Joyless Responsibility

Posted on September 13, 2007 by Dave Pollard

griefI‘ve written recently about the importance of each of us accepting personal responsibility for our actions, for our inactions, and for knowing their consequences. It is natural to accept responsibility, because in nature it is almost always joyful. It entails raising offspring, together, as community, and looking out for each other. It entails taking only what we need and knowing that by living simply we are preserving and sustaining a rich diversity of life that reciprocates our taking responsibility, and provides for us, so that our lives can continue to be joyful, astonishing, easy.

But sometimes we have to take responsibility that is joyless, a burden, a thankless chore. For a few weeks each year when the fledglings are young, the adult birds in our yard look disheveled, exhausted. They know, I suppose, that it will pass, so they labour on, but they look tragic, unnatural. For many humans, too, responsibility is thrust on us unasked, even unfairly, and in our modern fractured nuclear society it is rarely shared.

In civilized human society, these burdens may not be so short-lived. We can suddenly find ourselves facing a lengthy term of joyless responsibility for:

  • Elder relatives incapable of looking after themselves
  • Troubled or handicapped children or other relatives
  • More dependents than we can cope with
  • Animals (often ill or unsocialized) that no one else will take responsibility for
  • A dysfunctional spouse or addicted family member
  • Sustaining a marriage that is loveless and dysfunctional
  • A farm or small business that is overwhelmingly stressful and not really viable (the suicide rate among farmers in some nations is epidemic)
  • Charitable, social work or health care work
  • Dysfunctional students
  • Subordinate employees and co-workers in a stressful, unmanageable corporation
  • Unmanageable debts or contractual obligations

The work that comes with this responsibility, in addition to being protracted, perhaps even interminable, is also often arduous, unappreciated, and not terribly successful at making anything better. No surprise, then, that we see so much stress and unhappiness in the extraordinarily affluent nations of our world. No surprise, either, that escape, if only for a week, or a day, or the length of time the next substance-induced ‘high’ lasts, is the fondest dream of so many.

Some of this responsibility is thrust on people unwillingly, in which case the sufferer often feels the world is treating them unfairly. Some of it is, at least initially, accepted willingly, even embraced with excitement, but later, as frustration, failure and disillusionment set in, becomes loathsome, unbearable, and then there is the additional torment of feeling that it was their fault, that they have only themselves to blame.

How do we cope when this happens to us? If there were an easy answer it wouldn’t be such a prevalent and intractable problem for so many. In some cases it may be possible to:

  1. Spread the responsibility: Reach out and ask others to help. This may require swallowing one’s pride, or paying or making some other sacrifice. In some cases this cost is so unbearable or unaffordable that it’s not worth it. In some cases, where the helpers are incompetent or lazy, it may not help. In some cases it may take skills or time or energy to find the right people to help, that the sufferer just doesn’t have. But sometimes it works. Many hands make light work, and all that.
  2. Share the grief: Losing our freedom can cause more suffering than almost any other imaginable affliction. It can make us crazy. Telling someone who cares can, sometimes, for some people, help partly unburden, get the grief and anger and terror out there where it can be seen for what it is, instead of bottled up inside. 
  3. Increase resilience: Sleep and exercise can make the unbearable a little less unbearable. 
  4. Just walk away: This one is tougher, and rarely works, but in those cases where it is clear that (a) the responsibility will never end, it’s for life, and (b) the work you’re doing is not really helping, it may be the answer, the only answer. Is it irresponsible to give up on a failed marriage, a job looking after the needy that’s burning you out, or an obligation that can’t ever be repaid? Maybe. But sometimes you have to weigh your responsibility to yourself against that owed to others. If you trust your instincts, sometimes they will tell you what you can’t bear to admit to yourself.

I’ve written before about another form of grief, regret for what happened in the past, or what might have been but never was, and how pointless but tempting it is to let that grief eat you up forever. The grief of putting up with unbearable stress, responsibility and self-deprivation in the hope that it is really making a difference, that, in the end, it will all have been worthwhile, is the mirror image of this, another self-constructed and endlessly agonizing fiction.

But suppose we do not live today with such responsibility. What then is our responsibility to the billions of others who are living lives of endless, lonely, joyless responsibility? What if anything do we owe them?

The prevailing ethos of our time is that ‘we are not our brother’s keeper’, but that we are responsible for family members in need. As well-entrenched as this ethos is in most modern religions, its logic is unfathomable to me. We are either responsible for others or we are not. And if we are, and if by accepting responsibility we are merely exchanging someone else’s unbearable anguish and burden for our own, what do we accomplish?

I have no answers to these questions. The problem of our responsibility in a world of so much suffering is an intractable one, and it has no simple answers, if it has any answer at all. Perhaps that realization is what inspired Eliot to write the Four Quartets, and especially these three excerpts on global human suffering and how we cope with it:

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere…

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present…

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.

(Sigh.) I still have so much to learn.

Category: Being Human
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 5 Comments

Need Less

Posted on September 12, 2007 by Dave Pollard
giftThe essence of radical simplicity, of the gift/generosity economy, of natural community, and of natural entrepreneurship, I think, is needing less. Needing less makes us, as individuals, members of enterprises, communities and societies, more self-sufficient, and more resilient, and allows us to give more with the ‘excess’ time, energy and money that we have by virtue of needing less. Meanwhile, the industrial economy is utterly dependent on consumers needing (or thinking they need) more and more. Need creates scarcity, and scarcity increases neediness. Without ever-increasing need there can be no growth, and without continuous growth, the industrial economy collapses. By contrast, the natural economy is sustainable indefinitely requiring only generosity, resilience and innovation.

It is increasingly obvious that our world can no longer afford the industrial economy, and the manufactured needs that perpetuate it. As co-dependents of the ruinous corpocracy desolating the Earth to fill these needs, we have become addicts to the endless satisfaction of these needs — by virtue of how we work and what we work at, our helplessness, and our boredom, borne from poverty of imagination.

In order to need less, we do not have to become ascetics or martyrs, nor do we have to sacrifice. What we do have to do:

  1. Rethink where and how we work: Of course face-to-face meetings and working in constant physical proximity with co-workers and customers is preferable. It is also, today, an extravagance. The resources we squander simply to be physically closer together are obscene. We must quickly and dramatically simplify and improve the technologies for Simple Virtual Presence, and then make them ubiquitous and mandatory. We should then make commuting a social sin, unless you job actually requires you to touch ‘hard’ products — products that cannot be captured in bits and transmitted electronically. I would guess that that would reduce the need for (a) office buildings, (b) cars and airplanes, (c) gasoline, (d) business attire and travel accessories, and (e) high salaries and long work-hours to pay for these things, and would save a ton of time that in turn would reduce other needs that are currently a direct result of spending most of our waking hours either in cars or away from home.
  2. Think and buy longer-term, and learn to make, do and fix things ourselves: Much of what we ‘need’ to buy is replacements for the shoddy crap that clogs the malls and supermarkets, and fills our sloppily-constructed homes. We should make the manufacturers of everything take back and recycle, reuse or (if necessary) pay for disposal of everything we buy when it breaks or wears out, at their cost. Then the cost of poor quality, throw-away junk will be pushed back to the manufacturers, driving most of them out of business. What will be left will be durable, well-made and, yes, more expensive. It will also mostly be locally-made, because Chinese manufacturers will have to pay to take back the crap they sell us, and they won’t be able to afford to. We can help by learning to make and do and fix things ourselves, as a hobby, and also as a means of self-liberation from dependency on others who, usually, can’t be depended on.
  3. Learn to entertain ourselves, in community: A huge amount of money is spent on so-called entertainment and recreation ‘products’, mostly junky, overpriced, and dominated by oligopolies. This industry of schlockmeisters preys on our imaginative poverty, our isolation from others (even in our own physical communities), and on our exhaustion (much of it from energy-wasting commuting, shopping and other avoidable activities). If we did (1) and (2) above, and got together with others in our communities, we would be able to create our own music, theatre, films, games and other entertainments. This would exercise our creativity and imaginations, be more satisfying, and re-engage us socially with people other than family and work colleagues, all of which have benefits that extend far beyond just reducing our needs.
  4. Do things together: Reintegration into physical communities would also allow us to realize the benefits of collaboration, reducing the need for us to hire outsiders to do things for us, and the need to buy stuff ‘self-ishly’ just for our household, even though it is rarely used and all our neighbours have the same stuff sitting rarely-used in their houses. We could also learn new skills from this collaboration, further reducing our need to buy goods and services from others. 

So much for most of our financial and physical needs. What about our emotional neediness — the need for the other stuff in Maslow’s hierarchy — security, love and attention and appreciation, self-esteem and meaning and self-actualization? I would argue that (3) and (4) above would also increase the amount of security and attention and appreciation we get, and (2) and (4) above would increase our self-esteem, by increasing our competencies and self-sufficiency.

But how else can we reduce our emotional neediness? I think one way is through generosity — by looking out for others, loving them, paying attention to them, appreciating them, genuinely complimenting them, showing and teaching and helping them, we reduce their emotional neediness. We turn scarcity of love, attention, appreciation and self-esteem into abundance. How do we know this generosity will be repaid in kind? We don’t. But it might. And it doesn’t cost us anything, except a bit of time and effort (which (1)-(4) above can give us more of) to begenerous with these gifts.

Give more… Need less.

Category: Let-Self-Change
Posted in Collapse Watch | 4 Comments

Vignette #5: The Cat Who Was Never Let Out and the Bird Who Was Never Let In (A Fable)

Posted on September 11, 2007 by Dave Pollard
Terry Krysak

Once upon a time, in a condominium in the centre of a big city, there lived a slightly plump cat who was never let out. Every day, she would stare out the screen window of the condominium at the traffic and the people rushing by and the dogs being walked and the bicycles tinkling their bells and, of course, at the birds.

One of those birds, which was also slightly plump, perched on the streetlight outside the condominium window every day. And every day the cat who was never let out would crouch down and stare at the bird who was never let in, and the bird who was never let in would stare back.

J Scott Bovitz

I imagine the cat who was never let out envied the bird who was never let in. I imagine she imagined chasing and catching and eating the bird, and imagined it tasted delicious. I imagine she wondered what it would be like to be outside. I wonder if the cat could ever remember being outside.

I imagine the bird who was never let in wondered what it would be like to be inside. The cat who was never let out seemed very content and well-fed and perhaps a little lazy. What would it be like to never have to do anything, to get food and warmth for nothing?

One day, the cat who was never let out got a special treat: Her breakfast was served on the window sill where she watched the world and the bird who was never let in. This was too much for the bird who was never let in. He flew down onto the cement awning (over the first floor shops below) outside the second-story window where the cat who was never let out was eating and staring. He walked right up to the window and pecked at the screen where the breakfast bowl was sitting. The cat who was never let out lunged and the screen gave way, falling onto the cement awning, with the cat tumbling on top of it. The bird who was never let in retreated to the streetlight.

For a moment the cat who was never let out (who was now out) froze. Then cautiously she crept to the edge of the awning and peered over the edge.

Suddenly the bird who was never let in made a beeline for the cat’s food on the window sill. The bird who was never let in was now in. The cat who was never let out, who was out, charged back in in pursuit. After much noise and feathers flying the bird who was never let in emerged and retreated towards the streetlight again. The cat who was never let out came back out and lunged after the bird who was never let in (who was out, on the edge of the cement awning) and toppled over the edge, twelve feet to the sidewalk below.

Slightly dazed but not hurt, the cat who was never let out, who was now really out, panicked at the shouts of a cyclist whizzing by, and she darted into the traffic. Horns honked as cars screeched to a halt, but she made it safely across and cowered in a basement window grating, mewing piteously.

Meanwhile, the bird who was never let in, was back in, eating the food of the cat who was never let out, who was out. Screams ensued as two women appeared at the window in panic. One of them ran out the door to the stairs to find the cat who was never let out (who was out) while the other picked up a broom and began chasing the bird who was never let in (who was in) all around the condominium apartment.

The poor bird who was never let in (who was in) was squawking in terror, trying to find the way out in the maze of little rooms in the little apartment, and to avoid the swinging broom of the hysterical woman. Finally, he found the exit and swooped out, and the woman carefully retrieved the screen from the cement awning and put it back into place.

The other woman had by then retrieved the cat who was never let out (who was out, hiding in the window grating) and was scolding her angrily but holding her tightly as she crossed the road and went back into the apartment.

And so the cat who was never let out was back in, and the bird who was never let in was back out.

The next day, as the cat who was never let out jumped up to the window sill, she discovered the window had been closed. She could still look out, but she could not hear the sounds or smell the smells.

Soon after, the bird who was never let in soared down and perched on the streetlight. The two creatures stared at each other. Can you imagine what they were thinking?

And then suddenly, it was as if the cat who was never let out winked at the bird who was never let in. Or was she blinking back a tear? And then the bird who was never let in shrugged and tilted his head and laughed at the cat who was never let out. Or was it a sigh?

And since then, every day the cat who was never let out waits for the bird who was never let in, and they stare at each other and gesture to each other. As if they know something we could never imagine.

Cat photo by local photographer Terry Krysak. Bird photo by J. Scott Bovitz.
No creatures were harmed in the making of this fable. The cat and the bird are real; I see them every day from my office window. The story isimagined.

Category: Fables (for my granddaughter Cassandra)
Posted in Creative Works | 4 Comments

Natural Enterprise: The Book, The Title, The Web Tools, and the Journey

Posted on September 10, 2007 by Dave Pollard
working naturally
As you probably know, my book on creating sustainable, responsible, joyful, community-based businesses will be published in the Spring by Chelsea Green. I need some assistance from readers to finalize a title and subtitle, and to design the web tools that will accompany the book.

The original title for the book was Natural Enterprise. In discussions with another publisher and with my agent, the title morphed to Working Naturally: Discovering What You Were Meant to Do and How to Do It Responsibly, Sustainably, and Joyfully.

Chelsea Green has challenged me to revisit the original title (or something close: The Natural Entrepreneur) and to condense or change the subtitle to something shorter and punchier.

As the graphic above suggests, the book’s purpose is:

  • To help you better understand and overcome the fears of entrepreneurship, and assess whether you have it in you to be an entrepreneur — i.e. when you’re dissatisfied with your current work (or lack of work), to help you answer the question “now what do I do?”
  • To help you discover the ‘sweet spot’ where your Gifts (what you do uniquely well), your Passions (what you love doing) and your Purpose (what is needed in the market, that you care about) intersect i.e. what you were meant to do; and also who you were meant to work with
  • To explain to you what a Natural Enterprise is, and the important ways it differs from most modern businesses, and why Natural Enterprises are inherently more responsible, sustainable, improvisational, collaborative, resilient, and joyful
  • To teach you how to do exceptional market research, to find unmet needs that are in your ‘sweet spot’
  • To help you imagine ways to fill those needs, and then teach you the innovation process to bring your ideas to fruition

So what do you think — do you prefer Natural Enterprise, Working Naturally, The Natural Entrepreneur, or something else as the main title? And how would you shorten or change the subtitle to capture the gist in fewer words than my sixteen?

The three-part website accompanying my book will contain tools to help people (a) find their ‘sweet spot’, and people to make a living with, (b) share success stories and war stories of what has worked and what hasn’t, and (c) expose needs and ideas that might address them to ‘the wisdom of crowds’.

The first of these tools, Finding Natural Partners, would enable you to discover and share your ‘sweet spot’ with others — you could identify the Gift(s) and Passion(s) you have that are ‘on Purpose’. You could search for other people who share your Purpose and whose Gift(s) and Passion(s) complement your own — potential Natural Enterprise partners. You could discover what other people have identified as their Purpose and (if it resonated with you) make it your own. You could discover how Natural Partnerships had emerged in other communities, and replicate them in your own community.

The tool for doing this would have to be very simple, intuitive, and fun to use. Any complexity would have to be ‘buried under the hood’. It should also enable both virtual conversations and face-to-face meetings. It has to be more structured than a discussion forum but less structured than a form-filling exercise. The process of discovering your ‘sweet spot’ is iterative, so the process of using the tool has to be flexible and not tedious. I’m not even sure it can be ‘specified’ — it may have to evolve. Peer production, anyone? Should I set up a very simple wiki or some other tool to ‘talk through’ its design?

The second tool is the Natural Enterprise Community, and while it sounds like a forum, it’s actually more of a storybook. I foresee it being a place where people could tell their story, complete with moral (“remember to do this” or “don’t do that”), in the first person plural. Because I have never discovered a Natural Enterprise that’s a sole proprietorship, I will seed this with some collective success stories and some cautionary war stories about people who tried to do everything themselves. I’d like to offer a story template, but not impose it on anyone. Stories are valuable because they provide context through detail and specifics (so-called ‘best practices’ and ‘benchmarks’ usually oversimplify and sacrifice that essential context). We are all natural storytellers, and I just want to create a place where people can share their stories.

The third tool is the Natural Collaboratory. This is an ‘idea market’ with a difference — no money changes hands. It’s a place for people to float ideas, do some secondary research, and get a ‘crowd’ of prospective customers and coworkers to assess these ideas, and perhaps even serve as the launching pad for Open Source, Peer Production or Open Space activities to move these ideas forward.

I see this third tool as being more structured. Each idea should be based on some real, primary research that indicates there is an unmet need to be filled, and the need and the research needs to be spelled out, as context for the idea (and to avoid people just being lazy and posting their pet ideas without having done the homework, and to shut up people who just ‘black hat’ ideas by claiming there is no unmet need for them). But beyond that I can see the idea development as very collaborative, very conversational, going where it will, facilitated by some real-time Skype or other inexpensive technology to allow more iteration and rapid idea development than forums permit. This is not intended to be a vehicle for innovation — in most cases I think innovation needs more resources and energy than any online tool could manage. It is a vehicle for ideation — for thinking out loud about how identified needs might be solved, imaginatively, without getting sidetracked by the details of commercialization.

I am a little worried that people will be afraid to float ideas in case someone else steals them. The book explains that even great ideas are pre-commercial, and it is the innovation process that separates great ideas from great products and services. But some fear is inevitable. I am going to see whether we might use some kind of preemptive ‘idea registration’ process to preclude anyone taking a great idea and spending a fortune to patent every imaginable application of it. Ideas should always be free, and freely shared.

I’d welcome your thoughts on these tools. I don’t want anyone rushing ahead to prototype them, because they need to be collectively imagined and talked through first. I doubt that anyone will be able to make money developing them — my hope is that they will serve as ‘working models’ for other applications that need similar enabling processes and infrastructure.

They might even be among the first of a new generation of social networking tools that have actually been designed to meet a specific business need, so that unlike Web 1.0 and 2.0 tools they might actually achieve sustainedtraction in the business community. It’s worth a try.

So — title, subtitle, tool evolution — what do you think?
Posted in Working Smarter | 25 Comments

Sunday Open Thread — September 9, 2007

Posted on September 9, 2007 by Dave Pollard
Shh
What I’m thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon:

Joyless Responsibility: I’ve written recently about the importance of each of us accepting personal responsibility for our actions, for our inactions, and for knowing their consequences. It is natural to accept responsibility, because in nature it is almost always joyful. It entails raising offspring, together, as community, and looking out for each other. It entails taking only what we need and knowing that by living simply we are preserving and sustaining a rich diversity of life that reciprocates our taking responsibility, and provides for us, so that our lives can continue to be joyful, astonishing, easy. But sometimes we have to take responsibility that is joyless, a burden, a thankless chore. For a few weeks each year when the fledglings are young, the adult birds in our yard look disheveled, exhausted. They know, I suppose, that it will pass, so they labour on, but they look tragic, unnatural. For many humans, too, responsibility is thrust on us unasked, even unfairly, and in our modern fractured nuclear society it is rarely shared. How do we cope when this happens to us? And what is our responsibility before that time, when we know billions of others are living lives of endless, lonely, joyless responsibility?

Need Less: The essence of radical simplicity, of the gift/generosity economy, of natural community, and of natural entrepreneurship, I think, is needing less. Needing less makes us, as individuals, members of enterprises, communities and societies, more self-sufficient, and more resilient, and allows us to give more with the ‘excess’ time, energy and money that we have by virtue of needing less. Meanwhile, the industrial economy is utterly dependent on consumers needing (or thinking they need) more and more. Without ever-increasing need there can be no growth, and without continuous growth, the industrial economy collapses. By contrast, the natural economy is sustainable indefinitely requiring only generosity, resilience and innovation.

Vignettes: Coming up soon, vignette #5.

Blog-Hosted Conversations: Delayed a couple of weeks due to technical problems with Skype and with Pamela, the software I was using to record the conversations. So starting next week, this blog will feature 30-minute conversations, initially on the subject of “What is your model of a better way to live, and what capacities do we need to develop or re-learn to live that way?”

Open Thread Question:

What’s your single favourite work of art, and why?
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 6 Comments

Saturday Links for the Week — September 8, 2007 — The Anti-Corporatist Edition

Posted on September 8, 2007 by Dave Pollard
corporationEnding the Personhood of Corporations:

Corporate Crime Reporter has a fascinating review of Robert Reich’s new book Supercapitalism. It’s good to see a mainstream politician (Reich was Clinton’s Secretary of Labor) who gets why corporations are inherently pathological, and what to do about it. Excerpt:

Companies cannot act with criminal intent because they have no human capacity for intent. Arthur Andersen may have sounded like a person but the accounting firm was a legal fiction. . . how can any jury, under any circumstances, find that a company ëknewí that ëitsí actions were wrong? A company cannot know right from wrong. A company is incapable of knowing anything. Nor does a company itself take action. Only people know right from wrong, and only people act. That is a basic tenet of democracy.

As I’ve reported before, the courts made a huge mistake decades ago when they gave corporations ‘personhood’, the rights of persons under the law without commensurate responsibility (their liability is limited by law). When you give anyone (or anything) rights without responsibilities you are asking it to behave irresponsibly.

I agree completely with Reich that corporations should have no standing whatsoever under the law — they are fictions, constructions of convenience that were designed for one purpose, the raising of money for collective enterprise. They were never designed or intended to be lobbyists or litigants, or to do anything other than hold and disburse collective moneys in accordance with the needs of the enterprise while protecting investors from financial liability beyond the amount of their investment.

On the one hand, that means that they should not have any legal standing in court — no right to sue or to hear ‘their’ arguments. As non-persons they should not be allowed to disburse funds or to lobby for political purposes.

The quid quo pro, as Reich argues, is that they should not be allowed to be sued, nor should they pay taxes. You don’t sue the corporation, you sue the executives, the directors, and (to the extent they vote for measures that cause injury) the shareholders. Since the corporation is a fiction, a financial holding instrument, no one should be allowed to hide behind the corporation, and corporations as non-persons should not be allowed to indemnify anyone from litigation. When any decision you make exposes you to direct personal liability for the consequences of that decision, you’re going to act responsibly in making that decision.

Likewise, corporations should not pay taxes. Today, corporations act as tax shelters, because corporation taxes are lower than personal taxes. Stripped of its personhood, corporations would not be able to shelter shareholders from tax, because the income would flow through to the shareholders and be taxed in those individual shareholders’ hands. It then makes no difference whether profits are distributed as bonuses, share options, or dividends, or are retained in the corporation for reinvestment. The individuals, real people have earned the profit, and they should pay tax on it. Corporations were designed to be, and should be, completely transparent.

The removal of personhood, of identity to corporations has other implications as well. What happens when the executives, directors and shareholders need to decide between two courses of action, one of which will benefit the shareholders and the other of which will benefit the employees or the community or the environment? Today, executives and directors can be sued or dismissed for failure to resolve such conflicts uncompromisingly in favour of maximizing profit accruing to shareholders. The argument is that it is ‘unfair’ for executives and directors to be liable for balancing conflicting needs and wants. Yet we all have to do this every day of our lives — e.g. we balance our personal needs and values against those of our employer and those of our employer’s customers, which are often in conflict. Why should executives and directors be treated differently?

I believe every corporation should have a charter, developed and approved by shareholders, that stakes out their collective philosophical position and guides directors and executives in their actions. If it says damn the employees and the environment, let’s ravage the planet and offshore all the jobs to Asia to line shareholders’ pockets, that’s up to them. As investors, community members, and members of watchdog agencies, we will then be able to determine whether we want to ‘take any stock’ in such a corporation, and how much attention we should be paying to the actions of that corporation’s people and, when necessary, suing them personally for violation of the law. If the charter says social and environmental responsibility are paramount, and rank ahead of the financial interests of shareholders, then shareholders will have no cause to complain if short-run profit growth (and share price) suffers in the interests of creating longer-term sustainability.

This is all about personal responsibility for one’s actions, including one’s actions as a so-called ‘agent’ of a corporation, and as someone who gives their money to those who run corporations, in the knowledge that that money can be used in a variety of ways, ways that have consequences. It includes the responsibility to be informed and to take an active part in understanding what those consequences are.

(a tip of the hat to Common Dreams, in my view the best aggregator of what’s happening that’s important in the world)

What Else Is New This Week:
Posted in How the World Really Works | 6 Comments

The Impatient Listener

Posted on September 6, 2007 by Dave Pollard
In Deep Conversation Pam O'Connell
“In Deep Conversation” by Irish artist Pam O’Connell

There’s a reason attention and appreciation are so highly valued — give them to someone, genuinely, and they’ll do almost anything for you — It’s a scarce resource.

While we only have so much attention to go around, we tend to be stingy with it. We spend (on average) 58% of our work time working alone (too much of it on e-mail). And we divide the rest among too many people, often several at once, to the point some of us don’t really pay attention to anyone or anything. Instead, we browse incessantly. It’s called ‘paying’ attention because it requires giving. We’re pretty mercenary when it comes to ‘paying’ for things, so most of us tend to give, or pay, only when we think we will get something valuable in return. Some of us aren’t any more generous with attention when we’re away from work.

And we can only appreciate what we pay attention to, so the generosity of our appreciation is constrained by our attention span. My experience has been that men tend to be more appreciative of things that capture their attention — but since their attention is so much harder to capture than most women’s, they end up being stingier with both.

Despite my valiant attempts to become more attentive, I remain an impatient listener. This is in part due to the fact that I am impatient in general. I no longer get angry or stressed when I feel my time is being wasted, but I still tend to get distracted and look for something else to do, to occupy my mind and my senses, when what’s in front of me isn’t terribly interesting to me, or is poorly articulated.

I think we get into this poor-attention habit when we have a lot of meetings, conferences, or presentations to attend. People come to expect a lack of attention at such events — we daydream, doodle, work on something else while half-paying attention, or, if permitted, multi-task overtly with technology. Presenters and speakers then compensate for this lack of attention by speaking more slowly, or repeating themselves, so the bad habit is  reinforced, and even efficient. If you then try to impose ‘flaps closed’ rules and brand multi-tasking as rude, you’d better be respectful of people’s attention, or you’ll just come across as arrogant, and as a time-waster.

That’s why I tend to prefer one-on-one conversations, where the person you are talking with expects your full attention, and therefore it is reasonable for you to expect them to be clear, concise, meaningful, and respectful of your attention. But as we know, it rarely works out that way. If we get impatient, we tend to interrupt, and to start thinking about what we’re going to say next instead of listening. Most of us tend to filter everything we hear through our personal worldview and values, and ignore (not even process) anything that tends not to fit with that worldview, so the result can be almost comical — two people each essentially talking at the other person, and talking to themselves. No attention is being paid at all.

Kids have an interesting way of handling all this. With each other, they are usually pretty patient, perhaps because they don’t yet believe they have all the answers. They’re attentive to a point, but they’re also paying attention to other things going on around them. This is what learning is all about. The law of two feet prevails — they’ll be attentive until they find they’re no longer interested, and then they’ll walk away, no offense intended.

With adults, they try to teach us the important lesson of managing the expectations of conversation and attention in advance. When we call them because we want to talk with (or usually to) them, their answer is usually “What?” This isn’t (often) rudeness. It’s a request for an articulation of the purpose of the conversation, from the view of the adult. They will then figure out (for themselves) what they think the purpose of the conversation is, or should be. They won’t articulate it, because (foolish kids!) they figure that, as adults, we should know what their expectation is, pay attention to it, appreciate it. When we don’t, they fidget, they daydream etc.

Some conversationalists suggest that everyone party to a conversation, meeting, conference or presentation articulate their expectation at the outset. I can appreciate the idea, but I don’t think it works in practice. Often we don’t know what our expectation is until the event is over (or not even then). Sometimes we don’t want to admit what our expectation is, in case it’s embarrassing to us, or the person who hears it and realizes they can’t possibly live up to it. And when both, or all, participants articulate wildly different expectations, what then?

Sometimes it can work, however. I try to say at the outset of every conversation or meeting what I hope to accomplish, what I’m looking for, and what I’m offering in return. It is in a way a contract, and if you’re asking someone to ‘pay’ attention it’s not unreasonable to suggest what you’re giving back, what’s in it for them. And while sometimes this attempt to clarify expectations, outcomes and intentions is ignored (if it’s not consistent with what the other person’s expectations are, chances are they won’t even ‘hear’ it, and even if it is, or they do, you may not get a reciprocal articulation of the other participants’ expectations), sometimes it works brilliantly, and, as long as you deliver what you’ve promised in return, people will marvel at how productive your meetings are.

But that brings us back to the challenge of focusing our attention when the person we’re talking to is hard to understand, repetitive, ignorant, aggressive, long-winded or otherwise distressing. The law of two feet is (alas) usually socially unacceptable between adults. Interrupting, ignoring or hurrying the other person is considered rude. Unless they’re so good looking you don’t care what they’re saying, what do you do?

Of course, it depends. In some cases it makes sense to invest time essentially teaching others (through nods, puzzled looks and other clues) how to make their point more clearly or appreciably. Good communication skills are, after all, acquired through practice. In other cases, when it becomes clear that communication is impossible, it makes sense to politely conclude the conversation and beat a retreat.

The irony is that it takes a fair bit of attention to determine which is the better approach. Attention that, all too often, we are unwilling to invest. We’ve all witnessed the comical, or tragic, results — shouting matches, dangling conversations, disconnected conversations, embarrassing silences, contests of wills, humiliations, bullying, utter misunderstandings.

We can practice being a good listener, and being a good conversationalist, and both will help. In addition, I think the key is willingness to create the space for genuine understanding to occur, to nurture it, to give it a chance, to manage expectations. We all want attention and appreciation, and if we give it, generously, we may be surprised howmuch we get in return.

At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.

Category: Conversation
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 2 Comments

Finally, a Comprehensive Green Shopping Guide — for Canadians

Posted on September 5, 2007 by Dave Pollard
Earth Speaks
Adria Vasil’s terribly-named book (and Now Magazine column) Ecoholic, is one of the most important reference books to appear on the newsstands in this decade. It’s subtitle describes it better: Your guide to the most environmentally friendly information, products and services in Canada.

The book exhaustively reviews just about anything you can imagine buying, explains (patiently, in lay terms but naming the bad chemicals) the environmental considerations (cradle to grave, from the way it’s produced to how it’s disposed of) of that type of product, warns you of what not to buy, and why not (including a lot of greenwashed products), and then tells you what you might want to buy, in moderation, if you really need it. It’s refreshingly blunt and opinionated, but well researched, and it balances the pros and cons carefully (e.g. local vs. organic foods). And it’s printed on 100% recycled, ancient forest-friendly paper.

The book is written for Canadians, but the buying considerations are global, as are many of the products criticized and endorsed. Refreshingly, no section of the book says all your alternatives are equally bad, though in some cases it’s a matter of choosing the best of a bad lot. In some cases make-your-own recipes are included.

Topics covered:

  • Personal care products and services: shampoo, soaps, bath products, hair dye, hair removal, deodorants, tooth, makeup and nail care
  • Apparel: clothing, shoes, jewellery
  • Health care products and services: pharmaceuticals, natural health remedies, bug repellents, menstrual and sex products
  • Foods (with an excellent intro on industrial agriculture, food processing and labeling): meats, vegetarian, seafood, dairy, sugar, chocolate, coffee and tea, water, alcohol
  • Baby products, toys, school stuff, and pet supplies
  • Home products: kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, furniture, electronics, cameras, cellphones, lighting, cleaning, laundry, air purifiers and pest control
  • Home improvement: renovations, flooring, cabinets, counters, carpets, paint, wallpaper, heating, cooling, insulation and green energy
  • Lawn, garden and patio products (including water saving)
  • Transportation: cars, alternative fuels, motorcycles, bicycles, flying, tourism
  • Recreation: sports, camping, holiday celebrations, flowers
  • Financial: ethical investing, green jobs, greening your office

Read this book and you’ll think twice about eating soy, buying from some of the most famous ‘green’ product lines, and wearing Gore-Tex. Every page is packed with useful, sometimes astonishing information. Buying green is hard work, not as simple as reading the claims on the label, and this book arms you to the teeth with what you need to be a responsible shopper. Word of warning, though: The best choices may take some searching to find, and you won’t find many of them in the big box stores or supermarkets. So plan ahead and don’t make a separate trip to get everything you need, or you’ll consume in gasoline what you save in product waste and toxins.

The book concludes with a discussion of the big environmental issues: climate change, endangered species, the end of oil and water and forests (including a well-deserved swipe at the Alberta tar sands, Canada’s ecological holocaust), the dangers of chemicals and the disastrous food production industry.

This was clearly a labour of love, going far beyond the material in Adria’s weekly columns. I plan to carry it with me everywhere I shop (along with my Boycott List), and use it as an essential research tool. It is, alas, not (yet) available online in a searchable database format. I’d pay for it if it was, and was kept up to date.

In short, it’s indispensable. I just stumbled on it in the bookstore (not well publicized), and I’vebought five copies for others already. Even if you’re not Canadian, buy a copy, and use it. Brava, Adria!

Category: What You Can Do
Posted in Collapse Watch | 1 Comment

The World Without Us

Posted on September 4, 2007 by Dave Pollard
The World Without UsAlan Weisman’s The World Without Us is a book-long exercise in “what if…” Specifically, it asks, and answers, what if the human species immediately and completely vanished from the Earth, today.The answer he provides is neither tedious nor depressing, in part because Weisman infuses the book with a ton of interesting, even astonishing information, and in part because he keeps changing the setting of the future scenario to show that the answer is not at all simple. Some critics have complained that the whole book is a seductive set-up for the conclusion in the book’s Coda: That the only alternative to dreadful annihilation and the horrific mess we will leave behind when we wipe ourselves out, is an urgent Stop At One program for every female on the planet for the next 150 years, returning our numbers to a sustainable 1.6 billion and preventing the Sixth Great Extinction just in time.

I didn’t find the book as entertaining or as stimulating as Ronald Wright’s novel (A Scientific Romance) with a similar theme (the sudden extinction of humanity, leaving other species more or less intact). And I will confess that while I agree with the prescription in the book’s Coda I don’t think it fits well with, or follows from, the rest of the book. But my copy is already full of underlined passages of intriguing arguments, facts and figures. A sampling:

  • Thomas Jefferson said “such is the economy of nature that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct”. This was before Darwin, of course.
  • The Americas were once home to most of the world’s largest and most exotic mammals, almost all of which were hunted to extinction long before the Europeans arrived to begin their murderous reign.
  • The existence of much of the Great Plains is likewise due to fires set by early human inhabitants to concentrate game and create grazing land; it is not the ‘natural vegetation’ of these areas. Except in New England, pre-European invasion America was already extensively cleared and planted, dependent on maize.
  • Species extinction is the result of humans’ (and quite probably other large-brained apes’) “acquisitive instincts that can’t tell us when to stop, until something we never intended to harm is fatally deprived of something it needs. We don’t actually have to shoot songbirds to remove them from the sky. Take away enough of their home or sustenance, and they fall dead on their own.” Isn’t that a marvelous way of summing up the paradox of being a conservationist?
  • The reason wild animals have done comparatively well in Africa is that they co-evolved with humans, so they learned the danger we posed, whereas elsewhere we arrived abruptly and wiped them out before they could learn.
  • Only 6000 years ago the Sahara was green savanna.
  • If humans suddenly vanished tomorrow, it is quite conceivable that baboons would quickly evolve to fill the niche created by our absence.
  • The vast majority of plastic sent to landfills ultimately ends up, instead, in the ocean, over a billion tons of it, all the plastic ever created (since its invention about 60 years ago)
  • Close to a trillion non-biodegradable tires have been produced since the automobile was invented scarcely a century ago.
  • Left unattended, petrochemical ‘alleys’ would eventually explode in a runaway chain reaction creating a toxic band of poison that would circle the Earth, creating a chemical ‘nuclear winter’ producing massive die-off and mutations. A large gas well that caught fire and was left uncapped could likewise burn for millennia, making the CO2 created by Saddam’s oil well arson look like child’s play.
  • Likewise, left unattended, nuclear warhead depots would leak waste products that would take a quarter million years to neutralize, CFC depots would leak enough mothballed toxins to wipe out the ozone layer, and stored depleted uranium from thousands of nuclear power plants would…well you get the idea. Half the nukes would ultimately burn down, and the other half would melt, adding to the mess.
  • The soils in much of North America were already severely depleted and poisoned with man-made toxins a century ago. As early as the 1800s, every conceivable form of fertilizer from everywhere on the planet was harvested to try to renourish Europe’s depleted soils. The buildup of lead in our soils will take 35,000 years — several ice ages — to disappear naturally.
  • The algae blooms that are consuming more and more freshwater lakes due to runoff of artificial phosphate and nitrate fertilizer, weigh tons and choke so much oxygen out of the water that everything living in it quickly suffocates.
  • Songbirds are dying in massive numbers — billions of birds in North America per year alone, and perhaps 2/3 of all songbirds in the past generation alone — due to a combination of attractive red lights on transmission towers, high-voltage lines, cats, and chemicals (notably dioxins, which are even more toxic and long-lasting than DDT — which is making a resurgence in many countries as mosquitos build up resistance to newer chemicals).

If this book makes you want to learn more about how we got into this mess,you’re ready for the grim but liberating truths of John Gray’s Straw Dogs or Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress. Happy reading!
Artwork from Salon.com’s review of the book.
Posted in Collapse Watch | 5 Comments

The Next War of Independence: Natural Community, Natural Enterprise, Natural Economy

Posted on September 3, 2007 by Dave Pollard
olympic 2
The independent media have been telling us for several years now that the US is no longer a free country, nor is it any longer a democracy. It is a corporatist aristocracy — a corpocracy — where the laws are written and enforced for the benefit of a small elite of corporate oligopolies and their political benefactors, and where thanks to a two-party political hegemony, a corrupt electoral system, gerrymandering, vote-machine rigging, and repression of minority voting rights, even the vote, the last vestige of democracy, is meaningless.

For those of us who do not live in the US, the situation is hardly better. The corporate oligopolies own or control most of the industry, land and resources in most of the world’s struggling nations and many affluent nations, and anti-democratic ‘free’ trade agreements subvert domestic laws to the ‘right’ of global corporate oligopolies to freedom from regulation or restriction of trade in any signatory nation, regardless of the social and environmental damage that ‘right’ brings with it.

As a consequence, the systems that govern us are not governed in our interest:

  • You can either work obediently for a large corporation that is part of an industry-controlling oligopoly, or you can struggle on the Edge of that economy.
  • You have no say in how your tax money is spent, so most of it is spent on subsidies and bailouts to the corporate oligopolies and military and other adventures that secure resources for those oligopolies.Substantially all of the additional wealth created (at enormous social and environmental cost) in the last generation has, as a result, accrued to a tiny elite.
  • You have no say in what happens to the land in the community where you live. The municipal politicians are owned outright by the development industry, and they encourage development that extinguishes all non-human life and any natural features, and replaces them with bland, artificial, homogeneous subdivisions which are unsustainable, wasteful and anonymous — convenient only to the corporate employers who want pliable, transient and undemanding workers and consumers.
  • The education system brainwashes us that our way of living is the only way to live, that things are better than they have ever been, and that the only way to make a living is to start at the bottom of a corporate oligopoly company and crawl your way up. Entrepreneurship is portrayed as a brutal, risky struggle.
  • The mainstream media are propaganda machines designed to dumb us down so we don’t realize what has happened to us, and they never present information threatening to or critical of the corpocracy. 1984 has arrived, while we weren’t paying attention. Orwellian (‘Leave No Child Behind’, ‘Clear Skies Initiative’) slogans and messages are everywhere, and they’re unchallenged by the complacent media.

The US war of independence was fought against an elite occupying force imposing its will on the majority. The only differences today are that the occupation is global, and that the means of control are more technologically advanced and pervasive.

So how could we take back our land, our resources, our civil freedoms, our democracy, our economic and education systems?

The first step, I think, is to realize that we still have the power, if we have the will to exercise it. This world is too vast and complex for any group to control it, and even its human systems cannot be controlled by any elite without the acquiescence of the large majority.

The second step is to realize that Bucky was right: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” We won’t win zoning battles or economic control battles or electoral system battles or proportionate representation battles in the courts or the election campaigns or the markets that are controlled by the elite. We must instead walk away from these corrupt and dysfunctional systems and build new ones, responsive and responsible and sustainable alternatives that others can look at and say “yes, that works much better”.

So here is what we need to do:

  1. Organize in our own communities to create principled local economies that make us self-sufficient. Decide what we need and then create it, locally, responsibly, sustainably, entrepreneurially. Local natural foods, durable hand-made clothing, natural buildings, local theatre, information, entertainment and recreation, renewable energy co-ops. These local economies will let us work, shop and live in our own communities, without the need for private automobiles or any of the addictions of corporatist culture. Then we can easily boycott everything made wastefully, elsewhere.
  2. Take responsibility for our own education. Deschool our communities and learn independently and from each other how to learn, how to think critically and creatively, and the other essential skills that make us self-sufficient and responsible, not unthinking consumers, cogs in the corporatist machine.
  3. Patiently and relentlessly blockade development of community resources by outsiders. Make it more trouble than it’s worth for them to exploit and degrade local land and resources. When they give up and go away, when the land become worth less to them, quietly acquire it and create local community trusts in perpetuity that prohibit exploitation or sale to outsiders forever, and which are governed by principles of stewardship and respect for the land and for all those living on it. 
  4. Because these local economies are not profit-oriented and are self-sufficient, by doing these things we are effectively starving the corpocracy of the only four things it values — our tax dollars, our cheap obedient labour, our consumption of their crap, and our attention to their propaganda. Without these things they cannot survive. They need to sell more and more every year just to keep their share prices from crashing. They need our tax dollars to finance their global wars to acquire the remaining scarce resources. They need our eyeballs glued to the idiot box to hawk their products and propaganda. They need us indebted to them. They need us fearful and helpless. They need us to be dependent.

We do not need them. That is the power we have that they do not. All it takes is a willingness to use it.

I think it’s just a matter of time. I believe more and more of us are realizing what we have lost, including our independence. It is human nature to want to be independent, to be self-sufficient, to seek meaningful community, and if necessary to fight for these things. We’ve done without them long enough. It’s time to build a new model, a betterway of living. We need to be free.
Posted in Collapse Watch | 13 Comments