Last evening I went to see Nicole Foss (Stoneleigh at The Automatic Earth) talk about preparing for economic collapse (which she believes, as I do, will precede and help precipitate energy and ecological collapse). The presentation, which will be available in expanded form on their blog shortly for streaming or on DVD, lasted almost three hours including questions, and was, like their blog, fascinating, provocative and insightful. Some new learnings for me:

• It is quite possible to have the worst of both worlds in an economic depression: deflation (plunging prices) and high interest rates, and this is likely what’s on the horizon. The reason for this is that the rate of inflation/deflation is a result of available purchasing power, not a determinant of it. So we could see the value of our homes and investments drop precipitously, while at the same time the cost of borrowing (and of servicing our huge existing debts) soars to double digits, driven by risk fears and distrust reducing the availability of credit.
• A paradox of economic depressions is that in such times purchasing power declines faster than prices, so even though prices are dropping, our available cash and credit to take advantage of these dropping prices is falling even faster. The result: a vicious cycle of declines in spending, income and wealth.
• What’s worse, in these situations most of the small amount of cash that’s available is chasing the most essential goods (food, energy) so the prices of these goods decline the slowest and the least.
• Nicole believes that, as money supply continues to drop to 1970s levels, we should expect to see 1970s-level prices and wages soon. Do you remember what your house was (or would have been) worth in the 1970s? What the investments in your pension were worth then? What salaries for those doing your job were then?
• Some countries are especially vulnerable to economic collapse due to debt overextension. Japan’s debt load is huge. Canadians’ household debt load relative to GDP is one of the highest in the world. The UK’s total debt load to GDP ration is 1000%, mostly due to financial sector over-leveraging. Belgium, Netherlands and Switzerland also have massively over-leveraged banks. And, as many have already realized, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Ireland are all essentially bankrupt already, and their collapse will almost surely mean the end of the EC and the Euro.
• The most dangerous psychological fallout of sharp economic contraction is a shrinking of what Nicole calls the “trust horizon”. When banks don’t trust other banks, lenders don’t trust creditors (and vice versa), and no one trusts the government, lending seizes up (aggravating the shrinkage of credit, spending and purchasing power), many people cease complying with government regulations (like paying taxes), and governments, desperate to hold onto power, become repressive. The timing couldn’t be worse: When peak oil hits and energy must be rationed, the loss of trust will destroy citizen willingness to comply with the rationing scheme, leading to black markets, massive corruption and potentially even the collapse of governments.

What can governments do to prevent or mitigate the collapse of the overextended economy?

Anyone who reads the NYT knows that the austerity approach currently being rammed down the throats of the EC’s most overextended nations (and by the right-wing British government on its citizens) will not work. The argument against austerity goes something like this:

The government decides to cut back services in order to reduce massive debt levels and restore confidence in the nation’s solvency and currency. But the cutbacks in services affect mostly the poor, the sick, and the unemployed. Deprived of essential government services, these people have no alternative than to get worse, more dependent on others, and more inclined to take desperate measures that cost the country more than the cutback services did. Government support services are also cut, as are government payrolls leading to more unemployment (a further drain on the economy), a forced massive contraction in citizens’ spending (leading to further contraction in businesses unable to sell their products), and so on in an endless downward spiral. The excessive government debts levels that are causing the current crisis were not run up by overspending or undertaxing in recessions, but (almost exclusively by right-wing governments) by overspending (on wars, corporate subsidies, bailouts to reckless banks and corporations etc.) and undertaxing (the rich) in good times. The answer now, this argument goes, is not a crash diet but a sensible long-term plan to mitigate and correct the excesses of the past and ensure they are not repeated. Austerity by right-wing regimes in the 1930s greatly worsened the Great Depression.

Most of those (like the NYT) who oppose austerity approaches support stimulus programs. The argument is that by increasing government spending now, rather than decreasing it, we can help encourage renewed economic growth, and once that happens and the economy is booming we can selectively cut back some of these programs and increase taxes to start reducing the debt to manageable levels.

The problem with this thinking is that:

1. We’re far too late to do this — debt levels are already far too high to ever be repaid even after a prolonged boom,
2. Economic growth is causing and aggravating all the problems our modern society is facing — climate change, oil scarcity, and income inequality etc. — and is completely unsustainable in any case, and
3. We have a long history of, in good/boom times, electing right-wing governments (Reagan, Thatcher, Harper etc.) who perpetuate the misbehaviour of undertaxing and overspending (on wars, corporate subsidies, bailouts etc.) rather than repaying the deficits racked up in hard times. We cannot be trusted to ever repay our debts, which is why we’re in this global economic mess.

We are, in short, caught in a bind, where neither austerity nor stimulus will help — both make the situation worse, and now it has reached the point of no return.

Coping with this predicament is, of necessity, going to be left up to us as individuals within our communities to figure out collectively for ourselves. As our economies collapse, as the cheap energy that has provided almost all of the productivity growth we have achieved in the last two centuries runs out, and as climate change begins to wreak havoc on every aspect of our social and economic lives, governments and large corporations will collapse and our world will become, in lurches, much more local and self-managed. This is Nicole’s view, and, as I’ve argued often in this pages, it is mine too. In my next article I’ll talk about some of the ways Nicole suggests building the social capital and relocalized infrastructure and capacities to cope with the coming post-crash world.

But in the meantime, if austerity (contraction) and stimulus (renewed growth) are both disastrous prescriptions for our exhausted, reeling economy, what should we be telling our governments to do (and not to do) now?

My ‘Plan C’ answer is consistent with the title of my recent post, the intercession of a thousand small sanities:

1. End the wars: Immediately cease the imperialist and resource wars being waged by affluent nations against struggling nations all over the world, and the ideological and futile wars on “terror” and on drugs and “illegal” immigrants.
2. End corporate subsidies: Eliminate all agricultural, energy, military and other corporate subsidies, and instead provide incentives for new small business creation and employment.
3. Replace “free” trade with “fair” trade to reinvigorate domestic work and employment. Cancel globalist trade treaties like NAFTA and those of the WTO. This will provide an enormous boost to local economies, and save valuable energy used in long-distance transportation. And while we’re at it, forgive struggling nations’ debts: These nations will only be able to achieve self-sufficiency and democracy if we give them back the land and resources we’ve stolen from them, and let them make a fresh start.
4. Radically simplify tax laws and really enforce them: Current tax codes in most countries are so complicated that the rich who can afford to pay for expensive tax evasion schemes end up paying less than the rest of us. A simple tax code that computes your year-end global net worth and the annual change in it, and taxes a certain portion of each, with no deductions or exemptions or loopholes, on a graduated scale, could generate vastly more tax revenue, more fairly, with much less effort by everyone, even if those with income and net worth less than, say, $50k were exempted from tax entirely.

There are some other things governments can do to conserve resources, relocalize administration and services, delayer bureaucracy, shift health care from treatment to prevention, overhaul and radically scale down the domestic security and prison systems, and deschool our communities, but these are trickier reforms that will need to be done carefully or they’ll just be done badly and make matters worse.

The longer-term answer, I think, is to move towards a radically decentralized, steady-state economy. But I think it’s idealistic to think we’ll ever have the luxury of doing that. The storm ahead will be fierce, and we first have to stop the austerity and stimulus advocates from sinking the economic boat before it even begins to navigate the rocky and narrow strait between collapse through ruinous contraction and collapse through ruinous growth.

sand sculpture in honour of the year of the dragon — online in several places, source unknown

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S END

What Am I To Do With Feelings Like These?: Paul Kingsnorth’s Pilgrimage: This month’s Orion features a tour de force of passionate, sensitive writing about how the environmental movement has lost its way, and what he’s doing now as a result, from Dark Mountain co-founder Paul Kingsnorth, his best work I think since the Manifesto. Two excerpts from this lovely piece of writing (but please go read the whole article):

I look out across the moonlit Lake District ranges, and it’s as clear as the night air that what used to come in regular waves, pounding like the sea, comes now only in flashes, out of the corner of my eyes, like a lighthouse in a storm. Perhaps it’s the way the world has changed. There are more cars on the roads now, more satellites in the sky. The footpaths up the fells are like stone motorways, there are turbines on the moors, and the farmers are being edged out by south-country refugees like me, trying to escape but bringing with us the things we flee from. The new world is online and loving it, the virtual happily edging out the actual. The darkness is shut out and the night grows lighter and nobody is there to see it.

It could be all that, but it probably isn’t. It’s probably me. I am thirty-seven now. The world is smaller, more tired, more fragile, more horribly complex and full of troubles. Or, rather: the world is the same as it ever was, but I am more aware of it and of the reality of my place within it. I have grown up, and there is nothing to be done about it. The worst part of it is that I can’t seem to look without thinking anymore. And now I know far more about what we are doing. We: the people. I know what we are doing, all over the world, to everything, all of the time. I know why the magic is dying. It’s me. It’s us…

I don’t have any answers, if by answers we mean political systems, better machines, means of engineering some grand shift in consciousness. All I have is a personal conviction built on those feelings, those responses, that goes back to the moors of northern England and the rivers of southern Borneo—that something big is being missed. That we are both hollow men and stuffed men, and that we will keep stuffing ourselves until the food runs out, and if outside the dining room door we have made a wasteland and called it necessity, then at least we will know we were not to blame, because we are never to blame, because we are the humans.

What am I to do with feelings like these? Useless feelings in a world in which everything must be made useful. Sensibilities in a world of utility. Feelings like this provide no “solutions.” They build no new eco-homes, remove no carbon from the atmosphere. This is head-in-the-clouds stuff, as relevant to our busy, modern lives as the new moon or the date of the harvest. Easy to ignore, easy to dismiss, like the places that inspire the feelings, like the world outside the bubble, like the people who have seen it, if only in brief flashes beyond the ridge of some dark line of hills.

But this is fine—the dismissal, the platitudes, the brusque moving-on of the grown-ups. It’s all fine. I withdraw, you see. I withdraw from the campaigning and the marching, I withdraw from the arguing and the talked-up necessity and all of the false assumptions. I withdraw from the words. I am leaving. I am going to go out walking. I am leaving on a pilgrimage to find what I left behind in the jungles and by the cold campfires and in the parts of my head and my heart that I have been skirting around because I have been busy fragmenting the world in order to save it; busy believing it is mine to save. I am going to listen to the wind and see what it tells me, or whether it tells me anything at all. You see, it turns out that I have more time than I thought. I will follow the songlines and see what they sing to me and maybe, one day, I might even come back. And if I am very lucky I might bring with me a harvest of fresh tales, which I can scatter like apple seeds across this tired and angry land.

The Endless Obsession With What Might Be: My favourite non-fiction writer John Gray urges us to stop fixating on the future and learn to live in the now: “Without the faith that the future can be better than the past, many people say they could not go on. But when we look to the future to give meaning to our lives, we lose the meaning we can make for ourselves here and now.” Thanks to Euan Semple for the link.

Early Signs of Civilization’s Collapse: “This is one of the most important trends you’ll see in 2012 and beyond: Global supply lines are breaking down. The just-in-time system of deliveries on tap is deteriorating. Have you noticed how often the products or parts you need are backordered or delayed?” Thanks to Robert Volkwyn for the link.

LIVING BETTER

What Love Looks Like: An interview in Orion with Tim DeChristopher, in prison for daring to disrupt the sale of oil and gas leases on public land, on non-violent resistance and having the courage to risk your freedom for what you believe. Thanks to Tree for the link and the one that follows.

How Doctors Die: Most knowledgeable doctors refuse the same aggressive end-of-live medical treatments that so many of their patients demand, and that many doctors prescribe for them.

No Meat, No Dairy, No Problem: The NYT Food Critic Mark Bittman goes semi-vegan.

From Occupy Wall Street to National General Assembly: Lawrence Lessig: The Harvard prof and expert on political worldviews is encouraging Occupy to organize a new Constitutional Conference and National General Assembly to radically reform and democratize the US constitution. And Occupy is on the case. Thanks to Sam Rose for the link.

StreetBank is “a website that allows you to see all that your neighbours are giving away or lending. It’s a giant attic, garden shed, toolkit, fancy dress chest, library and DVD collection for you and anyone living within one mile of your home.” Thanks to my neighbour Don Marshall for the link.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Who are the 1%?: Mostly doctors, lawyers, bankers, and financial and corporate executives.

Harper and His Ultra-Conservative Corporatists Wage All-Out War on Environmentalists:

• Canada’s megalomaniac PM has been blatently lobbying in the US, Europe and using the corporatist Canadian media to push sale of dirty megapolluting bitumen sludge from the horrific Alberta Tar Sands.
• He’s pushing for multiple pipelines to export it to the US and Canada, working hand-in-hand with big multinational oil companies.
• He’s launched a propaganda war labeling all environmentalists opposed to his plans as “radicals” and “extremists”, and tried to ignite xenophobia by claiming opponents are fronted by “foreign radicals”.
• A former BC Cabinet Minister explains why any or all of the three proposed Tar Sands pipelines would be a disaster.
• Lots more on this travesty (and the outrage of renewed logging of old growth rainforest in fragile areas of BC) in in the Vancouver Observer — thanks to Keith Farnish for this link.
• Meanwhile, this bastard created a “financial oversight” agency for his retired cronies that in its three years of existence has spent millions, but, by their own admission, has yet to do any work whatsoever.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

Here’s an amazing and beautifully-filmed dubstep video featuring Marquese Scott dancing to a remix of the song Pumped Up Kicks (caution: disturbing lyrics). Thanks to Liz Henry for the link.

And an equally remarkable video of a crow using a bottle cap to repeatedly sled down a garage roof. Thanks to Mushin Schilling for the link, and the one that follows.

Walking backwards through time, a clever video that will make you think twice about the nature of movement, and of time.

Jonah Lehrer writes in this week’s New Yorker (full article by subscription only) that research shows non-critical brainstorming doesn’t work — debate and criticism, it turns out, stimulates rather than represses creative ideas, the best ideation groups have a good mix of people who know each other and those who do not, and the best collaborations occur face-to-face where spontaneous and unexpected meet-ups are physically likely and culturally encouraged.

A poignant essay by a once middle-class American coping with a new “first-world problem”: ever-present daily struggle and anxiety over the basic necessities of life for herself and her family. Thanks to Tree for the link and the one that follows.

How Millennial Are You?: A just-for-fun self-test. I scored 53, a typical score for someone half my age.

Seeking the Kermode Bear in the threatened BC Great Bear Rainforest, photographer Paul Nicklen had a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Thanks to Sharon Goldberg for the link.

THOUGHTS FOR THE MONTH

From Wallace Stevens (thanks to Cheryl Long for the link):

THE SNOW MAN

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

From TS Eliot’s essay The Social Function of Poetry:

Poetry has to give pleasure… [and] the communication of some new experience, or some fresh understanding of the familiar, or the expression of something we have experienced but have no words for, which enlarges our consciousness or refines our sensibility… We all understand I think both the kind of pleasure that poetry can give and the kind of difference, beyond the pleasure, which it makes to our lives. Without producing these two effects it is simply not poetry.

From philosopher Eugene Gendlin (thanks to LessWrong for this quote and the three that follow):

YOU CAN FACE REALITY

What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.
And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived.
People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.

From cartoonist Tim Kreider, on being wedded to a fixed idea of the future:

Whether their motives were righteous or venal, highminded or base, noble or ig-, in retrospect the obvious verdict is that they were all morons–yes, even the distinguished fellows and visiting scholars at think tanks and deans of international studies schools. They were morons because the whole moral, political and practical purpose of their scheme depended on its going exactly according to plan. Which nothing ever does. The Latin phrase for this logical fallacy would be Duh. Some of them were halfway intelligent; some of them may even have been well-intentioned; but they lacked imagination, and this is a fatal flaw. What we learn from history is that it never turns out like it’s supposed to. And the one thing we know for sure about the future is that it won’t be like we think.

From A Softer World:

There should be a word for the things we do not because we want to but because we want to be the kind of person who wants to.

From Terry Pratchett, in the fantasy novel Making Money:

Plans can break down. You cannot plan the future. Only presumptuous fools plan. The wise man steers.

From John O’Donohue, in To Bless the Space Between Us (thanks to Chris Corrigan for the link):

FOR THE TIME OF NECESSARY DECISION

The mind of time is hard to read.
We can never predict what it will bring,
Nor even from all that is already gone
Can we say what form it finally takes;
For time gathers its moments secretly.
Often we only know it’s time to change
When a force has built inside the heart
That leaves us uneasy as we are.

Perhaps the work we do has lost its soul
Or the love where we once belonged
Calls nothing alive in us anymore.

We drift through this gray, increasing nowhere
Until we stand before a threshold we know
We have to cross to come alive once more.

May we have the courage to take the step
Into the unknown that beckons us;
Trust that a richer life awaits us there,
That we will lose nothing
But what has already died;
Feel the deeper knowing in us sure
Of all that is about to be born beyond
The pale frames where we stayed confined,
Not realizing how such vacant endurance
Was bleaching our soul’s desire.

cartoon by Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune, from Cagle comics

The Occupy movement has focused public attention on the vast and growing disparity of wealth and power in the US, and increasingly in other affluent nations. You’ve all seen the statistics — essentially all of the increase in real wealth and income over the last 40 years has accrued to less than 1% of citizens, and for the other 99% real wealth and income have declined, in some cases precipitously. As a result, nearly half of all Americans, and well more than half of American children, now live in poverty or near-poverty. There is essentially no social or economic mobility left in US society — if you’re born rich, you will surely grow richer, and if you’re born poor, you will surely grow poorer. The American Dream, and the American middle class, are dead.

This dramatic and accelerating shift has not been an accident. It is the result of deliberate policy decisions that have prevailed since the Reagan/Thatcher era: Huge subsidies, bailouts, tax loopholes and tax cuts for the rich and wealthy, near-zero interest rates (well below the real cost of living, masked by fake government statistics), massive deregulation (and non-enforcement or cheap out-of-court settlement of horrific regulatory violations), dismantling of employee benefits, crippling of unions and workers’ rights, incentives for offshoring and laying off domestic employees, and on and on.

The rich and powerful now own the politicians of all major parties, almost all of the large corporations that control much of the economy, and the mainstream media, and through them they have altered the financial, political, economic, tax, regulatory, information and education systems, globally, to suit their own purposes and entrench and further enlarge their power, wealth and privilege. As long as this elite continues to wield this much power, the situation will continue to get worse. And as renowned management consultant Charles Handy has said: No one gives up power willingly or voluntarily.

So how might this power be shifted? How can we radically redistribute income, accumulated wealth and power from the 1% to the 99%? The likelihood of revolution seems remote, and revolutions rarely achieve democratic or egalitarian ends anyways — the power and wealth are simply redistributed to a new elite. Political reform seems equally improbable, since the political systems (and the use of bribes, first-past-the-post voting, interference with minority voting rights, election-rigging, super PACs, paid media smears of establishment critics, backroom deals, threats from slimy corporate lawyers, and gerrymandering) ensure that there is no choice for voters that is not endorsed by the 1%.

We could wait until the economy collapses, at which point governments, banks, large corporations and the media will also collapse. The wealth and power of the 1% will then largely evaporate, and the elite will take what’s left of their money and retreat behind their gated mansions, as the suffering of everyone else mounts.

We will of course continue, no matter what happens and no matter what else we do, to try as networkers and teachers and writers to inform the majority of the 99% about the criminal actions and social and environmental atrocities that have allowed the 1% to acquire and entrench their wealth and power, and as activists to undermine, mitigate and undo some of their most outrageous damage and injustices. But this is a tall order: Decades of propaganda and educational neglect have brainwashed most citizens to believe the rich and powerful have earned their privileges legally and ethically, and that there are opportunities for anyone to join them. And that until/unless they join that elite the average citizen isn’t listened to and can’t change anything anyways.

Thanks to the Occupy movement, the Indignant movement and the Arab Spring movement, it is dawning on many people that the massive disparity and inequity of wealth, income and power in the world is not because some people are smarter or luckier or harder-working than others, but because the 1% have cheated, bribed and stolen the wealth of the 99%, and the natural wealth of the Earth, and used it to brutally and relentlessly consolidate their power over all of the systems of modern society, on a global basis. That, in effect, our society is now run by a privileged, in-bred and self-perpetuating elite of gangsters and banksters — an illegitimate, unelected, undemocratic, criminal elite. One that is running our economy off a cliff, and desolating our world to the point of collapse.

Still, the conditioned response of most people, even those most oppressed and those most aware of the true extent of malfeasance that has led to this state, is a “Well what can we do anyway?” shrug. “It’s always been this bad” resignation and “It’s not really that bad” denial play right into the hands of the elite. That is why I predicted that (although I think there is still considerable life left in it yet) the Metamovement will ultimately fail. No one gives up power willingly or voluntarily. And (almost) no one is prepared to make the powerful give it up involuntarily.

So we wait.

The people of the world’s struggling nations (and the homeless in affluent nations) are perhaps a step ahead of the rest of us in this cycle of growing disparity and hopelessness. They have lived with this reality longer, and while there are still millions, perhaps billions longing and dreaming of joining the elite, there are few in denial that the rich and powerful are substantially gangsters and banksters dressed up and posing as caring democrats.

If we can, like them, move past denial, what would it then take to move past outrage, and move to take back our political and economic systems? Is “involuntary” redistribution of income, wealth and power in a morally bankrupt political and economic system necessarily violent? Is it even possible, or, as Hendrik Hertzberg at The New Yorker has written, are the huge, massively-complicated, centralized, necessarily-bureaucratic systems that underpin our civilization themselves the problem — is their very size their undoing? Could we really bring about change, for example, by revoking the rights of corporations and making the elite individuals hiding behind them personally and fully liable for their corporations’ (and banks’, and political parties’) illegal activities? Or would their armies of well-paid lawyers simply prove, as many believe, that the rich and powerful can get away with anything?

And then what? When corrupted courts exonerate the criminal elite, will that elite be spurred to even more extreme and transparent outrages, and will a chastened citizenry give up once and for all and just struggle along as best they can? The failure of most of the public to become outraged at the Citizens United case, or other egregious highly-publicized pro-corporatist court decisions, is disturbing.

My sense is that most citizens (and the proportion is growing with each new generation) intuitively feel that the systems under which we are forced to live and work are hopelessly broken and that the elite is too well entrenched for there to be any hope of fixing these systems through reform, by “working within the system”.

So we wait.

The work of anthropologists suggests this is how civilizations often end. When the majority have given up believing in them and in their possible reform, but are not yet ready to walk away from them, system collapse becomes inevitable. The coming Long Emergency, as our unsustainable economic, energy and ecological activities cause all of our civilization’s systems to repeatedly reel and stumble, and finally fall, will give most of us, I think, the impetus we need to walk away, at first to the edges, where the homeless in affluent nations and the vast majority in struggling nations are already living — outside the purview of the “official” political, economic and other systems, and then off the edge, to begin to create new systems from the ground up. I see all of this happening, in waves and fits and starts, over the next half-century. We will have no other choice.

Until then, the gangsters and banksters will continue to rule, though more and more uneasily, as their own dependence on many of these systems results in them slowly or quickly losing most of their wealth and power. And even then they will have more than most of us could ever dream of.

So we wait. And do what we can, in the meantime, both to mitigate as much as possible the most egregious ills of the elite machine, and to begin to begin to learn what we must learn to start again when that machine completes its desolation of our planet, and implodes.

Cartoon by Terry Mosher (Aislin) in the Montreal Gazette

It’s been a particularly dispiriting month for those of us doing the grim duty of chronicling civilization’s collapse. I had hoped that when the unsustainability of our economic and political systems became obvious, those with wealth and power would take their money and run, rather than fight an unwinnable battle. But it’s becoming clear that denial among the 1% is strong, and they’re willing to do just about anything to hold on to power, including waging an all-out war against the citizens who gave them that power. Some evidence of what they’ve done recently, and the consequences:

• Obama signed an abhorrent military bill authorizing the indefinite and arbitrary detention (and possible torture or ‘disappearance’ in Guantanamo or one of the secret military prisons) without charge or access to lawyers or appeal, of anyone deemed to be a ‘terrorist’ by the US government or its agents, regardless of citizenship, and anywhere in the world.
• The FBI has joined the Canadian intelligence service in deeming animal welfare activists, including anyone who dares expose or even just investigate the evils of factory farms, testing laboratories and other animal torture facilities, to be ‘terrorists’, subject to the above human rights abuses (thanks to David Hodgson for the link).
• Obama has also resumed the use of Bush’s ‘signing statements’, objecting to dozens of provisions in the latest budget bill sent to him by Congress as impeding on his constitutional authority, announcing his intention to ignore those provisions as he in his sole discretion deems appropriate. Bush used these provisions basically to put himself above the law, and Obama, facing a hostile and utterly dysfunctional Congress, is now following suit.
• Details of mindless slaughter of Afghan civilians by the US occupying force, covered up by the authorities, were found in a junkyard.
• Obama’s White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs has been a “one-stop wrecking machine” for environmental legislation, watering down or eliminating regulations at the behest of corporate lobbyists more energetically than Bush did. And the Republican Congress is introducing a new bill to allow them to unilaterally kill any new regulation its corporate owners don’t like.
• In a secret wire, Canada’s security agency asserted that without using torture, they couldn’t do their job, and lobbied the government to renew the law enabling them to do so.
• We’re still learning the chilling truths about the billion dollar G20 police-staged riots in Toronto last year. Most Canadians thought this type of politically-motivated police thuggery could never happen here.
• Thanks to a freedom of information investigation by the Climate Change Network, it has been revealed that Environment Canada warned the Canadian government about the ecological atrocity of the Alberta Tar Sands, and the government chose to label the report ‘secret’ and bury it.
• When BC First Nations presented a united front against the Alberta Tar Sands pipeline, threatening to blockade bulldozers if necessary, the slimy pipeline consortium found a dissident group of members of one group and ‘persuaded’ them to sign a contract approving the pipeline on behalf of their people. A new study describes the huge risks involved in the project.
• The village of Attawapiskat is a hell-hole in Canada’s north where due to unresolved sewage backups in their community First Nations people have been living for three years in horrific conditions in temporary mouldy wooden and canvas housing; the right-wing Harper government blames the First Nations, accusing them of wasting government money sent to them.
• The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has, well, basically stopped inspecting food (and specifically the claims made on labels regarding efficacy and nutritional value), leaving the powerful and chronically negligent agribusiness industry to “self-regulate”.
• Despite conservatives’ aggressive attempts to discredit the statistics, reviewers have now confirmed that the recent US census did indeed show that nearly 1/2 of all Americans are now either living in poverty or living below twice the poverty level, defined as ‘low income/near poor’. Further evidence of the disappearance of the middle class.

As long as we cling to the foolish belief that these systems can be ‘reformed’, or that with the right ‘leaders’ the systems can be made to work, we will waste time that could be spent learning and practising community-building, and planning, acquiring and developing the new relocalized competencies, processes, resources and infrastructures needed to sustain ourselves when the current systems crumble. What will it take before we understand that sustainable ways of living must be local, rooted in place and adaptive to the unique situation of each place, and that they simply do not scale without becoming unresponsive, ineffective, bloated with useless bureaucracy, and utterly corrupt?

We have seen this ‘failure to scale’ now in ideologies across the political spectrum: Communism, capitalism, mixed-economy socialism, libertarianism — none of these economic systems scales without becoming dysfunctional. I have long been a believer in the mixed-economy model used in Scandinavia and (though it is currently being dismantled by governing corporatists) in Canada. I know a lot of bright, passionate, well-intentioned people who work in the ‘public sector’ in fields like social welfare, education and health, and even they admit the systems they work in are dysfunctional, and the money and energy spent on them are largely wasted and ineffective at achieving the goals these services are intended to provide.

The users of these services — notably the physically and mentally ill, the poor, the homeless, the sick, and students — often don’t know what they need or want, and have been so dumbed down by (and become so dependent on) these systems that they can’t begin to partner competently with service providers to make the provision of these services even marginally effective. Most people simply don’t know how to prevent, self-diagnose or self-treat illnesses, how to learn, how to make a living for themselves, or how to self-manage any aspect of their lives in even the most basic ways. As long as these systems depend on massive, centralized, standardized bureaucracies catering to incapacitiated, dependent ‘clients’, there is no hope for them. We need to let go of these systems, and our belief in them, and start the hard work of learning how to prepare for, and adapt to, full-on collapse and the crises that will accompany it.

photo ridiculing Fox News’ allegation that the new Muppet Movie is left-wing propaganda

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S COLLAPSE

Occupy Space, Cooperatively: Shareable.net talks about the need for a permanent, vibrant physical space for the Occupy movement in each community. I think this is absolutely essential. We can’t learn the process of building community when we’re constantly dealing with evictions from politicians and police. If we create community space in each community for this purpose, not only will the movement be more effective, the creation of the space as a cooperative will be a great exercise in learning how to create local coop enterprises. And it will give us practice in facilitating large and small groups, in creating a vision of the world we want and intend to create, in making decisions and achieving consensus and in resolving conflicts. Thanks to Tree for the links.

Practical Post-Scarcity: Open Source Ecology identifies and teaches how to build, maintain and use 50 essential machines that can be made from local materials, and which allow construction and manufacture of many of the structures and products needed for self-sustained communities, fuelled by local renewable energy sources. Thanks to Seb Paquet for the link. An interesting contrast to Hexayurts, the simple, cheap buildings proposed by Vinay Gupta and popular among Dark Mountain’s members.

A Kinder Gentler Revolution: Thanks in part to the Occupy movement, there has been a resurgent interest in the importance of compassion and generosity in achieving change. Ripples of kindness, caring, thoughtfulness. Helping people save their homes. Thanks to Tree for the links. And for more on the deeper meaning behind Occupy, check out Tom Atlee‘s blog.

Cash Out Time: Ilargi at TAE says it’s time to start taking some of your money out of the banking system and keeping it in cash.

China Collapsing?: Paul Krugman sees signs that the fragile, critical economy and social fabric of China is disintegrating.

Economic Re-Set: Jim Kunstler foresees the collapse of the European economy and a possible disruption to next year’s US elections as a result. He describes the coming economic meltdown as not being a depression, but rather a “re-set”.

LIVING BETTER

Free Food: Todmorden, UK has now achieved substantial food security, growing (and giving away) all its own vegetables. Thanks to Tree for the link. Meanwhile, Stan Goff at Feral Garden calls for “a million gardens” as the first stage of achieving local food self-sufficiency, an act of emancipation from the agribusiness industry. Thanks to Paul Heft and Anthony Dias for that link.

Derek Sivers’ Co-op Business Model: From the founder of CD Baby: You already have something that people need. Find out what that is and share it with everyone that needs it. If it takes effort to do so, charge a little so you can keep on sharing it. Thanks to Kate Michi Ettinger for the link.

Pro-Vegetarian Ad Campaign: Toronto transit riders get the message. Note: video contains disturbing scenes. Thanks to Prad for the link.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Enough of that in my opening remarks this month.

cartoon by David Sipress in the New Yorker

FUN AND INSPIRATION

A Letter to Yourself at Age 16: What would you say to your 16 year old self, if you knew then what you know now? Thanks to Nick Smith for the link and the one that follows.

Why Humans Had to Invent Time: Without it, we would be stuck in the present. Fascinating set of experiments to demonstrate this.

How to Avoid Occupy Eviction: How Occupy Melbourne prevented the tents from being dismantled. Priceless. Thanks to Liz Henry for the link.

What’s It All About ALF: Steve Best provides a compelling and compassionate portrait of the animal liberation movement.

Who: Amazing hi-res slow-motion video of owl landing. Thanks to Tree for the link.

Feminist Sci-Fi: Liz Henry tells you what to read to put a different perspective in your reading.

Aaron Hobson’s Google Street View collection: An amazing, haunting collection of uncomposed photos from the Google Street View van. Thanks to Sam Mills for the link.

Dan Gilbert: On what makes us happy (not what you’d expect). And on how our failure to understand what will/won’t make us happy in the future leads us to make bad decisions (and to indecision).

Robert Sapolski: On how we mishandle stress. And on what makes our minds work differently, we think, from other creatures’. Thanks to Avi Solomon for the links.

Movin’ On Up: Fascinating study of the exodus of blacks from SF to the exurbs, and how they were disproportionately hit by the housing/foreclosure crisis. Sometimes charts and statistics do help you understand. Thanks to Liz Henry for the link.

Edible Education 101: Atlantic offers the entire Michael Pollan lecture series in sustainable food production online. Thanks to Raffi Aftandelian for the link.

Hallelujah Chorus for Corporations: Corporations are people too. Thanks to 3Es Newsletter for the link.

I’m Going to Go Back There Some Day: Gonzo (Dave Goelz) sings the best Muppet song ever, penned by Paul Williams and Kenny Ascher.

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH

From Maia Duerr: “Every dollar you spend is a statement about the kind of world you want”. (original author unknown)

From Derek Sivers’ book Anything You Want (advice for entrepreneurs):

Business is not about money. It’s about making dreams come true for others and for yourself.
Never do anything just for the money. The real point of doing anything is to be happy, so do only what makes you happy.
Just answer the calls for help.
Your business plan is moot. You don’t know what people really want until you start doing it.
Starting with no money is an advantage. You don’t need money to start helping people.
You can’t please everyone, so proudly exclude people.
Make yourself unnecessary to the running of your business.
Don’t think you need a huge vision. Just stay focused on helping people today.
Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing.

From WS Merwin:

THE NEW SONG

For some time I thought there was time
and that there would always be time
for what I had a mind to do
and what I could imagine
going back to and finding it
as I had found it the first time
but by this time I do not know
what I thought when I thought back then

there is no time yet it grows less
there is the sound of rain at night
arriving unknown in the leaves
once without before or after
then I hear the thrush waking
at daybreak singing the new song

—–

Collapse! The Game

DRAFT 1.0

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.
• The Community Map: This map shows the 13 Aspects of an Effective Community (see illustration 1), and tracks the ‘investment’ of members of the community in (a) infrastructure, (b) resources and (c) acquiring competencies, relevant to each Aspect.
• The Well-Being Index: The index (WBI – see illustration 2) is initially set to a score of 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’).
• The Community Vulnerabilities Matrix and 22 Crisis Tokens: This matrix (see illustration 3) 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’ (low severity high probability) and a ‘severe’ (high severity low probability) version. A suggested starting position for the tokens for each version of each crisis 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.
• Infrastructure, Resource and Specialized Competency Cards: Forty cards of each of these three types suggest investments that can be made in specific Aspects of the community. An additional 20 cards describe General Competencies that can be useful in any of the 13 Aspects of the community. Players must decide collaboratively which of these to invest in, which involves risk trade-offs.
• 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.
• Crisis Impacts Table: Shows the impact of each version of each of the 11 crises on each of the 13 Aspects of the community (see illustration 4). 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.

Play:

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. The 140 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. Tokens are placed on the respective hexagons of the community map to show which Aspect these 65 ‘investments’ in the community apply to. Players holding General Competency cards must choose and write down which two Aspects they elect to apply those General Competencies to. Depending on the number of General 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).
4. The Well-Being Index marker is placed at the number corresponding to the number of tokens on the Community Map minus 15 (i.e. approximately 60).
5. The 22 labelled Crisis Risk tokens are placed on the Community Vulnerabilities Matrix at the initial positions suggested in illustration 3. 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. For crises moved up or down on the Matrix, make a note on the Crisis Impacts Table — all non-zero Crisis Numbers for that row of the table need to be adjusted up or down by 1 accordingly when a crisis occurs.
6. 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).
7. 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 8 (otherwise go step 9).
8. 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 hexagons for that Aspect) to the Crisis Number on the Crisis Impacts Table.
   • If the investment is greater than or equal to the Crisis Number, 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.
   • If the investment is less than the Crisis Number, 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 tokens in that Aspect when the crisis occurs, or if the Crisis Number is more than 3 greater than the number of 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 General 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 Aspects affected by the crisis. When you are finished, note the Related Crises for this crisis (shown on both the Crisis Description and on the applicable Crisis Risk tokens). For each Related Crisis you must now move the two Crisis Risk tokens either one space right or one space up (decide this by group consensus). If you move the token to the right and this moves it into the orange Crisis Occurs area, you now have another crisis — repeat this entire step for this new crisis. If you move the token up, make a note on the Crisis Impacts Table — all non-zero Crisis Numbers for this row of the table will go up by one when this crisis actually occurs.
9. 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.
10. Repeat steps 7-9 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, community and consensus, right?)

Work still to be done:

• Write the 140 Infrastructure, Resource and Competency cards (I’m about 1/2 way through this process)
• Write the Event cards (just beginning this process)
• Write the generic Community Story and Crisis Descriptions
• 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.

Cartoon by Mark Hurwitt

Quite often people ask me how I can live with a personal belief system that is so seemingly pessimistic and hope-less:

• I believe that our civilization will inevitably collapse, in stages, over the course of this century, and that that collapse will bring immense suffering (though perhaps no more than the suffering that civilization inflicts now, every day, on the human and non-human creatures of this world).
• I believe that, in our desperate efforts to deny or delay inevitable collapse, we will do more damage to our environment and exhaust more of the planet’s natural wealth in the decades to come than has even been done to date.
• I believe that faith in technology, innovation, human ingenuity, ‘free’ markets, leaders, deities and spontaneous global consciousness-raising, to re-form civilization culture, are all desperate salvationist magical thinking, and that such thinking is foolish, dangerous and a distraction from coming to grips with what we can and must do.
• I believe ‘we’ are not the rational ‘individuals’ we imagine ourselves to be. ‘We’ are nothing more than a complicity of our bodies’ organs that evolved our minds for their survival purposes, minds that our culture is, in its struggle to survive, trying to seize control of to have our bodies instead do its bidding. We are all, now, victims of this chronically stressful body-vs.-culture war inside us, that has left us feeling exhausted, anxious, fearful, powerless, helpless, culturally imprisoned, intellectually paralyzed, self-blaming, and physically and emotionally ill.

I have spent ten years coming to this conclusion, ten years of questioning and challenging and studying and re-thinking everything I have been taught to believe. And while many may think this is a dismal philosophy, I feel immensely liberated by it, freed from the illusions of responsibility for and control over and denial of who I am and what is happening in the world.

I think we will all have to achieve, in our own way, a high level of awareness of reality, and of self-awareness, and heal ourselves to reach a state of peace with that reality and with what it means, if we want to cope with what is in store for us in the coming decades. This blog has always been and continues to be my means of achieving this for myself and offering it, for what it’s worth, to others.

The Metamovement (the Occupy, Indignant and Arab Spring movements) has successfully provoked an awareness in many citizens of the inequity and injustice of wealth and power in the industrial growth economy, and how the 1% are now the sole beneficiaries of that economy and the accelerating desolation of the planet and liquidation of its resources. Many of us would like to believe that this heralds a broader understanding of how the world really works and what is needed to mitigate the suffering of civilization’s beginning collapse. Richard Heinberg, for example, writes that what protesters and activists are “for” is:

1. Energy literacy
2. Conservation
3. Resilience
4. Relocalization
5. Family planning
6. Beauty
7. Biodiversity

I would love to believe that large swaths of the Metamovement have this degree of understanding of the current state of the world and what is needed to make it better. But there is no evidence that this is the case. As the cartoon above humorously illustrates, most of the current protests are about who has, and who should have, what share of the world’s power and wealth, and about the unjustly unpunished crimes of the powerful and the wealthy. That makes perfect sense, and the protesters’ cause is a good one. But it is light years shy of the kind of collective self-enlightenment that Mr. Heinberg (of whom I’m a great fan BTW) and other wishful thinkers would have us believe has been achieved.

But it’s a step in the right direction. Perhaps once people understand that most of what they have been and are being told by their ‘leaders’, by the corrupt political and economic establishment, by the incompetent and duty-derelict media, and, alas, by our teachers, parents and peers, are lies – then we might begin to wake up in large numbers to what is really happening in the world, and how we must start now to prepare for collapse, mostly by relearning essential competencies and capacities so we are ready and resilient, at the personal and community level, to deal with the unpredictable cascading crises ahead, in the moment, no matter when and how they hit us.

Thanks to Justin Bale’s OWS archive for most of the images in this post

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S COLLAPSE

The Coming Insurrection: This booklet, whose authors were charged with promoting “terrorism” for writing it, offers a fascinating insight into the anger of young Europeans, and how different the current political situation in Europe is from that in North America, due to the different power dynamics and greater political literacy of most Europeans. Thanks to Keith Farnish for the link.

The Informal Economy: Sharon Astyk envisions what a mixed formal/informal economy might look like after civilization’s collapse. I think she overestimates how much we’ll be willing to put any trust in formal economy structures once our economic system collapses, but it’s a great, and important, thought experiment, all part of being prepared for what comes next.

Emotional Resilience: Chris Martensen interviews Carolyn Baker on preparing ourselves emotionally for collapse. Carolyn draws on studies of areas hit by disaster to envision the challenges we’ll be facing, and prescribes preparations including increased self-awareness, self-knowledge, and self-management, making connections to others and the Earth, and increasing capacity to deal with our (and others’) negative emotions. Thanks to 3Es Newsletter for the link.

Be Prepared: I’m fond of saying that 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. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be prepared for what is reasonably predictable/plausible. Flemming Funch explains: “Not only do you save yourself a lot of anxiety, but it is a lot more comfortable to prepare for things in advance. It is a lot easier to prepare to have a source of drinking water when the stores are open and your Internet connection works than it is when you’re thirsty and nothing is open, because of some kind of minor or major breakdown. It is a lot easier to think of how you’ll charge your cellphone or your radio before the electricity actually goes down.” Are you prepared?

Hubbert’s Third Prophecy: Many don’t realize that, after successfully predicting Peak Oil and its consequences a half-century ago, Hubbert went on to predict that the next major impact would be “cultural crisis”. Gary Flomenhoft explains, and suggests radical reform of the financial and money system to stave it off.

“A Single Chaotic Event”: Dmitry Orlov backpedals on his “five stages of collapse” model, saying that because the bailouts of banks and runaway indebtedness are escalating, the collapse is likely to be more sudden and more extreme than he’d previously predicted.

Anti-Fragile not Resilient: In a recent video’d speech, Black Swan author Nassim Taleb explains (caveat: he’s an arrogant and frustratingly unclear speaker) the thesis for his next book: The best preparation for “black swan” (unexpected, unpredictable and catastrophic) events is not “resilient” systems (i.e. with ability to bounce back from these events) but “anti-fragile” systems (i.e. that actually benefit from such events). Natural systems, he says, are mostly inherently anti-fragile (e.g. evolution). Human-made systems are mostly fragile; we need to learn from nature. Thanks to Avi Solomon for the link.

Greenhouse Gases Rise By Record Amount: To the surprise of few, political efforts to reduce global CO2 emissions are not only ineffective, the increase in pollution is actually accelerating.

RIP Richard Douthwaite: The brilliant environmental economist and author of Short Circuit, the free online manual for creating a new economy from the community up, passed away last Monday.

LIVING BETTER

Community Creates Its Own Co-op Department Store: Saranac Lake NY is learning what we’re all going to have to learn — how to self-manage a community when the economy collapses and all the big corporations disappear.

Nassim Taleb Calls for End to Bank Bonuses: When the risks of bad investment decisions are paid for by the taxpayer through bailouts, it’s outrageous that those making these decisions get huge bonuses when they make the right gambles (and often, significant bonuses when they make the wrong ones). Taleb says with their government protections banks are tantamount to government organizations, and bankers should be treated as public servants who get paid a fixed salary and no bonuses. Logical, but don’t hold your breath.

CBD Dares Say Overpopulation is a Key Environmental Issue: The Center for Biological Diversity asserts that without birth control sufficient to reduce human numbers, no amount of environmental effort will be enough to succeed. Glad someone is willing to name the elephant in the room.

Cartoon by Marco Marilungo, needs no translation

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Inequality and Abuse of Power and Wealth as the Issue of 2011: A recent OECD report put the US at the bottom of the heap of affluent nations in social justice (poverty, health, education and income/wealth inequality). Canada has nothing to be proud of either (its scores don’t justify its overall rank). Glenn Greenwald explains how the 99% are starting to realize the American Dream has been stolen by the 1%. Excerpt:

If you were to assess the state of the union in 2011, you might sum it up this way: rather than being subjected to the rule of law, the nation’s most powerful oligarchs control the law and are so exempt from it; and increasing numbers of Americans understand that and are outraged.  At exactly the same time that the nation’s elites enjoy legal immunity even for egregious crimes, ordinary Americans are being subjected to the world’s largest and one of its harshest penal states, under which they are unable to secure competent legal counsel and are harshly punished with lengthy prison terms for even trivial infractions. In lieu of the rule of law — the equal application of rules to everyone — what we have now is a two-tiered justice system in which the powerful are immunized while the powerless are punished with increasing mercilessness. As a guarantor of outcomes, the law has, by now, been so completely perverted that it is an incomparably potent weapon for entrenching inequality further, controlling the powerless, and ensuring corrupted outcomes.

The tide that was supposed to lift all ships has, in fact, left startling numbers of Americans underwater. In the process, we lost any sense that a common set of rules applies to everyone, and so there is no longer a legitimizing anchor for the vast income and wealth inequalities that plague the nation. That is what has changed, and a growing recognition of what it means is fueling rising citizen anger and protest. The inequality under which so many suffer is not only vast, but illegitimate, rooted as it is in lawlessness and corruption. Obscuring that fact has long been the linchpin for inducing Americans to accept vast and growing inequalities.  That fact is now too glaring to obscure any longer.

Occupy/Indignant/Metamovement Roundup:

• Jerome Roos ridicules Fukuyama and the other believers in the inevitability of a US-based New Global Order, now that globalism and capitalism have been found inherently corrupt and non-viable for the 99%. Thanks to Helen Titchen Beeth for the link.
• Big Banking’s key lobbying firm urges intelligence and propaganda campaign against Occupy movement
• Occupy Freedom: Great hip-hop Occupy song. “All we needed was a spark.”
• Keep Wall Street Occupied, an ingenious plan to tie up the banks by returning their junk mail with a few extra enclosures. Thanks to Tree for the link and the two that follow.
• Where Will Occupy Go Next?: Sally Kohn suggests the future of the movement will likely be not in tent cities, but in anti-corporate activism.
• We Are the Many: Clever and moving song by Makana, sung quietly at a recent pre-G20 dinner
• Barbara Ehrenreich on why homelessness is such a key theme of the Occupy movement. And the NYT talks to the homeless in the Occupy movement to discover why they feel safer and at home as part of Occupy than in “homeless shelters”.
• Miki Kashtan on Consensus vs Voting as Occupy decision-making process — Is that all there is?
• Some cops get it, and take the side of justice in Occupy vs Bank confrontations. Thanks to Jim Newcomer for the link.
• Matt Taibbi’s take on the Occupy movement How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the OWS Protests; the inspiration for my post last week The Occupy Movement: Don’t Tell Us What To Do
• … and you can download your very own cut-and-paste 3D Guy Fawkes Occupy mask here.

The Graphics of Inequality: Several interesting charts on the power and wealth of the 1% vs the 99%:

• Who are the 1%? Executives, bankers, lawyers, doctors, auditors and other financial professionals, mostly
• Other mind-blowing facts on income inequality: median net worth by age and race, falling wages for the 99%, Gini index, falling corporate taxes, falling social mobility, etc.
• The 75 corporations that own the US politicians
• Who owns the Senate?: Finance, insurance, real estate and lawyers and Big Pharma. And the House?: Labour, finance, insurance, real estate, Big Pharma, Agribusiness, lawyers and lobbyists. Thanks to Liz Henry for the link.
• Even Wal-Mart stumbles as the poor get poorer, while luxury goods makers selling to the 1% report record profits
• Census data and maps confirm the disappearance of the middle class

Quarter of a Million Animals Abused Annually in UBC “Research”: The university’s official abuse apologist says this represents “less than 6%” of Canada-wide university laboratory abuse. That means the Canadian total is a disgraceful five million animals tortured in laboratories every year.

Canada’s Corporate SLAPP Lawsuits Intimidate Truth Tellers: The Walrus explains how the sleazy lawyers of big corporations in Canada use threats of massive, expensive defamation lawsuits to intimidate and silence whistle-blowers and critics of corporate abuses.

Too Big to Jail: Robert Scheer says that not only are the big banks and other mega-corporations “too big to fail”, their inept and corrupt leaders are “too big to jail”. To do so, he says, would be political suicide and set off a massive wealth exodus to a “safer” country, and perhaps a depression.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

Image from a post by Nick Smith, believed to be from the collection of John Wareham, artist unknown

The World’s Greatest Optical Illusions: A stunning and substantial set of illusions than can be viewed onscreen. Thanks to Seb Paquet for the link.

Imagine Armed Chinese Troops in Texas: Fascinating thought experiment to understand why so much of the world hates America, from the quixotic Ron Paul campaign. Thanks to my publisher Margo Baldwin for the link.

The Pathologization of Stress: Provocative argument that diagnosing many stress-related traumas as PTSD just plays into Big Pharma’s drugs-for-everything propaganda and doesn’t produce better healing.

The End of Happily Ever After: Bonnie Stewart ponders why so many of her monogamous friends are breaking up, and what that means for the rest of us.

The Once and Future Way to Run: The NYT discovers the best long-distance runners run differently from the way we’re all taught to run. See also this related video.

A Time Chart of Death By Violence: Interest NYT graphic shows deaths from wars, genocides and other violence throughout civilization’s history. Deaths since 2000 are absent, and many of the death tolls cited are most likely heavily understated. Nevertheless, the trend is pretty clear.

Adopt a Shelter Pet, Please: The shelter pet project asks that if you’re thinking of getting a cat or dog at this season of the year, please adopt a shelter pet instead of buying from a breeder or pet store.

Sony Introduces 3D Visor/Headset: Get rid of your monitor and get total immersion right in your face. As a fan of portability in technologies, this actually kind of intrigues me. Not so sure this is good for your eyes, or your brainwaves, however.

THOUGHT FOR THE MONTH

From Angie Riedel (thanks to Dale Asberry for the link):

The highest crime between people is demanding by force, by law, by deceit, by manipulation, by threat, by imprisonment, by bribery, by withholding information, by telling lies, by ultimatum, by any means of coercion at all, that someone else must relinquish themselves, in essence cease to exist, and instead become a mere extension of someone else’s will, carrying someone else’s thoughts, ideas, desires, goals and philosophies.

The Metamovement (the umbrella term for the Occupy Movement, the Indignant Movement, the Arab Spring Movements and other anti-capitalist and pro-true-democracy movements around the world) has succeeded in drawing attention of many citizens to the fact that the actions of powerful, amoral large corporations are now much worse for the 99%, and for our planet, than those of large governments.

More importantly, there is a dawning acknowledgement that railing at governments now solves nothing — replacing politicians with others is ineffectual, adding more regulation or taxes on the rich (when there is no political will, no resources for enforcement, and infinite loopholes for the 1%’s army of expensive and well-connected lawyers to exploit) accomplishes nothing, and deregulating and allowing the ‘markets’ (i.e. the capitalist oligopolies) to solve our problems is a recipe for disaster, fraud and bankruptcy. And likewise, we can not possibly hope for or want a resurgence of “economic growth” (which accrues inevitably and entirely to the 1% in today’s hopelessly broken systems) to get us out of the hole we’re in.

The 99% is beginning to realize that, while they definitely need to make demands — for fairness and more equitable distribution of income, wealth and power, for example — to keep the corporatists’ vile excesses from getting even worse, trying to “reform” the present-day political and economic systems is fruitless, a waste of time and energy.

Instead, what is needed is for the 99% to walk away from the current unsustainable, rapacious, soul-destroying and Earth-destroying systems the 1% have so effectively exploited to their own advantage — the political, economic, work, media, education, health, and technology systems on which we are all, today, utterly dependent — and build a new culture with new systems and infrastructure, bottom-up, egalitarian, community-based, focused on the welfare and well-being of all, without the 1%’s help or the need for their support.

Just like those who walked away from past ‘civilized’ cultures when they began to crumble, we have to start now to build a new culture, and let the current one die. In fact, we need to help it die faster instead of encouraging it with bailouts, subsidies, tax breaks, artificially suppressed interest rates, cheap labour and meaningless consumption and crushing indebtedness — encouragements whose benefits accrue entirely to the 1% and are all at our expense.

To help it die faster we need to starve it — of our spending, our labour, our investment, our votes, our financial indebtedness, our tax dollars, and most of all our quiet complacency, compliance and complicity in its oppression of us all and its destruction of our planet. And in doing so we need to show solidarity with those of the 99% who live in struggling nations, by ending our wars (declared, undeclared and secret) against them, by forgiving their debts, and by giving them back the land and resources that the 1% extorted from them in collusion with the local thugs our so-called democratic governments installed and supported to run their countries.

To do all this we have to starve the growth-addicted capitalist system until it collapses (it’s already teetering), and then dismantle it and return its stolen property to the people of the local communities it has turned into social, political and economic dependants. The 1% are not stupid, though, and knowing this day would come they have worked very hard to shift the entire economy from a production one that depends on dedicated and thoughtful labour and innovation, to a financial one that depends on endless increases in spending and indebtedness, where wealth comes not from making anything useful but from the mere printing of money and the perpetuation of the illusion that only money — not anything else, not work, not love, not collaboration, not citizens’ health or well-being, not people at all — has value. They have successfully brainwashed us to believe that our only value in this society is as consumers, and as borrowers to fund ever more consumption.

It’s time to call their bluff, and tell them: We’re not buying it any more. We’re not buying any more their crappy goods made by the 99% working in virtual slavery in struggling nations. We’re not buying any more the propaganda their media spin out about the importance of GDP and “growth” and stock prices and austerity (for the masses) and the need to keep slavishly paying the crushing mortgages on underwater homes. We’re not buying any more the legitimacy of the police surveillance state created under the guise of fighting “terrorism” and now used to spy on, terrorize, destabilize and demoralize our own citizens. We’re not buying any more the crappy McJobs that are offered to us as crumbs when we leave the zombifying universities, drowning in debt. We’re not buying any more their wars, that chew up our poorest and naivest citizens as fodder in the imperialist crusade to steal the last of the world’s resources and to silence or imprison anyone who dares speak the truth about them. We’re not buying any more the worthless Ponzi scheme of stocks and bonds that provide cheap capital to shift even more wealth and power to the 1%, and the fear-mongering that if we stop believing in them we will lose our life savings and our pensions. We’re not buying any more the bailouts and subsidies and handouts to the ultra-rich and ultra-reckless 1%, that our tax dollars have been stolen to fund. We’re not buying any more that wealth trickles down and that anyone can be or do anything if she or he applies herself or himself hard enough. We’re not buying any more that our chronic illnesses and grinding poverty and homelessness and unemployment are somehow our fault. We’re not buying any of it any more.

In the streets of our cities, in protest, in indignation, in revolution, in conversation, in comradeship, in community, we’re realizing that everything the 1% have told us and sold us is a lie, and we’re beginning the work at last to “buy instead” a new vision of how the world can work. A vision we are just starting to put together. A vision the realization of which we are preparing to invest our labour, our energy, our inventiveness, our passion, our earnings, our savings, and possibly the rest of our lives to achieve.

It’s a vision of people making decisions in our communities that benefit everyone, respectfully, listening and appreciating all points of view, seeking consensus, collaborating, letting the wisdom of the crowd emerge, and respecting generations yet unborn, and all life on Earth.

It’s a vision of finding meaningful, joyful, creative work for everyone, doing things we are competent, even exemplary at doing, which meet real, local, human needs and leave the planet better than we found it. And providing the products of that work generously to those who need it, and our knowledge to those who wish to do similar work, without expectation of reciprocity or payment, without fear, without competitiveness, knowing that in this way everyone in the community will look after each other, and no one need keep score of who did how much of what in this win-for-all cause.

It’s a vision of deschooling us all so that we relearn how to learn and think critically and rediscover the joy of learning what we want to learn, when and how we want to learn it, by doing and participating and watching and being mentored, and knowing that in this way we will discover the work we were meant to do, and dive passionately into the challenge of learning how to do it well, and continuing to learn, in everything we do for our whole lives.

It’s a vision of a world where information and actionable news is conveyed through conversation, dialogue, in context, where we make sense of it together, in thoughtful deliberation.

It’s a vision of living a healthy self-managed life in a healthy community, preventing rather than having to treat accidents and illness, self-monitoring, self-treating, helping each other and drawing on the wisdom of many kinds of skilled healers when needed, and, when our time comes, dying with dignity.

It’s a vision of living sufficiently, modestly, sharing and belonging (with each other, to the place we live, as part of all-life-on-Earth) rather than owning and dominating. Of entertaining ourselves imaginatively in our abundant leisure time, and rediscovering the meaning and value and joy of play.

It’s a vision of a world where the pursuit of growth and ‘progress’ are seen as folly, where envy and possessiveness and jealousy are seen as childish and unseemly, where anger and fear and sadness are transient and acknowledged by others with compassion and understanding and a desire to help heal, and where the measures of how well we are doing are the amount of love in the community, the amount of genuine laughter, and the freedom of all creatures, at last, from suffering, from confinement, and from fear. All made possible because our new culture sees the world as a place of abundance and not of scarcity, and makes it so…

Some of the people involved with and attending the Metamovement’s events are seeing the stirrings of this already. Robert Jensen is listening in, and advising us that the systems we need to replace are collapsing now and that even (perhaps especially) the 1% know it:

The inhuman and antidemocratic features of capitalism mean that, like a cancer, the death system will eventually destroy the living host… The people who run this world are eager to contain the Occupy energy not because they believe that the critics of concentrated wealth and power are wrong, but because somewhere deep down in their souls…the powerful know we are right. People in power are insulated by wealth and privilege, but they can see the systems falling apart. US military power can no longer guarantee world domination. Financial corporations can no longer pretend to provide order in the economy. The industrial system is incompatible with life.

Michael Albert suggests how the Metamovement can begin the task of building a new culture by reaching out, listening to and engaging the rest of the 99% and then moving into community-building activities like education, housing and the arts:

Why not have classes for learning? Why not have activities for creating?… Why not have a program of activities that returns people to their home locales for organizing purposes each night, or even for all but the explicit time of assembly meetings, perhaps?… [O]nce an occupation has a lot of people, have subgroups initiate other occupations in more places, all federated together and providing one another mutual aid. In the most local, neighborhood occupations, visit every home. Talk with every resident. Involve as many neighbors as possible. Determine real felt needs. If what is most upsetting neighbors is housing concerns, daycare issues, traffic patterns, mutual aid, loneliness, whatever, try to act to address the problems. Have occupations self manage and create innovations artistically, socially, and politically. Have occupations occupy indoors, not just outside… [G]o get them [the rest of the 99%], inform them, inspire them, enlist them, empower them, and they will come.

And philosopher and lifelong activist Grace Lee Boggs tells us that:

You begin with a demonstration. You begin with a protest. But you have to move on from there, and that’s what I see happening now with [the Metamovement]. The people are rightfully, righteously protesting the corporations and the domination of the culture by the corporations and the suffering that that is inducing. But out of the protests they have to move to another stage.

You have to begin doing something that doesn’t depend on exposing the “enemy”. You have to begin becoming the solution yourself instead of just protesting and challenging the enemy. We need people to be reinventing the institutions in our society: Reinventing work, so that we don’t think that having a job and being able to pay the bills is what being a human being is all about. And reinventing education, so that our young people are able to see themselves as part of the rebuilding of our society.

So many of the institutions of our society need reinventing, need re-thinking, and you [the Metamovement] need to do that. You cannot be satisfied with rebelling. You have to be aware that we are at one of the turning points in history where we need revolution, and revolution means reinventing culture.

Reinventing culture, creating a new vision that returns power to the people and strives for well-being for all, is an epic challenge, and if it is successful at all, it will take a generation or more. It starts by realizing that, as Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker has said, it is the systems that are broken, and irreparably so. The 1% have exploited them, ruthlessly and methodically, for their own advantage, but no one is in control. To reinvent our culture, so that the 99% have something else to ‘buy’, instead of trying to get politicians or other ‘leaders’ to ‘fix’ the systems, and instead of believing that the only problem is an evil, greedy 1%, we have to abandon those systems and create new ones from the ground up, that will help us achieve the vision I described above.

I’ve written before that I’m not optimistic that the Metamovement, or anyone, can succeed in this mammoth task. We’re all exhausted already, and few are up for this dangerous, risky and all-consuming challenge. It is easier, and safer, to stay in denial, to listen to the messages that promise better times ahead with patience and some minor tinkering with the existing systems. This desperate belief in the sustainability of our bankrupt and desolating culture is the Grand Delusion of our age. Its adherents run the gamut of the political spectrum and include religious salvationists, techno-salvationists, humanist salvationists, and all manner of libertarians, idealists, neo-cons, neo-liberals, free-marketers, reactionaries, denialists, wishful and magical thinkers, and of course corporatists. There are a lot of them in the 99%, and we’ll have to be patient until they’re ready to listen, and to join us.

I still think the Grand Delusion will prevail for at least another decade, and will be fuelled by exploiting  the remaining resources of our planet even faster and more recklessly, and by printing even more imaginary wealth into existence, and pretending it has value. But I no longer think we’ll last until the 2030s before the Grand Delusion loses all credibility and the next Great Depression hits. And, as Sharon Astyk has said, we won’t have cheap energy to power ourselves out of it next time.

At some point reasonably soon our cartoon coyote civilization is going to look down and realize the cliff edge was back there. A growing number in the Metamovement have realized this already. There is and will be no option of clawing our way back to the cliff. Although momentum is now on our side, gravity is not. The real question is, if we don’t start right now — and even if we do — do we have any hope of learning to fly before we hit the ground?

(thanks to Tom Atlee and Maia Duerr for some of the links above)

Cartoon by Matthew Diffee in The New Yorker

I‘m back home after 10 days in the US. The delays and challenges of crossing the border get worse every trip, and I am filled with unease every moment I’m in the Paranoid States of America. I know that I might be interrogated, imprisoned indefinitely without cause or charge or access to legal counsel, and secretly deported, possibly to a country that treats prisoners even more brutally than the US, without anyone being told what had happened to me. This treatment would have nothing to do with the law or violation of it or due process, but would be on the whim of any employee of the massive run-amok unaccountable security apparatus that now dominates “law enforcement” in the US. And it happens every day. And it’s likely to get worse: The US administration is considering border fencing and large-scale regular drone flights along the border.

Meanwhile, the euphoria of the Metamovement / Occupy movement is surfacing many suggestions and ideas for a better economy, ways of reinventing the economic system to operate for the benefit of all. What all these proposals seem to have in common is that they offer no credible path to get there from here. An idea that cannot be implemented without an unprecedented global massive change in our thinking is just an idealistic dream, and today, we need something more than dreams. It will be left up to the realistic few, those who have moved past the second denial, to act. It remains to be seen what those actions will be, and what they will accomplish.

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S END

“La La La La I Can’t Heeeeear you!”: Why your brain won’t allow you to believe that civilization is inevitably crashing. Thanks to Todd Suomela for the link.

The Depression: If Only Things Now Were That Good: David Leonhardt in the NYT explains why the economic outlook today is much worse than it was just prior to the Great Depression. And Sharon Astyk notes that his pessimistic review omits the fact that we no longer have cheap oil to power our way out of it. And this post from Business Insider has a substantial and astonishing set of charts on wealth inequality, the plight of the 99%, and financial sector profits.

Alan Grayson Steals the Show on Bill Maher: In just 90 seconds (starting at 1:45 mark of this video) Grayson explains the outrage of the 99% against Wall Street and their fury against governments that don’t do their job. This guy should be president.

LIVING BETTER

“I Never Realized How Dull a Classroom Could Be”: Kate Fridkis talks about going to university after a life of unschooling.

Feminism and the Metamovement: Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy provides some backstory for her always well-reasoned radical feminist viewpoint. She helps us remember that patriarchy and misogyny are integral drivers of the industrial growth economy, and of the tools of disconnection that have allowed the 1% to steal the resources of the other 99%, and which have created a civilization that is unsustainable and ruinous. A core part of the Metamovement “wake up” call for all of us.

Calvin and Hobbes explain the financial crisis. Thanks to Sharon Goldberg for the link.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

“Voting is Worthless”: The NYT summarizes what’s happening in the Metamovement in Europe and Asia, where participation in anti-corporatist and anti-corruption demonstrations regularly dwarf what North American protests draw.

The Creative Class is a Lie: Salon’s Scott Timberg launches a series of articles explaining the nonsense of corporations embracing “creatives”, and other magical thinking about the ability of our dysfunctional economic system to reform itself.

Scientists Dispute FBI Conclusions on Anthrax Mailings: The FBI ruined one man’s reputation with false accusations, and then drove a second to “suicide”, in a staggeringly botched (or deliberately falsified) investigation into the mailing of anthrax-laced letters to left-of-centre politicians shortly after 9/11. Now, scientists say that the guy who allegedly committed suicide (conveniently before trial), Bruce Ivins, the champion of using US military personnel as guinea pigs for his dangerous “squalene” process of injecting oil into patients’ blood streams to shock the system into reacting more strongly to small amounts of anthrax vaccine (hence making the vaccine much cheaper), either was not the perpetrator of the anthrax mailings at all, or else had top-level sophisticated help. The entire investigation is fatally tainted, and the rush of the US administration to close the case has a very bad smell.

“You Hypocritical Americans Think Others Should Abide By Laws That You Ignore”: In its continuing distortion of the news to US audiences, the American corporatist mainstream media covering the release of the US hikers kidnapped in Iran conveniently omitted references to the fact that the hikers blamed much of their ill treatment on the US government’s policies of warrantless arrests, torture prisons, refusal to sign international rights accords, contraventions of the Geneva Convention, and extraordinary rendition. Their captors told them repeatedly, and correctly, that if they had been foreigners captured in the US, their treatment would have been much worse. Just ask Maher Arar.

The Second Keystone Pipeline: Just on the off-chance the US government can’t be wined and dined and lied to by Big Oil sufficiently to approve the Tar Sands pipeline to Louisiana refineries, there’s an alternative, even more environmentally destructive Plan B pipeline that would take the Tar Sands sludge through the Rockies and hence on to China for refining and use there. Big Oil doesn’t care. The extreme right-wing Canadian federal and Alberta governments don’t care. They’re content to let lobbyists and environmentalists fight it out to determine who will get the sludge, mined in the most environmentally destructive project in human history and one of the world’s sources of global warming — the US or China. Whoever wins, everybody loses.

Warning from Harper to Environmentalists: Canada’s loonie government has issued a quiz for its anti-money-laundering regulators that labels organizations like PETA, IFAW and Greenpeace as “eco-terrorist” organizations. Guess we know what to expect if we try to block the Tar Sands now.

This amazing drawing by Bowen Island cartoonist Ron Woodall shows how my idyllic home is perceived both by those of us who see it as sanctuary (top) and those who see it is development opportunity (bottom). The image is the three iconic mountains of Bowen Island (Apodaca, Gardner and Collins) as viewed from the hourly ferry that connects us to the ‘continent’.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

“They Believe in Social Darwinism But Not in Darwin”: Yoram Bauman’s brilliant stand-up routine sends up the full spectrum of American politics.

“From Blackout, to Circus”: Jon Stewart explains the media coverage of the Occupy movement. Thanks to Tree for the link and the one that follows.

Letter from Goldman Sachs: Andy Borowitz sends up Goldman Sachs with a letter telling the bank’s clients how to profit from the Occupy movement.

Greece Offers to Repay Debts With Giant Wooden Horse: Another funny column on Euro debt problems from Andy Borowitz.

This is Where I Live: A video of a helicopter flight around Bowen Island, my home, showing the 40% of the island being considered for a National Park. I think that is my house at 6:29 at the right edge of the screen halfway up.Thanks to Chris Corrigan for the link.

THOUGHTS FOR THE MONTH

Via Richard Heinberg (thanks to Paul Heft for the link):

Many people assume that solving our problems means being able to continue doing what we are doing now. Yet it is what we are doing now that is creating our problems. Every “solution” mentioned above comes at a cost in terms of fundamental changes in individual and societal behaviors and priorities.

But our society as a whole is not inclined to do what is required to solve them, even if the consequences of failing to do so are utterly apocalyptic. This statement seems bizarre on its face. Who would prefer to see economic collapse, the exhaustion of precious natural resources, the disappearance of millions of species, the failure of food systems—and resulting misery and death for millions upon millions of humans? Well, no one, if we put it that way. Yet the choices are not always so clear-cut, and we humans are hard- and soft-wired with genetic and psychological programming that can make it very difficult for us to undertake costly short-term behavioral change in order to avert future catastrophe. Policy makers will do the right thing only after all other alternatives have been exhausted.But for the solutions we [need now], this does seem to be more or less the case. And this is true not just of policy makers, but the majority of us worker bees as well.

[There is a fundamental] mismatch between the human nervous system and the complexities of our modern world. While early hunter-gatherers evolved quick reflexes to cope with immediate threats in a limited environment, people in modern industrial societies face long-range problems not readily apparent to the five senses — growing population, climate change, resource depletion, and proliferation of debt. At their cores, our fight-or-flight brains just aren’t up to dealing with these kinds of slowly developing dilemmas, even though our more advanced cerebral faculties enable us to define both challenge and potential solutions…

All of the solutions to our growth-based problems involve some form of self-restraint. That’s why most of those solutions remain just good ideas. That’s also why we will probably hit the wall, and why [catastrophic] outcomes are likely. The sustainability revolution will occur. The depletion of nonrenewable resources ensures that humankind will eventually base its economy on renewable resources harvested at rates of natural replenishment. But that revolution will be driven by crisis… [So, ] how should we be preparing?

From Bucky Fuller (thanks to Flemming Funch for the link):

The things to do are: the things that need doing: that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done — that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often gets buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviors induced or imposed by others on the individual.

cartoon by lynda barry

In my bio I say:

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.

My recent article The End of Strategy has attracted some interesting discussion about resilience among members of a private Facebook group established by Seb Paquet, focused on preparing for civilization’s collapse. Several people suggested that “resilience” (in the sense of “bouncing back to the way things were before”) is precisely what we don’t need — and that what is needed is capacity for adaptation. I tend to agree — when I speak about resilience I mean precisely this adaptive ability to move to a place where we ‘fit’ in with new and emerging realities (that is what Darwin was referring to when he spoke about survival of the “fittest”).

My statement above comes from having spent most of my work life adapting to changing realities in the work world, and also from a lifetime of observing people fitting into harsh and rapidly-changing circumstances — life in traumatizing nuclear families, in brutal and alienating schools, in demoralizing, fiercely competitive, numbing workplaces, in ‘voluntary’ social groups of all kinds, and facing situations such as chronic and/or debilitating physical or mental illness, the death or loss of a loved one, the loss of job, home, savings or other security, profound business, family or personal failures, or being the victim of personal violence or eviction from one’s home or homeland. The trauma need not even be personal — witnessing profound or repeated suffering of other people or animals, or massive destruction of any kind can be just as shattering.

These circumstances and changes are largely unpredictable, and most of us have faced our share of them. The result is often trauma, and a resultant persistent or chronic sense of anxiety, fear, insecurity, resistance to change, anger, grief and/or feeling of never having enough to be happy or content. It is possible that the propensity of most people to become more change resistant as they age may be due to this. I have said often on this blog that to some extent the whole world has become a hospital and has been for a long time — we are all damaged, suffering, traumatized, trying endlessly to heal ourselves and those we love. TS Eliot in the poem East Coker:

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

Our natural inclination is to try to “get back” to health — back to what we imagine (usually nostalgically) was a time when everything was better, healthier, surer, stronger, more certain and safe and reliable. But that imagined place of unmarred beauty, absolute safety, complete certainty and predictability was always illusory. Many of us have realized this and are now seeking to “move forward” to a place of healing and eventual health, and whole movements and cultures have emerged to support that pursuit.

In the meantime, most of us continue to be buffeted by the shocks and stresses of modern civilization and the aftershocks, caused by the actions of those especially damaged, on the rest of us.

Resilience, then, entails finding spaces and processes where/how we can heal from damage already inflicted on us, while at the same time finding ways to respond to the ongoing shocks and stresses we face. Where can we find those healing spaces and processes, and the capacities and processes to best cope with recurring and newly-emerging shocks?

While most devotees of the idea of resilience seem focused on systematic ways to plan for, anticipate, prepare for, prevent or mitigate crises and unwanted changes, a few, like Sam Rose of the Future Forward Institute / Forward Foundation, have realized that such command-and-control approaches generally don’t work, and are trying more natural approaches, focused on helping people develop peer-to-peer resilience capacities and processes.

In the discussion with Sam I said:

I have argued before that we can only achieve behaviour change one-on-one, and only then through providing information or stories that improve understanding, reveal unconsidered possibilities, or suggest different ways of perceiving the situation.

I think we need to focus our energies on enabling and facilitating people’s learning, especially learning of new and much-needed capacities, rather than trying to change behaviour by changing processes. That’s why I still use the word ‘resilience’ as one of the core capacities we need to learn, because the future is going to be so strange, and so different from anything we might try to predict now, and so different even from community to community, that we can’t plan for it. No one is in control. Or in other words we should focus on helping people to ‘be’ better, rather than suggesting how they can ‘do’ better.

Such approaches are constrained, however, to local communities with a lot of face-to-face contact, and inevitably don’t scale well. A lot of change advocates are impatient with this kind of action — it’s slow, requires a lot of investment of time, and considerable (rare) mentoring, facilitation and other skills and knowledge of how complex systems work.

Sam wrote back:

I think the greatest hole in our society is effective support for activities that people might do on their own (outside of the context of large corporations, institutions, or government). There are already lots and lots of resources out there to teach someone how to do practically anything they might want to do. However, the number of people who can just strike out and learn/do on their own is small. Most of us need a “sensei” to help us get up to speed on the literacies we need.

So, part of me is thinking that an immediate need would be to help people become independent and networked educators of other people. This is a real need that I am hearing from more and more people. I actually make part of my living doing this already [supporting local food and energy initiatives, and open source and proprietary technology initiatives]…I think this can happen on or off the internet (although an internet connected computer is a powerful tool). In addition to that, I am thinking about a way to guide people towards goals such as replacing their power sources, employing open source technology as individuals and groups towards food production and water procurement, and learning where and when to establish and co-maintain commons.

I’m a bit skeptical about how much of this can be done online, but with the right technology that enables learning-by-doing and learning-by-watching online networks, I could be persuaded. Sam agrees that there needs to be a balance between face-to-face and high-quality online resources. These face-to-face plus online “resilience networks” could, I think, be established now by putting the framework and infrastructure in place and modelling them small-scale, and waiting until events start to catalyze large-scale demand for them. Sam is convinced there is a good living to be made right now using such networks to help meet pent-up demand for better food, renewable energy, open-source software and other peer production activities.

What capacities might such networks help us acquire, and what processes might they pilot? Here is my subjective list of the Top 12 Resilience Capacities and Processes (mostly from the list in my earlier 65 Essential Resilience Abilities post, diagrammed above):

1. Agility/Flexibility/Openness/”Looseness”/Self-Adaptation (letting things pass through you instead of steeling yourself against them, and changing your behaviours instead of trying to change others or the world)
2. Imagination
3. Improvisation/Intuition (capacity to do something helpful/useful in the moment)
4. Self-Management
5. Self-Knowledge
6. Awareness/Understanding (of what is and what is really happening)
7. Demonstration/Giving Attention (showing others, not telling them, and listening — the essence of good mentoring)
8. Generosity
9. Facilitation/Holding the Space
10. Acceptance/Appreciation/Letting Go
11. Invitation/Eliciting/Challenging/Partner-finding (i.e. engaging others)
12. Collaboration/Connecting/Building Upon/Translation/Consensus/Synthesis (i.e. working well with others)
13. “Workaround-ability” (the capacity, so critical in large and unresponsive organizations, to find ways to achieve important objectives despite violating approved rules, processes, procedures or instructions)

How can “resilience networks” — groups of people in community (real or virtual) dedicated to helping fellow members improve their resilience to shocks, and heal from past shocks — help us to acquire these capacities? I think the answer is through a combination of three things:

• Connecting those wanting to acquire the abilities above, with those who (as assessed by peers) have those abilities and are competent at helping others acquire them
• Enabling practice: through organization, invitation, facilitation, demonstration and mentoring, providing the place, time and means for those seeking to improve their abilities to practice safely and learn effectively, and in turn help others practice and learn
• Providing resources and support: drawing on people with access to good learning resources, and people who are good empathizers and healers who can help people recover from serious and traumatizing shocks, in the past and as they happen

I continue to believe that these networks need to be primarily local, and I seriously doubt they will scale well. We may use similar models and technologies in different communities, but the need, the content, the capacities and the practice spaces will have to be local and customized to individual and community needs.

I’m intrigued about the possibility of creating some models and templates of resilience networks, and will be reading more about what Sam and others in the Peer-to-Peer movement are doing. We all have a lot to heal, and a lot to learn, and we will have to start now and work hard to be ready for the crises ahead — not with plans and prognostications but with personal and community resilience, drawing on the twin strengths of good ‘health’ (in the larger sense of the word) and deep change-abilities.

I spent much of my professional career developing and implementing Strategic Plans. The hardest part of this was that most people didn’t (and still don’t) know what ‘strategy’ is: the choice among alternative courses of action, not the determination of goals and objectives. It’s about how, not about what.

Most of the ‘strategic’ plans I was given (by bosses, and by clients I was advising) were not plans at all, but rather targets. I began to realize that my bosses and clients didn’t have the foggiest idea how to achieve these targets, which is why they just set them and left it up to me to achieve them. Indeed, for the most part they didn’t care how they were achieved, so I got rewarded and applauded when the targets were achieved (even if it was not my doing) and chastised and rated poorly when they were not (even if the failure was not my doing). In part this is because in most organizations today the bosses do not now how to do the work of their subordinates, so they can offer nothing of value in setting strategy (i.e. in intelligently suggesting how to achieve objectives and targets).

This failure of understanding and setting strategy seems endemic in all kinds of organizations today. Executives’ compensation is wildly disproportionate to the value they provide (they are mostly overpaid number crunchers), and the amount of control managers have over an organization’s activities, and success or failure, is absurdly overestimated.

The middle column of the chart above shows how strategic planning should work, but in most organizations it does not work at all. Instead of strategies being developed collaboratively and intelligently, they are either left up to individuals (who are given only objectives and targets), or imposed without consultation; in the latter case, the worker must figure out how to work around the (inappropriate) strategies to achieve the targets and objectives, while still helping the boss save face by making it appear s/he at least tried to implement the strategies. It’s a farcical game that goes on everywhere, and, especially in organizations that have grown too large to manage, it’s one of the reasons most organizations are so dysfunctional. The energy of the organization comes from control and authority, but the control is a myth, and the authority is consistently misapplied.

As I began to work with and study what I now call Natural Enterprises, and later Natural Communities, I began to realize that, rather than trying to make strategic planning actually work, these organizations had actually given up on strategic planning entirely, and instead operated improvisationally, with an entirely different modus operandi that is illustrated in the third column above.

Instead of being driven by a Mission and Vision (which are inherently and perpetually dissatisfied with the current state, such that any happiness in those organizations that goes beyond transitory success is highly suspect), these organizations are driven by a Purpose — a shared “Why are we here?” statement that, for the most part, needn’t and doesn’t change. Instead of getting “stretch targets” that can never be achieved, they aspire to sustainable happiness of their members (workers, customers, community). They worry not about how to ‘grow’ to get somewhere else, but how to continue what they do well now.

Since they have no objectives and targets to become what they are not now, they are free to focus on assessing the risks and threats to sustaining what they have already become. And they have no illusions of being in control: instead of trying to change their environment, they seek to prevent (in a few cases), mitigate (more often) and adapt to (most often) the changes, risks and threats that they envision. It is an essentially conservationist organizational philosophy, instead of the ‘grow or die’ philosophy that prevails in most organizations today.

And instead of authoritarian coercion and leaving the ‘how to’ up to the people on the front line by default, these organizations empower and trust those people to decide not only the ‘how’ but the ‘what’ of their actions, drawing on their personal passion and sense of responsibility, and their experienced, improvisational skill to know what to do, and how to do it, in the moment.

The cynicism, distrust and alienation that prevails in most large and traditional organizations preclude such an approach, which is why the economy and culture that has created such organizations is unsustainable and crumbling. Once this economy and culture collapse, I expect to see such an approach, which worked in pre- and non-civilization cultures, become once again the way most human organizations operate — though of course at a much smaller scale than today’s civilization.

We would be wise, I think, to emulate these Natural Organizations now, to the extent we can do so. Giving up on the folly of top-down strategic planning in today’s volatile and hugely unpredictable world only makes sense. We can and should learn to co-operate Natural Enterprises and Natural Communities improvisationally, replacing Strategic Planning with Resilience Planning.

But old habits die hard. Consultants and ‘expert’ advisors to all types of organizations have been steeped in the Strategic Planning ideology, and continue to push this dysfunctional approach on their clients. Even the Transition Movement, for example, often tries to create Future State Visions and Descent Plans that are more about what can be implemented (now) than about scenarios of what might need to be adapted to in the future, more about trying to control the community’s destiny than giving its members the capacity to adapt resiliently to the unforeseeable. It is no wonder that many Transition communities’ efforts are stalling.

Resilience planning is about growing better, not bigger. It’s about sufficiency, and sustainability, and responsibility, and trust, and adaptability and giving with the faith that our gifts will come back to us. It’s more about learning and being than doing. It’s about taking joy in what we are doing well, and how we are being of use to the world here, now.

It’s time we tried it.