Just about a year ago, I posted an article on the work that Christopher Allen had done on:

• optimal size of groups for sustainability and collaborative effectiveness (short answer: around 5-7 for work groups and around 50 for networks/communities), and
• maximal span of any one person’s relationship ‘circles’

Christopher illustrated his answer to the second issue (the one this article is about) with the lovely drawings of Nancy Margulies, shown above, of three concentric circles/spirals, which he called, respectively, the support circle, the sympathy circle, and the trust circle. He argued that there are rivers or threads running through all three circles representing common ‘context’ for these relationships (work, shared philosophy or beliefs, kinship, love etc.), what he calls ‘geographies of connection’ on the topographical map of our relationships. Here’s Nancy’s illustration of these threads:

Over the last week, I’ve been chatting with Tree Bressen, Rob Paterson, Melinda Fleming and Nancy White about how many meaningful relationships we can sustain without exhaustion. I hypothesized that (based on people I know) most people have either 5-7 really close (family/love/other partnership) relationships that essentially take up all of their social time, or they have somewhere north of 50, almost all more tenuous, relationships. In either case there’s a constant struggle I would argue, to give and get the aggregate attention and appreciation one wants from one’s social network.

The prevailing view is that we can (and do) have both — an intimate inner circle and a more tenuous second and third circle (or perhaps there are more circles, or perhaps it’s just one continuous outward spiral with strong links at the centre and weak links further out). But my observation is that very very few people really have both, and that people are pretty willing to give up on their large networks if they can find what they want in their inner circle. There’s a constant tension, though — since that inner circle is “putting all one’s eggs in one basket” there is a risk of losing those relationships and not being able to replace them, so many people, I think, try to keep that larger network ‘in reserve’ as a safety net(work).

Because we only have a limited number of hours per year for social activity (take away sleep etc., work time and time wanted for solitary activities and I’d guess we each have between 1500 and 3000 hours a year of social time to parse out), cultivating our networks (which are largely outside our control) can be hugely challenging.

And on top of all this, some of us (sensibly I think) are trying to rediscover or maintain another essential relationship, to Gaia, to all-life-on-Earth, to the natural world. For most of us there is a huge disconnect here — the people in our circles, like we ourselves, live outside the natural world (both physically and especially psychologically) so there is no context of place in which to situate and ‘make sense’ of these relationships. There is, in short, no real community. The relationships, and the attention and appreciation that draw us to others and others to us, are substantially all in our heads.

I have said before that I think humans were and are meant to live a tribal, place-based life as part of community and of all-life-on-Earth. In that natural, prehistoric, and now ideal and unachievable world, we are, at a certain age of adulthood, given the choice of asking to be invited to join the community in which we grew up, or leaving the community and seeking another that gives our life more meaning and value. We can be a part of a community, or we can live peripherally to it, as a visitor or traveler or nomad, until we find the place and community (the two are largely inseparable) where we know we belong. In the natural and prehistoric world one is always a part of the greater circle of all-life-on-Earth, so even those who live on the periphery of community still feel a larger belonging, connection, and appreciation. But there is relatively little choice in such a world of who we can choose to live in community with. Most natural tribes (and not just in human societies) have significant buffer zones between them, and a certain Darwinian reticence to accept strangers. One earns one’s place in a community, and the relationships with the tribe naturally follow.

My Gravitational Community — the 50-70 people listed in the right sidebar — has evolved over the years but stayed roughly the same size. As some of the people who have come into my ‘orbit’ have become much closer to me, the attention I have for the rest (manifested mainly through this blog, IM, e-mail and Second Life) inevitably wanes and these relationships tend to weaken and ‘fall out of orbit’. I wonder if there’s a Quantum Theory for social networks, a ‘rule’ that determines, based on your total social time and energy and on the number of people in various levels of intimacy or proximity to you, how many ’spaces’ are left in the outer orbits?

If all your relationships are shallow, I can envision you having 150 (Dunbar’s number) such relationships, and juggling them competently. At the other end of the spectrum, I suspect the maximum number of sustainable meaningful relationships for newlyweds and new mothers is between 1 and 2. Perhaps an inverse-square law applies. And then, as we all struggle with Tom Robbins’ great question How do we make love last?, some of those inner circle covalent relationships slide out to outer circles or out of orbit entirely, making room for either a host of new outer-orbit relationships or a new ‘one and only’.

It will not come as a surprise to my regular readers that I believe we are naturally polyamorous, and that there is more strength and sustainability in an set of 3-7 covalent relationships that are intimate and loving and appreciative and attentive but not exclusive, not demanding of the lion’s share of one’s time, and full of accommodation and compersion for each partner. These relationships (especially in today’s world) need not be reciprocal — each of the 3-7 others one has a poly relationship with may have 3-7 other relationships, such that the total poly network could involve dozens of people. This provides a lot more flexibility and support than can be expected from any monogamous relationship. But it is a lot of work, especially when the relationship members live far apart.

My Gravitational Community is broken down into categories that show how the people with whom I have meaningful relationships came into my life, but it would probably be more honest if I were to categorize them by what draws me to them (and hopefully, them to me): that draw may be emotional/visceral/erotic appeal, shared purpose or ideals, or any of three types of intellectual appeal (great intelligence, great creativity, or great communication skill or other attractive competency). Think of these appeals or ‘geographies of connection’ as spokes or rivers flowing out from the centre, as a second dimension (along with ‘quantum level’) of the ‘map’ of one’s social network. Might be a little too personal and too revealing to show for the Gravitational Community on my right sidebar though!

Please feel free to join the dialogue, and let me know if and how you think it’s possible to have it both ways — the ‘cold fusion’ of a fulfilling and intimate inner circle as well as a large and diverse and dynamic ‘outward spiral’ of people with whom one also manages to sustain an enduring and meaningful relationship.

And also please let me know if you have thoughts on how it might be possible to somehow ’situate’ the people you have important relationships with, within the larger relationship we all have (but have largely forgotten) with all-life-on-Earth. To meld and merge all these juggled relationships into real communities.

saraswati, hindu goddess of knowledge, creativity and openness (image online, uncredited)

Some recent comments from readers of my First Principles post led me to revisit one of the first posts I wrote on this blog, nearly seven years ago. It was about a seven-step process for coping with a new situation that Cyndy Roy and I co-developed. Here’s an excerpt:

Sense, Self-control, Understand, Question, Imagine, Offer, Collaborate

We developed this before I started reading and writing about complexity theory, but it occurs to me that this is really a practice (can’t really call it a methodology) for coping with complexity — with situations that have no simple (put the lights on a timer) or merely complicated (include a torque converter in your electric bicycle conversion kit, and make sure you true the wheels before riding). In complex situations, there is no ‘right answer’ — there are too many variables, no clear cause-effect relationships (if you do X, you may or may not get result Y), and no way of predicting what will happen. Most of the ‘problems’ we face are not (complicated) problems (with ’solutions’) but rather (complex) predicaments that we have to adapt ourselves to.

It seems to me that wild creatures (and perhaps Buddhists) appreciate this, and they appear to use these seven steps to cope with situations over which they (and we) have no real control. I think we would be wise to do likewise. Here’s how these seven steps differ from the normal ‘problem-solution’ process we use in merely complicated situations. As you review them, think about a specific complex situation: Example: Resolving a non-trivial conflict between two people you respect and who both have valid points that cannot be reconciled:

1. Sense: Pay attention to everything that is happening. Don’t try to identify the ‘problem’, or the ’cause’ or the obvious ’solution’ because in complex situations there are none of these. If we think we see a cause or solution, we’re probably over-simplifying and we will be prone to making erroneous decisions.
2. Self-control: Become aware of your own subjectivity, biases, feelings, and predispositions. Know yourself, and appreciate that you are not separate from this situation or from others trying to cope with it. You are a part of the system and hence of the predicament. You cannot control it (though you probably wish you could and my want to try to); you can only control yourself, and your reaction to it. Appreciate that the situation is a predicament, that you and others need to accommodate and adapt to, not a ‘problem’ that needs to be ‘fixed’. Lower your own and others’ expectations that there are magical or simple ‘answers’ to this situation.
3. Understand: Appreciate that things are the way they are for a reason, and that there’s a reason that this predicament has no simple (or complicated) ’solution’. Appreciate the situation, and the different knowledge, ideas and perspectives that people have in regard to it. Appreciate not just the ‘intellectual’ content of the situation but also the emotions at play. Sympathize with what and how people feel and understand why they feel that way. Let your senses and intuition inform your understanding.
4. Question: Use questions, of yourself and of others, to explore and deepen your appreciation, and that of others, of the situation. Don’t proffer answers or quick fixes, because if there were a quick fix it would already have occurred to someone and have been done. Ask questions that are not judgemental but which are probing, challenging, and which push past unacknowledged biases or assumptions.
5. Imagine: Surface approaches and possibilities that others have not thought of, and encourage and facilitate others to do so, collaboratively. Hold these approaches and possibilities open. Find different ways to look at the situation. Think about how nature copes with analogous situations and challenges. Hold the creative tension between what is imaginable and what is practicable, by encouraging both creative and critical thinking.
6. Offer: Be generous. Be the first to offer something of value — your time, resources, willingness to talk with others or do research. Give and incite others to give likewise, following your example, your intention. Take responsibility.
7. Collaborate: While there are certain actions that each person will, as a result of the understanding and appreciation they have achieved through this process, do personally, take personal responsibility for, some of the most powerful actions that can come from this practice are collective, collaborative. In collaboration, you do what you do best, and show others what you do, and by watching others you learn from them too. And the collective product is a give and take, a weaving, an adaptation to each other as well as the predicament you are working to address, to adapt yourselves to. Collaboration can produce, unexpectedly and unpredictably, results that outshine what any individual, no matter how brilliant or competent, could ever do alone.

This seven-step practice was itself a collaboration with Cyndy, and despite all I have learned since we developed it, I can’t see how to improve on it, which shows, I think, the value of collaboration.

To remember the seven steps, I created a simple set of hand movements: open and receiving (sense), fingers together contemplatively (self-control), forefingers pointed up in aha! style (understand), left hand open in a receiving gesture (question), fingers  of right hand to temple (imagine), right hand open in giving gesture (offer), hands clasped supportively together (collaborate). Much better than an acronym.

It is a practice, and as such it takes practice, but it seems to work.

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

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

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

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

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

My life used to be so complicated.

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

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

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S END

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LIVING BETTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FUN AND INSPIRATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

Field Art: Thanks to Tree for the link.

THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Risk:

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

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

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

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

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

Low to Medium Risk:

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

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

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

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

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

Other potential actions along these same lines include:

Medium Risk:

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

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

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

High risk:

One evening last week I was ranting on Twitter about “What the World Needs More Of”. I wrote:

the world needs more: lovers, dreamers, people unafraid to be different, people who know who they are, appreciative listeners…

the world needs more: people honest enough to admit they are broken, damaged, disconnected, seeking healing and sanctuary…

the world needs more: people who shout that the emperors, all of them, have no clothes…

the world needs more: people not afraid to say “i’m sorry” for things that aren’t their fault.

This last rant raised questions from some perplexed followers: Why should we apologize for things that aren’t our fault? I explained:

“i’m sorry” = i empathize with your pain, suffering, situation, and don’t pretend to have a way to “fix” it so i’ll just be present with you

The discussion moved over to Google Buzz, as the puzzled followers found my explanation more interesting than the initial rant. Here’s how it went:

Melinda Fleming wrote: ” The small hours do bring truth to those who listen deeply, don’t they?”

Karen HayDraude wrote: “My sister who lives in the US calls this, “Canadian sorry”, since her American pals were forever asking her what she was apologizing for.”

Melinda replied: “That’s funny! There’s a difference, though. In Afrikaans we use the word “meegevoel” which literally means “to feel together”. It seems that, in English, the only way to express such a sentiment, is to say “I’m sorry” which sounds like an apology for wrongdoing on one’s own part. But “meegevoel” is a simple expression of being & feeling empathically “with” the other person.”

I chimed in: “More evidence that modern language is designed to convey information not feeling. Just did a crossword for which ’sorry’ was the answer to the clue ‘Not my problem!’ “

Mushin Schilling added: “The dutch (zuidafrikaans) ‘meegevoel’ is properly translated, I think, with ‘compassion’ – but knowing of this English inadequacy I have introduced the Germanic “I feel with you” into conversations.

What exactly do we mean when we say “I’m sorry”? It can be an apology (”oops I didn’t mean to do that”), a regret (”I should have done that.”), an excuse (”not my department”) or an expression of empathy (”I empathize with your pain, suffering, situation, and don’t pretend to have a way to ‘fix’ it so I’ll just be present with you”). The “Canadian sorry” is deliberately ambiguous, allowing the listener to choose which of these three meanings s/he chooses — I’ll leave it to you whether doing that shows cowardice, indifference or cleverness. As a Canadian I’d say it’s potentially dangerous, if you’re called on which you intended.

The words “sorry” and “sore” mean, etymologically, “in pain”. “Sorrow” originally meant “grief or sickness”, so to be sorry meant to be so full of grief or sickness that it was painful. The use of the term as an apology is at best a hyperbole and at worst a lie. As an apology “Pardon me” is more apt (though that expression is now used as a question, with the tacit “… I wasn’t listening to or didn’t hear what you said”, or even as an accusation if said angrily).

The truth is that “I’m sorry” too often means nothing at all. Like “I love you” it is important when said genuinely, but prone to overuse and hence cheapening of meaning. We should use it to mean what it originally meant: I’m pained by the grief/sickness that you and/or I feel. If we’re not really suffering, we shouldn’t imply, with the word “sorry”, that we are.

This brings us back to empathy and compassion, the appreciation of the feelings (suffering or joy) of others. This appreciation is about attention, understanding, and caring. In our attention-deficit society, it’s in short supply. I’ve often said (infuriatingly to many) that with notable exceptions men tend to seek attention more than appreciation, while women tend to seek appreciation more than attention. Men try to “fix” simple and complicated problems, while women appreciate the complexity of predicaments. If it’s a predicament it can’t be fixed, and if it’s a problem, just empathizing rather than doing something may seem lame. The trick is to know which is which. Generally, if there’s any doubt in anyone’s mind, it’s probably complex, and in that case empathy is called for.

What I’m doing is asking to be “pardoned” when I’ve done something wrong, or think I may have (the Canadian in me), acknowledging regret in the rare situations when I wish I’d done something differently, and, when I’m genuinely feeling pain or suffering for my own situation or that of another I care about, briefly describing how I feel and then, as appropriate, acknowledging the other person’s suffering. And when someone expresses their own pain or suffering and I cannot honestly say I feel their pain or suffering, I simply acknowledge that suffering.

Clarity of expression means never having to say you’re sorry. Our language is so poor at conveying emotion, and the other languages I’m aware of are only marginally better. There are times I genuinely loathe language, and prefer to empathize silently, which tends to be better appreciated by animals than humans (and which does not work at all over the phone and other social technologies).

Perhaps we need to study animals to relearn their skill at conveying and detecting empathy. Perhaps we need to either abandon or improve communication tools that are limited to disembodied words, which are so clever at conveying ideas, at rhetorical expression, and at deception, and so useless at conveying things that really matter. The world needs a better way to say, and show, “I hear, I appreciate, and I care.”

Where might we find, or how might we invent, this better, nonverbal way?

And what else does the world need more of?

There is compelling evidence that for the first million years of human existence on Earth, we were almost entirely vegetarian, living in the trees, in rainforest. Those who lived near the sea were doubly charmed: not only was there an abundance of fruits and vegetables in easy reach, there were also sea plants and sea animals easy to catch and eat. Seafood provided us with the fatty acids necessary for brain growth, and that, combined with prehistoric climate change, allowed and/or forced us to expand our range outside the rainforest. There, plants of the type we could eat were in short supply, so we adapted and became almost entirely carnivorous, with the invention of the arrowhead and the discovery of fire. Then, perhaps thirty thousand years ago, we discovered catastrophic agriculture (the fact that certain hardy grains grew plentifully and exclusively in areas ravaged by flood or fire). We learned to exploit and perpetuate this agriculture and to process the grains to be edible, and this allowed us, finally, to settle, to have children more often than once every four years (since the little ones no longer had to be carried on long migrations), to eat an astonishing variety of foods, and to desolate the Earth with our soaring population and ravenous appetites.

That is a short history of human food, as we are coming to know it. A million years foraging easily as vegetarians, perhaps a hundred thousand as struggling hunter-gatherers, and then thirty thousand as settled omnivores. Our digestive systems have adapted remarkably well, though we never did have time to evolve the speed, agility, teeth and claws needed to chase down prey and tear raw flesh, so it’s a good thing those fatty acids gave us the brains to invent tools to do these things for us. All of this is imprinted in our DNA, indelibly. We are the product of over a million years of evolution.

Many of the people I know love to cook. One of the first bloggers I got to know when I began my Salon blog was Julie Powell, whose Jule/Julia blog, book and movie are now legendary. As I remember it, Julie’s fans were less interested in her personal life (or Julia Child’s) than in exactly how that day’s recipe on page 132 of the cookbook worked out, and how other readers’ experiences with the same recipe compared to theirs.

I was married to a woman who cooked very well, and preferred that I stay out of the kitchen where I was, she felt, just in the way. I expected that now, living alone, I would rediscover a passion for cooking, and jump into my barely-touched Veganomicon with enthusiasm and abandon.

I have not. I’ve read the book, and found it well written and entertaining, but most of the recipes seem to be, well, work. I’ve ploughed through a few recipes and they turned out OK, but much of the time I prefer to just throw together a bunch of raw foods, cut ‘em up, make a salad of them, or a sandwich, or a soup, or a simple stir-fry, or just lay them out around the edge of a plate or two and eat them just as they came from the garden.

I’ve concluded that I don’t cook. I forage. Whether it’s in my kitchen with its bins of nuts and seeds and crisper drawers of vegetables and leaves and sprouts and shoots, and bowls of fruits and cupboards of breads and crackers and shelves of jams and salsas and spices, or in the local organic foodstore the Ruddy Potato or the cheaper Vancouver Whole Foods (a ferry ride and a bus ride for those like me who are now car-less),  I am the primeval gatherer. Instinct tells me what to buy, though I avoid non-vegan foods, choose local, organic and raw whenever possible, and avoid GMO and any processed foods whose ingredients aren’t natural and recognizable. But I’m not averse to buying (mostly locally) prepared foods that are not highly processed, especially when it comes to desserts or difficult or time-consuming to make foods.

I guess that makes me lazy. But I feel great kinship with our ancient ancestors. Like our cousins the (mostly vegan) bonobos, they ate an astonishing diversity of different plants, most of them as simple as bananas to obtain and eat. Eating shouldn’t have to be work. It should be easy and fast and fun, and healthy and nutritious, and it should occur when you’re hungry, not at any specified meal ‘time’. We’re natural foragers, in our kitchens and our grocery stores.

Eating is, of course, a social act, and I appreciate that there is a joy in preparing food for others to share, and in the appreciation of that gift. But still: The popularity of the ‘buffet’ shows that we still like to forage, to make personal choices, to mix things up for ourselves, to take what comes, to try stuff. That can be done with raw vegan foods too, and I can’t imagine a guest being insulted at having the choice of many fresh, well-laid-out natural foods, without the fuss and time required to actually cook anything.

I suppose I’m just too new to this cooking thing to really get it. I have at least a million years of catching up to do. What’s this desire for heat and the mingling of flavours all about, anyway? Are my taste buds missing something, or is this a cultural thing, like the desire to wear shoes?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S END

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LIVING BETTER

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

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

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

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

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

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

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

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

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

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

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

FUN AND INSPIRATION

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

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

THOUGHT FOR THE WEEK

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

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

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

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