ABOUT DAVE POLLARD (dave.pollard@gmail.com) Last year (2010), after 40 years trying to work within the industrial growth society, I walked away from it. During that 40 years I advised entrepreneurs about starting and running a business, innovation, research, sustainability, coping with complexity, and the effective use of knowledge and social media, started a blog in 2003 called How to Save the World, which documents what I’ve learned about how the world really works, and how we might create better ways to live and make a living, and in 2007 authored my first book, Finding the Sweet Spot: A Natural Entrepreneur’s Guide to Responsible, Sustainable, Joyful Work. I was born in 1951, have lived most of my life in various parts of Canada, was married for 27 years to a woman I remain on good terms with, have two wonderful step-children and three grandchildren I am very proud of, and I am now poly and in love. I am now focused on the work of self-knowledge and self-acceptance, generosity and appreciation and imagination, and living naturally and presently, and am striving to improve my personal capacities for dealing with what I believe is a coming, unavoidable, civilizational collapse. I’m not depressed about this probability. Since quitting paid work and moving to Bowen Island BC last year, I’ve become involved with the local intentional community and Transition movements, the Dark Mountain collective of artists writing about and portraying the final years of our civilization, and an international group developing novel tools and games to help groups improve their collaborative and communication processes. I am a vegan, earth- and animal-loving, earth-grieving, idealistic, poly, unschooled, anarchist, radical, unspiritual, hedonistic, anxious, comfortably retired (from paid work), creative generalist, writer, dreamer and imaginer of possibilities. I believe that what drives human behaviour (and makes change possible or impossible) is (I call this Pollard’s Law): We do what we must (our personal imperatives), then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. There is no time left, ever, for doing work that is merely important or needed. I believe things happen the way they do for a reason, and if we want to change things we first need to understand what that reason is. I believe the key to resilience in the coming decades will be our ability, in the moment, to imagine ways around the crises we cannot prevent, predict or plan for. I don’t believe that we can save the world (despite the title of this blog), but I do believe we can, and must, make a difference. ABOUT THIS BLOG This weblog is a journal of my search to find better ways to live, and make a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works. While it originally contained articles about innovation and knowledge management (the field I was practicing in), and about blogging (which was a novelty when this blog began in 2003) it now has four principal categories:
I don’t try to cover “current events” since for the most part I think they are unactionable and hence thinking about and debating them is, I believe, largely a waste of time. I do write a monthly (formerly weekly) summary of links to the most significant news about civilization’s collapse and what can be done to mitigate and prepare for it, along with some inspiring stories, works of art and quotes. |
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Ere Parek, Izzy Cloke, Zabi AmaniEssential Reading
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About the Author (2023)
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--- My Best 200 Posts, 2003-22 by category, from newest to oldest ---
Collapse Watch:
Hope — On the Balance of Probabilities
The Caste War for the Dregs
Recuperation, Accommodation, Resilience
How Do We Teach the Critical Skills
Collapse Not Apocalypse
Effective Activism
'Making Sense of the World' Reading List
Notes From the Rising Dark
What is Exponential Decay
Collapse: Slowly Then Suddenly
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Making Sense of Who We Are
What Would Net-Zero Emissions Look Like?
Post Collapse with Michael Dowd (video)
Why Economic Collapse Will Precede Climate Collapse
Being Adaptable: A Reminder List
A Culture of Fear
What Will It Take?
A Future Without Us
Dean Walker Interview (video)
The Mushroom at the End of the World
What Would It Take To Live Sustainably?
The New Political Map (Poster)
Beyond Belief
Complexity and Collapse
Requiem for a Species
Civilization Disease
What a Desolated Earth Looks Like
If We Had a Better Story...
Giving Up on Environmentalism
The Hard Part is Finding People Who Care
Going Vegan
The Dark & Gathering Sameness of the World
The End of Philosophy
A Short History of Progress
The Boiling Frog
Our Culture / Ourselves:
A CoVid-19 Recap
What It Means to be Human
A Culture Built on Wrong Models
Understanding Conservatives
Our Unique Capacity for Hatred
Not Meant to Govern Each Other
The Humanist Trap
Credulous
Amazing What People Get Used To
My Reluctant Misanthropy
The Dawn of Everything
Species Shame
Why Misinformation Doesn't Work
The Lab-Leak Hypothesis
The Right to Die
CoVid-19: Go for Zero
Pollard's Laws
On Caste
The Process of Self-Organization
The Tragic Spread of Misinformation
A Better Way to Work
The Needs of the Moment
Ask Yourself This
What to Believe Now?
Rogue Primate
Conversation & Silence
The Language of Our Eyes
True Story
May I Ask a Question?
Cultural Acedia: When We Can No Longer Care
Useless Advice
Several Short Sentences About Learning
Why I Don't Want to Hear Your Story
A Harvest of Myths
The Qualities of a Great Story
The Trouble With Stories
A Model of Identity & Community
Not Ready to Do What's Needed
A Culture of Dependence
So What's Next
Ten Things to Do When You're Feeling Hopeless
No Use to the World Broken
Living in Another World
Does Language Restrict What We Can Think?
The Value of Conversation Manifesto Nobody Knows Anything
If I Only Had 37 Days
The Only Life We Know
A Long Way Down
No Noble Savages
Figments of Reality
Too Far Ahead
Learning From Nature
The Rogue Animal
How the World Really Works:
Making Sense of Scents
An Age of Wonder
The Truth About Ukraine
Navigating Complexity
The Supply Chain Problem
The Promise of Dialogue
Too Dumb to Take Care of Ourselves
Extinction Capitalism
Homeless
Republicans Slide Into Fascism
All the Things I Was Wrong About
Several Short Sentences About Sharks
How Change Happens
What's the Best Possible Outcome?
The Perpetual Growth Machine
We Make Zero
How Long We've Been Around (graphic)
If You Wanted to Sabotage the Elections
Collective Intelligence & Complexity
Ten Things I Wish I'd Learned Earlier
The Problem With Systems
Against Hope (Video)
The Admission of Necessary Ignorance
Several Short Sentences About Jellyfish
Loren Eiseley, in Verse
A Synopsis of 'Finding the Sweet Spot'
Learning from Indigenous Cultures
The Gift Economy
The Job of the Media
The Wal-Mart Dilemma
The Illusion of the Separate Self, and Free Will:
No Free Will, No Freedom
The Other Side of 'No Me'
This Body Takes Me For a Walk
The Only One Who Really Knew Me
No Free Will — Fightin' Words
The Paradox of the Self
A Radical Non-Duality FAQ
What We Think We Know
Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark Bark
Healing From Ourselves
The Entanglement Hypothesis
Nothing Needs to Happen
Nothing to Say About This
What I Wanted to Believe
A Continuous Reassemblage of Meaning
No Choice But to Misbehave
What's Apparently Happening
A Different Kind of Animal
Happy Now?
This Creature
Did Early Humans Have Selves?
Nothing On Offer Here
Even Simpler and More Hopeless Than That
Glimpses
How Our Bodies Sense the World
Fragments
What Happens in Vagus
We Have No Choice
Never Comfortable in the Skin of Self
Letting Go of the Story of Me
All There Is, Is This
A Theory of No Mind
Creative Works:
Mindful Wanderings (Reflections) (Archive)
A Prayer to No One
Frogs' Hollow (Short Story)
We Do What We Do (Poem)
Negative Assertions (Poem)
Reminder (Short Story)
A Canadian Sorry (Satire)
Under No Illusions (Short Story)
The Ever-Stranger (Poem)
The Fortune Teller (Short Story)
Non-Duality Dude (Play)
Your Self: An Owner's Manual (Satire)
All the Things I Thought I Knew (Short Story)
On the Shoulders of Giants (Short Story)
Improv (Poem)
Calling the Cage Freedom (Short Story)
Rune (Poem)
Only This (Poem)
The Other Extinction (Short Story)
Invisible (Poem)
Disruption (Short Story)
A Thought-Less Experiment (Poem)
Speaking Grosbeak (Short Story)
The Only Way There (Short Story)
The Wild Man (Short Story)
Flywheel (Short Story)
The Opposite of Presence (Satire)
How to Make Love Last (Poem)
The Horses' Bodies (Poem)
Enough (Lament)
Distracted (Short Story)
Worse, Still (Poem)
Conjurer (Satire)
A Conversation (Short Story)
Farewell to Albion (Poem)
My Other Sites
Hello, I have just subscribed and wonder if you ever correspond or if you ever visit western MA. our thoughts are similar and Derrick Jensen is one of my favorite authors I have just yesterday discovered you and your work online I am impressed thanks for your amazing candor. Sincerely Tom Harter
Hi, Dave:
I’ve read your article with great interest. My thoughts and observations have brought me to more or less the same point that you have reached, namely that the coming catastrophe has now become inevitable, and that the two features of the world we live in which defeat us are complexity and exponentiality. But I do still think that beyond passing our insights on to the next generation, we must do everything we can to ease up on the environment in order to mitigate the horrible events now upon us.
BUT I am amazed at your claim that 70 million Germans, under Hitler, wanted to rule the world and exterminate non-Aryans. It’s a disturbing piece of either complete ignorance or vicious racism. I was one of those 70 million and I know that neither I nor any of my friends or family had the slightest interest in ruling the world, nor were we prepared to exterminate non-Aryans. Such statements tend to discredit anything else you have to say. You’d better read up on history before uttering such nonsense.
Here is to more rigorous and honest historical research!
Henry