view from just above my new home; more of my recent photos here

One of the discoveries I’ve made as a result of retiring from paid work, and living alone for the first time in decades, is that I now have the freedom and responsibility to make my own decisions. When much of your life is tied up with work (collaborative or hierarchical) and the schedules and priorities of others, most decisions are made for you, or at least restricted by the constraints of society. It is a bit startling to realize that, suddenly, almost every decision I face is mine alone to make. Each decision may have repercussions for others, which I of course have to think about, but ultimately my decisions are now driven by principles, not by accommodation.

As I’ve made these decisions, I’ve started thinking about What are the principles that are driving them? So far they boil down to just three, which I’m calling First Principles — I wish it hadn’t taken me a lifetime to discover them.

1. Being Generous: This principle is about realizing that we’re a part of all-life-on-Earth and that, contrary to what we have been taught, we are neither ‘alone’ nor ‘individual’. Paying attention to others, listening, giving, caring, sharing, ignoring one’s illusory ’self’ and focusing on collective — community and planet, now and generations to come — not only makes sense, it is, I think, the essence of being human, of being alive, really here, now.
2. Valuing Time: Much of what we do is a consequence of what we (are taught to) value. Too often we end up valuing money, or what it buys (security, we think, and even love) instead of realizing that our time has far more value than any ‘currency’. That doesn’t mean ’saving’ time, or hoarding it, or seeing it as a scarcity to meted out selfishly. It means enjoying its passage. It means not giving it up for money (or even love). It means taking every moment as a gift. It means living Now, not in the past (regrets, nostalgia) or the future (dreams, fears).
3. Living Naturally: We’ve lived so much of our lives in artificial environments, distracted, that we’ve forgotten how to see how nature makes decisions, and realize that those decisions, based on a billion years of evolved knowledge, are inevitably more sensible than any we might make ‘independently’. Nature shows us how to live: to adapt rather than trying to control. To love, abundantly. To see and enjoy beauty. To be honest, always, even when it hurts. To imagine and to improvise. To learn by doing and by watching, not by being told or even by reading. To let go of outcome and of what is past or might be in future, and just be.

That’s it. All the decisions I’ve made in the past couple of months, since I’ve been freed from having others make decisions for me, have been driven by these three First Principles: Be generous. Value your time. Live naturally.

My life used to be so complicated.

Now, suddenly, it’s merely complex. So much easier.

One of the delightful cartoons of Natalie Dee. See lots more here.

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S END

Trying to Cure Reality: A new book Manufacturing Depression, by Gary Greenberg (reviewed by Louis Menand in the New Yorker) debunks the industrial economy myth that depression is a disease that needs chemical and therapeutic “curing”. Our civilization is collapsing, we’ve exhausted the natural resources our planet took a billion years to store up, we live in suffocating, overcrowded, polluted, horrifically stressful conditions, and we have launched the planet into the 6th global extinction. Why shouldn’t we feel bad? Thanks to Raffi Aftandelian for the link:

The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that more than fourteen million Americans suffer from major depression every year, and more than three million suffer from minor depression (whose symptoms are milder but last longer than two years). Greenberg thinks that numbers like these are ridiculous—not because people aren’t depressed but because, in most cases, their depression is not a mental illness. It’s a sane response to a crazy world.

“We Think We Are the Doctors. We Are the Disease”: Chris Hedges explains how our civilization culture is buckling and starting to crumble, and how we must both resist and dismantle this culture and create new sustainable living models. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link. Excerpt:

All resistance must recognize that the body politic and global capitalism are dead. We should stop wasting energy trying to reform or appeal to it. This does not mean the end of resistance, but it does mean very different forms of resistance. It means turning our energies toward building sustainable communities to weather the coming crisis, since we will be unable to survive and resist without a cooperative effort.

The Path of (Most) Resistance: Along the same lines as Chris Hedges’ article above, Derrick Jensen in his new article in Orion says we need to get past our belief that “resistance is futile” and realize that if we really want to save the planet we have to fight:

We need organized political resistance. Power needs to be named and then dismantled systematically. This requires joint action of whatever sort is deemed necessary. While the frontline actionists are taking apart systems of power and fighting to defend wild nature, the culture of resistance is providing loyalty and cooperation and material support, as well as building up alternate institutions—from means of bringing justice to economic systems to food supply chains to schools to new literary forms—that can take over as the system comes down. The template is not hard to understand. It will take its own culturally appropriate forms.

Right now, a small group of half-starved, poverty-stricken people in Nigeria have brought the oil industry in that country to its knees. They remember what it is to love their land and their communities—perhaps because they are not drowning in privilege, but in the toxic sludge of oil extraction. Is that what it will take to get environmentalists in the U.S. to fight back? [These Nigerians have] said to the oil industry: “It must be clear that the Nigerian government cannot protect your workers or assets. Leave our land while you can or die in it.” There is more courage, integrity, intelligence, and pragmatism in that statement … than in any statement I have ever read by any American environmentalist, including myself. We need to accept the fact that making this type of statement (and being prepared to act on it) might be necessary to preserve a living planet.

(And in a related story:  Several new local initiatives demonstrate that where there’s enough passion and energy focused at the local level, change happens. Thanks to the Bowen Island Phorum (my new daily guilty pleasure) for the link.)

Real Communities are Self-Organizing: Dmitri Orlov questions the feasibility of “building community”, arguing that organization cannot be imposed; it must occur by the collective consensus of members, or it won’t happen at all. Thanks to Jon Husband for the link. Excerpt:

How representative a democracy the US ever was is rather beside the point; the point is, it was once a country where people could successfully and openly self-organize, and now it isn’t. Once there were strong, cohesive communities in the US, which could organize and bring pressure to bear on their elected officials. And now, as described in Robert Putnam’s widely discussed book Bowling Alone (2000), there are no such strong, cohesive communities in the US, and so… they can’t organize, because, I would think, there is nothing for them to organize. Existence of communities allows communities to organize; lack of community prevents communities from organizing. That’s a bit of a tautology, is it not?

LIVING BETTER

5 Ways to Make Social Media Work: A great article and list by Justin Kownacki. (My comment to Justin on the list: “Much of this is about two important aspects of coping successfully in the 21st century: generosity (including listening and appreciation), and valuing your time — two things most of us are pretty lousy at.” The 5 Ways:

• Have a purpose (if you don’t have anything insightful, clever, novel, or useful to say, then don’t say anything)
• Don’t confuse media with marketing (one is communication; the other is trying to sell you something)
• Let someone else be the expert (focus on what you really are exemplary at)
• Comment selflessly (improve the conversation elsewhere than on your own blog)
• Kill one of your channels (say less, and in fewer places, and say it better)

Brilliant Idea That Needs to Be Free: I’m a huge fan of mind-mapping (graphic that captures visually the organization, ideas, decisions and learnings of a meeting, course curriculum or other intellectual work) and also of collaborative work and tools (wikis etc.) So the new app co-mapping, which allows mind-maps to be collaboratively developed (in real time or not) really appeals to me. Problem is, they’re charging user license fees for it. Can someone develop a free open source alternative, or better, show the developers of this tool a better business model to pay their development and maintenance costs?

Inflatable Sleeping Coat: An award-winning idea for hikers, campers, trekkers, and perhaps for water safety and potentially light water travel as well. Not to mention a possible boon for the homeless, today and, as numbers swell, in the future. Essentially, this is an insulated, water-proof coat with two detachable, inflatable sections that can serve as a bed and pillow, a cushion, or even as a raft. Terrific. Thanks to reader Tatu Siltanen for the link.

Giving Away the Store: A man in Oregon gave his devoted employees a special gift on his 81st birthday: their company. With the distressing trend to “demutualization” it’s refreshing to see the opposite: a corporation converted to a co-operative. Thanks to Tree for the link and the two that follow.

A Business That’s Mushrooming: Now mushrooms are finding use as all-natural building materials, biodegradable packaging and ‘green’ insulation.

Tarot as an Insight Incubator: Rather than a dubious predictive tool, some people are now using Tarot readings to stimulate creativity, insight and self-knowledge. “The cards help us to see ourselves and events symbolically, as archetypes, and therefore more objectively. And that has a way of making our personal dramas feel much less overwhelming.”

Even More Reasons to Move Your Money: Not only do they invest more ethically, small financial institutions like credit unions also charge you lower fees and give you better interest on your deposits.

How Touch Heals, Inspires and Sustains: New research shows the incredible power of human touch. Thanks to Jerry Michalski for the link.

Dreams of Cascadia: The idea of creating a new coastal nation running from Northern California to British Columbia is not new, but the recent Vancouver Olympics fanned the dreams of idealists that it was possible, only to dash them on the rocks of surly xenophobic customs agents on both sides of the border.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

The very rich get (much) richer: New government data shows that for the 400 richest US taxpayers, the last year of Bush was yet another windfall year, as despite the recession their average income rose by $81 million while their average tax rate dropped. Simply obscene.

Wall Street’s Pushed Us to a Second Brink: An expose by Matt Taibbi explains how recent actions of big financial institutions not only haven’t contributed to lowering risk of a second economic collapse, they’re actually deliberately precipitating one. Thanks to Raffi Aftandelian for the link.

When Corporations Really Rule the World — Now: John Robb describes the stranglehold that corporate interests now have on political power in the US. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.

Here Comes Permanent Unemployment: This endless recession (despite the moronic MSM reports touting a recovery) is creating chronic victims: Millions who became unemployed and who may never find work again in a permanently gutted job market.

The Trauma of Industrial Childbirth: A woman’s haunting story of how the ordeal of modern induced childbirth, necessary as it may have been, has left her permanently scarred with PTSD.

MRSA Has a New Virulent Cousin: MRSA, a devastating and antibiotic-resistant bacteria killing thousands in hospitals today, has a new and even more potent and resistant cousin, called “Gram-Negative” Bacteria (The name refers to its undetectability in a certain test, not its mass). Further indication that our foolish strategy of trying to eradicate bacteria (the only life-form with a greater mass on Earth than humans) by soaking everything in antibiotics only serves to accelerate bacteria’s incredible adaptive capacity and create even more deadly diseases. When will we realize we can’t control the Earth and it’s evolution, even if we were wise enough to be able to discharge that power competently?

Undamming the Salmon: After a huge amount of work, all parties have agreed in principle to dismantle dams in Oregon and California that have devastated salmon stocks. But many hurdles remain.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

Blame Canada (2010 Version): Steve Almond’s priceless take on the Vancouver Olympics. “But maybe I’m being too cynical. Maybe the Olympics have always been about vertical integration of ancillary entertainment platforms.”

graphic of why people pirate movies (thanks to Rob Paterson for the link)

The Psychology of Small Urban Spaces: An old but still timely look at how humans behave in public spaces. Thanks to several readers for the link.

The Secret of the Maya: This is interesting, though I confess I find much of it unfathomable. Brilliant or nonsense? Thanks to Andrew Campbell for the link.

The Case for an Older Woman: OK Cupid provides some revealing data on what online daters are looking for, and what they should be looking for instead. We may lie about our biases, but we can’t hide from the numbers. Lots more to make you cringe with recognition or shame on this site — like this post on attractiveness. Thanks to Tree for the link.

Clever Made-Up Words: Results of a Washington Post contest from a few years ago that asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Thanks to Miralee for the link. The winners:
1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.
2. Ignoranus: A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.
3. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
5. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
6. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation a bout yourself for the purpose of getting lucky
7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
8. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.
9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
10. Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.
11. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease.
12. Karmageddon: It’s when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, and then the Earth explodes, and it’s a serious bummer.
13. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
14. Glibido: All talk and no action.
15. Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

Field Art: Thanks to Tree for the link.

THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK

From Bill Seitz “We don’t have many American product recalls, because we don’t make anything.”

(A joint essay by Guy R. McPherson, Keith Farnish, Dave Pollard, and Sharon Astyk.)

Indebtedness is a form of servitude, sometimes involuntary, and, in extreme cases, can become a form of endless and harrowing imprisonment. Consider, for example, the current usurious rates of interest (compared to what savers earn on their savings in the same banks that charge that interest). Some religions consider the charging of interest as immoral, even criminal. According to all four gospels in the Christian bible, even the normally passive, peaceful prophet of Christianity got so worked up about usury in a temple he started acting like John Ferguson on the sidelines of a hockey game.

Purchases by consumers (this awful word is used here only because that’s what we citizens have become – involuntarily) drive the world’s industrial economy. And purchases by consumers depend on the confidence of those consumers, so that consumer confidence underlies commercial success. If a potential consumer has no confidence in her ability to purchase an item, then she won’t. If enough potential consumers lose confidence in their ability to purchase and pay for any particular item, the sales of that item will plummet, causing the manufacturer and sellers of that item to fail.

Considering the current economy, which will no doubt crash again within the next year or two, we can help create a situation that will both change behaviour for the better and prevent people from getting into financial trouble. Accomplishing this will require getting wide support for such ‘frugal’ activities, and this will pose a huge challenge to the hopelessly optimistic, reality-challenged corporations dependent on the industrial economy.

How do we persuade people that they definitely cannot afford to take out loans to buy more stuff? We can start by targeting luxury purchases such as houses, cars, and appliances. Governments throughout the industrial world recognize the importance of such purchases to the industrial economy, and have therefore provided huge subsidies, tax credits and other financial incentives (with taxpayer dollars) for purchasing houses, cars, and — more recently – appliances.

Most people need loans to purchase these “durable goods” (which are, ironically, no longer either durable or good). Loans traditionally are seen as safety nets, but it has become clear they really represent traps. Never mind the psychological or ecological implications of consumerism — there is no evidence to suggest anybody has minded so far — the focus here is on the trap into which each potential consumer falls by taking out a loan for frivolous purchases. Every loan is a bad deal for the borrower, whether it’s a line of credit, a secured loan, a mortgage or a credit card payment.

The system needs you to keep borrowing; if you don’t then who knows what could happen:

So what can we do? Here are some tactics that can be used to unshackle yourself, and help others unshackle themselves, from crushing and unnecessary debts. The risk assessments below are an average that the four of us came up with, but risk varies greatly by jurisdiction and personal risk tolerance, so be careful: Your mileage may vary, and it may be helpful to talk it over with others, even friendly legal advisors, before you try some of these tactics:

No Risk:

Don’t take out a loan for anything. If you need it — and probably you don’t — save your money and buy it, barter for it, or borrow it.

Encourage others to join you. Start by sharing your car (with those you trust), your garden, your tools, even your clothes. Pass stuff on; give stuff away. Buy stuff used. You don’t need that loan and neither do the people you care about.

Pay off your credit card regularly, on time, every month, and consolidate debts into the lowest-interest vehicle possible if you can’t pay them off entirely.

If you already have loans, and most recent students do, then seek deferral under economic hardship. Odds are pretty high you’re actually experiencing economic hardship, so this is not a lie. (But be aware that if you recover from this hardship these debts can come back to haunt you, so think about this if you’re not planning on living a subsistence life).

Before you sign anything that entails debt, read the fine print, pause, and talk with others, and help others do the same.

Low to Medium Risk:

Start a “misinformation” campaign (from the point of view of the loan companies):

Via snail mail, send out carefully crafted false “parody” press releases from loan companies and banks to media outlets such as local radio stations, local press (and even the nationals if you are brave and clever enough). These “press releases” should discourage people from taking out loans (because, after all, people don’t really need all the stuff they buy on credit).

If you make the “press releases” as authentic, virtuous-sounding and complete as possible, and word them so that responses are not required, then there is a good chance they will be run by the media without questions being asked.

Or, do a bit of “subvertising”, parodying corporate websites on the Internet or (at a little higher risk) posting parody billboards: Focus on loan companies and banks, changing the messages to emphasize the immoral aspect of loans. Alternatively, if your risk appetite (and tech savvy) is a bit higher, you can hack existing websites or remove loan advertisements entirely. For more information on techniques for doing this, read this Keith Farnish post. And EFF has a good online white paper about protecting yourself/your message when using the Internet for gripe/parody purposes.

Keep an eye on the legal situation as it unfolds: The tremendous success of groups like the Yes Men is attracting a lot of attention among corporate risk managers – and their lawyers. Risk of these tactics could rise as a result.

Other potential actions along these same lines include:

Medium Risk:

Last month I wrote about ”Walking away from your mortgages”:

Many people are now living in homes with mortgages that are greater than the value of their property. Why would anyone continue to pay a debt that is higher than the asset it secures? After all, big corporations view pulling the plug on unsuccessful ventures and sticking the debtholders and shareholders a key business strategy. The whole idea of “risk capital” is that the interest and other fees you earn for lending to risky borrowers compensates you for the risk, so that if the borrower defaults you accept the loss and chalk it up to experience. Yet for some reason homeowners feel some moral obligation to throw good money endlessly after bad. This of course is exactly what the corporatists, who have no such moral compunction, are counting on, what economists call moral asymmetry. The logical response would be to tell the lender to write off the excess of the mortgage beyond the property value, and refinance the mortgage accordingly. Apparently in some US states (called “recourse” states) this moral asymmetry is institutionalized — that is, lenders can go after a mortgagee’s personal assets if they default. There is, of course, no recourse when the corporatists walk away from debts, offshore their operations, and stiff the taxpayers whose subsidies and bailouts paid for the corporatists’ ventures.

Where is the sense of outrage here? Have the education system and media so dumbed down the citizens that they can’t see this scheme for the cruel and criminal con it is? If everyone with a mortgage greater than the value of their home either walked away from it, or was legally empowered to require the excess to be written off as the “bad debt” it is, then of course there would be many bank failures and plunging profits. That’s how the market system is supposed to work. The lenders, of course, want it both ways, and Obama and the citizens seem blithely willing to let them have it.

High risk:

(This is the first of at least three ‘miniature’ posts. I’m spending most of my time these days digesting what I’ve been learning, about myself and about others, from a raft of new people I’ve met in the past month, and from the experience, for the first time in 30 years, of living alone. This isn’t giving me enough time for my usual lengthy blog articles, but I wanted to at least get these three ideas out, for your thoughts.)

Over the past month I have heard at least a dozen candid ‘life stories’ from people, mostly in answer to the questions, “Who are you, now?”, “Why are you here?”, and “What are you going to do next?” There is a strong recurring pattern in these stories, and I don’t think it’s just because almost all these people are living on the West Coast of North America. The pattern is, to put it indelicately, brokenness. As I hear people open up and talk to me (and others, often in groups) about what they are feeling, I get a growing sense that we are all broken, wounded, suffering, seeking sanctuary, bewildered, wondering how we lost something important that was part of us.

I think the reason I never heard this clearly before is that I wasn’t listening. If you show, by your inattention, that you don’t care about other people (and I confess to having been notorious at that, to the point of acknowledging a certain misanthropy within me), they will never trust you enough to tell you what they feel. We have all been conditioned, by parents’ reprisals, by the school system, by peer pressure and by the work world, to hide what we feel, to suppress it, to take on a more stable and mature persona than the one we really are. We assess people as a result by their demeanour and their appearance, by what they do rather than who they are underneath all the gunk they have taken on to act out the identities expected of them, the only identities tolerated in this harsh, homogeneous and judgemental society.

When I suggest we are ‘broken’ I’m not saying there is something wrong with us, that we need to be ‘fixed’. I mean that we have been broken, tamed, like wild horses. We are, after all, the first domesticated species, having taken our own medicine and become ‘civilized’ before we ran roughshod over the entire planet with our civilization religion, our civilization dis-ease, this culture of fear and acquisition and disconnection.

I think despite this cultural conditioning we are all, still, as a result of a million years of living in trees and in forests and as a part of all-life-on-Earth, wild at heart. This civilization stuff is just a veneer, a cloak we wear that is ill-fitting and uncomfortable, too heavy for us, smeared with all the gunk we have taken on, a mask of what is expected and what we are not.

We are broken, damaged, suffering, but we do not need to be fixed. What we need is to rediscover who we are, authentically, and to re-become that real person, the person underneath all the acting and artifice and false personas. We need to become as wild as we always were, feral, uncivilized, reconnected.

How do we do that? It has taken a lifetime of practice to appear to become (and to the point we have taken these false identities seriously, to really become) someone we’re not. What ‘healing’ practices will it take for each of us to become who we really are? In this world where money is valued too highly and time not highly enough, can we even make enough time for such practices? What will others think and say and do if we start to become our true wild selves again? Will they fight us or follow us? Is this the first step, perhaps the only needed step, to walking away from a civilization that no longer serves us and which is destroying our planet?

That’s a lot of questions, and for now that’s all I have. Tell me what you think. I’m listening. Go wild.

I have spent much of the past two weeks in community with others, immersed in discovering how, when and why community works, and how it might be encouraged to work better. I was exposed to a diversity of alternative cultures, all of them progressive, but some spiritual and others not, some healthy and others not, some informed and others not, some joyful and others not. In addition to learning some important things about myself, I also have achieved, I think, a better understanding of human nature, and why community is so hard to achieve in our modern, anti-communitarian, disconnected (from all-life-on-Earth and from the needs, knowledge and desires of humans) society.

These communities each have their own unique micro-economy, more or less generous, more or less integrated with the modern industrial economy, more or less functional. This has got me thinking again about the Gift Economy and other alternatives to industrial economy.

The much-envisioned successor to our dysfunctional, teetering industrial economy has been given many names: the steady-state economy, the sustainable economy, the information economy, the attention economy, the relationship economy, the gift economy, the abundance economy, the generosity economy. Perhaps the challenge with envisioning and naming this economy stems from the fact one cannot sustainably separate economic systems from all the other systems that make up a society: social, educational, technological, media, political, health etc. These systems need to be aligned, and in the industrial society that is nearing its end, they are:

• Industrial economy – focused on uninterrupted growth of material production, acquisition, ‘ownership’ and consumption by humans, totally ignoring all ‘external’ costs, and based on large-scale centralization and concentration of wealth (“globalization”), on principles of scarcity and on a pseudo-“market” that steals from the poor and middle class and rewards the rich
• Industrial society – conversation and social activity centre around what is being consumed (media, brand names, political propaganda, advertising)
• Industrial education – teaching students to be obedient to hierarchy and industrial authority, fearful, dependent, ignorant of history and what is really happening in the world, unthinking, uncritical, and unimaginative
• Industrial technology – designed to con ‘consumers’ into believing they can consume more, and grow endlessly, provided it is done ‘smartly’, and deployed to control, to stifle innovation, and, of course, to wage war on invented enemies as a means of preoccupying and distracting these consumers from realizing how the world really works
• Industrial media – contrived to dumb down the citizenry, oversimplify issues into emotional dichotomies, and entertain in lieu of informing, to reduce expectations and reinforce the dogma of the corporatist elite
• Industrial politics – two Tweedledum and Tweedledee interchangeable political parties in each jurisdiction are carefully designed to provide the illusion of choice and democracy, while massive centralization (which the corporatists call “globalization”) is employed to provide the small elite corpocracy with exclusive and discreet access to political ‘leaders’, thus ensuring extension of their wealth and power, while protecting those ‘leaders’ and the corporatists who control them from the wrath of ‘ordinary’ citizens
• Industrial health – designed to ensure the rich are coddled and the rest are kept in fear and self-blame for the illnesses caused by the industrial food system and the wastes and excesses of the rest of the industrial economy, so that the masses are neither willing nor able to challenge the hierarchy or the principles of the industrial systems

An economy and society that would live up to any of the alternative post-industrial names above is so utterly different from the industrial model that it is almost impossible to imagine getting there from here. Which is exactly what the proponents of the industrial systems want – a sense of the hopelessness of reform, a sense that the industrial way is the only way to live. Here’s how I imagine these same seven systems in a post-industrial world:

• Post-industrial economy – focused on the well-being of all (rich and poor, human and non-human), egalitarian, non-materialistic, sustainable without growth, community-based, hugely diverse, and self-sufficient within each community; achieved through the generosity and reciprocity of loving, caring, attentive citizens living in relationship with community and with all-life-on-Earth, through stewardship of the land for all future generations
• Post-industrial society – conversation and social life revolve around care, love, respect, curiosity, diversity, discovery, creation, re-creation and learning, and the focus is almost entirely local, without losing sight of the fact that each creature and community is an essential part of all-life-on-Earth
• Post-industrial education – revolves around self-discovery, self-exploration, self-learning, creativity, imagination, self-sufficiency and self-empowerment within and as part of interdependent community, life-long, undirected, and achieved through observation, practice and experimentation
• Post-industrial technology – designed to make life simpler, healthier and more leisurely, and to enhance learning
• Post-industrial media – designed to inform, enable, enrich, make interesting and facilitate learning, conversation, imagination and understanding of how things really are and, when necessary, what might and must be done or done differently
• Post-industrial politics – largely dormant, since in an egalitarian, abundant, uncrowded, peaceful world there is little need for political decisions or action; activated at the community level to seek consensus and resolve dissention, inequality, unfairness or conflict when necessary
• Post-industrial health – focused on the prevention, self-diagnosis and self-treatment of illness and injury (physical and emotional), and on the reduction of pain and suffering rather than the longevity of life; community-based and accepting of and adaptive to natural catastrophes and illnesses

Not surprisingly, these qualities are those of natural systems – those that existed in the millennia before modern civilization, and those that still prevail in uncivilized and non-human societies. For that reason I choose to call these systems “natural” rather than “post-industrial” systems, since while I think they will emerge from the ruins of industrial society once civilization collapses, I am not sure that what remains of human society will have the context or culture to realize them as such. They are as much pre-industrial (or at least pre-civilization) as post-industrial. Yet they are not nostalgic, and do not presume we could ever return to the culture from which civilization evolved.

Here is the contrast between Industrial and Natural Systems again, boiled down to a few essential descriptors and differentiators:

Read this table and it’s hard not to conclude “you can’t get there from here”. That may be true, but there are many things we can do to ‘model’ the Natural Systems on the right side of this chart in our own communities, especially if these communities are relatively small and progressive in their thinking. I’ve seen lots of examples in the last two weeks of communities that behave very much as if they were Natural Systems, despite the impracticability and near-impossibility of completely extracting one’s community from the global industrial society:

• I’ve seen communities where there are no ‘price tags’ on the goods and services exchanged, where because the community is small and intimate, no one can ‘cheat’ the system by taking more than s/he gives, at least not for long. There is no money in these communities, no ‘currency’, no accounting for what’s given and taken. They trust each other to be fair. It doesn’t always work, but usually it does.
• I’ve seen communities where what is valued is not possessions and income but collective well-being. Some members of these communities have reached ‘zero footprint’ and have also made a pledge to leave nothing behind — to give away everything they come into possession of before they die. Some of them live quite comfortably (if insecurely) on incomes that to most of us would be seen to be sub-poverty-level.
• There is an interesting and ingenious new business model that Jerry Michalski has developed that provides three ways for people who are creative, or have other talents that are not ‘commercial’ in the industrial economy model, to ‘make a living’ comfortably without having to worry about selling anything. I’ll be writing more about this soon.
• I’ve seen communities where time spent learning (about oneself, and about the world, developing capacities and competencies), and time spent caring for others, is valued much more highly than time selling products into a commercial market. In fact, in these communities, participating in the industrial economy is viewed with some pity: “Why are you wasting your time and talent earning money when it could be put to much better use?”
• I’ve seen communities where unschooling is the norm and learning is lifelong and continuous. The children in these communities are more curious, more mature, more informed, more creative, more articulate, and more connected to everything than their counterparts in the institutional industrial education system. I worry for them: If they eventually try to enroll in the industrial education system, how long will they last, and what will they think of a world where most of their peers accept this as something of value?
• I’ve seen local community-based media that contain real, actionable news, and interesting, novel ideas, knowledge, insights and perspectives that are used in the community for lively and generous debate and conversation.
• I’ve seen local community-based ‘political’ organizations focused on specific, real local problems, organizations that encourage dialogue and innovation and which produce a broad local consensus on how to live better in community.
• I’ve seen local ‘wellness’ organizations, some of them Gift Economy based (pay what you can afford and think appropriate) that appear far more effective at improving the physical and mental health of members of their communities than institutional industrial health clinics and facilities. A key part of their success is that they work with the patient to co-develop and co-operate a personal wellness program, instead of doing their health work to and on the patient, as if the patient were a dumb machine.

Lots more on this topic to follow in the coming weeks. If you have examples of models of Natural Systems behaviours and successes, please tell us about them.

artwork constructed of hundreds of thousands of rice plants in japan, seen from an aerial view; thanks to tree for the link

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S END

25 Plants You Should Consider Growing: Unlike most “Post-Civ” bloggers I rarely write about growing your own food. Sharon Astyk often does, and this low-maintenance edibles list is inspiring. Time to start some serious gardening. The plants are:

Walking Away From Mortgages: Many Americans are now living in homes with mortgages that are greater than the value of their property. Why would anyone continue to pay a debt that is higher than the asset it secures? After all, big corporations view pulling the plug on unsuccessful ventures and sticking the debtholders and shareholders a key business strategy. The whole idea of “risk capital” is that the interest and other fees you earn for lending to risky borrowers compensates you for the risk, so that if the borrower defaults you accept the loss and chalk it up to experience. Yet for some reason homeowners feel some moral obligation to throw good money endlessly after bad. This of course is exactly what the corporatists, who have no such moral compunction, are counting on, what economists call moral asymmetry. The logical response would be to tell the lender to write off the excess of the mortgage beyond the property value, and refinance the mortgage accordingly. Apparently in some US states (called “recourse” states) this moral asymmetry is institutionalized — lenders can go after a mortgagee’s personal assets if they default. There is, of course, no recourse when these corporatists walk away from debts, offshore their operations, and stiff the taxpayers whose subsidies and bailouts paid for the corporatists’ ventures. Where is the sense of outrage here: Have the education system and media so dumbed down the citizens that they can’t see this for the cruel and criminal con it is? If everyone with a mortgage greater than the value of their home either walked away from it, or was legally empowered to require the excess to be written off as the “bad debt” it is, then of course there would be many bank failures and plunging profits. That’s how the market system is supposed to work. The lenders, of course, want it both ways, and Obama and the citizens seem blithely willing to let them have it.

The Bottleneck Century: William Catton, author of Overshoot, has a new book Bottleneck, that describes the collapse of civilization in this century, and forecasts an 85% human population die-off to about one billion people. To Catton, the culprits are overpopulation, overconsumption, and short-termism, compounded by competition, the ideological corruption of language, and hyper-specialization that have reduced our societal resilience. His message is very consistent with John Gray’s, and mine, in asserting that collapse cannot be prevented, but that working models of a better way to live and make a living, developed now, might benefit its survivors. Thanks to David Hodgson for the link.

Until the Party’s Over: Stoneleigh describes the mania that allows us to be collectively irresponsible in ‘boom’ times: “When people feel they are operating within the bounds of properly structured criminality, they feel no personal responsibility and do not fear consequences.” Now, will someone please turn the lights off?

Growth Isn’t Possible: A new research report from the New Economics Foundation concludes that we have to move immediately to a zero-growth, steady-state economy if we want to get atmospheric carbon concentration under 350 ppm in time. Of course, that’s not possible either.

Shorter Showers and the Nature of Complexity: Melanie Williams weighs in on the Derrick Jensen argument that individual action is inadequate in dealing with the economic, energy and ecological collapses we now face. Derrick argues that actions like taking shorter showers, recycling, and turning down/up thermostats, even if taken by millions of people, will have an insignificant impact on these problems, and that, in addition to this, we need to take direct, personal action in areas where we have particular expertise (Derrick’s is in dismantling dams that no longer serve any useful function, and which destroy habitats and migration). Melanie argues that our collective power as consumers is enormous. She also lists “Personal Ways to Disengage from the System: sell your car, don’t buy processed foods, build passive solar homes, give up gadgets, use a clothesline, don’t use airplanes, stay where you are.” I think we need to do both, but I am also convinced that even doing both will not be enough.

Manifesto for Relocalization: The New Rules Project outlines steps that will be needed to relocalize our economy before the industrial economy collapses. Thanks to Tree for the link.

View Collapse Online: The film about Michael Ruppert, Collapse, is now downloadable on YouTube in 8 parts. Thanks to David Hodgson for the link.

“Steady-State Economy” Idea Goes Mainstream: The links and articles on the site are lame, but it’s good to see a broad-based appreciation of the principles of moving to a zero-growth economy, and an acceptance that this is a viable option for the future, albeit one that is nowhere in sight.

LIVING BETTER

Eight Maxims of the New Media: A great recap from Mark Coddington. Thanks to Jerry Michalski, the smartest guy on the freakin’ planet, for the link:

1. “Do what you do best and link to the rest.”
2. “If the news is important, it will find me.”
3. “Information wants to be free.” (actually Marshall McLuhan said this first, not Stewart Brand)
4. “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.”
5. “Our readers know more than we do.”
6. “The people formerly known as the audience”
7. “The sources go direct.” (i.e. intermediaries that add no real value are toast)
8. “Transparency is the new objectivity.”

Electric Bicycles, for Better and for Worse: For those, like me, trying to become car-free, electric bicycles would seem to be an important part of the solution. But China seems destined to wreck this green technology opportunity as well: Whereas a quality electric bicycle costs about $2,000 and an upgrade kit for your manual bicycle $1,000, China, home to a staggering 120 million electric bicycles, is dumping heavy, shoddy electric scooter “bicycles” (where the pedals are just there to skirt licensing and insurance regulations), into the Western market for $500.

Oregon Taxes the Rich: Bucking the historical, geographical and ideological trend, Oregon voters approved tax increases for rich individuals and corporations to pay for social services. Maybe it will start a trend.

Fifteen Emerging Conservation Issues: Most of the complexity of natural ecosystems remains unfathomable to us, but here is an intriguing list of 15 emerging issues in conservation from synthetic meats to biochar — newly discovered problems and interesting ideas — that need more study. Beware unintended consequences. Thanks to Dave Riddell for the link.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Elizabeth Warren on How Big Banks Still Don’t Get It: The head of the TARP oversight board says that financial institutions will simply not participate in the economic reforms needed to prevent the disappearance of the middle class and that they still feel entitled to obscene salaries and profits. Only by wrenching power and wealth away from these organizations will we be able to redistribute wealth sufficiently to prevent the US from becoming essentially a third-world elite-versus-everyone-else nation, she says. Thanks to Raffi Aftandelian for the link.

Some Religions are More Equal Than Others: An American Christian hate group is trying to exploit the extreme right-wing orientation of the US Supreme Courts to narrow religious rights in that country to just Christianity and selected other large organized monotheistic religions. Thanks to Tree for the link.

Last Word on Citizen United Case: Glenn Greenwald and Kevin Drum talk sense about the Supreme Court’s decision to throw out all restrictions on corporate campaign financing, when others can’t see past the ideology and emotion it has stirred up. The decision really is logical in the context of the granting of personhood to corporations and the breadth of the US First Amendment. There is an answer: To elect policy-makers and appoint Supreme Court judges to undo corporate personhood rights and recognize that non-profit organizations deserve rights that for-profit corporations do not. But don’t expect to see that happen anytime soon.

Post-Copenhagen Climate Process at a Standstill: Copenhagen was a disaster, proof that multilateral accord even on urgent matters is essentially hopeless as each country defends its turf and national agenda, but the discussions that were supposed to make things better in 2010 are going even more badly.

Downer of the Month: If you still foster any hope that the mainstream media might somehow help raise ecological consciousness, just watch this pathetic car commercial, which was shown during the Superbowl and has been seen by millions since. Then read the even more pathetic comments by viewers. A sure-fire cure for optimism.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

Music for reflection and meditation from Japan: MARTH. Thanks to Miralee for the link.

Silly pictures from the I Can Has Cheezburgers / Lolcats folks: There I Fixed It: unsafe fixes and your tax dollars at work.

THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK

From Sharon Astyk, on the suffering of men, and how it differs from that of women:

Statistics from cultures undergoing major crises seem to bear out the assumption that often, women adapt better than men to many difficult situations.  The decrease in lifespans in the former Soviet Union that accompanied the collapse was in part due to loss of health care, but a lot of it had to do with rises in suicide rates, stress and alcohol abuse.  At one point, the division between lifespans for women in Russia and for men was more than a decade.

This does not mean that every man facing a transition into a poorer, less energy rich world is doomed to crisis.  But I think it is important to talk about – because just as I’ve written many times about the changes that peak oil and climate change and their economic consequences are likely to bring about for women, the ones that come for men are important and real.  All men, and all  of us who love husbands, fathers, brothers, friends, sons need to be aware of these  issues – to be aware of the degree to which watching your world unravel seems to engender different responses.  Women who turn to each other, who talk, whose identities may be more complexly built on a mix of personal and professional identities may not grasp how hard this is for the men in our lives to face unemployment and shifts in everything they’ve known. I think this is an important thing to be able to be open about, for both men and women, and also and important thing to be conscious of.

Have you had this experience, either personally or for someone you cared about?  None of us want to see the rates of suicide rising. None of us want to watch the guys in our life struggling.  None of us want them to turn to drugs and drink to dull a sense of loss.  Of course many men won’t.  In many cases it is the women who struggle with these issues.  But overwhelmingly history suggests that the psychological trauma of watching your world transformed often strikes men, particularly men of middle age and above, harder than it does women.  How do we soften the blow?

As most of my readers know, I’m in the process of retiring, and reorienting my life towards three sets of practices, illustrated above and inspired by the work of Joanna Macy. These three sets of practices are:

1. Competency and capacity-building (personal and collective)
2. New model creation (developing working models of better ways to live and make a living)
3. Activism (work to undermine industrial systems so that they collapse and make room for the new models)

One aspect of this third set of practices that I’m hoping to focus on is what might be called ‘hacking massively complicated systems’.

Just to explain what I mean by ‘massively complicated’: while social and ecological systems are inherently complex — evolutionary, effective (but inefficient), and resilient — most of the political, economic and corporate systems that are driving our civilization off the edge of a cliff are, by contrast, complicated systems – efficient but dysfunctional, centralized, inflexible, and massive (mostly global).

Complicated systems are mostly man-made and somewhat mechanistic. They are built like a car engine (lots of parts, but a finite number, such that you can see cause and effect and can predict the results of an intervention). As a result, they are inherently fragile: they break down easily, and constantly, and they’re vulnerable to sabotage.

By contrast, complex systems, like ecosystems and communities, have an infinite number of variables, and it is virtually impossible to discern cause from effect, or to predict what the result of an intervention will be. As a result, complex systems are much harder to hack.

I have written before about how we might use Donella Meadows’ 12 Ways to Intervene in a System to hack massive complicated systems such as the Alberta Tar Sands, or the Industrial Agriculture system. By hacking, I mean disruptive intervention. I’m impatient with the tried-and-true methods of trying to confront The Man, which in my experience are mostly negative, ineffectual, blunt, directly confrontational, and oriented to try to change public opinion rather than directly disrupt what these systems are doing. Worse, they play to the advantages of the system we’re trying to undermine.

Why can’t we use the same ingenuity to hack these systems and reduce the damage they do, that was used by the architects to create these systems in the first place? For example, in fighting the Tar Sands, how might we hack the financial and reputational systems of Big Oil to undermine the credibility of their financial and assay data, to the point lenders would stop lending them the vast amounts of money they need for their horrific ‘development’?

I was fortunate to have the opportunity yesterday in California to speak to a very smart group (including some experienced and wily hackers) about this challenge – how do we hack these destructive systems to undermine them, to exploit their centralization and vulnerabilities, to bring them down? Here is what some of the group (besides reminding me about the value of Donella Meadows’ systems approach) told me:

• Be careful about the assumptions we make in any change movement. If we’re going to brainstorm ways to hack industrial growth systems, we’d better be confident that we’re fighting the right enemy and not precipitating something that might be even worse.
• We may be more effective (both directly and in terms of the stickiness and transmissibility of our message) if we use more of the Yes Men type of approach – galvanizing people through wit, humour and play rather than anger.
• Part of the set of approaches we use to hack these systems should be Carrot-Mob actions that reward sustainable behaviour as well as punishing destructive behaviour.
• We should be looking at the area of Emotional Design for inspiration for ideas on effective hacking of these systems.
• We should consider constructing “Ethical Mosquitoes” – organizations that mimic all of the processes and behaviours of the dysfunctional organizations that are part of these destructive systems, but differ sharply and positively in the few ways that these organizations are most destructive. This focuses attention on what is wrong with these organizations and processes and provides a clear ‘migration path’ to less destructive and more sustainable behaviour.
• We should expect that the more adversarial we are to the organizations and systems we want to undermine, the more we will invite responses – propaganda, greenwashing, legal and political opposition to what we’re doing. We need to be clever to appear less adversarial than we really are. But on the other hand, there is power in bringing to bear social disgust against the more repugnant aspects of these systems.
• We need to have moles working inside these organizations and systems who will help us undermine and topple them from the inside while we’re working to undermine and topple them from the outside. There are good people still trying to fix the system from within, that we need to tap into.
• It’s better to suggest and show people a better solution than to simply criticize what’s wrong with the existing systems.
• Be aware that, beneath the merely massively complicated economic and political systems we’ve erected, that are behind so much of the damage, there are people in social systems in these organizations, and these social systems are complex, not complicated.
• It was suggested that we look at the book Influence, the work of the “world’s greatest hacker” Pablos Holman, and the book Power vs. Force
• We should look at how and why the music industry was undermined and destroyed, as a model for how to undermine some of these other systems.
• A small segment of the group took the position that all of the above ideas are politically naïve, and that nothing less than a violent, revolutionary confrontation, a war against civilization, can possibly work.

What became very clear to me from this discussion was the need for those of us who want to make the world a better place to get a much sounder basic understanding of complexity theory and the challenges of bringing about change in complex versus complicated systems. As much as I love my friend Dave Snowden’s work in this area, it’s pretty dense reading, and something more basic and accessible is needed. One of the people in the group I was speaking with has written a book on complexity that I’m looking forward to reading.

So when I hold my Open Space sessions on hacking the Tar Sands and hacking Industrial Agriculture this Spring, I’ll need to ensure that participants have a grounding in social complexity theory before we start. And I’ll have to include some of this august group, who I thank for the opportunity for a first airing of my third set of intended practices.

The ultimate objective is to evolve a methodology that can can be used to hack any destructive complicated system.

In a recent article, I discussed one of the great challenges of creating model communities that might, when our civilization collapses later in this century, show the survivors a better way to live and make a living than the fragile, hostile, globalized, centralized, dependent, anonymous, suspicious urban and ex-urban agglomerations most of us live in now.

That challenge was and is the cult of individualism – the bizarre worldview that holds that we have a ‘right’ to acquire, possess, ‘enjoy’ and refuse to others, anything (and, if we were to be honest, anyone) we can ‘afford’ (no matter how our money was acquired), including as much property as we choose, and that we have a responsibility to and for no one except ourselves and our immediate families. The corollary of this cult worldview is that we have a ‘right’ to secure that property with guns and fences and locks, and that those who have no money or property have only themselves to blame and, in a sense, deserve to suffer illness, poverty, hunger and an early death..

The cult of individualism is likewise the cult of materialism and consumerism – our ‘value’ is a function of what we own and how much we consume.

As my friend Nelda Martinez pointed out, this pervasive and now-global worldview is the antithesis of communitarianism, and poisons every effort to make community work, because as soon as the desires or needs of the individual and those of the community are at odds, the individual always wins – s/he walks away from community, or refuses to accept its authority and the commensurate responsibility that every member of a real community must embrace. The idea that everything belongs to the community (or beyond that, that it belongs to no one and that community belongs to the land) is anathema to the cult worldview, totally irreconcilable with it. The idea that authority resides in the collective, achieved by consensus and continuously re-earned, rather than being bought by money or achieved by wielding political power coercively, is likewise unthinkable. The idea that we are individually and collectively responsible for the well-being of all life in our community and through it for all-life-on-Earth, now and for generations to come, is unfathomable.

It is hard to imagine how we could make the transition back from this only-life-we-know cult worldview to a communitarian worldview, but as Nelda explains that is precisely what we must do if we are to hope to find a sustainable alternative way to live and make a living.

In a comment on my initial post, another reader, Sue Greer-Pitt, points out that there is another major challenge to making community work in our modern civilization. That is our inherent desire to find and make a life with people like ourselves, rather than with the people who happen to be our immediate neighbours. As Sue puts it, “Community has always been about finding others like ourselves and imposing conformity. “ Our modern geographic transience, she says, can be ascribed to the fact that this “exclusive” conformity and closed-ness of homogeneous communities left most of us, in a world with an ever-exploding population, out in the cold, driven to the anonymous cities in search of those who would accept us, seeking with other “ex-communicated” people others who share our worldview with whom we can make our own exclusive community.

It’s hard to accept that this intolerance of difference and diversity, this xenophobia, with its undercurrent of racism and every other –ism, is truly the inherent nature of our species. When we were a steady-state species in a world of abundance without growth, this constant dynamic of separation and reconnection was sustainable (if disruptive). In the pre-industrial world where you could expect to meet perhaps a few hundred people in your whole life, your choices of who to live with were few, and you either settled for those you knew who you liked best, or opted for a solitary life, essentially self-selecting yourself out of the gene pool.

But when you can expect to meet and choose from among perhaps tens of thousands, even millions of people, and when at the same time the world has run out of space for new pioneer communities, and has become so monstrously overpopulated and crowded with humans that our world of abundance has become a world of previously unimaginable scarcity, competition and suffering, you have the makings of a total societal breakdown. Too much choice, too much unrealistic, impossible expectation, too much friction between heterogeneous neighbourhoods barely concealing their fear of and loathing for each other.

It would be magical thinking to believe we are going to solve the horrific problem of overpopulation and exhaustion of our resources and our natural world, or that we are going to suddenly change, on a large scale, millions of years of evolved human nature. So what can we do? How can we create viable model communities that really work, in the face of the double dilemma of the pervasive cult of individualism and our inherent and insatiable longing for homogeneity, to be comfortable with others ‘like us’, who we can work with and play with in activities that we share a love of, and share ideas with sympathetically, and just love without fear or restraint?

My friend Joe Bageant’s son says that “Community is born of necessity”. His answer to this question is that we will create workable, sustainable communitarian models when we have no other choice, when the only life we know has ceased to be.

While I think this is true, I wonder whether there are enough of us now who see the necessity of putting aside our idealism, recognizing and overcoming our individualism and desire for homogeneity, and creating what my brother calls Gravitational Communities – groups of people who have enough of a common worldview, and enough self-knowledge and self-esteem, to do the hard, post-modern pioneering work of creating model communities that really work, to show others what is possible, or at least what will be when there is no alternative.

How would we go about finding people altruistic and self-aware enough (and not too busy dealing with the all-consuming needs of the moment in industrial society) to create such model communities ‘gravitationally’? And if we found them, how would we go about creating, consensually, collaboratively, collectively, models that will serve as a beacon for others, and as perhaps the only useful legacy of civilization culture for the survivors of its collapse?

Now that my amazing new home is basically furnished and functional, I’m getting down to my reconnection practices. I’ve been exploring the rainforest next door, resuming my regular 5k runs, and beginning my meditation and presencing practices, both outdoors in ‘my’ park with the brooding stone circle, and indoors, where I have a view from my living room of the town of Gibsons and the mountains of the Sunshine Coast across Howe Sound (astonishing at night), and of the mountains of Cypress Provincial Park across Queen Charlotte Channel out the adjacent window.

In the process, I’ve been focusing more on poetry than on non-fiction writing, and on the images, smells, and sounds that I found so inviting when I discovered this place. So I thought I’d share some of these words, pictures and sounds with you:

part of the rainforest beside my new home on Bowen Island

The Cat’s Song (by Marge Piercy)

Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.
My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says
the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing
milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.

Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.
I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,
to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.
Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.

You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends,
says the cat, although I am more equal than you.
Can you leap twenty times the height of your body?
Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?

Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch.
My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.
My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings
walking round and round your bed and into your face.

Come I will teach you to dance as naturally
as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.
I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.

Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word
of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg
and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.

a sign we discovered in the middle of the forest on Bowen Island; it points in the approximate direction of the upcoming Winter Olympics

Style (by Howard Nemerov)

Flaubert wanted to write a novel
About nothing. It was to have no subject
And be sustained upon the style alone,
Like the Holy Ghost cruising above
The abyss, or like the little animals
In Disney cartoons who stand upon a branch
That breaks, but do not fall
Till they look down. He never wrote that novel,
And neither did he write another one
That would have been called La Spirale,
Wherein the hero’s fortunes were to rise
In dreams, while his walking life disintegrated.

Even so, for these two books
We thank the master. They can be read,
With difficulty, in the spirit alone,
Are not so wholly lost as certain works
Burned at Alexandria, flooded at Florence,
And are never taught at universities.
Moreover, they are not deformed by style,
That fire that eats what it illuminates.

photo by hugh wyeth

The Principles of Concealment (by David Wagoner)

If you’re caught in the open
In an exposed position, alone,
Disarmed, and certain you may be
Attacked at any moment, you should settle quickly
All your differences with whatever lies
Around you, forcing yourself to agree
With rocks and bushes, trees and wild grass,
Horses, cows, or sheep, even debris
To find what you have in common. You no longer
Want to seem what you are, but something
Harmless and familiar: in a landscape
Given to greenness and the cold pastels
Of stubble and field stone,
Protective coloration may be too much
To hope for, beyond your powers
Like the beatitudes of browsing
And those conspicuously alarming colors
That declare you’re poisonous
Or taste terrible—all may be doomed
To fail with an enemy equipped to kill
From a distance. Your shape betrays you,
And you should try to break it
With disruptive patterns: if an enemy sees you,
Not as a whole, but as a head distinct
From a torso, as legs or arms
By themselves—he may ignore you
And let you have your moment
In the sun as an abstraction gone
To pieces, as a surface mottled and dappled
Ambiguously by intercepted light
Like a man cancelled. But all these efforts
Will come to nothing if you move: one gesture
May catch all eyes. If you stand
Still then, or stay seated
If you’re sitting down, or go on lying
Down if you’re lying, an easy solution
May occur to you, cheek to cheek
With the hard facts of inorganic life:
That you have no enemy,
That no one is hunting you,
That all your precautions were a waste
Of attention better given to more rewarding
Evasions and pursuits. If so,
And you take your place again
As a distinct departure
From your foreground and background,
You should know it’s possible
For you to feel, after all,
At the first step, at the first crack
Out of the box, that lethal impact,
That private personal blow marking your loss
Of the light of day, the companionship
Of the night, and the creature comforts of home
As you become a member
Of that other civilization spreading itself
Around you, ready and able and still
Called the natural world.

John Martyn, Small Hours

For the young who want to (by Marge Piercy)

Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is what you have done
after the play is produced
and the audience claps.
Before that friends keep asking
when you are planning to go
out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you
had after the third volume
of remarkable poems. Earlier
they accuse you of withdrawing,
ask why you don’t have a baby,
call you a bum.

The reason people want M.F.A.’s,
take workshops with fancy names
when all you can really
learn is a few techniques,
typing instructions and some-
body else’s mannerisms

is that every artist lacks
a license to hang on the wall
like your optician, your vet
proving you may be a clumsy sadist
whose fillings fall into the stew
but you’re certified a dentist.

The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.

photo by Maren Yumi

Learning by Doing by Howard Nemerov

They’re taking down a tree at the front door,
The power saw is snarling at some nerves,
Whining at others. Now and then it grunts,
And sawdust falls like snow or a drift of seeds.
Rotten, they tell us, at the fork, and one
Big wind would bring it down. So what they do
They do, as usual, to do us good.
Whatever cannot carry its own weight
Has got to go, and so on; you expect
To hear them talking next about survival
And the values of a free society.
For in the explanations people give
On these occasions there is generally some
Mean-spirited moral point, and everyone
Privately wonders if his neighbors plan
To saw him up before he falls on them.

Maybe a hundred years in sun and shower
Dismantled in a morning and let down
Out of itself a finger at a time
And then an arm, and so down to the trunk,
Until there’s nothing left to hold on to
Or snub the splintery holding rope around,
And where those big green divagations were
So loftily with shadows interleaved
The absent-minded blue rains in on us.
Now that they’ve got it sectioned on the ground

It looks as though somebody made a plain
Error in diagnosis, for the wood
Looks sweet and sound throughout. You couldn’t know,
Of course, until you took it down. That’s what
Experts are for, and these experts stand round
The giant pieces of tree as though expecting
An instruction booklet from the factory
Before they try to put it back together.

Anyhow, there it isn’t, on the ground.
Next come the tractor and the crowbar crew
To extirpate what’s left and fill the grave.
Maybe tomorrow grass seed will be sown.
There’s some mean-spirited moral point in that
As well: you learn to bury your mistakes,
Though for a while at dusk the darkening air
Will be with many shadows interleaved,
And pierced with a bewilderment of birds.

Postscript: For those who have worried that, living in this place of astonishing peace and beauty, I will lose touch with what is going on in the real world, and all the work that needs to be done, my post tomorrow will describe what I intend to do, from my quiet place, to make a real difference, and to help others coalesce in ways that will bring the brightest progressive minds to bear on ways in which we can undermine and end the industrial economy and the brittle, cruel and devastating industrial society that holds the world in thrall.