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.

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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:

Over the past decade, a significant proportion of the world’s population has moved past denial that human activity is killing our planet, and that our current way of life is utterly unsustainable. But very few have moved past denial that our civilization is finished, most likely in this century, that there’s nothing we can do to prevent it, that the descent, as civilization crashes, will cause much damage and suffering, and that our human descendents will be much fewer in number and live radically simpler, relocalized lives. I call this the Second Denial.

Until we get past this second denial, most of those privileged and enlightened enough to have been able to move past the first denial will continue to waste everyone’s time and energy trying to “reinvent” civilization, prescribing utopian technological, innovative, behavioural or social fixes to prevent collapse.

Meanwhile, those who have not yet moved past the first denial will be doing everything in their power to sustain the industrial growth status quo. They include:

• The corporatists who “own” most of the land, resources and media, whose vast stolen wealth is fiercely and relentlessly devoted to generating even greater acceleration of industrialization, resource use, production, and control and propagandization of their “consumers”, no matter the cost, because as soon as growth stalls, they lose everything;
• The billions (mostly in struggling nations) who aspire to live the way the well-off in affluent nations live today, and who don’t understand why this is impossible; and
• The passive consumers of affluent nations who have been bred from birth to be fearful of change and who cling desperately, even violently, to the American Dream of universal prosperity and endless “progress”.

As our civilization begins to reel under the combined effects of the end of cheap energy, the end of stable climate, and the end of the industrial growth economy, this majority will resist every attempt to mitigate the damages our civilization is causing, in the desperate hope that they can get, or keep, a piece of the Dream. Those already struggling will do everything they can to stay alive as civilization crumbles, including razing what’s left of our forests, building nukes, burning coal, and exhausting the world’s fresh water. Complicit with them will be the passive consumers, who will give anything to protect their lifestyle — the only way they know to live — and the corporatists, dependent on never-ending bailouts and ever-increasing production, consumption and debt for their overly-leveraged, growth-addicted political and economic enterprises.

The informed progressives and idealists who have moved past the first denial will be no match (in numbers, power or desperation) for the billions who believe their survival depends on sustaining the unsustainable. Idealistic progressives’ actions to try to move to a more sustainable way for us all to live, to “reinvent” civilization, or to find some kind of utopian technological or social “solution” that will allow a gentle descent and a soft landing for civilization, will be overwhelmed by the horrific damages the majority will inflict on our planet in the desperate attempt to survive. The result will be more pollution, faster acceleration of atmospheric warming, rapid abandonment of environmental regulations and attempts at enforcement, and more (mostly local) resource wars.

Only when a significant proportion of our species moves past the Second Denial can we start working on mitigating and resilience actions that will actually help those facing the crises of civilization’s collapse. Only when we give up our “we can control this” mentality, and our magical thinking dreams and schemes — belief in and wasted effort on global consciousness raising, spontaneous voluntary massive change, technological cures, gentle transition programs, wishful incremental-change-is-enough (if we all do it) thinking, individual preparedness plans, social/economic reinvention and “innovating our way forward” projects — will we be able to face the stark reality of what our children and grandchildren are going to face because of our stupidity, and get to work on actions to mitigate its worst effects and develop the capacities we and they will need to cope with cascading crises as they unfold.

Since I made my own reluctant way past the second denial, I have found myself arguing more often with those who have worked past the first denial than those who have not. I have been accused of defeatism and “doomer” thinking and “unhelpful” negativity. “We want hopeful projects that make a difference now”, they tell me.

I don’t want to argue. Daniel Quinn said famously:

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

While Quinn was undoubtedly speaking about people still at the First Denial stage, I’ve found his advice works just as well when dealing with people at the Second Denial stage.

But it’s pretty lonely here, too far ahead of myself for my own, or anyone else’s good. Granted, there are some others who’ve made it past the Second Denial: many of the Dark Mountain artists, some grief counsellors who recognize the symptoms of denial, three leading climate scientists I’ve met (a seriously depressed group), some post-civ writers and readers, and some fans of John Gray’s Straw Dogs.

While I’m waiting, I’m trying to understand why so many bright people are still stuck at the Second Denial stage. They really don’t want to hear any information that would push them past denial.

I’ve been looking at the famous (and controversial) five-stages-of-grief model, which is pictured on the chart above. Here’s why I think it’s so hard for people to make it through these stages, starting with the stages of grief related to the First Denial (that our current way of life is unsustainable):

• Denial: “I can’t believe this is happening”. We’ve always figured out how to overcome problems in the past; this won’t be any different. Look outside, it doesn’t look like anything is wrong. We’ve always been taught, and told, that times have never been better, progress is endless, and our civilization is the culmination of centuries of learning, adaptation and wisdom. And there are a bunch of scientists and other experts out there who say this is all speculation and fear-mongering; I believe them. If it were that serious, we’d know, we’d be acting, our leaders would be fixing it.
• Anger: “It’s not fair; who’s to blame?” I’ve raised my kids so they’ll have a chance to live better lives than mine, and no one told me this is now impossible. It’s the government’s fault. Someone should go to jail for this. Why didn’t someone do something about this earlier, so it wouldn’t have got to this point? Why is God testing us this way?
• Bargaining: “I would give anything for this not to be true now”. Let’s do what we have to do — deregulate coal mining and nuclear power development, so at least we put this off for a few generations. Maybe by then there’ll be some better answers that won’t require any real change in behaviour. I’ll drive a smaller car, recycle and turn off the lights, and if we require everyone to do that surely that will buy us some time? Let us pray for salvation.
• Depression: “What’s the point in doing anything then?” Might as well give up, since nothing that I do will make much of an impact anyway. How do I talk to my kids about this? Was it my fault for not knowing, our generation’s fault for not acting when we had time?
• Acceptance: “OK, it’s true and I can’t fight it, so what can I do now?” Lets see what will be needed to make the transition to a way of life that is sustainable. I’m willing to sacrifice more now, so that future generations will have a good quality of life. Let’s tell everyone about this, get global consciousness up to the point we’re all working to make it better. God will look after us anyway. And human ingenuity, when push comes to shove, can find ways to make life both sustainable and materially comfortable, so we don’t really have to change much. Let’s get on with it.

And now, the stages of grief related to the Second Denial (we can’t prevent collapse, and it’s going to be profound and difficult):

• Denial: “I can’t believe this is happening”. Civilizations don’t die. We’re living in the greatest time ever, a time when the human species has learned and invented more than ever before in history. We’ve put people on the moon, so surely we can solve this problem. I don’t want to hear this defeatist crap. If we all work together, there’s nothing that can’t be done. There are signs everywhere of global consciousness raising — we still have time to reinvent civilization to be sustainable, and even better than it is now. And the people I trust tell me not to worry — that this is just a temporary hiccup before we get back to healthy sustainable growth again. If it’s really that bad, why isn’t anyone talking about it, and why aren’t the signs of it obvious?
• Anger: “It’s not fair; who’s to blame?” Damn the corporatists, the lawyers, the greasy politicians and governments, the neo-cons, the people with large families, the people with large SUVs, the media, stupid fucking moronic people in general — they’ve conspired and been complicit in letting the world get to this impossible place. We were crying for action when we saw this crash coming and everyone else was just arguing over the seating arrangements. Humans are so greedy, so selfish, so thoughtless, so ignorant. When things get hard, I’m just going to look after myself and to hell with everyone else. My spiritual icon, why have you forsaken us, you’re supposed to look after us?
• Bargaining: “I would give anything for this not to be true now”. If civilization is doomed anyway, why not live it up, take everything we can get, ratchet everything up to get a few more years of good life. Turn off that bad news, I’m convinced already, we’re fucked, I don’t want to hear about it anymore. Tell me you still love me, that you know we all did our best, that we’re not to blame, that it’ll be OK at least for a while longer. Buy me a spaceship, find me an all-powerful saviour, transplant my consciousness into something that will survive the crash.
• Depression: “What’s the point in doing anything then?” It’s hopeless. Might as well blow it all up now and stop the suffering early. It’s only going to get worse. Our children and grandchildren are going to hate us forever for what we’ve done to them.
• Acceptance: “OK, it’s true and I can’t fight it, so what can I do now?” John Gray:

The mass of mankind is ruled not by its own intermittent moral sensations, still less by self-interest, but by the needs of the moment. It seems fated to wreck the balance of life on Earth — and thereby to be the agent of its own destruction. What could be more hopeless than placing the Earth in the charge of this exceptionally destructive species? It is not of becoming the planet’s wise stewards that Earth-lovers dream, but of a time when humans have ceased to matter…

Humans use what they know to meet their most urgent needs — even if the result is ruin. When times are desperate they act to protect their offspring, to revenge themselves on enemies, or simply to give vent to their feelings. These are not flaws that can be remedied. Science cannot be used to reshape humankind in a more rational mould. The upshot of scientific inquiry is that humans cannot be other than irrational…

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

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

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

[And in the meantime, he says, we should take joy in the astonishment of being alive, in idle pleasures and play, and in reflection, contemplation and living in the Now; we should be as responsible as we can in the context of our own communities, and take consolation from the value of our just actions even though their impact is small; and we should fill our lives with awareness, new experiences, love and learning, and just be.]

The stages-of-grief model is far from perfect, but it describes pretty well the roil of most of the people I know who are transitioning past either the First Denial or the Second. When you are coping with grief of the kind this terrible knowledge invokes, it is easy to get stuck, to backslide into earlier stages, even to experience all the stages at once.

I’m not an advocate of feeling grief just to progress past denial. My guess is that many people can’t handle it, and are probably better off living in denial, at least as long as possible. I’m just suggesting that when I got past the Second Denial I found it very painful, much more painful than what I felt when I moved past the First.

Denial is certainly understandable, especially when it relates to something as massive, impersonal, gradual, “invisible” and unimaginable as collapse of a civilization. Studies of past civilizations suggest their citizens believed they would last forever too. Talking about civilization’s collapse is even less socially acceptable than talking about climate change — the kind of subject that leaves people uncomfortable, depressed, feeling helpless, and anxious to “change the subject” (or the channel).

As long as there are 1000 articles talking about the importance of returning to economic growth, increasing profits and GDP, for every article advocating a zero-growth economy, it is those who have moved past the first denial who feel cognitive dissonance with what they know to be true, not the First Deniers. And when there are even fewer articles saying that even moving to a steady-state economy is a pipedream, and that what is needed is actions to dismantle the worst elements of the industrial growth economy now, it is no surprise that talk of the need for such actions causes the eyes of First Deniers to roll back in their heads, and brings exasperated cries of “doomer”, “unhelpful”, “defeatist” and “polarizing radical” from Second Deniers who feel caught in the middle. They are caught in the middle, just as those who’ve moved past Second Denial feel isolated and alone.

Richard Bruce Anderson describes the grief that accompanies the First and Second Denials:

At the heart of the modern age is a core of grief. At some level, we’re aware that something terrible is happening, that we humans are laying waste to our natural inheritance. A great sorrow arises as we witness the changes in the atmosphere, the waste of resources and the consequent pollution, the ongoing deforestation and destruction of fisheries, the rapidly spreading deserts and the mass extinction of species. All these changes signal a turning point in human history, and the outlook is not particularly bright. The anger, irritability, frustration and intolerance that increasingly pervade our common life are symptoms associated with grief… Grief is a natural reaction to calamity, and the stages of grief are visible in our reaction to the rapid decline of the natural world…

Even if we face the consequences of our assault on the natural environment, we may still find that the problems are too big, that there’s not much we can do. Yet those of us who feel this sorrow cannot forever deny it, without suffering inexplicable disturbances in our own lives. It’s necessary to face our fear and our pain, and to go through the process of grieving, because the alternative is a sorrow deeper still: the loss of meaning. To live authentically in this time, we must allow ourselves to feel the magnitude of our human predicament.

I’m also suggesting that until I moved past the Second Denial I was one of those idealists who wasted a huge amount of time and energy (mine and others) on dreams and schemes to “save the world” — by means of innovation, technology, mass behaviour change, consciousness-raising and the other forms of salvationist magical thinking, the kind that the deniers of the inevitability of civilization’s collapse so love. And from my perspective the sooner we get past dreams of salvation, and move on to undoing, stopping and mitigating the worst current effects of industrial civilization (like the Alberta Tar Sands and factory farming) , the better.

We can stop some of the suffering, and the destruction to our planet, if we’re willing to take the (potentially enormous) risks that stopping it entails. Hoping and expecting that we (a) will invent our way out of it, or (b) can persuade billions of people to stop supporting it and thus disable it, is just wishful thinking, and it’s useless.

I don’t know if I’m prepared to take those risks. But my reticence is not due to denial that the Alberta Tar Sands and factory farming are atrocities creating massive destruction and suffering, or denial that stopping them wouldn’t be of enormous benefit to the world, or denial that there is no magical way to achieve the same end safely and gently. And these atrocities are, in microcosm, what is happening with our entire industrial civilization.

Perhaps when there are more of us…

Cartoon by Stuart Carlson, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, from four years ago

The greasy politicians, the corporate war profiteers and the compliant media are working together to present us with the usual “you’re with us or you’re with the enemy” dichotomy on the interminable war in Afghanistan.

Like most modern “intractable problems”, it’s not a “complicated problem” at all (as we should have learned in Vietnam and a hundred other civil and regional conflicts, you can’t “impose” democracy on people). It’s a complex predicament: We have to learn to understand and live with it, and intervene in ways that make sense, without the expectation that such interventions will “solve” it, and with the humility to appreciate that things are the way they are for a reason, one that is usually self-reinforcing, and that our primary goal in any intervention should be to not make matters worse.

Here are some ‘facts’ about the situation in Afghanistan that few people, regardless of ideology, dispute:

• Afghanistan is an ecologically devastated country, and has been for a long time. Its natural beauty and ability to support life have been desolated by horrific overpopulation relative to carrying capacity, centuries of overgrazing, bombing, landmines, and reckless misuse and waste of water and other resources. The reason opium poppy cultivation drives the entire economy is that nothing much else can grow there anymore, at least not at a scale sufficient to allow its people to trade for the things they desperately need and cannot provide for themselves.
• Historically, the country has been repeatedly invaded, pillaged and then abandoned, leaving behind a vacuum that local warlords and rival militias have filled. Despite serious internal power struggles, no one has really been in “power” in all of Afghanistan in centuries. The Soviets decided to support one progressive faction to bring some stability to the country, leading millions of conservatives to flee to Pakistan and organize as mujahideen (“strugglers”) to overthrow the Soviet-backed regime, which they did with the help of covert and overt US and Pakistani arms and support. When the Soviets withdrew, the warlords and rival militias once again filled the power vacuum.
• The Taliban, largely consisting of refugees who had fled to Pakistan as mujahideen, waded into this desperate situation with a promise of an alternative to the despotic warlords and endless wars between militias. With military and financial support from Pakistan, they won a civil war against supporters of the country’s post-Soviet government, and installed a brutal and repressive regime, which was toppled by the NATO invasion in 2001.
• The country today is not centrally governed. It is once again run by local warlords who use power and propaganda to brainwash and cow their populations. The so-called national government is totally corrupt and substantially governs only in the capital district of Kabul, thanks to massive ongoing financial and military support from NATO nations.
• If/when the US/NATO leaves, another civil war among rival militias, and a Taliban resurgence, are almost certain. The majority of the Afghan people don’t want civil war or another Taliban government.

The NATO invasion and war with various insurgents has cost at least a trillion dollars, killed thousands of mostly innocent people, further crippled the country, and lasted longer than either world war. Despite the promises of Obama, there is no reason to believe the current situation, which is chaotic and rife with corruption, can or could be improved by more or different foreign military, political and/or economic intervention.

So what should be done? I confess that I was sufficiently taken in by the reports of the mistreatment by the Taliban of its people that I supported the initial invasion, but I am no longer sure that was a defensible position. The current situation is untenable and unsustainable, and the reports given to Obama about the situation have been universally dismal. Few think the current interventions are working, but most think withdrawal is not an option either. Vietnam all over again.

If we are willing to admit that invading, even with the best of intentions, was a mistake, then what? Are we obliged to atone for that error by prolonging the inevitable, compounding the human and financial losses indefinitely? What is the value, and cost, of saving face? I recognize that pulling out of Afghanistan now will cause enormous suffering in a country that has suffered endlessly for decades already. It will embolden despots and desperate people everywhere. It will be a humiliating admission that even the best-intentioned military actions are, in a world where guns, bombs, mines and other technologies are cheap, easy to obtain and effective at oppressing citizens, probably going to fail, and make the situation worse.

Because it’s a predicament, not a problem, there is no “answer”. We will ultimately be forced by some other, more urgent, crisis to abandon Afghanistan. The real question, now, is, What is the best use of our people (especially the energies of the millions of our people whose jobs are in one way or another security or social welfare related) and our money, to make the world safer, happier, more livable? That is an existential question, probably far beyond the capacity of politicians, corporations and media to even think about.

My answer is another question: How can our energies and money (which is actually, if we were to be honest, our children’s money, since we’ve spent all ours and our spending now is just increasing the debts they will have to repay) best be applied to reduce the aggregate amount of suffering in the world?

Although my answer to that second question is probably not that different from what any thinking, caring, informed person would come up with, I dare not speak it, because my answer flies in the face of too many of the beliefs we hold sacred, and which we will probably cling to as our civilization continues to careen off the cliff. My answer would suggest that maybe we need to give up many of the hard-fought rights and freedoms we cherish. It suggests maybe the time for big governments and big organizations and globalization is past. It suggests that the way most of us in affluent nations (and I include myself) live, is an outrage, unforgivable. It suggests that just about every thing we have been taught about the world, and how to conduct ourselves in it, is wrong.

And, worst of all, it suggests that what we must do, to act in the best interests of all life on Earth now, is beyond our individual and collective capacity. It is, like the situation in Afghanistan, hopeless.

For an alternative, natural economy to work, we either have to wait for this amoral-capitalist economy to collapse (which it will, but probably not for a few decades), or we have to plant the seeds for this alternative economy in the cracks where the current one is already failing most badly — at the community level where the economy is most obviously failing to produce meaningful work, sucking resources, wealth and opportunity out, and dumping mass-produced and imported crap that ends up in the landfill, and pollutants in our air, water, soil and food that make us sick and contribute to climate change. But before we can plant these seeds we need to unlearn the nonsense we’re taught and told about economics, and learn how a healthy economy actually works.

Perhaps the best way to explain this is by showing models that contrast the features of the amoral-capitalist economy with those of a cooperative natural economy. Let’s start by looking at two enterprises, a traditional amoral-capitalist one and a cooperative natural one:

The diagram above is a slightly cynical but not unfair depiction of how most entrepreneurs taught amoral capitalist economics start and run their businesses (and I advised hundreds of them, so I’m not making this up):

1. It all starts, sadly, with the entrepreneur’s dream that s/he has a better idea, something that the “market” will love as much as s/he does. It’s likely to be something that competes with products or services already offered by established companies, but somehow “differentiated” from them. It’s also likely to be a one-person enterprise to start, and a one-boss enterprise thereafter. Businesspeople who try to do it all themselves are almost sure to overstress themselves, make fatal mistakes, hate most of what they do, and fail, often early and spectacularly.
2. Advised by “professionals” who went to the same business schools, the entrepreneur sets up the company as a for-profit corporation, borrows heavily (and expensively) for “start-up” costs, and then hunts for sources for materials and labour to make his/her products and services. It’s quite possible that investors, seeing this as a high-risk investment, will want a large return (high interest rate) and equity position (controlling interest, especially if profit and growth targets are not met) in return for that risk. Once production is started, the company needs to fund customer receivables, inventories, capital equipment, and lots of start-up expenses. Its balance sheet is scary, with no resilience if there are sudden changes in the economy or market, and with a ton of money tied up and no room for error.
3. Now our poor entrepreneur has to go head-to-head with established competitors to try to attract customers. S/he will often spend an enormous amount on marketing and advertising to do so. The debts pile up, and little has been sold yet. Our entrepreneur is not sleeping well.
4. The idea will now either pay off, or not. Chances are, with incumbents willing and able to take discounts to fend off new competitors, our entrepreneur will not make profit and growth targets. The business might be shut down and liquidated by unhappy lenders and investors, or taken over and the entrepreneur ousted. Or, more simply, it will just run out of cash, and/or make a few naive, fatal decisions.
5. But just maybe it beats the odds and succeeds. Now it has to meet grueling annual growth and profitability targets to meet the investors’ demand for a very high rate of return on their investment, to compensate for the heavy risk they took.
6. And if it grows it will start to attract the attention of large corporate competitors, which can use their money and position for dozens of usually-effective tactics to crush this upstart. And if it still succeeds, they will shrug, sigh, and make the entrepreneur an offer s/he can’t refuse. The exhausted entrepreneur will usually take the money and run. And either retire, or start all over again (probably not as successfully) with another idea.

This unhappy process explains why most traditional enterprises fail, and why the biggest companies in most industries form collusive oligopolies that control the market, the politicians, and the media, and become “too big to fail” (so if they do screw up, the government — the taxpayer — bails them out).

It has evolved this way for simple Darwinian reasons. It’s what works when the “market” is given some simple (amoral, dysfunctional) rules to operate and is then left to its own resources. It’s a Frankenstein monster, but it was inevitable.

Now let’s look at how a community-based, cooperative economy could work, if it were made up of natural enterprises that “flew under the radar” of the corporate giants, and used a completely different set of processes and rules to get established and operate:

1. Our natural entrepreneurs don’t try to do everything alone, and they don’t decide what their offering is to be until they’ve done their market research and identified something in the local community that is needed, and not being met by established companies. As our economy starts to fall apart, such opportunities might be present in just about any essential sector:
   • A food co-op, that grows and distributes local, organic foods using permaculture or other sustainable methods (i.e. not dependent on monoculture, wage slave employees, massive oil-based chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and massive irrigation).
   • A co-op on the Mondragon model that makes and repairs high-quality, durable, customized clothing from local, sustainable materials.
   • An energy co-op that establishes, augments and manages the collective renewable energy of the community.
   • Building and furniture co-ops that construct and refurbish buildings and furniture using local materials and labour.
   • A housing co-op that builds and co-manages homes and community common spaces for its members and the community at large.
   • A local water and water resources stewardship co-op.
   • Information, media and technology co-ops that collect, store and disseminate information to the community.
   • Theatre, art and recreational co-ops that help the community realize that entertaining yourself is more enjoyable, engaging and fulfilling than consuming packaged entertainment produced elsewhere.
   • You get the idea.
2. Now, in a process called Peer Production, the local people interested in becoming suppliers, customers or investors of the offering that will fill the unmet need from step 1 above, self-organize and become partners in the enterprise, and co-design the offering to meet their specific needs. This is not rocket science; the reason it isn’t done in traditional economy companies is that it doesn’t scale well up to the multi-national level that traditional enterprises need to grow to to continue to exist.
3. The partners now decide which of them will work how many hours in the enterprise and what they will be paid (dependent on their time availability, personal income needs, and the needs of the enterprise — but with little differential between highest and lowest hourly rate, and with an appreciation that the enterprise is not for-profit and must manage its costs prudently).
4. They will also decide how much short-term working capital they need (likely to be much less than a traditional enterprise requires, for reasons that will become apparent in a moment), how much the existing partners are willing to invest, and how much they’ll need to obtain from the local Credit Union (which is another local community-based co-op), and what rate of return on investment they will offer (since the product is being made by its potential customers to meet an unfilled need, the risk is low, and so is the needed rate of return). Based on these calculations, they will be able to set a zero-profit price for their offering, and confirm with potential customers that this is viable before even thinking about production.
5. Now the partners can pre-order, and prepay the cost of, the offering that they have co-designed to meet their requirements. Additional customers may be brought in at this stage on the same basis. There are no receivables and no unpaid inventory to have to worry about, or to finance. And the Credit Union which is a partner in the co-op will actually buy the equipment and then lease it to the co-op, knowing that the risk of the enterprise failing is low (and hence the lease payments will carry a low risk premium) — so there is no equipment on the balance sheet either, and no need for capital financing. The enterprise begins its life almost entirely debt-free, and stays that way. And the equity is the partners’ — the workers’ — not that of some absentee outside group demanding huge returns, growth and profitability.
6. Finally, the offering is produced to the customers who have already bought and paid for it. No expenditure is needed for advertising or marketing, and there is no need for the enterprise to grow, or to earn a profit (just enough to cover its costs). The balance sheet is small and lean, giving the enterprise resilience to deal with changes in the economy and market. Because it’s local, it creates local employment, respects local customs, is better for the environment, and minimizes transportation and other distribution costs. Everybody wins.

As co-operatives of many different types have found, the hard part in doing all this is the re-learning of what collaborative enterprise is all about. It takes a lot of practice, but it’s a natural human endeavour. There are excellent facilitators who can help with enterprise formation, the basics of peer production, invitation (of people in the community to identify and explore unmet needs), consensus, and conflict resolution. Most lawyers, accountants, bankers and traditional consultants should be used as little as possible, since they tend to perpetrate the traditional economy myths and lack the information and experience to know what’s needed in cooperative, natural enterprises. In time a new school of professionals practiced in the natural economy will emerge — I’ve heard that Credit Unions in Germany, for example, now offer “turnkey” financing packages for local wind and solar energy co-ops, complete with training.

As we relearn how to make a living for ourselves, we will be able to help each other out, and establish networks and alliances to share skills, knowledge and resources. I can imagine the growth of a Gift Economy (or what I call a Generosity Economy) blossoming in the abundance of appreciation, know-how, saved time and strengthened relationships that a cooperative natural economy engenders. With time, a community might be able to wean itself off dependence on the amoral-capitalist economy entirely, so that when that economy collapses it will already have made the transition to a steady-state natural economy, and be in a position to help other, unprepared communities with the terrible struggles they will then face.

It’s entirely possible, if we have the will to do it. I see it starting to happen already in some progressive communities that have Transition Initiatives underway. But I have a sense that it will take a few more economic, energy and ecological seismic shocks before many will wake up to the need to find a better way to live and make a living. I’m not sure it won’t be too late by then, but, if we’re in time, we’ll have some models and communities to show us the way.

Toronto Star photo

A great corporatist hoax was perpetrated in Toronto during the G20 this past weekend, and both the Canadian public and most of the mainstream media bought it hook, line and sinker. To anyone who has ever participated in an anti-globalization protest, this will not be a surprise.

There were over 10,000 police in the downtown streets, in many places every 10m on empty streets and en masse in other places. Yet if you look at the photos of the so-called “anarchist vandals” who smashed windows of American Apparel and other big US-owned chains on Saturday, you won’t find anyone being arrested or challenged — in fact you won’t see any police in any of the pictures of vandals at all (but lots of cameras, of course). Similarly, the police cars set afire were seemingly driven in advance by police into the centre of the publicized demonstration area, and then left, empty, unlocked and unwatched. Shortly thereafter, the empty cars were attacked and torched by the vandals with no obstruction from the police, who are nowhere to be seen in any of the much-publicized photos (see for yourself below).

Then, beginning shortly after the totally-ignored vandalism occurred, large masses of heavily armed police charged peaceful, stationary protesters, beating and arresting dozens apparently at random, and charging the crowd, firing tear gas and rubber bullets at groups just milling around, seated talking or singing together. The unprovoked violence of the cops then continued for the last 36 hours of the G20 meeting, as gangs of heavily-armed police shoulder to shoulder threatened, arrested, bullied and charged at people going about their business in neighbourhoods throughout Toronto, seemingly with no purpose except to instill anger and fear of the police, and incite retaliatory violence.

Here is a collection of photos and videos that pretty well speak for themselves:

• Toronto Star photos of “anarchists” vandalizing windows and police cars Saturday, totally undisturbed by the police. Follow-up Toronto Star photos of police-protester confrontations and G20 leader preening on Sunday, the last day of the G20.
• Video by right-wing mainstream broadcaster Global TV showing trigger-happy police firing at a crowd of unarmed protesters point-blank.
• Citizen journalist video of police arbitrarily charging into and arresting protesters sitting peacefully in a park.
• Citizen journalist video of police charging people singing Canada’s national anthem.
• Citizen journalist video of police harassing and charging people in their home neighbourhood of Queen Street West, Sunday night after the G20 was over, and miles from the G20 meetings.
• Citizen journalist video of police charging and arresting people in the designated Free Speech Zone who keep asking over and over “we’re just standing here man, what are we doing wrong?”
• Citizen journalist video of police charging and arresting people at random at the end of a peaceful march.
• National Post (right-wing Toronto mainstream media newspaper) photographers tell of their personal ordeal when they were arrested and imprisoned for photographing the police violence:

“We weren’t just handcuffed. They also put cuffs on our legs, around the ankles. Once we got to Eastern Avenue (the site of the temporary detention centre) we were put into makeshift cages. They were about six metres by four metres in size. For a while, they kept moving us from cage to cage, as we were being processed and the charges were explained to everyone. We were strip searched. It is all kind of blurry. Once we got to speak on the phone to a lawyer, we had some idea of what was happening and knew that we might get out on bail the next day. We did not get any water for 12 hours.We could not wear our shoes in the cell. It was so cold. It felt like it was five degrees and we were in our t-shirts. There were no blankets. There was just a narrow steel bench and a port-a-potty with an open door.”

• National Post reports on the mass illegal arrests of protesters.
• More citizen journalist videos and photos.

Toronto Star photo

The big surprise of the event is that the police gangs beat up, arrested and caged in a makeshift prison many journalists and professional photographers including representatives of the corporatist mainstream media, who had been set up to film and report on the “anarchists”. Bad idea: The publisher of the mainstream Toronto Star called the show of force “a brutal spectacle that failed the city“. An interviewer for TVOntario was appalled by what he saw first hand, and tweeted his outrage for hours. A reporter for the right-wing corporatist Globe & Mail wrote Police G20 Tactics Give Toronto a Black Eye saying:

Come to Toronto, for work or pleasure, and enjoy having your civil liberties trampled and your right to free expression stifled. Avail yourself of our hospitality in a crowded detention pen, with free stale buns and water when (or if) your hosts get around to it. Partake of an invigorating massage, courtesy of police officers wielding truncheons. The best part – there’s no charge! Except that seems to mean the cops will pick you up, hold you, then let you go without ever following through criminal charges or prosecution, suggesting they had nothing on you in the first place.

The mainstream media as a whole seem a bit bewildered by all of this, but none of them has yet said what the indymedia knew all along: the masked “black bloq anarchist” vandalism was a carefully-staged photo-op for the gullible media, to justify the $1.3B security price tag for holding the ludicrous primp-and-preen G20 “leaders” circus right in the midst of Canada’s biggest city (essentially shutting down the whole city for a week, with a cost to workers and businesses of billions more), and to discourage and discredit legitimate anti-globalization protest.

As in previous large-scale protests, there is substantial evidence that many of the 10,000+ police “hired” for G20 security worked undercover, in plainclothes, and as infiltrators/instigators of the “anarchists” and perpetrators of the vandalism. Since the vandals are all conveniently masked and unidentified (no police around to unmask them), we will never know.

Will the mainstream media figure it out? Stay tuned, but don’t hold your breath. And don’t hold your breath, either, for the dumbed-down Canadian majority to realize they’ve been had. The whole world was watching, but precious few realized what they were really seeing.