Spare Struggling Nations from Executives Without Borders

Posted on August 21, 2007 by Dave Pollard
blood diamonds
An article in this month’s S+B by Economist writer Jon Ledgard suggests that business executives in the affluent nations should be spreading the gospel of globalization, ‘free’ trade and the ‘market’ economy in Africa to save it “from total collapse”.
I hope struggling nations will have the good sense to say “no thanks, you’ve ‘helped’ us enough already”. It’s bad enough that so many in affluent nations have been caught up in the cult of leadership and the wildly inflated sense of executives’ and consultants’ value and infallibility. We don’t want to export our myths to countries where it can do real damage. The missionaries we’ve sent in past have wrecked enough lives.
There is no question that the economies of most struggling nations are in ruins. This has been caused by a combination of interrelated factors:
  • The near-total destruction of soil, water, forest and other resources, due to pillaging by corporations from affluent nations, the loss of connection and respect for the land, overuse, wars supported by affluent nations’ weaponry, and horrific poverty thanks largely to overpopulation (when the only ‘asset’ you can ever hope to own is children for labour, you tend to have a lot of them)
  • The loss of knowledge of how to make a comfortable, sustainable living locally in each unique ecosystem, thanks to social disintegration and massive dislocation and migration to the cities
  • The scourge of diseases due to overcrowding
  • Government and corporate corruption, thanks to the increasing disconnection between centralized governments and the people they supposedly represent, and between business owners and workers
  • Attempts to impose affluent nations’ political, social, economic, legal, technological, educational and other systems on struggling nations where they simply don’t work
The answer is not to export more affluent nation ‘answers’ to struggling nations in the person of well-meaning ‘executives’. The proponents of such ideas would be well advised to learn from the horrible example of the religious missionary groups, who continue to send well-intentioned born-again volunteers to build schools and churches and hospitals for (instead of with) the people of struggling nations, and then wonder why the locals are disinclined to maintain them when the volunteers go back to their comfy homes.
What is needed instead are efforts to help the people of struggling nations undo the damage that we have caused:
  • Giving them the resources they need to relocalize their economies and relearn lost skills and knowledge that produced healthy, self-sufficient communities for millennia before we disrupted them
  • Giving them back their land and resources
  • Offering (not imposing) innovations like microlending and permaculture and pharmaceuticals, at no charge
  • Forgiving indebtedness that was mostly incurred to enrich despots, not the people
  • Cessation of the sale of arms and armies
To believe that we have any more ‘solutions’ that will work for these people is the height of arrogance. Rather than ‘executives’, the businesspeople who might have some value to the people of struggling nations are entrepreneurs in small, sustainable businesses — Natural Enterprises. Entrepreneurs have learned how to work around problems instead of paving them over. They know how to scrounge. They know how to live within their means. They know the value and skill of resilience and improvisation. This is knowledge the people of struggling nations could get some value from. And the learning and value would definitely be reciprocal. In fact if we were to be fair, we should probably pay the people of struggling nations for the experience, since the value we receive will almost certainly exceed what we have to offer them.
So, please, spare the struggling nations the scourge of self-important, deluded, well-meaning executive missionaries. We have done more than enough harm already. It’s time to give back what we stole, and realize that our flawed, devastating, ruthless and unsustainable big-business models work badly enough here, and have no place in nations whose people have forgotten more than we have ever learned.
We need to clean up our own act before we presume to take it on the road.
Posted in Working Smarter | 11 Comments

Toxins for Fun and Profit

Posted on August 20, 2007 by Dave Pollard
tar sands
Alberta Tar Sands sludge mining, in what used to be pristine boreal forest. Photo: Melina Mara, Washington Post .
In a recent speech, a former premier says Alberta will have to go to the Supreme Court to defend the oil industry’s right to pollute when it accelerates tar sands development next year, because the environmental damage will be like nothing Canada has ever seen or imagined.

Paul Blanc’s new book How Everyday Products Make People Sick: Toxins at Home and in the Workplace was nothing like what I expected. I thought I would get a laundry list (heh) of household and workplace products to avoid, why, and what to use in their place.

But this book is essentially a history of how corporatists — big corporate oligopolies, ‘bought’ politicians and meek ‘regulatory’ agencies — have colluded for over two centuries to poison workers and consumers with products and processes deadly to human health and the environment, and keep them ignorant of those dangers, all in the interest of profit. In the process, perfectly safe and environment-friendly alternatives have been suppressed and belittled by advertisers. And information on the dead, diseased, poisoned, injured and ruined people and communities as a result of these toxins in the air, water, soil and food has been ruthlessly suppressed.

The emphasis in the book is on workplace toxins, because that is where the cause-and-effect connection between contact with these chemicals and health problems is possible to establish, despite the hundreds of denials, cover-ups, and transfers to anonymous numbered companies to reduce corporate liability. Public disasters like Bhopal, Chernobyl, Minamata and Exxon Valdez are just the tip of the iceberg. What the book can only suggest is the chronic effect of these chemicals in our homes and the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. We know that the corporatists have caused the massive suffering that these chronic diseases have inflicted on billions of people, but we also know it will never stand up in court.

The list of products connected to chronic diseases runs the gamut of virtually everything we have in our homes and offices, including substantially all man-made chemicals and plastics. For example:

  • Adhesives: glues, cements, furniture adhesives
  • Automotive Products: fuel additives, rubber
  • Cleaning Products: dry cleaning products, soaps and detergents, turpentine, ammonia, bromine and chlorine bleaches, muriatic acid, fumigants, phosphates, formaldehyde
  • Coatings: paints, dyes, wood preservatives (creosote, aresenides etc.), varnishes, sealants, tars, latex, leather sprays
  • Food Additives and packaging: preservatives, colourings, flavourings, dietary supplements, cellophane, microwave popcorn, microwave containers
  • Garden and Agricultural Products: fungicides, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, DDT, 2-4-D, 2-4-5-T,
  • Fibres: acetate, asbestos, viscose, rayon, vinyl, cellulose wool, flame retardants, polypropylene, neoprene
  • Industrial Chemicals: mercury, benzene, resins, cellulose derivatives, brass, zinc, cadmium and manganese products, cyanides, coal combustion wastes, cotton dust, photographic chemicals, welding gases, electroplating and galvanizing chemicals, hydrochloric acid, radium and other radioactive trace elements, potash, manganese-treated steel, toluene, sulphuric acid
  • Other Household Products: aerosols, refrigerants, artificial leather, rubber products (balloons etc.), heating briquets and oils, products containing lead, polyurethane, insulation, PVC and other plastic containers
  • Other Products: animal euthanasia products, chemotherapy substances, explosives
  • Personal Care Products: artificial nails, nail polishes and polish removers, condoms
  • Pharmaceuticals: antibiotics, anaesthetics

The list of diseases these poisons are associated with is almost as long, and includes just about all chronic and non-infectious diseases (and even some infectious diseases such as tuberculosis are aggravated by poor working environments):

  • Respiratory diseases: sick building syndrome, asthma, inhalation fever, asbestosis, silicosis, lung diseases
  • Neurological diseases: parkinson’s disease, ALS
  • Organ diseases: skin diseases, allergies, kidney diseases, cirrhosis of the liver, cardiovascular diseases, eye diseases, tuberculosis, hemochromatosis
  • Cancers: all types, notably angiosarcoma, leukemia
  • Blood diseases: anemia, lead poisoning
  • Mental illnesses: dementias

And of course environmental toxins are also suspected in the spiraling epidemic of 40+ autoimmune diseases.

Kind of a sad story about industrial society, isn’t it? This is what ‘our troops’ are fighting for in Iraq and Afghanistan — the corporatist interests and the Bushies and Harpers in their back pockets, who need oil to continue to poison our world and sell us toxic junk that kills us and causes devastating chronic illnesses.

Blanc’s depressing stories are accompanied by an edgy explanation of how the corporatists have pulled off this scam so successfully for so long. He identifies eight strategies:

  1. “More data are needed”: Characterizing scientific evidence about the dangers of these products and processes as limited, exaggerated, insubstantial, or inconclusive, as Big Oil has done hiring Lomborgian pseudo-scientists to produce junk science as propaganda to counter damaging legitimate research
  2. “It must have been used incorrectly”: Blaming the victim
  3. “We can self-regulate as needed”: Arguing that regulation is overly costly and ineffectual
  4. “The Precautionary Principle would bring the economy to a grinding halt”: Labeling opponents as unrealistic, idealistic, or reactionary
  5. “We stopped CFCs when they were proved dangerous; workplace safety is in employers’ interests too”: Insisting the ‘market’ will intervene to require any corrections to corporate behaviour that may be necessary
  6. “We still haven’t had what we consider a fair hearing”: Foot-dragging using armies of lawyers, as with Exxon who still haven’t paid for the Valdez disaster
  7. “We settled, without acknowledging fault”: As Koch Industries has repeatedly done, bargaining with political friends for slap on the wrist penalties while continuing to poison workers and the Earth
  8. “We want an industry-friendly rep running that Agency”: Twisting the arms of politicians to have regulators run by those who simply refuse to enforce the law against corporatist wrongdoing

They’ve been doing this for centuries, and it’s still going on. They’re still getting away with murder.

PS: Today, a coalition of health and labour groups issued a report saying Ontario is steeped in chemicals and the province needs to take immediate action in reducing toxic emissions and cancer-causingsubstances in the environment. Yeah, like that’s going to happen.

Categories: Corporatism and Health
Posted in How the World Really Works | 9 Comments

Sunday Open Thread — August 19, 2007

Posted on August 19, 2007 by Dave Pollard
chair
What I’m thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon:

Open Space: Ever since I began learning about Open Space, I’ve been trying to ‘improve’ it (especially, trying to impose a ‘framework’ on the process and Open Space competency training on the invitees). Now I know a bit more about Open Space, I realize how foolish that was, and thank practitioners of OST for being so patient with me. I once believed that my ‘sweet spot’, where my Gift, my Passion and my Purpose intersect, was fomenting dissatisfaction; more recently I restated it as facilitating self-change. Now I’m thinking that it’s closer to my greatest Gift of imagining possibilities — facilitation is too ‘passive’ a role for me (I am not especially competent at or passionate about such a role). How can I capture, in a few words, this idea:

The capacity to be a sounding board, observing, listening, imagining and interjecting relevant possibilities, and showing tools and methods that might improve effectiveness, to help people let themselves become who they really are and do what they were meant to do.

Not a coach, not a facilitator. Something in between, perhaps. Is there are name for this?


Vulnerability Not Neediness: Last week I mentioned that the capacities needed to be an excellent collaborator and those needed to be an exceptional sexual partner were surprisingly similar. It occurs to me that the capacities needed to be an excellent member of a Natural Community or Natural Enterprise are likewise similar to those needed to be an exceptional life partner. One of the qualities we find attractive is a voluntary vulnerability that stems from openness, independence, strength and self-confidence, not from dependence and neediness.

We Are 26%: I read last week (and am trying to find it again) that 26% of North Americans say they would buy products that are socially and environmentally responsible, and locally made, or would do without, rather than buy cheap imported junk, even if this involved considerable extra expense, or some self-sacrifice on their part. More interestingly, the economic demographic of this 26% is apparently U-shaped — it is the poor and the rich who would do so, while the lower-middle to upper-middle classes remain mostly addicted to consumption.

Book Reviews: The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman, and How Everyday Products Make People Sick, by Paul Blanc.

Vignettes: Coming up soon, vignette #5.

Blog-Hosted Conversations: Starting the last week of August, once a 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:

If you were suddenly put in the position of having to look after aseverely incapacitated loved one full time, how would you handle it?
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 9 Comments

Saturday Links for the Week — August 18, 2007

Posted on August 18, 2007 by Dave Pollard
peru earthquakePeople search for the bodies of loved ones in Pisco, south of Lima.
Photo: REUTERS/Mariana Bazo

Help the People of Peru: 30,000 families whose lives have been shattered by the recent earthquake need our help. Here’s how to do so:

  • Canadians can contribute to the Red Cross’ special Peru Earthquake fund online, or directly through the Peruvian Consulate in Toronto by transfer to Royal Bank account # 06702 113 ñ 4329 (Ref.: Sismo Per™ 2007)
  • Americans can contribute to the Red Cross’ special Peru Earthquake fund online, or directly into the Interbank accounts (Dollars: account #200-0000001118 / Soles: account #200-0000001119) with the following money transfer agencies: Xoom, Bancomercio, Uno, Dolex, BTS, Viamericas, Ria, Transfast, Pronto EnvÌos, Vigo, Bob Travel, Girosol, MFIC, Intertransfers and Mateo Express. Interbank has stated that these agencies will not apply commission fees for the transfers. For more information call free at 1-866-352-7378.
Thanks to Mariella Rebora for the links.

‘Learning’ That Trying to Change the Political/Social/Economic System is Impossible: A brilliant and important essay by Naomi Klein explains the corporatist agenda to discourage us into believing that everything we want to do has been tried and failed. Excerpt:

The real problem, I want to argue today, is confidence, our confidence, the confidence of people who gather…under the banner of building another world, a kinder more sustainable world. I think we lack the strength of our convictions, the guts to back up our ideas with enough muscle to scare our elites. We are missing movement power. Thatís what we’re missing. “The best lacked all convictions,” Yeats wrote, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Think about it. Do you want to tackle climate change as much as Dick Cheney wants Kazakhstan’s oil? Do you? Do you want universal healthcare as much as Paris Hilton wants to be the next new face of EstÈe Lauder? If not, why not? What is wrong with us? Where is our passionate intensity?

What is at the root of our crisis of confidence? What drains us of our conviction at crucial moments when we are tested? At the root, I think itís the notion that we have accepted, which is that our ideas have already been tried and found wanting. Part of what keeps us from building the alternatives that we deserve and long for and that the world needs so desperately, like a healthcare system that doesn’t sicken us when we see it portrayed on film, like the ability to rebuild New Orleans without treating a massive human tragedy like an opportunity for rapid profit-making for politically connected contractors, the right to have bridges that don’t collapse and subways that don’t flood when it rains. I think that what lies at the root of that lack of confidence is that we’re told over and over again that progressive ideas have already been tried and failed. We hear it so much that we accepted it. So our alternatives are posed tentatively, almost apologetically.

Chickens: Moving to Cage-Free But Not Free-Range: The realization of the horrific cruelty to billions of chickens in battery cages is beginning to dawn on humanity, but progress is at a snail’s pace. Several groups are trying to push for a change from battery cages to large cage-free barns, still cramped and locked inside, but at least with some room for movement. Even this tiny change is taking the capacity of the corporatist Big Agribusiness oligopoly.

Google & Microsoft Enter Online Health Information Fray: Challenging online health leaders WebMD and Revolution Health, and the most popular government health sites, Google and Microsoft are trying to exploit the fact that most searchers for health information start with a search engine.

Complexity Explained: A group called Calresco summarizes complexity theory and why understanding it is so important to grappling with the intractable problems of this century. Thanks to Andrew Campbell for the link.

Thought for the Week: From reader Ayanleh in response to Wednesday’s post about the seven elements of effective collaboration:

I am from Somalia (East Africa) and currently live in the United States. When I was growing up and was learning about “modernity” and how to attain it, I remember modernity’s focus on the individual, from individual rights to individual freedom. Yet everything in my culture revolved around the group, or more specifically the clan or sub-clan. In its day to day activity, the clan was a collaborative effort. It sought to help individuals to survive in an often harsh and unforgiving environment. Clans often fought each other for these scarce resources but they more often collaborated than fought with each other. There were many practices they instituted in order to mitigate the competition between clans, such as intermarriage.

But the clans then sent their kids to the West and their children came back with new ideas about collaboration. The collaborative efforts were to be restricted by new boundaries of class, ideology or nationhood. Some even tried to transform the clan into a closed collaborative effort that sought to simply eradicate (no longer inter-marry with) fellow clans. Our modern education swept away our traditional methods of collaboration, so we live in a state of perpetual anarchy.

When the West looks at us now, they see in us the confirmation of our African “savagery”. When I talk to my elders, they wonder if sending their kids to be educated in the West was such a great idea after all. The irony is that in the West, we are now educated about “team work”and building “collaborative” efforts. These were skills that our elders perfected over centuries and that are now slowly dying. My hope is to bridge the two somehow.
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments

Non-Advice for Chronic Sufferers

Posted on August 15, 2007 by Dave Pollard
suicide
Image: Suicide by Scandinavian artist Joakim Back.

The most moving character in Nick Hornby’s amazing novel A Long Way Down, about four would-be suicides who end up in a kind of crazy self-managed support group, is Maureen, the woman stuck looking after her severely handicapped teenage son. She is an example of a sufferer from what I called in my recent post on managing stress the ‘fourth source’, the chronic stress that imprisons the sufferer for a long period or even a lifetime, as contrasted to the three ‘transient sources’ of stress — sudden changes, time pressures, and unwelcome surprises. I explained:

[This fourth source of stress is usually] a longer-term adversity, such as having to look after a loved one (or worse, someone you don’t love), or putting up with constant physical or emotional pain or disfigurement or a life-altering disability. The people I know who face such stresses have told me they don’t feel courageous or like martyrs: What seems to us to be courage, they say, is simply not having any other choice — we do what we must. Nevertheless, to me, this would be a form of imprisonment, and, like all of nature’s creatures, imprisonment is what we fear most, the form of stress that has no resolution, no relief, no way of coping through resilience. Those who are imprisoned, regardless of whether anyone thinks that imprisonment is real or self-inflicted, are the unhappiest people, I think, in the world. It is no wonder they seek escape, solace, through drugs or religion or suicide.

I know quite a few people in this situation. My father is coping with his second wife’s long-term dementia and physical illness. Some of my friends (and some respondents to the above post) are coping with similarly ill elders or children or other loved ones, and have put their own lives on hold, indefinitely. I know people who are living themselves with chronic agonizing physical diseases, or debilitating, exhausting mental illness. I know people who are in prison or some other involuntary institution, or trapped in jobs that they have no choice but to stay in. I know people who stay, for reasons that fill me with astonishment and dread, in relationships where they are chronically and severely abused. I know people who are addicted to substances that make their lives, and those of people who once loved them, an endless living hell.

These are people in prisons as real as if they had bars and locks on them, who live lives of what Thoreau called “quiet desperation”. Suicide and other quick escapes from the constant suffering and agony are, for most, ‘a long way down’, as Hornby explains. For them, there is no conceivable way out.

Some people have asked me what to do if you find yourself in this situation. I have no answers. In my youth I suffered from severe depression, and while it did not last that long it kept coming back, and when I was in that terrible place fighting the noonday demon it was as if time stretched out forever. I got lots of advice, most of it bad, and all of it useless. I tried all the solutions and none of them worked, and most of the people I spoke to admitted none of them worked for them either.

Some of you may think it’s unfair or unreasonable to compare someone suffering from a crippling physical or mental illness or addiction to someone coping with the illness of someone else, but I see these all as just different types of prison — the experience is the same, and I will not pass judgement whether one prison is more honourable than another. Severe and uncontrollable suffering is unbearable, and chronic suffering that just endures and goes on and on every day is a thousand times more unbearable. I have no answers. We do what we must. Part of my unbearable grief for Gaia is feeling for all those in the world who are suffering, but my sympathy doesn’t help any.

In Hornby’s book, his character Maureen says:

You know that things aren’t going well for you when you can’t even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they’ll presume you’re asking them to feel sorry for you. I suppose it’s why you feel so far away from everyone, in the end; anything you can think of to tell them just ends up making them feel terrible.

When I was in the blackness of depression the fact that people cared for me and worried about me and wanted to help meant nothing to me. They couldn’t do anything. I didn’t expect anything from them. I didn’t care about them, and the ones that really pestered me with worry or useless suggestions or offers to help (if I told them how) or gratuitous advice (“cheer up, snap out of it”) just annoyed me. Depression is still considered by many a ‘selfish’ affliction, a weakness that indicates lack of resolve or lack of courage, so at least I didn’t have to cope with lots of people worrying about me. I did what I had to do, and was fortunate enough, unlike some, to wake up from the nightmare, with no one’s help, including my own.

So I don’t know what to say to people who ask me What Can I Do? — to make the suffering less unbearable, to reconcile oneself to one’s lot. Some people swear by support groups, not those put on by well-intentioned (or not) psychologists or social workers, but those run by fellow sufferers who (supposedly) know what you’re going through, and can perhaps sympathize and offer coping tips. They never worked for me, so I won’t recommend them, but I guess it depends on your situation and your ability to get value from these things. I doubt prisoners on death row have a support group, or would want one. For some it can help just to talk it out, and if that works for you, that’s great, provided you can find a patient listener. That never worked for me either, though it has for some people I know, and I’ve tried to become a better listener, and to realize that my role is not to proffer answers (since there usually are none) but rather to help the other person make sense of their predicament and their agony in their own minds. I’m not great at this, but with practice I’m getting better.

There are some who turn to drugs or religion or suicide, none of which I ever had much use for, or would recommend, but neither would I pass judgement on those who find any of these works for them, as long as the perpetrator of these ‘cures’ doesn’t gouge the sufferer for a lot of money when they are vulnerable to being gouged.

I’m sorry. I usually offer answers or at least approaches on this blog, but for sufferers in long-term prisons of one kind or another I don’t have any to offer. If other readers have suggestions, they’re more than welcome to post them in the comments thread below (or e-mail them to me if the temperamental RadioUserland comments thread doesn’t work).

That’s all I’ve got.

Category: Being Human
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 14 Comments

Collective Emergence

Posted on August 15, 2007 by Dave Pollard
olivos collaboration
A collaborative drawing by Claudia and Sergio Olivos

I‘ve told a few stories about great collaborations on this blog. Here are a couple of them:

  • A few years ago one of our neighbours sent out invitations to a ‘work bee’, to repair and refinish the century-old barn that serves today as their garage. Refreshments were offered as inducements, but my initial reaction was reluctance: Were we being ‘Tom Sawyered’ into doing someone else’s work? My wife, who has a lot more sense than I, dismissed this and volunteered us immediately. As readers know, my lack of manual dexterity and coordination are legendary, but I participated, learning how to do several things I’d read about but never understood, and making up in energy what I lacked in competence. I can’t describe what an incredible sense of accomplishment we felt, or how much sheer fun we had. Every time I drive by that barn, I say to myself with unrestrained joy: We did that!

  • A few years ago I watched our arthritic dog Chelsea sitting in the shade in the back yard with our visiting daughter’s small dog Laker. Chelsea always enjoyed canine company but after introductions they didn’t really ‘play’ together, they just sat around outside (kind of like their humans), watching the world go by. Suddenly, as I was watching, Laker spotted a chipmunk and raised her head sharply. Within fifteen seconds, Laker and Chelsea, who had never ‘collaborated’ on anything to my knowledge, and who certainly had never individually caught any of the abundant wildlife in our area, had together outflanked, flushed out, cornered and trapped the chipmunk, which simply gave up, lay down and closed its eyes. In that fifteen seconds there had been at least fifty moves made by each of the three ‘players’ in the drama, a sophisticated chess game of trial and error, signaling and tactical adjustment. It was absolutely amazing to watch. When we pulled the dogs away and rescued the poor chipmunk, the look of triumph and joy on the dogs’ faces was unmistakable. 

How do these extraordinary occurrences happen? Given the staggering complexity of social environments and interrelationships, how we get attuned to each other to work such magic with no plan? You could not orchestrate these collaborative outcomes, these ‘collective emergences’, nor could you predict them, yet they are not rare. Under the right circumstances, they are commonplace miracles: We see them in at least five areas of human (and animal) endeavour:

  • Sense-making: Working together to make sense of something, to understand, gain insight, obtain ‘collective wisdom’
  • Imagining: Working together to come up with ideas and possibilities
  • Innovation: Working together to come up with a design, an offering, a product or service
  • Creation: Working together to produce a construction or work of art or science
  • Performance: Working together improvisationally to enact or invent a piece of theatre, sport, or performance art

I’ve studied the collaborations that seemed to be the most successful ones, and identified seven elements that seem to be present in most of them. Here they are, along with some ways in which these elements can be nurtured to increase the likelihood of a collaboration achieving remarkable results:

  1. The Right People: The right number (not too many, not too few) with diversity of viewpoints, skills and knowledge. People who have a lot of practice in collaboration seem to learn how to self-select into, to coalesce into, collaborations that work. I don’t think imposing membership on a collaborative group is effective, no matter how well-intentioned.
  2. Capacity and Knowledge: Good collaboration requires a variety of left- and right-brained skills, gifts, talents, instincts, knowledge, and capacities such as openness, awareness and imagination. Some of these are easy to acquire; others are much more difficult. The more people in the group who have these capacities, the more likely the collaboration is to succeed. You need to urge potential members of collaborations to continuously learn these capacities, and provide ready access to needed knowledge.
  3. Attitude: A combination of passion for the subject of the collaboration, energy, and positive enthusiasm. Great collaborations are great fun. Black hats and those who are quick to lose attention, give up or disengage are absolutely toxic to collaboration. Your invitation should be such that it attracts those with the right attitude and discourages those with negative or unhelpful ones.
  4. Responsibility: This is both a personal responsibility to devote oneself to the task at hand, and to act on the results of the collaboration appropriately when it is over, and also a collective responsibility to the rest of the collaborators. I’ve seen self-managed collaborative groups eject those members who lack that sense of responsibility, gently but firmly.
  5. Mutual Respect and Trust: Some people start with this for strangers, and only lose it if it’s betrayed, while others don’t trust others until and unless that trust is earned. What’s interesting is that self-managed groups that contain both types of people seem to work it out.
  6. Environment: The best environments I’ve seen are natural, unconstrained places with lots of fresh air and room to move. This, I think, is more important than a ‘creative’ environment (with lots of toys to play with while working) or a technologically-rich one.
  7. Chemistry or Dynamic: It’s great when the chemistry of the self-selecting members works spontaneously and powerfully. But when it doesn’t, a good facilitator can create and enable the dynamic that can compensate for a lack of natural chemistry, enabling the group to work together effortlessly, and making them want to.

When you think about it, these same seven elements of great collaboration could also be the seven elements of great sex.

The collective emergence that comes out of great collaboration is worth all the work to create the right conditions, and all the practice andlearning that are needed to make it extraordinary.

Subject: Collaboration
Posted in Working Smarter | 6 Comments

Grateful

Posted on August 13, 2007 by Dave Pollard
dali persistence of memory
Dali, The Persistence of Memory

Stress can, if we are not careful, be our undoing. Modern stress, unlike that faced by prehistoric people, is often chronic (recurring, or never going away) and ‘unmanageable’ (there is no obvious, immediate action we can take to respond to it and hence discharge it). It served its purpose when we needed adrenaline to flee or fight predators. But now, it just makes us physically and mentally ill — our bodies just have not adapted to cope with ‘civilized’ stress.

It has been a momentous few weeks for me. I started my new position. I completed and submitted my book manuscript. And I have grappled with a whole series of small problems — I cut a corner too tight in an underground garage and badly scraped the side of my car, the swimming pool sprung a leak, we had a grass fire caused by a faulty circuit breaker, someone accidentally damaged our side gate.

The combination of all these things in rapid succession would have been too much for ‘the old me’ to handle. Sudden dramatic change, time pressure, and unwelcome surprises are all major stressers in our lives.

How does resilience help us cope with all three of these sources of stress?

  1. Sudden Dramatic Change: If it’s not an unwelcome change (if it is, see point 3) sudden changes should be joyous. A new member of the community, a new love, a new career — these are things to cherish, to celebrate, not to get stressed over. We should take our cue from what happens when we fall in love: Time stops, goes away. We are there in the moment, and it lasts almost forever. So the change over this infinite time is so gradual it is no noticeable change at all. Love change, embrace it, slow it down, make it last, and the stress disappears.
  2. Time Pressure: Time pressures are, like time itself, illusory, self-imposed. You either have sufficient time to do something or you don’t. Worrying about whether you have enough time changes nothing. You can reduce the worry by not creating expectations (in others or in yourself), expectations that you have enough time to do something when you don’t. This is the agony of the procrastinator — the tendency to put things off until there is almost, or perhaps, not enough time to do them. This is human nature (we do what we must, when we must, and not before; we are preoccupied our whole lives with the needs of the moment). But in the modern world it is unhealthy. You’ll get it done or you won’t. So put away the stopwatch, just do it, and enjoy every moment of it. I ended up rewriting a lot more of my book than I expected, and adding a lot more. For three weekends I worked twelve hour days, and loved every second of it. I didn’t care about the deadline, as close as it was. So there was no stress. The work took as long as it took, as long it had to take.
  3. Unwelcome Surprises: This is the toughest of the three stresses, the one that still gets to me — sometimes. The flood and the fire stressed me briefly, because they could have been disastrous, if they’d spread to the house, the wetlands, or the neighbours’. You can tell yourself rationally that it’s absurd to get stressed about what could have been, that it’s a fiction, and so not worth worrying about or getting angry about, but it takes practice to do this. The car accident didn’t stress me much at all (although I was annoyed at myself, because I wasn’t paying attention). And the fence damage only annoyed me because the guy who did it didn’t admit it right away — I had to approach him. We can get better at handling the stress reaction to these things, I think, with practice putting it behind us, adapting it it, letting it bounce off us, flow through us. But what if it’s a truly horrific surprise — the loss of a loved one, the loss of a job, a bankruptcy or an involuntary move? Can we ‘learn’ to let such crises flow through us as well, without remorse for what we might have done differently, for the fiction of what could have been? I’m not so sure.

I’ve also been fortunate not to have faced a fourth source of stress — a longer-term adversity, such as having to look after a loved one (or worse, someone I don’t love), or putting up with constant pain or disfigurement or a life-altering disability. The people I know who face such stresses have told me they don’t feel courageous or like martyrs: What seems to us to be courage, they say, is simply not having any other choice — we do what we must. Nevertheless, to me, this would be a form of imprisonment, and, like all of nature’s creatures, imprisonment is what we fear most, the form of stress that has no resolution, no relief, no way of coping through resilience.

Those who are imprisoned, regardless of whether I think, or anyone thinks, that imprisonment is real or self-inflicted, are the unhappiest people, I think, in the world. It is no wonder they seek escape, solace, through drugs or religion or suicide.

So now whenever I experience one of the three transient stresses above I imagine being imprisoned — with no escape, no way of coping by slowing time down or just doing things in the moment or rationalizing that ‘what could have been’ is absurd to be unhappy about — and it’s the gratefulness I feel at realizing that my stressful situation will soon pass, vanish backwards into the fiction, the exhaust of the past that is disconnected from Now, that discharges my stress most quickly and powerfully.

But that realization and that gratefulness also resurfaces my unbearable grief for Gaia, because I am, we all are (those of us who feel it, anyway) connected with all-life-on-Earth, and hence with every creature who is imprisoned, who is suffering not just for a brief moment but all the time of their life without escape.

It is a paradox that that realization fills me, at once, with such sadness, and yet strengthens the growing joy and resolve that fills my life, a joy I never felt when I was disconnected. So we cope with transient stresses through resilience that comes from practice, from self-awareness and gratefulness and connection, but the by-product of all those things is grief for those whose stresses are not transient, but enduring and unrelieved, and that grief is, in a way, another source of stress, not personal or intense but sympathetic, chronic, a part of us all until the end of the world.

Category: Let-Self-Change
Posted in Collapse Watch | 6 Comments

Living Lightly on the Land

Posted on August 13, 2007 by Dave Pollard
pool-candle
A few readers have questioned how I can claim to be an environmentalist when I live in a large house with a pool on a large lot. Surely, they say, this is about as far from radical simplicity as you can get?

I would certainly agree that building such a large house, even one as well insulated as ours, would be environmentally irresponsible. When we bought it 13 years ago, however, our two kids and their SO’s, two potential grandchildren and three dogs were in the picture. And although they’ve moved out, the fact is that the house is nearly 30 years old and if we weren’t living in it (responsibly), someone else would be living in it (probably less responsibly).

When I think about it, I realize that we’ve made much greater strides towards radical simplicity than even I would have dared to think:

  • We had an energy audit done indicating the house is exceptionally well insulated and energy-efficient (it’s built into the side of a hill). There was almost no opportunities for improvement, but we did what they suggested to make it even more efficient.
  • Our greatest expenses each year are property taxes and insurance (hardly ecologically harmful).
  • We rarely eat in restaurants anymore (when we do, they’re locally-owned and locally-sourced, certified healthy), and eat mostly vegetarian, uncooked, unprocessed, unpackaged foods.
  • We avoid Chinese and other imported products as much as possible, and invest in durable, well-made products; we buy sparingly, not frivolously, and >90% of our purchases are Canadian made goods.
  • We have virtually no garbage; everything at the curb is in the blue (recycled) or green (compost) boxes.
  • We never use the air-conditioner, despite our record hot summer (dress light, jump in the pool to stay cool).
  • We never set the thermostat above 60F in winter, and use our high-efficiency, low-emission fireplace insert burning windfall wood from our own property.
  • We rarely watch TV and subscribe to no newspapers and very few magazines; in our extraordinary neighbourhood, we make our own entertainment and get our information electronically.
  • We have done and will do no ‘cosmetic’ renovations, no matter how ‘unfashionable’ that may make us.
  • We use no fertilizers, herbicides or pesticides and the new trees we plant are native, self-sustaining species.
  • We never water the lawn (nor do our neighbours); we don’t care if it’s brown in the summer.
  • We don’t drive to buy anything until we have at least three places in the same area to go (no impulse shopping).
  • I fly only for work (as rarely as possible) and personal visits are squeezed in around work trips as much as possible.
  • We use compact fluorescents (and only when and where we need them), solar lights and candles for light.
  • We drink tap water from the community well.
  • The pool does not need heating because it’s out in open sun and covered with a solar blanket.

Our total expenses, excluding property taxes and insurance, are a third what they were a decade ago. We’ve made a lot of progress, and are still working on areas where our footprint can be further reduced:

  • We need to further reduce gasoline by telecommuting more and mowing the lawn less often.
  • We need to reduce water consumption by catching rainwater to water the gardens.
  • We need to eliminate pool chemicals by switching to salt water.
  • My laptop remains an indulgence that uses too much energy and toxic chemicals.
  • We need a better way to dispose of compact fluorescent bulbs.

But while we’ve made some important and conscientious choices to conserve, to consume less, the changes to our lifestyle have been more radical than just what we don’t buy and don’t use. Radical simplicity is about simple pleasures. Nothing gives me more joy than sitting out in the yard, at sunrise or sunset or after dark, and just listening to and watching, paying attention to things I never used to notice. Chelsea our wonderful pound rescue taught me that. I would sooner walk in the forest, in the moonlight, in the rain, than subject myself to any ‘commercial’ entertainment.

I find small-talk a waste of time, and I’ve learned to excuse myself from it politely. I’d much sooner read, or talk about something important. I have no desire to travel, even to Toronto. I’ve found my place, right here, and I never get tired of it, or bored with it. There is always more to learn from it, and from the wild creatures who, like me, belong to it.

When I buy a book that isn’t made from unbleached, recycled paper I complain to the publisher.

There is no sacrifice here. The reductions in our footprint have been completely painless. I am happier than I have ever been, and healthier. With less noise and less unneeded light I notice things I never used to. I find more joy in lamplight, kittens, working together, bubble baths, dew, quiet conversation, sparrows, caresses, homemade music, fireflies, poetry, children’s laughter, stories, thunderstorms, self-organized community activities, wildflowers, helping people, learning how to do things and fix things, silence, wild hares and foxes and deer, scented candles, fruits and vegetables from the garden, love — all these things right here that cost nothing — than I ever found in costly, faraway entertainments.

I wish you could all be here, to share these things with me. So I could show you. Radical simplicity is not just about what you consume. I just can’t believe it took me so long to learn, to understand. Not so simpleafter all.

Posted in Collapse Watch | 9 Comments

Sunday Open Thread – August 12, 2007

Posted on August 12, 2007 by Dave Pollard
tao of holding space
What I’m thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon:

Radical Simplicity: Much of what we need to do to create sustainable models of better ways of living and making a living requires us to simplify how we live: traveling less, buying less, owning less, owing less, supporting self-sustaining local community. How can we learn to appreciate radical simplicity, so we can become better at this?

Personal Resilience and Collective Emergence: I’m learning how not to take the bad things that happen hard, angrily, or personally, and how to let things emerge, in their own time, collaboratively. Why are we never taught these important lessons before the accumulated stress does so much damage to us?

Vignettes: Coming up soon, vignette #5.

Blog-Hosted Conversations: Starting the last week of August, once a 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:

How much progress have you made in the last five years towards reducing your footprint on the planet? 

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 7 Comments

Saturday Links for the Week — August 11, 2007

Posted on August 11, 2007 by Dave Pollard
strange maps

Amazing Visualizations Blog: Kudos to my colleague Greg Turko for finding Strange Maps, a blog of unusual and sometimes brilliant visualizations that add meaning to and make sense of information. The top one reproduced above is a picture, from Japan, of the most prevalent Web 2.0 sites and how they’re connected. The one below it tells lonely single males to go East, and lonely single females to go West.

Helping Communities Work Better: The Institute for Local Self-Reliance is doing two things to make communities more resilient: Lobbying to change laws to encourage local sustainability (New Rules Project) and working to encourage extensive recycling in all US communities (Waste to Wealth Project).

Journalism and Propaganda: John Pilger explains how the mainstream media and the mainstream political parties are distracting us from the need to dump them both in favour of independents interested in more than money and power.

Republican Presidents Forever?: In a related story, both the New Yorker and the NYT have been following the efforts of both US parties to pervert the workings of the electoral college to their advantage (the Republicans may yet be able to guarantee presidential power forever thanks to a shrewd California initiative), and the efforts of some states and Common Cause to end the tyranny of the college entirely by going to one-person, one-vote (democracy, what a concept).

Early Signs of Crash of Markets, Dollar, Economy: The collapse of the overextended housing market is now rippling through financial markets despite the trillions of dollars governments worldwide are furiously throwing into them, while the US dollar is poised to fall through the floor. Maybe just a dress rehearsal for the economic crisis ahead. Maybe not. Thanks to Dale Asberry for this link and the two that follow.

ALEC, the Corporatist Trojan Horse: NRDC is co-sponsoring a site to throw light on the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a consortium of huge multinationals working together very successfully to get corporatist-friendly legislation and deregulation passed.

Visual History of Religion in 90 Seconds: A neat video on a map of the world tracks the growth of the world’s Big 5 organized religions since prehistory.

Thought for the Week: Another great quote on community, by eco-feminist Susan Griffin, contributed by reader Peter Dixon:

[There is] a desire that is at the core of human imaginings, the desire to locate ourselves in community, to make of survival a shared effort, to experience a palpable reverence in our connections with each other and the earth that sustains us … to be defined by the largest arcs of meaning that connect flesh and river, sky and word, reverie and theleast act of survival.
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 1 Comment