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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imagine a world, for example, where:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S END

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LIVING BETTER

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

Yurts for Beginners: How to build an earthbag roundhouse.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

cartoon by Adrian Raeside in the Victoria Times-Colonist

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

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

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

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

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

Canada/Tar Sands Corner:

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

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

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

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

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

FUN AND INSPIRATION

cartoon from the New Yorker by David Jacobson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH

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

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

From Timothy Scott Bennett:

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

From John Rember:

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

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

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

kittens playing: photo by artistlanas

In my last article I advocated re-learning to play, the way wild creatures do, both as a means of increasing the joy and resilience in our lives, and as a means of creating a context, a behaviour model, that will allow us to talk with others about the terrible truths of our current way of life and the inevitable crises ahead, without being dismissed as ‘doomers’ (or worse) by the incredulous, the hopeful and the deniers.

My sense is that if we could regain this capacity of playfulness in everything we do, it would positively colour our whole worldview, change how we see the world and our attitude and approach to everything we do, and hence positively affect our relationships with others. But that will only happen with practice (if it were easy we’d already be doing it).

And that change in perspective must be genuine, not forced. We must be true to ourselves. This playfulness and joy has to be an emergence of what we already are (albeit well-buried by years of cultural indoctrination), rather than an affectation or attempt to change ourselves into something we are not.

How then might we go about this? In my last article I suggested:

• studying wild creatures and following their example,
• practicing keeping ourselves ‘open’ to wonder and possibility (constantly asking: how can I make what I’m doing more joyful and engaging?), and
• ‘presence’ practices to get ourselves into a space of being both relaxed and aware.

Here are some additional thoughts I’ve had about this since I wrote the earlier article:

Are We Brave Enough to Play?: I think conscious playfulness requires a certain degree of courage. Not in the sense of recklessness or insensitivity to the situation or to others, but in the sense of a childlike willingness to try something without being held back by fear of being thought foolish. For example, one of the most playful things you can do, I think, is flirting. This can be hazardous in a society in which many of could mistake your behaviour as aggressive, immature or worse, and respond with hostility. Wild creatures invite play by taking a submissive posture, and opening themselves to rejection. If we’re going to flirt as a form of play, we’re going to have to shrug off inappropriate responses, and persevere until we find willing and mature ‘playmates’. Likewise, we are going to have to be clear that this is play, and not (when it is playfully reciprocated) try to make it something more serious ourselves. Likewise, to be playful with others at a time when they are feeling sad, anxious, angry or fearful runs the risk of being seen as callous or insensitive.

Can We Be Playful and Pessimistic At the Same Time?:  I think this playful, joyful attitude and approach is totally consistent with a very bleak view of the current state of the world and a very pessimistic view of the future. It is, I think, all about giving up hope and just being, in the moment, focused on making the best of now, rather than worrying about a future you cannot control, predict or prepare for, or compelling yourself to do what your’e not prepared to do, or beating yourself up for not doing it. The underlying worldview, the ‘new story’ driving this attitude and approach is that life is an ever-present moment of amazing, joyful, playful being. That worldview does not negate the terrible knowledge of what is and what may come to be, but neither is it precluded by that knowledge. It is, however, easy to get caught up in our negative or unduly hopeful stories about the future, lose our sense of presence, and hence our capacity for playfulness.

How Can We Disable Our Ingrained Tendency to Keep Score?: Some things best to avoid in play, I think: competitiveness, objectives, scorekeeping, heavy thinking, complicated structure, and prescriptive or constraining rules. Many modern games are not play at all, but rather self-tests; we have more than enough of those in our lives already.

How Can We De-Structure Our ‘Play’ Time?:  Some semi-structured types of play we engage in, even as adults, include role plays, improv acting, music, crafts, and exploration of wild places. But our modern world is so competitive, so measured, and so directed that it is hard to keep such activities joyful, and undertake them purely for their own sake, and let go of performance scores, outcomes or intentions. At the same time, some games can be attention-consuming distractions and diversions from the reality of the moment — the opposite of real play, which is inherently present, alert to what is, and relaxed.

How Do We Learn to Let Go, As a Prelude to Becoming More Playful?: Since it’s almost impossible to rid our lives of stress and sadness, what approach can we take, and who can we learn from, to accept anything that happens with equanimity, to adapt instead of trying to control?

How Can We Self-Manage Without Becoming Less Playful?: For a number of years I’ve (occasionally) practiced an approach to dealing with complex and difficult situations that I summarize as SSUQIOC: Sense, Self-Control, Understand, Question, Imagine, Offer, Collaborate:

•    Sense: Observe, listen, pay attention. Reflect. Be Open. Perceive. Intuit.
•    Self-control: Don’t judge, expect or jump to conclusions. Stay calm. Focus. Self-manage. Breathe. Let go.
•    Understand: Assemble the facts. Appreciate the context. Know why. Sympathize. Accept. Keep learning. Let come.
•    Question: Ask. Challenge. Think critically.
•    Imagine: Picture, hear, feel what could be. Envision a better way. Suggest possibilities.
•    Offer: Consider. Give. Explain. Demonstrate. Mentor. Facilitate. Help. Make it easier/ more fun.
•    Collaborate: Co-create. Recreate. Let evolve. Yield, shift, build on, bridge, adapt.

But how can we practice this type of self-management and still be open to play, free from self-censoring? How can we be self-aware enough to keep ourselves constantly playful, without that self-awareness (and the accompanying sense of responsibility) making us anxious and inhibiting us from that very playfulness?

Prehistoric humans did not have to ‘work’; even the collaborative browsing for food in the rainforest was a playful, easy, highly pleasurable activity. Is it even possible to be playful when so much of ‘civilized’ life is serious, stressful, difficult, and not at all fun?

There is some evidence that wild creatures spend most of their lives in ‘Now Time’, mostly in play. When a stressful situation arises they shift immediately into ‘Clock Time’ — the wary, fight-or-flight state of readiness that we humans live almost all our lives in. Might there be an approach to playful self-management in low-stress ‘Now Times’ that corresponds to the composed high-stress ‘Clock Time’ self-management approach represented by SSUQIOC?

If there is, I think it might be something like the ‘HCCPEP’ approach shown in green on the right side of the chart above: Heal, Celebrate, Connect, (Be) Present, Engage Others, Play:

•    Heal: Rest, recover, recuperate.
•    Celebrate: Notice beauty. Wonder. Stop thinking and just Be.
•    Connect: With your emotions, instincts, senses, and all-life-on-Earth.
•    Be Present: Relax. Be aware and open to possibility. Let go of goals, hopes and outcomes. Get rid of distractions.
•    Engage Others: Invite. Flirt. Initiate.
•    Play.

So, to the extent that I can avoid stressful events, I could use the HCCPEP approach to become more playful, and when stressful situations arise I would switch over to the SSUQIOC approach.

Of course, this is all easy to say, and to some extent runs counter to my recent assertion that we should learn to accept ourselves for who we are, and not try to become ‘better’, or what we’re not.

But this isn’t really a self-improvement program. It’s really a reflection, I think, of who we humans are naturally when we’re not exhausted, anxious, consumed with grief, anger or fear, or distracted, or otherwise ‘off our game’. This, I believe, is how wild creatures behave — and underneath the veneer of civilization we are all wild creatures. This is really a program for re-becoming ourselves, getting out from under the schmutz — the gunk that has been layered on us that coercively tells us what we should be and should do, to the point we disconnect and cease to be ourselves.

Having said that, I think for me to follow this approach effectively will require an enormous amount of practice. We’ve forgotten how to do all these things, and they no longer come ‘naturally’ to us as they seem to do to wild creatures. Following this two-pronged approach will also require an enormous amount of presence, self-knowledge and self-awareness.

But as a framework for coping with stressful events, and for relearning to play, it has great appeal to me. So I’m going to try practicing it. I will let you know how it goes. The practice will probably not make me a ‘better’ person, but maybe it will help me re-become that amazing, alive, feral human creature I was in my preschool years — that being that I always have been, and have missed ever since I learned, miserably, so many years ago, to become everybody-else.

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

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

tree swallows in aerial acrobatics; photo by Richard Seaman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

on playing with a young fox

for just a moment
I held the universe at bay

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

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

there is no use reporting it to the Royal Society.

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

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

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

We are all pattern recognizers. Our worldview, what we believe, depends on how we have organized what we’ve seen and heard and read and been told (by those we trust, and those we don’t) into patterns. It’s the process by which we make the enormous volume and complexity of knowledge at our disposal sufficiently manageable to understand and act upon.

I have always prided myself on my ability to synthesize large volumes of information, and to imagine interesting and useful possibilities arising from it, seeing connections and patterns others cannot. So it’s been dismaying and humbling to discover that much of the ‘wisdom’ I’ve obtained from observing, synthesizing and musing on my knowledge and experience is neither comprehensible nor very palatable to others. I think I finally understand why.

When I served as an advisor to entrepreneurs for some thirty years, what my clients told me they valued most from me were the leisurely breakfast meetings I’d have with them, during which they would talk about what was keeping them awake at night, and I would respond by telling them what some of the other organizations I had served or studied had done in similar situations, and/or speculating on how something I’d heard, or seen, or read, often in an unrelated context, might present a unique opportunity for them.

I thought that it was my synthesis of information, and my imagination, applied to their business ‘problems’, that they valued. But now I’m coming to realize it was actually my stories that they valued — stories of other business’ successes or failures or experiences, and stories about what I had read, relevant to their situation. I now suspect that the ‘lessons’ I embedded in or attached to these stories were mostly politely (perhaps even unconsciously) ignored by my clients, as they internalized my stories through their worldview and belief systems. They drew the conclusions on what my stories meant, and how they were actionable to them, and did not want or expect me to do so. My value, perhaps my only real value for most of my work life, was as a story-teller. Of course, my ability to select the right stories to tell them was important, as was my ability to articulate them well. But still.

My book, Finding the Sweet Spot, is likewise the synthesis of what I learned from all those clients. I am now wondering if it would have been more useful, and more successful, if it had contained a lot more stories and less of my own synthesis of what those stories meant to me, the patterns I recognized.

The elders and tribal leaders of First Nations peoples knew the power of stories. They didn’t tell the others of the tribe what to believe or what to do. They knew that a good story that each listener could interpret and make their own was more compelling, and unarguable, and hence, in most cases, more effective at influencing beliefs and behaviours.

But surely people want to be told synthesized truths, nuggets of wisdom, and what they should do to benefit from them? How else can we account for the mountains of self-help books published every year, some of which are astonishing best-sellers that make their authors fantastically wealthy, famous, even revered?

And then it struck me:

People don’t want to be told what they should believe or what they should do. They want to be told what they want to believe and what they want to do. They want it to be simple, easy, and fun. They want stories that convey and support those beliefs and actions. In short, they want to be reassured.

Take, for example, one of my most popular articles, Ten Things to Do When You’re Feeling Hopeless, which was picked up by several of the social ‘news amplifier’ sites and ultimately republished in Utne Reader. It is short, breezy, provocative without being heavy, and kinda fun. The first item in the list is sufficiently in-your-face to be worth thinking about and perhaps passing along to others, without being really unsettling, while the rest of the list are mostly easy, fun things to do — things most of us want to do. So the list is harmless, if not terribly useful. It’s reassuring, though, which is what most of us want — especially when we’re feeling hopeless.

I’m not belittling this. There’s a reason we want this, and it is because this is how we learn and cope. This is nature, and not just human nature. We look for patterns, and once we find them, we tend to dismiss ‘outliers’ that contradict the pattern, and we uncritically accept evidence that supports it. The brain evolved to help us make quick optimal decisions, and large amounts of contradictory data does not help us do that.

And we loathe complexity, because it paralyzes us: our scientists can’t bear the thought that time and space are infinite and infinitely complex, unknowable, not subject to any simple ‘rules’. Leaders of large organizations religiously pursue strategies and employ decision-making methods that are absurdly oversimplified, and preposterously overestimate how much control and influence they have over the organization’s success or failure.

We much prefer the comfort of simple models of cause and effect, and systems that are intuitively understandable and which we can fully predict and control. Alas, those models are usually oversimplified to the point they are only useful within very narrow constraints and short human time spans. The technologies built on such models, such as our underground water systems, our nuclear power plants, and our antibiotics, almost invariably create more long-term problems than they solve, and prove to be ill-conceived ideas. And the only systems that are truly predictable and controllable are trivial, fragile, or fictitious, and hence of almost no practical use.

No matter that simplistic models and solutions and symptoms rarely work: Still, we want books that tell us we can lose weight easily in 7-10 days, or that we can geoengineer our way out of climate change. We want to believe what we already believe, or at least what we want to believe, or, in cases when there is overwhelming evidence that those beliefs no longer make sense, we want to believe what we are ‘born-again’ ready to believe. And, likewise, we want to be told that what we ‘should’ do is what we are already doing, or what we want to do, or what we are at last ready and willing to do. Until then, we are deaf, and there is no point arguing with us.

Take a look at the poster above, the Holstee Manifesto from a cool recycled clothing manufacturer that the smart folks at the knowledge synthesizer (heh) BrainPickings love so much they keep it on their sidebar. And what’s not to love? When I first saw it I thought about putting it on my sidebar. But then I thought: It’s reminding me of what I already believe, and telling me to do what I am already doing and/or want to do. Even if, in some cases, in my heart I know I am not going to do it. It makes me feel good, mostly, and perhaps that’s enough.

Two of the truths that emerged for me from decades of pattern-seeking and pattern recognition are what I have come to call Pollard’s Laws:

Pollard’s Law of Human Behaviour: We do what we must (our personal, unavoidable imperatives of the moment), then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. There is never time left for things that are merely important.

Pollard’s Law of Complexity: Things are the way they are for a reason. If you want to change something, it helps to know that reason. If that reason is complex, success at changing it is unlikely, and adapting to it is probably a better strategy.

I keep citing them on this blog because I keep discovering how consistently true they are, primarily with reference to my own situation, but also from what others tell me, or describe. I could have worded them as advice on what to believe or what to do, and put them in a nice poster. But the truth is that not very many people like them. They’re messy and complex, and the advice that they imply (don’t try to be what you’re not; if you’re a procrastinator your only hope is to try to find some way to make what you don’t want to do easier or more fun; nobody knows anything and no one is in control, so stop expecting governments and leaders to make anything better, ever; stop trying to change the world and accept that no matter what we do we’re more-or-less fucked) is not what people want to hear. So they choose not to listen.

I get that. I’m not an evangelist for my beliefs. Daniel Quinn advises “People will listen when they’re ready to listen and not before.” I’m not privy to any knowledge that others can’t obtain with a bit of research, but I don’t expect many people to read what I have read in doing my research because the messages are not those they want to hear — they don’t jibe with their worldview. They didn’t jibe with mine for a long time, and it’s only by accident that they did, at exactly the time I was ready to listen to them.

Fortunately, I don’t have my heart set on writing a self-help book. And I’m not particularly concerned that over the years the readership of this blog has dwindled by more than half as its messages have become more complex and more grim.

Likewise, unlike many business leaders, new age gurus and alternative culture humanists, I don’t believe you can change a culture (except, as a few business and political leaders have discovered, by exterminating the existing members and bringing in ‘believers’ to replace them). Changing a culture entails changing what most of its people believe, and most people will believe only what they want to believe, regardless of its veracity. And even if through relentless effort you can succeed in forcing them to change their beliefs, that won’t cause them to change their behaviour; it will just make them unhappy and resentful. Stalin and Mao, between them, caused the deaths of 140 million citizens of their beleaguered and accursed countries in their attempt to change their cultures, and in the process changed nothing.

So, having argued for the foolishness of offering advice, here is some advice: If you want to be popular, at least for a while, tell people in a clever way to believe what they already believe (or are finally ready to), and to do what they are already doing (or at least are ready to, or want to do). If you want to be a true friend, don’t proffer advice at all — just listen and empathize and accept them for who they are, what they believe, and what they are likely, and unlikely, to do.

And if you want to really influence people, though in ways you cannot ever predict or control, tell them good stories. But please, if you do, beware of stories’ subversive power, and don’t tell lies or carefully-edited myths. Like the best woods, the best stories are unsynthesized and unvarnished.

I‘ve just finished reading Moonwalking with Einstein, the book by Joshua Foer (little brother of Jonathan Safran Foer, the guy who persuaded me to go vegan). After researching the techniques used by the world’s memory ‘grand masters’, Joshua ended up preparing for, competing for, and winning the US memory championship.

The techniques he used date back millennia, and were used before the printing press and even before written language. Although there are some new, more powerful techniques used by memory champions, the underlying techniques are unchanged, and entail the use of powerful images, and familiar locations (our brain remembers images and sequential locations much more readily than ‘un-placed’ facts) that are ‘connected’ to what the learner wants to memorize. Without the use of such techniques, not even memory champions can keep more than 5-7 facts in their ‘working memory’ at a time.

You are probably familiar with them since hundreds of ‘self-help’ books have described them:

1. The memory palace: Committing to memory a journey through a familiar place (a childhood home, say) and then associating each item in the list you’re trying to memorize with a sequential point in that journey. To do that, you have to conjure up a memorable image (the more prurient the better) that you can connect with each item in the list, and then ‘place’ that image in the next place in the sequence in your journey. Then as you retrace the journey the images will immediately come to mind in the correct order.
2. The Major System, Person-Action-Object (PAO), and Chunking: This entails first breaking a long string of data (like a phone number) into several pieces and memorizing each chunk instead of each datum. To memorize numbers, the Major System converts the numbers 0-9 into the following consonants: 0=s, 1=t/d, 2=n, 3=m, 4=r, 5=l, 6=sh/ch, 7=k/g, 8=f/v, 9=p/b. Vowels can be inserted anywhere to make the results intelligible. So the number 3219 can be remembered as man (playing) tuba, or Manitoba. A more sophisticated system, the PAO, converts every two digit sequence from 00-99 into a memorized image of an unique person performing an unique action on an unique object. Then any 6-digit sequence can be memorized as the person (from the first two digits) performing the action (from the second two digits) on the object (from the third two digits) — one image to remember 6 consecutive numbers. Card counters and card memorizers use the same technique except with 52 unique P-A-Os instead of 99, allowing them to memorize any 3 consecutive cards with one image, and a whole deck with 18.
3. For memorizing prose and poetry, first read a set of lines to get the gist of it, then create an image that captures the essential ‘memes’ of that set of lines, and place each in a memory palace. Some people assign an image to each line or phrase, others to every word (they use a set of memorized ‘stand-in’ images for the 200-or-so commonest words like pronouns and conjunctions). Some people make their images intellectually stimulating, while others recall the emotion that the words provoked. Many use puns, mnemonics or rhyming words as part of their images. Even the best memory champions struggle with learning text — because of its complexity it’s the hardest thing to memorize.
4. All of these techniques take considerable practice to learn, until they become second nature. If you want to get really good at memorizing, you need to push yourself to memorize more, faster, each day, or your improvement will soon level off.

Although Joshua confesses his memory for unstructured information (like where he left his car keys) is no better now than before he learned the techniques and became a memory champion, and that a lot of structured information (like schedules, ‘to do’ lists and contact information) is easier to keep in a written list or other external place than taking the trouble to memorize it, he does make a compelling argument for practicing the art of memorization on the following grounds:

• It’s good mental exercise as you age, and the social advantages of remembering people’s faces and names and one or two really important (to them or you) things about them is enormous.
• It’s a good practice for becoming more attentive, more mindful, more present in the moment every day.
• You only really ‘know’ a great piece of writing when you’ve committed it to memory.
• “How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember … Our memories make us who we are.” That includes “our ability to find humour, to make connections, to create new ideas, and to share in a common culture”.

I was sufficiently persuaded to decide to practice. The obvious starting point is some of my own stuff — favourite stories, poetry, some of the things I would like to be remembered for, perhaps the ‘signature posts’ on my right sidebar. To be able to stand up before a group and say something that was well-written verbatim without notes is a very powerful capacity, and I’d like to learn to do that.

So that’s where I’m starting.

But then what? What should I memorize after that? If I get into the practice of spending just 15 minutes a day practicing memorizing, what material should I work on besides my own? What’s worth memorizing?

Here are some of the things I’m considering memorizing, for various reasons — they’re succinct and compelling, they’re entertaining, they capture important and essential truths that are often and easily forgotten, they are things I believe and care about so deeply that by memorizing them I feel I might become more truly myself:

• TS Eliot’s Four Quartets
• The lyrics and chords for 20 selected songs I am learning to perform
• The Dark Mountain Manifesto
• The first chapter of John Gray’s Straw Dogs

Thinking about this also, to my surprise, got me thinking about what I want to write next on this blog. What are the most important things I have learned in the nine years since I started writing this blog, which now extends to some 7,000 pages of material? How can I distil them and say them in some memorable way, that I can ‘perform’ when the opportunity permits, to audiences of one or a hundred, in poetry, in prose or in song?

What about you, dear patient reader of my clumsy, verbose and often circuitous writing? What have you memorized, and what to you is worth memorizing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . . . .

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

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

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

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

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

cartoon by charles barsotti; purchase his work here

You say you want it fixed. It is not good enough, you say, it does not work the way it was supposed to, the way it was advertised to work. It does not meet your expectations.

All right, then, I will look at it. I will perform a laying of hands on it, and free it to become what it was intended to be. I will mind-meld with it, to enlighten it. I will percolate it with my aura, blinding, pulsing waves of meaning, of intent.

But still I know it won’t be enough. It doesn’t soar, you say. It doesn’t end world poverty. It does not make you desirable to others by whom you wish to be desired. It lacks resonance, purpose, that old magic.

I bring it into the shop. I apply torque, and ratchet it up tighter. I mesmerize it, enthrall it with my very presence. It offers to do anything I want, so I ask it to grant you a hundred wishes, provided they are each worded in the form of a question.

Won’t do, you insist. It doesn’t sparkle, enchant. It cannot cut through steel, or broken hearts. It shudders when it hears the cries of children. It leaves calcium deposits, puncture wounds, a bitter aftertaste.

I take it to the specialist, the guru, the wizard, the doctor of imperfect things, the one who surpasseth understanding. I am in tears now, pleading for improvement, repair, freedom from the pain, the injury, the injustice.

The all-knowing one blesses it, decrees it to be of the highest colour, beyond colour even, achieving perfect clarity, integral, transcendent, at one with the force, copacetic.

But as soon as you see it, you frown. It still hasn’t provided global liquidity, you complain. Poxviruses continue to proliferate, everywhere there are locusts, sexual dysfunctions, fungi, celebrity scientologists, plagues of idealists, reality tv. It’s not working, it’s worse than useless. Take it away, you demand.

So I do. I wrap it in feather down and steal it away, in my arms, through the blizzard, the sandstorm, the anticyclonic gloom. I place it in a pyramid, which I place in turn in a box of styrofoam worms.

I return empty-handed, chastened, cleansed. I should have known better, I confess. I throw myself at your mercy. I genuflect, bow, drill holes in my forehead, scrub myself with baryons, admit to past indiscretions, libels, illicit thoughts about checkout girls, minor felonies involving periscopes, bicycle seats.

You are inconsolable. It’s not that, you say, not that thing that you kept trying to fix. It’s you. You are the cause of the epidemics, assassinations, Davos conferences, stuttering, extreme sports, anomie, conspicuous consumption, genital warts, Nascar, pthalates, failure to achieve cold fusion, failure to achieve carbon sequestration, YouTube beheading videos.

There is no defence for this. I failed to factor in the causes and effects, do the multivariate analysis. I ask how I should pay for this, what should be my recompense.

Accept responsibility, you reply. That is enough. Carry that weight. Push that rock uphill, and don’t stop. Wear a sign on your forehead, so everyone will know.

I sighed. This was much worse than I had feared. I had expected hanging, electrocution by faulty taser, lethal melamine injection, death by water.

I had hoped for excommunication, banishment.

Exile.

Bowen in Transition, like many global Transition Initiative communities, is already doing several short-term small-step activities — learning about and (at a personal level) applying permaculture principles, obtaining and acting upon home energy audits, compiling a list of local experts in sustainable food, energy, building etc., holding awareness events etc. But as I noted in my recent Preparing for the Unimaginable post, I am concerned that we need to start thinking about longer-term, larger-scale, community-wide changes if we want to have a community sufficiently competent, self-sufficient and resilient enough to sustain ourselves through major and enduring crises.

I have read some of the “energy descent plans” of some of the leading Transition communities, and they strike me as being long on ideals and objectives and short on credible strategy — how to get there from here. And while my original thought was to draft a “Transition and Resilience Plan” that would include current-state data, scenarios, impact analyses and detailed action plans by community segment (food, energy etc.), I have come to realize that our future is so “unimaginable” that strategic planning is impossible — we cannot begin to know what we must plan for, and if we guess, we will be almost certainly so wrong that our plan will prove mostly useless.

Instead, I wondered if it made sense to have what Don, Rob and Robert called a “Working Towards” plan — specific ideas for helping us (1) build community and increase collaboration and sharing, (2) reduce dependence on imports and centralized systems and increase self-sufficiency, and (3) prepare psychologically and increase resilience for whatever the future holds. The idea was to start doing this within our 40-person Bowen in Transition group, and then engage others, until a majority of Bowen Islanders have acquired this knowledge and these capacities, and Bowen has become a real community. “Working Towards” these three objectives — community, self-sufficiency and psychological resilience — seemed to be something we could all agree on regardless of our ideology.

The more I thought about this ambitious goal, the more skeptical I became. Even if we could get our 40 Transition-savvy members to collectively model this behaviour (when we can’t get most of them to even show up for meetings), how could we possibly scale this up to a couple of thousand people?

As we talked, it was clear that each of us was sufficiently passionate about Transition to stay involved in it to some extent, focused mostly on short-term payback actions in the areas each of us cares about — for Don that includes water, waste management and well-being, for Rob it includes renewable energy, conservation and sustainable technology, for Robert it includes learning and education, and for me it includes livelihoods, transportation, ecological sustainability and self-governance. But as Rob pointed out, most Bowen Islanders are so busy (and stressed) looking after (and out for) family, homes and careers they have no cycles left to do more than vote, sign petitions, and attend occasional information meetings. Transition, even for the aware, is mostly in the “important but not urgent” category.

How do we make Transition urgent, or, if not urgent, at least easy or fun to be involved in in some meaningful way? Robert talked about the value of stories in getting people to a common understanding, which might be a way to create a sense of urgency. He said most Bowen Islanders came here from elsewhere, and their story is mostly about why they came here and what they consciously gave up to do so.

Our story, he explained, reflects and drives our values, and those in turn determine what we think is important to do in the world. Combine that with Pollard’s Law (we do what we must — looking after personal imperatives and addressing the needs of the moment; then we do what’s easy; and then we do what’s fun — what we love doing) and you get something like the graphic above. It explains (left side) why 40 Bowen Islanders gave up a day of their time without much convincing to take our crash course in Transition; it also explains why it’s so difficult to get them/us to do much more.

I talked a bit about Resilience Circles — the new movement that Tree told me about and that Transition US is working with. A resilience circle is:

A small group of 10 – 20 people that comes together to increase personal security during these challenging times. Circles have three purposes: learning, mutual aid, and social action. The economy is going through a deep transition, and economic security is eroding for millions of people. We’re worried about our financial security and about the future we are creating for our children. Many of us aren’t part of communities where we can talk openly about these challenges and fears.

Tree’s group in South Eugene, Oregon, that I mentioned in my post on Building Local Social Capital, exemplifies resilience circles (although it does not call itself that and did not follow the Resilience Circle process). Could such circles be the model that might allow us to bootstrap community to a community-wide scale? One presenter to Transition US suggested that a converging of the Transition and Resilience Circle “methodologies” might allow us to do just that.

The challenge with doing this is that I don’t think you can just go about setting up resilience circles in a coherent and organized way. These are substantially self-organized groups. And unlike Transition groups (which tend to have local champions that coordinate and hold them together), resilience circles appear to be more collectively-managed, with no one particularly in charge or depended upon for their continuance.

The four of us discussed the “magic” of such small “sticky” groups that keep going without a leader or end objective. We each had some experience of such groups — mine was (is) a group that meets monthly for breakfast in Toronto, that I co-founded and which is still going strong without me more than a decade later. It has no leader, and sending out reminders is unprompted and self-organized. It has often had guests, who occasionally join the group, and has had a few larger-group and longer events, but it has generally had about eight members at any one time, of whom usually 5-7 show up each month. Is there something magic about this number, we wondered, as Christopher Allen has suggested (his research suggests ideal size of a working group is 5-7 people and ideal size of a “community” is about 50 people)?

If he’s right, then perhaps instead of trying to create and sustain an Island-wide Transition group we should be looking to create Resilience Circles in each immediate neighbourhood in which one or more of our 40 Bowen in Transition members lives. What would happen if each of us were to call up, out of the blue, our immediate neighbours (whether we know them or not), invite them to a “block party”, and gauge whether there is sufficient interest among them to self-organize a Resilience Circle? This kind of “cellular organization” has worked well for others.

Then, instead of the primary role of Bowen in Transition being Island-wide awareness-building and member recruitment as it is now, it might evolve into a much simpler role of visiting on a rotating basis the 20 or 30 Resilience Circles on the Island, during their get-togethers, suggesting Transition-related activities to them  and sharing “success” stories between/among the different circles. If we could link and network, say, 25 Resilience Circles of a dozen people each, that would be 300 people in the Bowen in Transition network, instead of 40.

The question is whether such a network of circles could evolve into a true model “community”. That raises the question What exactly is a “community” anyway? If we mean it in the sense that we need to “build local community” to be able to take on additional responsibilities when local crises hit and central authorities are no longer able to respond, and to be able to collaborate and share and make decisions in our collective interest, and support each other, then I would say a community is a group of people (around 50 if Christopher is right) who collectively have these attributes:

1. They know and care about each other, and help each other actively and voluntarily rather than out of a sense of obligation or contract.
2. They collectively have the capacities to make a life together in a relatively independent, self-sufficient and self-managed way, and to support each other.
3. They care about the same things. That may be shared values, or shared longer-term objectives, or may be just the result of being thrown together to cope with one or more shared crises.
4. They live in a geographically contiguous area and have a shared sense of place and connection to the land. (I know this proviso will be controversial among “virtual community” fans, and I am not saying that virtual groups can’t do some of these things well, but they can’t do all of them, especially if the crises at hand take from us much of today’s taken-for-granted technology, which I think they will.)

So today 50 people in an area of 500 people could constitute a community, if it was not too far-flung. And then if and when we find ourselves in a world of multiple crises or total social collapse, these 500 people could re-form into ten communities of 50 people each, with 5 people in each of the new communities having already learned how to live in community, and hence able to show and teach the other 45. They would make natural community “federations” of 500 people, and these federations might, as with indigenous confederations, be granted responsibility and resources from the individual communities for doing certain things that are impractical for a group of only 50 to do.

How many circles, then, does it take to make a community? If a circle is 5-7, it would take 7-10. If a circle is 15 (as in the Resilient Circles model) it would only take 3-4. We can’t prescribe it — it needs to evolve to suit the needs and culture of the people and place, and will probably vary.

But I’m intrigued about the possibility of creating a viable, self-sustaining and intimate Resilience Community from neighbourhood cells up instead of from municipality down. And I’m intrigued about the idea of “Working Toward” Transition not by compiling a plan, but organically by developing commitment, compassion, capacities and a sense of urgency in small federated groups, and allowing their collective wisdom to percolate across, until, in our collective wisdom, we are ready for whatever we, and coming generations, must face in the years and decades ahead.

top drawing by Nancy Margulies

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

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

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

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

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

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S COLLAPSE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LIVING BETTER

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

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

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

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

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

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

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

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

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

Tar Sands Watch:

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

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

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

FUN AND INSPIRATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THOUGHTS FOR THE MONTH

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

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

From Sam Rose:

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

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

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

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

From Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire:

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