how to save the world

Taking the Pledge:

Moving Beyond Kyoto: Al Gore makes the tough task ahead plain.

Live Earth’s 7-point pledge on the climate crisis

• To demand that my country join an international treaty within the next 2 years that cuts global warming pollution by 90% in developed countries and by more than half worldwide in time for the next generation to inherit a healthy earth;
• To take personal action to help solve the climate crisis by reducing my own CO2 pollution as much as I can and offsetting the rest to become “carbon neutral”;
• To fight for a moratorium on the construction of any new generating facility that burns coal without the capacity to safely trap and store the CO2;
• To work for a dramatic increase in the energy efficiency of my home, workplace, school, place of worship, and means of transportation;
• To fight for laws and policies that expand the use of renewable energy sources and reduce dependence on oil and coal;
• To plant new trees and to join with others in preserving and protecting forests; and,
• To buy from businesses and support leaders who share my commitment to solving the climate crisis and building a sustainable, just, and prosperous world for the 21st century.

And why the pledge wasn’t necessary in the 1620s: The BBC explains why community-based living, eating local foods, recycling and wearing those funny clothes made sense then, and still does today. Thanks to Chris Brainard for the link.

I’m an expert all of a sudden: Foreign Policy magazine kindly acknowledges this blog as a deep-thinking look at what the future holds. Thanks to Keith Robinson for the link.

Et Le Devoir est d’accord avec moi: A French-language editorial in Le Devoir says essentially what I did in my article on the National Day of Action. Merci ý Martin-Šric Racine for the catch.

Thoughts for the Week: What if there’s a sudden stock market crash? A fascinating 10-year old story from WaPo (when the market had surged to half today’s level) explains how the government has reacted to huge stock market drops in past, and what they would do if it happened today. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link.

Are we meant to walk barefoot, like a fox? Jason Godesky explains the natural, integrative way to walk, and why shoes are an abomination that hurt our posture, our agility, ourwalking/running stamina and our health.

And as I sat there listening to the frogs and watching a bat skimming the surface of the pool looking for insects, and breathing slowly and deeply, I realized that the reason the birds and animals have become so tame around me is not a Gaia connection but the fact that my smell is now a part of this place, from running around sweating, from lying in the grass, from constantly repairing the bird feeders after squirrel and raccoon deconstruction. The wild creatures recognize me as belonging to this place, which is their place, too.

While I always used to want to travel, now I’m more than content to spend my leisure time, my time for discovery and contemplation, in my place. As I become more attentive, I’ve learned that this place still has a million mysteries to show me. The work I do in this place is never a chore — mowing the lawn, power-washing the decks, vacuuming the pool, and my 5k runs, are all forms of meditation, relaxation, connection. And despite all the time I spend out in my place, I am always discovering new and astonishing creatures, noticing things I’d never noticed before.

I imagine this place as it was before humans arrived. It is moraine land, and what grew here 40,000 years ago before the last ice age, and 20,000 years ago when the ice retreated again, and even 5,000 and 2,000 years ago, and what grows here now are very different. But somehow it is still the same place. The trees and plants and creatures, including me, that now belong to this place were meant to be here, we chose this place, together, as our home.

When I speak to people who have lived their entire lives in the city, they can’t understand this, though I get indulgent smiles from them. And I know people who live in this paradise who still see it as just a lot of work, as something to improve, to keep ‘up’.

Wilderland. Wonderland. I wish everyone could find it, feel it. Know their place.Belong to it, and through it, belong to all-life-on-Earth.

If everyone knew, maybe it wouldn’t be too late.

Nobel chemist and pioneer complexity expert Ilya Prigogine is cited by my friend Andrew Campbell as saying that nature has no secrets — everything we want or need to know in the world is waiting to be discovered. That means it is waiting for us to be ready to learn it, which presupposes that we have:

• Capacity to understand: That’s not just a function of brain capacity, but also the ability to pay attention and to be open to new ideas and possibilities, and to imagine;
• Need to understand: Either an urgent adaptive/survival need, or intellectual curiosity to discover; and
• Tools to understand: The toolkit with which we were endowed by nature is comparatively poor (consider our relatively feeble eyesight, dim sense of smell, slow speed and inability to fly), but we have compensated for it with our ingenuity, especially at biomimicry — inventing new tools that mimic the best nature provides.

We have a need to understand — the challenges we face as a society have never been greater. And although our man-made tools are fragile and clumsy by nature’s standards, they give us what we need.

What we are lacking, I think, is capacity. Despite (or perhaps because of) our large brains we are inattentive, prone to erroneous prejudgement, distrustful of our intuitions and our subconscious knowledge, and we suffer from dreadful and growing imaginative poverty. We are seemingly unable to grasp complex issues and concepts well — we are so left-brain heavy that we over-analyze and over-simplify, and we are driven (I suspect because of our increasingly poor learning habits) to create mechanistic, complicated explanations for organic, complex phenomena. Then, when these explanations fail, we add further levels of complication, until we have thirteen-dimensional universes with vibrating strings.

We try to deduce when we should induce. We analyze when we should be synthesizing. We look for root causes when we should be looking for patterns. We try to impose order when we should let it emerge and study why it emerged as it did. We try to change and control our environments when we should change ourselves to adapt to them.

So what we should do now is build our capacity to understand — capacity of attentiveness, openness, imagination, intuition, subconscious awareness, appreciation of complexity, ability to learn and intuit and induce and synthesize and see patterns and adapt and let come and let go. And then show others in our communities why this capacity is so important and help engender it in them, too.

Then we will be ready, together, to discover what nature has been waiting to show us and tell us. No grand unifying theory of everything — just an understanding of how the world really works, and why our current way of living is unsustainable, unhealthy and unnatural. And what to do tomake it better.

So I’m starting a new tradition — Mid-Year’s intentions. These aren’t things you want to do, they’re things you know you’re going to do. It’s a taking stock, a self-clarification of priorities, a statement of intentionality. In accordance with Pollard’s Law — We do what we must, then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun — this list is about what you’re driven to do (not what you wish you were more driven to do), it’s about what easy/fun playing and learning activities you’re going to do. It’s about realizing what you’re becoming, not becoming something that you’re not. It’s about being more yourself.

My reason for blogging about it is that I think it might be revealing to my readers (and if you write about your intentions that could be revealing to your readers). Our readers would then have a little better context for understanding us, and what we write about, and understanding it better. Good stuff for a Friday, I think. So here are my ten mid-year’s intentions:

1. Let myself continue to become more loving, more positive, more engaged, more attentive, more enthused, more appreciative, more self-sufficient, more open, more vulnerable, more resilient. 
2. Make my book on finding and creating natural sustainable enterprise, for my readers, extraordinary, the best thing I’ve ever written, and start experimentally building the stuff around it — peer-to-peer entrepreneurial self-help networks, partner-finders, success stories, an entrepreneurial centre of excellence, a program to get media buzz about our society’s lack of entrepreneurial skills — that will make it the catalyst for change it is meant to be.
3. Ensure that my next business assignment is aligned with helping entrepreneurs to succeed sustainably, so my book and my work reinforce each other. This is in the spirit of doing one or two things really well, rather than trying to do everything.
4. More and more, teach by showing and by facilitating, rather than by telling. 
5. Complete the transition to a healthy, natural, varied vegetarian diet of mostly raw, unprocessed, local foods. 
6. Find an opportunity every day to make someone’s life less stressful, less needy, easier, and more fun.
7. Whenever possible, spend time with children and animals, in nature and in beautiful places, in play and in spontaneous activities.
8. Continue to live simpler, more ‘naked’ in every sense. Own less, owe less, want less. Make more time for things that are important by reducing the number of urgent things that ‘have’ to be done. Learn to say ‘no’ gracefully.
9. Exercise more and differently. My running routine is immensely therapeutic, but I seek to expand it to include more varied and holistic exercises.
10. Learn something new of value every day. This could be something practical, something insightful, something inspiring, or something that builds capacity. Something that makes me more useful to others and to the Earth. And practice what I’ve learned.

Only a few years ago some of these things would have been impossible, even inconceivable, and others would have seemed so arduous that I would groan just contemplating them (or feel guilty about not even trying). Now they’re easy, they’re in my nature, they’re what I’m becominganyway. I am so fortunate!

Now, what are your intentions? If you have your own blog or website, report them there and just link back here — your readers should know.

I reported recently about new research that suggests the cause of the collapse of the Atlantic fishery was neither overfishing and pollution (as environmentalists suggested) nor an abundance of seals (as the fishermen suggested), but global warming. The authors argued that the marine ecosystem is so complex that minor changes in air and ocean temperature can trigger major changes in species at the bottom of the food chain, which then ripple through the whole ecosystem, with dramatic, sudden and unpredictable consequences. ‘Unknowingness’ and unpredictability are the hallmarks of complex networks.

Now there’s evidence that the same thing could be happening to our forests. The emphasis in forest ecosystem stewardship has been on combating ‘invasive species’ like the Asian longhorn beetle, regulated cutting, replanting and fire management. But after five years and millions of dollars spent in BC and Alberta alone combating the mountain pine beetle (MPB), a native insect in Western highland coniferous forests, authorities have declared the battle lost. Billions of the insect have ravaged lodgepole pines and moved on to Douglas fir and interior spruce and other conifers. The focus now is on helping bankrupt loggers avoid bankruptcy and find another living.

They tried all the usual ‘complicated’ solutions: Clearcutting with monoculture replanting. Controlled burns. Spraying and pheromone trapping. Nothing worked. In the process, out of ignorance or opportunism other tree species were also cut down. The canopy cover has been lost. The fire danger of dead standing timber is substantial.

The real danger, however, is that the starving beetles have not only jumped to less hospitable conifers in their own mountain ecosystem, they’ve moved East and started to infest the Boreal forest. That’s the vast forest that covers half of Canada, from the Rockies to the Atlantic. It is one of the world’s great carbon sinks. And arborists say there is nothing standing in the way of the MPB devastating it, as it has devastated the mountain forests of BC and Alberta.

What’s going on here? Well, the entomologists say the MPB thrives when several years in a decade have warm winters and summer drought. That’s exactly what’s happened in the past decade. And many of the birds that eat the beetle have suffered inexplicable population losses. So the ecosystem is wildly unbalanced, and as a result already 9.2 million hectares (36,000 square miles) of forest is exhausted or severely stressed.

It’s the story of the Atlantic cod all over again, except this time instead of the devastation of marine life we’re looking at the devastation of a vast land area, and all the life that depends on it. All because one beetle exploited a small sustained climate change. The butterfly effect without wings.

So if all the complicated solutions don’t work, what should we do? The truth is we haven’t the foggiest idea. When it comes to complex networks, we don’t have a clue. We don’t know enough — can’t know enough — about such networks to analyze them and determine cause and effect. We can’t predict what will happen. We just don’t know. We’re helpless to ‘fix’ what is to us an unfathomable black box.

If we can’t fix it, we can leave it to the expert. Nature has been balancing unbalanced systems for billions of years.

And we can adapt. That’s what natural creatures do when environments change. My prescription, therefore, is radical and simple:

1. We need to combat global warming with every instrument and program at our disposal. Contributing to it must be recognized and punished as the criminal behaviour it is. We need to radically alter our lifestyles to reduce carbon emissions by at least 90%, and damned soon.
2. We need to adapt and become resilient to abrupt changes in our ecosystems. That means learning to live in a world without oil, coal, fish, and trees — and without the products (gasoline, plastics, chemicals, andnon-recycled wood and paper) made from them.

That’s what we get for messing with complexity, mucking with things we don’t understand. What will it take before we learn?