image: earth during the eocene epoch, the last time the average surface temperature was 25C, via bbc nature

image: depiction of eocene rainforest in the antarctic, from this site, original source uncredited

image: from the documentary film baraka

Imagine this:

1. Imagine that, a few millennia from now, down the steep slope that followed Peak Everything, the sixth Great Extinction is finally winding down. The pace of species extinction is slowing, and landscapes, while still often showing the signs of many recent ecological catastrophes due to ongoing tumultuous climate change, are beginning to show more patterns of succession. Our lovely planet has been through this kind of change many times before: At least twice it’s been choked in dust after meteorites or volcanoes that produced a global night that lasted a year and soaked the planet in a deluge of rain with the pH of battery acid. At least once it’s been totally encased, pole to pole, in a sheet of ice miles thick.
2. Imagine that this Future Earth looks about as different from the way it did in the 21st century as it did the last time the average surface temperature was 25C rather than 15C — during the early Eocene epoch about 50 million years ago. Imagine that more than half of the planet is therefore now desert, including the Western US, Southern Europe, the Western 2/3 of all tropical areas, and all of the areas that were already desert in the 21st century. Much of the rest of the planet is now rainforest, subject to torrential and relentless monsoons, including former Arctic and Antarctic areas. There are no ice sheets or glaciers now. Rising sea levels have engulfed the formal coastal areas and reduced overall planetary land mass by about 20%, and coasts are now mostly steep and mountainous.
3. Imagine that human population has declined to about 50 million, and is still declining, though much more slowly than during the earlier stages of the Great Extinction. The remaining humans have abandoned all technologies, in part because there is no cheap accessible energy to power them, and in part because with population now so small and declining, there is no real need for technologies for a full and healthy life. Population is still declining because humans are just not naturally well-adapted to very hot or changeable climates, whereas many of the succession species that now feed on humans (jaguars and crocodiles, for example) are much better adapted to prevailing climates. Nuclear radiation from abandoned 21st century power plants has also created ongoing birth rate and illness problems for humans and other species.
4. Imagine that humans have readapted to living in the trees (because it’s safer and more comfortable), to gathering rather than growing food (because it’s more reliable and easier), and to a vegetarian and insect diet (because it’s better suited to our digestive system and more accessible in post-tool-use societies). Humans still look much like they did in the 21st century (and, for that matter, much like they have for the past million years), but they behave much differently. They have given up abstract languages because such languages are no longer of value or use, though they can communicate essential messages very accurately through vocalizations (whistles, calls and songs) and gestures. They retain a passion for art and music and practice these extensively. They live in small, autonomous tribal cultures, each with a territory large enough to provide abundant food even when catastrophic climate events occur, and little or no contact with adjacent human cultures, which are, as a result, very diverse.
5. Imagine that such humans have given up their sense of time, again because they have no need for it. They live entirely (except for brief periods when under attack by predators) in the present, joyfully, in the moment. They have, of course, memories (so do most creatures) but their minds, without clocks, calendars and abstract language, now evolve differently from the way they did in the old “civilization” times, so they cannot and do not dwell on the past, nor fear nor long for the future. They live lives of great joy, leisure and abundance, and are unaware of the trajectory that will inevitably lead, many millennia hence, to their ecologically maladapted species’ slow and final extinction. And they are unaware of how humans live/lived in other places and times. It doesn’t concern them. They do not fear death; they accept it. Their curiosity is focused on here, and now.
6. Imagine that such humans have begun to evolve cultural and coping characteristics more aligned with their forest-dwelling bonobo cousins than their savannah-dwelling chimp cousins. Their best-adapted societies are peaceful, gentle, matriarchal, affectionate, and egalitarian, and resolve internal conflicts and stress through embrace, caress, and sexual calming methods rather than through the expression of violence.
7. Imagine that, despite the apparent similarities between these post-civilization humans and prehistoric tree-dwelling humans, there are a number of qualities that clearly distinguish them. These differences are not physical but behavioural, due to differences in selected genetics, learned behaviours passed between generations, and differences in environment. Post-civilization humans are still not as intuitive as prehistoric humans, but they are more imaginative and hence more playful. They are more empathetic, because they still pass on the embodied grief of having experienced massive suffering and hardship just a few hundred generations ago. They still retain vestiges of skill at abstraction and capacity to synergize, that comes through in and is practiced in their art and music composition. They also ironically retain vestiges of competitiveness, even though this no longer serves a useful purpose.

Imagine that.

If you can imagine that, perhaps you can understand why some of us are no longer working to save or reform this sad, damaged, unsustainable, juggernaut civilization culture, or even to try to make a “transition” from it to some other large-scale, high-technology, global-scope culture. Perhaps you can understand why I say “It’s hopeless, but we’ll be fine.”

If you can, perhaps you can help me imagine how we can make it to this strange and wonderful future Earth, from where we are now, with the minimal amount of intervening suffering of human and other creatures, and the minimal amount of damage to this planet we call home. What could we do, now, and in stages over the coming few decades as the ragged flywheel of our civilization comes violently and shudderingly apart, that would prepare us to cope better, to be hurt less, to do less harm?

I’m trying to imagine that.

There is something seemingly unfathomable to the human mind about exponential curves. As I wrote last fall:

There is an old story about the invention of the chessboard, in which the inventor as his reward asks for one grain of wheat on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and doubling until all 64 squares are full. The seemingly modest request adds up to many times more than all the wheat the world has ever produced. The purpose of the story is to teach about our inability to grasp the impact and unsustainability of accelerating increases in anything, particularly in the final stages. Even when more than half of the squares have been filled the inventor’s request still seems manageable. It is only when it is too late that its impossibility is realized.

 Even when almost all the squares have been filled, the request still seems manageable. We are now living in a world where almost all the squares have been filled. We have used up the easy-to-get half of the Earth’s resources, which accumulated over billions of years. We have used most of that in the last two centuries, and most of that in the last two decades. In the process we have destabilized the planet’s climate systems. We are nearing what is now being called “peak everything”.

And there is certainly nothing “normal” to human eyes in what mathematicians call a “normal curve”, at least when time is the independent variable. We always seem to perceive the future as much like the present, only more so, and our favourite works of utopian and dystopian fiction turn out to be mostly somewhat hyperbolized reflections on the best or worst of the world as it was when the authors wrote them.

Even when we try to conceive of the downside of the normal curve — sharp at first and then tailing off slowly — we can only see everything going backwards, back to the way it was when the curve was at that height before. A simple, rapid decline, like those that befell previous civilizations and unsustainable cultures, is unimaginable. We can’t picture it because it’s never been that way for us. Even the current set of collapsnik writers, like James Kunstler, portray a post-collapse future that is almost nostalgically like the old American West.

In recent months, we have seen the news from climate scientists become exponentially worse. A decade ago we were hand-wringing about a 1C rise in average global temperature by 2100. A year ago it was a 2C rise by 2050 and a 4C rise by 2100. Now it appears all but certain that our failure to consider the “positive feedback loops” inherent in our astonishingly delicately-balanced climate systems made us absurdly optimistic, and a 6C rise by 2050 is quite possible. I can’t blame you if you haven’t been keeping up — neither had I. Two recent videos, one by Grist’s David Roberts and a second, even more recent one by fellow collapsnik Guy McPherson, will bring you up to speed.

The message of these videos, and the data underlying them, is simple, but it’s a lot like hearing news of a terrible and sudden loss in the family, the death of someone you knew was at risk but somehow believed would get through it, or at least last a while longer. It’s too soon. It can’t be that fast. We cannot accept it, as the trickster piles a mountain of grain onto the third-to-last square of the chessboard.

The message is two-fold:

1. Not only are we fucked, but it’s coming much sooner than we expected. It’s coming in the first half of this century, not the second. By 2050 life for all but the simplest and most well-protected species on this planet will almost certainly be impossible, except for small numbers in a few marginal areas.
2. The whole issue of mitigation and the need for activism is now more-or-less moot. Even if we were to collectively and massively change our behaviour starting tomorrow, it would only delay collapse by a few years, and quite possible make the collapse even more catastrophic. Until recently there was at least a chance that perhaps a combination of behaviour change and the reduced availability of cheap fossil fuels might combine to pull us back from the brink, or at least make a much-changed and simpler life possible for a much smaller population of humans and other creatures. That chance is gone.

The climate scientists, abetted by the ecological economists, have pronounced the certain and imminent (i.e. within most of our lifetimes) death of the vast majority of life on our planet, including the human species. Now, we can mourn. Most of our human family will continue to fall into one of the three categories of non-acceptance of this pronouncement that I wrote about in my If We Had a Better Story post:

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.

None of these are unusual reactions to horrific news, but they’re likely to be crazy-making to those of us who are past this stage, and trying to get on with preparing ourselves and those we love for what is to come.

The most intriguing reaction is from collapsniks like Derrick Jensen and John Duffy who, against hope, want us to work (as they do, indefatigably and to their great credit) to kill the economy. John starts out his essay by saying “We are going to go extinct.” and near the end says:

If we want to not die, then we need to stop doing the things that are going to kill us… We need deindustrialization, and we need to wring the bloody neck of capitalism, before hanging it, drawing it, quartering it, and setting the remaining bits of its corpse on fire to make sure it can’t rise from the dead like the unholy zombie that it is… This is all to say, I can’t fight my enemies and my allies at the same time. Liberals, lefties, environmentalists and everyone else who purports to give a damn has to give up on being capitalism apologists who somehow think we can keep this gravy train of mass consumption going.

It’s a great rant, but he’s like the lover of the recently-declared-dead patient who insists on trying CPR interminably and punching the people trying to take the defibrillators away from him. Or, perhaps, he’s like the angry griever trying to assemble a posse to kill the ones he believes caused the death of the one he loves. It’s understandable, but it’s futile. It’s too late.

In the comments to John’s post, Paul Chefurka writes:

I’m not particularly angry or outraged any more. Once I was, but now I’m just fascinated, amazed, amused, bemused, curious. I attach no moral dimension to this unfolding any more, though once I did. Now there is no blame, no more agonized wishes to rewrite the past, no more fearful visions of a shattered future.

We are what we are, we did what we did, we ended up here.

I’m very curious to see what comes next. Aren’t you?

Paul didn’t get a terribly sympathetic response, so I wrote to Paul and asked him how he had managed to reach this stage of acceptance. I also asked him about a gorgeously-written and deeply-moving recent article in Orion, Gaze Even Here, about “evoking a consciousness of brokenness”, in which the author, Trebbe Johnson, says that she and her companions found solace in spending time “gazing” at clearcuts and videos of animals dying in oil-slicks until their grief and anger and revulsion turned to curiosity, acceptance, compassion and even love. I mentioned that some people in my circles had seen my attempts at non-attachment, at letting go of what I know I cannot change, as detachment, as an emotional shutting down or turning away. Paul replied:

I’ve faced the same accusations about detachment. They generally come from activists for whom action is the inner imperative, and who have no exposure to Buddhist principles. Also, they haven’t hit bottom yet, which is why the still think that action is an answer. Only once someone hits the bottom and bounces off the rocks do they usually start looking for truly radical responses like non-attachment.

As a first thought – perhaps what Ms. Johnson is suggesting isn’t really that radical at all. What she’s suggesting is a starting point for someone who wants to wake up in this new world. It’s where Joanna Macy begins as well. The bigger question may be, where do you go once you’ve taken the grief on board – how do you find the will to move, and how do you pick your direction?  This is where doing deep inner work around grief, shame and the Shadow come in.

Out of that work comes the beginning of non-attachment. To people who conflate it with detachment, I explain that non-attachment is what allows me to confront the big issues directly, to engage fully but not be paralyzed by emotion. It’s not an abdication of feeling, but a way of seeing the world around me with complete clarity and doing what the world needs, rather than being selfish and getting mired in my own suffering.

Sometimes that helps people understand, but for a lot of activists it’s still a step too far. They are still focused on their own suffering, and in order to validate their response they have defined that suffering as a virtue. It’s not, it’s a trap. Non-attachment is the most functional way out that I’ve discovered so far.

What are the elements of non-attachment that might be applied to coping with the knowledge of the inevitable collapse of organized society amidst the chaos of economic collapse and runaway climate change? What makes sense to gaze at, and what should we, for our own sanity, leave unseen? How can we be, and act, in a fully engaged, joyful, curious, productive, useful-to-others way, without becoming either “detached” (emotionally disconnected or inured) or exhausted? Here are some of my early thoughts on this:

1. We cannot, must not, prescribe one “right” behaviour or approach for everyone. We are all different, and the best way for each of us to cope will be different. What’s important is to patiently wait for those we care about to realize what is ahead, and then support them to find their own way to cope with it productively.

2. I think it could help to develop, working with climate scientists and enlightened (non-classical) economists and energy analysts and artists and musicians and film-makers, a set of nuanced, candid, non-idealized, non-sensationalized visions or stories of what our world in collapse will look like, by 2020, 2030, 2040 and 2050, and then, as Trebbe might put it, to “gaze” at them. These stories would be based on data, and on an appreciation of history of how people behave in an accelerating (but not relentless) series of cascading crises where there is no scapegoat, no one to blame, where everyone is largely in the same boat. These stories would be focused on what collapse will mean for the day-to-day lives of people living in cities, towns, the country, in nations at different levels of “development”. My guess is that for most of the world, in the already-struggling nations and places, life will not be much different, except that the death rate (mostly from disease and malnutrition) will be somewhat higher and the birth rate much lower. We have a lot to learn, I think, from people in the third world, in impoverished cities, and in the streets, who are already living with collapse. The image below shows in red/purple/white areas that, due to climate change-induced chronic drought, will be largely ununhabitable within a few decades, so our stories for them, billions of people, would likely be stories of migration. The stories would be varied, and stark, and, perhaps to our surprise, inspiring and astonishing.

Map of serious chronic drought areas, per research simulations by UCAR/NCAR, an agency of the National Science Foundation. This map is forecasts for the 2060s, but is based on outdated climate change data, so it is likely to come true considerably earlier. Thanks to resilience.org for the link.

3. Perhaps most importantly, we will all be better off, I think, if we were to learn non-attachment, empathy, presence, resilience, relocalization, community building, and a host of other skills and capacities, technical and ‘soft’, so that we can tolerate the changes we will face to our way of living and the very foolish actions many (with the most to lose, in wealth or power) will inevitably try to do, unsuccessfully, to “control” the situation. We must expect the emergence of charismatic dictators, genocides, civil wars, geo-engineering, the burning of almost everything flammable for fuel and electricity, and cults, and deal with them the best we can without letting them unhinge us. We may be fortunate enough that as our centralized systems collapse, the resources for possible authoritarian atrocities will rapidly diminish, so the decline could be relatively peaceful, if not free of suffering or misery. We may well discover that crisis brings out the best in us, but should be prepared in case it brings out, in some, the worst. We may find that, with a sufficient voluntary decrease in birth rates (not an unlikely scenario), over the coming decades we might reach a human population level well below one billion without a dramatic increase in death rates, though we should be prepared for a rising death toll and what it may do to our collective psyches. In all of this, non-attachment and presence can enable us to live, even through these crises, lives of love and joy and appreciation for the miracle of life.

A final thought, and one that perhaps is the most unimaginable of all for those of us brought up to believe the way we live now is the only way to live. What’s on the right side of the normal curve, after collapse, isn’t another growth cycle. It’s the proverbial long tail. We may become an endangered species by century’s end, but we’re unlikely to become extinct for several millennia after that — just increasingly few in numbers and increasingly irrelevant to the ecosystems and recovery of the planet from yet another great extinction. Without vast amounts of cheap energy to power technology, we’re just not going to be very well adapted to post 21st-century Earth. Just as we don’t notice the 200 species going extinct every day, I doubt that the species that thrive after the great extinction will notice the death of the last of the species that once believed it could rule the Earth forever.

Thanks to Tree for the link to the Orion article, to the authors of the articles/videos cited above, to Sue Bullock for the link to Kill the Economy, to John Duffy for the link to the Grist video, and to Paul Chefurka for the ideas prompting this article.

illustration from my book Finding the Sweet Spot

About half the people on Bowen Island, where I live, commute daily to Vancouver via a heavily taxpayer-subsidized car ferry. The reason they do this is, basically, that whatever they have to sell can’t be profitably sold here, because it doesn’t directly meet any of our needs. Much of what they produce does make it back here, in the form of gasoline, imported products, processed foods, bank, insurance, accounting and legal ‘products’, construction materials, pharmaceuticals and household goods. And interest and rents paid to absentee mortgagors and landlords. Little of what we really need — food, clothing, building materials, drugs, energy, household products, health services etc. — is made here in significant quantities. We ‘import’ just about everything.

The other half of the population is either retired, unemployed, or (from what I have ascertained) constantly struggling to make a living. We have many artists, craftspeople and artisans, musicians, and service people of all kinds (hairdressers, therapists, construction workers, seamstresses, retailers, caterers, water taxis, maintenance people, restaurants etc.). The price of land and property here is insane, thanks to our proximity to Vancouver, so a lot of people work from their homes instead of offices. The citizens, struggling with the high cost of living, mostly find the prices charged by the locals “expensive”, while these prices are often not enough to cover the local service-provider’s rent. Turnover and business failure rates are therefore high, as is the number of people who give up and move ‘back’ to the mainland.

So we suffer from a double predicament: Our local economy is utterly unsustainable; and our residents (both commuters and non-) have so little left after paying for essentials — money that all flows out of the island — that they can’t afford to pay the locals who are trying to make a living here, and hence make our local economy a little more robust.

Jay Tompt, writer with Transition Town Totnes (where the Transition movement began), recently explained that even Totnes could not feed itself in a crisis, because the food, transportation and other systems are completely interdependent, so “you’re only as resilient as your neighbour”. And everyone is your neighbour in this globalized world.

And a local food expert in California says the entire “eat local” movement is naive and insufficient: “When the dust settles, however, locavores are likely to be disappointed and frustrated. The modern food system will bear their imprint to be sure: any ‘serious’ sit-down restaurant will source as much locally as possible, schools will have salad bars, and big box stores and groceries will glowingly highlight foods on sale grown within the state. Indeed, all of these things are happening already. But farm soil will become even more scorched earth, standard coffin sizes will be wider around the waist, and the eating habits of the majority of Americans will be barely changed.” [this is an outstanding article worth a read -- thanks to Raffi Aftandelian for the link]

So when I went to hear Charles Eisenstein speak this month (more on that below) about the New Economy and community currencies, I was looking for answers that might be applied to deal with this ‘problem of dependency’, this ‘leakage’ of money out of our island to centralized corporations and institutions. I wanted to believe that, instead of encouraging the local artisans and service providers to form cooperatives to sell to mainlanders what Bowen Islanders couldn’t afford (the “if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em” approach), there was some way to actually create viable ‘right livelihoods’ right here, that would increase our local self-sufficiency, resilience and sustainability, and wouldn’t be quickly eroded by this leakage of money. In the New Economy, Eisenstein said, everyone will be able to offer their gift to their community, and between us we will ensure that everyone gets what they need, without needing to monetize or account for it. What would it take for us on Bowen to give up our servitude to money and the industrial growth economy, and our mainland-dependent jobs, and create a sustainable local economy in which no one needed to struggle or work insane hours or do work they despised?

Alas, the only answer I came away with, and it will not be forthcoming for a few decades, is the final collapse of the industrial growth economy, when we will have no choice but to embrace the New Economy and discover, to our wonderment, that its subsistence lifestyle is happier, healthier and better for us and the world in every way. Only when the car ferry becomes prohibitively expensive due to fuel cost increases, and then rationed, and then discontinued entirely, will we react by either leaving the island or finding a viable livelihood here. Only when cheap imported clothes become more expensive than what we can make ourselves, and then unavailable at any price, will we relearn the essential (and enjoyable) skills of making our own. Only when the 3000-mile-meal becomes a $300 meal instead of a $30 meal, and then shelves empty of the California produce on which we now depend, will we start to relearn how to grow and harvest our own food, and relearn what to do with it.

That doesn’t mean we can do nothing now, and some of us, who are both aware of what’s happening and what’s coming and who have the luxury of time to act on our knowledge (mostly these are healthy non-commuters without young families) are starting to explore the many New Economy practices and experiments that are being tried in progressive communities in affluent nations everywhere. But it’s hard to be patient, to see this as (at least from the perspective of one person’s life) a marathon, not a sprint. It’s hard not to hope that the collapse happens sooner and faster and more persistently (but not so fast as to be overwhelming) so that the point at which we all must change comes more quickly, before things get even worse (and as we try to perpetuate the industrial growth economy with Tar Sands and fracking and endless war and geoengineering, they will get worse).

It’s hard to let go of the terrible knowledge of how the world works and what is most likely to come, and that we can’t ‘fix’ it, we just have to go with it, adapt to it, each moment and each day at a time. It’s hard when it’s gotten very dark and you’re lost in the forest and it’s starting to rain, not to get fearful or angry or sad, but instead to laugh and sing and play in the rain and know that life is astonishing and somehow you’ll find your way forward, safely, without suffering, to where you’re meant to be. It’s good to have you all, dear readers, here in the forest, laughing and singing and playing with me. It’s hopeless, but we’ll be fine.

PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S COLLAPSE

cartoon by the wonderful michael leunig

Straddling the Old Economy and the New: Charles Eisenstein, author of Sacred Economics, was recently in Vancouver and spoke powerfully for 80 minutes about what the New Economy represents and how we can encourage it as a means of preparing ourselves for the Old Economy’s collapse. He made a similar speech in Vancouver a year ago, talking about how we’ll need to straddle the two economies for decades as the Long Emergency unfolds. Highlights of the more recent speech (I’ll link to it if/when it comes online):

• He covered many of the issues in this excellent short (12 minute) film about his book in more detail.
• For those who want to hear a full (over one hour) Eisenstein speech the ones he gave in Portland and London are very good.
• One of his essential messages is about how money enslaves us physically and intellectually even though it is nothing more than a set of agreements (based on underlying stories) about what has value, and “all” we have to do to bring about a New Economy is the “impossible” task of changing those agreements and stories to ones that are aligned with what we really value.
• He spoke poignantly about his activist friend who spent much of the last year looking after his 95-year-old mother-in-law, and how under our old-style economic thinking even progressives would see this as a “waste of time”, a diversion from his more “important” activist work. In the New Economy, he said, that work would be valued and supported, and the fact it isn’t tells us a lot about our culture and our world.
• The New Economy, he said, will encourage and enable us to stop ‘working for a living’ to make ends meet, and instead focus on identifying what our unique gift to the world is, and how we can offer it, without having to worry about whether anyone will pay us for that. It will be a Gift Economy based on generosity and trust that when we each offer what we can, and see our lives as lives of service to all-life-on-Earth, not lives of working harder and harder to stave off scarcity, we will discover that we don’t need most of what we buy, and we don’t need to work that hard or long to live very comfortable, meaningful lives. “A gift is different from a financial transaction. If I buy something from you, I give you the money and you give me the thing, and we have no more relationship after that. I don’t owe you anything, you don’t owe me anything. The transaction is finished. But if you give me something, that’s different because now I kind of feel like I owe you one. It could be a feeling of obligation, or you could say it’s a feeling of gratitude. What’s gratitude? Gratitude is the recognition that you’ve received, and the desire to give in turn. And that’s why we are driven to give. Because everything we’ve received is a gift. Our life is a gift. Having air to breathe – we didn’t earn that. We didn’t earn being born. We didn’t earn having food. We didn’t earn seeds being able to grow. Everything that we have is a gift.”
• He explained that our ‘growth’ economy, based as it is on the need for ever more debt to offset the printing of ever-more money, is unsustainable and ruinous (scroll down from this link to see the article). “The problem that we are seemingly unable to countenance is the end of growth. Today’s system is predicated on the progressive conversion of nature into products, people into consumers, cultures into markets and time into money. We could perhaps extend that growth for a few more years by fracking, deep-sea oil drilling, deforestation, land grabs from indigenous people and so on, but only at a higher and higher cost to future generations. Sooner or later – hopefully sooner – we will have to transition towards a steady-state or degrowth economy.”
• He often pauses to ask “What if we…?” and “Why not?” questions. This thinking forces us from our worldview that this economic system is the only one that can work in the 21st century. While I’m still not convinced “we can get there from here”, his ability to articulate what’s going on and the possibilities for “impossible” change is the best out there right now.

Experiments in the New Economy: Gar Alperovitz talks (also for over an hour) about how the new economy is creeping in, as social networks allow us to discover and work with others who understand that our current economy is unsustainable and will soon collapse, and try interesting experiments in what he calls “democratized wealth” economics. Teaser: “The pain levels are forcing people to do new things because they have to. In a crisis that isn’t what happens; you get explosions. But what we’re seeing, and this is the part that’a very interesting to me, what we’re seeing is an explosion of activity, both political, some social, but above all economic in a way I think could matter.” Thanks to Jon Husband for the link, and the one that follows.

Manuel Castells on New Economy Cultures: Sociologist Manuel Castells talks about how the failure of our industrial growth economy to provide for most citizens, combined with distrust of the political system to reform it, is driving cultural change that is enabling the emergence of the New Economy. Excerpt:

When I mention this alternative economic culture, it’s a combination of two things. A number of people have been doing this for quite a while already because they don’t agree with the meaninglessness of their lives. Now there is something else – it’s the legion of consumers who cannot consume - they don’t have the money, they don’t have the credit, they don’t have anything – [so] they try at least to make sense of their lives doing something different. So, it’s because of needs and because of values – the two things together – that’s why it’s expanding.

Places Worth Caring About: James Kunstler argues that the blight of most modern North American cities and the “public realm” spaces within them results from the negligence of architects, designers and developers to define spaces that reflect the nature, needs and interests of the people they are allegedly building for. Thanks to Don Marshall for the link. Excerpts:

We know what’s going on in these [modern suburban] houses, you know. We know that little Skippy is loading his Uzi down here, getting ready for homeroom. We know that his sister Heather is turning tricks up here to support her drug habit. Because these places, these habitats, are inducing immense amounts of anxiety and depression in children, and they don’t have a lot of experience with medication. So they take the first one that comes along, often. These are not good enough for Americans…

We’ve got a lot of work to do… No amount or combination of alternative fuels is going to allow us to continue running what we’re running, the way we’re running it. We’re going to have to do everything very differently. And America’s not prepared. We are sleepwalking into the future. We’re not ready for what’s coming at us. So I urge you all to do what you can. Life in the mid-21st century is going to be about living locally. Be prepared to be good neighbors. Be prepared to find vocations that make you useful to your neighbors and to your fellow citizens. One final thing — please, stop referring to yourselves as “consumers.” Consumers are different than citizens. Consumers do not have obligations, responsibilities and duties to their fellow human beings. And as long as you’re using that word ‘consumer’ in the public discussion, you will be degrading the quality of the discussion.

The Myth of Disaster Looting: A new investigative report shows that, when disasters hit, people rally together and crime rates actually drop. This is something to keep in mind when we prepare for the Long Emergency, since it will be no different. No Mad Max, no armed roving gangs, just communities struggling, as they do now in most of the world, to meet the needs of the moment, together. Thanks to Phil Jones for the link, and the one that follows.

The Arrival of Peak Fertilizer: We’ve been told that our industrial agriculture system is heavily dependent on oil; a new Mother Jones article explains how, reveals how perilously small the supply of both phosphates and potassium (two of the four key components of modern fertilizers) is, and explains how ecologically devastating the production of synthetic nitrogen (ammonium, the third key component) is. It omits describing the equal noxiousness of oil-derived sulphur, the fourth component. Most of this artificial fertilizer ends up in runoff into lakes, groundwater and oceans, so this oil-dependent and scarcity-prone substance fouls both the air and the water.

LIVING SMARTER

cartoon by hugh mcleod at gapingvoid, and great advice to prospective entrepreneurs

The Only Thing Co-Working Needs to Be: Last year Bill Tozier wrote a brilliant, and very funny, rant about the misconceptions of people about “co-working”, as if it was about office space, or making money, or any of a dozen other misconceptions. It’s really about community. If you’re a small business owner, or aspire to be one, read Bill’s article. He makes one of the main points I try to make in my book: Don’t try to do this alone.

How to Help Small Business? Shut Up and Listen: Ernesto Sirolli has an excellent speech excoriating Westerners for our arrogant attempts to “teach” entrepreneurship in struggling nations, instead of listening and appreciating the local context and culture for enterprise, appreciating the passions of their prospective entrepreneurs, and understanding local needs. Thanks to Cheryl and to Pauline Le Bel for sending me this link almost simultaneously.

Death, and Life, with Dignity: I want to acknowledge the courage of ALS-sufferer Gloria Taylor, who got Canada’s ban on doctor-assisted suicide ruled as unconstitutional in June, defeating both the federal and provincial governments who opposed her case. She died last month, of complications of an infection, but the battle goes on, as the ruling has been appealed by the federal government. The right to die is destined to become one of the biggest issues of the coming decades, with the religious right resorting to fear-mongering about it inevitably leading to elder, and other, abuse. The Canadian federal government did make one intelligent decision this month, however, refusing to block the production of generic oxycodone, and in so doing putting the needs of chronic pain sufferers ahead of the concerns of addiction treatment professionals and law enforcement agencies.

What If We Trusted You?: My friend Jerry Michalski talks about institutional education versus unschooling in the context of trust, and shows how distrust creates dysfunction and how trust (e.g. Wikipedia’s open editing) leads to a renewed passion for learning. And then he posits that this choice, between institutionalized distrust and liberating trust, has been made, and made poorly, in every facet of civilized life, not just education, and that we can make a different choice.

Velomobiles: The Future of the Car?: Working prototypes of a recumbent tricycle with an aerodynamic shell and electric motor suggest they can go as fast as today’s electric cars with 1/80th the power use.

POLITICS & ECONOMICS AS USUAL

cartoon by dan piraro

Grand Juries: The American Inquisition System: Few people know about how the “grand jury” system in the US works, and that’s the way they like it. This is one of the reasons I get uncomfortable every time I visit the US — anyone, without cause, can be simply “disappeared” in this system. If you’re a vocal supporter of any non-mainstream political group or idea in the US, be cautious, and be aware. This process removes every “human right” you thought you had, on the whim of any zealous prosecutor or law enforcement officer. Even the ABA’s FAQ damns the process. No other ‘democratic’ country allows this. Thanks to Morva Bowman for the link.

Naomi Klein’s Disaster Capitalism: An excellent documentary based on Klein’s book Shock Doctrine, explains how the Chicago/Friedman/Rumsfeld school has encouraged, advised and supported political, economic and military terrorism (“shock therapy”) around the world, notably in Allende’s Chile, Thatcher’s UK, Reagan’s pre-9/11 and Bush’s post 9/11 US, US-occupied Iraq, Yeltsin’s Russia, and disaster-stricken New Orleans, all designed to privatize everything under the control of a small elite and cow the citizens into meek obedience to extreme right-wing authoritarian political-military-industrial regimes. The 2008 market collapse and subsequent gutting of the public treasury to ‘bail out’ the private sector is just the latest volley in this ongoing and relentless corporatist war, and, Klein says, it will only stop when we make them stop. Thanks to Poor Richard for the link.

Frack Fight: An explanation of how ecologically devastating fracking is, and how Big Oil is pulling out all the stops to crush opposition to it anyway.

Canada’s Bizarre ‘Entitled’ Conservatives: It’s funny how Canada’s (few) conservative icons just keep disgracing themselves. I think we should create the Conrad award, after the neocon publisher Conrad Black who was imprisoned for fleecing his companies (and their shareholders) to pay for his and his wife’s spending excesses. This month’s Conrad awards go to Margaret Wente, Canada’s most execrable reporter, for serial plagiarism and hysterical denial in the face of overwhelming evidence (she’s still on the payroll of the now equally-execrable Globe & Mail, once a respectable newspaper), and to John Furlong, Olympic organizer, TEDx speaker, Order of Canada holder and idol of the hard-work-and-integrity crowd, for his self-aggrandizing autobiography’s failure to mention his years of alleged abuse of First Nations children (although many sworn affidavits have been filed by his alleged victims, he’s denied everything and hired an army of lawyers to sue the reporter who broke the story). Sad. And vying for possible Conrad awards next month are two more right-wingers, Toronto’s loony mayor Rob Ford and Alberta premier Alison Redford, who both seem to think conflict of interest doesn’t apply to them.

Canada’s Debt Levels Reaching Pre-Collapse Levels: Canadian citizens’ debts are now at the same level that US debts were at just prior to the housing market collapse. Still, they’re saying it can’t happen here.

The Secret Canadian Geoengineering Experiment You Weren’t Supposed to Know About: With federal government knowledge and approval, a wingnut group dumped 100 tons of iron suphate into the ocean near ecologically fragile Haida Gwaii, BC, in violation of several international ocean treaty and environmental laws, producing a plankton bloom that could be seen from space, in the hopes it would produce a temporary fish boom and that they could sell carbon offset credits for the project. It, uh, didn’t work.

Using Invasive Species as Biofuels: Now that the economics of ethanol have been shown definitively to be disastrous, defenders of growing stuff to burn in our cars are promoting invasive species that grow really tall really fast with minimal needs for cultivating as more ‘efficient’ biofuel sources. They call the latest weed a ‘miracle’. They said the same of the oil-fertilizer-based ‘green revolution’. Thanks to Tree for the link.

And Now the FHA Needs a Bailout: The US FHA, which stepped in to insure risky mortgages when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went under, now bankrolls over $1T in mortgages — and it’s underwater, even if house prices don’t fall further.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

cartoon from XKCD

Funny Pie Charts: This list of the world’s most hilarious pie charts is priceless; you may have to sign up for Quora to see them. Thanks to Seb Paquet for the link, and the one that follows.

How We Decide What We Think: Interesting hypothesis by Gene Bellinger on how we decide what we think and do. It notes that our worldview filters out data that is not consistent with that we (already believe), but doesn’t mention that there is evidence (from studying the neural processes in our brains) that our actions actually precede our decisions, i.e. the physical action we take in the moment often occurs before the cognitive process that supposedly produces the decision to take that action. That means that our actions determine our beliefs in another positive feedback loop, and our beliefs are often just rationalizations for what we have already decided (emotionally and/or instinctively) to do.

New Yorker Magazine Calls for Obama to Launch Huge Effort to Combat Climate Change: David Remnick’s lead editorial “No More Magical Thinking” calls on him to use the Presidential Address to start an effort to combat climate change comparable to Kennedy’s project to put a man on the moon. We’ll see.

The Keys to Well-Being: A new study of UK census data on the subject of people’s sense of well-being revealed that disabled people, visible minorities (non-whites), the unemployed (especially long-term unemployed), those in temp jobs, those working long hours, those working in the private sector, and those living in the cities and very impoverished areas are relatively unhappy, while the retired, local government workers, and those who work part-time by choice are the happiest. Thanks to David Hodgson for the link. Meanwhile, a new book, The Antidote (review coming soon), argues that “positive thinking” seminars and self-help books actually raise expectations and hence increase unhappiness when they fail to deliver, and a contrary strategy of imagining the worst and then realizing something better can actually help. Joyful pessimism, anyone?

How Indigenous People Sleep: Research on non-Western sleep habits reveals that indigenous peoples, including children, have no “regular” bedtime, are usually accustomed to sleeping with noises and/or movement going on around them, and often sleep in two 3-5 hour stretches with an hour or two of calm wakefulness between them. Thanks to Tree for the link.

Anne Lamott’s Secret Prayer: Help. Thanks. Wow. Anne Lamott’s three words that represent what she prays about. I’m an atheist and I’m not buying, but damn the woman can write.

THOUGHTS FOR THE MONTH

photo by Wilma Hurskainen (thanks to Dave Riddell for the link)

What is the #1 killer worldwide of girls age 15-19?: Answer: Complications of pregnancy and childbirth. Thanks to Liz McLellan for the link.

From Karen Maezen Miller (thanks to Beth Patterson for the link), on loving a teenager:

They love us in a different way. I said that when someone asked what it was like to have a teenager.

I feel like we’ve lost a daughter. My husband said that after a silent and inconsequential Sunday.

Just shut up. I said that to her after a ride in the car yesterday.

And yet, there is love, so much love between us and it has gone nowhere! I am standing on the high bluff over death valley, infinite openness in all directions, stunned dumb in the emptiness, but I know the space before me is pure love. Pure love. Life grows here, even when we can’t see it. Refreshed in a cool night, fed by invisible rivulets. A whisper of sea sails five hundred miles across five mountain ranges, and the whisper is this.

They love us in a different way. They love us in the space, the space that is nothing but love.

Love is not a feeling, not a thought, nothing given or got, not more or less. Not a precaution or warning, not a push or a prod. Not a reminder, not a teaching, not a performance. Love is not what I say and not what you hear. Not how was school how was the test what about homework what are you wearing wash your face eat your dinner pick up your shoes I don’t like her him that when if what did you do what did you say what about your terrible wonderful failure success happiness sadness what about me what about me what about me?

Love is the space between us. There is so much space.

What will you put into that space today, I ask myself before I hear the roar of my own echo: Just shut up.

From Zvika Krieger (thanks to Harold Jarche for the link), on the future of “employed” work:

I asked Elli Sharef [of the headhunter/employee assessment firm HireArt] if she had any insights on the broader employment picture, since she spends most of her day trying to match employers with employees. The most striking trend she sees is that having a strong, well-rounded resume is no longer good enough. Employers are increasingly looking for specific [pre-existing] skills sets that match their needs.

“They don’t want to train people on the job anymore,” she says, marking a shift away from the apprenticeship model that defined many sectors in the economy before the recession. “There are just too many people looking for work for companies to waste time on someone who can’t start, ready to go, on the first day.”

This is Not Cool.

From Ann McMaster (thanks to Maristela for the link), on the difference between ‘detached’ and ‘unattached’:

When I’ve been attached to my dream [of co-creating a better world], I’ve been consumed by it, pouring so much energy into it that I eventually felt drained, hopeless, defeated when it didn’t look like it was going to happen. That’s when I let it go, detaching myself from what was once important. [But] detached means separated, and in this context, distant from my heart. While unattached means autonomous, self-governing – open to possibility. When I’m in right relationship with myself and my dreams – I have them, they don’t have me.

I have been writing a lot of late on the importance of relearning to build and live in community, if we are going to cope well with the coming economic, energy and ecological crises. Problem is, most of us now live in anonymous, opportunistic, disconnected neighbourhoods, relating primarily to those outside rather than inside our communities, depending on outside centralized systems for just about everything, and not knowing or particularly caring about the people who live around us, the natural ecosystem of the place where we live, or how much of anything essential really works. We’ve forgotten what real community means, what it is.

This got me thinking: What are the essential elements of community, anyway? If we succeeded in creating or reshaping our neighbourhoods into authentic communities, what would they “contain”? What would they look like? How would they work? I started scribbling and the sketch above is the first draft I came up with. Imagine it scrawled on the back of a napkin (if my handwriting was legible I would have used a hand drawn sketch instead).

I have no idea what to do with this, and I’m sure it’s a very flawed and incomplete model. But it seems to me it’s something we need to have a model of, if we hope to create (or at least help evolve) communities that work.