainly a plausible option.

Psst, Wanna Buy $2.2T in US Debts, Cheap?: Ilargi points out that in 2010, over two trillion dollars of US federal debt (plus tons more at lower levels of government) will come up for renewal. Who’s going to buy it at current interest rates of 1%? At 5%? At 10%? Well if all else fails, maybe the US government will buy its own debt, under cover, just to show someone has faith these debts can be repaid. Oh, wait, they’ve already been doing that. Just don’t tell China.

LIVING BETTER

Does Innovation Start with the Customer?: An interesting NYT piece on customer-centric innovation. This is one of the key messages of my book Finding the Sweet Spot — that natural enterprise starts with meeting an unmet need, not with hawking me-too products developed in a lab. But these corporations still don’t get it — you don’t bring the customer into your innovation centre and show them what you’re doing. You ask the customer open-ended questions that surface needs, and then through creative conversation you co-develop new products and services with your customer. You know you’re there when the line between supplier and customer is so blurred you can no longer tell them apart — they just become colleagues, collaborators, partners.

Four Important Trends in US Consumer Behaviour: Is the consumer becoming smarter? Maintaining more liquidity/resilience, more ethical purchasing, looking for more durable goods, relying more on community purchases, collaboration and recommendations. Thanks to tree for the link and the one that follows.

The Ultimate Alternative Currency: The hour in now being used in some places as a unit of currency. Give an hour of what you do best, take an hour of what you need that someone else does best. Everyone’s time is valued equally.

Ten “Rules” of Homeschooling: Sharon Astyk explains what she’s learned homeschooling her kids. Most important: “The best thing to teach them is how to learn [for themselves]“.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Ten Worst Things About the Bush Decade: A smart summary by Juan Cole. What’s scary is that nothing has been done to prevent a repeat of all these atrocities by the next wingnut president. Thanks to Stephen Downes for the link:

1. The constitutional coup of 2000, in which Bush was declared the winner of an election he had lost, with the deployment of the most ugly racial and other low tricks in the ballot counting and the intervention of a partisan and far right-wing Supreme Court (itself drawn from or serving the oligarchs), and which gave us the worst president in the history of the union, who proceeded to drive the country off a cliff for the succeeding 8 years. And that is because he was not our president, but theirs.
2. The September 11 attacks on New York and Washington by al-Qaeda, an organization that stemmed from the Reagan administration’s anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s and which decided that, having defeated one superpower, it could take down the other.
3. The great $12 trillion Bank Robberry, in which unscrupulous bankers and financiers were deregulated and given free rein to create worthless derivatives, sell impossible mortgages to uninformed marks who could not understand their complicated terms, and then to roll this garbage up into securities re-sold like the Cheshire cat, with a big visible smile of asserted value hanging in the air even as their actual worth disappeared into thin air.
4. The Iraq War, in which the US illegally launched a war of aggression that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, displaced 4 million (over a million abroad), destroyed entire cities such as Fallujah, set off a Sunni-Shiite civil war, allowed Baghdad to be ethnically cleansed of its Sunnis, practiced systematic and widespread torture before the eyes of the Muslim Middle East and the world, and immeasurably strengthened Iran’s hand in the Middle East.
5. The Bush administration’s post-2002 mishandling of Afghanistan, where the Taliban had been overthrown successfully in 2001 and were universally despised.
6. The Katrina flood and the destruction of much of historic African-American New Orleans, and the massive failure of the Bush administration to come to the aid of one of America’s great cities.
7. The imperial presidency was ensconced in ways it will be difficult to pare back.
8. The environment became more polluted.
9. Health and food insecurity increased for ordinary Americans.
10. Stagnating worker wages and the emergence of a new monied aristocracy.

The Fastest Depleting Resource: … is credibility, according to George Monbiot, reporting on the claims the International Energy Agency has been inflating oil reserve data to avoid “frightening markets”. Thanks to tree for the link and the one that follows.

Jeff Luers Finally Free: The man who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for blowing up three SUVs in a protest against fuel waste (no one was hurt) is finally free after nearly 10 years behind bars.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

Knowing the right time to die: If only we were this sensible, respectful and caring with humans we love.

A helicopter “blows” a deer frozen in the ice back to safety. Thanks to prad for the link.

A bit belatedly, an engineer’s christmas card. Thanks to tree for the link.

THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK

From Thomas Traherne (thanks to Sheri Herndon for the link):

You never enjoy the world aright

Till the sea itself flows in your veins

Till you are clothed with the heavens

And crowned with the stars.

My friend Paul Heft sent around Derrick Jensen’s article on the need to bring down the industrial systems that are destroying our planet, and my article in response, A Serious Resistance, which argued:

It is time for us to mount a serious resistance. It is time for us to tell the world, starting within our own communities, relentlessly, unapologetically, furiously, that the industrial growth economy that is killing our world must stop — now. It is time for us to start to take back our world from the thugs whose reign of industrial, imperial, colonial terror across the globe has begun the sixth great extinction on our planet, one that is desolating the world, bringing about massive and inevitable economic, energy and ecological collapse.

In this serious resistance, we must each pick our own role, yet work in concert and collaboration with our fellow resisters. We must draft others into the resistance movement, and we must do more than just talk about how bad things are, or how we might get the regime to mitigate its horrors. We must choose and commit ourselves to real measures of the defeat of the regime and the undermining and collapse of the industrial growth systems — economic, political, social, educational, technological, and media. Derrick has listed his measures. Mine include the complete stoppage of the Alberta Tar Sands and the industrial agriculture system, especially factory farming (”confined animal farming operations — CAFO”).

One of the recipient of Paul’s note was our mutual friend Nelda Martinez, who responded with this extraordinary letter:

I have read both Jensen’s and Dave’s pieces, and while I agree that the steps they outline are necessary, they remain insufficient – there is a piece missing, and I think I know what it is.

The problem that both have is in their approach.  In both cases, the proffered perspective is “there’s me, and then there’s everything else.”  Both insist upon individual consideration, individual decision making, individual commitment, and individual action.  Jensen says, “for me, winning means..” and then rattles off a list of states of nature that he, personally, would prefer to see, and then implicitly includes the reader in his conclusion that this must be done by whatever means necessary.  Dave’s step number one is to “build our own personal capacities and competencies” in conjunction with those of our communities, as though our communities’ capacities and competencies might somehow even be identified, much less honed.  It is my belief that that is precisely where the insufficiency lies.

The problem is that our so-called communities are so loosely knit, so diffuse, that they are almost impossible to identify, much less mobilize.  Most such “communities” are utterly non-communal; reliance upon them in any but the most immediate, most dire of circumstances is folly.  And get this: the reason that “community” is such an ephemeral thing is that we collectively agree that we value our individuality more than we value membership, or participation, in community.  It is the one binding characteristic, the one single shared value we place above all else – that our individuality comes first.  In order for community to have meaning in the context of this discussion, the sense of belonging to community must have greater priority than the right to individual thought, belief, or expression.  In order for any meaningful action to work, the self must be subsumed to the group.

I make no apology for this.  I am fully aware that it rubs right against our sense of what is right and good; that’s just what I’m saying.  I welcome any expression of resistance to the idea, and hold up the vehemence of such response as evidence of my assertion.  The more vigorously opposed one is to the idea that individual strength and expression is the very root of our problem, the more surely one is illustrating the truth of the allegation.  It truly is our top number one shared value, and all other values must necessarily fall before it.

Ours is a culture of individuals, and it will be our undoing unless we figure out a way to fix it. (I can hear the name-calling now, beginning with “communism,” “cult,” “beehive mentality,” “fanatic,” and “zealot.”)  The truth of the matter is that it is precisely that very zealotry that will enable us to succeed, and without which, we will be consigned to failing – as individuals – with lots of individual thoughts, suggestions, preferences, and opinions.

What we need is a shared system of values that is, as Dave puts it, “sustainable, responsible, and resilient.”  Fortunately, we know that such a system is available, in that humans succeeded in living quite well, for quite a long time, before corrupting the system.  I have written before about the problems associated with the adoption of agriculture as a way of life [Dave says: see Jared Diamond's famous essay on this], and Dave has thoroughly elaborated the problems associated with industry.  I submit that it is the values associated with these two patterns of behavior that are our enemy, and that our efforts must be toward the undermining of these value sets, not toward the machinery that is their manifestation.

But the mere prohibition of values or behaviors is rarely effective; witness the efficacy of the Ten Commandments as a moral code.  What is needed instead is a set of replacement values that is simply more attractive than the one currently in place.  And then we, our community, must all adhere to it – all of us.  There can be no compromise on this point; individual expression or interpretation must not be tolerated, especially in a fledgling movement (this is where the zealotry part comes in).

So the answer comes not as some kind of conservation movement, nor as any way to maintain ourselves, or our way of life for future generations.  We must embrace the notion that the system is going to come down, or indeed is coming down now, despite any efforts to halt its collapse, and that our options lie in how we will position ourselves to face that as it occurs, or is occurring.

While we still have some measure of leeway in terms of our response, we must take advantage of the infrastructure that enables rapid communication and transportation, and establish a true community.  It must be a community that is not composed of merely “like-minded individuals”  who put great stock in being “free spirits,” but of people committed to a single ideal, joined in a community whose purpose is greater than the whims or desires of its individual constituents.  And it must be based upon a set of values that is self-propagating, popular and enticing to the point that it sells itself, as we simply don’t have time for a slow-growing, grassroots movement.  It must be framed in such a way that it catches on like a fad, stays in place as unperturbedly as anything written by Beethoven, and is ultimately as universally known as shave-and-a-haircut.  If we can do all of this in the narrowing window of opportunity we have available, we will have made a difference.  Otherwise, I would suggest that we all go back to our televisions, put our feet up and have a beer – we have front row seats, and it promises to be quite a show.

If you are not already as blown away by this tour-de-force of thinking and writing, I should mention that Nelda is only 29 years old.

What she says is simply brilliant. We do have a cult of individualism in North America & Europe. This is not the case in Asia (thought that may be changing quickly) or in indigenous cultures.

What got us into this problem was, I think, a reaction against the fearsome power of propaganda (especially with the new ubiquitous media of radio and TV). Hierarchies got very powerful and very rich and, after Stalin and Hitler and Mao, there was an upsurge of loathing for government and for collective action of any kind (anticommunist hysteria). Americans then began to idolize the cowboy myth — of ’self-sufficiency’ and rugged individualism and fending for yourself without government or anyone else helping you.

It’s understandable — I’m very fond of ee cummings’ lament about how prone we are to become ‘everybody else’ because our modern culture indoctrinates us into mindless and passive conformity so effectively:

I do think we take on the ‘everybody-else’ ‘gunk’ that our culture lays on us and which we accept when we’re young and end up (if we’re smart) spending the rest of our lives scraping off of ourselves.

But that’s very different from the cult of individualism. I think we can be altruistic and collectivist and part-of-all-life-on-Earth while still being “nobody but ourselves”. But because we confuse the need to struggle against the loss of our individuality due to cultural indoctrination (a good struggle), with the need to struggle against all government and all collective and cooperative and collaborative work (a bad struggle), we get it exactly backwards: Instead of becoming ‘nobody-but-ourselves’ we become ‘ourselves apart from everybody’.

It takes great self-knowledge and self-confidence, I think, to be truly yourself and think critically, while also committing yourself absolutely to optimizing the collective well-being of the community. There’s a natural and very healthy tension there that I’ve witnessed among (for example) intelligent and sensitive people in the Intentional Communities movement. They are able to BE themselves but still DO everything as integral part of community.

While the rest of us are busy with our logo clothing and brand name cars BEING everybody-else and DOING things only for ourselves, alone, with our own, private and unshared property.

Exactly backwards.

I’d be interested in your thoughts on Nelda’s comment that, in order to be effective, at least initially, “the self must be subsumed to the group” — that model communities must be zealous and single-minded in their pursuit of shared objectives and intentions and that until then “individual expression or interpretation must not be tolerated”. It is true, I think, that indigenous cultures and truly effective communities tend to be of one mind, and fanatic about their values, principles and beliefs. Yet Chris Corrigan, who has worked closely with many aboriginal communities, stresses “passion bounded by [individual] responsibility“, that while the collective must listen carefully and respectfully to all the ideas expressed by community members, ultimately the decision on what to do (or not do) is left to the absolute discretion of the individual.

These ideas are not necessarily irreconcilable, but if we are to posit some theories or principles about the essential nature of an effective post-industrial model community, we need to tease this out. We need to respect and trust individuals in community to BE nobody but themselves and to DO what they themselves have passion and accept responsibility for, while at the same time we need to achieve a much higher degree of cultural cohesion among community members, to overcome what Nelda laments about today’s “so-called communities … so loosely knit, so diffuse, that they are almost impossible to identify, much less mobilize”. And then what we need from these cohesive communities, I think, is concerted, radical action. We can’t wait for consensus among a disparate group.

The question then becomes whether we can identify and coalesce radical model communities of people who know themselves, know what is happening in the world, know what they’re meant to do and must do, and who are willing to subvert their personal self-interest and comfort to the community’s collective programs and practices, and hence to really make a difference — to make measurable substantial progress towards undermining and ending the systems of the industrial growth society.

I agree with Nelda that nothing less than this will make any significant impact on the accelerating desolation of the earth. I doubt, however, that this degree of subsuming of individual wants and privileges to the collective need is likely to happen, even among the enlightened and progressive “communities” of human civilization culture. We’ve become far too “self-ish”, perhaps because that is how creatures respond in times of great stress. What would it take, do you think, for that to change?

—–

Thanks to all my readers for your support and encouragement this past year. 2010 is likely to be another year of great change for many of us. I wish you and your loved ones peace, love and joy in the coming year.

Derrick Jensen writes:

A serious resistance movement…means a commitment to winning, which means figuring out what “winning” means to you. For me, winning means living in a world with more wild salmon every year than the year before, more migratory songbirds, more amphibians, more large fish in the oceans, and for that matter oceans not being murdered. It means less dioxin in every mother’s breast milk. It means living in a world where there are fewer dams each year than the year before. More native forests. More wild wetlands. It means living in a world not being ravaged by the industrial economy. And [doing] whatever it takes to get there (and if, by the way, you believe that “whatever it takes” is code language for violence, you’re revealing nothing more than your own belief that nonviolence is ineffective).

If we’re seriously going to try to make the world a better place, we must, as I have written before, do a combination of three things:

1. We have to build our own personal capacities and competencies, and those of our communities
2. We have to undermine the industrial growth economy that is destroying our world
3. We have to create new natural structures and models that are sustainable, responsible and resilient

Before we can do any of these things, we need to reconnect with our instincts, our emotions, our senses, and all-life-on-Earth, understand how the world really works (not what we’re told in school, in the workplace, and in the media), and know ourselves: what we are uniquely good at, what we have passion for, and what our purpose is, what we’re “meant to do”.

Most of us who know what is happening in the world are prepared to do all of these things, except for item #2: “We have to undermine the industrial growth economy that is destroying our world.” Such is the power of the social, political and economic systems and their propaganda machines that we feel this is too radical, too risky, too ungrateful, too antisocial, too much “biting the hand that feeds us”.

We have been culturally indoctrinated, and our minds colonized, to feel this way. This indoctrination is all that is keeping us from walking away, from ceasing to participate in, the industrial growth economy, and from seeing actions that undermine this bankrupt and savagely destructive economy as heroic and necessary rather than as acts of treason or terrorism.

Suppose you lived in a community that was run by a ruthless gang that threatened and intimidated, extorted and stole, murdered and abused and confined, destroyed and poisoned and burned, and pressed everyone in the community into its service. Would you not see the destruction of this clique and its operations as a necessary and heroic act?

Now suppose that gang became so powerful that over time it could buy off the politicians of all the major parties, infiltrate and corrupt the police and regulators and the military to do its dirty work, rewrite the textbooks, and buy up the media, in order to portray itself as the natural order, as the only alternative to communism and anarchy, as democratically elected, as protectors of its community members, as law-abiding and patriotic in the face of conjured-up “terrorist” enemies who threatened your property, your loved ones, your security, your job?

And suppose that, after a few generations, people who had never known anything else began to think that this was the only way to live? Would this thoroughly indoctrinated generation still see the destruction of this clique and its operations as a necessary and heroic act? Or would the very thought of its collapse be terrifying, no matter how destructive it was?

A serious resistance begins when enough people realize that this is not the only way to live, and that continuing to live under a massively destructive, relentless, irresponsible and unsustainable regime is unbearable, indefensible, and a betrayal of future generations and of our own human values. It begins with a breaking of the colonial mindset, and finding the knowledge and courage to imagine a better way to live, and then to fight, ceaselessly, doing what we can each do best, to undermine, to hold back, to defeat, and to dismantle the machinery of oppression and desolation that has held us in its thrall for so long.

A serious resistance is never easy. Just ask those who resisted the brutal totalitarian regimes that killed a quarter of a billion people in the last century, or who resisted invading foreign armies, or armed paramilitary forces well-supplied and trained by rich nations thousands of miles away, or who resisted local warlords or religious fascism or genocides. For most, such resistance will only occur when it hits home, when there is no other choice but to fight.

It is time for us to mount a serious resistance. It is time for us to tell the world, starting within our own communities, relentlessly, unapologetically, furiously, that the industrial growth economy that is killing our world must stop — now. It is time for us to start to take back our world from the thugs whose reign of industrial, imperial, colonial terror across the globe has begun the sixth great extinction on our planet, one that is desolating the world, bringing about massive and inevitable economic, energy and ecological collapse.

In this serious resistance, we must each pick our own role, yet work in concert and collaboration with our fellow resisters. We must draft others into the resistance movement, and we must do more than just talk about how bad things are, or how we might get the regime to mitigate its horrors. We must choose and commit ourselves to real measures of the defeat of the regime and the undermining and collapse of the industrial growth systems — economic, political, social, educational, technological, and media. Derrick has listed his measures above. Mine include the complete stoppage of the Alberta Tar Sands and the industrial agriculture system, especially factory farming (”confined animal farming operations — CAFO”).

I am not a pioneer in this. The resistance has already started, but it is still sporadic, and not yet a real threat to the regime and systems we must bring to an end. It’s time to get serious.