how to save the world

Saturday Links for the Week: July 12, 2008

Posted on July 12, 2008 by Dave Pollard

A Short History of the End of Civilization: Mike Davis is a brilliant and provocative writer. Just go read his brief and incisive summary of what has led our civilization to the brink of collapse. Mike, you need a blog! Teasers:

The UNDP…warns that it will require “a 50 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 2050 against 1990 levels” to keep humanity outside the red zone of runaway warming… Yet the International Energy Agency predicts that, in all likelihood, such emissions will actually increase in this period by nearly 100 percent — enough greenhouse gas to propel us past several critical tipping points…

Let’s just ask: What if the buying and selling of carbon credits and pollution offsets fails to turn down the thermostat? What exactly will motivate governments and global industries then to join hands in a crusade to reduce emissions through regulation and taxation?…

And what if growing environmental and social turbulence, instead of galvanizing heroic innovation and international cooperation, simply drive elite publics into even more frenzied attempts to wall themselves off from the rest of humanity?… We’re talking here of the prospect of creating green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an otherwise stricken planet…

National Academy of Science…found that the richest countries, by their activities, have generated 42 percent of environmental degradation across the world, while shouldering only 3 percent of the resulting costs.

Humans Have 23 Years to Go: IFTF is creating a game set 10 years from now that gives the players 23 ‘years’ to deal with five cascading social, ecological and economic crises that threaten to end civilization. Sounds like fun, if they’ll let us play (full access to members only, and the link above was down at time of writing). Problem is, they’re calling the game Superstruct (literally: build over top). Seems to me that the only viable solutions to this problem will be bottom-up, not top-down. Shouldn’t the game be called Substruct? Thanks to Jerry Michalski for the link.

Discover Undiscovered Musicians: Some great hand-made music from unknown artists you can browse and play to your heart’s content — IACmusic.com. Here’s my own ‘station’ collection of what I’ve been listening to there.

Pictures Without the Need of Words: My friend Melisa Christensen is the photo director of a sweet little film, lovingly and exquisitely photographed, about human relationships and priorities.

Great Green Events Calendar: Leafing Through tells you where to go, greenly, all over the world.

See What Global Warming Has Wrought So Far: A couple of years ago I pointed out the NOAA viewer that lets you see a movie of glaciation, coastal flooding and vegetation change over the past 21000 years (since the last ice age). If you haven’t seen it, take a look. What would be interesting would be to project it forward, assuming a hundred-fold or thousand-fold acceleration of rate of change.

The Only Diet for a Peacemaker Is a Vegetarian Diet: “Conscience dictates that the grain should stay where it is grown, from South America to Africa. And it should be fed to the local malnourished poor, not to the chickens destined for our KFC buckets.” Even the orthodox churches are starting to get it.

Who Are You Trying to Impress?: Justin Kownacki analyzes the politics of conversations, and how disruptive they can be to making the conversation meaningful, valuable, and informative.

The Mortgage Lender Implode-o-meter: Keep up to date with the collapse of IndyMac, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and all your favourite wacky trillion-dollar irresponsible lending characters.

Google Offers Animated Avatars for Google Chat: The poor man’s Second Life app “Lively”, has just been released. Limited avatar options. Agonizingly slow. Much work needed.

Doug Rushkoff on Open Space Democracy: Democracy is a collective choice and emerges through collective action, he says. If we only care about what it means to us individually, and what we do individually, democracy is lost. Branding, advertising, the mainstream media, corpocracy, hierarchy — these are all directed at us as individuals. We have to get past self-interest, past individuation of everything. Don’t ask What can I do?, discuss What can we do? Thanks to William Tozier for the link.

Unintended Consequences: George Monbiot’s latest article about the Death of the Oceans raises some more interesting thoughts about unintended consequences in complex systems. Of course high oil prices will reduce (somewhat) demand for gasoline and hence reduce CO2 emissions. But that reduced demand in affluent nations will also allow Asia to continue to pick up whatever oil is not contracted for, pushing emissions right back up again. And while high prices will drive some people to switch to more efficient vehicles, will those more efficient vehicles then be driven further than the gas guzzlers? Monbiot explains that high oil prices are keeping ocean-devastating fishing trawlers in port, but it’s also got fishermen striking for subsidies, pushing politicians who want re-election to divert money from worthy causes to subsidizing uneconomic activities. And environmental laws designed to prevent permafrost and glacial melt and ocean disasters are being abandoned in the desperate search for a little more cheap oil, accelerating global warming that will ultimately require huge taxes on oil to curtail. This is precisely why the “market mechanism” that so many conservatives trust to solve global warming and everything else simply does not work. Complex systems are inertial — they tend to adapt to stay in equilibrium until forced to a new equilibrium by either decisive intervention, or catastrophe.

Canada’s Conservatives “The Republican Farm Team”: George Bush’s (last?) lapdog, arch-conservative Canadian PM Harper, is refusing to allow conscientious objectors to the Bush war to come to Canada, ending a two-century-old tradition of providing sanctuary for Americans of conscience. Bush now beckons Harper obediently to his side by barking “Yo Harper!” Meanwhile, as they shrugged off their responsibility for the global food crisis, Bush and Yo Harper and the rest of the G8 gang of thieves chowed down on an extravagant 18-course meal of high-energy, high-cruelty imported foods.(Thanks to Meg Fowler for the links).

Alberta Hypes Bitumen Sludge Mining to Obama & McCain: Despite growing realization that the Alberta Bitumen Sludge Mining operation (what the industry prefers to call ‘oil sands’, depicted above) is the most ecologically destructive project on Earth, the government of Alberta, whose economy is utterly dependent on this horror, is busy lobbying both US presidential candidates to endorse buying its dirty oil. They will almost certainly succeed: It’s not in their backyard.

found magazine

Find of the Day, above, found on top of a baby change table in a women’s washroom in BC. Thanks to Darren Barefoot for the link.

andrew campbell and marysa de veer
© 1997-2004 original work by Andrew Campbell & Marysa de Veer

Thought for the Week: Being A Part: I’ve been chatting recently with Andrew Campbell and Beth Patterson about connection with the land and all-life-on-Earth. Andrew has pointed to the work of Gregory Bateson (whose first wife BTW was Margaret Mead) and his discussion of immanence — the quality of remaining within as a part (of the environment, Gaia, the complexity of all-life-on-Earth), while our minds furiously attempt to analyze, to dissect, to set ourselves apart. Beth has collected a remarkable set of stories from readers that answer the question “Where is Home?” I replied to Beth that I thought the most evocative writing I had readabout this was that of Sam Mills of the now largely-lost blogs feral and thistle & hemlock (she now writes the blog bitterbrush); here’s an example of how she tells us what it means to be a part.

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 1 Comment

Friday Flashback: Beginning Again

Posted on July 11, 2008 by Dave Pollard

In September 2005 I summarized biologist David Ehrenfeld’s prescient 1993 book Beginning Again, in which he lovingly tells the story of the giant green turtles of Costa Rica, who have lived there unchanged for 300 million years, skewers bureaucracy and hierarchy as twin evils of the modern era, laments the loss of the critical skills of craftsmanship and maintenance, insists that there is no adapting to catastrophes in complex systems (so we must learn to prevent them), champions generalists over narrow specialists, calls for restrictions on increase of human numbers, urges adoption of sustainable polyculture and permaculture to replace catastrophic agriculture, and warns (in 1993!) of the looming crisis created by the “bottomless pit of debt” in the US.He likens our modern economy to “a massive flywheel, spinning too fast for its size and construction, coming apart in chunks as it spins”. This, he warns, is what happens when you try to replace an effective complex natural system, with great resilience and redundancy evolved over hundreds of millennia, with an efficient complicated, man-made system, fragile, over-extended, unforgiving of any failure in any of its moving parts. The big losers when it comes apart, he warns, will be the poor and the young. The rich and old, who have hoarded what they need to pull them through, will increasingly closet themselves away from the masses as the cascading crises wreakhavoc on everyone else.

Read the article.

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | Comments Off

there is an artist hiding inside each of us

Posted on July 9, 2008 by Dave Pollard

there is an artist hiding inside each of us.

it wants to re-present what we see, sense, feel…
spatter 15-5

it wants to capture what is, what is astonishing, here, now…
turkey 3

it want to create what can only be imagined…
swirl

it wants to design miniature truths…
SLC logo

it wants to tell the world who we are, and what is going on…
shadow portrait of dave pollard

it wants to create meaning, to say “look! there’s a pattern here!”…
social fluency

it wants to inspire, to tell an important story, and convey what we feel. it wants to provoke change by showing what is now that cannot go on.

i’m writing a song. the artist in me is crying out for new means of expression.

there is so much that is important that we have to communicate. why are we wasting time debating, analyzing, planning?

we know what has to be, and what has to be done, and what we have to be and do to real-ize that.

what are we waiting for?

category: creative works
all artworks by the author

Posted in Creative Works | 2 Comments

Help Me Design the Natural Enterprise Toolkit

Posted on July 8, 2008 by Dave Pollard

My first book, Finding the Sweet Spot: The Natural Entrepreneur’s Guide to Responsible, Sustainable, Joyful Work will be published next month by Chelsea Green. The publisher is sponsoring a companion website/toolkit at http://naturalenterprise.org that is currently under development. I’d love your help with the design.

Just as a reminder, the book has six chapters, as follows:

ftss chapters
The first chapter entails identifying your personal ‘sweet spot’, where your Gifts (what you do uniquely well), your Passions (what you love doing), and your Purpose (what is needed that you care about) intersect. It’s a personal exercise. The last two chapters are operational advice, mostly for once you’re up and running.

Chapters 2-4 are collaborative processes, and that’s where naturalenterprise.org comes in. The site will offer a simple set of tools that will help you find business partners, research unmet needs, and collaborate to explore solutions to those needs. The diagram at the top of this article shows how it will be organized. Here’s a walk-through:

naturalenterprise.org/community will allow you to offer and receive advice about Natural Entrepreneurship, and it will have three parts to it:

ASK A QUESTION: Will allow prospective entrepreneurs to pose questions about any facet of natural entrepreneurship, and others to offer suggestions in response to those questions.
POSE A PROBLEM: Will allow prospective entrepreneurs to describe challenges they’re facing in the process of creating the work they were intended to do, and others to discuss these challenges and work towards resolution of them.
TELL A STORY: Will allow anyone to tell a success story or a ‘war’ story (about failure) about their enterprise or journey towards entrepreneurship.

naturalenterprise.org/partners will enable you to find partners for your Natural Enterprise, and it will have six parts to it:

DESCRIBE YOUR PURPOSE: Will allow prospective entrepreneurs to ‘publish’ their identified Purpose — the need they’ve identified that they truly care about, and which they have some Gifts and Passions around. This is to enable other prospective entrepreneurs to browse and DISCOVER PEOPLE WHO SHARE YOUR PURPOSE, and connect with them (part 7).
DESCRIBE YOUR GIFTS AND CAPACITIES: Will allow you, once you’ve identified your Passion, to list the Gifts (that are also your Passions) you have that are in the ‘sweet spot’ i.e. ‘on Purpose’, consistent with the Purpose you identified. It will also allow you to self-assess your Capacities, from a list of twelve essential Capacities that the partners of any Natural Enterprise must have between them. These are the things you bring to the prospective Natural Enterprise. The book (and website) explains how, to find your ‘natural’ partners, you need to find those whose Gifts and Capacities complement your own, collectively providing everything that the enterprise needs without a lot of overlap. This will allow other prospective entrepreneurs to BROWSE your GIFTS AND CAPACITIES to see whether they are a good fit for their proposed Natural Enterprise, and, if so, connect with you (part 8).
DESCRIBE GIFTS AND CAPACITIES YOU LACK: Will allow you, once you’ve identified your Purpose, to list the Gifts and Capacities you don’t have, which are needed to complement your own in order to achieve your Purpose. This will allow other prospective entrepreneurs to BROWSE your list of NEEDED GIFTS AND CAPACITIES to see whether they are a good fit for your proposed Natural Enterprise, and, if so, connect with you (part 9).

naturalenterprise.org/collaboratory will enable you to collaborate with potential enterprise partners and others to research and innovate, and it will have three parts to it:

EXPLORE A NEED OR PROBLEM: Will allow you to develop, together with others, a better understanding of a possible unmet need that is ‘on Purpose’ for your prospective Natural Enterprise.
CANVASS THE CROWD: Will allow you to poll all readers of naturalenterprise.org to gather ‘collective wisdom’ about the viability of an idea, about the future, about which of a set of alternative actions to pursue, about a subject you lack knowledge about, or about a market.
RESEARCH A NEED: Will allow you to study a subject collaboratively, assign partners work to do, and collect the results of your research in one place for group discussion.

It seems fairly obvious to me that for 1-3 we will need some kind of discussion forum, for 4-9 we will need a database that anyone can add to or browse in different ways, for 10 we’ll need a wiki or similar tool, for 11 we’ll need a survey tool like Survey Monkey, and for 12 we’ll need some kind of project collaboration space/tool.

The question is, dear readers, how easily can we pull this together without the need for a lot of coding? Can we use existing open source forums (as Dick Richards did for his book Is Your Genius at Work?), and open source databases, wikis, survey tools and collaboration tools, and easily put them within the site ‘umbrella’ so users don’t get lost? If so, which specific apps should we use? If not, how much work wouldit be to pull this together?

Category: Creating Natural Enterprises

Posted in Working Smarter | 6 Comments

The Seven Steps to Business Sustainability

Posted on July 7, 2008 by Dave Pollard

Interface Carpets’ sustainability model

It’s tough explaining sustainability to executives. When it comes to knowledge, and acceptance of responsibility, they are all over the map. Surprisingly, those in the most polluting industries are often more advanced in their thinking than those in ‘service’ industries. The way to get attention for the subject, and the way to approach the issue, depends on who your audience is.

My French teacher likens it to the challenge of getting a very obese man to adopt a diet. If he thinks he’s just ‘big-boned’, or thinks it’s someone else’s fault, or thinks the risks to him are non-existent or overblown, or thinks nothing will work, you have a challenge. If he’s doing his best, but it isn’t good enough, you have a challenge. If he thinks it’s just ‘his problem’, and no one else is being hurt by it, you’ve got a challenge. And let’s face it, diets are tough — hard work, lifelong change, high failure rate, and no fun. And the worst thing you can do is point out how hard it’s going to be, and how far away the goal is.

I’ve spoken to a lot of business execs about this subject in recent months — delightfully, it’s part of my job. And I’ve learned that there’s a way to ‘get to’ everyone, if you listen enough first to know what approach to take. And I’ve learned that positive approaches that stress benefits and opportunities generally work better than approbation, though executives are naturally attuned to matters of business risk, if those risks can credibly be portrayed as big enough or imminent enough (a big ‘if’).

So I’ve developed a Seven Steps to Business Sustainability model, which I outline below. The trick with this model is not to overwhelm or discourage businesspeople who are still at the early steps by showing them all seven. My approach is to take them through a ‘script’ to discover what step they’re currently at. If they’re like the majority, still at step 1 or 2 (or not even there), I will only talk about steps 1-3. If they’re at step 3 (about 1/3 of business execs are) they’re ready to be congratulated and introduced to steps 4-5. If they’re at step 5 (very few are) they’re ready to be nominated as sustainability leaders, and ready to look at the whole enchilada.

What I like about the model is that it follows the process we all follow in dealing with threats, like forest fires or hurricanes or computer viruses. It starts with acknowledgement, and then moves on to short term and then long-term actions to cope with it.

Here’s the model and the ‘script’:

Awareness: Do you know the facts about climate change — what it means to your business and to our whole planet, and what the regulations are that affect your business and the businesses of those you deal with, and how important an issue it is to your customers, to your employees, to your competitors (and what they’re doing about it) — and to your children and grandchildren? This is the most difficult step, and it’s rare I get an unqualified yes. If I don’t:

I take the exec through the effects of climate change on crop yields, forest and ocean resource productivity, the spread of hot-weather plant, animal and human diseases (like the mountain pine beetle threatening the entire Canadian boreal forest) and pandemics, on water availability, on demand for air conditioning, on ecosystem crashes and biodiversity losses, on weather patterns, drought, flooding, severe storms and desertification, on glacial melt, permafrost stability, ocean currents and global sea levels, and on
stability of infrastructure and transportation
I talk about the business risks associated with climate change: insurance cost spikes, risk of shortages of natural resource production inputs (and cost increases as they become scarce), disaster preparedness, recovery and contingency costs, business interruption risks, supply chain disruption risks, transportation interruption risks and cost increases, business relocation costs, and dirty-tech retooling costs
I explain the reputation risks of companies perceived to be behind the curve, and the competitive advantages that clean-tech innovators and early-adopters can achieve
I tell them what long-term investment fund managers and bankers are looking at in determining investment and credit worthiness of companies, and how securities authorities are responding to these investors’ demands for more disclosure of what companies are doing about climate change
I walk them through the current myriad of regulations in effect around the globe, and how they are quickly becoming more stringent and requiring more information collection and disclosure
I provide current emission information for Canada and its provinces, along with reduction targets

GHG emissions Canada
So much for Kyoto: Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions 2006 and 2020 projections for Canada, MT CO₂ equivalents, data per Government of Canada, map by Tory’s LLP

Acceptance: Once I have the exec briefed on the facts, I ask: What do you think is the responsibility of your company to tackle the challenges of climate change and environmental sustainability? What is the responsibility of governments? What is your personal responsibility as a business leader, and as a citizen of Canada? How does that responsibility extend to other jurisdictions in which you do business? How do you trade off your short term responsibility to shareholders against your long-term responsibility to future generations? When I first started asking these questions, it was to surface global warming deniers, who even a year ago were fairly common. Now I’m astonished to discover this is quickly becoming one of the issues keeping executives (especially those with children) awake at night. When there’s no microphone or camera on them, they will tell you they care about this issue. Most still think government needs to take the lead, to create a ‘level playing field’ they’ll gladly comply with. But increasingly they’ll admit that there is no level playing field, that cheats will always cheat, that greenwashing can work, that it’s one thing to make complicated environmental laws and another thing to enforce them, that ‘free’ trade agreements can render environmental laws null and void, and that this troubles them. They’re accepting responsibility, and now asking, not what do they have to do, but what can they do?
Compliance: Once they are aware of the issues, and accept responsibility for dealing with them, I ask them: Are you in compliance with climate change and other environmental laws in force at each level of government in each of the jurisdictions in which you operate? This is a fairly straight-forward discussion that depends, of course, where they do business. They need to learn about caps, emissions levels (absolute and ‘intensity-based’), reduction targets, fines and penalties, credits and ‘carbon’ taxes. The frustration with the myriad of different regulations, and different types of regulations, is palpable. Most executives I speak with would prefer more stringent, but simpler, more consistent rules to the current situation.

vancouver montreal sea level rise
Maps of Vancouver and Montreal showing flooding of Richmond/Ladner, lower mainland, Montreal East and South Shore if Greenland ice cap and West Antarctic ice sheet melt, via http://flood.firetree.net

Mitigation Strategy: I’m now finding that most businesspeople, even those in small businesses and those that do not directly emit pollutants or use large amounts of raw materials, water or energy, are ready to tackle steps 4 and 5. To explain mitigation, I say: To the extent a company is responsible for significant GHG emissions, or depends on suppliers that are, it will be essential to find alternative ways to produce goods and services that do not have such a negative impact on our environment. What programs do you have in place to measure and voluntarily reduce your carbon footprint, including that which originates from your suppliers’ production and is incurred in foreign jurisdictions. There are some really novel programs out there, as well as some really poor ones. There are even some incentives available, aside from the reputation and innovation and first-mover advantages of bold mitigation strategies.
Adaptation Preparedness Strategy: Where mitigation is about reducing the company’s negative impact on the environment, adaptation is about reducing the impact of environmental crisis and climate change events on the company. These impacts depend on the nature and location(s) of the business and include the matters described in step 1 above such as disease and pandemic outbreaks, chronic shortages of (and price surges for) water, energy and natural resources used by the company and by its suppliers, extreme weather events, flooding and water shortages of cities in which the company operates or sells products, chronic blackouts, brownouts and telecom and other infrastructure failures, loss of insurance coverage, market and rate instabilities, and threats and attacks from desperate individuals, groups and nations (the poor will suffer the worst consequences of climate change, and have the weakest social safety nets). No one can be prepared for all such eventualities, but simulations and other applications of complexity modeling, and disaster and contingency planning, can help companies be as ready and as resilient as possible. I’ve seen a fascinating simulation of how a global pandemic outbreak of influenza or a once-isolated tropical disease can cripple the global economy, not because of the number of deaths, but because of human panic bringing economic activity to a standstill.
Holistic Sustainability Strategy: The discussion of steps 4 and 5 above is usually all most businesspeople can handle at this point in our understanding of sustainability. But there are a few companies that have seen where this is all leading to, and I’m ready for them. The chart at the top of this article shows the Cradle-to-Cradle model that Interface Carpets uses. This is the ultimate resilience strategy: reuse and cycle everything, and produce more energy and cleaner water than what you use. This approach acknowledges that we are all part of a complex and interconnected economy, and that the environmental impacts of our suppliers and customers are as important as the ones we are directly responsible for. If you need no new materials or resources to operate, and if you take everything back from your customers and reuse or recycle it, then you have made your entire cycle of production endlessly renewable. Not only does this mitigate your environmental impact, it makes you relatively immune to the impacts of environmental crises and climate change on your suppliers and even your customers.
Zero-Growth Economy Strategy: Climate change is making us aware that there truly are limits to growth, and that no company or economy can keep ‘growing’ forever. Our current economy is completely dependent on consumers buying more and more ‘stuff’ every year, and it is truly unsustainable. Likewise, our capital markets, and shareholder expectations, are based on large annual increases in profits. So how can a company make the transition to a steady-state economy, and thrive with the same profit each year? Economists like Richard Douthwaite, Herman Daly and Peter Brown have suggested what would be needed to make such a transition at the macro (country) level. Businesses need to start thinking about how such a transition will affect individual businesses, industries and markets, and make the structural and strategy changes necessary to make that transition too.

I think there will be a huge market for business advisors who will be able to take companies one step at a time from step 1 to step 7. I know there are a few people (like Gil Friend) who do this. We’ll soon need a lot more.

Category: Understanding Economics

Posted in How the World Really Works | 7 Comments

Saturday Links for the Week — July 5, 2008 — The Story Edition

Posted on July 5, 2008 by Dave Pollard

(Several of the students from two Melbourne universities that we hosted yesterday said they thought I looked startlingly like Aussie star footballer Jason Akermanis, above top, except for the blond hair. I don’t see it, but I’m flattered. Must be the mannerisms. Used to be told I looked like John Denver or Richard Belzer, above bottom. Who’s your celebrity lookalike?)

Creating Space for What’s Important: Another inspiring article by PS Pirro: “I know why I didnít do it sooner, and I know why all that other stuff was cluttering up my list: following a heartís desire is very scary stuff. Itís so much easier and so much less risky to spend your hours doing things that donít really matter, to pursue lesser goals, to do the work that others think is important. When I clear space in my thinking — and in my physical environment — and then hold that space open for my own real and true desires, my heart recognizes the opportunity, and slips right in. And the next thing I know, Iím elbow deep in paper and notes and yes, I’m scared, but I’m also full of gratitude. My heart says thank you, thank you.”

A Death Without Meaning: Oncology nurse Karen Crone tells a very short story about some people she briefly knew. The story will stay with you a long time, asking questions that have no answers.

Murder in the Park: Cassandra tells an unsettling story, and leaves us to imagine our own ending.

How to Use ‘Mystery’ Stories to Engage Your Business Audience: Matt Moore, who I met recently in Toronto, has a new podcast on Story Work featuring Shawn Callahan (who I met in Melbourne in April) and Madelyn Blair. At the end of it, Shawn talks about how scientists are framing their papers as mystery stories that expound on their problem (the ‘murder’) and their discovery of the solution (the ‘murderer’). In another article he explains how that approach (Pose the mystery; Deepen the mystery; Home in on the proper explanation by considering (and offering evidence against) alternative explanations; Provide a clue to the proper explanation; Resolve the mystery; Draw the implications for the phenomenon under study) can be used to engage the audience in any expository presentation. And the best title for such presentations is usually a question.

Determined to Do the Only Thing You Could Do: Jen Lemen reminds us of an amazing poem, The Journey, by Mary Oliver.

The CN Tower Belongs to the Dead: Our Descent’s weekly YouTube round-up includes this remarkable solo bravura performance of a song about Toronto’s most famous landmark (I work about a block away from it) with some equally remarkable lyrics.

Another Great Mystery (Unre)Solved: There is something perverse about human nature that causes us to be dissatisfied with important mysteries that are never solved. The death of JFK (and several other up-and-coming politicians who embarrassed those in high places); the Anthrax Mail murders; the strange way the Trade Centre towers collapsed from below; the truth behind chemtrails; what happened to the plane that struck the Pentagon; the inability to find many of the world’s most notorious murderers and criminals — all of these mysteries beg for a solution. Even the most rational of us, in the absence of anything close to a resolution to these issues, can be tempted to believe conspiracy theories, because as other theories lead only to dead ends, they begin to appear more plausible. One of these unresolved issues back in the news is the perplexing fall of Trade Centre Tower 7, many hours after the twin towers’ collapse, and without an airplane strike to explain it. Many years later, there is an explanation, but its implausibility is already restoking the conspiracy theories.

Collective Answers and the End of E-mail: After getting his pro-IM, anti-email article published in the NYT, my friend Luis Suares of IBM in Spain replies to reactionary critics: “Because I no longer have the stress of constantly having to check e-mail, the flow of the conversations is out in the open available to everyone else to contribute as well; it is no longer only me who can action something, my social networks can help chime in and contribute”.

Is the Corn Ethanol Lobby Responsible for the Food Price Spike?: A new survey suggests as much as 75% of the recent massive increase in global staple food prices is due to land shifted from food to fuel production.

An Artist Shouts Out About Cruelty to Farmed Animals: Twyla Francois is leading an international campaign to raise awareness of the horrific abuse that farmed animals suffer in our society. Caveat: This site is not for the squeamish or easily depressed.

What Does the Quality Co-construction of Learning Mean?: Nancy White’s Lisbon presentation on how to build (Velcro) bridges between teachers and learners.

Building Consensus in a New Community: Cheryl (“Mira”) and I (“Cal”) are part of an Intentional Community in Second Life that now boasts over a dozen members. We ‘live’ on a deserted island that provides us with all we need to live, but, like people suddenly shipwrecked together, we’re still working out how to get along and what we intend to be and do on the island. We’ve agreed to come ‘inworld’ on a regular schedule (that works for all the members, who live in time zones all across the world) to explore these issues. Mira has documented our latest group conversation, where we try to develop a consensus on the objective and operating principles for our community, with unexpected and interesting results.

16000 Litres of Water to Produce a Kilogram of Beef: Now that you’ve figured out your carbon consumption footprint, and how to reduce it, it’s time to get to work on reducing your water consumption footprint. Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link.

Kennedy Airport is Not Part of the US: That’s the weasel ruling of a US court that assessed that Canadian Maher Arar, who was abducted by Homeland Security as he made a connection at the US airport while returning home, and sent to Syria for months of excruciating torture, could not seek damages for his arrest and kidnapping.

Have the Young Forgotten How to Read?: Blogger Amanda Kyffin thinks many people today have lost the ability to process text longer than a paragraph, or to concentrate on written material longer than a page. Does that inability pose a challenge to our ability to learn, or does it simply reflect that we need to find other, more visual, means to communicate? And in this attention economy, if it takes longer than a page to communicate a difficult concept, how can we hope to do so? Are stories the answer?

coffee art

Just for Fun: Coffee Art: Latest craze at some coffee houses is mouthfuls of artwork (like that above) done with coffee, cream and chocolate. Here’s an amazing video showing how it’s done. Thanks to Cheryl Long for the link.

Thought for the Week: Literature as Remedy for What Ails Us: Alberto Manguel’s book and lecture series The City of Words meanders through some of the great works of fiction throughout history and urges us to rediscover fiction as source of ideas to understand and remedy many of the maladies of our time: consumerism and corporatism (the Frankenstein myth and 2001: A Space Odyssey have much to teach us about inflexible human creations that can destroy their maker), political psychopathy, our fear of other cultures and our inability to synthesize the best of many cultures, our inability to recognize and reject business, political and religious propaganda, our lack of imagination and critical thinking, our lack of appreciation of the advantages and dangers of myth, our learned helplessness, and the oversimplification of what is important. The wise message of the book is simple: If you want to understand the world better and make it a better place, you would be better off reading great stories than books that offer oversimplified analysis and prescribedsolutions.

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments

Friday Flashback: Save the World Reading List

Posted on July 4, 2008 by Dave Pollard

In April 2006 I published the latest edition of my Save the World Reading List. It’s probably due for an editing and revision, but, unlike the last revision, the next edition is likely to be only modestly different. Here are the books and articles I’ve read over the past two years that might make worthy additions to the list:

The Great Depression, by Pierre Berton. In 1929 we thought the good life would go on forever, and eventually everyone, not only the upper classes, would benefit. We were wrong, and this book explains why, and shows us what will happen when the US dollar crashes.
Figments of Reality, by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. We are a complicity of the separately-evolved creatures in our bodies organized for their mutual benefit; our brains are their information-processing system, not ‘ours’.
The Two Income Trap, by Elizabeth Warren. Families now need twice as many members each working twice as hard just to have what their parents had.
The Idols of Environmentalism, online essay by Curtis White. How the very nature of our work mitigates against our environment.
Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt. Correlation analysis dispels many of the cause-and-effect myths that underlie much of our modern society’s and economy’s behaviours.
The Megacity, online essay by George Packer. A portrait of Lagos, Nigeria, the world’s fastest-growing city, an endless sprawl of slums in a ruined country, whose people survive only on their wits, workarounds and the propaganda of hope it might somehow one day get better.
The Other Side of Eden, by Hugh Brody. What we can learn from the world’s aboriginal cultures.
The Idea of a Local Economy, online essay by Wendell Berry. Why relocalization, bottom up, is the only way to reform our economy.
Waiting for the Macaws, by Terry Glavin. Stories of the dawning of the sixth great extinction.
A Theory of Power by Jeff Vail. A free downloadable book. How we can overcome the Frankenstein monster of our industrial corpocracy through a revolutionary rhizome (network) social structure based on self-sufficient, egalitarian non-hierarchical communities.
The Logic of Sufficiency, by Thomas Princen. A set of principles, assumptions and connecting theory for rationally and collectively self-managing complex adaptive systems (like societies and ecosystems).
Heat, by George Monbiot. A specific plan to reduce CO2 emissions by 90%, but it requires everyone’s cooperation to work.
Deer Hunting with Jesus, by Joe Bageant. Why the working class of the US, and perhaps of all nations, suffers quietly and resists all calls for action to deal with the outrages of our time (of which they are the primary victims) and the crises that threaten is.
Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert. What it means to be human, explained through the author’s personal stories.
Life is a Verb, by Patti Digh. Say yes, Be generous, Speak up, Love more, Slow down, and Trust yourself.
The Anglo Disease, by JÈrÙme Guillet. How corporations, governments and citizens have become co-dependent on a dysfunctional economy built on five fraudulent deceptions.
Finding the Sweet Spot: The Natural Entrepreneur’s Guide to Responsible, Sustainable, Joyful Work, by Dave Pollard. My new book on how to discover the work you were meant to do, and then start an ethical enterprise to make it reality.

I’m probably missing some important additions — books or articles or maybe videos I’ve read in the past two years but forgotten, which belong on this list, but until I get my Table of Contents updated I won’t know for sure. Here’s the 2006 list:

How to Save the World Reading List – Revised and Updated (April 2006)

In Beyond Civilization, Daniel Quinn says:

People will listen when they’re ready to listen and not before. Probably, once upon a time, you weren’t ready to listen to an idea than now seems to you obvious, even urgent. Let people come to it in their own time. Nagging or bullying will only alienate them. Don’t preach. Don’t waste time with people who want to argue. They’ll keep you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to something new.

Five years ago, I became ready to listen, and, starting with Full House and Ishmael, began to learn the truth about what is happening to this world, and what we can, and can’t do, to save it from civilization’s excesses.

Here’s the updated list — 80 books and articles that have forever changed my worldview and my purpose for living. The fifteen most critical readings have a numbered triangle in front of them, with the numbers reflecting the order that, I would suggest, it makes most sense to read them in.

What Life was Really Like Before Civilization: Revisionist History

[1] Full House, by the late Stephen J. Gould. The presence of man on Earth was an unlikely and random occurrence, and after the next Extinction Event life on the planet is likely to evolve very differently. We are not the Crown of Creation.
The Wealth of Man by Peter Jay. The life of pre-historic man was easy, idyllic, and very pleasant. Hunt big slow game an hour a day, relax and enjoy the rest.
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, (online) essay by Jared Diamond Why the adoption of agriculture was ‘a catastrophe from which we have never recovered’.
[4] The Story of B and Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Also the IshCon discussion forum. The first two of these three books are fictionalized stories about human history from a different, anti-civilization perspective, with penetrating, astounding analysis and insight. Ishmael is more popular but I prefer The Story of B which recapitulates the entire theses in a series of ‘lectures’. The two critical lectures are online here.
Original Affluence, by Marshall Sahlins. If you wanted to defend a new society that featured rigid hierarchy, agonizingly hard work, suffering, frequent starvation and slavery, wouldn’t you try to portray the alternative life as ‘short, nasty and brutish’?
Extinction, by Michael Boulter. Our planet’s history is one of cycles punctuated by massive extinctions and new beginnings. Our only choice is whether to end this one sooner (a century) or let it end later (several millennia).
The Axemaker’s Gift by James Burke and Robert Ornstein. How innovativeness has been increasingly corrupted to concentrate and retain power, instead of making the world better.
[12] A Short History of Progress, by Ronald Wright. A survey of past civilizations makes clear that savagery and short-term thinking are responsible both for humanity’s evolutionary success and its destruction.
[13] Straw Dogs, by John Gray. While we have a responsibility to try to make the world better and joyful, for those we love and leave behind, we cannot be other than what we are: a fierce, brilliantly adaptable species destined to bring out the next great extinction, and annihilate ourselves in the process.

What’s Going On Under our Noses: The Real News

The Unconscious Civilization, by John Ralston Saul. How and why we’ve become helpless slaves of the political and economic system we built.
Ockham’s Razor, by Wade Rowland. What’s wrong with our modern values, and where to look for new ones.
Beginning Again, by David Ehrenfeld. A biologist’s plea for a new partnership with nature, and prediction of the mechanized world coming apart like a broken flywheel if we don’t heed his advice.
[5] A Language Older Than Words, by Derrick Jensen. A profound and disturbing argument for why moderate answers to our current predicament won’t work.
[6] The World We Want, by Mark Kingwell. Why we are best served by trusting our instincts rather than what we are persuaded is moral or rational.
People Before Profit, by Charles Derber — How rampant corporatism ravaged the vast majority of people worldwide in the 1800s, and is doing so again.
State of the World, by WorldWatch Institute, The 7 trends that most threaten eco-collapse: population growth, rising temperature, falling water tables, shrinking cropland per person, collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, and the extinction of plant and animal species.
World Scientists’ Warning (online), by the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished. A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.”
Dream of the Earth by Thomas Berry. “We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story.”
Healing Time on Earth, by David Brower. An argument that life without wilderness is meaningless and unsustainable.
The Future of Freedom, by Fareed Zakaria. How cultures change, and why they don’t.
The New Rules of the World, by John Pilger. A devastating portrait of how the world really works.
The Demon in the Freezer, by Richard Preston. How vulnerable we all are to individual acts of terror, chaos and sabotage.
[10] Against the Grain, by Richard Manning. How and why grain monoculture evolved, and how it’s ruining the Earth.
Population Projections, by US Census Bureau. They’re no longer assuring us that US and Global Population will level out at 300 million and 9 billion. Would you believe 1 billion and 12 billion by the end of the century, and still rising?
Global Warming, by NOAA. An online synopsis of US scientists’ consensus on the causes and consequences of global warming.
This Overheating World – Worried? Us? (online essay) by Bill McKibben. Article in the UK journal Granta explaining the psychology, and cynical political expediency, of denial.
Are Cities Changing Local and Global Climates?, (online) by NASA. Studies of urban microclimates and how they contribute to local climate change and instability.
Restoring Scientific Integrity (online) by Union of Concerned Scientists. The Bush regime’s distortion of scientific research to forward its own political agenda, and how it threatens our planet.
Climate Collapse, by David Stipp (online article) from Fortune Magazine. The possibility and chilling implications of global warming producing sudden drastic climate shifts.
Conservative Myths on Global Warming (online) by Blogger Carpe Datum. A brief but thorough explanation of the science behind global warming, and the reasoning behind scientists’ connecting it to human activity and worrying about the risks of resultant instability
The Empire Strikes Out, by Kenny Ausubel. Corporatism and acquisitiveness run amok are ruining our world, but nature always bats last.
The Tragedy of the Commons, by Garry Harding. The commons, that which belongs in common to all of us, is disappearing — Why nobody really cares.
Elizabeth Costello, by JM Coetzee. Why we tolerate a holocaust against our fellow creatures on Earth.
The Machine in Our Heads, by Glenn Parton. How the ecological crisis is rooted in a human psychological crisis.
Rogue Primate, by John Livingston. How anthropocentric cultural prosthesis has led our species astray, and how we can find our way back by rediscovering “the sweet bondage of wildness”.
In Defiance of Gravity, by Tom Robbins. An (online) essay that argues we must “insist on joy in spite of everything.”
The Slow Crash, by Ran Prieur. An (online) essay that explains how civilization will end, not with a bang, but with a series of whimpers.
[15] The Long Emergency, by James Kunstler. The story of our dystopian future, caused by our cultural incapacity for preparedness, and sparked by resource scarcity and cultural conflict.

About Gaia: What Nature is Really About

[2] When Elephants Weep, by Jeff Masson. Compelling scientific evidence that animals feel deep emotions.
Mind of the Raven, by Bernd Heinrich. Compelling scientific evidence that animals are intelligent, complex, rational and communicative.
The Sacred Balance by David Suzuki. A passionate explanation of James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, the need to redesign how we live, and the importance of spending more time in nature.
The Hidden Dimension, by Edward Hall. We need space and a natural environment to be healthy and human. When we’re deprived of them, we get mentally ill.
[7] The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram. How to reconnect with nature, and rediscover wonder.
The World is Dying, by Richard Bruce Anderson. Online essay about our instinctive grief over knowing what we are doing to our beleaguered planet, and our feelings of helplessness about how to remedy it.
The Weather Makers, by Tim Flannery. A scientific explanation of global warming, how we are causing it, and the possible consequences.
The Truth About Nature, by Dave Pollard. My own essay, synthesizing the ideas in this reading list.

Toolkit for Change: Knowledge We Can Use to Save the World

[3] Freeman Dyson’s Brain (online interview), in Wired Magazine. The twin keys to building a better world are (a) establishing viable self-sufficient local communities to replace big centralized states and governments, and (b) selective more-with-less technologies like solar/wind energy coops and biotech medicines.
The Developing Ideas Interview (online) with economist Herman Daly. An economic and tax program that favours communities and commons instead of corporations, and a ‘contract’ to reduce our population and ecological footprint.
Tools for Conviviality, by Ivan Illich. “The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. Otherwise man will find himself totally enclosed within his artificial creation, with no exit.” Full book is online.*
Beyond Civilization, by Daniel Quinn. A prescription for creating a post-civilization world, starting with preparing yourself.
The Unconquerable World, by Jon Schell. Why non-violence and consensus-building are the only viable way forward.
The Support Economy, by Shoshana Zuboff A model for a post-capitalist economy.
Unequal Protection, by Thom Hartmann. The case for denying ‘personhood’ to corporations.
When Corporations Rule the World, by David Korten. The need to get corporations out of politics and create localized economies that empower communities within a system of global cooperation, overcoming the myths about economic growth and the sanctification of greed, and focusing instead on overconsumption, poverty, overpopulation, and reining in untrammelled corporate power.
Radical Simplicity, by Jim Merkel. How to free yourself from possessions and wage slavery without sacrifice.
The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. What makes things change.
The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki. Why collective wisdom is better than accepted wisdom and expertise at solving problems, and how to tap it.
Ten Ways to Make a Difference, by Peter Singer. A pragmatic recipe for change.
[8] The Truth About Stories, by Thomas King. The truth about stories is that that’s all we are. Want a new society? Write a new story.
The Boycott List, by Responsible Shopper, and Good Stuff, by the WorldWatch Institute. What not to buy, and what to buy instead.
The Corporation, by Joel Bakan. An action plan for undermining corporatism.
[9] Humans in the Wilderness, by Glenn Parton. How we might reintroduce humans, well-spaced-out, into a primarily wilderness Earth.
At Home in the Universe, by Stuart Kauffman. How self-organizing, self-managing systems work.
EarthDance (entire book online), by Elisabet Sahtouris. Eleven steps to cultural metamorphosis (my summary is here)
eGaia (entire book online), by Gary Alexander. How to achieve peace, cooperation and sustainability (replacing war, competition and growth, the fuels of our current culture) and a future state vision with vignettes from individuals’ lives in a balanced and harmonious future world.
[11] The Commonwealth of Life, by Peter Brown. A 14-point plan for stewardship of the Earth based on an accepted set of duties, responsibilities, and universal rights.
Cradle to Cradle and The Hannover Principles, by Bill McDonough. Cradle to Cradle outlines a 5-stage design and materials usage approach to sustainability. The principles should drive the way we design, develop and operate cities.
[14] Creating a Life Together, by Diana Leafe Christian. How to create and sustain model Intentional Communities.
The Growth Illusion and Short Circuit, by Richard Douthwaite. A blueprint for creating Sustainable Local Economies. Short Circuit is free online [my summary is here].
Biomimicry, by Janine Benyus. Lessons and approaches from nature that could transform and inspire our processes for food production, harnessing energy, manufacturing, health care, education, collaboration and entrepreneurship.
The Cellular Church, by Malcolm Gladwell. An online essay that suggest cellular organization principles might allow us to accomplish, bottom-up, what political entities cannot.
Is Your Genius at Work?, by Dick Richards. A guide to deciding how your talent and passion (your ‘genius’) can be applied to your purpose, and hence how you can best help to save the world.
To Be Of Use, by Dave Smith. A sustainable entrepreneur’s explanation of why creating natural, sustainable enterprise is essential to our planet’s survival, and hence to our own peace of mind.
Sustainability Within a Generation, by the David Suzuki Foundation. Eleven public policy programs that could achieve this extraordinary goal. This essay, by me, explains how these programs, along with my own four proposed programs (a sustainability information exchange, sustainable enterprises, personal sustainable living programs, and sustainable intentional communities) could bring both top-down and bottom-upsynergies to achieving sustainability.

Posted in Collapse Watch | 3 Comments

What If You Had 30 Minutes to Teach a Graduating Class?

Posted on July 2, 2008 by Dave Pollard

Every year at this time we get to read/hear/see some of the best commencement speeches to graduating classes. Some of them are quite inspiring, but what interests me is that, after years of supposed ‘education’, graduates get to hear advice, rather than information or knowledge.

If I had 30 minutes to address a graduating class I would resolve to actually try to impart some knowledge, rather than advice. Personally, I only take advice from people who know me, and who I trust, so I don’t think giving it to a bunch of restless strangers is, in the long run, very useful.

When I mentioned this to a friend, she asked me:

If you had 30 minutes to teach (rather than preach to) a graduating class, what would you teach them?

In the past year I have learned so much that I would answer this question much differently today than I would have at any previous point in my life. What I would do would be to show them how the world really is, and I would do it entirely with data presented in graphical format. I would not interpret it, or tell them what it meant. I would let the facts speak for themselves, and trust them to be smart enough to figure out how to act on it. My objective would be to infuriate them, provoke them to say (as graduate students have told me on more than one occasion): Why didn’t anyone tell me this before; why don’t they teach this in school?

Here are some of the data I would show them:

Large corporations have, for years, been eliminating more jobs than they have created, and this trend is accelerating. The data supporting this (for the US) are shown above. Just to keep even with growth in the labour force, the US needs to create 150,000 net new jobs per month, and Canada needs to create 20,000.
Virtually all the new jobs that will be created in the next decade (all by small to medium sized employers) will be low-paying clerical, administrative, and retail sales and service jobs. The data supporting this (from the US Department of Labor) are shown below.

DoL growth industries

Since 1970, the top 5% of income earners have more than doubled their real incomes and net worth. For the other 95%, real income and net worth have decreased. If home prices and stock prices dropped a mere 30%, the majority of the population of affluent nations would have a negative net worth. We have more assets than ever before, but far more debts, and average spending is now 4% more than average earnings. This is despite the fact that, during this period, most families grew from one-income to two-income families. The income inequality curve (below) is so steep it’s almost invisible. And for 99.9% of families, the chances of significantly improving your economic status (the second chart below), no matter how hard you work, are negligible, much less than the chances of your economic status significantly falling.

US Income

US Income 2

Then I’d show a chart showing what Fortune 500 executives think are the biggest risks facing their companies and facing the economy in the next generation, and the 10 things they say currently keep them awake at night. Hint: global warming and talent shortages are not on these charts; consumers slowing down their rate of ever-increasing consumption is.
Next I’d show charts of how our governments spend their money, in both affluent and struggling nations: How much goes for military, defense and ‘security’ spending, how much for corporate subsidies, consulting fees, tax breaks, debt repayment and ‘pet’ projects, versus how much goes for health, environmental protection and education. And with them I’d show charts of average de facto tax rates for different income levels (pretty much flat lines). And I’d show the trends of US government debt levels and trade deficit levels, which affect everyone in the world. I’d show what would happen to debt repayment costs if we get another interest rate spike like in 1980. And I’d show the trends of how much of our ‘wealth’ is generated by ‘financial’ activity versus activity producing real goods.
After that I’d show the simulation of the human cost in deaths and disability (significant but manageable) and the economic cost (staggering) of a global influenza pandemic, alongside health experts’ cumulative probability chart of such a pandemic occurring over the next 50 years.
Next I’d show maps of deforestation, fresh water and air pollution, and soil degradation around the world, alongside violent death and suicide rates where these problems are the worst, and life expectancy charts in AIDS-ravaged countries and in the former Soviet republics.
Then I’d show Hubbert’s Peak Oil chart, and a supply/demand chart showing what happens to prices when demand for a product is rising in some places by over 20% per year while global supply is in long-term, permanent decline. Beside it I’d list all the products that currently depend on cheap oil.
After that I’d show charts of life expectancy, disease rates, suicide and murder rates, poverty and bankruptcy rates between 1929 and 1939, alongside economic data for 1920-1928 and 2000-2008, and a couple of the historic 80-year-cycle curves in The Fourth Turning.
Next I’d show a map of the world highlighting the area with a current population of a billion people who will be underwater if the Greenland ice cap and Western Antarctic ice sheet both melt. Superimposed on it I’ll show global population since ‘prehistoric’ times, and the ‘normal’ population curves of the six most-studied previous civilizations.
Then I’d show the charts of biological and biodiversity loss in the past five great extinctions in history, and the data to date for the current, sixth great extinction.
Finally, I’d show the famous scene (below) from Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth showing average Earth temperature (blue line) and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration (red line) for the past 650,000 years (with Gore on the forklift at right)..

inconvenient truth

My ‘speech’ would contain no pleas, no exhortations, no wise counsel, no clever quips. Just enough information for them to think, just for a few moments, about what they intend to do with the rest of their lives. Andthen I’d sit down.

I wouldn’t expect any applause.

Category: The Education System

Posted in How the World Really Works | 21 Comments

Peter Block’s Community

Posted on July 1, 2008 by Dave Pollard

Most people know Peter Block as the consultant’s consultant — he wrote the book that many consultants use as their methodology. Since then he is best known for his book Stewardship, that I reviewed two years ago, and his more recent spin-off The Answer to How is Yes.

Stewardship was about how to convert hierarchical organizations into flat, responsible, sustainable, entrepreneurial organizations, something like what I have come to call Natural Enterprises.

His new book, Community, proposes, analogously to convert isolated, hopeless neighbourhoods into dynamic, self-directed communities. I have the same general concern about the new book that I had about Stewardship: Why struggle to transform a dysfunctional corporation, or neighbourhood, into one that works, when it’s much easier to create a new one, a Natural Enterprise or an Intentional Community, from scratch? And has anyone effectively, and sustainably, re-formed a corporation or community? Are Savannah, Boston, Chicago and Portland really now communities that work?

Block starts with a series of theses about what’s wrong with modern neighbourhoods and with our ways of trying to better them:

Every community is different, and things that work in one don’t necessarily work in others.
We try to solve problems through individual persuasion and action, instead of collectively.
When cities start to decay, too often those with money, energy and ideas flee to suburban or exurban areas instead of staying to deal with the problems.
The cult of leadership lets citizens off the hook and breeds dependency and entitlement.
Engagement of citizens is negative: “Many citizens get engaged in community only when they are angry”.
Social service organizations are stigmatized as inefficient, compassion is marginalized, and the only news reported is crime and scandal.
The preoccupation of those working with the challenges of cities is on coping with fear and finding fault. In this worldview, he says:

We are a community of problems to be solved. Those who can best articulate the problems and the solutions dominate the conversation. The future is defined by the interplay of self-interests, dependent on the accountability of leaders, and controlled by a small number of wealthy and powerful people, we categorize as “they”. Community action is aimed at eliminating the sources of fear. We aim at a set of needs and deficiencies. To eliminate fear and respond to neediness, we try harder at what we’ve been doing all along, what isn’t working. We lock down neighbourhoods, build more prisons, reduce tolerance to zero. We call for better programs, more expertise, more funding, better leadership, stronger consequences, and more protection.

Block’s framework for genuinely improving communities has six components:

The engagement and convening of a broad cross-section of the community to explore issues and ideas collectively.
The creation of small groups within larger groups as the basis for exploratory conversations focused on possibilities, not problems.
A focus on questions that open rather than rushing to answers, that encourage learning and exploration rather than giving and getting advice.
The creation of several types of conversation:

Conversations of invitation: invitations that declare the possibility of collective resolution and action, frame the choice to attend or not, describe the hurdle and expectation of participants, stress appreciation for those who choose to attend, and are delivered personally.
Conversations of possibility: surfacing/exploring the crossroads that each participant is at that gives him or her passion about the subject
Conversations of ownership: surfacing/exploring what actions each participant is prepared to commit to
Conversations of dissent: surfacing/exploring doubts, reservations, and reasons for lack of commitment
Conversations of appreciation: surfacing/exploring the value, learning and connection each participant has received from others

The creation of an atmosphere of hospitality, welcoming strangers.
The creation of physical and social space that supports belonging.

After describing how this framework has worked in several communities, including his own (Cincinnati, which he describes as “like most of our urban centers, like New Orleans without the flood”), Block concludes with a list of pressing urban issues and intractable problems the methodology could be applied to.

If you notice a lot of similarities between this methodology and Open Space, you’re not alone — Block acknowledges Open Space as one of the techniques that he draws on.

What I liked most about the book was the diagnosis of what hasn’t worked. These failed approaches are almost instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever worked on an urban renewal or community improvementproject.

And of course I liked the fact that Block’s approach boils down to Love, Conversation and Community.

Category: Building Community

Posted in Collapse Watch | 1 Comment

Velcro Bridges

Posted on June 30, 2008 by Dave Pollard

When I finish mowing the lawn down by the pond I invariably come back inside covered with burrs. These are nature’s clever seed carriers, and the way many plants hitch a ride with passing animals (like me) to new fertile soil.

Janene Benyus tells us that many human innovations arise from learning from and copying (Biomimicry) nature (and we would be wise to pay more attention, since nature has many more secrets to tell us). Burrs were the inspiration for Velcro, the commercial product now used instead of buttons, zippers and laces to allow fabrics to adhere to each other, and in place of glue when you want to detach and reattach something.

In Lisbon recently, Nancy White has been talking about how the idea of Velcro might be applied to learning — making ideas and learning ‘sticky’ so that when something comes along that the learning applies to, it adheres. She and I and Jeremy Heigh (and several of my other correspondents) have also been talking about bridges — and the need for us to create better bridges between groups of people who are currently disconnected:

liberals and conservatives
rich and poor
old and young (especially boomers and Gen Millennium)
people of different cultures who distrust each other (or worse)
those in need and those with something to offer (ideas and resources)

The industrial economy developed intermediated markets to address the last of these chasms. Sales methods, marketing tools and programs, ‘channels’, agency agreements and, of course, advertising. These one-to-n, one-way self-serving methods of connecting suppliers to customers worked when communication was expensive, but they have had huge costs. They have created an economy based on and dependent on consumption, not on well-being, on ‘creating’ needs instead of responding to them, on serving the wealthy not the needy, and on dumbing information down for mass lowest-common-denominator dissemination.

BWE3 The new economy now emerging enables almost-free, two-way communication, and it allows it peer-to-peer, not just by those with the money and infrastructure to transmit it. It is blurring the line between producer and customer (which is what Net Neutrality and Peer Production are all about). In an earlier post I gave this example of what may soon be possible:

Suppose I want a chair that has the attributes of an Aeron without the $1800 price tag, or one with some additional attribute (e.g. a laptop holder) the brand name doesn’t offer? I could go online to a Peer Production site and create an instant market, contributing the specifications, a bunch of technical links available online about just what makes this chair so special, and, perhaps a maximum price I would be willing to pay. People with some of the expertise needed to produce it could indicate their capabilities and self-organize into a consortium that would keep talking and refining until they could meet this price — and, if not, they might counter-offer something close. Other potential buyers could chime in, offering more or less than my suggested price. Based on the number of ‘orders’ at each price, the Peer Production group could then accept orders and start manufacturing. The possibilities are endless — somebody might want customization or some other attribute, to which the same or some other Peer Production group might respond. Another Peer Production group might self-form and come in with a lower price, perhaps creating a new or larger market. People might ‘subscribe’ to this market to watch bids and offers progress, or put in ‘silent’ bids if the offer fell to a certain point. Perhaps Herman Miller (maker of the Aeron) might enter the bidding itself, meeting my bid and offering the intangible value of their brand as well. Perhaps eBay would chime in with used Aeron chairs that meet my specifications at an even lower price (in fact eBay would be a natural host for these virtual instant markets), bringing their reputation systems into play.

Ideally such free flows of information could also apply in areas other than the provision of goods and services. In breaking down the chasms between ideologies, generations, social and economic strata, we might finally have a level playing field of knowledge and learning worldwide, and, through greater understanding of the situation and history of others, less fear, jealousy, ignorance, anger and violence. And by providing potential producers everywhere with the knowledge of what is needed and the knowledge of how to meet that need, we might also start to reduce the inequality in this world, and enable local enterprise and self-sufficiency to flourish.

Marshall McLuhan famously said that information is always trying to be free (in both senses of the word). But at present, it is still a long way from free. Most of the world is still not online. Whole generations don’t understand what’s happening, or where, so they can’t and don’t participate in these new flows of information and understanding. Much of the world is illiterate, and locked out of written-language learning entirely. Most of the rest of us live deliberately only among those of our own strata, isolated through private property, fences, private transportation, separated schools, restricted offices, private clubs, fear and a desperate shortage of time, so that we rarely encounter those ‘different’ from ourselves in any respect. Even online our networks are dominated by ‘friends’ (and through them, similar friends of friends) we have chosen because of some common time-saving ‘brand’ so that we end up in echo chambers, hearing our own ideas and beliefs and knowledge reflected back at us, and not hearing any others.

To overcome this, we need to build bridges, to let new ideas and understanding and knowledge and learning in, and we need them to be ‘Velcro’ bridges, so that these flows (part of the firehose that overwhelms us everyday) stick around long enough that we listen and pay attention, and so that they adhere where they apply to what we need and appreciate.

This is all about helping people to make connections more easily. Everyone has a stake in making this happen.

Why do we need this? Why doesn’t ‘the market’ sort out this supply and demand automatically? Let me give an example. A few months ago I went to two conferences back-to-back. The first was a conference for senior executives on social networking, where there was much concern about cost, security, and diversion of people’s attention from their ‘jobs’. They asked me, as one of the panelists, whether they really needed to embrace this ‘social networking’ stuff to attract top new recruits. They could not imagine any other use for it.

The next day I was at a bloggers’ conference where (aside from Nancy and me) the attendees were almost entirely young and tech-savvy. They spent the conference sharing some truly brilliant ideas for social networking, and lamenting how hard it was to get anyone to pay for their skills and ideas. It became abundantly clear to me that most of them didn’t have the faintest idea how business executives make decisions, or even how businesses operate in today’s economy.

So here we have two groups of people who need something from each other and who have something to offer each other, but they don’t talk, and probably can’t talk each other’s language to communicate those offerings in ways that the other can understand. They need a bridge, a way to connect with each other.

Second example: Recently I’ve been to two conferences of Information Professionals. These are people with university degrees who are expert at research, indexing, cataloguing, and finding information. They are probably (along with some IT people) the most underappreciated people on the planet. Because business executives (and I’ve spoken to a lot of them) see absolutely no value in what they do. They think everyone should be able to do these things (they don’t see it as the specialty it is). They see it as a cost, something to squeeze cost out of, to outsource. They see value in connection, not in collection.

The IPs for their part have, with few exceptions, staggeringly little knowledge of what their employers do, and how and why they use and need information. They have these amazing skills but no appreciation for how their employers could really put them to use. They have focused their energies on collection rather than connection because that’s what they were taught. They need a bridge, a way to connect with each other.

Nancy, who helps create bridges between rich and poor, and between the educated and uneducated, could probably provide a host of other examples.

So how do we create such bridges? I have a few ideas, but we need a lot more. Here is what I’ve found works:

Have conversations with people to discover what they need and care about, and document them. People respond to needs and cares, and if you can get conversations (which provide enough context for people to appreciate why they need and care about these things) going about these things, they will have energy and will attract attention from those who can meet those needs, and who also care about these things. I really believe we should all have movie cameras at hand to capture these conversations, and the stories that people tell, with the energy and passion of the participants. They are far more persuasive than the best analysis or sales pitch.
Observe, pay attention, do real primary research. Primary research is not online search, it’s face-to-face interviews and walking around and studying what’s not working, and why. It’s cultural anthropology. It’s talking to a lot of people to really understand what’s happening, and what needs to be improved, and why it’s not working now. It’s observing needs that the people that have them may not even be aware of themselves, because they’re ignorant of answers out there that are being used in other places or contexts. Or because they’re just so used to the problems they no longer even notice them — it’s the only life they know.
Imagine possibilities. In many cases and places there is a sense of resignation or hopelessness about situations that are miserable and about problems that seem intractable. Once you’ve identified a need or problem, and really understand why it’s a need or problem, you have enough context to begin to imagine some avenues to explore towards resolving it. Like the Frenchman who invented Velcro. That doesn’t mean you have to come up with solutions — they’re best addressed by step 4 below. But it helps to have some ideas to prime the pump, to get people thinking about solutions instead of problems.
Bring people with passion and responsibility together and facilitate them. Use your recorded conversations and observations and research findings to intrigue the people who might be able, together, to come up with solutions, to the point where you can invite them to get together with the people who have the need, who really know the problem. If you can craft an invitation that gets people who normally don’t talk with each other talking, about issues and opportunities they all care about, you’re half way there. You also need to ensure they have enough sense of personal responsibility to act on what they learn from talking with each other. Most of us have that, but sometimes it needs to be brought out, provoked, facilitated. You know I’m a fan of Open Space, but there are other techniques as well. But the invitation is critical, and so is how you facilitate (=from the Latin ‘make easier’) the dynamic of the group, engaging their passion and sense of responsibility, and steering them to voluntary action.
Discharge fear. In each of the 4 steps above, you will face people’s fear: People afraid to admit they don’t know what to do, or that they can’t solve their own problems, or that they’re not doing well. People afraid that you’re a spy for some group they don’t trust, and that by talking with you or letting you observe them you’ll get them into trouble. People afraid of the people on ‘the other side’ that they will have to talk to. People afraid to imagine a way out of the current hopeless or mind-numbing situation. People afraid to be passionate, and afraid of responsibility. You need to surface these fears, get them out on the table, name them, and then work to discharge them by talking about the astonishing outcomes that are possible if they can get past these fears, and showing that these outcomes are a ‘win’ for everyone involved.

Not easy, is it? But worth it!

So if that’s how we build bridges, how do we make them Velcro bridges? How do we make them ‘sticky’ — enough to snag people before they hesitate and go back, or when they don’t even realize it’s a bridge worth crossing? How do we attach little ‘hooks’ to the bridges that will fit with and latch onto the ‘loops’ in their own makeup? And how do we build them in such a way that, after we’ve gone and are no longer a part of the process, people continue to cross the bridge of their own volition, when they come across it, when they’re ready?

I have a few ideas on this too, but I need some more thoughts from you, dear readers. Tell me what you think, and I’ll assemble the resultsinto a Part Two of this article.

Category: Working Smarter: Complexity and Discovery

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