how to save the world

Sunday Open Thread – July 29, 2007

Posted on July 29, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Lightning Branches, by Andrew Campbell (a depiction of Now Time)

What I’m thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon:

I’ve nearly completed the manuscript for my book on Natural Enterprise, which is due at the publisher in two weeks. Until then, articles here will continue to be short, focused and relatively unambitious. Apologies for not responding to e-mails, and blog comments. I’ll get to them later in the summer.

Our Youthful Skeletons: The NYT has unearthed some letters written by Hilary Clinton in her youth. I shudder at the thought that this could happen to me, and I suspect Hilary’s not too thrilled either. Now that everything we write is archived online, what scrutiny, what unfair out-of-context youthful writings will be dredged up to embarrass and discredit politicians and celebrities in a generation? Will we one day have the right to purge the Net of early writing? Will it even be possible?

The Three Seductions of Organized Religion: Absolution, salvation, and uncritical community. Damned appealing promises. Are these why so many people continue to belong, even fervently, to organized religions?

Out of Time: The realization that time is not linear, is not just a dimension like the dimensions of space, could change our perception and understanding of everything. When we spend so much of our life inside our own head, what happens when the foundation of that life suddenly vanishes? When we measure our accomplishments, the progress of our lives, in terms of clock time, what happens when we find that measure is a chimera?

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:

What’s the most innovative organization you know of, personally, and what is their secret?

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 2 Comments

Saturday Links for the Week – July 28, 2007 – the Cultural Anthropology Edition

Posted on July 28, 2007 by Dave Pollard

What’s Important This Week:

The World Without Us: Alan Weisman speculates on a future world without humans. Wonder how it compares to Ronald Wright’s vision? (image above is from Weisman’s book)

Who Cares About Factory Farmed Animals’ Welfare?: The factory farmers say they do what they can. Their customers say they are getting better because customers demand it. The animal welfare groups say it’s because of them that the situation isn’t worse. Most ‘consumers’ still don’t want to know.

Why We Don’t Care: Seth Godin explains why we only give a damn about things that we can relate to personally, even when if we all cared, we could make a big difference. That doesn’t make us heartless, just human. Thanks to Ed Diril for the link.

And the Rosy Futurists Still Reassure Us: … that technology will save us, and make everything better and better. Jim Kunstler sets us straight. Thanks to Jon Husband for the link.

The Care and Feeding of White Folks: Repost of a 1995 article by Earl Dunovant portrays the appearance of whites on the planet as an experiment gone wrong, and suggests what might be done. Thanks to Dale Asberry for this link, and the one that follows.

Parallels Between Soviet Collapse and Current-State US: Interesting presentation by Dmitri Orlov, a witness to the Soviet collapse, on lessons in ‘collapse preparedness’ the US should be learning now.

Thought for the Week:

Andrew Campbell ruminates on the nature of time:

[Dave said:] James Taylor said “the secret of life is enjoying the passage of time”. He’s exactly right, but it’s so very hard to learn to do it, and to get yourself into a situation, by simplifying your life, where you can do it. With my intentional thoughts, I get to enjoy these ‘passages’ twice — once as I intend them, and again when they occur.

[Andrew replies:] No, he’s not exactly right – (is anyone about anything that is complex and living?) but i wanted just to interpose that in the context of stress, life, chance and choice etc, the way to increase awareness and aesthetic engagement (connecting begets fruitfulness) in our world(s) is to come to know through engagements with ideas (concepts) that time is manifolded and that it is best accessed as Beamish knows, through the realization (mindandbody) that there are ‘other’ (kinds of) times – like Time – i.e. animals under low stress live in that Now Time we used to talk about. I think what being in Now Time does is it affords us an experience of how we might live with more Free Energy (At de Lange) – that is to say, unlike a clock that monotonously unwinds somehow its trapped-stored energy releasing it like a slave works (a.k.a. a machine) – we might enter into a dance with creation itself so that we feel safe to collapse (creative collapse) releasing small quanta of imagination, creativity, creative perceptions from >< with that amount of energy we don’t need to uphold the whole system, meaning we let go because we decided (free will) that our deeper connection in such a cycle of Time affords us a reciprocal let come from our world – it is saying in effect – we co-create each other, you and i are mutually engaging – i will heal you (Emerson) – make you ‘whole’ (Goethe et al to Bohm and beyond) we are not separate — and if one were religious which i know you are not, then one might begin to glimpse an idea of how ‘miracles’ like resurrections might happen – and if ever a civilization needed a resurrection of some kind — it’s us NOW.

[Dave wonders:] Perhaps “enjoying the passage of time” is really just letting go of linear ‘clock time’ and living at least in part in Now Time. It’s not so much that we enjoy the “passage” as that we don’t notice it, we don’t ‘pay attention’ to it. And perhaps then we realize that it is an illusion, a construct. What we enjoy is the ‘passage’ to Now Time.

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 7 Comments

The Dynamics of Social Networks

Posted on July 26, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Social networks are by nature complex phenomena — they can never be fully known or understood, and there are an infinite number of variables that affect their evolution and their success or failure. My observation is that they are also very fragile — while some ‘bonds’ of a network may be eternal or resilient, most networks as a whole seem to be in a constant state of flux, and easily disrupted. I’ve been trying to figure out why this is, and what might be done to make whole networks more resilient and more effective.

Dave Snowden has pointed out that our networks do not include us as individuals, but rather as identities. This means that you may have people networking with you in your various identities e.g. as a parent, as a co-worker, as a member of a project etc. He says we have both formal (formed for us) and informal (self-organized) manifestations of each of three different types of identity:

role based (e.g. as CIO or as acknowledged facilitator)
membership based (e.g. as employee in a division or as cohort of some association)
event or project based (e.g. as part of a project team or as player in a pick-up game)

Dave argues that informal, self-selected, self-organized networks tend to be more effective than formal networks, for various reasons such as greater trust and less hierarchy. But while formal networks can be controlled and directed to some extent by those with appropriate authority, informal networks are much harder to influence. The best way to stimulate and influence them is through what Dave calls boundary conditions (or rules), attractors and barriers, instituted early in the network’s evolution.

To be effective, informal networks need to have (I’ve amplified Dave’s list somewhat here):

a complex, shared problem, and either a sense of urgency to address it or a strong affinity to make it durable if the problem endures (e.g. the Toronto Maple Leafs’ failure to put together a decent team for its fans)
a means to measure success, so that progress can be assessed
meaningful (to the members) rewards to belong and contribute
some constraints on the formation and membership to prevent it becoming uselessly elitist, hopelessly conflicted, an echo chamber, or unwieldy (Dave says the ‘natural limit’ of a network is 15)

So, for example, if you have identified a customer need in your enterprise, but you are stuck because of some limitations of current technology, you may try to establish or join a network of people, perhaps around the world in different organizations and capacities, who care about that particular technology constraint. In this case success is easy to measure — you either invent or discover something that overcomes that constraint or you don’t. Some members will tell stories about what they have been doing or read about. Others will just lurk — they may not have enough to contribute but be waiting to jump as solutions and approaches to the problem emerge. If you add an attractor ( e.g. a prize) you may get some members to work harder on the problem. If the network gets too small to be doing much, or too short on diversity of members, or too large to keep track of who’s doing what, it may dissolve or fragment. You may be able to impose some constraints on membership to keep this from happening.

This is an example of an informal network that attracts members based on their interest in the specific project, i.e. it is project-based rather than role- or membership-based. Once an effective solution to the technology problem has been found, it is unlikely that the network will endure.

Blog networks probably combine all three types of identity basis: Some people will ‘join’ (e.g. subscribe to a blog’s feed and comment regularly) because they have role affinity — other knowledge management directors or consultants, for example, subscribing to a KM blog. Some will be attracted by membership affinity — a shared belief in or love of something, such as Gaia, or vintage cars. Some will be drawn by project/event affinity — getting Obama elected, for example. My blog covers so much diverse territory that it creates dissonance for some readers ( e.g. those who love my practical articles on KM but loathe my political views). The networks of people it attracts are not always congruent (though I’m surprised and delighted how often they are).

Role affinity draws principally on shared or related actions and behaviours. Membership affinity draws principally on shared beliefs or passions. Project/event affinity draws principally on shared objectives.

What makes informal networks so fragile is that our identities are constantly changing. If I move from a job as Chief Knowledge Officer to one as Facilitator, it’s likely to affect which networks I select to belong to. If I give up on the political process, I’m likely to abandon networks whose members still believe in it. Once the election is over, by campaign networks are likely to dissolve. Shared problems eventually lose interest or urgency, or are given up as insoluble, or get solved. Progress may become impossible to measure or impossible to achieve. Rewards may lose their lustre. Or despite membership constraints, the cohesion of the network may just dissipate to the point there is no focus or purpose left.

While informal networks are fragile, formal networks are, usually, ineffective. There is something in human nature that makes us object to being told who we must network with — it’s like being forced into an arranged marriage. Imposed formal networks depend on hierarchy and power, and on sanctions for refusing to work within the prescribed network. Given our affinity for sharing peer-to-peer, this means communication in formal networks is usually forced and dysfunctional — instructions go down and are (often) ignored, while data is extracted (often) begrudgingly and reported upward. We share knowledge only when and to the extent that we have to.

The most powerful phenomenon in formal networks is workarounds. These are the ways we find to do things effectively despite the formal networks pressuring us to do things (usually) ineffectively. It’s not that those high in the hierarchy want us to be ineffective. They just don’t know any better. They have never done our jobs so they don’t know the best way to do them. And because messengers are shot, they are not told what isn’t working or why, so their decisions are inherently flawed by lack of essential information.

Workarounds are what make the world work as well as it does, despite the dysfunctions of hierarchy and size. Courageous organizations (those that are small enough to be able to do it, anyway) recognize this by not establishing any formal networks, by having no hierarchy. They have no need for workarounds, just trust in people’s ability to figure out how to do their best given the constraints they have to live with.

This doesn’t just apply to the workplace. Family members learn that “it’s better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission” from a domineering parent whose advice makes no sense. Likewise team members with a bad coach. Wherever there are formal networks, there will be workarounds to make them work better than they otherwise would.

All of this explanation of social network dynamics presumes that you subscribe (as I do) to what Lakoff calls the liberal-progressive worldview. Those who have a conservative worldview tend to prefer formality and hierarchy and organized order, and they would have written this article from a completely different point of view.

While they are welcome to do so, the fact is that there are, in many networks, formal and informal, conservatives. These people prefer formal networks to ‘messy’ informal ones. They like to be told what to do and how to do it by someone with the authority to do so, and they trust authority more than they trust the ability of their peers to make decisions. They loathe workarounds.

What does their presence do to the dynamics of a social network?

First, they will be reluctant participants in informal networks, hesitant to trust them. This will inevitably make informal networks less effective, or, more likely, because these conservatives will self-exclude from such networks, making them poorer for the lack of their knowledge, ideas and experience.

Secondly, they will attempt, with the best of intentions, to try to formalize informal networks (to add ‘discipline’ to them), to denigrate them when they run counter to the operation of formal networks, and to disable or at least formalize workarounds.

Third, their obedient success in the organization may make them pariahs among the by-passed informal networkers, and may well drive the informal networkers out of the organization entirely.

So what you end up with in many larger organizations are two modi operandi going on simultaneously and at cross-purposes: One group improvisationally and creatively finding the best way to do things by networking informally peer-to-peer, and working around imposed constraints, and the other trying desperately to make things work as they are ‘supposed’ to, according to the manual, the boss’ edicts, and the organization chart, trying to impose ‘best practices’ and block workarounds.

No wonder so many large organizations are such unhappy places, since the dissonance between these two ways of working must be infuriating to both groups. In fact, it is even more complex than that, because most of us sometimes see the value of doing things differently from our normal modus operandi: Liberal-progressives see the need for organizational rigour in areas where there is considerable risk, while conservatives see no harm in informal networks for some creative tasks or as an outlet for frustration with the organization’s rules.

And as liberal-progressives move up in the organization, they generally become more inclined to see the value in formal networks that can exercise their new power and authority (and by embracing them, they often find they move up even faster). Meanwhile, conservatives who’ve been around awhile start to learn what works in reality and what only works in theory, and may tend to become more accommodating of informal networks, workarounds, and those who beg forgiveness instead of asking permission.

They’re like the stern parent who discovers to his astonishment that, when the rebellious kids are given the chance to set their own rules, their self-discipline is far more stringent and effective than imposed discipline ever was.

Every once in awhile I take a look at my networks, formal and informal, and the different identities in which I find affinity with others. They are so complex and so dynamic that they cannot really be mapped. And what’s most fascinating is that, if I asked the people in my networks (in their various identities) to map how they saw their networks involving me, I’m sure they would be utterly different from how I would draw them. Dave who?

Category: Social Networking

Posted in Using Weblogs and Technology | 1 Comment

Intentional Meditation?

Posted on July 25, 2007 by Dave Pollard

I‘m pretty hopeless at meditating. I just don’t seem to be able to slow down and focus my mind sufficiently to get the benefits from it.

I have, however, found that certain focused activities do get me into a state that is very relaxed, open and attentive:

My 5k runs, three times a week, in an oval in my back yard, free from traffic and distractions (other than curious wildlife).
Repetitive outdoor chores like power-washing the decks and mowing and trimming the grass.
At night, falling asleep and letting go of the concerns of the day.

These are all easy, effortless tasks that let my mind wander, so perhaps I do get close to a meditative state while I’m doing them.

What I like to do in this state is not meditation but rather intention. This entails thinking in detail, step by step, about how I am going to do something (something easy and certain and enjoyable), in the near future. I wrote about my mid-year intentions recently, and these are what I think about. These thoughts are not fantasies, wishful thinking or resolutions. They are realizations , thoughts about things I am in the process of doing, and that I am certain of completing. They are stories in process.

I generally start with short-term (next day or few days) intentions and then if time permits move to longer term (next few months) intentions — beyond that is too far for reasonable certainty, and premature for intention. One day at a time.

So my current meditative intentional thoughts are about:

the completion of my book on working naturally and Natural Enterprise (three weeks from now)
meeting new people and learning from them, listening to them, appreciating them, being open to them (every day)
my new position, as executive with a large, influential and trusted professional association, and the opportunities it will give me to help entrepreneurs succeed sustainably, responsibly, joyfully, on their own terms (starts next week)
showing people how their work, and their lives, can be easier, simpler, and happier (every day)
living a simpler, healthier life, trusting my intuition and my emotions and my senses, learning from nature and from just paying attention to what is happening, how things work, why things are the way they are, what it all means, and what I can do to adapt and evolve and help others adapt and evolve to cope with it and to influence things in small, positive ways (whenever the occasion arises)
imagining possibilities, both for their own sake (as a writer of imaginative fiction) and to see how those possibilities might make the world a better place, at least for those I love in my communities, and perhaps serve as models for others

These are delightful thoughts, full of joy, discovery, learning, creation, letting go and letting come, letting things emerge and make sense. If our life is a movie we each star in, I’m looking at tomorrow’s script, and learning and rehearsing my lines.

James Taylor said “the secret of life is enjoying the passage of time”. He’s exactly right, but it’s so very hard to learn to do it, and to get yourself into a situation, by simplifying your life, where you can do it. With my intentional thoughts, I get to enjoy these ‘passages’ twice — once as I intend them, and again when they occur.

I don’t know if this is anything like meditation. The word ‘meditation’ means to ‘turn over’, to take appropriate measures, to consider and do what needs to be done. The word ‘intend’ means to stretch towards. Perhaps my ‘intentional meditation’ is too decided, not sufficiently considered. While I’m thinking, I certainly can imagine possible obstacles to achieving my intention, but I imagine, at almost the same time as these obstacles occur to me, natural workarounds for them.

What do you think? Am I on to something, or too self-confident for my own good? And is this really meditation, or is it a poor substitute, forthose unable to slow down and consider fully and thoughtfully?

Category: Let-Self-Change

Posted in Collapse Watch | 9 Comments

Personal vs Collective Self-Interest

Posted on July 24, 2007 by Dave Pollard

The idea of the ‘free’ market economy is that, if each of us pursues our enlightened self-interest, the result will be an optimal balancing of those interests, and an economy that produces what people most need, or at least want. This blog has explained why, as wonderful as that idea may be, it has never been and can never be realized, and our pursuit of it, as if such an idealized notion can work, has led to some colossally dumb ways of doing things. As a consequence:

Since it is in the interests of many that the interests of others be un-enlightened, advertising, marketing and other huge industries have sprung up to deliberately mislead us, and to try to artificially create wants and needs.
Many of us have become addicted to consumption, so that what we buy is not in our self-interest, but in the interest of the pushers of products. Those pushers do whatever they can to ensure we remain addicted, by keeping interest rates artificially low (far less than real inflation) and by encouraging reckless borrowing and indebtedness.
A small minority of the population has an obscene share of the wealth. That means they buy not only what they need but everything they might conceivably want, pushing the price of those items up astronomically. Everyone else buys what they’re addicted to, and, if they have anything left over, they buy some of what they need. For an increasing number who can afford nothing, that means they buy nothing – they get what they need by begging, borrowing and stealing, and many of them end up incarcerated, or dead.
Costs and prices are massively distorted by subsidies extorted from lawmakers in return for campaign contributions, by exploitation of abysmal social and environmental standards in desperately struggling nations, and by externalizing the costs of pollution, social dislocation and illness caused by corporatist activities, which end up paid for by taxpayers.

However, even enlightened economists able to see that the ‘free’ market economy is an unachievable ideal, and a myth, tend to acknowledge that, barring these distortions, it makes sense to pay attention to consumers’ expressions of self-interest, as being a reasonable representation of what people need (or think they need) and want — an expression of the ‘wisdom of crowds’.

But Wisdom of Crowds author James Surowiecki, who went to such pains to explain in his book the need for a surveyed ‘crowd’ to be objective and independent of ‘groupthink’ (if their collective perspectives are to be truly wise), points out in this week’s New Yorker that the self-interest of individuals, taken collectively, can be very different from the collective self-interest of the group as a whole.

As an example he notes that, in a market ‘undistorted’ by regulation, people choose to buy large, gas-gulping, clumsy vehicles (SUVs and light trucks) — because they (mistakenly, as Malcolm Gladwell points out) believe they are safer, that if your car is bigger and heavier than the other guy’s, in an accident you will fare better. But when asked if they would favour regulations that ban such vehicles, they overwhelmingly say yes.

Another example that was reported recently is that, while the majority of business owners want less social and environmental regulation of their industry (because they think it puts them at a competitive disadvantage versus countries that lack such regulation), an overwhelming number would not only support, but would actually prefer, strong social and environmental regulations on business provided they were across-the-board (affecting every competitor equitably) and rigorously enforced.

We can see examples of this everywhere. The expressed self-interest of individual buyers in the absence of regulation is very different from their acknowledged collective self-interest in an equitably regulated environment. It’s not regulation we hate — in our modern crowded society we could not live without regulation (sorry, libertarians, though I like the idea); it’s inequitable regulation, and regulation that is clearly arbitrary and not in the collective self-interest, that we are opposed to.

And because of our (often deliberately fostered) skepticism about the competence of government to do anything effectively (and about its honesty), we tend to believe that all regulations will necessarily be inequitable and ‘selectively applied’.

So given that skepticism, we tend to prefer to pursue our (unregulated) personal self-interest, and shrug off the fact that our collective self-interest would be better served if that personal self-interest were restricted, and altered, by effective, honest regulation.

Unequivocably anti-regulation forces (the corporatists) prey off this skepticism, playing us off against each other, and profiting from the inequities and the selective application and non-enforcement of regulations. And laugh all the way to the bank.

Bush’s orders to regulators not to enforce the law, and to dismantle regulations, have therefore gone largely unchallenged, except by a few brave whistle-blowers, who promptly lost their jobs.

The bottom line is that we need to restore integrity to government, and restore authority to regulators to uphold and enforce regulations equitably and not arbitrarily, before we have any hope of persuading citizens to vote for their collective self-interest over their personal self-interest.

We’re smart enough to know that the collective self-interest is better for all of us. The question is whether we’re smart enough and committed enough to fix the shattered hulk of dismantled, corrupted North American governments (I can’t speak for Europe’s governments, though I sense that regulations there are stronger and more or less intact), so that they can make regulation work effectively again in our collective self-interest.

I’m not entirely sure where we’d even begin. No one trusts government anymore. Self-regulation has never worked (you don’t ask the foxes to manage the chicken coop). And corporate charters and mandates encourage unregulated corporations to behave pathologically. Pricing and taxing instead of regulation (as distinct from in addition to regulation) merely punishes the poor

What do you think? The majority apparently want big, heavy vehicles banned from the roads and dramatically increased fuel efficiency standards across the board for all vehicles. They recognize this is in our collective interest. But governments of every political stripe have failed to enact them, and failed to enforce the lax standards that exist. Is there a political, or economic, solution? What might that solution be?

Image: theoretical supply demand curves, from wikipedia

Category: The Political Process

Posted in How the World Really Works | 5 Comments

Too Much Outrage, and Not Nearly Enough

Posted on July 23, 2007 by Dave Pollard

My favourite cartoon from the ever-provocative Ted Rall

I‘ve been trying to figure out why some people love Michael Moore’s new movie Sicko, and others hate it. The wildly divergent reactions, it seems, have less to do with political view and more to do with the perceived solutions (or lack of them) to the outrageous situation that Moore presents — the utterly dysfunctional and egregiously expensive and inequitable US healthcare system.

Consider some of the other outrages that the daily news inundates us with daily:

Exxon’s and Big Oil’s effective lobbying of the Bush Administration to deny and ignore global warming, and to dismantle and not enforce environmental regulations;
The tragedy of diseases in struggling nations causing such misery — easily preventable, curable or at least treatable, if only the drugs and equipment were made affordable;
Koch Industries (the largest private company in the US), guilty of hundreds of horrific and deliberate environmental infractions that would have an ordinary citizen behind bars for life, escaping with tiny fines in out-of-court settlements orchestrated by good buddy and campaign recipient Bush;
The fraudulent war in Iraq, the abuse of civil liberties and other criminal responses to the events of 9/11 which have made the world much more dangerous and much more miserable, and left the US treasury bankrupt;
The obscene salaries of executives in the global corpocracy, funded by taxpayers through the massive subsidies these corporate welfare bums receive in return for their campaign contributions to establishment politicians, salaries of more in a single hour than the minimum-wage earner gets in a year, and more thanthe average struggling-nation wage-earner gets in their short lifetime.

These stories provoke two simultaneous reactions in most people: outrage and a feeling of impotence to do anything about them. Why would people tell us stories that make us so angry and conflicted? Several reasons:

Propaganda and manipulation: to instill fear and cow people into compliance with the established order;
Laziness: it is easier to stir people up about a problem than to do something about it;
Money or fame: outrage gets attention, with can produce ratings, fame and fortune;
Search for help: frustration and bafflement at not knowing what to do can cause people to shout out for answers, to whistle-blow, or to engage in curious gossip.

Stories that provoke helpless outrage are infectious, viral. They spread easily and quickly. But as the audience or storyteller, these stories have a toxic effect on us:

They make us angry and fearful,
They instill a sense of Learned Helplessness,
They provoke us to want to act, a willingness to do anything,
They make us want to inure ourselves from the helpless rage, through denial or just turning away, and
Most of all, they raise our stress level.

Not healthy. After awhile, some of us just turn it off, refuse to pay any more attention to the news.

What should we do? While some of these stories are trumped up or exaggerated, a lot of them are horrible truths, and ignoring them just plays into the hands of the perpetrators and their accomplices.

A healthier, more effective response would be:

Critically assess the information: Consider who has the most to gain from exaggerating or denying it. Ask yourself whether it makes sense. Consider the source.
Filter out information that is unactionable: If there’s nothing you can do about it, why worry about it? There are more than enough causes of stress in our lives without exposing ourselves pointlessly to more.
Tease out actions that are simple and effective: If there is something you and others can do about it, make it simple to act, and ensure that action will be effective. There’s only so much time for activism, so we need to use it advantageously. In my experience, petitions rarely work. Good investigative research can accomplish a lot (the mainstream media, with few exceptions, are too lazy, cheap and compliant to do it, but they’ll often publish it if it’s handed to them. Direct face-to-face confrontations sometimes works. Street theatre sometimes works. Pick a strategy that’s novel and likely to get attention. If there isn’t one, then it’s unactionable — in which case see rule #2.
Don’t pass on the information unless it’s credible and actionable: Gossip and rumour can be dangerous and cause suffering or litigation, and set back your cause. And if it’s unactionable, passing it on is just stressing out other people.
Don’t mistake passing information on for action: If it’s actionable, act. Pass it on after you’ve acted, not instead of acting. Tell people what you’ve done that’s made a difference. Be a model.

So how would you apply these rules to Moore’s new movie?

Don’t go see it. There are better things to do with your time than to get stressed and frustrated about problems that have no answer.

What would it take to fix the US healthcare system? The same thing that, eventually, ‘fixes’ any dysfunctional complex system: crisis. When the system gets so overwhelmed, so expensive, so broken, that it falls apart, and there is enough of a sense of near-unanimous urgencyfor creating a new one, it will happen.

A few million people outraged and feeling impotent won’t be nearly enough to bring about change.

Category: Activism: What You Can Do

Posted in Collapse Watch | 4 Comments

Sunday Open Thread – July 22, 2007

Posted on July 22, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Boathouse at Dawn, Fiji, photo by Ron Romanosky, at webshots

What I’m thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon:

I’m working furiously on completing the manuscript for my book on Natural Enterprise, which is due at the publisher in three weeks. Until then, articles here will continue to be short, focused and relatively unambitious.

More Thoughts on Complexity: The two articles from this week’s New Yorker that I referred to in yesterday’s post have got me thinking about coping with complexity, since that is what they’re really about. If it is true that the choices we make for ourselves in an unregulated environment (‘safe’ gas-gulping cars) are radically different from the choices we would make for our society in a regulated environment (no big or gas-gulping cars allowed at all), what does this mean for the future of our political processes and systems? And if investigative journalism shows us facts so damning that we are baffled about our failure to act (or perhaps more accurately, our impotence to act) does this explain today’s whiny, do-nothing political echo chambers and our cynicism about activism, and if so, what can we do about this?

Vignettes: Coming up soon, vignette #5.

Blog-Hosted Conversations: Plan is for 30-minute conversations, once a week, on the subject of identifying and acquiring the essential skills and relationships we need to be models of a better way to live, and what those models might look like. They will happen, but not until the book is into the publishers.

Open Thread Question:

Why is it that, despite the relatively low survival rate of sole proprietorships, most people who decide to start their own business doit alone?

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments

Saturday Links for the Week – July 21, 2007

Posted on July 21, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Rufus & Quack #4Making Sense Of It All This Week:
Lee Arnold’s Two-Minute YouTube Review of Al Gore’s New Book: The inventor of ecolanguage does it again. Brilliant.

Leaders and Heroes, Proud of Their Obscene Wealth: The great NYT investigative reporter Louis Uchitelle interviews corporate leaders who really believe they’re worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and that their donating a bit of it to charity makes them heroes as well as brilliant leaders. Fascinating, nauseating, essential reading.

What We Want for Ourselves, and What We Want for Our Society, are Different: James Surowiecki in The New Yorker makes the most compelling argument yet for why we all need regulation. Extract:

The curious fact is that many people buying three-ton Suburbans for that arduous two-mile trip to the supermarket also want Congress to pass laws making it harder to buy Suburbans at all. Whatís happening here?…

Between 1975, when fuel-economy standards were first introduced, and 1984, average fuel economy improved by sixty-two per cent, without any decline in performance.) This is not because of technological difficulties or a conspiracy on the part of the auto industry. Itís because automakers have listened to car buyers, and put their energy into making vehicles bigger and faster, rather than more efficient. In calling for a law requiring better gas mileage in our cars, then, voters are really saying that theyíre unhappy with the collective result of the choices they make as buyers. [This is echoed in repeated surveys of business leaders showing it’s not regulation they object to, it’s regulation that is not applied across the board or which is unevenly or not enforced.]

Why Michael Moore is So Infuriating: Also in the New Yorker this week, Atul Gawande reviews Sicko and notes “Sicko doesn’t really offer solutions…[yet] the movie is so effective in depicting the inhumanity [of the US healthcare system] that it makes our failure to act seem baffling.” He goes on to explain why Edwards’ and Obama’s universal coverage proposals won’t ever see the light of day, and why “failure to act” isn’t baffling at all once you begin to understand the hazards of reforming complex systems. Moore doesn’t offer solutions because there aren’t any. Things are the way they are for a reason. Only a large-scale crisis — like another Great Depression or The End of Oil — will precipitate needed change.

Natural Work Needs No Sabbatical: Chris Hardie ponders why companies feel the need to offer and require staff to take paid vacations.

Immune System Suppression Won’t Help Us During Pandemics: A paradox of pandemics, poultry flu and some other infectious diseases is that those with the strongest immune systems have the highest mortality rate. This is due to a phenomenon called ‘cytokine storms’, a consequence of hyperactive immune systems that, it was thought, might be worse than the disease it was fighting. Under this theory, suppressing the immune system and preventing these ‘storms’ might reduce mortality during pandemics. Alas, a new study says it isn’t so: It’s the disease, not our body’s reaction to it, that most determinesmortality, and compromising the immune system just makes the disease’s job easier.

Thought for the Week: From an old Neil Young song On Our Way Home:

Though we rush ahead to save our time, we are only what we feel.

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | Comments Off

Technophilia, Virtual Communities and the World of Ends

Posted on July 19, 2007 by Dave Pollard

A lot of my friends and readers are technophiles. They believe that social networking and other technologies can make the world a much better place. I’d like to believe it, but I don’t.

The industrial economy is rigged. It is not a ‘market’ economy or a ‘free’ economy. It is designed to reduce us to mere, insatiable consumers — of politicians’ promises with our tax dollars, of overpriced, imported crap products, of ‘education’, of packaged information and entertainment ‘products’, of health treatments etc. We are given just enough cash and credit to keep us addicted, and we are isolated from serious social interaction to make us compliant. No great conspiracy. That’s just how the world works best when the objective is to maximize profit and GDP.

We are not people in this economy. We are consumers, taxpayers, students, audiences, patients. Numbers. Demographics.

The natural economy, the one we keep striving towards because it’s, well, natural, is inherently social, which is one of the things we like about it. It engages us as customers, citizens, learners, participants, as peers in the collective enterprise of living and making a living. It disintermediates the robber barons, the corrupt politicians, the boring teachers, the mindless media, and healthcare professionals who profit from our illness. They are not needed in a natural economy. There is no place for them.

It is not surprising, then, that we are attracted to entrepreneurship, to networked rather than hierarchical organizations, to the idea of community. Small is beautiful, and we are social creatures by nature.

The idea of a World of Ends is that we don’t need middlemen to do what is important. With the Internet, with social networking, we can co-produce what we need together, for ourselves, with nothing skimmed or suboptimal. It is suggested, and we would love to believe, that the World of Ends is evolving, slowly, under the corporatist radar, waiting to achieve sufficient momentum that it cannot be stopped.

In a fully developed natural economy, we would all be members of self-selected, self-managed natural enterprises, and of self-selected, self-managed natural intentional communities. Natural enterprises and our natural community would be self-sufficient and self-governed, and as members of them we would look after our own learning, recreation, health and well-being.

It’s a great idea, and we need to work towards it. But there are two problems with how we’re approaching it now:

Technology alone will never get us there. Technology is a facilitator of social change, not a catalyst for it. We need to want to change, we need to have to change, before we will. And there is no indication, in history or in what is happening today, that we want or need to change that profoundly.
The glue that holds natural communities together is physical and emotional, not virtual or intellectual. To make them work, and to make them sustainable, they must be part of a massive relocalization of the way we live and the way we make a living. Long distance social relationships may be pleasant and instructive, but they are not the stuff of true community. As useful as the Internet is in letting us practice social arts, it may actually be an impediment to creating real, sustainable community, something we can depend on, live on. The economics of natural enterprise and natural community are inherently local, geographically centred on physical place.

I know this is hard to explain, which is perhaps why I keep putting off trying to express it. I understand the two problems above intuitively more than intellectually. We can develop software virtually, and we can undertake artistic collaborations remotely. But we cannot build a whole economy on fragile, multiple virtual relationships. Most of what our economy is about is atoms, not bits. It is quality, locally produced food and clothing and building materials. It is creation and recreation that we participate in, in person.

Ultimately we will have to abandon the illusion that we can be part of a global, virtual, ever-changing ‘electronic’ community, that we can be citizens of the whole world, that social networks and technology can change the world. Eventually we have to come back to place, to true community, and make it work, face to face.

The world we will face by the end of this century, a world of cascading crises and horrific scarcity, will not allow us to play with technology. This technology is fragile and needs huge amounts of energy stolen from future generations to work at all. We cannot afford it. This future world, a world of rust and reclamation, will force us to face hard truths. Our future social networks will be held together with flesh and sweat, not messages and VoIP.

It’s time we got down to the business of figuring out how our descendants will live, and make a living, when the ephemeral constructs of our rapacious, delusional age are gone. It’s important to get started, withlove and without illusion. Here, now, in this place.

The time for toys is over.

Category: Technology and Society

Posted in Using Weblogs and Technology | 8 Comments

Plenitude on Any Terms

Posted on July 18, 2007 by Dave Pollard

In today’s NYT, Verlyn Klinkenborg laments the lack of attention to the fact that California’s population (like Canada’s) is expected to nearly double to 60 million by 2050 (both populations, barring crisis, will reach 100 million by 2100, with US total population expected to remain about ten times that amount, one billion by 2100). Klinkenborg notes that, even with a moderation in the growth of consumption and average house size, the increase in total use of land and resources, and waste produced, will increase at a considerably faster rate than population. He concludes:

This population forecast is a vivid reminder of the assumptions that make meaningful change so hard. We can’t help believing in growth. We can’t help believing that the way to create change is simply to buy different stuff, so growth doesn’t stop. And we refuse to think seriously about the number of human beings on this planet, a kind of growth that somehow seems “natural” to us. It makes no difference how little each of those 60 million Californians will consume in 2050. It’s nearly impossible to imagine how they could meet their water needs alone.

And then there is the impact of all those people on the other species with which they might have shared the Golden State. In 2007, we remain blindly impervious to the life-claims of almost all other forms of life ó to the moral stipulation that their right to life is equivalent to ours. How it will be then I do not know, but if there are indeed 60 million people living in California in 2050, there will be nothing meaningful to be said on the matter, except as a subject of nostalgia.

We like to take it for granted that we’re moving ahead in environmental consciousness. We like to hope that the curve of our environmental awareness will catch up to the curve of our economic growth and things will somehow come into balance. But faith in our progressive enlightenment seems a little misplaced to me, especially when I remember a speech that James Madison gave to his local agricultural society nearly 190 years ago.

Madison said, simply, that we have no reason to suppose that all of Earth’s resources, which support so much living diversity, can rightfully be commandeered to support mankind alone. It seems incredible to me, in 2007, that a former president could articulate such an environmentally sound principle of conscience. But it’s a principle that should move to the very center of our thinking. It should cause us to re-examine not just how we shop and what we drive and who we elect but also how our species reproduces. It should cause us to re-imagine that once and future California, which lies only 43 years away, and make sure that it isn’t barren of all but us humans.

Population growth of 1-2% per year is so slow that we tend to ignore it, and assume that it can be simply or naturally absorbed. But 1% growth compounded adds up to 60% in 50 years and 170% (a near-tripling) in 100 years. And 2% growth compounded adds up to 170% growth (a near tripling) in 50 years and 620% (over seven times current population) in 100 years — that’s what’s (still) occurring in most of the world’s struggling nations. It’s the proverbial ‘boiling frog’ situation – nothing seems to be happening, but suddenly you wake up and the place you love is gone.

I live just outside the Greater Toronto Area, in an area, the Oak Ridges Moraine, that is, for now, supposedly, protected wetland and greenbelt (see map above). The GTA, home to half of Canada’s new immigrants, is growing by more than 2% per year, so even if this slows somewhat, we’re looking at a population of six million today exploding to 15 million by 2050 and over 40 million by 2100. Since most of the new residents want single-family homes on private lots, we’re talking about a quadrupling of built-up area by 2050 and a ten-fold increase by 2100. This is precisely what has happened in most of the cities in the struggling nations in the last century. The New Yorker has chillingly described what urban life is like there.

A recent post by my friend Joe Bageant explains the sense of fatalism, disbelief, denial and indifference that most of us feel when we look at such forecasts. He likens us to ants who, up until the day their colony dies off suddenly from lack of water, continue to do what they have always done, unaware or unresponsive to the pending disaster. Do they sense, know it is coming, and just shrug their thoraxes that these troublesome signs are not their business, something in the Queen’s or the Ant God’s hands? Joe writes:

We begin too late to “make better choices.” Grim choices that do nothing but postpone the inevitable, which are called better ones and sold to us to make ourselves feel better about our toxicity. Burn corn in your gas tank. Go green, with the help of Monsanto. But not many can be concerned even with the matter of better choices. Few can truly grasp the fullness of the danger because there is no way they can get their minds around it, no way to see the world in its entirety…

All the green energy sources and eating right and voting right cannot fix what has been irretrievably ruined, but only make life amid the ruination slightly more bearable…

So we postpone transformation through truth, and stick with what has always worked — empire and consumption. And we twiddle our lives away thorough insignificant fretting about mortgages and health care and political parties and pretend the whole of Western culture is not a disconnect…

We allow ourselves to imagine the worst is somewhere in yet another future so we can continue without owning decision. Love of comfort being the death of courage, we continue the familiar commoditized life, the only one we have known…

Some few of us are in a hellish limbo, simply waiting for total collapse because it is easier to rebuild from nothing than to change billions of minds not even remotely concerned with the looming catastrophe. A minority of the world, the six percent called America, suffers the mass self-delusion of endless plenitude. A much larger portion is less concerned with the moral aspects of consumption because they are brutally engaged in trying to find enough to eat and a drink of clean water. So plenitude on any terms looks damned good. Escape to America because those fuckers over there don’t seem to be suffering at all.

And that brings us back to 60 million and then 100 million Californians, a like number of somewhat colder, somewhat less drought-stricken Canadians (nearly half of them in the GTA), and a billion Americans, still looking for “plenitude on any terms”.

I know, you don’t believe it will happen. Previous neo-Malthusians, after all, have been wrong; their dire predictions never came about. Why should it be any different this century?

We’ll figure it out, you say. We’ll adapt. We’ll voluntarily reduce our fertility. We’ll close down immigration before it gets to this. Technology will allow us to live better with less consumption, to collaborate on solutions.

And what more can we do anyway? We’re already being more frugal, driving greener cars, having fewer children than our parents. We’re doing our part. So shut up about it already.

Like Joe’s ant colony, we don’t believe in Armageddon. And those who do also believe in salvation from a higher power. We do what we must, then we do what’s easy, andthen we do what’s fun.

If only those needs, those comforts, those joys didn’t come with such a huge, and inevitable cost.

Category: Overpopulation

Posted in Collapse Watch | 7 Comments