how to save the world

A Plea for the Protection of Wilderness: Rick Bass in Orion writes a moving and poetic argument for wilderness protection, but also for responsible consumption:

The Story of Stuff: A brilliant little video explains how our economy really works, and why most of what we’re taught about our economy is a lie.

How Should a Responsible Male Behave?: Just when I’d kind of written off the whole male gender, one of my readers writes a fascinating article on how the 21st century male (the ‘alpha male’) should behave. His list has a decidedly male skew and point of view to it, and it uses a different vocabulary from the feminine love/conversation/community language that has recently become my preferred means of expression, but it’s pretty impressive. What do you think?

Love the One You’re With (Even at Work): Perhaps it’s telling that my favourite reading in Salon.com has shifted from Andrew Leonard’s How the World Works (the excellent business/economics column I cite in these pages so often) to the feminist column Broadsheet. This week Katharine Mieszkowski explains why office romances are an enduring phenomenon of our times, and why they’re more hazardous for women.

US Chamber of Commerce Disgraces Itself: HTWW explains they’ve fallen under the control of the right-wing corporatist oligopolies, and are running ads opposed to carbon emission taxes.

James Kunstler Explains the Disaster of Suburbia: Dave Smith let me know that Jim’s 2004 TED talk is now online.

Theory of Community-Based Generosity Economy: Interesting summary of why community-based economies are healthier than import/export based economies, from Regenerosity.

Taking Water from the Air: Reader Craig De Ruisseau points out a new invention that, at least at the community level, could help us cope more sustainably with drought. Another great example of Biomimicry.

A Writer’s Writer Shows Us How to Blog: Freelance writer Liz Seymour is one of the finest storytellers on the planet. From the first sentence of every blog post you’re hooked. While I’d love to believe that blogs are conversations, Liz shows us that they are, most effectively, fireside chats in which we each take turns telling a story, lovingly, that conveys something of who we are, and something else important.

Thought for the week, from Rick Bass in Orion:

What I’m Thinking of Writing (and Podcasting) About Soon:

Love, Conversation and Community: I remain convinced that

So if it seems as if, these days, I don’t write about anything else, that’s why. This week I’m going to write about the essential aspects of intentional community other than the social aspects (capacities and principles) I wrote about earlier. One of these aspects, I think, is the intention to live a life of Radical Simplicity.

Vignette #8

Blog-Hosted Conversation #4: I’m going to interview one of the women who’s lived in a polyamorous relationship or circle, and who believes that such communities can work and are the natural way to live, and love.

Possible open thread conversation: If you’re still working within the political, economic or educational system in the hope that you can bring about meaningful change to those systems, if you think it really matters who wins the next election, no matter where you live, why is that? Why haven’t you given up on thosesystems?

What I’m Thinking of Writing (and Podcasting) About Soon:

Love, Conversation and Community: I remain convinced that

So if it seems as if, these days, I don’t write about anything else, that’s why.

The Evolving Role of the Information Professional: Since I listed the five major ‘products’ of my new employer, some people have suggested that this list might define the new role of the information professional in all sorts of organizations.

Gangs and the Malleability of Human Ethics: Observers of the now decade-long intractable genocides and civil wars in Darfur, Somalia, Chad, Zaire and other African nations describe the same gang phenomena repeated endlessly: Men horrifically tortured and slaughtered, women systematically and repeatedly raped, children kidnapped and forced into slavery and military duty, animals and other resources stolen, and villages burned to the ground. What is it about human nature that so many can perpetrate such atrocities for so long without remorse?

Vignettes #7 and #8

Blog-Hosted Conversation #4: I’m going to interview one of the women who’s lived in a polyamorous relationship or circle, and who believes that such communities can work and are the natural way to live, and love.

Now the revisions to my book on Natural Enterprise are finally in to the publisher, I should have more time for blogging, and answering e-mails and comments. Thanks for bearing with me.

Possible Open Thread Question:

What is it about the female psyche that so many women are willing to sacrifice themselves just toplease selfish thoughtless arrogant men?

Image: Remember Next Winter, by prismes, from deviantart.

All About Polyamory:

A Little Bit of Politics: While I’ve been preoccupied with love, conversation and community, a few important things are still happening in the political world:

• HTWW reports that in Norway, if you do what all the North American financial institutions do and borrow and lend recklessly, and stick your employees and creditors with the consequences of your irresponsibility, you lose your corporate charter. Bravo!
• WWF reports that Europe’s carbon trading scheme is bedeviled with fraudulent carbon credit claims and filings.
• Economists Brad Setser reports that the US trade and financial deficit has become so bad that demand for the $US has completely dried up.
• Paul Krugman reports that while the stock market soars, the average US citizen is struggling, and hopping mad.
• And Americans also have stopped trusting the corporatist food production system. You’re going to eat that?

Classical Music on YouTube: Thanks to my new friend CleverClogs for putting me on to these amazing recordings. Finally, the chance to compare different performers’ versions of my favourite classical music. Here are some of my favourites:

• Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G, 2nd mvmt
• Shostakovich’s 2nd Piano Concerto, adagio
• and a hilarious version of ‘Rachmaninoff had big hands‘

Thought for the Week:  My recent twitter rant:

1. Please take a look at this wonderful 4-page article by David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World. This was the presentation David made at the conference I attended in Boston a couple of weeks ago. In it, David does the following:
• Correctly identifies the causes of the social and environmental crises now facing us: overpopulation, overconsumption of resources, inequality and ‘institutional pathology’ (the fact that ‘private-benefit’ corporations are designed to increase consumption and inequality, instead of to advance the public good)
• Prescribes what is needed: reduced consumption, redistributed wealth and power, reallocation of resources from harmful to beneficial uses, increasing ‘natural capital’ while reducing financial capital, and freeing up knowledge (removing intellectual property rights) to accelerate social innovation, adaptation and learning.
• Calls for the breaking up and replacement of ‘private benefit’ corporations with rechartered ‘public benefit’ corporations with a mandate to produce what is needed for social and environmental health and well-being instead of to produce as much as possible as profitably as possible; these would serve as catalysts for the creation of a new decentralized, self-organizing economy consisting of self-reliant community-based economies, comprised in turn of locally-rooted, human-scale, fair-trade enterprises (what I have called ‘Natural Enterprises’).
• Calls for leadership of citizens who reject capitalism ‘working from outside the existing institutions of elite power’, to educate others and demand ‘strong, active, democratically accountable governments to set and enforce rules’ to create this new economy.
2. Then please take a look at my article from Tuesday, which the graphic above is from. You’ll notice that what Korten is calling for is precisely the model corresponding to the Natural social worldview in the lower left of this graphic: Natural Enterprises making up a Natural Economy operating within devolved-power, self-sufficient Natural Communities. 

What’s your reaction to Korten’s proposal? Mine was that it’s exactly the impossible and unachievable change we need. Citizens just don’t rise up against a dysfunctional socio-economic-political system and replace it with something else. And if they did, they would be fighting the government of the day to the death, since that government exists precisely to defend and sustain the existing dysfunctional economy. We are not going to have a collective anti-capitalist uprising and revolution, and even if we were governments certainly wouldn’t be responsive to it.

Let me say it again: Whether you want to change the political or economic system, save the whales, stop global warming, reform education, spark innovation or anything else, the answer is in how meaning, and understanding of what needs to be done, emerges from conversation in community with people you love, people who care.

That’s the way you see the solution to problems when you take the ‘feminine’ Natural social worldview in the lower right of the graphic above. If (let’s be optimistic, when) communities start having conversations about this, and start to really care about it, so it goes from the ‘nice to do’ list (that never gets done) to the ‘have to do’ list (that does get done) — when that happens, the kind of emergence of ‘what needs to be done’ is unlikely to be revolution, mass uprising, or pressuring of governments. The consensus on ‘What needs to be done’ is more likely to be a walking away from the existing economy, a refusal to do business with ‘private-benefit’ corporations, and the creation of local, mostly women-run cooperatives, Natural Enterprises within a cooperative local Natural Economy. We’ll just drop out of the industrial economy, and starve it to death. It’s our consumption that drives the current dysfunctional economy, after all.

I wonder if I can persuade my publisher, Chelsea Green, to give copies of my book on Natural Enterprise awayfree to aspiring women entrepreneurs.

C

Imagine that you love someone completely, and that they passionately crave and enjoy the company of another for one of the following reasons:

• his/her intelligence, ideas, knowledge, imagination, creativity, curiosity, wit, sense of fun, sense of humour, sense of play, beliefs, expressiveness, hobbies or passions
• his/her emotional warmth, empathy, ability to communicate on a common emotional plane, heart, generosity, perceptiveness, fire, energy, strength, sensitivity, appreciation, tolerance, capacity for love, trustworthiness, or responsibility
• his/her beauty, art, talent, spirit, connectedness, synaesthesia, or aesthetic sensibility
• his/her sex appeal, skill/capacity at love-making, erotic mystery, or promise of sexual variety

How would you feel? Insecure? Inadequate? Threatened? Jealous? Angry? Hurt? Envious? Vulnerable? Turned off? Fearful?

Now imagine that this lover told you you were silly to feel this way, that his/her love for you was undiminished or even strengthened by his/her other loves, and that it would be good for you to also find other lovers whose company you enjoy.

Now how would you feel? Rejected? Humiliated? Ridiculous?

The key to compersion is to learn not to feel any of these negative emotions, and instead to feel delight in the pleasure your lover finds in others that enlarges his/her happiness and frees you from the expectation that you must be all things to him/her. This allows you to be, for him/her, exactly what you are that he/she loves, and at the same time frees you to find other lovers who spark something in you, not necessarily better than what you get from him/her, but different.

Now imagine that each of you has five other lovers, making a dozen people in all who you both love, either directly or because of what they do for the ones you love directly. And imagine that these twelve people in your polyamorous circle have made a pledge of polyfidelity (to love only these same 12 people, and to leave the circle if they choose to love others outside the circle, the community.

Do you feel better now? Does the ‘safety in numbers’ of the circle, the absolute abundance of love available to you, make compersion possible when it wasn’t when the circle was small or uneven?

In many recent conversations with people who are in, or were in, or think they might one day be in such a relationship, I’ve heard these three comments over and over:

1. Males seem to have more of a problem with compersion than females, especially when the circle is small and open. This is the finding that troubles me most.
2. While many see the polyamorous/compersion lifestyle as a worthy ideal, they also view it as idealistic and even unachievable or unnatural. This may be due to the fact that we are unpracticed, in our modern, love-starved, love-as-scarce-resource, competitive, untrusting society. It may take a generation of experimenting with polyamorous circles and communities before they become (or, some think, re-become) just the way many of us live and love.
3. The circles seem to work better when women are mostly responsible for managing them. This is pretty easy to understand — most women are more grounded and better at listening and seeking consensus than most men. 

I’d like to believe the first of these finding is just the result of lack of practice setting aside the negative feelings we associate with our lovers loving others, but I’m not so sure. I’ve felt pangs of these negative feelings myself, despite the deep and growing circle of loving and generous friends that are in my life.

Is there something wrong with me, or is this just the way men are — are our bodies just telling us to choose one person to love and battle other men jealously for her (or his, if you’re gay) exclusive love?

To try to get at the answer to this question, I considered what would be an evolutionary advantage — would polyamory or monogamy bode better for the health and well-being of the whole circle, community or culture? To me the answer to this is a no-brainer: polyamory groups should be better equipped and inclined to defend and advance the interests of the whole. So polyamorism should be the natural way to live and love.

So if this is true, what’s wrong with us (men in particular) that we now find it so hard to behave naturally? I suspect it comes down to “it’s the only life we know” — we won’t viscerally believe in polyamorous circles and communities, where compersion holds sway, until we’ve seen models, first hand, that show such communities work.

For those of us who want to make the world a better place, then, our job would appear to be clear: Try, experiment, learn from polyamorous circles and intentional communities until we have evolved some working models, with the bugs worked out of them and the natural rules of engagement for them re-discovered. We owe it to ourselves, our sad love-deprived world, and the generations that follow.

For the rest of my life, this will be, I suspect, one of my key goals, purposes, and intentions. In a world gone mad, where every conceivable political and economic approach to saving it has been tried and found wanting, this may be our last chance. I said yesterday that life’s meaning emerges from conversation in community with people you love. The rediscovery of compersion as natural human behaviour may therefore be the way home, to the place we have always belonged, and the essential way of living we have tragically forgotten..

Photo by Rhonda Miller from this remarkable Metroactive article about polyamory.

No Love Left in the World: A lovely little Thanksgiving post from Jen Lemen. A heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

A Polyamorous Potpourri: Since I’ve recently become somewhat obsessed with this subject (in the context of creating natural intentional community), I’ve been reading a lot about it. Here’s some of what I’ve discovered. Thanks to the wonderful women who pointed these articles out, and who, just to be on the safe side, I won’t publicly identify here:

• Polyamorism in the news
• Polyamorism weekly blog
• Polyamorism – livejournal (just rich conversations, and so, extremely useful)
• Monogamy vs Polyamorism – a startlingly candid view from a guy who’s living it
• The Green-Eyed Monster – managing jealousy in polyamorous/open relationships

Stephen Downes on the Reality of Virtual Learning: This guy’s just brilliant. Learning as flow, and everything you thought you knew about reality is wrong, or at least subjective. Just go listen/read/browse.

Jeff Buckley’s Everybody Here Wants You: Melisa’s nomination for most romantic song ever, a perfect choice.

Thought for the Week: from The Feet of Duende by Michael Meade (thanks to Eric Lilius for the link)