(image: from the toronto star, taken during the 2010 G20 protests, via state of collapse)

~~~~~

You poisoned my sweet water. You cut down my green trees. The food you fed my children was the cause of their disease.
My world is slowly fallin’ down and the air’s not good to breathe. And those of us who care enough, we have to do something.

I work in your factories. I study in your schools. I fill your penitentiaries, and your military too.
And I feel the future trembling, as the word is passed around: “If you stand up for what you do believe, be prepared to be shot down.”

Your newspapers, they just put you on. They never tell you the whole story. 
They just put your young ideas down. I was wonderin’: Could this be the end of their pride and glory?

And I feel like a stranger in the land where I was born. And I live like an outlaw. I’m always on the run.
I’m always getting busted, and I’ve got to take a stand. I believe the revolution must be mighty close at hand.

I smoke marijuana, but I can’t get behind your wars. And most of what I do believe is against most of your laws.
I’m a fugitive from injustice but I’m goin’ to be free. ‘Cause your rules and regulations they don’t do nothing for me.

And though you may be stronger now, my time will come around. You keep adding to our numbers, when you shoot my people down.

– Quicksilver Messenger Service, What About Me (1970)

Esteemed evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, author of the award-winning Biology as Ideology, which attempted in 1990 to dismantle the illusion of near-perfect knowledge of much of modern science and the arrogance of much of its establishment, more recently wrote a book called The Triple Helix, which brings complexity theory to the interrelationship between genes, organisms, and environments. The thesis of this book is that most of our thinking about all three phenomena is dangerously oversimplified and wrongheaded because it is so difficult to get our minds (even scientists’) around the inextricable connection between them: each creates and is created by the other two, so any attempt to isolate, study and effectively intervene in any one will inevitably result in unexpected results because of impacts from, and on, the other two.

It’s a short but challenging read, and full of interesting information that, with hindsight, appears obvious but when revealed to us seems somehow astonishing. Take for example the idea of the “wind chill”, the effect of high winds on our perception of temperature. Meteorologists use a measure called “feels like” to inform us, for example that a temperature of 0F (-18C) with a wind of 25mph (40 km/h) “feels like” -24F (-31C). Our skin will suffer frostbite proportionally faster. But Lewontin tells us that actually it is only when the wind is high that the temperature “feels like” what it really is. That’s because we constantly walk around within a small self-made envelope or “environment” of heated air, due to our respiration and the higher ambient temperature of our (in cold weather) heat-radiating bodies. So it always “feels like” closer to our body’s normal internal temperature than it really is — except when a harsh wind blows away that envelope of illusory warmth and exposes us to the true temperature around us. This is just one example of this gene/organism/environment complexity. What we call the “environment” is substantially a co-creation of the organisms (including, recently, humans) that have co-evolved within it and which are constantly evolving it in turn.

The most provocative argument in the book, however, is in the chapter on causality, where Lewontin deconstructs some of the simplistic cause-and-effect arguments that underlie much scientific and political “understanding” and decision-making. He writes:

The distinction between causes and agencies can have important effects on the actions that are taken to intervene in human affairs. In the nineteenth century in Europe the chief “causes” of mortality were not cardiovascular disease or cancer, but infectious diseases. The mortality statistics show that the most important killers were diphtheria, smallpox, tuberculosis, bronchitis, pneumonia, and, in children, measles. At the time of the first systematic recording of these sources of mortality in the 1830’s, the death rates from all of these diseases were decreasing, and 90 percent of the decrease had already occurred by the time of the First World War. What was the reason for this dramatic change? It was not the discovery of the pathogens, because there was no observable effect on these death rates after the germ theory of disease was announced by Robert Koch in 1876. It was not the introduction of modern drug treatments, because from 90 to 95 percent of the reduction in death rates from these “causes” had already occurred when antibiotics were introduced after the Second World War. It was not improvements on sanitation, since all these principal killers were airborne, not waterborne, diseases. Nor could the change have been entirely caused by measures designed to prevent diseases from spreading. Measles was the principal fatal disease of children in the nineteenth century, but when I was a child no one died of measles, although every child contracted it.

The most plausible explanation we have is that during the nineteenth century there was a general trend of increase in the real wage, an increase in the state of nutrition of European populations, and a decrease in the number of hours worked. As people were better nourished and better clothed and had more rest time to recover from taxing labor, their bodies, being in a less stressed physiological state, were better able to recover from the further severe stress of infection. So, although they may still have fallen sick, they survived. Infectious diseases were not the causes of death, but only the agencies. The causes of death in Europe in earlier times were what they still are in the Third World: overwork and undernourishment. The conclusion to be drawn from this account is that the level of mortality in Africa does not depend chiefly on the state of medicine but on the state of international production and exchange, although it would be absurd to say that medical care is irrelevant.

The same distinction between causes and agencies is relevant to problems of pollution and the management of waste. When popular and legal action is successful in preventing a particular industrial process that poisons workers or destroys resources or accumulates non-degradable wastes, industry switches to a different process in which other poisons or wastes are produced and other resources consumed. Paper consumes trees and puts sulfites into the water and air. Its replacement by plastic consumes petroleum and creates a non-degradable end product. Miners no longer die of black lung from coal mines as coal is replaced by petroleum. Instead they die of cancer induced by the products of refineries. Sulfites, deforested mountainsides, non-degradable waste dumps are not the causes of degradation of the conditions of human life, they are only its agencies. The cause is the narrow rationality of an anarchic scheme of production that was developed by industrial capitalism and adopted by industrial socialism. In this, as in all else, the confusion between agencies and causes prevents a realistic confrontation with the conditions of human life.

What does this mean for our response, as citizens and healers and caregivers in the modern world? If our attempts to improve the health of those in struggling nations by improving sanitation and access to medicines are misguided, since they’re focused on ever-changing agents of the problem instead of the real cause of the problem (overwork and malnourishment), what should we do instead?

Likewise, if our attempts to improve the “environment” by enacting laws to reduce pollutant emissions and waste are misguided, since they’re focused on ever-changing agents of the problem instead of the real cause of the problem (industrial capitalism/socialism), what should we do instead?

A number of recent research studies have surfaced some distressing and perplexing data about “the conditions of human life” since this book was published:

• While life expectancy in most countries continues to rise, there is growing evidence that the quality of that life is deteriorating — people are spending more of their lives physically and emotionally ill, and the severity of these illnesses is increasing.
• The number of people suffering from debilitating chronic illnesses, notably the ever-growing list of auto-immune diseases, is skyrocketing, and the increase is most noticeable in affluent nations. All reputable studies show this increase is not due to either increases in diagnosis or the simple elimination or reduction of other lifetime illnesses. And now there is growing evidence that the auto-immune diseases suffered by pregnant mothers may be responsible for the epidemic increase in autism, Asperger’s and ADHD in their children.
• Life expectancy for the American poor is plummeting, following a trajectory similar to that of the people of Siberia and some southern former-Soviet republics after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

All the evidence suggests that we are continuing to try to cope with these disease problems by attacking the agents — bacteria and viruses, and toxins in the air, water, food supply, soils, and in utero. And by blaming the victims (for poor eating habits, laziness, bad genes, weakness to addictions, ignorance etc.), America’s favourite pastime. And so industrial medicine, industrial pharmacy, industrial agriculture, industrial technology, industrial psychology, industrial law, industrial education, industrial social services, industrial nutrition, industrial “self-help”, industrial economics, industrial politics, industrial government, and even what might be called “industrial activism”, continue to be our principal means of trying to make the world a better place.

If Lewontin is right, we should instead be attacking the real causes of these things: Overwork (exhaustion and chronic stress), malnourishment (not to be confused with simple hunger), and industrial capitalism/socialism (and their associated industrial systems, which we’re trying to “re-form” to be what they inherently cannot be). Stress in the poor has been attributed to lack of autonomy (power), manufactured scarcity, and lack of self-sufficiency. Poverty per se doesn’t seem to be a factor, though inequality does. But we are discovering that these causes of horrific environmental and social “dis-ease” are essential, even integral, to the industrial systems we have (mostly with good intentions) created and now utterly depend on.

Perhaps taking refuge in his authority only as a biologist, Lewontin doesn’t proffer ideas on how we might undermine and/or cope with these ‘real’ causes. In the passages above, he doesn’t talk about solutions, but rather about “a realistic confrontation with the conditions of human life.”

He is known to be a Marxist, but Lewontin refuses to allow political ideology to trump his scientific (or logical) judgement. In a 2001 article in the New York Times Book Review, he dismisses the grounds for opposition to GMO crops used by most critics as scientifically indefensible, and is scathing in his review of shoddy anti-GMO research. What he rails against instead is the entire system of industrial agriculture, which he accuses of having reduced the farmer to a life of corporatist servitude. He doesn’t differentiate between the capitalist and socialist regimes that practice this type of agriculture.

If he has any ideas on how his sociopolitical ideology might guide us to assess what could actually be done, today, to rid the world of overwork, malnourishment, the lack of autonomy and self-sufficiency, manufactured scarcity and other chronic social stressors, and industrial capitalism and socialism (and their industrial support systems), he isn’t saying what they are. He’s written scathing critiques of the concepts of social/cultural evolution, which he portrays as pseudo-science, and it is clear that he doesn’t believe that cultures “progress” any more than they “evolve”. Perhaps he’s a believer in revolution. Or perhaps he’s just waiting, with a scientist’s detachment, for civilization to collapse once more, to see what emerges from its ashes.

System diagram of the vicious cycle of the Industrial Economy (red, top) and the virtuous cycle of the Natural Economy (green, bottom)

Jeff Clearwater and Ferananda Ibarra* led a presentation on (Charles Eisenstein et al’s) Sacred Economics and Sharing Economies the other day while I was in Eugene OR (thanks to fellow communitarian and alternative economies enthusiast Tree Bressen twisting their arms to add Eugene to their current West Coast speaking tour). One of the ideas they presented that I found particularly inspiring was this:

Much of what we believe, and much of what we are trying to change, is rooted in the terminology, the language we use to discuss it. If we want to change our own ideas , beliefs and worldviews, we need to stop using that terminology, because it leaves us anchored in the paradigm we are trying to escape.

This idea is consistent with George Lakoff’s idea of “reframing” conversations, because as long as you are talking with someone who has a different frame or worldview about a subject, you will never achieve an understanding or appreciation of the other person’s perspectives and beliefs, or what underlies them. So for example, liberal and conservative views on abortion and gay marriage are framed either in terms of women’s and minority rights, or in terms of protecting traditional morality. The two sides cannot meaningfully converse because they have totally different worldviews that come from irreconcilable beliefs about how the world really is and what drives human behaviour.

So what Jeff and Ferananda are saying is that, similarly, when we try to discuss radically new approaches to a topic (such as economics), we can easily get trapped in the old-paradigm language about that topic that drags us back to accepted (and often dysfunctional) intractable ways of thinking about that topic. That prevents us from explaining the new ideas clearly and compellingly to others, and can also trap us in our own thinking, preventing us from really boldly imagining and seeing the full potential for such new ideas.

If you want to change your thinking, they say, you must first change the old-paradigm words and expressions you use. In the case of economics, these are words like: customer, supplier, production, marketing, sales, financing, revenues, income, expenses, assets, property, debts, capital, and, most important perhaps, money. Many of these terms are non-essential and even nonsensical in many of the alternative economies being discussed these days, and there is a need for some new terms for concepts in these new economies that don’t currently exist in our language.

I’ve written a lot about such economies over the years (type “natural economy” or “gift economy” into the search bar in the upper right of this blog if you want to read more). Lately I’ve stopped, not because I think the industrial growth economy is worth saving, but because I think it’s naively idealistic to believe we can transition to a new economy before the current one collapses, or to believe that an economy can be ‘designed’ and ‘implemented’ in our complex modern world any more than a new political system can. Such systems evolve in uncontrollable ways, and generally become dysfunctional as they become larger and more entrenched, until they collapse, when new systems evolve to take their place.

Notwithstanding my skepticism, I think Jeff and Ferananda are on to something. One of the failings of my own book Finding the Sweet Spot was that it tried to explain the concept of Natural Enterprise (and how to create one) using the language of traditional competitive marketing-driven growth-dependent business. Natural Enterprise can’t properly be described in terms like “competitive positioning” or “marketing strategy” or “venture capital” or “return on investment” because these terms are meaningless to cooperative enterprises that have no need to compete, or market, or raise funds. But try explaining this to anyone in business, or business school, or government (or their banking and accounting friends)! Or try writing a book of only a few chapters that explains why this is so!

The best way to convey the nature, value and potential of a Natural Economy (or a Sharing or Sacred or Gift or Generosity Economy or whatever name you choose for it) is to build a small-scale model of one that works, or tell a story that explains how it works, without reference to the language or concepts of the existing industrial growth economy. That’s why Jeff (who has spent his life organizing Intentional Communities) has teamed up with Ferananda (who has studied and written about alternative economics and currencies), in the hope that Intentional Communities will volunteer to be ‘laboratories’ for a new economy, models that others can observe and hopefully follow (and where failures of these models, when they occur, will be non-traumatic, fast and educational).

I remain skeptical that such models will ever evolve to be able to replace our existing economy at any significant scale, but I’m on the record on this blog as a believer in models and stories as powerful instruments of change (and a believer that Intentional Communities are already learning the skills we will all need when our industrial economy collapses), so I certainly wish them well, and will support their new economic experiments in any way I can. If you’d like to help support Jeff and Ferananda you can contact them at Co-Creating Community Wealth. Or if you’re in the Eugene area you can support that community’s local new economy initiative, under the leadership of my friends Tom Atlee and John Abbe, at Let’s Talk: Our New Economy.

What kind of non-old-paradigm language could we use to describe such a Natural Economy, and the Natural (Post-Industrial) Culture such an economy would be a part of? And what kind of stories could we tell to depict such an economy (a pre-industrial, indigenous or non-human existing “economy”, or an envisioned one growing up in parallel to, or as the successor to, the industrial growth economy)?

What is an “economy” anyway? The old-paradigm definition (defined in that economy’s own terms) is “the state of a country or region in terms of the production, trade and consumption of goods and services and the supply of money” (that’s the Oxford definition). Using such a definition, it’s a tautology to say that our economic “health” is best served by maximizing production, trade and consumption. Money, the measure of that “health”, is everything.

I’ve taken to cynically defining economics as “the rationalization of the absurdity of unemployment”. Jeff’s alternative definition is that politics is the process of understanding and appreciating each other to make decisions in our collective best interest, and economics is the process of taking care of each other and the planet to optimize our collective well-being.

If we were to use that language, if we were to measure our collective well-being (including the well-being of non-humans and our planet as a whole), what kind of language would we use, and what concepts would emerge that need new words or new appreciation? How would we ‘design’ a system whose purpose is to improve our understanding and appreciation of each other and to make decisions in our collective best interest? It certainly wouldn’t involve voting, lobbying, corporate campaign funding or ‘representatives’ thousands of miles away whose only responsibility is to get re-elected by doing more self-promotion and seeming less offensive to a majority of people than the one Tweedledee alternative who can afford to be on the ballot.

And how would we ‘design’ a system whose purpose is to optimize our capacity to care for each other and our collective well-being? It certainly wouldn’t look anything like the system we have today, or any of the alternative systems that nations have tried to implement (well-intentioned or not).

There have been many books written about such systems, and I will not attempt to list them all (Herman Daly, Charles Eisenstein, Richard Douthwaite, Peter Brown come to mind. My own Natural Economy vision is illustrated by the graphic at the top of this post, which I won’t attempt to rehash or embellish here. Suffice it to say that such systems would require us to live every aspect of our lives very differently from the way we do today. I think it is doubtful that we will ever get enough people to think about and talk about their economic (and political) lives in a way that, “natural” though it may be, is so foreign to most people’s experience as to be unimaginable and untenable.

But there may be an opportunity, and perhaps even a responsibility, for those of us with the capacity to do so, to constantly challenge ourselves not to use language that gives credibility to dysfunctional established economic and political systems, either in our conversations with friends and foes, or in our personal writing and thinking about these topics. And instead, to develop ‘scripts’ of new terms and expressions that, as challenging and even bewildering as they may be to many who will listen to or read our words, will be consistent with a more natural, empathetic, healthy and radically critical worldview of how the world really works, and will enable us to truly imagine, and creep our way towards, a realization of systems that embody such a worldview.

Imagine a world, for example, where:

• There is no need for ‘money’ or currency of any kind, because people trust that the gifts they receive from others, without charge, will balance their gifts, without charge, to others. Not a barter system, a system of generosity and trust. No accounting necessary. No need to ‘value’ anyone’s time. No transaction fees.
• There is no such thing as ‘property’. The land and the resources that come from it are sacred and don’t ‘belong’ to anyone. Instead people ‘belong’ to the land and to their community.
• There is no such thing as a ‘job’, or ‘work’ or ‘employment’. People continually self-organize to determine and co-create and give what is needed.
• There is no such thing as a ‘stock market’ or a ‘bond market’ or a ‘debt’. People give what is needed. They don’t expect or need ‘profit’ or ‘growth’.

Hard to imagine, isn’t it? How would we describe what we ‘do’ (which for many of us is the first thing we relate to others in today’s society when we introduce ourselves — we equate it with who we are) when there are no ‘jobs’? We would have to say instead who we associate with, what we love and care about, what we ‘play’ at — a very different way of relating to strangers. What if we were to think of that world and that economy as natural, and our current one as an aberration, and start to introduce ourselves to others that way now, and invite them to do the same — “Hello, I’m Dave and I really care about X.” And if they insisted on telling you their “job”, what if we just politely acknowledged and then ignored that and asked them what they were passionate about?

And if someone were to complain about the “unemployment rate”, what if we politely explained that that data is really meaningless because in a healthy society there would be no such thing as jobs or employment or unemployment, and that if we could only all agree to develop it it is entirely possible to have an economy where everyone does what they love and what they’re good at, and most of the day is free for play, and then ask them, when that society comes to pass, what will they play at?

And if someone with a roof over their head and good health were to tell us that they dreamed more than anything else of winning or inheriting some money so at last they would feel secure and happy and good about themselves, what if we told them a deliciously credible story of a world where no one had any money and no one owned anything, yet everyone felt secure and happy and good about themselves?

What if we stripped the poisoned words of our ruinous, mindless, acquisitive and unsustainable economy, and our corrupt, irresponsible and dysfunctional political systems, from our vocabularies — refused to use them, and “translated” them when we heard or read about them, and in our discussions of economics and politics steered the discussion persistently and gently to how we might better understand and appreciate each other so we could make decisions together in our collective best interest, and take care of each other and the planet to optimize our collective well-being?

And when we get raised eyebrows and looks of incredulity in response, what if we just smiled and explained that that, after all, is what a healthy political and economic system does for its citizens?

It will take some writing and rehearsing of new scripts and stories free of the adulterated language of old paradigm thinking, and some practice telling them. But Jeff and Ferananda have persuaded me it’s worth it — it’s the work of liberation.

And for those who lack the patience and speaking ability to do this, an alternative is to write stories and plays and songs in this new “language” about a society in which such an economic and political system is a reality. Word Plays. Theatre of the Possible. Or perhaps, in today’s terrible, impossible world, Guerrilla Theatre.

*Ferananda is Fernanda Ibarra’s new first name. She has added the ‘a’ to create a less common name, one that means (in Spanish and Sanskrit) “steel bliss”. Online you’ll find both spellings of her name.

diagram from my earlier blog post explaining what complex systems are and how they differ from ‘merely complicated’ systems

In last week’s New Yorker, Adam Gopnik laments the epidemic of imprisonment in America, especially of the young and visible minorities, and explores what leads a society to give up on, incarcerate and hence enslave so many in brutal, soul-destroying institutions. In the article he describes the atrocity of privatization of prisons:

No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:

“Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.”

Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.

Gopnik reviews both the history of incarceration worldwide, and the circumstances that have led to different policies and approaches to defining, controlling and dealing with “crime”. He describes the precipitous decline in serious crime in New York and other large cities over the past two decades, and concludes that all three of the popular theories for this decline are wrong. Liberals are wrong to believe that better social programs and “broken windows” preventative programs are responsible — there is simply no evidence to support any correlation. Conservatives are wrong to believe getting tough on crime and more rigorous enforcement are responsible — if anything such actions have worsened the situation by leading to embittering enforcement excesses. And the statisticians who believe (as reported in Freakonomics) that it was the drop in birth rate among the poor and disadvantaged (as a result of Roe vs Wade) that is responsible, are also wrong — correlation doesn’t always mean cause and effect.

What led to the decrease, Gopnik found, was the combined effect of millions of small sustained actions by millions of determined people just trying to make their corner of the world a little better:

Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime.

Gopnik is saying, in effect, that complex ‘problems’ like crime, poverty, climate change, peak oil, corruption, pandemics, and unsustainable growth economies, are not ‘problems’ that can be ‘solved’ at all, but rather, as philosopher Abraham Kaplan explained, predicaments that must be “chipped away at” and adapted to. Our species tends to loathe complexity, and prefers to oversimplify everything, and the politicians, lawyers, corporations and media play on that loathing by always proposing analytic (“A or B”) dichotomies and simplistic “answers” — which cannot possibly work. “Three-strikes” laws, “trickle-down” economics, emissions trading schemes, subsidies, religious taboos and inquisitions, austerity programs, prohibitions, bailouts, military invasions and “quantitative easing” — these are all massively expensive complicated “solutions” to complex “problems”, and they have all failed spectacularly.

“The intercession of a thousand small sanities”, as Gopnik so elegantly puts it, will never be a popular approach to coping with complex predicaments, especially as they grow, through the indifference and incompetence of leaders and vested interests and the sheer size and scale of the systems creating them, into crises and then into chaos and collapse. Yet it is the only approach which has a chance of making things better.

And this is the reason, I think, why more and more informed, intelligent, imaginative people are giving up on trying to ‘reform’ our systems through various complicated solutions, and joining the ranks of the ‘collapsniks’ who concur with John Gray’s analysis that our civilization and our world cannot be “saved”, and that instead of hoping and trying to save it we should do nothing more than becoming more our animal selves — reconnecting with the rest of life on Earth and with our primeval senses and instincts, getting outside our heads, coping with contingencies (perhaps through “the intercession of a thousand small sanities”), relearning to play, living in the moment, turning back to real, mortal things, and simply seeing what is.

This seems to me obvious in hindsight, but it has taken me a decade of study and learning and reflection to realize (and I have been so privileged to have had the opportunity to learn it)! What may now be labeled as fatalistic, pessimistic, hope-less “doomer porn” might, soon enough, come to be seen as just a modest and enlightened philosophy of how to live a better life.

Everyone, it seems, has advice on what the Occupy movement should do next, in the face of winter, dwindling and hostile press coverage, flagging public support, volunteer burnout, and police raids and brutality. We’re all armchair strategists at heart.

The corporate-owned media have worked furiously to discredit the movement by portraying us as dangerous, dirty, and aimless, and by dwelling on the kind of mundane events that inevitably occur in all large unorganized groups operating in public spaces: fights, drug use, petty crime, fire hazards, waste disposal etc.

Criticism of the movement is now coming from some progressives as well, who compare Occupy’s relatively small numbers and unfocused strategies with those of the Arab Spring uprisings and those of our sister Indignant movement in Europe (here is just one week’s remarkable schedule of events, venues and issues addressed by the Madrid, Spain Indignant movement, for example). These critics also argue that Occupy’s biggest challenge is winning over the rest of the 99% and getting them to join us in outrage and solidarity (this is much harder to do in North America, where the 99% is less informed and engaged in the political process than those in other parts of the world).

All these criticisms miss the point.  The Occupy movement has already accomplished an enormous amount. The people attending the general assemblies and camping out with others are creating a vital basis for long-term solidarity, and learning a huge amount about how the world really works, about consensus and cooperation, about self-organization, and how to create and live together in community. We are learning that we don’t have to put up with systems plagued with corruption, inequity and rot. We have learned that it just might be possible to create something new, together, to replace the systems that are crumbling, systems which do nothing for us and which are destroying our dignity, our humanity, and our world.

But we are just starting. As Matt Taibbi brilliantly points out today, we don’t know what we want. We just want the rest of the world to know that we’re outraged, and fed up with the 1% controlling our lives and our government and our economy and our media, and we want to urge the 99% to join us as we begin to begin to figure out what to do about it, now that we know the existing power structure is not going to do anything for us.

We don’t want to be led. We don’t want anyone in control. We don’t want anyone to speak to the media or governments for us or to represent us or make decisions for us. We’ve tried that system and it doesn’t work, at least not for the 99%. We want to create something new, together. We have absolutely no idea what it is, or what it will look like, or how long it will take. We don’t need anyone’s advice as we figure it out. If you want to help, come and join us, but speak with us and not to us. And most of all, listen and help us get organized. And be patient. It takes time to co-create something new, together, as equals.

So, thank you, Occupy comrades, in the camps, the streets, the houses and schools and workplaces and wherever we rise to speak truth to power and work to begin to bring the corporate and political criminals to justice, to re-enfranchise and re-empower us and return dignity and equity and what’s been stolen from us, and to create better ways to live and make a living. Don’t listen to what others tell us to do. Together, in our own way, taking as much time as we need, we are figuring out exactly what needs to be done. They can tear down our tents, and fill the jails and courts and hospitals with our bodies, but the Movement is not going away. Keep the faith. En todo el mundo, la lucha está en la calle.

[The "Metamovement" is Umair Haque's collective name for the various global pro-democracy, anti-corporatist movements that have sprung up all over the world this year: the "Occupy" movements in over 400 cities, mostly in the Americas, the parallel European "Indignant" movements that began with the  15M protests in Madrid, Spain attended by over 100,000 people last May, and the "Arab Spring" movements in the Middle East nations.]

METAMOVEMENT ORGANIZATION AND OPERATION

Monday evening I attended the General Assembly of Occupy Portland. The group there now consists of about 600 people, with perhaps 200 camping in the “occupied” park, 150 (including both campers and non-campers) showing up for the daily General Assemblies (decision-making and information meetings), smaller numbers attending a host of educational, planning and protest events, and the full number attending less frequent marches and other high-visibility events.

Last evening (Tuesday) I attended the General Assembly of Occupy Eugene (Oregon). The group is about half the size of Portland’s, though attendance at their General Assembly was almost as high. The Eugene group is in close communication with the Portland group and have adopted a number of the same operating protocols.

It’s amazing to see the self-organization and self-management of the Occupy groups. Rotating groups of skilled facilitators have come together and voluntarily convene and facilitate the General Assemblies. They are using established facilitation processes (consensus decision-making and rules of procedure that are vastly more inclusive than the rules used in meetings convened by the 1%), but they have had to tweak and evolve the processes on the fly to suit large groups of people who don’t know each other and which change day-to-day. They have also had to educate the large number of attendees at General Assemblies on how the process works — a huge challenge — and also make clear to both participants and media that they are neutral facilitators, not leaders or spokespeople for the groups (in fact the groups have no ‘leaders’ or ‘spokespeople’, much to the exasperation of media, police and authorities). Occupy Portland, like other Occupy cities, has posted their evolving General Assembly consensus process on their website, so that other Occupy groups can adapt and learn from them.

The self-organization and self-management extends far beyond meeting and decision processes. Each Occupy group has evolved committees that look after food (that must conform to local health regulations, so that there is no excuse for police or other authorities to shut them down), cleanup, water and sanitation, first aid, mental health, education (some Occupy groups offer child care facilities), police liaison, safety and security, recreation, arts and entertainment, engineering, maintenance (there is a plan and a fund for repairing any damage done to the occupied premises in Portland), information collection and dissemination, outreach, event planning and all the other essential functions of a small possibly-permanent human establishment.

It is amazing to watch the groups use the so-called ‘human megaphone/microphone’ to get the attention of a large and dispersed Occupy group quickly. If there’s an urgent announcement, the announcer will shout out “Mike Check!” and everyone in the vicinity will immediately stop talking and repeat, 5 words at a time, what the announcer is saying, so that everyone in the area can hear it. The privilege is not abused. I have seen it used effectively to alert the group that there is an angry dispute occurring (“Mike Check Peacemaker!” tells the members of the Peacemaker committee where the altercation is and that their presence is needed), and I have also seen it used to alert the group that there is a police presence in the area (“Mike Check Legal!” tells the members of the Legal and Safety committee that they need to get there immediately to witness and mediate any interaction between the group and police).

Equally impressive is the education that is occurring, with daily training in subjects like conflict resolution (especially dealing with people with mental disturbances or under the influence of alcohol or drugs), facilitation, first aid and legal rights, the degree to which low-tech workarounds are emerging to deal with situations as they arise (e.g. hand signals to convey a sense of a large group’s response to what is being said), and some of the technologies (like livestreaming) being used to broadcast, track and record events as they occur.

THE CHALLENGE OF BALANCING GROUP AUTHORITY AND INDIVIDUAL AUTONOMY

From what I have seen, the major challenge the Occupy groups are dealing with is about who is authorized to do what on behalf of, or binding upon, participants, without infringing on individual participants’ autonomy. For example, if someone wants to organize a march, does it need to be put forward as a proposal and agreed to by consensus of the whole? Since it only needs to be agreed to by consensus if it is put forward as a proposal at a General Assembly, does this encourage people to circumvent the collective decision-making process by just saying “I’m going to do this — who’s with me?” instead of putting forward a proposal to the group?

And what about committees?: Since anyone can form a committee, what authority does a committee have, if any, and if it has no authority (except as granted at a General Assembly through the proposal process) what is the point of its existence (it would seem in that case to have accepted responsibility without commensurate authority, which can quickly become untenable)?

The general sense seems to be that matters that affect the entire group should be subject to discussion and agreement by proposal at a General Assembly. But what exactly does “affects the entire group” mean?

There have been cases in the Occupy movement of marches and other actions that have been approved by consensus at a General Assembly, others that have failed to achieve consensus (in large Occupy groups, there is a fallback to 90% approval if consensus cannot be achieved, but that means if only 85% of a group agrees to an action, it is not approved), and still others where a march or other action was just announced at a General Assembly or elsewhere, without being ‘proposed’ for consensus discussion at all. And some of these ‘unproposed’ marches were ‘endorsed’ by a committee of a General Assembly. If the march or other action turns into a debacle, does it really matter whether it was ‘proposed’ (and agreed to) or not?

Similarly, there are committees that have received recognition by General Assemblies (in that they are announced there, and make regular committee reports there), but there is no clarity on where the authority of these committees begins and ends. Communications committees have been approached by media for comments on various matters, for example, and have (inappropriately, in my opinion) sometimes proffered comments that they believe consistent with the principles of the group. The correct answer to “Is Occupy (name of city) opposed to the use of violence?”, for example, is “Occupy (name of city) has not expressed a consensus opinion on that subject”.

It will be interesting to see how the Metamovement evolves processes and positions on matters of authority, responsibility, representation and power. These are issues, after all, that are at the heart of the Metamovement’s dissatisfaction with the de facto rule by the corporatist 1%.

FRAMING THE MOVEMENT

George Lakoff has suggested a ‘frame’ for the Metamovement, which he argues is necessary to prevent the media and others framing it for us. His frame: “We love America. We’re here to fix it.”, with the subordinate message “The Public is not opposed to the Private. The Public makes the Private possible.” The main message is to deflect accusations that the Metamovement is selfish, negative, unpatriotic and destructive. The subordinate message to is deflect accusations that the Metamovement wants something for nothing, that government is not inherently part of the problem, and needs to be part of the solution. This is the message that Elizabeth Warren has been pounding home in her Senate seat campaign.

BROADENING ENGAGEMENT

It is encouraging to see thousands of people in hundreds of people cities around the world marching in the streets in solidarity for the 99% of the population disempowered and disenfranchised by despots and corporatist elites, pulling the strings of government and making all the key political, economic and social decisions in our world.

But in order to convince the despots and elites that we really are the 99%, we need to engage those who are unable, because of fear, or lack of access or opportunity, to join us in the streets. More than that, we need to engage the large number who have given up on reforming the system, or been so beaten down by illnesses, or by the dysfunctional education system, the propagandizing media, and endemic political oppression in their countries and communities, that they are not even aware of our message.

How do you think we can do this? I’d welcome your thoughts and will share them with the Metamovement groups.

Here are a couple of ideas I came up with:

• Create Michael Wesch-style videos of the stories, feelings and ideas of the 99%: Create a list of Metamovement questions such as “How has the disempowerment of most citizens by the political and corporate elite affected you?”; “What actions of governments and big corporations have made you most angry?”; “What do you think governments should do to re-empower and improve the welfare of the 99%?”; “What do you think we, the 99%, need to do ourselves, things we cannot expect the government to do for us?” Then ask people to download a blank “99%” poster, write their answer to one of these questions on it, add their first name and city, and then send a photo or short video clip of themselves holding the poster to the answer compiler, who would craft them into a series of videos.
• Create “virtual marches”: Use some kind of social/meeting software tool that can track and log the number of people signed in. Use meetup or some similar online scheduling tool to schedule a virtual march. At the scheduled time, people would sign in on the designated site, text in their expressions of solidarity, and perhaps watch Metamovement-related videos or livecasts together. If done on a community-by-community basis, those physically marching and occupying could then legitimately say they represented a group ten or a hundred or a thousand times greater.

THE METAMOVEMENT’S NEXT STEPS: THREE TYPES OF ACTIONS BEYOND MARCHES

It seems to me that actions proposed by the Metamovement will fall into three categories:

A. Demands of Government: Actions that need to be taken by governments and regulators,

B. Street Actions: Actions that the people in the Metamovement can do physically during the occupations, both to draw attention to our message and demands, and to demonstrate our collective will, and

C. Ongoing Local Initiatives: Actions that the communities of the Metamovement need to take responsibility for ourselves, on an ongoing basis, to begin to create a new economy and society and show the way to a new, community-based way of living, in which most power and responsibility will be vested. These initiatives would be local, but coordinated with those of other Metamovement communities.

It occurred to me that it might make sense to look at the various platforms of the Metamovement to see what types of actions might emerge in each of these three categories. Looking at the various manifestos and other statements of the Metamovement’s groups, the main objectives would seem to be:

1. Re-empowerment of the people and communities (a real shift of decision-making power from the 1% to the 99% including more transparency in lobbying and less money in government decision-making, greater autonomy, and increased community self-management)
2. Reining in of corporatist rights and privileges (end to: subsidies, bailouts, tax breaks, monopolies and oligopolies, deregulation and lack of enforcement of regulations, corporate personhood, corporate concentration of media ownership)
3. Debt forgiveness (end to foreclosures, elimination of struggling nations’ debts, student loan debts, mortgages in excess of property value, usury etc.)
4. Banking and money system reform
5. Wealth and income redistribution and equalization (tax reform, break-up of excessive concentration, nationalization of industries in areas essential to public well-being)
6. Free and universal access to health
7. Free and universal access to education
8. Right to decent livelihood (employment, support for self-employment and cooperatives etc.)
9. Right to social security
10. Economic system reforms to make the economy environmentally sustainable
11. Peace and social justice (end to imperialist wars, greater equality of rights, security from unreasonable detention, surveillance and harassment)
12. End to resource waste and destruction of the planet
13. Shift in criteria used for political and economic decisions and laws from wealth and growth to happiness, justice and equality
14. Food security

If we were to use this scheme, we could start to identify actions of each of the three types (Demands of Government; Street Actions; Ongoing Local Initiatives) to advance each of the 14 objectives. These might help bring direction and focus (and sustainability) to the Metamovement.

Here’s a 3 x 14 table we might use to define and sort these various actions. I’ve filled in some of the cells with a few ideas I’ve had, or which others I have spoken with have employed or suggested.

What would you add? Are there objectives missing? What else should we be demanding, doing, and self-organizing for ongoing community-based work? How can we build on the Metamovement phenomenon to start to achieve the objectives that 99% of us believe in, that the current power structures are disinclined to pursue?

[Belated thanks to Bruce Campbell for pointing me to Umair Haque's article on the Metamovement.]

First edition of the Occupy Wall Street Journal. Full size copy and edition two here.

There have been, belatedly, attempts to connect the “We Are the 99%” Occupy Wall Street protests with the protests in the Mideast against anti-democratic regimes and in Europe against unemployment, austerity and government inaction. What is unique about the newest US protests (at least since the ill-fated anti-globalization protests of a decade ago), and perhaps the reason why it took so long for them to get media and public traction, is that they are anti-corporate more than anti-government.

Umair Haque, an economics writer (best known for his explanation of the phenomenon of Peer Production) I have written about on this blog over the years, and now a writer for HBR, has recently labelled these protests with the collective term the Metamovement. In his essay he says:

The common thread behind each and every movement in the Metamovement… [is] a sense of grievous injustice, not merely at rich getting richer, but at the loss of human agency and sovereignty over their own fates that is the deeper human price. In other words, it’s not just about inequality–but the deeper failure of institutions…

The deeper thread that runs through [these protests is] one not merely of loss of financial prosperity, but of the paring back of dignity, of the evisceration of agency, of the disappearance of that which might be said to be essential to the experience of being human…

Not every revolt ends in revolution–but every revolution begins in revolt. And make no mistake–this is revolt; insurrection against a monstrous, barbaric status quo that’s failed too many, too deserving, for too long–while serving too few, too undeserving, far too well. It is not in the nature of man or beast to stay yoked to the gleaming machines of their own economic, social, and moral annihilation.

The Metamovement is in essence a revolt against disempowerment, and, while government is the favourite whipping-boy, there is a growing awareness that globalization has led to corpocracy — concentration of power in the hands of the wealthy multinational business owners, who buy and sell politicians at will and hence control the laws, the regulations, law enforcement and other political decisions including when and with whom we go to war. Loathing government has always been popular and acceptable in North America (which is why most elections are about which party is hated more). Loathing big corrupt anti-democratic corporations is new, and unsettling to the corporatists and the mainstream media they own. It’s OK to howl at the puppets, but not at the puppet-masters.

As Jeff Wells explains, there is an overwhelming and global sense that the rest of us don’t matter any more in our globalized industrialized society, except as passive consumers of products. We are not needed or wanted any more for our ideas, for our viewpoints, for our knowledge and skills, for our approval at the voting booth, or even for our physical labour; the corpocracy would prefer that we just borrow more and spend more, endlessly, quietly, and uncritically, until we die.

The metamovement is short on coherence of demands (and hence was and still is dismissed as aimless and anarchic by media and politicians alike) because there is a growing sense that what is needed is not for those in power to do something different, but for those in power to cede that power back to individuals and community, and leave it up to those individuals and communities to decide on what, in their particular situations, should be done with that power.

And, as consultant-philosopher Charles Handy has pointed out in a warning to political, economic and social idealists, nobody gives up power voluntarily. This is the greatest challenge to the Metamovement, as the people of Syria, Libya and Yemen know all too well.

What makes the situation even more complex is that there is no coherent consensus among the various facets of the Metamovement on who should be ceding power, or how. In the Mideast the target is corrupt totalitarian governments, but who their power should pass to is far from unanimous, and that makes a lot of people nervous, especially those who’ve seen who has risen to fill the power vacuum in other countries.

Neither the target nor the goal of the Metamovement is clear in North America or much of Europe. To some extent the protesters are not for anything — their solidarity is in opposition, not in intention. The left-libertarians of Occupy Wall Street are opposed to global corporatism, and want it dismantled to re-empower individuals and communities (as one writer put it “We don’t want to overthrow the government, we just want it back.”). The right-libertarians of the Tea Party are opposed to government and government regulations (including regulation of corporatists), and want government dismantled through deregulation in order to — you guessed it — re-empower individuals and communities. Both believe the other is fraudulent, misguided and dangerous, but both are expressing, from their worldview and with the knowledge available to them, anger and outrage over our growing loss of dignity, disempowerment and even irrelevance to the global monoculture corporatist society in which we all live.

Meanwhile a large part of the populace, especially many young people, have pretty well given up on the possibility of any power shift occurring. Some of them think the Metamovement is ridiculous; most of them, I suspect, don’t know and/or don’t care about it. The billions around the world who have opted out of all active engagement with the political and economic system (other than continuing to support it with their purchases, their passivity and their resignation), are the real 99%.

So where is this Metamovement going? When there are no cohesive goals, demands, or measures of success, can the Metamovement ‘succeed’?

The real purpose of the Metamovement, at least in North America and perhaps Europe, is not to get the corrupt political and economic corporatist 1% to cede power, or to reform itself, or to compel political leaders to dismantle it or tax it fairly or reform it on threat of replacing them with leaders who will. Only the hapless Tea Party faction of the Metamovement is naive enough to believe that can or will happen.

The real purpose of the Metamovement, I would argue, is to re-engage the 99%, from the bottom up, community by community around the world, first to learn how things really work and what is really going on, and then to decide what actions need to be taken in response. In every nation and community the situation is different and the response that is needed will inevitably be different.

The purpose of the Metamovement is education and then organization. That means countering the official propaganda and refusing to support, with complacency, with tax dollars, with consumer dollars, with obedient wage-slave labour, or with the acceptance of crushing debt, the existing political and economic systems that are currently run for the benefit of the corporatists. It means curing the epidemic of anomie that has infected so many of us, everywhere. It’s a hugely ambitious goal.

In much of the Mideast that means for the moment deposing despots, and then struggling to avoid allowing either other ideologues or global corporatists to fill the power void. In North America and Europe that probably means both starving the system (by refusing to support it politically or economically), and smartly and strategically sabotaging it (where it is weakest) — blocking it, breaking it, or taking it at every turn, without causing suffering and without getting caught (at least until we are far enough along as a popular movement that the enforcement authorities will refuse to arrest us, and will instead join us).

This is and always has been the dream of revolutionaries. It has succeeded, sometimes, in the past, and it may succeed again, in some places and situations at least, for a while.

But look at where we stand now, the larger picture. Real democracy is, for all our efforts, rare in the world, and power inequality is staggering, growing by leaps and bounds, and almost unprecedented in human history. And we are headed towards a series of catastrophic and cascading energy, ecological and economic crises and no one is in control — no one, not the 99%, not the 1%, has the power to avert them. We have unleashed the sixth great extinction of life on Earth and it’s been accelerating unimpeded for thirty thousand years. We have created a political and economic industrial growth civilization monoculture that is unsustainable, out of control and unstoppable.

This is part of the learning that the Metamovement will have to internalize, relate to the local situation in every community, and decide how to act upon. So, of course we need a Metamovement to work to restore the balance of power in our political and economic systems, and to restore dignity and purpose to our lives. But such a movement will take a long time, will be fiercely opposed by powerful interests, will entail huge risks, and will have to play out across a backdrop of growing crises, the imminent train wreck of our global industrial growth civilization, for which we must all share the blame.

My sense is that, in the short run, the situation is simply not bad enough in most of the affluent nations of the world to engage sufficiently large numbers of people to learn and commit to what is needed and stick with it long enough to achieve the power change the Metamovement will discover is required to achieve their ends.

And every failure, like the recent failure of the anti-pipeline demonstrations in Washington DC (despite evidence of unethical and possibly illegal activities by both US and Canadian governments and regulators working with Big Oil), will only serve to demoralize the Metamovement and sap its energy.

And in the longer run, I believe that the massive and chronic crises we will all be facing will consume so much of our time and attention that the Metamovement will fall by the wayside.

In the meantime, I applaud the Metamovement and its hard-working members, especially those who are informed and not naive about what is really going on. I hope they succeed. I fear they cannot.

Last Sunday I went for a long walk in the woods.

I am fortunate to live on a hill overlooking mountains and ocean, in the only house on the street, adjacent to a municipal park which is in turn adjacent to a large piece of forested crown land called Block 6. Block 6 is included in plans for a National Park on Bowen Island that would include almost 40% of the land area of the island.

Block 6 is not “old growth” (>175 year-old trees) forest. The Sḵwxwú7mesh, the Coast Salish peoples from whom the Island and 2500 square miles of adjacent mainland was stolen by Europeans in the late 1700s, did not harvest much of Bowen’s temperate rainforest. Logging on Bowen by Europeans began in earnest in the 1870s, peaked in the 1890s, and continued until the 1950s.

Predominant Block 6 tree species are Douglas Fir, Western Hemlock, Red Alder and Lodgepole Pine with undergrowth of a wide variety of ferns, moss, grape and berries, and an average tree age of 90-150 years (meaning no logging since the end of the 19th century). Ecologists report a “significant” part of the area is “old growth” forest — never commercially harvested. Huszar Creek runs from Fairy Fen, a diverse wetland in the centre of the Block, to the Salish Sea on the south coast. The eastern part of the Block features Radar Hill, site of a military base during WW2 (lookout for Japanese warships) and, from then until now, communications towers and a gravel pit operation.

The picture above shows what I saw (and regularly see) for the first part of my walk. Even though much of the adjacent area remains undeveloped, you can see on the Google Maps satellite view precisely where Block 6 begins — from the park you walk through a veritable tree ‘curtain’ and suddenly the landscape becomes wild rainforest; and you can really imagine what this land looked like before the arrival of humans.

I decided to walk down to the sea, since I wanted to see the beach and forest in the Cape Roger Curtis area before the bulldozers changed it. CRC is a 600 acre privately-owned plot, comprising nearly one eighth of all the residential-zoned land of the island, scheduled for subdivision into 50 two-million-dollar 10-acre lots each with a multi-million-dollar monster executive oceanfront home on it. The alternative plan, which would have seen half the area set aside as parkland and the rest more intensively developed for about 400 families, was rejected by both the local politicians and islanders because of the lack of infrastructure to support so many new families (it would have increased the population of Bowen by 25%, albeit over a 20-year development period).

As it turns out, I was too late. As I walked from Block 6 into the CRC lands, what was last year an almost imperceptible change almost brought me to my knees. Although few of the lots have yet been sold (despite private helicopter trips for billionaire prospects to view the area), the roadwork has all been put in. Where there was once wilderness, now paved roads, subdivision signs, and fencing prevails. Sixty-foot-wide driveway entrances have been carved out at the edge of each of the first 14 lots to be offered. These 14 lots are not square, but long slivers 200 feet wide and 2000 feet long, allowing the developers to offer oceanfront access to all 14 billionaire owners, and hence demand the maximum price per lot. The recommended site for the monster homes is (of course) right by the ocean, and accessing it will require each buyer to construct a driveway the full length of the lot, from the access road to the house, almost a half-mile long, and requiring almost 1/3 of all the trees on the lot to be bulldozed just to build the driveway.

Close to tears, I sought to find the small pebble beach I had scrambled down a year ago at the end of my walk. This is what I found:

I guess I should have been prepared for this, but I was not. The oceanfront wilderness that was Cape Roger Curtis has been destroyed by two developers for the exclusive benefit of 50 billionaires. (I expect the developers have hived off the best lots for themselves and their friends, as invariably happens when such pristine land is subdivided.)

In the 1980s I saw this happen in Brampton, Ontario, where I lived then. Some of the best growing land in Canada was rezoned residential under the relentless pressure of developers, and, like Mississauga before it, the entire municipality was turned, in just a decade, into a wasteland of near-identical shoddy single-family homes on 20- and 30-foot lots. When I moved away to Caledon in the 1990s I saw it beginning to happen again — a developer sued the town council for a half billion dollars for not rubber-stamping their plan for a huge subdivision even though it ran contrary to the town’s official development plan.

Developers and their sleazy real estate and lawyer shills now provide over 90% of the campaign funding for candidates for municipal elections. We should not be surprised that even the anti-development candidates finally burn out from battling the relentless and well-financed campaigns to turn every square inch of ‘vacant’ land into profit. Candidates who can’t be bought off or driven off are defeated by pro-development candidates with slick and deceptive campaigns.

This is not, of course, something unique to Canada. It is happening, in various ways, all over the world.

The green areas on this map (from the Forest Frontiers Initiative) are all that is left of the world’s wild forests, the only remaining areas that are large enough and sufficiently intact to support a natural and largely undiminished ecosystem. At current rates of deforestation they will all be gone in 50 years. The light brown areas are degraded forest, fragile and disrupted and now dependent on human ‘management’. Both the light and dark brown areas, comprising half of the world’s land surface, were wild forests as recently as 8,000 years ago. And most of the world’s deserts and grasslands, shown in white, have also been, at least intermittently, wild forests since the end of the last ice age, before human civilization spread across the Earth.

As the map above shows, within 50 years the desolation of our planet will be complete. No matter that our industrial civilization is unsustainable, and will collapse soon after the worst damage has been done.

The worst is always done at the end. With eleven billion people struggling against the forces of massive energy, ecological and economic collapse, we are not going to recognize the planet we’re left with as it all falls apart.

A bulldozer. Another baby. More stuff produced, more stuff consumed. More of the land gone. More resources exhausted. More waste. More debt, to the banks, to the Earth, to future generations. None of it can be repaid, undone, sustained.

Or stopped.

(This is a rather silly post about our clumsy measurement systems, and how, if we were to reinvent them, we might come up with something much more intuitive and easy to remember; skip it if you’re busy, since I have two more important posts coming soon. The image above is Dali’s “Persistence of Memory”, portraying our most diabolical measurement device.)

We humans tend to prefer measures that we can relate to something tangible and permanent, like the day and the year as our principal measures of time in virtually every calendar. We know how big a foot is — in an average farmer’s work boot, it’s a foot long. An inch is the width of an adult male’s thumb, and since that is almost precisely 1/12 of a foot, the word inch (meaning one twelfth) was chosen for it. The Romans had an average walking stride of 2.64 feet, so they called two strides (one stride with each foot) a pace, and measured longer distances in thousands of paces (mille passus, shortened to mile). We measure the height of horses in “hands” — using the width of our hand including the thumb, measuring hand over hand (that hand width is now standardized at 4″). The Romans and British once used actual stones to measure their weight on a balance scale, and they knew the heft of a stone. For smaller weights, they used grains of wheat, or, for metals, a carob bean (which became known as a carat).

This might be a credible excuse for Americans’ refusal to adopt the metric system, except that most Americans have no idea of the anthropomorphic origins of their measures. To me, this refusal to adopt the system used almost everywhere else on the globe reflects their dominant culture: contrary, ruggedly and defiantly individual, arrogant, profoundly conservative and resistant to change. The British still refer to their weight in “stones” (one stone being about 14 pounds); they’ve gone halfway metric and seem determined to go no further, perhaps for similar reasons.

What we measure, and how we measure it, reflects our culture. Canadians somewhat grumpily adopted the metric system, knowing that they’d have to contend with Americans next door who would not. We did so I think because we are adapters, consensus-seekers, and idealists, and it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Our modern measures are often abstract. It’s hard to relate to pounds, ounces, grams, kilograms, degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit. Some of our time measures, like seconds, minutes, hours, weeks and months (though the month is vaguely related to lunar cycles), were arbitrarily set, and it’s only due to practice and cultural acclimatization that they mean anything to us. The idea of moving to decimal measures at least makes sense because it relates back to our digits, our basic physical way of counting.

What would happen if we set aside the culture-based measures we use and converted to a set of measures to which we can physically and directly relate, and made all other measures decimal derivatives of these basic ‘universal’ measures? I’m not advocating we try to implement this (our culture is so strong that changing measurement systems is almost humanly impossible) — I’m just putting it out as an intriguing thought experiment:

1. Length: The standard measure of length might be one walking Pace (p), 2.64′ (80 cm, under the current metric system). The DeciPace (dp) would be one tenth of that, the width of your four fingers excluding thumb. The CentiPace (cp) would be one tenth of that, the width of a standard pencil. Anything smaller than that we’d leave to the scientists and advertisers, who use milli- and micro- and nano- to make really tiny things sound substantial. A KiloPace (kp) would be 1000 Paces, the distance we can walk in 10 minutes (though see the comments below on time measures), run in 5 minutes, or drive in the city in 1 minute. Anything larger than that we’d leave to the astronomers, poets and philosophers.
2. Area: A Square Pace (p²) would then be one walking pace by one walking pace. A small apartment would be 70 p², a small house 200 p², a large house 400 p², a small building lot 300 p², and the area a farmer with oxen can plough in a day (an acre) would be about 6000 p² (80 p x 80 p).
3. Volume: One Cubic DeciPace (1 dp³=1000 cp³) would be about the volume of two mugs of coffee. The spoon in that mug would hold about 8 cp³, which is 2 cp by 2 cp by 2 cp. Your gas tank would hold about 100 dp³.
4. Weight: The standard measure of weight might be one Book (b), equal to the average weight of a trade paperback. The average person would weigh about 200 b. The water or coffee in your mug would weigh 1 b. Your average car would weigh 3000 b if you’re in Europe or Japan, 4500 b if you’re in North America.
5. Time: A day is a day and a year is a year. Everything else would a fraction of that, using Internet Time. Time notation might be yyyy.ddd.mmmmm and each day might start at the midpoint between sunrise and sunset at equinox at Greenwich UK. So at that time in Greenwich tomorrow, everyone in the world could sync their watches to 2011.234.00000. If you spoke with someone at that time and wanted them to call you again seven days later half-way through the day, you’d log it in your calendar as 241.50000. If you lived at the latitude of Greenwich your posted work hours might be daily .30000 – .67000 and, while it would be the same time everywhere on Earth, the person working the same shift a half-world away would have posted work hours as daily .80000 -  1.17000. If you took a flight that took a quarter of a day starting at .80000 the flight arrival and departure would be shown as Dep .80000 Arr 1.05000. Your midday lunch break or favourite TV program in Greenwich might run from .48000 – .52150. To ease the world towards a steady state economy we might encourage employers and self-employed to work only five or six days out of every ten, so if they were 3 on, 2 off, 3 on, 2 off, you might work days ending in the digits 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, and 9. Calendars might have 10 columns and scroll either 4 rows at a time (maximum information that would fit on one screen) or 9 rows at a time (to show each of four ‘seasons’ in turn) with the last 5-6 days of the year in a final row, perhaps celebrated as a global holiday. To specify recurring annual events such as a birthday on the 173rd day of the year you might denote it as *.173 and to specify a recurring event on days ending in the digits 2 and 7 you might denote them as *.**2 and *.**7 or simply as **.2 and **.7. We might soon get accustomed to having someone say they would be back in .01 d (10 millidays, 10 md), and accustomed to setting the microwave for .001 d (1 md).
6. Speed: Normal walking speed using the above measures would be about 150 p/md, running speed about 300 p/md, and city driving speed 1500 p/md.

It’s fun to think about anyway.

Speaking of measures: When I first started my blog, in doing some design for a game I compiled some prices-per-pound for various consumer products and ranked them from cheapest to most expensive. I recently did this again, and the rankings are shown below.

The biggest changes in 8 years? Food prices per pound are up about 60% compared to 2003 (that’s a lot more than the ‘official’ inflation rate of course). Digital electronics are down about 50% over the same period. Brand names cost on average twice what near-equivalent no-name products do, which I would guess goes entirely into advertising, executive salaries and profits. Some of this data may surprise you. All numbers are retail price divided by weight excluding packaging. Foods are in black, household and pharma products in blue, and other manufactured goods are in red: