Map showing the variance in temperature rise — from nil to 16C (30F), with an average of 4C/7F,  that could be expected as early as 2060 if we continue to emit more carbon each year as we are doing now. In the Arctic that’s an average of 30F warmer, every second of every day in every season. Here are more details and the interactive map from the UK Meteorological Office. Thanks to Sue Bullock for the link, via this explanation of the map.

You may have noticed that my ‘links of the month’ posts have become less frequent (often every second month) and less focused on the ‘politics and economics as usual’ material. This is partly because I see no point in alerting readers to the endless flood of bad and unactionable news (or indeed reading such news myself). It’s also partly because as I have given up on environmentalism (while still encouraging activists who continue to find their work meaningful and purposeful to keep up the good fight) I have become more interested in news about resilience, play and inspiration — not as a distraction from the reality of our current terrible situation, but as a means of coping with it mindfully.

I’ve been in the US for the last couple of weeks, and everything that is bad at home in Canada seems more transparently worse here. I started writing a post called “A Sickly and Exhausted Nation”, but I gave up on it because I thought it would provoke defensiveness among my US readers (even those who are more critical and pessimistic than I am, and because it seemed so obvious and self-evident it didn’t warrant saying. My friend, the film producer Tim Scott Bennett kind of said it all when he wrote earlier this year:

Did not the culture of civilization, at some point, take off on a weekend fling of unexpected exhilaration that spiraled out of control, bringing the entire planet face to face with our present predicament? And have not many people’s lives, at least those lived here in the heart of Empire, become so loveless, abused and unsatisfying that we’re poised now to do almost anything to get out of them? Have we not truly managed to do something no other living creature has managed to do, which is to make ourselves, individually and collectively, miserable?

Aye, now I’ve done it. I’ve violated a deep taboo, spoken the unspeakable. Because, well, we’re so happy, we Americans. Aren’t we?

I mean, sure, we’ve got corrupt leadership, economic insanity, and the end of cheap energy to contend with. We’ve got climate change and population overshoot and mass extinction to think about. We’ve got dying oceans, dying forests, dying aquifers, dying krill, dying caribou, dying everything. We’ve got nuclear power and nuclear waste and nuclear weapons and depleted uranium. We’ve got fucked up political systems, health care systems, educational systems, economic systems, agricultural systems, and septic systems. We’ve got racism, sexism, narcissism, workaholism and fascism. We’ve got child abuse and elder abuse and spouse abuse and animal abuse. We’ve got rapes and murders and suicides. We’ve got unwed mothers and single parents and children having children. We’ve got addictions, distractions, obsessions and compulsions. We’ve got unemployment and underemployment and homelessness and debt. We’ve got boring, meaningless work, longer hours, longer drive times and falling real wages. We’ve got unsatisfying relationships, loneliness, divorce and broken homes. We’ve got mental illness, stress, busy-ness, depression, despair, medication and “the deliberate dumbing down of America“. We’ve got obesity, diabetes, asthma, cancer and heart disease and all those other “diseases of civilization“. And sure, all of these things seem to be spiraling out of control, as if Conquest, War, Famine and Pestilence just stormed onto our polo field and started to beat the ever-loving crap out of our players.

It makes me, and apparently Tim, wonder: What exactly is it we’re trying to sustain?

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S END

Paul Kingsnorth On Wildness and Despair: The co-author of the magnificent Dark Mountain Manifesto, and author of Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and the follow-up Thoreau Farm Letters, has two more gems I’ve just discovered:

On Nature laments the fact that the Human Empire now occupies 93% of the Earth’s surface, with the remaining wild 7% under siege and in retreat. Excerpt:

Will they [the wild places] survive climate change and the growing human appetite for more shiny things? We don’t know. But we have to hold on to them as if they will, because there is, at this stage, nothing else to do.

I suspect that the best hope we have now – hope for a living planet, hope for the continuation of beauty and wildness and ecological diversity and our own sanity as a species – is to protect as much of the world’s wildness  as we can, try and carry it through the coming storm and just hope that on the other side we will have found some accommodation with ourselves and with the wild. Any such accommodation, if it ever comes, won’t happen in our lifetime. But we have a flame to keep, in case it ever does.

On the Correct Management of Despair riffs on Derrick Jensen’s Beyond Hope theme. Its lovely conclusion:

That is my despair. What should I do with it? I can talk, perhaps with you. I can share it. I can write it down. But I can’t and won’t pretend that I don’t feel it. And I won’t replace it with something called ‘hope’ just because I can, or think I should. I can live my life well, be happy, love, work, do the things that matter to me. I can save some of the good things, if I try, I hope. But I can’t hold back the despair all the time. Why should I? It’s a response – a rational response – to what we are doing; to the world we are levelling. It’s the only honest response.

The despair leads me to the mountain, and the mountain shows me the lights of the city as it spreads and the mountain is dark, at least for now, because the lights have not yet come. If they do not come it will not be because we chose not to send them this way; it will be because we fell back into our own fires before we got a chance to send them out here, and profit from them accordingly. Increasingly, now, I hope the lights never come. I hope the world goes dark again and that when the morning comes none of the lights work ever again. Only the sun, and at night the stars, reflected in the undammed rivers.

The Radicalization of David Suzuki: I don’t much like David Suzuki. I’ve met him and found him arrogant, judgemental and insensitive. But he’s been a flak for the hopeful do-what-we-can mainstream environmental movement for so long that it’s remarkable to see him shifting to a more radical stance. In this interview (alas, by Canada’s worst reporter, the execrable Margaret Wente) he allegedly admits the environmental movement has been a total failure and is at a dead end, and confesses to feelings of agony and bitter defeat over his role in it. Now, he says, we must abandon the entire idea of ‘sustainable development’ and immediately terminate the Alberta Tar Sands and similar developments. Wente writes: “The problem isn’t that the environmental movement has failed to explain this message. It’s that people have rejected it. Mr. Suzuki fears the consequences for the planet and the human race will be catastrophic.” Thanks to Sharon Goldberg for the link.

Burning Up and Running Out: Climate scientist Jon Koomey explains why the task of mitigating the effects of climate change in our complex society is so impossible: First, “there’s virtually no chance that resource constraints would provide a brake on carbon emissions in this century”. Second, “we’ll run out of the earth’s ability to absorb greenhouse gases long before we run out of fossil fuels”. So the 4C/7F scenario depicted in the graphic above is a conservative one — the best we can reasonably hope for.

You Can’t Say That: Part of the problem of getting meaningful dialogue on economic, energy or environmental collapse is that it is considered socially improper to discuss these issues, and the radical solutions that would be needed to effectively address them, at all. And of course, that’s exactly how the political and economic powers want to keep it.

Myths of Environmentalism: Why home solar, eating local, and hybrid cars aren’t as green as they are portrayed. Neither are bike-powered electricity generators (though direct pedal-powered machines are). And your online services are mostly powered by coal and nuclear energy. Thanks to Eric Lilius for the middle link, and Michael Bauwens for the third link.

Harbingers of Collapse: Mike Krieger argues that political upheaval in China, and the arrival of Peak Oil in Saudi Arabia, are close and inevitable, and either will precipitate global economic collapse. Thanks to Bruce Stewart for the link.

LIVING BETTER

The Library as Community Commons: As one library starts offering local seeds as well as books, why can’t we turn our libraries into community commons where people can swap and gift and collaborate in many different ways? Thanks to Tree for the link.

Yurts for Beginners: How to build an earthbag roundhouse.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

cartoon by Adrian Raeside in the Victoria Times-Colonist

The Chasm Between Rich and Poor in the US Widens Further: 93% of the increase in income and wealth in the US in the past year went to the already-richest 1%.

450 Chernobyls: The world’s 450 nuclear reactors depend on a steady and continuous source of electricity to prevent overheating and explosion. What would happen if solar flares disrupted electricity globally for an extended period?

Trading Water for Waste: A politically connected new nuclear power company wants to exploit much of Utah’s scarce water for new nuclear energy generation.

Take It Off, Because I Say So: Naomi Wolf explains how the ever-increasing powers of US security authorities (expanded further by the extremist US supreme court’s recent granting of authority that allows all security forces to do invasive strip searches of anyone, without need for a reason, and without limit) are deliberately designed to suppress dissent by sexually terrorizing citizens. Thanks to Sharon Goldberg for the link.

Corporatist Dictators Keep Control of Bankrupt Michigan Communities: Under a draconian Michigan law, communities that declare bankruptcy are put under the stewardship of appointed czars (often with fascist tendencies) with absolute dictatorial powers — unelected, unfireable, unrestricted by prevailing laws, not responsible to anyone — who can dissolve labour agreements, fire anyone, privatize anything to their cronies, do anything they want to do. The citizens are completely at their mercy. The courts recently upheld the appointment of these dictators, because the group trying to get them ruled unconstitutional used the wrong size font in their petition.

Canada/Tar Sands Corner:

Canadian Economist Blasts Tar Sands Pipeline Studies as “Propaganda”: A respected Canadian economist describes the reports used by the Canadian government and oil industry to justify the Tar Sands and its pipeline proposals as shoddy, one-sided propaganda, “quantitative billy clubs to beat back public inquiry.” Meanwhile, another study concludes the existing pipelines are “a rusty mess”, an accident waiting to happen.

The High Cost of Cheap Gas: Canadian gasoline is selling at about $1.40/litre (just above US$5/gallon). But its real costs are our dependence on it being so cheap.

Harper’s Religious and Economic Extremism: A review of the life of Canada’s extreme right-wing prime minister reveals the frightening depth of his reactionary, fundamentalist ideology. And ForestEthics, the environmental organization that works to achieve sustainable forestry, is so incensed by Harper’s war on environmentalists that it’s given up its charitable status to oppose his odious agenda. Thanks to Eric Lilius for the first link.

BC Forest Regs to Be Gutted by Government: A leaked document indicates that BC’s right-wing government plans to eliminate most forestry regulations after supply to sawmills plunged due to massive beetle infestation devastating boreal forests (another victim of climate change).

Is Canadian Real Estate Market Ready to Crash?: A student of bubbles says the Canadian market is exactly where the US market was before it imploded.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

cartoon from the New Yorker by David Jacobson

Complexity Goes Fractal: A hilarious April Fools’ Day lecture on complex numbers.

Elephant Plays With a Tablet: Commercial for Samsung. Elephant as artist. Real or fraud? You decide.

Dog Plays With an Otter: If only humans could learn to play with other creatures like this.

Photo505: Great fun with online photoshopping of your favourite portrait.

Most of Us Living Alone: In the US today, half of all adults are single, and 1/3 of all households have only one person in them. This is unprecedented, and is happening at a time when more than ever we need skill and experience living in community. It’s an interesting paradox: People are choosing to live alone usually because they can (it’s socially permissable and economically possible), yet so many of us are yearning for more social contact, more true connection and love.

Lethal Wetness: What our furry friends will do to avoid wet paws.

Converting Owned Homes to Rentals En-Masse: Good News or Bad?: Some large investment companies looking for improved ROIs are buying up thousands of foreclosed homes and renting them to tenants.

this joke will only make sense if you’re familiar both with Doctor Who and IKEA

Great Silliness About the War Between Cyclists and Drivers/Pedestrians: Don’t take this bike vid seriously. The music is fun. Not safe for work (or anything much else). Thanks to Shay Totten for the link.

When Political Satire Crosses the Line to Cruelty: When right-wingers are interviewed by the Daily Show and its offshoots, and don’t realize they’re being ridiculed, it can be hilarious. Or it can just be mean, and sad.

Climate Attitude Change: A new survey suggests that, essentially, young people don’t give a damn about the environment.

Writerly Grief: Jonathan Franzen writes angrily about the suicide of his friend and rival David Foster Wallace.

Baraka: The Sequel: The makers of Baraka have a new global cultural documentary called Samsara. Thanks to David Hodgson for the link.

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH

From Jerry Mander, in Timothy Scott Bennett’s movie What a Way to Go:

There is no real reason why the entire country couldn’t accept reality. We just have to drop the idea of capitalism, the idea of corporations running things, the idea of economic ‘growth’. It could be done.

From Timothy Scott Bennett:

I tend to post two types of things here: Doom™ and Music. I consider both to be a part of my spiritual practice, which I often summarize as “relating to what’s so as what’s so.” The Doom™ keeps me in touch with what’s so on Planet Earth at this time, the fact that our current human-built world is unraveling. The Music ALSO keeps me in touch with what’s so on Planet Earth at this time, which is that there is goodness and beauty and life here still, a Something Else™ which is growing up (to steal an image from Ran Prieur) through the cracks in the pavement with which we’ve tried to deny the Earth. Both Doom™ and Music yank me back into the present moment, where I can live my wonderful life in ever more clarity and connection. My life is a wild and challenging roller-coaster of Joy™ and Grief™ and Pain™ and Astonishment™, of full engagement and stuttering confusion and deep self-revelation and quiet acceptance and blind denial. My every step is a step forward, I think, even if I do not see my destination, even if it feels like I’m falling backward. And in my best moments, I begin to feel something new… a tingling energy, an opening up in my chest and shoulders, even a slight smile resting unbidden and unexplained on my face. And I think this feeling is what people call Gratitude™…

From John Rember:

Somewhere between Nixon’s Christmas bombing of Hanoi and the Alzheimer’s-tinged valedictory speeches of Ronald Reagan, somewhere between TV screens showing the helicopter evacuation of the Saigon embassy and newer, bigger, squarer, flatter screens showing the video-game destruction of Iraqi bridges in the first Gulf War, somewhere between the Bretton Woods economic summit and George H. W. Bush’s refusal to eat broccoli, America made a fatal-for-sanity choice, and succumbed to the reality it wanted to have rather than the reality it had. Surface came to be valued over depth, the conceptual over the perceptual.

In more familiar terms, Americans chose not to believe their lying eyes, especially when those lying eyes told them they had lost a war, had become a nation of obese slugs, and had hocked their grandchildren for oil. Getting ready for the final break, Americans had rejected Jimmy Carter, who told them their dependence on oil imports would by definition end their independence, and embraced Reagan, who told them that it was morning in America…

Anyone who has watched the debates during the presidential election season without realizing that the reptiles onstage are all sweating inside Goofy suits hasn’t been paying attention.

violet green swallow playing with a feather; photo by Chris Maynard

Recently, to my surprise, it’s become more acceptable to tell the grim truth about our civilization. Still not acceptable, mind you, but every once in a while when I do, I’ll notice someone nodding at me, giving me a sad smile, a quiet signal of comprehension and appreciation.

tree swallows in aerial acrobatics; photo by Richard Seaman

There are three (very large) groups to whom one cannot usefully or comfortably (or sometimes even safely) tell these truths:

1. The incredulous: Those who either know so little or haven’t had the opportunity to think about what they know, that they find the idea of collapse preposterous, unimaginable, and/or unthinkable.
2. The hopeful: Those who believe that collapse is not inevitable or can be significantly mitigated, or believe that even if it is inevitable and can’t be significantly mitigated, we should try anyway.
3. The deniers: Those who are intimidated or offended by, or overwhelmed with anger and/or guilt at, the very idea of collapse.

I have always found that, when in a crowd that I know contains members of one or more of these groups, or whose members I don’t know well, it’s usually unwise to talk about what’s really going on in our world. For the first group it’s a conversation-stopper, for the second it’s either disappointing or annoying, and for the third it’s an invitation to a hostile debate or a fight, neither of which serves any purpose.

So it’s usually best to stay quiet, because telling the truth always begs the question: “OK lunatic/doomer/asshole, what are you doing about it?” To which, if you dare reply honesty, their response is generally going to be “that’s ridiculous/a copout/treasonous”.

If an ‘environmental’ group were to suddenly announce that trying to prevent global ecocide was fruitless and they were going to focus instead on helping people prepare for inevitable collapse, all the other enviros would quickly turn on them. A couple of climate scientists I’ve spoken to have confided that they can never talk publicly about what they think is really likely to happen because if they did, their audiences would walk out, their sponsors would cut them off, and their employers would fire them.

If a political leader were to suggest the need to end capitalism, or that economic growth was madness, their career and possibly their life would be quickly terminated. Dennis Kucinich, the only elected politician who’s had the courage to tell the truth about our political and economic systems, is dismissed by most as a ‘kook’ and considered ‘unelectable’ by his own party.

If a business leader were to admit (as several have to me, privately) that the power of large corporations is unhealthy and often abused, that most large corporations are dysfunctional (even more than comparable-sized government bureaucracies), and that corporate activities like the Tar Sands, factory farming, and GMOs are antithetic to the public interest, they would be quickly deposed, and shunned by their colleagues (even those who knew they were right).

We all go around talking about ‘realities’ (like the ‘free’ market, ‘free’ trade, ‘sustainable’ growth and ‘democratic’ governments) that are actually complete fictions, ideals that have never existed in the real world. Yet we talk about them as if they were incontrovertibly real. And almost no one dares talk about what’s really real — such as the constant and inevitable atrocity, messiness and brutality of war as it’s fought on the front lines (and its utter futility), or the ghastly and never-ending suffering of the trillions of creatures confined, tortured and slaughtered to meet the incessant demands of our industrial food system, or the world our children and grandchildren will have to face when the debts we have run up come due and the desolation we have caused leaves them with a planet that can no longer support most forms of life.

As John Rember puts it in a lovely essay on Guy McPherson’s blog (thanks to Timothy Scott Bennett for the link, and for the inspiration):

To the extent that you can buy reality off—that you can use your wealth to move tens of miles upwind of a dairy, for example—you can say reality is for people who lack money. The real function of wealth in America is to give us the time, resources, and space to either construct an unreal world or have one constructed for us. Unreal worlds, for most of us, turn out to be better places to spend our time…

Once an imperial reality is created, real reality becomes sedition. Dissent—even the dissent of believing what you see rather than what you’re told—is suppressed, ridiculed, ignored, or violently eliminated…

Happily for the Disney Corporation and for the American Empire, growing up has become optional, and plenty of people have decided not to. You can’t blame them. Growing up means looking at the hard data, constructing your own narrative from them, and leaving the secure future for the lethal present. As a scientist friend of mine says, “Those of us with children and grandchildren cannot go there…”

We can’t talk about these things, not in pleasant company. Sometimes we wish we didn’t know these terrible realities. We carry them around like ghastly personal secrets of horrific past wrongdoing, unmentionable and unforgivable acts that must never be revealed for fear of total social ostracism, or worse.

But as long as we stay quiet, we’re complicit. We can’t win.

Or can we? Perhaps if we had a better story we could tell the truth. Perhaps the reason why we dare not talk about what we see and know when we’re among the incredulous, the hopeful and the deniers, is that we, too, are seeking an alternate, more bearable reality than the terrible one we have come so late to know.

As I write this there are a dozen violet-green swallows flitting outside my window, soaring over my hilltop home and down into the valleys all around. Swallows are very adept at turning in mid-air, in a way that looks a bit clumsy but is actually ideally suited to catching insects in mid-air. They will also fly near larger birds in the hope of catching their moulting feathers in mid-air. The two pictures above depict this.

But I also know that swallows will perform these acrobatic feats, including catching and releasing feathers blowing in the wind over and over again, for no apparent reason. Just for fun. The fact that doing this is good practice for more serious pursuits is not the point — most wild creatures play as their principal means of learning new skills, but clearly take great pleasure in doing so for its own sake, just because it’s fun. [If you're a skeptic, look at this bird behaviour, or this one, and tell me this isn't pure, calculated, play].

Maybe the birds are telling us something. Their story, their way of coping with reality, is to play, to take joy in every moment. Maybe that is the story of all wild creatures: That life is play, delight, pleasure, laughter, living in Now Time. Maybe that should be our story, too, those of us who can no longer believe the invented stories of our culture, and who can no longer bear the story of grief and shame and anger and sadness and fear for our future that we have told ourselves about this terrible, real world.

I keep thinking that what is missing in my life is more fun. Perhaps instead of looking for friends and activities that are fun, the birds are showing me how to be more fun, more play-full. It occurs to me that people are happiest with me when I am playful, laughing, fun to be with. My youngest memories, which I recall with great fondness, were times of seemingly endless play, imagining, creating, running around, laughing, mimicking, experimenting, discovering, interacting with pure joy and pleasure with everything and everyone I could see.

How did I forget how to play? Is it the same reason that John Cleese now has to set aside a time and place to be creative, and follow a regimen (thanks to Bill Anderson for this link)?

More importantly, how can we re-learn how to play? Loren Eiseley once wrote:

on playing with a young fox

for just a moment
I held the universe at bay

by the simple expedient
of sitting on my haunches before a fox den
and tumbling about with a chicken bone.

it is the gravest, most meaningful act I shall ever accomplish,
but,
as Thoreau once remarked
of some peculiar errand of his own,

there is no use reporting it to the Royal Society.

My guess is that we could re-learn to play the same way the swallows and the ravens and the young foxes learn to play: By instinct (or in our case, reconnecting to our instincts); by watching other wild creatures at play and following their example; and by practice. [If you have any thoughts on this I would welcome them: I don't expect much insight on this from online resources or from 'experts' in pedagogy.] Reaching back to those earliest memories, my sense is that most of it is about just being open — to wonder, to possibility, to finding out, for no other purpose than because it’s fun, joyful, pleasurable, irresistible.

Suppose we could do this, be this, and model it every moment. Suppose we filled our lives, and the lives of those we met and those we know, not just with earnest love, but with fun, joy and pleasure. Suppose we lived the story of being calmly, attentively, blissfully real — of being an appreciative, present and essential part of life’s unfathomable wonder and beauty, relishing every possible moment. And suppose we then began to tell the truth of what is happening in the world, opening people’s eyes up to the terrible reality of the real, teetering, fragile, suffering, desolated world. All the while smiling, with our eyes shining, gentle, relaxed, aware, at peace and full of humour. How would the incredulous, the hopeful, and the deniers respond to this dreadful message then? How might it change our own sense of unbearable grief, anger, shame and fear?

“In wildness is the preservation of the world”, Thoreau wrote. Perhaps in wildness we can also find our true story, and through it the means to help the frightened, anguished people of our world awaken to the world’s terribly reality, and its astonishing joy.

It’s been about 40 years since my first environmental activism, fighting against the Churchill River hydroelectric diversion in Northern Manitoba and the Mackenzie Valley Oil & Gas Pipelines through the pristine and fragile Canadian arctic to US markets.

We lost the Churchill River fight — in 1976 the so-called socialist provincial government flooded 850 square kilometres to divert 80% of the water from one huge river to another — because it was cheaper to dam one than two. All told, 2600 sq. km. were flooded, 25,000 First Nations people were either driven off their land or had their way of life irrevocably altered, and the ecosystems of the northern half of the province were desolated in ways we’re only now beginning to realize.

We stalled off development of the Mackenzie Valley pipelines then, but they are now being fast-tracked by the current corporate-owned ultra-conservative Canadian government in order to provide cheap energy to power the eco-holocaust called the Alberta Tar Sands. Big Oil wasn’t in much of a hurry back in the 1960s — they knew the value of the oil reserves they “owned” would only go up.

In the intervening 40 years, from the heady counter-culture days of the late 1960s, the human species has done more damage to this planet than we did in the previous 30,000 years, i.e. since the inception of human civilization, by almost every possible measure: loss of biodiversity on land, in the seas and in the air, loss of natural habitat capable of supporting any creature sustainably, pollution of land, air and sea, non-renewable resources extracted and non-biodegradable wastes produced. So much for the idealism of the boomer generation. And if current trends continue we will easily top all these disastrous records in the next 20 years.

So now we are fighting a whole series of new pipelines proposed to carry the dirty Tar Sands bitumen sludge from a ruined Northern Alberta to insatiable markets in the US and China. Big Oil has bought and paid for governments in all three countries, as well as all the so-called “regulatory” agencies that purportedly ensure these projects are in the “public interest” — processes that in all three countries are a pathetic joke.

I have volunteered to, and been asked to, become more active in my opposition to these pipelines, and the Tar Sands development that co-depends on their construction. But I keep hesitating because something is holding me back, something telling me (i) it’s a losing cause, (ii) I can’t face another losing cause, (iii) even if we win, here and now, the developers will pop up like Hydras again and keep fighting until they eventually win, and (iv) in the meantime, other eco-atrocities will fill the void in demand, where there is less organized opposition or even knowledge of their existence.

I am internalizing the realization of the effects of the Jevons Paradox, which observes that technological improvements that improve efficiency lead to increases, not decreases, in the use of related resources. People who drive hybrid vehicles tend to drive considerably more than those who drive SUVs. As more people drive more fuel-efficient vehicles, demand is suppressed to the point that price falls or levels off, making the driving of SUVs more economically viable.

Essentially, efficiency reduces cost, which encourages greater, not less, consumption. The more energy we can affordably produce, the more we will consume, one way or another. And once we’re used to (and even addicted to) that level of consumption, we will demand it be maintained, whether that means burning shale oil, Tar Sands sludge, fracking gas, the remaining wood in the rainforests, or deep-sea and arctic reserves. No matter the cost or the risk. Until we run out of everything. Then our energy-based civilization will go over Hubbert’s Peak and crash.

A similar paradox has been observed to drive human population numbers. You would think that providing healthy food to the poor would increase health and overall well-being, which would allow people to live longer and become more educated, and hence curtail family size and reduce overpopulation in their own self-interest. What is observed is the opposite. As Daniel Quinn’s books have explained, it is the absolute amount of affordable food available that determines population — the more food available, the more children will be born. As long as our technology finds ways to produce ever more food, human populations will rise until that food is consumed. Then it will crash.

The Canadian Government and its Big Oil sponsors aren’t terribly worried about losing the fight to build another Tar Sands pipeline overland to the US. They prefer that route because its political and ecological consequences are less treacherous than the alternatives. But there are two alternatives that they will take if necessary. The first is to build a new pipeline across central British Columbia to ship the bitumen sludge to China instead of the US. That option is unanimously opposed by the landholders, the First Nations of BC, except for a handful in the fraudulent colonialist “tribal councils” that have been bought off by the Big Oil consortium or its government friends.

The third option is to massively widen the existing Tar Sands pipeline through Vancouver BC, and ship it from there both down the coast to US markets and overseas to China. This is opposed by NIMBYs of all political stripes in the city, and the governments and Big Oil interests would prefer to deal with small numbers of poor, scattered citizens than the large, easily organized numbers in the cities. Besides, when the inevitable spills occur, they will be less newsworthy when they occur off Haida Gwaii or on some farm in the US heartland than when they occur on the shores and into the drinking water of a city of three million.

But Big Oil, leaving nothing to chance to protect the interests of its executives and shareholders, is proposing to complete all three pipeline routes, and warning US politicians that they don’t care whether America or China buys the stuff. China will take all we can produce, any time, regardless of environmental impact. The Chinese government is not known for its moral queasiness.

I’ve been at this on and off for forty years. In that time, massive government subsidies have allowed Big Oil to improve the “efficiency” of Tar Sands production from an EROI of less than 1 (totally economically unfeasible) to an EROI that, with the help of additional subsidies, tax breaks, non-enforcement of regulations, and support for the routing of the Mackenzie Valley pipelines to the Tar Sands mining sites and the construction of taxpayer-financed nuclear power plants on the sites, will be sufficiently large to generously reward the patience of the corporations’ executives and shareholders.

And it may stall off the End of Oil for a few more years.

So what should we do now? We can get out in the streets and protest the Tar Sands and its pipelines. We can lie down in front of bulldozers the size of factories. We can risk arrest, injury and death. We can go on hunger strikes, or set ourselves afire (perhaps with bitumen sludge as the fuel).

We might in the process slow the development down for a few days, maybe even a few years. In the meantime the people of the US, China and Canada will get their insatiable energy fix somewhere else — burning more coal, or converting more grainlands to (heavily subsidized) fuel oil production. Or more fracking and offshore drilling. We will ensure that the ever-accelerating demand for energy is fed, one way or another, until it can no longer be.

So, for me, there is no more point in us struggling for control of the driver’s seat in a car that is already careening off the edge of a cliff. It’s time for me to give up on environmentalism. That doesn’t mean I’m saying that you should, too, or that I believe your activism is foolish or valueless. It’s just what I’ve decided to do. Without attempting to justify or defend or argue for my personal decision, I just want to tell my story of how I came to this decision, this perspective, perhaps as much for my own peace of mind as to respond to those who think my decision is wrong-headed, or even immoral.

I share this perspective, it seems, with very few. The person who explains it more eloquently that I will ever be able to is Dark Mountain co-founder Paul Kingsnorth. In my January Links of the Month I urged readers to look at his brilliant essay in Orion magazine Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist in which Paul tells the story of his journey from activism and his reasons for “walking away” from environmentalism.

The author of the Thoreau Farm blog Wen Stephenson wrote a letter to Paul’s responding to his essay, taking issue with Paul’s belief that striving to “sustain” our current way of living is wrong-headed and his (Paul’s) decision to “withdraw” from environmental activism. Wen wrote:

Withdraw? Are you kidding? That Kingsnorth’s piece appeared in the same issue as Terry Tempest Williams’ long, morally bracing interview with Tim DeChristopher, “What Love Looks Like,” only made it harder to take. This, I felt, is what giving up looks like.

Paul responded to Wen’s letter. Here are some excerpts from that response (italics mine):

I have spent twenty years and more as an environmental campaigner… My worldview has always been, for want of a less clunky word, ecocentric. What I care passionately about is nature in the round: all living things, life as a phenomenon… My view is that humans are no more or less important than anything else that lives. We certainly have no right to denude the Earth of life for our own ends…

I do think that climate change campaigners… should be more upfront about what you’re trying to ‘save.’ It’s not the world. It’s not humanity either, which I’d bet will survive whatever comes in some form or another, though perhaps with drastically reduced numbers and no broadband connection. No, what you’re trying to save, it seems to me, is the world you have grown used to… a civilisation so extensive and powerful that it [has] energetically wiped out much non-human life in order to feed its ever-advancing appetites…‘Sustainability’ is, as far as I can see, a project designed to keep this culture — this lifestyle — afloat…

Of course, I am conflicted about this. I live at the heart of this machine; like you, I am a beneficiary of it. If it falls apart, I will probably suffer, and I don’t want to… I am trying to ‘walk away” from dishonesty, my own included. Much environmental campaigning, and thinking, is dishonest. It has to be, to keep going… Do you imagine that Thoreau would have looked out of that window at this Machine and determined to put all his efforts into marching about trying to keep it afloat? I think he would have kept on growing beans. His retreat from activism, after all, produced the words which now inspire yours…

‘Are you suggesting that art and storytelling can help spur the transformation of our energy systems?’ you ask. ‘ The answer to [this] question is, of course, no, and the Dark Mountain Project has no such end in mind. Art and storytelling are worthy in their own right, and we need a cultural response to the collapse of our world, if for no other reason than my personal desire to have an honest story to tell my children about how we destroyed beauty for money and called it ‘development’.

As for the climate movement which you believe is necessary to prevent this: well … I know I am beginning to sound cynical, but it’s not exactly cynicism, it’s a raw realism born of 20 years of wanting to believe in such movements and not seeing them… I don’t think any ‘climate movement’ is going to reverse the tide of history, for one reason: we are all climate change. It is not the evil ’1%’ destroying the planet. We are all of us part of that destruction. This is the great, conflicted, complex situation we find ourselves in…

I’m afraid my current beliefs are going to seem to you rather bleak. I believe that our civilisation is hitting a wall, as all civilisations eventually do. I believe that the climate will continue to change as long as we are able to pump fossil fuels into the atmosphere, because I believe that most human beings want the fruits of that burning more than they want to save the natural world which is destroyed by it. I think we have created an industrial techno-bubble which has cut us off from the rest of nature so effectively that we cannot see, and do not much care about, its ongoing death. I think that until that death starts to impact us personally we will take very little interest. I think we are committed to much more of it over the next century. I fear for what my children will experience and sometimes I wish I was not here to experience it either…

How do we live with this reality? Politics is not going to do anything about it… because politics is the process of keeping this Machine moving. What do we do? I don’t know. The reality is that we have used the short-term boost of fossil fuels to give us a 200 year party, which is now coming to an end in a haze of broken bottles, hangovers and recrimination. We have built a hugely complex society which now can’t be fuelled and is, in any case, responsible for a global ecocide. Living with this reality — living in it, facing it, being honest about it and not having to pretend we can ‘solve’ it as if it were a giant jigsaw puzzle — seems to me to be a necessary prerequisite for living through it. I realise that to some people it looks like giving up. But to me it looks like just getting started with a view of the world based on reality rather than wishful thinking…

There are a lot of useful things that we can do at this stage in history. Protecting biodiversity seems the crucial one… Standing up in whatever small way we can to protect beauty and wildness from our appetites is … probably the most vital cause right now. I’m all for fighting winnable battles. But we need to do so in the context of a wider, bigger picture: the end of the Holocene, the end of the world we were taught to believe was eternal; and, perhaps, the slow end of our belief that humans are in control of nature, can be or should be. There is much that is noble about being human, but we have a big debt to pay back, and debts, in the end, always have to be paid.

. . . . .

In the third part of the conversation, Wen suggests that what Paul proposes doing is “not enough”, and asks him what we should do as well and/or instead. Here are some excerpts from Paul’s response to this question (again, italics mine):

I wonder what it is that makes me so ‘ecocentric’, and you such a humanist? I wonder what fuels my sense of resignation, and my occasional sneaking desire for it all to come crashing down, and what fuels your powerful need for this thing called hope… This may sound a strange thing to say, but one of the great achievements for me of the Dark Mountain Project has been to give people permission give up hope… I find that a lot of campaigners are trapped in hope. I used to be. They believe - they feel pressured to believe, from within or without - that they must continue working to achieve goals which are plainly impossible, because not to do so would be to ‘give up hope’. What they are hoping for is never quite defined, but it’s clear that giving it up would lead to a very personal kind of collapse…

Giving up hope, to me, means giving up the illusion of control and accepting that the future is going to be improvised, messy, difficult. None of us knows what will happen, and I’m certainly not making any predictions. But whether or how this civilisation falls apart — and it looks  to me like it is already happening — is, to me, less important than whether it takes the rest of nature with it…

One reason I have ‘walked away’ from activism is because I want to concentrate more on my creative work. It’s what fulfils me most and it’s what I think I am best at… The other two reasons, are, firstly, I don’t think what you’re calling for will work… Secondly, I just don’t feel part of the ‘movement’ that is calling for it. I don’t feel part of it because its main concern is keeping humans happy. Everything else comes second. I don’t think we can afford this kind of mediaeval thinking any more…

You ask me: ‘what would you have us do?’ My answer, which sounds a little like the kind of thing Thoreau would have written, is simple: do what you want. Do what you need to, and what you have to, and what you feel is right. I’m not an evangelist; that’s one of the things I have walked away from. I can’t give myself to this supposed movement because it is not sustaining anything that I think is worth keeping. And I don’t think we will stop burning fossil fuels until there are none left. So: I don’t think it will work, and I suspect its motives. But I don’t expect anyone to follow me. I don’t want anyone to follow me. Who wants to be followed when they go out walking?…

We had a very practical obligation, as a species, to maintain the ecosystems we found ourselves part of in some semblance of health and balance. We have spectacularly failed to do that. Now climate change, ocean acidification, mass extinction and, possibly, economic collapse are going to be the result. I don’t welcome any of this as a way to ‘restore balance.’ I’m not that naive. Collapses bring many things, but balance is rarely one of them, at least initially. Still, I think that’s where we are. Covenant broken; consequences upon us. It’s too late to start worrying about the approaching army when it’s already encircled the city.

. . . . .

Paul linked to his conversation with Wen in a comment to the vehement debaters (which included me) on Keith Farnish’s Facebook article disparaging some ‘environmental’ organizations, where a similar discussion was playing out between those who believe in fighting to change the system peacefully from within, and those (like Keith) who think effective activism necessarily involves working to undermine or smash the system. I believe Paul was trying to transcend the debate, but I was apparently the only one to pick up on it.

When Paul says that his answer to ‘what would you have us do?’ is ‘do what you want; do what you need to, and what you have to, and what you feel is right’, the only thing I think he is missing is: We need to be talking with each other (openly, honestly and often) about what each of us has decided is what we want to do, need to do, have to do, and feel is right, and, more importantly, why we have decided this. Not in the effort to self-justify or to recruit followers or criticize others’ choices, but to raise other possibilities, and to show other ways of responding to the crises we are now facing.

I believe many of us are uncertain about what to do, but convinced we should be doing something. I believe that as our economic, energy and ecological crises grow worse and more frequent, and denial of civilization’s impending and unavoidable collapse becomes increasingly impossible, more and more of us will be giving up on our worldviews and looking for a new set of values and priorities that are aligned better with quickly changing reality.

There will be no solace in “I told you so”. But we may take some comfort in having told the stories of our own journeys from one set of now-untenable beliefs to another, in engaging, revelatory and inviting ways that will enable the many looking for new answers to the question ‘what should we do now’, some more compelling possibilities, some better models to consider.

Like Paul, my answer, for now, to the question of ‘what I want, what I need, what I have to do, what I feel is right’, lies in the activities that Dark Mountain embraces: Creative work (which you will see more of on this blog from now on, including music I’m composing) and the continued chronicling of civilization’s collapse. And also learning and practicing some essential capacities of presence and resilience (what our Transition group has dubbed a “Working Towards Resilience” program), and living every day as joyfully and as full of love as I can (and as much as possible in and near wilderness). If this is giving up, then I’m giving up.

kereru (native species), painting by NZ artist Robyn Forbes, from my own collection

Vera over at Leaving Babylon has written an interesting series of articles on the hazards of planning and on permaculture design. She’s also very good at responding to comments on her blog, which means that some great conversations have evolved in the comments threads. The most recent article on permaculture proposes understanding and emulating nature’s design, and as I was responding to it, it occurred to me that my response pretty well sums up my current thinking on where we are now in the collapse and the sixth great extinction, and what we can do about it. Here is what I wrote:

It seems to me that it is anthropomorphizing to say that nature ‘designs’ or to say that nature even cares. Nature adapts, mostly to other elements of itself. Evolution, which is tautological (it occurs because it works) tries a million random different things every second and those that don’t die produce what we call evolution. It’s all random, as Stephen J Gould showed so starkly and brilliantly in Full House. We can no sooner follow nature’s staggeringly complex lead than transmute ourselves into gargoyles. Human models and constructs are merely complicated, mechanical, temporary and fragile. We cannot and must not count on them.

I read all 1060 pages of the permaculture primer Edible Forest Gardens to learn that permaculture is about spending 20 years studying the pre-catastrophic-agriculture ecology of the place you live, and in the process intervening patiently to introduce and reintroduce native and native-compatible plants in such a way that evolution just might allow them to take hold. It’s the perfect model of how to behave in a complex system (Dave Snowden’s probe-sense-respond strategy). What we call design in such efforts is just hoping that we understand well enough so that a larger proportion of our interventions take hold than if we just planted stuff randomly. The celebrated indigenous permaculture ‘gardens’ of Central America were basically discovered, not designed, and were secreted away so humans couldn’t fuck them up with their design experiments. This works in places where the pre-cat-ag vegetation naturally supports a healthy human diet. It doesn’t work where most humans live now, which is why indigenous migrants to non-tropical-forested places evolved to eat mostly fish and meat and self-limited their numbers to what wild game was sustainably available — small numbers. Until we discovered and tried to replicate cat-ag, which as Jared Diamond has explained turned out to be a very bad idea. The idea that we can ‘do’ permaculture sustainably anywhere is, in my opinion, sheer hubris.

So what to do? If we want to be on nature’s side (assuming she/it has a ‘side’) we should do for ourselves what she is in the process of doing to us — quickly reduce our numbers to sustainable levels (at one point that might have been perhaps 2 billion, but with the damage we’ve done to carrying capacity now might be 1/4 of that), and have those that are left migrate mostly back to areas that support humans with a healthy human diet without cat-ag. We won’t do the former, for religious and cultural reasons and because it is too late to organize to do anything on such a scale even if we were capable of doing something in a coordinated way on such a scale, which we are not. So we’re left to do what we can, which is to do as little harm to the world as we can, love and care and look after each other, learn what will help us deal with the collapse that we have unleashed and might help the survivors begin to create a better way to live (mostly, learning to build and live in community again), and be present, relishing every moment of this amazing and unpredictable experiment called life.

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S COLLAPSE

Morris Berman on the End of the American Dream: A revealing interview with the writer who says America long ago lost its heart, and its way. Thanks to Tulcidious for the link. Excerpts:

Financial bigwigs lead their affluent lives, unaffected, unremorseful, and unindicted for wreaking havoc on the nation. Why? Because they won. They hustled better. They are living the American Dream. This is not the American Dream that says if you work hard you can be more comfortable than your parents; but rather, if you connive well, game the rules, and rule the game, your take from others is unlimited. In this paradigm, human empathy, caring, compassion, and connection have been devalued from the get-go.

The dominant thinking on the left, I suppose, is some variety of a “false consciousness” argument, that the elite have pulled the wool over the eyes of the vast majority of the population, and once the latter realizes that they’ve been had, they’ll rebel, they’ll move the country in a populist or democratic socialist direction. The problem I have with this is the evident fact that most Americans want the American Dream, not a different way of life. Endless material wealth based on individual striving is the American ideal, and the desire to change that paradigm is practically nonexistent. Even the poor buy into this, which is why John Steinbeck once remarked that they regard themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

Here’s what the US lacks: community, friendship, appreciation of beauty, craftsmanship as opposed to obsessive technology, and—despite what you read in the American newspapers—huge graciousness; a large, beating heart. I never found very much of those things in the US; certainly, I never found much heart. American cities and suburbs have to be the most soulless places in the world. America has its priorities upside down.

Let Your Life Be a Counter-Friction to Stop the Machine: A scathing, relentless and articulate 23-minute video by Paul Edwards and Lanny Cotler that chronicles the ruthless and destructive history of the US from the genocide of its indigenous peoples to the imperialist propagandized Orwellian hologram of today. It overstates the degree of power and control of the American financial and political elite, but not its brutality or the effectiveness of its ideological hold over its citizens. The title is a quote from Thoreau on the importance of civil disobedience in the face of tyranny. Thanks to Tree for the link.

Rebuilding from the Bottom Up: Respected (even in the mainstream) economist John Rubino recommends Nicole Foss’ recent Italian interview on the futility of looking for political solutions to our current economic crises. Excerpt:

My solutions, such as they are, are grassroots solutions. We have to build things from the bottom up. Our centralized life support systems will fail over time because they’re critically dependent on tax revenues that won’t be there and cheap energy that won’t be there. These centralized systems won’t be able to deliver the goods and services we’ve come to rely on…

In many parts of the world where people really don’t have any money anyway, their society functions on barter and gifts, working together, exchanging skills. This works as a model. It doesn’t get you a large fancy sophisticated industrial society because it doesn’t scale up that well. But it works very well at a small scale, and this is the kind of structure that we need to rebuild.

Visualizing Debt: A remarkable new infographic illustrates the 3T€ indebtedness of Europe’s five most bankrupt nations. Just so you know, that’s about 1/60th of the total US indebtedness (but no problem there, right?) Thanks to Eric Lilius for the link.

Glaciers, Essential to BC’s ‘Clean’ Hydro Power, Melting Fast: A scientist says glacier melt is accelerating so quickly that BC must start looking for other forms of energy to hydroelectric (hydro dams currently provide 80% of the province’s power). Coal anyone?

LIVING BETTER

Peer-to-Peer Gaining Strength: A new article from Simone Cicero explains the Peer Production model (illustrated above) in lay terms. This is the cooperative approach to business formation and operation I recommend in my book Finding the Sweet Spot. It is consistent with many of the changes we are going to have to make to the way we live and the way we make a living: greater collaboration, better identification of real human needs and co-designing and co-development of products and services to meet those needs, transition to a Gift Economy and the end of private intellectual property and manufactured scarcity. Thanks to Michael Bauwens for the link.

Stationary Bicycles as a Power Source: In Mayan Guatemala, they’ve brought this obvious, inexpensive alternative energy source to an art form. Thanks to Tree for the link.

Essential Capacities for Effective Group Participation: Gotta love Blurb, which provides a lovely intuitive feel to reading books online. One of the latest books on their site is “The Lotus”, which outlines nine essential capacities for groups to engender. Thanks to Venessa Miemis for the link. This is a great list:

• Being present
• Suspension and letting go
• Shared purpose and intention
• Compassion
• Whole system awareness
• Self-awareness
• Using personal influence (uncoercively)
• Humour
• Dealing with complexity, paradox, conflict and uncertainty

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Fascinating NYT interactive infographic shows how much citizens in different parts of the US depend on various forms of government assistance; of course this does not show the huge subsidies and bailouts given to corporations

Santorum Supports Fracking, Calls Environmentalism Terrorism: It’s hard to believe many Americans want this nut-job to be president. The religious fanatic comes out in favour of unregulated fracking and says all environmentalists are radical extremists with a terrorist agenda.

How the Anti-Science Lobby Works: An insider’s leaked documents from the Koch Brothers’ Heartland Institute show how Big Oil and Big Coal generate and fund propaganda campaigns to block climate change regulations and spread misinformation. Thanks to Ivor Tymchak for the link.

Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs: Just in case you haven’t already read this insider’s summation of soulless corporatist culture.

Tar Sands Watch:

• Against Pipelines: A remarkable two-part interview with the hereditary chief of a BC First Nations group explaining the farce of “environmental impact” and “First Nations impact” studies and “consultations”, the incredible risks First Nations people undertake to try to protect their land from ruinous development, and how the colonial “Indian Band Council” system is exploited by corporations and governments to push through phony treaties, bribe, coerce and demoralize resistance to the rubber-stamp approval of corporate development proposals.
• Engineer says Tar Sands EROI is uneconomic without huge government (taxpayer) subsidies
• Oil exec’s son testifies that pipeline and tar sands are reckless, unsustainable, and ruinous (thanks to Sharon Goldberg for the link and the one that follows)
• First Nations leader explains the dangers of coastal tankers on BC shores, and the deceitful, bullying tactics of the pipeline corporations

Government Policies Killing BC’s Forests: These clowns can’t manage anything, and they’re totally in the back pockets of the forest industry. Should be called the “forest elimination industry”.

Invisible Children/Kony 2012 Group Unmasked: One thing the people of central Africa suffering from brutal despots and child-kidnapping warlords didn’t need is a slick well-financed holier-than-thou right-wing religious fanatic group using opposition to the warlords as a vehicle for fund-raising and propaganda for “revolutionary” religious causes, including support for an African death-to-gays crusade. Watch the brilliant Charlie Brooker video at the end of the post, which sums it up perfectly.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

translation guide by Fraser McAlpine for BBC America; thanks to Dawn Smith for the link

Somebody That I Used to Know: Evidence of what can be done by artists without any corporate intermediaries and without spending megabucks. Watch these three videos in this order:

1. Pop song Somebody That I Used to Know by Gotye and Kimbra. Starts kinda slow but music gets interesting later and the video is clever.
2. Now watch this even cleverer cover version by Toronto indy group Walk Off the Earth. Note the number of views. Good harmonies too. (Thanks to Michele Hull for the link) (Bonus: WOTE guitarist Gianni Luminati’s amazing virtuoso solo performance)
3. Finally, watch this take-off on the cover version. Fall-down funny.

Non-Errors: A list of supposed grammatical and word-use ‘errors’ that actually aren’t — at least not anymore.

Are You an Asker or a Guesser?: This has been around awhile, but if you haven’t read it you should: Knowing which is your style, and the style of others in your circles, could save you a lot of grief and misunderstanding. Thanks to Tree for the link.

Neil Young’s Cortez Redux: If you’re a Neil Young fan, check out this 37-minute jam with Crazy Horse built around the song Cortez the Killer.

Twisty Takes on the Anti-Abortion Extremists: A hilarious review in I Blame the Patriarchy of a frightening trend: Criminal regulations designed to coerce and humiliate women into ‘rethinking’ their abortion decisions. She’s such a great writer. Thanks to Liz Henry for the link.

Shit Salt Spring Islanders Say: Also what Bowen Islanders, and most Cascadians who frequent offshore areas, say. Priceless.

Rick Mercer Spoofs Stephen Harper’s Anti-Science Agenda: PMO Scientist Pest Control

For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage: Interesting review of what this says about 21st century American culture and the ever-growing class divide.

The Unnaturalness of Monogamy: Chris Ryan, co-author of Sex at Dawn, explains why monogamy has only recently become an accepted norm in the human animal, and why it is so unnatural and biologically doesn’t work. Thanks to Cheryl Long for the link.

Vancouver in the 1950s and 1960s: An amazing online collection of the photographs of Fred Herzog, an immigrant who came to Vancouver in the middle of the last century and photographed what he saw.

THOUGHTS FOR THE MONTH

From the Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity:

Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money, then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present, the result being that he does not live in the present or the future. He lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.

From Sam Rose:

This is where 30 years of political apathy lands us: we get to re-fight the battles and wars that were at least in part won 40 years ago. Everything from your right to clean water, your right to peacefully assemble, your right to organize and collective bargain with an employer, your right to privacy, your right to link to a goddamn website, and your right to decide what to you do with your body are now in question.

From Brian Leli’s Where the Time Goes (thanks to Brian Kerr for the link, and the one that follows):

Life is a place where I am doing time. Nothing more and nothing less. I just want to get on with it and keep getting on with it until my parts break and I am unable to. The way I see it, all the hours and days are going onto a list somewhere. And I take pride in mine. When I reach its end, I want running down it to be like running the Boston marathon. To trudge through line after line of canceled television show, dreary bar, beach vacations and phone conversations would destroy me; then as well as now.

A blank page and a stopwatch. That’s all we get. Until we don’t. What we dreamt of doing doesn’t mean a damn thing.

From Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire:

This is the last age of the world, for we are come as far now as we may along our path from what is natural. We herd and pen the beast that’s born to roam. In huts we cling like snailshells to the fenland that it is in our great-fathers’ way to stride across and then pass by. We cook the blood from out the earth and let it scab to crowns and daggers; pound our straight track through the crooked fields and trade with black-skins. Soon, the oceans rise and take us. Soon, the crashing of the stars.

image from FlaSunshine on Flickriver

One of the lessons of Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan is that the events that have caused the greatest changes (and collectively most of the substantive change) to our civilization and our way of life were completely unexpected, unpredictable “black swan” events. His new book argues that rather than trying to plan and prepare for a future we can’t predict, we should do things that improve our resilience, and create systems that are “anti-fragile”. Unlike most fragile, complicated human-made systems, “anti-fragile” systems (such as evolution and other complex natural systems) actively adapt to, learn from and benefit from upheaval and dramatic change.

I have often said that that 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, and then navigate them.

So now I am sitting down with a small group of colleagues here on Bowen Island, starting to think about creating what the Transition Movement calls an “energy descent” plan for our island, and wondering how we can hope to plan for the unpredictable, unforeseeable, and unimaginable future we face.

I’ve been part of several scenario planning and simulation exercises over the years, and studied them extensively, and what stands out for me from these exercises are five systemic human predilections that render the product of such exercises more or less useless:

1. Believing the future is predictable: What actually happens turns out to be well outside any and all the scenario ranges that were planned for (not “better” or “worse” than the scenarios, but utterly different in unforeseen ways).
2. Believing the future will continue and accelerate current trends: We have an irresistible tendency to predict that the future will be much like the present only much more so (the “Jetsons syndrome”).
3. Believing change will come soon but overall will be modest: We tend of overestimate the speed of change in the short run and underestimate the full extent of change over the longer term.
4. Believing we can prevent, mitigate and otherwise control future events: We tend to wildly overestimate the degree of control we (including our ‘leaders’) have over the changes (political, economic, social, behavioural, ecological, educational, medical, scientific, even technological) that sweep over us. No one is in control.
5. Believing that centralization works: We tend to believe, irrationally and in the face of their record of colossal and continued failure, that centralization and unification will make things better, when it only makes them less agile, less democratic and more vulnerable. Even now the Wilber cult is calling for a “World Federation” that mirrors Cheney’s “New World Order” (and, fortunately, is just as unachievable).

I’m not surprised, therefore, that several of my Transition colleagues are skeptical of the value of a long-term Transition and Resilience Plan for our island. How can we possibly plan for a future we can’t begin to predict, that we have no control over, that we probably can’t even imagine?

Despite the cleverness of Taleb’s insights on ‘anti-fragile’ systems, they’re not very useful: Humans can’t create complex ‘anti-fragile’ systems. It’s taken nature billions of years to evolve them, and even then there have been at least five major extinction events that wiped out most of the life on the planet. We only just realized after several millennia that we have precipitated the sixth, and we are utterly clueless on what to do about it (and don’t get me started on geoengineering, the latest control fantasy by the people who brought you GMOs).

The only thing we can say for sure is we won’t be able to live as we do today. Since we can’s and won’t know how or when the coming economic, energy and ecological crises will unfold, and there’s no evidence that we can prevent, significantly mitigate, or long forestall these crises, what if anything can we do now to prepare for the unimaginable?

In the process of developing Collapse: The Game, I’ve been playing with various scenarios and mapping how various economic, energy and ecological crises (at least insofar as I can imagine them) might affect the various aspects and systems of human life — governance, food & water, energy, health/well-being, learning, transportation, communication, building, security, livelihoods, recreation, arts & crafts, science/technology/innovation, and ecology. The game simulates how, in a relocalized world, we would invest in new personal and community learning and capacity building, local resources, and community infrastructure, to anticipate and cope with various crises ranging from currency collapse and the end of cheap energy to pandemics and refugee crises.

For anyone who’s kept up with their Transition and Collapsnik reading (see the links under ‘Post-Civ Writers’ in the right sidebar), these scenarios have been sketched out at length in both fictional and non-fictional accounts. But although it’s clear that some of these crises are likely to occur, how and when they will occur is unknowable, nor is how they will manifest themselves at the local and national level, nor how the complex interrelationship between all of our systems will compound or mitigate their effects. It’s your guess against mine, and the debate is fruitless, since we’re all going to be mostly wrong.

So lately I’ve been thinking: Rather than trying to lay out specific ‘forecast’ scenarios for the future, would it be more useful to develop an illustrative story that would convey a sense of the degree of change to our lives that we might face in the future? That way we might get a visceral sense of how much our lives will (have to) change, and begin to think about, in general, what might we do to enable us, when changes of this magnitude occur, whatever they be, to be more ready for them than we are now?

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about; it’s a story about how I could envision some of the people currently living on Bowen Island might be affected by the types of economic, energy and ecological crises the Transition Movement and Collapsnik writers (including me) have been speculating we could face:

The biggest impact of the economic crisis on Bowen Islanders was psychological — the shame of losing jobs (as half of us did), the pain and dread of seeing a lifetime of savings disappear along with the prospect for retirement, the awkwardness of retired Islanders coming out of retirement after admitting their pensions and retirement savings were gone, the terror of foreclosure on homes as house values plunged far below the mortgages on them. The levels of stress, anguish and fear were palpable and many of us were badly scarred by the Great Deflation — we mostly tried to heal ourselves, or each other, using whatever therapies we could draw upon, though quite a few unfortunately took it out on family, friends and neighbours.

A lot of Islanders quietly moved — off-island to live with family or friends, or in with relatives or housemates. Most homes had multiple families living in them, in makeshift separate suites or improvised co-op arrangements. Homeowners took in boarders to make monthly payments, and renters took in sub-tenants. The poverty was subtle but apparent — the sudden appearance of homeless people on the island, in the woods and parks, the number of people asking for money by the ferry, people knocking on doors asking if they could do odd jobs, and asking if they could quietly tent in the back yard “until they got back on their feet”, many trees illegally cut for firewood. When the currency collapsed, Bowen Bucks became a real currency, though a Gift Economy largely prevailed, with people doing things for others, and giving ‘loans’ as they could afford, with the knowledge they would probably never be repaid. When you know everyone in the community, you do what you can.

The shame drove quite a few “breadwinners” to suicide, and the stress and poverty caused addiction and theft rates, and physical and psychological illness rates, to soar. Government cutbacks meant almost all civil service workers were unemployed, and cutbacks in health and education meant Islanders focused more attention on illness/accident prevention, self-diagnosed and self-treated many illnesses, home-schooled or unschooled their kids, and focused on palliative/hospice care rather than life prolonging in old age.

Energy rationing meant the end of daily car commutes to Vancouver, so those still working organized bus-pools. Ferry service was cut by three fourths and doubled in price, so the Cove was filled with “pitherers” — people, many on bicycles, offering to run errands or pick up supplies on the mainland for a fee or a return service. Because the Island is so hilly, bicycles were a challenge for many, so in addition to impromptu taxis and buses, organized by Internet, there was a black market for gasoline (and much gas siphoned at night from those without garages); there were even a few horses pressed into service. The Internet, a major energy user, was a shadow of its former self; streaming and file-sharing were gone, but basic communication services were still affordable and maintained. Cell phones were for emergencies only.

Thermostats were regulated by BC Hydro and energy audits became mandatory; up to the ration maximum, energy prices were subsidized to keep heating and lighting affordable. Some Islanders, to save money, kept their thermostats at 60F and wore coats indoors. Many others installed personal solar and wind energy generators, and a wind farm on Mount Collins was being studied. The high cost of energy had a huge impact on food costs, and almost all available growing space on Bowen was now being used for gardening; canning bees had become the most popular social events on the island. As endless avian flu outbreaks had made poultry farming uneconomic, many Islanders had gone vegetarian or vegan, as had most of the Island restaurants.

Climate change had had little direct impact on Bowen, but the indirect effects were extensive. The horrific US droughts led to political animosity over sale of so much Canadian water to Americans, using the abandoned Tar Sands pipelines, and almost led to war. Canada’s vast reserves were dwindling quickly. But the biggest climate impact was the arrival of thousands of boat people on our shores, climate change and economic refugees from dozens of countries devastated by drought, storms, soil exhaustion, civil war, famine, and desperation-induced despotism. Islanders were split between those wanting them expelled to almost certain death (the refugee internment camps were closed when the sheer flood of people overwhelmed them), and those wanting to take them in even as levels of hardship of our own people increased. A surge in Bowen’s murder rate was attributed by some to “criminal illegals” but was mostly due to increased stresses between long-time locals and over-zealous protection of private property by angry xenophobes.

So the idea would be that, rather than thinking about the need for each of us to learn technical skills such as how to grow our own food (or perhaps move somewhere where growing food is possible year-round), stories like this, customized to the unique circumstances of each community, would prompt people to start to think in general terms about preparing for major change, and asking broad questions about change resilience and change capacities such as:

1. Building Community:
   • How can we start to create a local ‘community’ capable of self-organizing and doing things competently, collaboratively and autonomously?
   • To start with, how can we get to know our neighbours and their skills and needs, at least well enough to know whether, if/when we have to create a true community with them, we’ll be able to (and even know whether this is the neighbourhood we want to be in if/when that happens)?
   • Who is our ‘community’, anyway (especially if it’s embedded within a big city with no coherent boundaries), and how cohesive could it be if it had to become much more collaborative and autonomous?
   • What’s the right size for organizing a community — big enough to have a good mix of skills and capacities, but small enough to be manageable?
2. Reducing Our Dependence on Centralized Systems:
   • How can we become less dependent on the current systems – government, corporate (employment), financial, health, education, food, energy, transportation, communication, clothing and equipment manufacturing, construction, entertainment and recreation, police and justice etc. – especially those that are currently highly centralized, vulnerable or far-away?
   • To start with, how can we as a community learn more about how these systems work, so if/when we need to recreate them locally (if the established large-scale systems fail), we’ll be able to do so?
   • And at the same time, how can we find out more about the community we now live in — its resources, where it gets its food and energy from, who has what skills etc. — to appreciate how well our community will fare if it has to rely much more on its own resources?
3. Increasing Our Self-Sufficiency:
   • How can we become more self-sufficient as individuals and as a community, less reliant on travel to/from, and purchase and sale of goods and services from/to other communities?
   • To start with, how much of what we buy and sell now (our goods, services and labour) is currently, or could be if necessary, sourced and used right in our community?
4. Increasing Collaboration and Sharing:
   • How can we, through careful buying, maintenance and sharing, learn as individuals and as a community to buy less and waste less?
   • How can we come to accept that we probably won’t like everyone in our relocalized communities, appreciate and get along with those we don’t, and learn to resolve conflicts and reach consensus amicably?
   • How can we learn and practice doing things (from cooking to mentoring our community’s children to fixing our houses) more collaboratively in our “do it yourself” culture?
5. Psychological Preparedness and Resilience:
   • How can we learn, as individuals and as a community, to cope better with whatever crisis may come our way; and to deal effectively with panic and with ideological differences?
   • How can we become better prepared psychologically to deal with change and adversity, and the negative emotions it can stir in us?
   • To the extent we are already intuitively aware of coming threats and crises, and how they might affect us and our children and grandchildren, how can we learn to accept and deal honestly and effectively now with this awareness, and the grief and anger and fear it brings?
   • How do we talk honestly with each other now about all of this as a community, and move past denial and procrastination when talking with loved ones and/or neighbours?
   • How do we become more self-aware and self-knowledgeable so we really become conscious of how we feel now, and how we might handle the stress of events to come and the changes they will require?

I believe it’s far more important for us to start answering these questions than to start learning about permaculture or solar panels. In fact, I think answering these questions will lead to a shared appreciation of what technical skills we will need, as a community, to acquire (we don’t all have to be technically expert at doing everything), and when we’d be wise to start learning and implementing these skills and this knowledge.

I’ve met quite a few people who live in co-housing, and they have, in the process of establishing themselves as true communities, broached and answered the questions in points 1-4 above. It wasn’t easy for them, and I believe that, in the process, they’ve moved far ahead of most of the rest of us in their level of preparedness and resilience for future economic, energy and ecological crises.

When I started to develop the outline for the Bowen Island Transition and Resilience Plan, I expected it to have a current state analysis, and a whole spectrum of future scenarios, followed by a timeline with specific action plans to achieve food security, post-descent energy self-sufficiency, our own currency, wellness and learning capacities and facilities, electric powered transport, green building, and so on.

I still think these are admirable goals, but I am coming to believe that trying to map a course from where we are now to that future is like trying to strategize how to win a yacht race to a specific destination without knowing either the course or the possible weather. When it comes to our civilization’s future we cannot know the course, and all we know about the weather is that it will be stormy.

Best then to focus on our preparedness for whatever we might face, the resilience, capacity and cohesion of our crew, and our readiness to act, in the moment, whatever comes, and to imagine and navigate ways around the obstacles as they present themselves. And fare forward.

forms of activism, adapted from the book Deep Green Resistance

There is a period in most relationships when one or more of the members knows in their heart that the relationship is not sustainable and something very difficult must be done, but they aren’t yet ready to do it. Most likely they are hoping that someone else will acknowledge it as well, and maybe even do it for them, save them the trouble. This period of awkwardness, tension, partial denial, suffering and unspoken grief, can last a long time.

I think we, the human species, in our astonishing relationship with each other, in this contract we call “civilization”, are now in such a period, and we have been for some time. We don’t want to give up on the relationship — it has given us a lot, we are used to it, and we can make ourselves believe it still has promise, that what is broken can be mended, but in our hearts we know it cannot. It is time to give up on it, to let it go; time to say goodbye.

There is evidence that many, perhaps most, previous civilizations (like the Anasazi) ended when they ceased to be able to provide what was needed and valued by their citizens, who then simply walked away from them, and returned to simpler ‘uncivilized’ ways of living. That’s not to say ‘walking away’ was easy — it must have been excruciating and terrifying to give up on the wealth of such civilizations, and to learn to become self-sufficient again, no longer dependent on the systems of the culture, the only way of living they had ever known. Only those with the knowledge, capacities and social networks to create a new way of life from scratch in the resource-depleted environs of the old civilization would have been able to make the transition; the rest would die trying. Not surprising then that so many still cling to the romantic dream of escaping to some other planet where, somehow, the failings and limits of our civilization would not apply, where the empire would expand forever.

Many of those who have moved beyond the first denial (that our industrial growth culture cannot continue the way it currently operates) and then beyond the second denial (that this culture cannot be ‘saved’, and that it will collapse no matter what we do), have started to think about what is needed now.

There are I think three main schools of thought on what we should do now:

1. We should do what we can to enjoy life for what it is now, and work peacefully to reduce our personal contribution to the damage and to reduce the current suffering of others during the collapse (a responsible pacifist approach),
2. We should work to try to reform the existing systems through non-violent social, political and economic means to make them less destructive and reduce the suffering they cause (a reformist approach), and
3. We should work aggressively to undermine and dismantle civilization now, even if this requires the use of force and violence, to minimize the total damage and suffering it will cause and hence make it easier for the survivors (a resistance approach).

These approaches are not mutually exclusive, but each requires a significant commitment of time and energy, so pursuing more than one diligently is difficult. All three approaches require the learning or re-learning of skills, knowledge and capacities to live more lightly on the land, increase our local self-sufficiency and reduce our dependence on our culture’s rapacious and teetering industrial growth systems. In our terribly busy modern lives, few have the time, the opportunity and the dedication to do more than pay lip service to this re-learning need. For most, it’s one more important-not-urgent “should” that never gets to the top of our “to do” lists.

And therein lies the challenge. Most of us are not ready to do what we think we “should” do to relearn essential skills and be responsible pacifists, reformists or resisters.

The reasons we are not ready are:

1. Too busy: We are too busy looking after the needs of the moment (ours and our loved ones’), after which we are too exhausted to do anything else (except reward ourselves with easy, fun activities, and recharge for tomorrow’s work and struggle — Pollard’s Law);
2. Hopeful it won’t actually be needed: We are (and this is human nature) hopeful that perhaps it isn’t as bad as we thought and something or someone will come along to make all this effort unnecessary;
3. Afraid of the risks: We are afraid of being wrong, or ridiculed, or ostracized, or hurt, or arrested or worse, if we try to be reformists or resisters (“can’t you ever say anything positive; I don’t want to hear about bad things I can’t change”);
4. Doubtful of its effectiveness: We are pessimistic that our efforts at reform or resistance will actually achieve any real, sustained results (“we though having a Democrat in the White House would change everything”);
5. Afraid to know how bad it really is: We are afraid of not being able to handle knowing the truth of how awful things really are if we become front-line reformers or resisters (“I visited a factory farm and now I’m a basket case — we have to change this, but we can’t”);
6. Too dependent on existing systems: We and our loved ones are so enmeshed in the existing systems that even tiny responsible pacifist actions seem impossibly difficult (“the other kids are all going to McDonalds after the game; can you drive some of us?”).

The current debate in the Occupy movement is instructive in this regard. Some pacifists have vilified the so-called “black bloc” (masked demonstrators who make media displays of seemingly mindless destruction of public and private property). The truth is that many of these “black bloc” people are undercover police and security plants staging these displays to justify police brutality and discredit the Occupy movement. And some are (not surprisingly) just angry young people filled with anomie and hopelessness. (None of them are “anarchists” in any sense of the word, and journalists of all stripes using this vacuous, inflammatory label are irresponsible.) Many in the Occupy movement are now attempting to re-brand it as a pacifist, non-violent movement that will as a matter of principle never use force or violence in pursuit of its goal to reduce inequality of wealth and power (and the abuses that inequality brings with it) in our society.

But as Derrick Jensen and others in the resistance movement have made clear, taking the use of force or violence off the table weakens the movement and emboldens its opponents to continue their abuses. Here’s a partial transcript of a section (49:30 through 1:02:00) of the new movie End:Civ based on Jensen’s books Endgame and Deep Green Resistance:

Civilization is going to crash, whether or not we help bring this about. This crash will be messy. Since industrial civilization is systematically dismantling the ecological infrastructure of the planet, the sooner civilization comes down, whether or not we help it crash, the more life will remain afterwards to support both human and non-humans.

I did some talks around the possibility of fighting back. If it was an audience made up of mostly environmentalists and peace and social justice activists, often they would put up what I’ve taken to calling The Gandhi Shield: They would say the names Martin Luther King, Dalai Lama and Gandhi again and again as fast as they can to keep all thoughts [of using force or violence] at bay.

Pacifists and non-violence activists have had a defining and even a censoring role in determining what other people’s participation can be, in a whole range of social struggles that has made it very much easier for the state to control those social struggles. Non-violence has debilitated social struggles, taken out their teeth, rendered them harmless.

We’ve got a couple of myths on the Left we have to get over. The first is that social change happens by moral suasion. It doesn’t. It happens by force. The problem with persuasion as a strategy is that it only works on people who can be relied upon to act from their position after their minds have been changed. The problem is that we’re not dealing with individuals who can be convinced or persuaded. We’re dealing mostly with large abstract social organizations and corporations which are basically sociopaths. You can’t argue with sociopaths, with those who are benefiting from the economic system. You have to stop them through some form of force, violent or non-violent.

The left subconsciously has as its goal to make resistance harmless. States have recognized that resistance will never disappear and in the past they tried repressing struggles the first time they arose. That proved ineffective. So now states rule by accepting the inevitability of conflict and resistance and trying to ‘manage’ it permanently.

Social movements in North America are locked into this pacifist doctrine that is imposed by the middle-class reformists who want to control the movement and dictate how it conducts itself.

Advocates of non-violence frequently say that non-violence works [best] and the principal examples they use of that are Gandhi and Martin Luther King. This constitutes a great historical whitewashing. The resistance in India was diverse and by no means pacifist in its entirety. Gandhi gets used as a way to shut down conversation. His name is used to discredit anything that isn’t a peaceful means of resistance. In India Gandhi is not deified and many there despised him as a collaborator. Gandhi got negotiating power from the British because there were other elements in the Indian struggle that were far more threatening to British dominance, so the British chose to dialogue with Gandhi, someone they could work with. They knew revolution was coming and they wanted to blunt it as best as they could. As a result of Gandhi’s influence, India went from being a colony to a neo-colony. The British were still able to maintain their influence.

My problem isn’t with people doing non-violent actions. We need it all. My problem is that so many pacifists don’t support more radical or militant work. You can’t assume that people who are using radical means of resistance haven’t thought about what they are doing. When some people decide their marches aren’t enough, those that toe the Gandhi line tend to believe they just aren’t thinking about it. [They are just as capable of critical thinking as pacifists.]

What most states try to do in these circumstances is define the elements of the opposing movement that are most easy to control and co-opt, and negotiate with and hand over some power to them in order to continue the existing system [and alienate more radical elements].

The same thing the states did with Gandhi and King they have done with the environmental movement. They’ve invited moderate elements [Greenpeace et al] into inquiries and government commissions and debates, and recognized them as the ‘legitimate’ leaders of the movement. They don’t want the movement to adopt more militant resistance tactics [which they label as "terrorism" and ruthlessly repress]. The powerful do not ever give up without a struggle, said Frederick Douglass. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will.

The things that so-called solutions to global warming all have in common is that they take industrial civilization as a given and the natural world as the dependent variable. It’s all about saving civilization. That’s entirely backwards. What it should be is: We need to do whatever it takes to save life on the planet. In the next 40-50 years we’re going to see the extinction of more species than we’ve seen in the past 65 million years. We have to do today the things we would be proud to tell our descendants about.

If we are serious about saving life on Earth, we’ve got to start fighting back. The big problem is power, something liberals have trouble wrapping their heads around. This culture has clearly-defined hierarchies, those with power and those who benefit from power and benefit from destroying the planet and exploiting other people. They’ve been doing that for a long time. Power is more important to them than anything else.

There is no personal consumer choice that is going to dismantle the systems of power that are behind the destruction of our planet. The politicians are servants of the system. It’s their job to keep it going, to keep the profits rolling in for the ruling class. They will never act in the people’s interest or the interest of the planet. It doesn’t matter what we say. The only thing they will respond to is force and the threat of disruption. And if we allow them to stay in power they will always take back any temporary advantage we get from them.

He is right, I think. But rather than being moved to join him, to become a resister, or at least someone who works with and supports resisters, I am left feeling torn, angry, helpless and perhaps a bit ashamed that I’m not ready to do so.

And until this internal struggle between those on the left, between responsible pacifists and reformists on the one hand, who refuse to sanction the use of force or violence, and resisters on the other, who dismiss pacifism and reform as useless and co-opted, we won’t even be able to agree on what’s needed and how to make it happen. Let alone be ready psychologically to do it.

If we really want to be ready to do what’s needed we have to get rid of each of the six impediments to action listed in green above. We are urged by our fellow responsible pacifists, reformists and resisters to do things like the following:

1. Too busy? Free up time for what’s important (by living simpler).
2. Hopeful it won’t actually be needed? Move beyond hope for ‘salvation’ of the way we now live.
3. Afraid of the risks? Overcome the fear of danger or retribution for doing what we know is right and what is needed.
4. Doubtful of its effectiveness? Persevere and keep fighting and believe we can win, and keep winning.
5. Afraid to know how bad it really is? Help each other find the courage to face and cope with hard truths.
6. Too dependent on existing systems? Create and embody compelling alternative models of less dependent ways to live.

Easy to say. If it were easy to do we would all be doing it. As I get older I’m learning that, rather than glibly prescribe answers like the six above, it makes more sense, if we really want to bring about change, to try to understand why things are the way they are (that’s the Corollary to Pollard’s Law). To ask someone to overcome, through sheer force of will, any of the six obstacles to readiness listed above, is, I think, asking the nearly impossible. It’s asking people to be who they are not.

I have had the good fortune to be able to retire with a (until financial markets collapse anyway) reasonable pension, so I’m no longer too busy to do what’s needed. I have learned enough (also through good fortune) to be able to move past the first and second denial, so I’m no longer hopeful that radical change won’t be needed. And because I live alone and can pretty much decide what I want to do each day, I’m no longer so heavily dependent on the existing systems I’m ill-disposed to undermine them.

Still, for reasons 3, 4 and 5, I am not ready to do what’s needed. Worse, I am increasingly tempted to give up on all attempts to become a reformist or resister, because being a responsible pacifist is just being who I am. I have never been a fighter, never been one to persevere or exhibit courage (in fact I am one of the most fearful people I know). And I suspect I’m in very good company in this.

So while I can agree with Derrick Jensen on what is needed, and how, and want to help somehow, I’m just not ready to do it, and I may never be. Derrick keeps saying that most people will never be deep-green resisters, but I get the sense he thinks that’s because their ignorance or ideology gets in the way. For most of us, I think, it’s just not in our nature. That may be a tragedy for the Earth, but it’s an honest reason, and part of the reason, I think, why things have become as bad, and hopeless, as they have. It explains why the corporatists have met so little resistance even as knowledge of their destruction has grown, and why the right wing, which lacks the pacifist sensitivities of the left and has no qualms about killing or smearing those who don’t agree with them, have held power disproportionate to their numbers for decades.

I’m weary of feeling bad about my inaction, my unreadiness to do what’s needed. Many of us know what should be done now, and the risks and sacrifices that will entail, but for some combination of the six reasons above, are not doing it, and won’t, probably, until it is too late. I acknowledge and applaud and thank those who are not held back by these six very human ‘excuses’, who are activists — either reformists or resistance fighters — doing what must be done, what I should be doing. Doing what we all should be doing, but aren’t ready to.

Back in December I posted the first draft of a new collaborative/cooperative game I have been designing for use in community-building, transition planning and resilience-building. I am pleased to present a second, more refined, somewhat simplified, and more complete draft. You can download the entire 30-page game package (rules, tables, community ‘story’, crisis descriptions, game boards and one of the two 128-card decks) in PDF form here. Following are the updated rules and some of the graphics from the PDF:

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Community Map for Collapse! The Game, showing the 12 ‘Aspects’ of resilient community. Players (community members) take on roles, and ‘invest’ time and energy in different types of Infrastructure (brick wall icon), Resources (leaf icon), Specialized Competencies (person-with-wrench icon) and Generalist Competencies (person-operating-machine icon). These investments determine how well their community copes with a variety of crises encountered during the game.

Purpose of the Game: To enable those concerned about coping with emerging economic, energy and ecological crises to learn about and practice, through game simulation, building resilient and sustainable communities.

Game Objective: The players work cooperatively to build a new self-sufficient, resilient community, and prepare for and deal with various 21st century crises as they impact the community. The effectiveness of their efforts is reflected by changes in the community’s Well-Being Index (WBI). The game continues until the WBI either falls below the ‘unsustainable’ threshold (game is lost) or rises above the ‘exemplary’ threshold (game is won).

Equipment:

• The Community Story: This is the background story behind the creation of your community. This reflects the culture of the community, what led it to be created, and the particular advantages and vulnerabilities of the specific place where the community is located. A generic story is provided, but players are encouraged to modify the generic story to better suit the situation of the particular place where they live.
• Community Map: This map shows the 12 Aspects (food security, energy self-sufficiency etc.) of an effective community (see illustration), and tracks the ‘investment’ of members of the community in (a) infrastructure, (b) resources and (c) acquired competencies, relevant to each Aspect.
• Well-Being Index: The index (WBI – see illustration) is initially set to a score of approximately 60 (‘satisfactory’). Events, activities, investments and crises all affect the WBI. The lowest WBI levels shown on the index is 30 (‘unsustainable’); the highest level is 90 (‘exemplary’).
• Community Vulnerabilities Matrix and 22 Crisis Tokens: This matrix (see illustration) shows the probability (horizontal axis) and potential severity (vertical axis) of 11 different types of crisis that can affect the community. Each crisis has both a ‘mild’ version (low severity high probability, crises A1 through K1) and a ‘severe’ version (high severity low probability, crises A2 through K2). A suggested starting position for each of the 22 crisis tokens is provided, but players are welcome to modify these starting positions to better reflect actual vulnerabilities in their community. The position of crisis tokens on the matrix is affected by various event cards that are drawn during the game; some events will push a crisis ‘over the edge’ at which point players must deal with it as a crisis occurring in the community in real time.
• Crisis Descriptions: A description of each version of each of the 11 crises is provided, but players are welcome to amend the descriptions to better reflect the situation in their specific community. These descriptions are used to assess the impact of an occurring crisis on each Aspect of the community, and to provide a context for the Strategy Discussion among players on how to address the crisis. Note that crises are not independent — increases and decreases in risks of some crises will automatically increase or decrease the risks of other crises.
• Investment Cards: Infrastructure, Resource and Specialized Competency Cards: 36 cards of each of three types (Infrastructure, denoted by a brick wall icon; Resources, denoted by a leaf icon, and Specialized Competencies, denoted by a person-with-wrench icon) identify alternative investments that can be made in specific Aspects of the community. An additional 20 cards (denoted by a person-operating-machine icon) describe Generalist Competencies that can be useful in any of the 12 Aspects of the community. Players must decide collaboratively which of these to invest in, which involves risk and personal preference trade-offs.
• Investment Tokens: 40 small tokens of each colours, used to mark which Aspects of community the members’ investments in infrastructure, resources and competencies pertain to.
• Role Sheets: A piece of paper for each player to record their selected Role(s) in the community, the Aspect corresponding to each Role, and decisions on which Aspects of community the player’s Generalist Competencies are focused on.
• Event Cards: 120 cards describe various events that are drawn at random and which govern the progress of the game. Some events are beneficial; others are not, and increase the risk of crises occurring. Some events are personal (e.g. they may entail a player losing his/her competencies, or acquiring sudden wealth that can be invested strategically in the community). The event cards include 10 ‘Black Swan’ event cards; suggested ‘Black Swan’ events are provided on these cards, but players are welcome, before the start of the game, to secretly write their own alternative ‘Black Swan’ events which, if these cards are drawn, override the default suggested events. The drawing of an event card represents the passing of 3 months of time in the life of the community.
• Investment Options Master List: This chart shows all 128 Investment Cards, by type, with the Aspect each pertains to. These are listed numerically by Aspect. This List also shows the Role that pertains to each Aspect.
• Crisis Impacts Table: Shows the impact of each version of each of the 11 crises on each of the 12 Aspects of the community (see illustration), and the interrelationship of the Crises. This table is used by the community in assessing its vulnerabilities and deciding what investments of infrastructure, resources and competencies to make in each Aspect.

Community Vulnerabilities Matrix and Well-Being Index (WBI) Tracker for Collapse! The Game. Event cards affect the likelihood of occurrence and the severity of various economic, energy and ecological crises. When a crisis moves into the red area, it becomes a reality and the community’s investments, and their collective capacity to address the crisis strategically in the moment, determine whether the WBI for the community rises to the ‘exemplary’ level (a collective win) or falls to the ‘unsustainable’ level (a collective loss).

Play: (Note: The game is designed optimally for 4-6 players)

1. Set-up: The players read out, and if desired, amend the Community Story to suit their local community’s situation.
2. Each player can choose to write one alternative, secret Black Swan event, containing the same information as the Black Swan cards in the deck. They assign it a number from 1 to 10, also secretly. If that Black Swan card is drawn in play, they announce the replacement Black Swan event they have written. (If two players have written a replacement for the same Black Swan event, the event written by the player who is next to draw an event card prevails).
3. Each player, starting with the youngest, chooses 1-2 community Roles, each of which corresponds to one of the Aspects of the community; these are listed on the Investment Options Master List, and note these on their Role Sheet. Players filling Roles are expected to take leadership to ensure the Aspect(s) that correspond to their Role(s) are appropriately invested in, so the community can cope with crises as they occur.
4. The 128 Investment (Infrastructure, Resource and Competency) cards are shuffled together. Ninety of them are dealt at random to the players, who turn them over so all players can read them. In turn, each player, in consultation with the group, discards one of their cards until only 65 cards remain. Investment Tokens are each placed on one of the 48 icons of the Community Map (corresponding to the Aspect the investment relates to and the type of Investment). Players holding Generalist Competency cards must choose and write down on their Role Sheet which TWO Aspects they elect to apply those Generalist Competencies to. Depending on the number of Generalist Competencies of the community, the number of initial tokens on the map will vary from 65 to 85, with an average of 75 (about 6 per Aspect).
5. The Well-Being Index marker is initially placed at the number corresponding to the number of tokens on the Community Map minus 15 (i.e. approximately 60).
6. The 22 labelled Crisis Risk tokens are placed on the Community Vulnerabilities Matrix at the initial positions suggested in the illustration. The community members then discuss whether they wish to adjust these Crisis Risk token positions to better reflect the specific vulnerabilities of their community. Each token can only be moved one space in any direction, with the proviso that when any token is moved, another token must be moved in the opposite direction.
7. The 22 Crisis Descriptions are passed around for players to familiarize themselves with. By consensus, any of the Descriptions can be amended to better reflect the specific situation of the community in which the players live. (The game includes printable electronic versions of the Descriptions, should players want to permanently customize the Descriptions to suit their specific situation).
8. Now, each player in turn draws an Event card, and follows the instructions thereon. If the Event card drawn results in a Crisis, proceed to step 9 (otherwise go step 10).
9. When a Crisis occurs, the process is as follows:
   • Refer to the Crisis Impacts Table. For each Aspect of community that is affected by the crisis, compare the investment in (resilience of) that Aspect (total number of tokens on the four icons for that Aspect) to the severity of the crisis (number shown on the Community Vulnerabilities Matrix).
   • If the investment is greater than or equal to the severity, remove one token (which one to remove is determined by consensus) from that Aspect of the Community Map, and have the player with that investment discard it (it goes back to the pile that may be drawn again in future turns); reduce the WBI by one point to reflect the energy expended dealing with the crisis.
   • If the investment is less than the severity, an emergency meeting of the community is convened. The Crisis Description card is read out. The various (but inadequate number of) investments in Infrastructure, Resources and Competencies for that Aspect are read out. The group now collectively discusses what their Strategy might be to deal with this crisis if it occurred with this level of severity in their community. This requires honesty, debate and imagination. After this discussion, by consensus (unanimous agreement, though players may ‘stand aside’ if they are not in agreement but don’t feel strongly enough to ‘block’ consensus), the community assesses the adequacy of its in-the-moment Strategy. They can choose to remove any number of tokens from one to all of the tokens in that Aspect, to reflect this consensus on the effectiveness of the crisis strategy. (Note: If there are NO Investment Tokens in that Aspect when the crisis occurs, or if the severity is more than 3 greater than the number of Investment Tokens for that Aspect, NO strategy will be adequate and the game is lost, regardless of the community’s overall WBI score.) For each token removed, a corresponding Infrastructure, Resource or Competency card is returned to the discard pile (exception: if it is Generalist Competency card, it is only returned to the discard pile if it has been eliminated from both Aspects where it was applied), and for each token removed WBI is reduced by one point.
   • Continue for all 3-5 Aspects affected by the crisis. When you are finished, note the Related Crises for this crisis (shown on the Crisis Description, Crisis Impacts Chart. and on the applicable Crisis tokens). For each Related Crisis you must now move the TWO Crisis tokens (e.g. if D – Food Security is a Related Crisis, tokens D1 and D2 must be moved) either one space right or one space up (decide this by group consensus).
   • If you move a token to the right and this moves it into the red Crisis Occurs area, you now have another crisis — repeat this entire step for this new crisis.
   • Finally, move the Crisis Token(s) for any crises you have survived back to their game starting positions.
10. The player completes their turn by drawing 2 cards from the unused Infrastructure, Resource and Competency cards and selecting one to ‘invest’ their time/energy in, adding a token to the appropriate square of the Community Map and moving the WBI index up by one point accordingly.
11. Repeat steps 8-10 as applicable for each player in turn until one of the following occurs: (a) WBI rises above 90 to the Exemplary level (game is won — congratulations), or (b) WBI falls below 30 to the Unsustainable level, or there is an inadequate number of tokens to deal with a crisis in point 8 of someone’s turn (game is lost — but you learned a lot about resilience, sustainability and consensus, right?)

Examples of Investment Cards for Collapse! The Game, clockwise from top left: an Infrastructure investment for the Sustainable Energy Aspect of community; a Resource investment for the Food/Water Security Aspect of community; a Generalist Competency that can be applied to any Aspect of community; a Specialized Competency for the Physical/Mental Well-Being Aspect of community. The complete draft deck of 128 Investment Cards is included with the download package (link at the top of this post).

Work still to be done:

• Write the Event cards (just beginning this process, but expect to be finished by end of April)
• Test the game out with various numbers of players to ensure that the Event cards make the game challenging but not impossible
• Field test the whole game with people familiar with sustainability, community and resilience, to improve the realism of the stories, vulnerabilities, crises, events, and strategy processes of the game etc.

How you can help now:

• Download the 30-page PDF using the link at the top of the page. Read through it and let me know what really appeals and what’s really annoying. What important aspects of game play are missing? Is it too random or not random enough? Do the Roles appeal to you? Are there any glaring omissions in the Investments in infrastructure, resources, or competencies?
• I know the game is complex, but our civilization is complex and so are the crises we are going to face. Short of computerization, how can some of the complexity be ‘put under the hood’?
• How can the game be ‘personalized’ more? For example, should we have blank infrastructure, resource and competency cards so that people can define their own? Should certain competencies be automatically ‘attached’ to certain Roles, rather than dealt out randomly? Should people be able to swap competency cards so that the set of ‘investments’ that they bring to the game is a better fit for the ‘real’ them?
• I deliberately avoid the use of money in the game, both to simplify it and because some of the crises we are likely to face may make our money worthless. Was that an appropriate decision? Should we have money, inflation/deflation rates, currency fluctuations etc. to teach people as part of the game what is going to happen to our ‘wealth’ when the economy collapses?
• I also deliberately avoided tracking global population or GDP or energy consumption, because I wanted the game to be focused on the local. It seems to me that no matter what happens to these global/national metrics, the outcomes will not be substantively different. I felt they would be a distraction. For the same reason I chose not to include scenarios of a civil war affecting the local community, or issues like the geoengineering of our atmosphere. Just makes the game too complicated, don’t you think?
• I’m working on the final game ingredient (the 120 Event Cards) now. Plan is to have a mix of ‘events’ that affect the whole community and that affect individual players. There will be about a 60-40 split between ‘bad’ events (those that increase likelihood or severity of crises) and ‘good’ events. Some will be both good and bad because of the feedback loops in our modern systems. Some events will be contingent on the community’s investments in specific infrastructure, resources or competencies (i.e. preparedness and resilience). Some will be contingent on some random determinant such as the roll of dice. Some will be contingent on real-life facts about the players (e.g. their blood type, age, knowledge, skills or diet). Some events will be directly ecological, economic or energy-related, but others will be sociopolitical, military, technological, scientific, educational, social movements, or extraordinary individual events with major repercussions. ‘Black Swan’ events might include earthquakes, new diseases (or disease cures), new food inventions, new good and bad technologies (nanotech, family planning, energy, nutrition, weapons, surveillance, power dissemination or concentration etc.), runaway glacial/ice-cap melt, internet virus or other sabotage, rise of charismatic national leaders (good and bad), new water purification and building technologies, bioterror risks etc. I welcome your thoughts on the Event Cards.
• What clever tweaks borrowed from other games could we introduce? The game Coopoly for example has Pictionary-type drawing challenges that determine the effectiveness of your ‘collaborative work’ in that game.
• Once the Event Cards are complete, we’ll have to play quite a few games to see whether ‘winning’ (remember, everyone wins or everyone loses) is too easy or too hard, and whether having the focus being on coping with crises is too negative. Any informed guesses or suggestions on that are also welcome. If anyone has experience at taking a game from this point to final testing and commercialization, I’d love to hear your ‘next steps’ list.

Thanks for the substantive and positive feedback on the previous version. Hope you feel as positive about this second draft.

In my previous article, I recapped and built upon Nicole Foss’ (Stoneleigh of The Automatic Earth blog) presentation in Vancouver last week. The first part of her presentation, I noted, was about the current intractable economic (and specifically debt) problems we face at all levels (governments, corporations, individuals), and how neither of the most-supported top-down alternatives (austerity or stimulus) can hope to improve the situation or avoid total economic collapse.

The second part of Nicole’s presentation focused on what we can do, at the local community level, to prepare for and build resilience to cope with this collapse. There are a number of things, she said, we can do personally:

• Get out of debt, so that our property cannot be foreclosed upon or repossessed when the situation worsens and we are unable to repay these debts.
• Keep as much cash on hand (and not in the bank) as reasonably possible (enough to last several months).
• Acquire useful, non-perishable hard assets (when the economy fails, so will trade, making many hard goods hard to obtain and expensive).
• Do not depend on governments to do anything useful.
• Be wary of banks (they may simply close when ‘runs’ begin, preventing you from accessing your money).
• Be wary of insurance companies and plans (they will not be able to pay out when their investments collapse).
• Find the right place to live and move there (in or near small towns near healthy agricultural areas; avoid suburbs).
• Learn practical essential skills, both technical and non-technical (e.g. mediation, facilitation).

There was considerable discussion near the end of the presentation on “building social capital” and other collective actions we can start taking now, in our communities, such as:

• Assess your community’s energy vulnerability and create a plan to manage the transition to much lower levels of use, more local self-sufficiency, and more use of renewable sources. Do you know where your town’s and region’s energy comes from now? How would you be affected by rationing, scarcities, huge price increases, and blackouts and other interruptions due to crumbling government service capacity?
• Do comparable assessments of local self-sufficiency in other critical areas (e.g. food security, water, health, transportation, communication, education, building, livelihoods, safety, creation & innovation).
• Build local networks and knowledge of what essential skills, capacities, knowledge, resources and infrastructure are available in your community, and what people need.
• Nurture “affinity circles” of people with shared interests and expertise to launch, teach about, publicize and support local community-based initiatives.
• Organize community get-togethers that are fun, informative, relationship-building and collaborative, and which allow members of the community to practice community-building, consensus, conflict resolution, disaster preparation, developing community capacities and resources and coping with crisis together.

Thanks to Tree, I have had the opportunity to attend several get-togethers of a self-managed community/neighbourhood group in South Eugene OR, which gets together regularly at themed pot-luck dinners and has covered issues ranging from beekeeping to the Transition Handbook. The various Transition Initiative groups I have been involved with, likewise, are drawing community members together to start to deal with these issues (the Vancouver initiative was the key sponsor of Nicole’s presentation).

It seems to me that this task of “building local social capital” presents some significant challenges that are preventing and stalling efforts to help us prepare for and cope better as we face economic (and subsequent energy and ecological) collapse:

1. How do we get the time and attention of people in our local communities, when most people are so busy with their daily lives they have no capacity or appetite to participate in another activity, especially one that might not bear fruit until the longer term (if at all)? We are all so preoccupied, always, with the needs of the moment.
2. While we can work together to increase our personal and collective skills, capacities and knowledge now, how can we start to initiate developing local shared resources (e.g. tool-sharing, work bees) and local infrastructure (e.g. well-being centres built around illness prevention and non-pharma treatment, local renewable energy co-ops), until the situation has become bad enough that people see an immediate need for these (so the process seems viable and urgent)?
3. Who are the exemplars of the skills and capacities we will need when the economy fails, and how can we get those people to voluntarily demonstrate and teach these skills and capacities to others in the community on a Gift Economy basis?
4. What are the qualities we need to engender (or re-engender) in each and all of us (e.g. generosity, authenticity, caring, and appreciation for what our children and grandchildren are going to have to cope with), so that when the time comes when we have to rebuild our society and economy bottom-up, one community at a time, we will have “what it takes”?
5. If I am right in saying “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”, then how can we increase the imaginative capacity of our fellow citizens so they/we will be ready, in the moment?
6. So far, the large majority of people I have met who are involved in Transition and other local community-building initiatives are over 40. Is the fact that younger people are largely not engaged with us in these initiatives a problem? What are they thinking and doing about all this?
7. How do we make “building local social capital” more fun, and easier, so we can engage more people?

These are the questions I’m thinking about now, as I ponder what project I should undertake next (beyond completing Collapse! The Game, which I’ll write about again very soon), to help make the world a better place. I have few answers, and expect that the best answers would come from collaborative groups, perhaps in Open Space, tackling them each in turn.

(Image above is one of 91 cards in the Group Works deck, developed jointly by more than two dozen experienced facilitators over 3 years to help facilitators and participants to design and enable better meetings, conferences and group collaborations. To learn more about the deck, or get your copy, please visit groupworksdeck.org . [Full disclosure: I am a member of the core team that developed the deck.])