ABOUT DAVE POLLARD (dave.pollard@gmail.com)

Last year (2010), after 40 years trying to work within the industrial growth society, I walked away from it. During that 40 years I advised entrepreneurs about starting and running a business, innovation, research, sustainability, coping with complexity, and the effective use of knowledge and social media, started a blog in 2003 called How to Save the World, which documents what I’ve learned about how the world really works, and how we might create better ways to live and make a living, and in 2007 authored my first book, Finding the Sweet Spot: A Natural Entrepreneur’s Guide to Responsible, Sustainable, Joyful Work.

I was born in 1951, have lived most of my life in various parts of Canada, was married for 27 years to a woman I remain on good terms with, have two wonderful step-children and three grandchildren I am very proud of, and I am now poly and in love.

I am now focused on the work of self-knowledge and self-acceptance, generosity and appreciation and imagination, and living naturally and presently, and am striving to improve my personal capacities for dealing with what I believe is a coming, unavoidable, civilizational collapse. I’m not depressed about this probability. Since quitting paid work and moving to Bowen Island BC last year, I’ve become involved with the local intentional community and Transition movements, the Dark Mountain collective of artists writing about and portraying the final years of our civilization, and an international group developing novel tools and games to help groups improve their collaborative and communication processes.

I am a vegan, earth- and animal-loving, earth-grieving, idealistic, poly, unschooled, anarchist, radical, unspiritual, hedonistic, anxious, comfortably retired (from paid work), creative generalist, writer, dreamer and imaginer of possibilities. I believe that what drives human behaviour (and makes change possible or impossible) is (I call this Pollard’s Law): We do what we must (our personal imperatives), then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. There is no time left, ever, for doing work that is merely important or needed. I believe things happen the way they do for a reason, and if we want to change things we first need to understand what that reason is. I believe the key to resilience in the coming decades will be our ability, in the moment, to imagine ways around the crises we cannot prevent, predict or plan for. I don’t believe that we can save the world (despite the title of this blog), but I do believe we can, and must, make a difference.

ABOUT THIS BLOG

This weblog is a journal of my search to find better ways to live, and make a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works. While it originally contained articles about innovation and knowledge management (the field I was practicing in), and about blogging (which was a novelty when this blog began in 2003) it now has four principal categories:

• How the world really works: What the political and economic news really means, the news you don’t hear, how the political and economic systems really work and why they’re so dysfunctional, the nature of complex systems, and the role that the media, the education system and our frames of reference play in how we understand the world.
• Preparing for civilization’s end: Articles about sustainable living and sustainable enterprise, how our civilization emerged and why it is no longer viable, what we can learn from nature and from history, building community, activism, alternative economies, animal sentience and how to prepare ourselves, and our children and grandchildren, for civilization’s twilight and aftermath.
• Understanding ourselves: Our culture, what drives us to do what we do, feel what we feel and be what we are, and what we can learn from science, the arts, holistic approaches to health, great writing, and stories.
• Creative Work: My short stories, poetry, memoirs and other fiction writings that try to imagine what is possible, and try to explain things that essays cannot, in ways that essays cannot.

I don’t try to cover “current events” since for the most part I think they are unactionable and hence thinking about and debating them is, I believe, largely a waste of time. I do write a monthly (formerly weekly) summary of links to the most significant news about civilization’s collapse and what can be done to mitigate and prepare for it, along with some inspiring stories, works of art and quotes.