In my dream, there are forty of us, gathered together, holding hands in a large circle. As a noted guest of the group, I am asked to say a few words before… I am not sure what — a meal, a conference, a departure? This is what I say:

Thank you to the organizers for your invitation, your welcome, for bringing us together.

As I look around this circle, I am struck by the fact that most of us here were around when the song The Times They Are a-Changin’ that we sang a few moments ago, was first written. We sang these words when we were preparing to shake the windows and rattle the walls, to end the war and usher in a better way to live:

Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don’t criticize what you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.

And as I look at us, now mostly grey-haired and rapidly agin’ ourselves, I wonder: Where are the voices of anger and protest and determination of those who are now the age we were then? Why are those in their teens, twenties and thirties not angry, not protesting, not pledging to smash the system that is desolating our world and pushing our fragile civilization to the brink of collapse and precipitating the sixth great extinction of life on Earth? Are they just uninformed? Too busy struggling with their own needs of the moment? Hope-less that change is possible, or that they can precipitate it? Complacent that someone else will solve the problems for them, and do so in time? When will they be ready to fight the exhausting fight that we are still leading after all these years?

John Gray, in his astonishing book Straw Dogs, tells us that our idealism was understandable but misplaced. He writes:

We can dream of a world in which a greatly reduced human population lives in a partially restored paradise; in which farming has been abandoned and green deserts given back to the earth; where the remaining humans are settled in cities, emulating the noble idleness of hunter-gatherers, their needs met by new technologies that leave little mark on the Earth; where life is given over to curiosity, pleasure and play. There is nothing technically impossible about such a world…A High-tech Green utopia, in which a few humans live happily in balance with the rest of life, is scientifically feasible; but it is humanly unimaginable. If anything like this ever comes about, it will not be through the will of homo rapiens…

Homo rapiens is only one of very many species, and not obviously worth preserving. Later or sooner, it will become extinct. When it is gone Earth will recover. Long after the last traces of the human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to spring up. The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.

On the basis of overwhelming evidence that I have examined in ten years of study of our civilization, I have come to accept that this civilization, like all those before it, will end, most likely through a Long Emergency that will consume much of this century, precipitated by a series of cascading economic, energy and ecological crises that will be beyond our capacity and resilience to survive. It will be ghastly and grim but it will be a drawn-out, generations-long descent that will be mostly peaceful, and accompanied by no more aggregate suffering than gaia, the collective organism of all-life-on-Earth, is enduring every day now, though most of us are afraid to see it because the grief of that reality, the knowledge of what is really happening in this terrible world, is just too much for us to bear. And post-civilization human society, with much smaller numbers and only rudimentary technology, holds the promise of being staggeringly diverse, exciting, responsible, connected, sustainable and joyful.

So what are we to do, we “elders” still holding the space for future generations who are strangely silent, absent, disengaged?

I would argue that our role, now, is to wait. That doesn’t mean we should do nothing. As we wait for those under 50 to take the torch from us, we should love with all our hearts, we should be generous to a fault, and we should continue to learn the truth of how the world really works, to hold a mirror of that unnatural present reality to the world, and to imagine how it might, if only in our dreams, be better.

Our role, I think, is to wait until the young are ready, because it is their fight now — they will be the ones who will have to face the darkest days and years of civilization’s slow collapse. And one day they will be ready, as ready as they can, to face that terrible truth and to do what they must. When that time comes, we must be ready to listen, to encourage, to counsel when asked, to facilitate. We must be ready to share what we know, to suggest models to help them cope and create a better way to live, to help them fight rear-guard holding actions to mitigate the worst excesses and atrocities of the industrial society we have, through our complicity and complacency and ignorance, thrust upon the world.

And beyond this, our role is to remove the obstacles to their fight, and to stay out of their way, to “get out of the new road if we can’t lend a hand”, because what we’ve shown, and done, for all our shouting and protesting for the last 40 years, is dreadful, beyond inadequate, pathetic. We have made the world, through our action and inaction, much, much worse than it was 40 years ago. It’s time we showed the humility and grace to acknowledge that failure, in our old age, and to accept responsibility for it and cede authority to those younger than we are, in the hope that they might do better.

So this is my plea, my prayer, my fervent hope, that we will stop trying to lead, stop hogging the limelight and the power and the attention of the world. Stop being preoccupied with ourselves and our own damaged egos and selfish needs. Just stop. Let go. And wait. The fourth turning is coming soon, and it’s time for us to yield, to get out of the way, to open and hold the space, to resign from authority and to contemplate and reflect self-critically on what we have done, who we are, what we owe. Listen to the young. Ask humbly how we can help them do what they think must be done. The future, dark and turbulent, is theirs. We must wait here, in the present, until they grasp it, like the string of a kite in a hurricane, and then hold them with every ounce of strength in our exhausted bodies and weary hearts.

We owe them no less.

cartoon from Amy Lenzo

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S END

Our Belief Systems at a Turning Point?: Gail at the Oil Drum suggests that the Enron/Worldcomm frauds, the bailout of greedy financial corporations, and now the incompetence and deception of BP and its cohorts have finally pushed the majority of us to a turning point where we no longer believe (a) businesses can ever be trusted to self-regulate or act in the public interest, or (b) technology and innovation will “save” us when we get into trouble. She may be right, but alas, the majority are still far from the turning point of giving up on charismatic leaders, higher powers or the cult of the individual. Only when we re-learn to self-organize, in community, will we start to make the hard transition to a better way to live, one that will give us some resilience to cope with collapse.

What Collapse Will Look Like: Pulitzer-winning NYT reporter Chris Hedges presents a stunning analysis of civilization’s beginning decline, and a portrayal of its ultimate collapse. Excerpt:

The tantalizing illusions offered by our consumer culture are vanishing for most citizens as we head toward collapse. The ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending credit and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone. The jobs we are shedding are not coming back… The belief that democracy lies in the choice between competing brands and the accumulation of vast sums of personal wealth at the expense of others is exposed as a fraud. Freedom can no longer be conflated with the free market. The travails of the poor are rapidly becoming the travails of the middle class, especially as unemployment insurance runs out. And class warfare, once buried under the happy illusion that we were all going to enter an age of prosperity with unfettered capitalism, is returning with a vengeance.

America is sinking under trillions in debt it can never repay and stays afloat by frantically selling about $2 billion in Treasury bonds a day to the Chinese. It saw 2.8 million people lose their homes in 2009 to foreclosure or bank repossessions – nearly 8,000 people a day – and stands idle as they are joined by another 2.4 million people this year. It refuses to prosecute the Bush administration for obvious war crimes, including the use of torture, and sees no reason to dismantle Bush’s secrecy laws or restore habeas corpus. Its infrastructure is crumbling. Deficits are pushing individual states to bankruptcy and forcing the closure of everything from schools to parks. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have squandered trillions of dollars, appear endless. There are 50 million Americans in real poverty and tens of millions of Americans in a category called “near poverty.” One in eight Americans – and one in four children – depend on food stamps to eat. And yet, in the midst of it all, we … continue to embrace the illusion of inevitable progress, personal success and rising prosperity. Reality is not considered an impediment to desire…

The decline of American empire began [when] we saw our country transformed from one that primarily produced to one that primarily consumed. We started borrowing to maintain a level of consumption as well as an empire we could no longer afford. We began to use force, especially in the Middle East, to feed our insatiable thirst for cheap oil. We substituted the illusion of growth and prosperity for real growth and prosperity. The bill is now due. America’s most dangerous enemies are not Islamic radicals but those who sold us the perverted ideology of free-market capitalism and globalization. They have dynamited the very foundations of our society. In the 17^th century these speculators would have been hung. Today they run the government and consume billions in taxpayer subsidies…

And yet, even in the face of catastrophe, mass culture continues to assure us that if we close our eyes, if we visualize what we want, if we have faith in ourselves, if we tell God that we believe in miracles, if we tap into our inner strength, if we grasp that we are truly exceptional, if we focus on happiness, our lives will be harmonious and complete. This cultural retreat into illusion, whether peddled by positive psychologists, by Hollywood or by Christian preachers, is magical thinking.

In a second article, Hedges describes the current “Mafia capitalism” and why it is now too late to try to rein in the corporatists who are accelerating the ultimate collapse of industrial civilization in their own, psychotic, short-term interest. [Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the first link and Edgerider for the second]

Advice for the Collapse: Hold Cash Now But Be Ready to Convert to Hard Goods: Ilargi explains that, for now, keeping your investments in cash in your local currency makes sense (stocks and bonds do not), but in the longer run, currencies will probably become worthless too. In addition to the hyper-inflation that’s likely to follow the current deflationary spiral, there is the risk of currency reissuance, as governments with crumbling economies simply replace discredited currencies with “new” currencies. By then you need to convert your currency to useful, durable hard goods. Meanwhile Paul Krugman says the Third Depression and a prolonged period of deflation are coming soon.

Renewables Can’t Save Us: Ted Trainer explains why renewable energy sources, taken collectively, and even assuming technology advances continue apace, cannot even begin to replace hydrocarbons, and why a dramatic and sustained plunge in global energy production is therefore inevitable. Thanks to Bowen’s Don Marshall for the link, and the one that follows.

Coping Emotionally With Collapse: Robert Jensen explains that, before we can act with full energy and intention to make the world a better place, we first have to come to grips with the emotional grief that comes with an awareness that collapse and extinction are coming, and that it is our species that is responsible. An elder, responding to Jensen’s request for ideas on how to cope with this grief, said:

I’m about to celebrate my 70th birthday. I live in a rural intentional community, close to land that feeds us and supports us. I’ve lived long enough now to be very aware of how different the world has become, how the cycles of nature are off kilter, how the seasons and the climate have shifted. My garden tells me that food doesn’t grow in quite the same patterns, and we either get weeks of rain or weeks of heat and drought. This is the second year in a row that our apple trees do not have apples on them. But most people get their food in grocery stores where the apples still appear, and food still arrives, in season and out, from all over the world. This will soon end, and people won’t understand why. They don’t see the trouble in the land as I and my friends do. I grieve daily as I look on this altered world. My grandchildren are young adults who think their lives will continue as they have been. Who will tell them? They can’t hear me. They, and many others, will have to see the changes for themselves, as I have. I can’t imagine that anything else will convince them. My grief for the world, and for them, is compounded by this feeling of helplessness because there is no way we can have the collective action you speak of when the ‘collective’ is still in denial.

In a similar vein, Transition’s Sophy Banks explains why support to help cope with this grief is an integral part of the Transition movement (thanks to Tree for that link).

Gulf Sea Floor Ruptured Beyond Repair: Russian scientists working at the scene confirm what the US/UK authorities won’t say: That due to 18 ruptures in the sea floor miles apart, created by the incompetent drilling activities of BP and its corporatist cohorts and government lackeys, the BP oil “spill” will never stop, and cannot be contained [Mother Jones has more detail on this -- thanks to Johnny Moore for the MJ link]. This blot on the environment will join the post-Katrina remains of New Orleans as icons of the unsustainability of Industrial Civilization. Thanks to Jerry Michalski for the link, and the one that follows.

An Economist Explains How the US Economy Has Been Permanently Hollowed Out: Henry Mintzberg: “A recent Gallup poll suggested that 55% of the American workforce is not engaged and another 16% is actively disengaged. Perhaps this is best explained by the relentless downsizing of the large American companies… Those left behind, with trust lost in their ‘leadership,’ have been inclined to put down their heads, cover their tails, and soldier on until they burned out or were themselves downsized.”

And a Non-Economist Explains How Economics Really Works: Joe Bageant provides a scathing and hilarious summing-up of economics. Excerpt:

The doomers and the peak oilers gag, and they call it American denial. Personally, I think it is somewhat unfair to say that most Americans and Canadians are in denial. They simply don’t have a fucking clue about what is really happening to them and their world. Everything they have been taught about working, money and “quality of life” constitutes the planet’s greatest problem — overshoot. Understanding this trashes our most basic assumptions, and requires a complete reversal in contemporary thought and practice about how we live in the world. When was the last time you saw any individual, much less an entire nation, do that?

Compounding our ignorance and naiveté are the officials and experts, politicians, media elites, and especially economists, who interpret the world for us and govern the course of things. The go-to guys. They don’t know either. But they’ve got the lingo down. Somehow or other, it all has to do with the economy, which none of us understands, despite round the clock media jabbering on the subject. Somehow it has to do with this great big spring on Wall Street called “the market” that’s gotta be kept wound up, and interest rates at something called The Fed, which have got to be kept smunched down. The industry of crystal gazing and hairball rubbing surrounding these entities is called economics.

Rich Walk Away from Mortgages, Poor Keep Paying: Most poor and middle-class Americans are still paying off mortgages, some of them much greater than the value of their homes, in the hope that prices will recover. The rich, backed by armies of overpaid morality-free lawyers who can find ways to creditor-proof their other assets, are instead walking away from their “underwater” mortgages in droves — and hence becoming even richer.

Embodying Action: Vera Bradova suggests a pathway from inaction, to either earnest outward action (conventional “political” activism) or what she calls  lifestylism (“green quietism”, caught up in the minutiae of political wrangling), to what she calls “embodied action” (including and moving from personal to political activism). “The path of embodiment, of incarnating my values and desires in my flesh-and-blood being, leads then organically into action which is infused by those values and desires.” In a related post, she explains the broad appeal of the Transition Movement.

LIVING BETTER

An Alternative to Open Space?: South African facilitator Allan Kaplan explains an intriguing and involved approach to facilitating groups dealing with complex situations, focused on continuous probing and provoking the group to greater and greater depths of collective insight. It appears to be quite a bit more hands-on than Open Space and other approaches to complex issues, and is based around a challenging series of questions each group must address, that emerges from the direction of the discussions and insights revealed. Based on the work of Goethe, it is called the Proteus approach. Anyone tried this? Thanks to David Derauf for the link.

A Potential Supreme Court Judge of Exceptional Quality: Jonathan Rauch provides a look at the nuanced  and savvy judgement of Elena Kagan and explains why he supports her despite her unwillingness to be a judicial advocate for gay marriage. The US Supreme Court might actually become functional and relevant again if it had more judges like her and fewer corporatist cronies and louts like Clarence Thomas.

Haitians Reject Monsanto Seeds: Haitians, although desperate for seeds in their storm- and earthquake-ravaged country, had the good sense to just say No to the “gift” of patented, invasive, chemical-dependent seeds of Monsanto, one of the world’s worst corporatist scourges. Thanks to Tree for the link.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

What Happens When Cities and States Go Bankrupt: The thousands of municipalities and states in the US are now, mostly, either insolvent or bankrupt. Like the big banks, they will be considered “too big to fail” and will be rescued by a federal government that will print yet more trillions of dollars to fund the bailouts, until finally the world cries “enough” and refuses to accept unrepayable US debt any longer. In the meantime, services will be slashed, bills will remain unpaid for months at a time (as happened in the Soviet Union before its collapse), but, not by accident, taxes will not be raised to help cope with the deficits. The NYT explains why this can and will be allowed to happen.

Obama Condones Arbitrary and Criminal Torture of Canadian: The Obama administration has compounded the utterly disgraceful and contemptuous treatment of Canadian torture victim Maher Arar. The only thing more disgraceful is that the Canadian government puts up with this abuse of one of its citizens.

putangitangi female, from the camera of the remarkable photographer (and friend) pohangina pete

FUN AND INSPIRATION

Bonnie Stewart tells of relationships lost, and, perhaps, found. Her writing is amazing.

Artists, Raise Your Weapons: My latest post on Dark Mountain describes Derrick Jensen’s and Stephanie McMillan’s recent provocations for artists to become more activist, and to eschew all activities not directly focused at fighting against industrial civilization. And I was very pleased to be mentioned by the Dark Mountain founders on their blog, for my earlier post on the role of artists in re-presenting the collapse of civilization and imagining better ways to live.

Cirque Phenix mixes dance and circus acrobatics to dazzling effect. Thanks to Dawn Smith for the link.

Eric Whitaker’s virtual choir. Lots more of his great compositions here. Thanks to Tree for the link.

David Foster Wallace predicted in his novel Infinite Jest that the kind of wifi videophone functionality in the new iPhone 4 would fail to catch on, according to Jason Kottke. We’ll see. Thanks to Chris Lott for the link.

Two by humourist Andy Borowitz: BP develops technology to convert lies into energy; and Angered by steroid accusations Lance Anderson throws car at reporter

THOUGHTS FOR THE MONTH

From Siona Van Dijk:

These days the present feels wrong. These days I feel wistful for the future, for moments of greater chaos when either we or our chlidren’s children will look back and laugh aghast at what we chose today to dramatize, at our naive concerns about the world, at our tragicomic headlines (so quaint! so misguided!) and fears. I feel wistful for a future as distant as we are from the ancients, one in which all that we consider known and true is wrong. i feel wistful for a future that contains nobody.

From Sheldon Kopp  (thanks to Tree for this quote and the one that follows): “The most difficult part of loving is learning to tolerate the helplessness we feel in the face of a loved one’s suffering.”

From Fred LaMotte: “Sometimes we aren’t called to heal a family member or a sea turtle, or to change them, or to lay on some slick enlightenment: but just to be present to their pain. This is difficult, because it requires humility.”

From Wendell Berry’s The Peace of Wild Things ( <– please watch the video — simple and stunning):

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Vermeer’s artist, from ibiblio.org

We are social creatures for a reason: It improves the likelihood of our survival. Together we can do things we could never accomplish alone. Culture, the shared beliefs and behaviours of a group of people working collaboratively, is powerful (though alas, that power, when co-opted by charismatic or psychopathic individuals, gangs or elites, can be terribly destructive and dangerous).

Just as we are part of a culture (and/or subcultures and/or “alternative” cultures), we are also a part of a greater whole, the organism of all-life-on-Earth, which has collectively self-regulated for more than a billion years to optimize the survival, diversity and joy of our lives.

And we are, in turn, made up of organisms, which have given us the illusion of being a single creature by evolving a collective “consciousness”. That collective consciousness is extremely useful, allowing the organisms that make up “us” to act “single-mindedly” (especially useful in times of fight-or-flight crisis).

So we are constantly processing three sets of messages that produce three different worldviews of who we are:

1. Messages from our component organisms, both conscious (directed through our brains) and subconscious (instinctive, programmed and somatic).
2. Messages from our culture, telling us who “we” are, what to believe and what to do.
3. Messages from the global organism (“gaia”) telling us how to adjust our behaviour and adapt to changes for the optimal well-being and balance of all life on the planet.

There is a huge amount of dissonance between these messages. For example, our component organisms (preoccupied with “our” own survival and procreation) might be telling us to make overtures to someone we find sexually attractive, while our culture might be telling us that such overtures are socially inappropriate in the circumstances and should be avoided, and while gaia is telling us that, in light of the horrific overpopulation of humans on our planet, we should not procreate and should be focused on rebalancing the world instead of preoccupied with our personal appetites.

When we fall in love, this dissonance is temporarily resolved in favour of the messages from our component organisms, as our body’s chemistry takes control of us. But only for a while – soon enough, the terrible dissonance returns.

For many of us, I think, this dissonance is paralyzing; it renders us ill, physically and mentally, and ultimately we get exhausted trying to handle it so we become desensitized, shut down. Such behaviour has been observed in rats subjected to severe protracted overpopulation stresses: the alphas become violent and sexually aggressive and hoard scarce resources, while the rest become mentally ill, withdrawn, and suicidal, and many eat their own young.

As a result, I think, when this dissonance becomes overwhelming we tend to dissociate, to start to retreat into and live in our own world, in our head, where we can ignore these conflicting messages and the unsettling and confusing behaviour of the increasingly anonymous crowd around us. We end up telling ourselves oversimplified stories about who we are, and what we’re supposed to do, and ignoring our instincts, our bodies, our senses, our emotions, our physical reality, and people with ideas and beliefs different from our own.

So when I walk down a city street, I don’t really “see” anyone, nor do they really see me. They are, I suspect, accepting as “true”, and engaged by, “news” that I see as nothing but lies and oversimplifications. They are, I tell myself, amused and entertained by “popular” books, music, films and “programming” that I find inane, cultural propaganda, or just plain wrong. The conversations and recreations that seem to enthrall and entrance them, I find meaningless, vapid, unforgivably stupid and a waste of time that, I think, should be spent dealing with the looming crises of our century.

Of course, I can’t really know. We are all, despite our a-part-ness, ultimately utterly alone. We may live in the same place, walk the same streets, but it is as if we all live in different universes.

How can we hope to achieve community when our physical neighbourhoods consist mostly of exhausted people with utterly irreconcilable and profoundly conflicted worldviews, living in private, separate worlds inside their heads? When we live in such an atomized society, how can we really know anyone else, enough to be able to perceive more than an idealized, abstract, outline view of who we think they are, or wish them to be?

And if we don’t know them, how can we care about them or what they believe or do? This is the crux of this dissociation, this disconnection from community and gaia and even our own bodies: we can only care about what, and who, we know.

And what hope is there in this isolated tumult to be able to find the right partners for the life we’re meant to live and the work we’re meant to do? What hope is there, really, to even inform others of what we know about how the world really works, or help them imagine a better way to live, when there is no shared context of reality, of community, and of caring to enable any meaningful communication to occur?

Over on Dark Mountain we’re debating our role as artists in re-presenting the world as it really is and imagining it as it might be. I recently posted an article there asking whether our role is merely to do our job as artists – to put our writing and art out there – or whether we have a responsibility to articulate it in a way that is accessible and understandable and hence actionable to the world.

But I wonder whether the latter is even possible when we’re all living in our own worlds, and whether the perception we have of being a part of social groups, the perceptions of intimacy and belonging and connection are just self-delusions, wishful thinking. With this technology that allows us to have a thousand “friends”, do we really have any at all, or is the friendship of others just something we convince ourselves we have because without it our lives would be unbearably lonely?

As I mention in my Dark Mountain post, Derrick Jenson in this month’s Orion berates us for not doing enough, and specifically for doing anything that does not contribute to the urgent task of trying to save our world from collapse, labeling such activities as “unforgivable”. In the article he cites an essay by cartoonist Stephanie McMillan that asserts:

In times like these, for an artist not to devote her/his talents and energies to creating cultural weapons of resistance is a betrayal of the worst magnitude, a gesture of contempt against life itself. It is unforgivable… Let us not be the system’s tools or fools. Artists are not cowards and weaklings — we’re tough. We take sides. We fight back…

It is our duty and responsibility to create a fierce, unyielding, aggressive culture of resistance. We must create art that exposes and denounces evil, that strengthens activists and revolutionaries, celebrates and contributes to the coming liberation of this planet from corporate industrial military omnicidal madness.

Pick up your weapon, artist.

Once we’ve learned the truth about this terrible world, is it our responsibility to devote the rest of our lives, every waking moment of our lives, to the work of fighting to prevent it getting worse? Or should we give ourselves a break and allow ourselves time to simply enjoy the wonders of the world and life and love? How much time?

And how far does our responsibility extend beyond doing what we must, what we do well, and what we enjoy doing? What should we do about the billions lost in their own worlds of ignorance and denial and distraction who are not ready to listen or change and never will be until it’s too late, and who are, collectively and indifferently, killing the world we love, even as those who know better and who are listening are working to save it?

How can we let them go on? And if we can’t, how can we stop them?

Lots of questions, for each of us – activists, healers, artists, facilitators, innovators, researchers, builders and connectors – to answer, in our own way. And wonder, as we struggle to reconnect, and to acknowledge our complexity and the astonishing ability of all-life-on-Earth to self-organize in our collective self-interest, just what is possible, now.

Last weekend I attended the Transition Movement 2-day introductory training course in Vancouver, along with three fellow Bowen Islanders. We immediately and unanimously agreed to establish a “Bowen in Transition” chapter, affiliated with the Vancouver Transition network (called Village Vancouver).

For those who might want to know a bit more about the Transition Movement, here’s an overview of what we learned, along with a rough first cut at how we might adapt it to the needs of Bowen Island, where I now live.

The first part of the course provided the facts about our unsustainable energy, ecological and economic systems, and outlined the main elements of the ever-evolving processes and activities that communities around the world are including in their Transition programs. It also outlined why it is so important for communities to  have a Transition program. Here’s a draft of a graphic that we might use to explain the purpose and key elements of a Transition program to the community of Bowen Island:

(click on any of the graphics in this article to see them full size — these are working drafts only and have not been approved by anyone)

We learned how the nature and composition of the Working Groups in any particular community will evolve to meet the unique needs of that community, and why it is unwise to try to formalize or top-down manage the Transition process using the initiating team’s preconceptions of what’s best for the particular community.

Next, we talked about the Principles behind the Transition movement, and our facilitators provided some insights for Transition program initiators about how to get traction in the community (make it fun, keep to the main messages) and how to deal with skeptics and deniers (just tell them you respect their ideas and move on; don’t waste time arguing with those not ready to listen). Here are the principles:

A significant amount of time was spent on the Visioning process – specifically getting your community to envision what life would be like (and how it would be different) if a Transition and Resilience program were developed now. I’m a great believer in future state visioning and scenario development as a means of getting people to really understand the purpose and value of acting now, and I was encouraged that the latest book by the Transition movement organizers is mostly focused on this visioning, and specifically on developing a timeline for future events, and how the Transition program can address, mitigate and help adapt to these future events.

Here’s a first cut at a future state scenario for Bowen Island (by contrast, Bowen is currently one of the most unsustainable and least prepared places for the challenges we face, that I know of):

What is missing here, I think, is the alternative business-as-usual scenario (with a few black swan events thrown in) to demonstrate why inaction is not an option. I’m hoping we’ll do that in the Bowen program.

Another thing missing is a process to help people bridge from the necessary but insufficient personal actions they are taking now, to the more comprehensive approach the Transition program embodies. Here’s an example of how one UK Transition Town (sorry, I’m not sure which one) is building that bridge, as we might adapt it to Bowen’s plan; this is all about encouraging people to continue personal actions rather than simply telling them what they’re doing is not good enough (and risking turning them off):

There is lots more in the Training for Transition course, which I understand is now being taught in countries all over the world. Much of the remainder of the course is focused on (i) the “heart and soul” issue (dealing with, and helping others deal with, the grief and sense of hopelessness that overwhelms many when they realize what is at stake and how hard the task ahead is, and (ii) how to initiate a Transition program in your community, traps to avoid, how to engage others, and how to “trust the process” to run without centralized management or hierarchy.

There were four issues that came up for me during the training, that were either very surprising or remain unresolved in my mind on how to deal with them; if anyone has any experience or thoughts on them, I’d welcome your comments:

1. The degree to which the program depends on acceptance of the Myth of Causality (that changes in beliefs will necessarily produce changes in behaviour and hence changes in results achieved by the program). My concern is that in many cases in complex systems I don’t think belief change is sufficient to bring about behaviour change, nor is behaviour change always sufficient to bring about significantly different results from business as usual. For example, many people have come to accept that significant climate change risks lie ahead, but believe there is nothing they can do, or that it’s governments’ job to “fix” the problem.

2. The claim that there is a Tipping Point beyond which a community consensus on the validity of assumptions and actions is sufficient to basically blow away the skeptics and deniers, and produce broad-based support for even radical projects and programs based on those assumptions or actions. The numbers tossed out for this Tipping Point were 15-20% of the population. I’m not so sure this is enough. In the US, a majority favour universal publicly-run health care and publicly-funded election campaigns, among many other progressive ideals, but inertia, and campaigns by a small but wealthy and powerful minority, have prevented any of these widely-supported changes from occurring.

3. How do we deal with the enormous challenges that we face in any attempt to bring about radical change quickly:

• most people’s addiction to the status quo (oil use, consumption and debt),
• endemic learned helplessness, fostered by those in power,
• most people’s sheer “busy-ness”, fear of insolvency, fear of unemployment, and fear of “not having enough” that prevents them working on anything other than family commitments and their exhausting jobs (working mostly for unsustainable employers)
• the propensity of anyone whose power is threatened to act quickly and violently to stop the change (Charles Handy, business consulting guru, famously said “No one willingly gives up power”), and
• Pollard’s Law, that says that despite what we believe should be done, it is human nature to exhaust all our time and energy doing what we have absolutely no choice not to do, doing what’s easy, and doing what’s fun; most Transition work doesn’t qualify by those criteria, and so it remains for most just a good intention, even among those who “get” the need for Transition.

4. My astonished realization that most young people attending the Transition training do not seem to feel the degree of grief, pessimism, and hopelessness that pervades the “heart and soul” of the boomers (who tend to make up the majority of Transition leaders, from what I gather). What is behind this generation gap – boomers’ exhaustion and cynicism, or young people’s naivety?

I think these four issues are absolutely critical to the success of the Transition Movement beyond its current early stages. Nevertheless, the momentum the movement has is remarkable, and it’s catching on all over the globe.

More on the subject of Transition as we move forward with our Bowen program.

Thanks to the course leaders Lena Soots and Bill Aal, their support staff, and all my fellow Transition training participants, especially Bowen’s Carol MacKinnon, Don Marshall, and Bob Turner.

[This article is cross-posted from my blog at Dark Mountain. In my preamble to the other artists in the Dark Mountain network I wrote:

Over the last couple of weeks there has been a flurry of attention in the blogosphere given to the Dark Mountain project. This has been accompanied by some criticism of what we're doing, of what happened at the Festival, and some serious misunderstanding, I think, of the entire focus and purpose of Dark Mountain.

So I thought it might be useful to go back to the Manifesto and to re-articulate why we're here. I've done so in a new Dark Mountain blog post called This is Why We're Here.

My thesis is that the work of Uncivilization has three roles, each of them vital but distinct: Activists, Healers, and Artists. I believe, as the Manifesto says, our role is the Artist's role, and that when we get distracted from that we lose our focus and fail to do our best work.

I hope you find it a worthwhile contribution to Dark Mountain.]

.     .     .     .     .

THIS IS WHY WE’RE HERE

(cartoon by Hugh Macleod from GapingVoid.com)

Like many of you, I was drawn to the Dark Mountain project by and Paul and Dougald’s amazing Manifesto. I have recently come to realize that our civilization is beginning a collapse that will be complete by the end of this century, and no amount of technology, innovation, political action or global consciousness-raising is going to save it. As John Gray put it so well in Straw Dogs:

Political action has come to be a surrogate for salvation; but no political project can deliver humanity from its natural condition. However radical, political programmes are expedients — modest devices for coping with recurring evils. Hegel writes that humanity will be content only when it lives in a world of its own making. In contrast, Straw Dogs argues for a shift from human solipsism [belief in our aloneness and our disconnection from everything else]. Humans cannot save the world, but this is no reason for despair. It does not need saving. Happily, humans will never live in a world of their own making.

Homo rapiens is only one of very many species, and not obviously worth preserving. Later or sooner, it will become extinct. When it is gone Earth will recover. Long after the last traces of the human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to spring up. The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.

My blog How to Save the World has been labeled by some readers as “doomer porn”, because it accepts this collapse as inevitable. Most of the world is not ready to acknowledge this, but in the founders and followers of Dark Mountain I feel I have found kindred spirits, people who have the understanding and intuitive sense to appreciate that most of what we are told (in school, by politicians and business, and in the media) are lies, and that we have a responsibility as artists to accept and represent — to hold a mirror — to our civilization’s inevitable collapse in this century.

My concern is that, because what Dark Mountain represents is so threatening to the worldview and belief systems of so many, we run the risk of trying to defend and argue what we intuitively know, and that such debate is not only useless (like the debate over abortion or veganism, it almost never changes anyone’s mind) but a drain on our creative energies, a diversion from what we, as artists and dreamers, do best: representing and chronicling our civilization’s collapse and, with our imaginations and perceptions, not our rhetoric, provoking the majority out of their ignorance, denial and lethargy of how the world really works and how we might find better ways to live. Daniel Quinn warned us of this, in Beyond Civilization, when he wrote:

People will listen when they’re ready to listen and not before. Probably, once upon a time, you weren’t ready to listen to an idea than now seems to you obvious, even urgent. Let people come to it in their own time. Nagging or bullying will only alienate them. Don’t preach. Don’t waste time with people who want to argue. They’ll keep you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to something new.

So now we are debating, with brilliant debaters like George Monbiot no less, about whether civilization can and should be saved. We are caught up in the arguments about whether we should devote more time to activism, even if it won’t “save” civilization, because we have a responsibility as knowledgeable, privileged members of our society to do what most lack the information or resources to do.

Have we forgotten the message of the Manifesto so quickly? Are we so easily unsettled by the attacks of the ignorant, the technophiles and the hopeless idealists that we lose focus on the whole, vital purpose of Dark Mountain before we’ve even begun our essential work? Here’s what Paul and Dougald told us:

We believe that artists – which is to us the most welcoming of words, taking under its wing writers of all kinds, painters, musicians, sculptors, poets, designers, creators, makers of things, dreamers of dreams – have a responsibility to begin the process of decoupling. We believe that, in the age of ecocide, the last taboo must be broken – and that only artists can do it.

Ecocide demands a response. That response is too important to be left to politicians, economists, conceptual thinkers, number crunchers; too all-pervasive to be left to activists or campaigners. Artists are needed. So far, though, the artistic response has been muted. In between traditional nature poetry and agitprop, what is there? Where are the poems that have adjusted their scope to the scale of this challenge? Where are the novels that probe beyond the country house or the city centre? What new form of writing has emerged to challenge civilisation itself? What gallery mounts an exhibition equal to this challenge? Which musician has discovered the secret chord?

If the answers to these questions have been scarce up to now, it is perhaps both because the depth of collective denial is so deep, and because the challenge is so very daunting. We are daunted by it, ourselves. But we believe it needs to be risen to. We believe that art must look over the edge, face the world that is coming with a steady eye, and rise to the challenge of ecocide with a challenge of its own: an artistic response to the crumbling of the empires of the mind.

This, dear brave comrades, is why we’re here. Not to engage in debate, in rhetoric, in analysis, in conceptual thinking, but to be artists — to re-present the world as we see it, in all its terrible beauty, when everyone else is seeing only manufactured illusion and hearing only relentless propaganda, and to imagine and present possibilities through our creative stories and art that most of our fellow humans, stunted from childhood imaginatively and creatively by civilization’s brutal and homogenizing systems, can no longer conceive of. Our responsibility is not to respond to doubters, deniers and apologists, but to show our weary human comrades that the world is not as they’ve been told, and that the only life they know is not the only way to live.

I have enormous respect for activists, and the courage and perseverance they show, every day, in their valiant struggle against empire, to speak truth to power. And I have enormous respect, too, for the healers, those like Joanna Macy and the hard workers in the alternative culture who work relentlessly to heal the anguish, the disconnection, the grief and the suffering that so many of us are afflicted with in this terrible world.

But that is their work, not ours. Ours is the third way, and we are the third force in the uncivilization revolution. Our work is, as Paul and Dougald say, the artistic response. Our work is to show the world, in our art and stories, as it really is, and to imagine it as it might be. Our work is the creative work of poetry, song, film, and story. The activists have the Transition Movement and the Permaculture Movement, the healers have the Work that Reconnects and the Intentional Communities movement.

And we, dear colleagues, have Dark Mountain. Let’s not forget why we’re here. Our work is at least as important as that of the activists and the healers. We must not get distracted. We have waited our whole lives for this moment, this responsibility, this realization, this charge. Remember who you are. This is why we’re here.

(remind you of someone you know? — photo posted anonymously on imgur)

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S END

Return to Dark Mountain: The current structure of these Links of the Week/Month (starting each set of links with articles on “preparing for civilization’s end”) took form with my first post on the Dark Mountain project. I don’t know whether it’s coincidence or not, but this past week, just when I signed up on their Ning site and mentioned them in Friday’s post, there’s been a flurry of articles on Dark Mountain on many of the blogs I read. About a year ago, Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine began a movement of writers and artists to tell the story of civilization’s current demise, and to imagine possibilities for the world that will follow, a world with a much smaller, Uncivilized human population. Their Manifesto is long, moving and brilliant, and their blogroll and the authors of the first edition of their journal are a who’s who of post-civ thinking.

They describe themselves as artists and as “curators”, rather than activists, and (unlike me) are unapologetic about that. In light of my recent declaration that I am at heart more artist and dreamer than activist and organizer, I’m going to be focusing more of my time on the kinds of things Dark Mountain is doing, so perhaps you’ll see me in the second edition of their journal.

Some of the recent responses to Dark Mountain’s message and activities from some of my favourite bloggers suggest Paul and Dougald might have lost a bit of focus (perhaps I could help? no, forget that):

• Ran Prieur is ambivalent about whether just art is enough: “Guard against passive hope”
• John Michael Greer warns to avoid magical thinking: “There is no ‘brighter future’ ahead” (thanks to Rick Wolff for the link)
• Vera Bradova lamented that the recent Dark Mountain gathering was male-dominated and too much presenter-audience focused (or as another attendee put it “white men with microphones”)

Should You Move Now Before the Crash?: My fellow “post-civilization” blogger Sharon Astyk has written a fascinating and well-considered piece on whether, in light of the coming collapse of our economy, energy and ecology, it makes sense to stay where you are or move now. She says you should move if:

1. Your mortgage is way more than the value of your house (especially since house values are likely to go lower)
2. You have young children or are elderly, and the people you’re closest to live far away
3. You have children you want to spend time with, or parents who need your care, living far away
4. You live in an extreme climate and are not adaptable to living without inexpensive heat, air conditioning, water, and imported food
5. You live in a community with people with mostly lousy (by your standards) values
6. You don’t think your children have a future where you live
7. You are planning on moving anyway (sooner is probably better than later)
8. You aren’t going to be happy or viable where you are if everything based on oil (transport, bought food, plastics, clothing, heat) gets much more expensive, or if your ‘commuter job’ disappears and you have to take (cheaper) employment locally
9. You live in an exurban area with no viable public transit, no locally produced food, and few close neighbours
10. You are not truly ‘native’ to where you live — never really fit in, called it home — and someplace else has always beckoned

If we all acted on this list, who would leave your community and who would come to take their place?

Collapse, Transition, Great Turning: Why Words Matter: Joanna Macy “Work That Reconnects” practitioner Carolyn Baker says we shouldn’t be afraid to use the word “collapse” in conversations, even when it may provoke awkward, angry or defensive responses.

More on Walking Away From Your Mortgage: Even the NYT is writing about people who have found new life by just stopping their mortgage payments — for people whose homes are worth less than their mortgage, it can take years for mortgage companies to navigate the huge foreclosure backups in paperwork and legal authorization, and many mortgage companies are now writing off the amount of mortgages in excess of current property value, just to keep from having to foreclose. About time.

UN Urges World to Go Vegan: For all the reasons I cited in my recent post, the UN says a move to global veganism is essential to forestall climate change. Thanks to Raffi Aftandelian and three others (including Sharon Astyk, who thinks the UN is too dogmatic about this) for the link.

LIVING BETTER

Living Lightly: Pay attention and notice when you become upset, and then recognize your judgements and expectations, and let them go, says Leo Babauta. I’ve started trying to do this, and it doesn’t always work, but I am becoming much more aware of when I am upset (anxious, depressed, angry, frustrated, impatient — all the situational reactive emotions), and that in itself is helpful. Thanks to Chris Lott for the link.

Joe Bageant Zen: An apparently angry and depressed Joe Bageant rages at the machine, and then proffers some spiritual advice:

[By] right action in the moment [I mean to] locate one’s heart in that particular day. Then proceed toward the least harm one can discern to do, with full knowledge that we always do harm, whether we intend to or not (the world is full of subtle unintended violence). Eliminate whatever suffering in sentient beings one encounters… Compassion is sublime. Besides, this is what the heart is designed for — to serve as a compass for the spirit.

Sculpting Your Own House: Joseph Diliberti built and decorated his own clay house for free, and says anyone can do it (photo above by Allen J. Schaben from LA Times.) Thanks to Tree for the link.

Ten Reasons You Should Start Running Barefoot: Take a look at the explanation from a Harvard prof about why landing on the front of your foot is healthier and more natural than landing on your heel.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Corporations Sue Online Commenters for Telling the Truth: In an ominous development, some of the millions of overpaid worse-than-useless lawyers in the US have started helping corporations launch frivolous, intimidating lawsuits against anyone who criticizes their client company’s products or services online. So much for free speech.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

Das Rad (The Wheel): Two rock piles witness human civilization. Subtitled. Thanks to Chris Corrigan (and three others) for the link.

Beatbox Revival: A hit Swedish song brings back the 1970s beatbox. Then, of course, YouTube makers had to show that you can make all those beatbox sounds with your own body. And finally, thanks to a Swedish phone company you can operate your own beatbox online. Great, silly fun.

Little Dee, Second Time: *Sigh* Chris Baldwin’s heart-warming coming strip Little Dee has ended. But you can read it all from the start. Read it to your grandchildren.

First Peoples’ Language and Community Map: For the area now called British Columbia. A wealth of information about Northwest indigenous peoples, their language and culture, prior to the theft of their land by Europeans.

THOUGHTS FOR THE MONTH

From Michael Meade (excerpt from The World Behind the World); I stumbled on this in an art gallery in Ashland Oregon:

So-called reality is the child of an ongoing love affair between time and eternity. Time begins in “all eternity” and returns there when it needs to be replenished. It only takes a little imagination to break the linear, literal spells of time and arrive back at the Once Upon a Time that is the origin of the soul to begin with.

Not just citizens of the world, not merely statistics without inherent meaning, humans are living metaphors, bodies and spirits conjoined with the glue of the soul and shaped by invisible threads of imagination and story. We cannot rescind this ancient and immediate heritage of imagination, for it is buried in the bones and laced into the body cell by cell. We are imaginative beings doused with eternity before our eyes ever opened upon this earth. From the beginning we see more than we can express and our last words fail to conclude the stories that live through us.

For we are lived through by energies, ideas and emotions that flow from the unseen world behind this world. We are overloaded by our own dreams, saddled with unusual fates and driven by unseen destinies. Were it not for the gravity that rests in our bones and vital organs, we would take flight. Were it not for the tangled relationships of past, present and future, we would escape every atmosphere and become the Unseen.

Despite the collapse of the immediacy of mystery into the confines of history, this down-to-earth world is also a mythic place, an ongoing production fashioned and staged by eternity. Despite the pressing problems and mounting concerns, the issue isn’t so much saving the planet as saving humanity from itself again. When times become dark and difficult the issue for those on earth comes down to living authentically, to authenticating the purpose and meaning already present in each soul.

No solitary idea, no matter how great, no single notion or shared belief can shift the weight of the world towards a meaningful future; but the accumulated vitality of many lives lived more fully might become a meaningful makeweight in the balance between time and eternity. Strange as it may seem, individual consciousness forms the makeweight, and living out the hidden meanings within life helps to balance the weight of the world. Each living being wrapped around an invisible, eternal thread, each a story breaking out of the wall of time to sing its own unfinished song.

sustainable, energy-efficient 500sf home built using local, healthy, natural materials into the side of  a woodland hill in Wales

.     .     .     .     .

When you begin to get free, you will get depressed. It works like this: When you were three years old, if your parents weren’t too bad, you knew how to play spontaneously. Then you had to go to school, where everything you did was required. The worst thing is that even the fun activities, like singing songs and playing games, were commanded under threat of punishment. So even play got tied up in your mind with a control structure, and severed from the life inside you. If you were “rebellious”, you preserved the life inside you by connecting it to forbidden activities, which are usually forbidden for good reasons, and when your rebellion ended in suffering and failure, you figured the life inside you was not to be trusted. If you were “obedient”, you simply crushed the life inside you almost to death.

Freedom means you’re not punished for saying no. The most fundamental freedom is the freedom to do nothing. But when you get this freedom, after many years of activities that were forced, nothing is all you want to do. You might start projects that seem like the kind of thing you’re supposed to love doing, music or writing or art, and not finish because nobody is forcing you to finish and it’s not really what you want to do. It could take months, if you’re lucky, or more likely years, before you can build up the life inside you to an intensity where it can drive projects that you actually enjoy and finish, and then it will take more time before you build up enough skill that other people recognize your actions as valuable.

- quote from post-civ pioneer Ran Prieur, sent to me by fellow North Cascadian David Parkinson (italics mine)

When I read this, I shuddered. This is exactly what I have been going through since my retirement from paid work a few months ago. As I mentioned in my last post, all my wonderful, ambitious intentions for model-building, activism, and even personal reconnection sit unrealized, either because I’m still too exhausted to commit myself to them, or because they’re not really what I want to do. And I suspect it’s the latter.

When I wrote the chapter in my book on how to discover what you really want to do (for a living), I adapted or invented a whole set of exercises that readers could use to hone in on the work they were “meant to do”, work the reader had personal passion about. Recently I’ve been putting myself through some of these exercises:

• The “three circles” exercise, to iteratively explore my gifts, passions and purpose and where they intersect
• Recalling the moments in my work and personal life that filled me with the greatest sense of accomplishment and joy
• Writing my bio, as I would like it to read by the time my life is over (i.e. personal obituary exercise)
• Summarizing who I really am (not what I do, or my titles or roles) in 50 words or less
• Making a list of the things I really care about
• Writing a future state day-in-the-life story about me, doing what I’ve always dreamed of spending every day doing

They’re a valuable but frustrating set of exercises, and they’re hard work, even when (perhaps especially when) all the restrictions (time, money, family obligations, work and other commitments) that I used to be able to use as excuses for the gap between what I really want to do, and what I am actually doing, have disappeared. My June 7 post re-explored my “three circles”, and it really was an exercise in going in circles. The problem with the “list of things I really care about” is that, when I look more closely at the list, I discover it’s really a list of things I think I should care about, or used to care about, or think someone needs to act upon (but not me, since I don’t have the right competencies or capacities). Or they’re so vast that they’re unactionable, or at least I have no idea where to start.

In preparing my 50-word “who I am” summary, I started with who I was as a young child and went through all the damage that was done to me, all the gunk I took on, all the things I pretended to be because it was expected, or was easy, but was not me, before I came up with this summary:

vegan, earth-loving, earth-grieving, idealistic, poly, unsociable, unschooled, self-dissatisfied, nudist, intuitive, corpocracy-hating, anarchist, doomer (about industrial civilization), optimistic (about post-civ society), radical, wounded, hedonistic, impatient, easily-discouraged, overly-analytical, generalist writer, dreamer and imaginer of possibilities

I picked these qualities to describe me because they’ve been emergent and persistent — as I get older they get more pronounced, more entrenched as part of who I am, such that it’s hard for me to imagine myself stopping being any of these things.

So, trying the 24 elements of this description on for size, seeing them as a part of my skin that I expect to wear more-or-less permanently, I then wrote a short day-in-the-life story of me being these 24 things, doing things I think I enjoy, practically, in the future. The difficulty in really believing this story is that it’s predicated on me finding the people I’m meant to live with, my intended (if not intentional) community. I’ve been looking so long that as I re-read this story I could hear myself saying “well, that’s never going to happen.”

But here’s the story anyway. Not world-saving or world-changing or even altruistic. Just me as I think I am becoming, or perhaps always was, and forgot, doing what I love:

The community is made up of a series of small but airy huts built by us collectively, into the mountainside, gently enfolded by rainforest and a short walk to the ocean. We each have our own hut, made (surprisingly easily and quickly, from my perspective as someone who had never built anything before) from local materials using a compressed earth block machine. The common areas are in separate huts, and all the huts are connected by a series of halls and tunnels. There is art everywhere, most of it our own.

I wake up late (some things never change), and spend the end of the morning walking, running, or meditating, usually alone, just being present with the abundance of wild life around us. Our lunch and dinner ritual is to forage in the Edible Forest Garden that surrounds our community, that now (after 20 years of work) sustains itself without the need for human labour, chemicals or water. We then sit and eat in community, together, exchanging ideas and asking the rest of the group questions about whatever creative projects we’re working on, or about philosophy or whatever else we care about, or how we might better model the world as it could be for all humans, or convey this possibility better to those still caught in the maw of industrial civilization. Eating and bathing have become, for us, communal activities, and if there’s a lull in the conversation someone will tell a story, or play music.

The early afternoon, usually, is our time for learning, and most of the time now we learn from each other, by watching, by doing, by practicing, rather than by reading or Internet browsing the way we usually used to learn. I’m learning to recognize the birds in the rainforest, by sight and sound, from one of our community members, and learning to draw pencil sketches from another. In return, I’m teaching the others a bit about song composition, and mentoring the community’s unschooled children. These learning hours also accommodate discussion of community matters needing consensus, conflict resolution, or personal commitments to be made, though our community has self-selected and taught itself so well that this is rarely needed anymore.

The later afternoon is mostly for more personal work projects and practices. Sometimes I write — mostly plays, film scripts, songs, poems and short stories these days. Sometimes I draw, or practice some of the other skills I’m learning. Often I just relax and daydream. My sexual fantasies are very creative, but they’re private. I’ve reached the age at which the objects of my desire are not interested in me in that way, so since my desire hasn’t abated I look after myself, even though the members of my community kid me about this (”that’s not poly.”)

Evening is time for community play — invented and rediscovered games, musical and theatrical improv, and rehearsed group singing, dancing, theatre and story-telling. Later in the evening, when only a few of us stragglers remain, we may discuss what’s going on in the rest of the world. Many of us have liaison responsibilities we’ve volunteered for — mine are with the international Transition Movement, the Unschooling collaborative, and the Dark Mountain artists’ cooperative — and the late evening discussion gives us a chance to brief each other on these extra-community activities and capture information and ideas to report back to our counterparts in other communities.

My day usually ends in the communal hot tub — hot water seems to stimulate my creativity — chatting with the other late-nighters and jotting down notes for the next day. And then more dreaming.

It occurs to me that this day-in-a-life scenario is probably not terribly different (except for a few convenient new technologies) from the life of prehistoric human rainforest dwellers. Community-based. Collective eating and bathing and play. Time for art and reflection and for private projects. Lots of learning-by-doing. Comfortable subsistence with minimal work.

Is this what I will, eventually, want to do, once I get tired of doing nothing? Maybe.

I know most of my readers do not have this freedom, and if it is annoying to have me moping about the fact that I do, I’m sorry. If you do have this freedom, or can imagine yourself having it, what would you see your story being, once you got tired of doing nothing?

Thank you, dear readers. I owe you so much, and I don’t say it enough. You’ve told me for years what I should do to make this blog better, and it’s only beginning to sink in. For years I wrote in the third person, as an ‘expert’; since you seemed to like my “how to … top 10″ lists I thought that was what you wanted (My most read post ever remains “10 Things to Do When You’re Blue“). Or I wrote in the first person plural, the “royal we”. My posts were full of unequivocal “modal auxiliary verbs” (should, must, needs to) because everywhere, everyone I encountered seemed to be looking for answers, for (re-)assurance, for direction, for certainty. My self-assured posts attracted lots of readers, including people I’ve come to meet and love, and people who gave me my last two jobs, and people who published my book, and people who turned my ideas, deservedly, upside down.

Cartoon from the New Yorker by PC Vey.

And when I started to become less certain, more conditional, proffering more questions than answers, writing more in the first person singular, my readership dropped off, and I worried that readers wouldn’t have the patience or the energy to put up with more meandering, introspective writing. When all along you were telling me that’s what you really wanted — authenticity, even when that entailed honest doubt, searching, second-guessing, admission of failure.

And that’s when I realized what this blog is really about, and why it doesn’t fit into any “blog categories”. Sure, as the subtitle says, it’s about understanding how the world really works and exploring models of a better way to live. But deeper than that, it’s a chronicle, now over seven years long, of my growing personal doubts about everything I had been told all my life, and, once I’d started to learn the real truth about this world, of my attempts to cope with that terrible truth. It’s my long-winded story about my transformation from someone who thought the world could be saved, to someone realizing it couldn’t be and didn’t have to be. And then asking myself, out loud: Now what?

So that’s where I am now, asking myself: What is my gift to the world? Now that I have, at last, the time and financial resources (and a little bit of understanding of what’s happening and what’s possible) to do anything I want to do, what should I do?

Perhaps that’s all any of us can do, if we really want to convey anything meaningful and durable and useful to others: tell our own story, as honestly as we can, and let others find resonance, perspective, understanding, ideas to explore, personal insight, hints, appreciation of what not to do, and why. Maybe even a few “ahas!” Everything we do in the real world falls apart, sooner or later. But those moments of magic connection we make sharing our stories with others endure, get adapted into their worldview, their imaginations, their work, their story, and then their story gets passed on to others and those magic connections multiply, again and again, in ways we’ll never know. In love, conversation, and community, stories are all we are.

So I have come full circle, and in trying to answer the Now what? question, I decided to go back to the three circles I introduced in my book Finding the Sweet Spot, at the intersection of which lies, as I optimistically told my readers, the answer to What We’re Meant to Do. Time to take some of my own medicine. So here I go again, thinking out loud, this time in the first person singular: Who needs my gift now?

The three circles above are my evolving list of what I think, at least today, the world really needs (things it needs that I care about, anyway), and a list of the things I love doing, and the things I am (I think, or have been told I am) uniquely good at. I’ve left areas 5 and 7 empty, because there are a depressing number of things in area 5, and because I think the things I made a living doing in this area (and which many “professional” people continue to make a profitable living doing) are oversold (i.e. the perceived need for them is manufactured and hyped) and even exploitative. Besides, since I have no passion for these activities there’s no point dwelling on them.

The first two items in area 6 (what’s needed in the world) — the capacity for empathy and the skill of facilitation — are, I believe, probably the most important things to learn, to practice, and to teach, in the 21st century. If we don’t care about each other, and if we aren’t able to work effectively in partnership and collaboration, there is no hope for us. I am optimistic that at least some subcultures appreciate this and are working on it. But I don’t think I will ever acquire this capacity and this skill so long as I remain misanthropic and self-preoccupied. I just don’t care enough about most people, or about how they get along, or don’t get along, and so for me to focus my energies on this would be an exercise in S&M.

The third through fifth items in area 6 are from the “what you can do” model I adapted from Joanna Macy’s work. They are what I intended to do (I said last year) when I retired. The problem is, while I’m interested in learning new personal capacities, and studying how we might help to dismantle civilization, and learning about and imagining new models of a better way to live, I’m really not interested in doing the work of implementing, actually doing what the world needs done. I have no heart for detail, no courage for danger, and no patience for perseverance against relentless opposition and obstacles. I really love people who are, but I finally know myself enough to know that’s not me, and if I tried to tough out the slogging this work entails my lack of real passion will defeat me. If I’m going to stick with it, I have to do what I love.

So that takes me to the 13 activities in areas 1, 2 and 4. These are all things I love doing, and a couple of them in area 4 (good stories and syntheses) are needed in the world, while three of them in area 2 (imagining, reflecting and writing) are things that I’m uniquely good at (I think, or so I’m told). I’ve been asking myself two questions, to try to get some of the things in area 4 and 2 into the area 3 “sweet spot”:

1. What would it take for me to become really good at telling and eliciting and capturing excellent stories, or at synthesizing (combining, integrating and distilling) useful, truthful information?
2. How might my gifts for imagining possibilities, reflecting on meaning, and writing, be applied in a compelling and personally engaging way to address what the world really needs?

I confess I was a bit shy about answering question 1, because although I’ve dabbled in studying lots of things over the past decade, I don’t think my practice has produced any new competencies — I give up too easily. So I focused more on the second question. But as I tried to connect the area 2 stuff and the area 6 stuff, I kept asking myself why, when I was so intellectually fascinated by the idea of a gift/generosity economy, by the transition movement and its amazing global traction, by the utter logic of unschooling, by the challenge of relearning the skills of consensus and growing our own food and living sustainably, by the excitement of actually stopping the abominable Alberta Tar Sands or the loathsome Industrial Agriculture system — was I so emotionally turned off at the idea of rolling up my sleeves and actually making some of these ideas work, and happen, in the real world?

Cartoon from the New Yorker by the late Charles Elmer Martin

And it came to me that most of what the world needs right now, most of what we are all increasingly working at, however we make our life or our living, is cleaning up the mess we have already made and are continuing to make at an horrific rate. The mess of global warming. The BP oil spill. The deforestation of the rainforests. Failed states created by thugs we have armed in places we have invaded, ravaged, occupied and abandoned. Chronic diseases caused by messed up water, food, soil, and nutritionally starved bodies. Abuse of spouses, children and animals. Poverty. Crime (including that by unrepentant corporations and politicians). Energy-sucking, endemic despair. War. The desperation that leads to nihilistic violence. Genocide. Emotional trauma and its massive toll on our mental health. Cultural homogenization and the collapse of cultural and biological diversity. Giant messes, every one. Huge amounts of work to be done, and no assurance we will make a dent in cleaning up these “intractable” messes, or even that we can stop them getting worse. And there is nowhere (at least in the real world) to go to escape from it. There are no untouched frontiers left on our crowded, globally messy planet.

I can find no joy in cleaning up a mess that seems daily to get worse. No wonder I don’t want to pursue my ambitious 2009 intentions to be of service in providing the world what it needs. Who wants to clean up a massive, ever-growing mess? It’s no surprise that so many of us want, instead, to be designers, to work in the clean world of cyberspace, to be artists and musicians, where we can start with a “clean” slate, with no mess to clean up before we can begin with the fun work of creating, of re-creating, starting anew. (Oops, slipped back into the “royal we” again.)

My aversion to mess-cleaning is aggravated by the fact that I’m tired. I’ve put in a lot of years of well-intentioned, hard work, even though I will now acknowledge that most of it was wasted effort, and much of it supported the system that creates the monstrous messes. It’s diabolical how the system that makes you/us/ me part of the mess problem makes you/us/ me too exhausted to help clean it up. I don’t want to work that hard anymore. Maybe I’m selfish, but let someone else save the world for awhile.

And I see all the human psychological and physical damage this hopeless, endless, giant gaping maw of mess has created: The walking wounded, desperate and unloved and self-blaming and at a loss where to turn. The psychopaths, who perpetuate ever-widening cycles of violence. The broken people, who find escape in TV or alcohol or drugs or porn or anything mindless and emotion-dulling. Those in denial that there’s anything wrong — the technophiles and channel-switchers and turn-back-the-clock reactionaries.  And those too brainwashed or brain-dead or uninformed or living in some parallel universe I can’t even comprehend, to even realize what’s going on. And it just makes me angry at the whole human race. Dave, the misanthrope. I wasn’t always that way. And anyway, my loathing for most of the human race is just a self-deception, a cover, a diversion for my loathing of myself for my selfishness, my exhaustion, all the years I wasted… And then the grief sets in and I just want to escape too. Hide away on the hill in the forest where the mess cannot, if I squint and distract myself, be seen. Living in my sleep.

Tired. Feel like hibernating until it’s all over, and we can start again. Tomorrow I’ll look at the three circles with fresh eyes and see if I can come up with a better answer for What is my gift to the world? My guess is that I should stop thinking and get out and meet some people who aren’t tired and cynical, but who also aren’t naive, and see if I can learn from them. The hard part is finding people who care. Some romantic fool said that.

Thank you. We’ll be OK, really. That’s not a promise, it’s an intention. Sorta.

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S END

Financial Industry as Organized Crime: A new documentary film “Inside Job”, demonstrates that the recent hijacking and sinking of the global economy was a deliberate criminal conspiracy by the financial industry. The collapse of the Soviet Union was followed by the takeover of their economies by organized crime. It appears the criminals in the US couldn’t be bothered to wait for the collapse of that country’s society. Salon interviews the film’s writer/director.

Here Comes the Rage: Ilargi argues that Obama has now shown total inability as a leader in all three of the key crisis areas facing us in the decades to come: economy (bailouts), energy (offshore drilling), and ecology (BP disaster). Unfortunately, this will just make most people look for another leader to take his place, instead of realizing that no one can solve these problems for us.

Closing the Barn Door: Sharon Astyk explains why political solutions are always designed to “fix” yesterday’s crises, not to avert future ones. “Now we’re concerned about everything.” Too late, my brother, too late, but never mind.

The Anti-Psychiatry Movement: Last month Toronto hosted an international meeting of “victims” and “survivors” of psychiatry. Speakers and attendees argued it is a pseudo-science whose fraudulent practitioners work in concert with Big Pharma to pathologize and profit from the perfectly understandable anxieties we all feel in this horrifically overcrowded, crisis-riven, violent global society. They claim, persuasively, that it is our culture, not us, that is sick and needs to be fixed. Of course the political and corporate powers were outraged and are lobbying to prevent public funds being used for such exposes in future.

ADHD Linked to Pesticides; Cancer Linked to Chemicals; Slaughterhouse Work Linked to Crime: New studies suggest that industrial chemicals in our air, water and food are not only poisoning our bodies, they are damaging our brains, and that they are a major cause of cancers. Thanks to Tree for the links. In the same vein, Prad links us to an article showing that industrial slaughterhouse workers not only become desensitized and deranged by their work, they are also prone to commit crimes in their communities.

Immigration’s Generation Gap: I argued last year that two of the biggest social issues of the coming decade would be immigration and the right to die. A new study suggests that boomers, who tend to be progressive on most issues, are the opposite on immigration issues, and that the issue substantially pits the young against the old.

LIVING BETTER

Listening Posts: Quarterly meetings of reflective citizens, to see what is emerging as the consensus of what is really happening in the world. “A sharing of preoccupations and experiences.” Thanks to Amy Barnes for the link.

Consensus Decision-Making: A link by Jeff Patton to four articles by Laird Schaub (who I just met last week) on better decision-making through consensus. A good companion to Tree’s consensus articles.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Going Mainstream, Selling Out: What is it about fame, position and the spotlight of the mainstream media that makes courageous progressives turn into cowardly, don’t-rock-the-boat conformists? Keith Farnish calls out Joss Garman.

California, Going Broke: Sam Mills’ story shows how one state is abusing its citizens in its effort to cut costs.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

Real-Time View of Ships in the Salish Sea, from fellow Bowen Islander Bob Ballantyne (not limited to the Salish Sea; you can see location and details of ships in all major shipping areas of the world). Note: Doesn’t work in Firefox.

Meetings, Bloody Meetings: A hilarious take from Ann Nichols on everyone’s least favourite activity. Add this blog to your blogroll. Thanks to Tree for the link.

The Secret Life of Plants, from the BBC (thanks to Dale Asberry for the link)

How Recipes Should Look, link from Jerry Michalski’s amazing Twitter feed (as are the two items that follow)

Real-Time Visualization on Steroids, from Britain’s Royal Society for the Arts

104 Cognitive Biases: A visual study guide

Civilization: “Are you tired of primitive living?” A great video satire. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.

THOUGHTS FOR THE MONTH

From Pamela Slim (via Gaping Void): You, less than, is a lie. Remember who you are.

From AV Flox (also via Gaping Void): A child would not hesitate to pack up a sleeping bag and sleep on a pier under the stars with you. (Thanks too to Hugh Macleod at Gaping Void for the cartoon at the top of this post).

From Imagine Alternatives (via Tree): Finding ways not to call the police.

From Rumi (via Panhala)

Let yourself be silently drawn
by the strange pull of what you really love.
It will not lead you astray.

From Melissa Moore: On the Eve of Turning 12