Maybe That’s What It Takes

To implement these practically into my new life, once I’ve moved, I have organized my day into three blocks of time: 10am to 1pm for reconnection practices, 2pm to 6pm for learning, facilitating action and model-creating practices, and 8pm to 12pm for reflection and writing practices. Starting with these three blocks of time, I developed the chart below that shows my long-term intentions, the long-term practices that “stretch toward” those intentions, and the short-term, daily intentions (exercises) in alignment with the longer-term ones. The long-term practices tie into the nine steps in my What You Can Do graphic above, and the colour (red, yellow, green) is from my ‘scorecard’ and shows how much work I have to do on each.

I’m now starting to drill down into what I’m going to do, especially to move from “red” to “green” in steps 1, 2 and 7. Here are some of the exercises I’m intending to do:

Reconnecting Exercises (preferably, but not always, in company with others):

• Listening and talking with other creatures during forest/ocean walks — paying attention to their songs and sounds, to try to understand, viscerally and intuitively, what they are saying, and ‘talking back’ to them in something like their own voice
• Spell of the Sensuous exercises — those described in David Abram’s book, connecting time past and future back into the present
• Sleeping in the wild
• Acknowledging my grief for Gaia, letting my heart be broken, and showing my broken heart to the word — with others, using some of Joanna Macy’s exercises like the truth mandella (taking turns speaking of these feelings of grief, anger, fear, pain and dread), and confessing sorrows to each other, drawing on Joanna’s Six Principles:
• This world, in which we are born, and take our being, is alive.
• Our true nature is more ancient and encompassing than the separate self defined by habit and modern society.
• Our experience of pain for the world springs from our interconnectedness with all beings, from which springs also our powers to act on their behalf.
• Unblocking occurs when our pain for the world is not only validated, but experienced (i.e. it is not enough to listen to the bad news in the media).
• When we reconnect with all-life-on-Earth, by willingly enduring our pain for it, the mind retrieves its natural clarity (or as Derrick Jensen puts it “When you listen, really listen to the land, you will know just what to do.”)
• The experience of reconnection with all-life-on-Earth arouses desire and intention to act on its behalf. Conversely, as long as we remain disconnected, we will remain unmotivated, helpless, part of the problem.
• Trust walks with others (taking turns blindfolded, guided by a partner, and sensing without seeing)
• Meditation in wilderness, especially guided meditations on the theme of affirmation and gratitude
• Intentional exercises (like this article, except done in groups)
• Artistic expression exercises — drawing, painting, dance, composing music, sculpture — including collaborative work

Facilitating Action (organizing and enabling groups to design and take actions that will undermine the worst and most destructive facets of industrial civilization, with the goal of ultimately dismantling it):

My belief is that this work must be collaborative, creative, and self-critical. It must achieve measurable results effectively i.e. without hurting others and hence creating martyrs of the supporters of our unsustainable systems, and without getting ourselves arrested. The results it achieves have to be more than public attention, even if that achieves some change in understanding, beliefs and behaviours. My two “starter” projects are to bring an end to factory farming (at least in Canada), and to halt the Alberta Tar Sands.

We have to be more creative than chaining ourselves to tractors and “liberating” farmed animals. These are PR stunts and they don’t achieve the results we seek: less (and eventually no) factory farming, and less (and eventually no) Tar Sands operations. We cannot rely on changing people’s buying behaviour (I’ve learned what battery caged hens hellish life is, but even I still eat food with eggs from unknown sources of supply — it’s just too difficult under the current industrial agriculture system to bring about real change through consumer movements alone). We cannot rely on politicians or lawyers or changes to laws and regulations and enforcement. These are the clowns that have got us into this mess, and they are fully invested in keeping it going. We are not going to be able to embarrass corporations to behave better — ExxonMobil is at once the world’s worst polluter and the most profitable company in the history of civilization. We need to find better, more effective ways to bring these horrific practices to an end.

What we need to do, I think, is bring together a lot of creative minds, with a great breadth of knowledge, experience, and deep understanding of how the Tar Sands and factory farms currently operate. And then we have to be methodical in identifying all the vulnerabilities of these systems and how they can be exploited. To that end, I think a good place to start is with Open Space as a methodology to enable a large group of invitees to self-organize to develop understanding and action plans, coupled with Donella Meadows’ 12 Places to Intervene in a System, which can focus our attention on actions that will achieve maximum results.

So, for example, how could we deprive tar sands and factory farm operators of critical sources of supply? How could we deprive them of funds? How could we disrupt production? How could we prevent them getting their ‘product’ to market? How could we reduce their market? How could we change the purpose of the energy sector from increasing supply of non-renewable energy, to reducing global carbon output to zero through sequestration etc.? How could we change the purpose of the farming industry from producing the maximum amount of food at the lowest price, to producing a healthy diet for everyone with minimal production and zero waste? How can we enable local energy and food coops to spring up and meet the needs of their communities so they have no need at all for the products of the tar sands or factory farms?

I don’t have the answers, but between us, with effort and shared knowledge and creativity, we do. There is a better way to live. We just need to seize the opportunity and power to create it, demonstrate it, and at the same time bring down the corrupt, cruel, wasteful, toxic, unnatural, irresponsible, unsustainable operations that the lawyers and politicians and corporations and educators and media have brainwashed us into believing is the only way to live. My job is to facilitate making that happen, and also to apply what I do uniquely well (imagining possibilities, and writing) to provoke the thinking that will bring these essential changes to fruition.
That’s some of what I intend to do, anyway.