how to save the world

Vignette #2 – Breathe

Posted on May 25, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Of all the contributions to my recent article on “great advice in 7 words or less“, my favourite was this one word from Siona: Breathe.

I was thinking about this as I drove to work, and home again, one day last week. It was another smog alert day in Toronto, and breathing was nearly as hazardous to one’s health as the alternative. But I repeated it, my mantra for the day, as I practiced breathing, and paying attention. Letting come and letting go.

One of the ways I’ve learned to improve my attention skills, and also to reduce stress, is to imagine that I know the strangers I look at, and to imagine their story. I started doing this in restaurants. My imagination sometimes gets the better of me, but it’s a useful exercise. It forces you to focus, to pay attention to the details, to look for hints to the story behind the face, to connect the dots.

The country road that comprises the first half of my morning commute, and the last half of my return trip, takes me from the protected green belt where I live to the edge of the relentless suburban sprawl. As I enter the construction zone, with depressing subdivision rezoning billboards on every farmer’s field, the traffic bunches up and slows to a crawl behind a cement mixer and gravel truck. On the right side of the road stands an old man who has just collected the mail from his mailbox, on the opposite side of the street from his house. He waits, patiently at first, for some driver to stop and let him cross back. He wears work pants with suspenders, and a checked green flannel shirt over his gaunt, frail frame. He looks tired, worn out, hunched over with a cane in one hand.

And then suddenly he loses it. He starts waving his cane menacingly at the drivers that are passing by, ignoring him as if he were invisible, and the look on his face becomes one of pure rage. I imagine him as having once farmed the land now barren and crisscrossed with the tire tracks of construction vehicles. I imagine him having sold the land when, facing high property taxes and hopelessly low prices from buyers of his produce or grain, he received an offer from a big developer that he couldn’t refuse. They’d allowed him to continue to work the land, now their land, for a salary until the city had reached its edges and plans of subdivision had been approved.

And now, with no land to farm, he has become useless. Invisible. Nothing to do but wait for busy people with destinations to whiz by, and watch his land become another indistinguishable tract of crowded starter homes. In this imagined context, I understand his rage, and I stop for him. He doesn’t smile, or even acknowledge me. He just shuffles back across the road to his house.

Breathe, I tell myself.

When I reach the highway, the shiny electronic toll road built for those in a hurry, those with expense accounts, I stay in the third of the four lanes, the designated ‘slow lane’ for vehicles traveling a mere 70 mph. Up ahead, in the fourth lane, is one of the trucks I always dread seeing, the silver-sided tractor-trailers full of small breathing holes, used to take animals to slaughter. I sigh. I want to turn away, to hope or pretend that it is empty. But I have to look, and of course it is not empty. Squashed up against the holes are the pink bodies of pigs, stacked three levels high. Breathe. Most of them are facing inward, it appears — the noise of the highway at rush hour is deafening and bewildering, and perhaps they prefer to look at each other. But near the front, I can make out, through the pattern of holes, one animal facing out towards me.

I want to close my eyes, imagining an imploring, terrified, desperate look on this animal, who, like over 90% of farmed animals, has probably lived his sad, monotonous life in the crowded stench of a feedlot. But as my car inches slowly by, the look I see on his face is instead more one of excitement. His expression says: “At last, something new, something important is going to happen.” His look is one of expectation, almost rapture. Pigs are intelligent animals, at least as smart as dogs and cats, and I picture the truck full of fattened pets, ceded by the local pound, and sigh. I am smiling and crying at the same time. Breathe.

As I pull even with the cab of the truck I look at the driver. A middle-aged South Asian man, he looks much sadder than his charges. He knows that his sentence is a long way from being over. This will not be his final, eventful journey. He wears a uniform, anonymous, obedient. He looks weary. I imagine him having come to this country, young and full of expectations, only to discover that his credentials are not recognized here, his skills not wanted. In a strange land, with others to support, in a culture he does not understand, with an accent that makes it hard for others to understand him, he has had to find a job, any job. He has done what he had to do, and this terrible work is it.

Breathe.

Returning home the same afternoon, I watch a Korean woman walking her young daughter home from school. The neighbourhood I’m driving through is a strange mix of Korean and Persian people, with most of the store signs in one of these two languages. My knowledge of Korean culture, other than the Hollywood version portrayed on the Gilmore Girls, is negligible. There are few clues in the faces of the woman and the girl, both of whom move quickly down the street, the girl’s hand tightly gripped in her mother’s, both with faces lowered.

But in the woman’s face I see signs of great resolve and pride that remind me of my own mother’s grim determination to make a life here for her family after her young immigration. I imagine the Korean woman’s momentous struggles: to do what she must, coming from a patriarchal culture where women were obedient and stayed at home, to a multicultural ‘consumer’ society where women are encouraged to be independent and two-income families are an economic necessity. Her dress, and her daughter’s, are practical, modest and non-descript, almost like cloaks of invisibility designed for security in a world where dangers must seem incessant and inexplicable. Like that of so many immigrants, the culture they seem to represent is frozen in time, a culture that is disappearing back in their homeland while it is being clung to so fiercely by refugees in this rootless new world.

And while the daughter’s face is dutiful and obedient it is also restless and resentful: At some point, like a bone or muscle stretched too far in one direction, she is going to crack, to rebel, perhaps violently or self-destructively. Her expression says that if Michelle Wie can turn heads with her attire and thumb her nose at convention while burning up the LPGA at age 15, why can’t every girl find a new way, a different way, free from the suffocating culture that seems a drab anachronism in a world of breathtaking possibility.

Breathe.

That thought, of cultures lost and found within larger dissonant cultures, stays with me until I am once again out of the city, where grey has given way to green and industrial smells to natural ones. And then, as I pull into a left-turn lane, I am shaken by the sight of two dead animals, fresh roadkill. They are the corpses of two raccoons, an adult and, beside and just behind it, a baby. The adult’s body is angled, curled towards the baby’s. The story I imagine of their demise is one I cannot bear, and I have to pull over to the side of the road, beneath the trees, and weep.

Breathe. Deep, long, gasping.

There is no difference between a deep breath and a sigh. Breathe. Focus. Pay attention. Practice. There is so much work to do, and we must be ready, capable. Just breathe, until we know what to do next.

Category: Short Stories

Posted in Creative Works | 7 Comments

What a Dying Person Wants

Posted on May 24, 2007 by Dave Pollard

A recent Medscape health bulletin contains a remarkable personal story by sociologist Margaret Nelson called Listening to Anna, about the difficulties that family members, those given ‘durable power of attorney’, and executors of ‘living wills’ face trying to decide what is ‘best’ for a suffering, terminal, and/or incapacitated patient.

Most of you don’t know it (or don’t want to believe it) but at some point in your life there’s a high probability you will have to make such a decision. It will present you with several serious quandaries:

The wishes the patient expressed in a healthy, rational moment may appear significantly different from what you perceive his or her wishes to be at a critical stage of illness.
Those wishes may also be at odds with what you think you would want in the same circumstances.
You may not know the patient’s personal views on using extraordinary means to extend life, especially if great or continuous pain is involved.
Frequently, 30% of life-long health costs can be burned through in the last six months of a person’s life, and if costs are not fully covered by insurance, the desire to give the patient the best possible care can be in conflict with the desire not to burden family and descendants with unnecessary, fruitless and/or crippling bills.

If that weren’t bad enough, the ideologically-crazed Bush Administration has waded in, with its outrageous, Taking Care: Ethical Caregiving in Our Aging Society ‘recommendations’, including this especially egregious one:

Advance instruction directives (or living wills), though valuable to some degree and in some circumstances, are a limited and flawed instrument for addressing most of the decisions caregivers must make for those entrusted to their care.

In other words, as demonstrated in the Schiavo debacle, if doctors and loved ones do not do everything possible to keep a patient alive, at any cost, the state licensing authorities and the government may choose to investigate, censure, intervene, override, and impose its values on your personal decisions.

Whether or not you live under such a regime, if you want to spare yourselves and your loved ones the agony and cost of uselessly and painfully prolonging the terminal period in your life, you need to ensure you and your loved ones have the kind of clauses Anna had in her living will:

In the event that I suffer from a condition in which there exists no reasonable expectation of (a) my recovering the use of my mind, memory, and imagination, and/or (b) recovering the physical and mental resources needed for living with adequate independence from medical, mechanical, and nursing support, then I want to be allowed to die as quickly and painlessly as possible.

If I suffer a condition from which there is no reasonable prospect of regaining my ability to think and act for myself, I want only care directed to my comfort and dignity, and authorize my agents to decline all treatment (including artificial nutrition and hydration) the primary purpose of which is to prolong my life.

Most boiler-plate living wills/health powers of attorney do not have such specific clauses in them — they refer only to the right and responsibility to make “personal care decisions” in the case of a patient’s incapacity to do so.

And then, once you and your loved ones have these clauses in place, and a wallet card to indicate to medical authorities you have a living will, you all need to be ready to do battle with family members and/or doctors and/or government meddlers with their own personal ideological agenda who will try to overrule the clear wishes stated in these clauses. This will come at a time when you and your loved ones will be especially vulnerable to doubts and coercion — sleepless, exhausted, stressful times when this unneeded and unhelpful outside pressure will only make matters much worse.

I keep saying it is not in our nature to plan ahead, to prepare for unforeseen eventualities. But after reading Anna’s story, I’m damned well going to make sure that these clauses are in my living will, and that I sit down with each of my loved ones and make it absolutely clear in everyone’s mind that, if and when the time comes, I am counting on them to have the courage and integrity to pull the plug.

You’re my witnesses. D–N–R. “Don’t leave ’em nothin’ to work on.”

Category: Being Human

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 6 Comments

Yet More Fun With Numbers: $7/Gallon Gasoline

Posted on May 23, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Chart by Stuart at Random Useless Info.
For the previous 30 years, 1950-1979, price was steady at about $0.30 – 0.40/gallon before spiking near the end of the 1970s.
In the last five years, the price of gasoline in North America has roughly doubled. This has created some problems for the poor, but for most people it has not caused hardship, and has not significantly affected buying or consumption behaviour. In fact, the inflation-adjusted price in 1998 and 2002 were the lowest since the 1940s. OK, you say, but aren’t gasoline prices a component of inflation? That’s true, but it’s not a major component, and besides, the real inflation rate for the average citizen is way higher than the distorted data the government spins each month. On that basis, gasoline has never been cheaper, inflation-adjusted.

Our problem, as environmentalists have said for years, is not that gasoline prices are too high; it’s that they are too low.

Crude oil prices have consistently averaged $20/bbl since 1950, ignoring two major spikes to $60/bbl, the first in 1979-80 and the second since 2003. In real (after-inflation) terms, crude oil prices have consistently fallen since 1950, and have never been lower. No wonder Big Oil is reaping record profits, gouging the consumer a little more each year to keep its shareholders happy with double-digit annual profit growth.

So it’s not surprising that, except for the Wal-Martization of the North American economy (offshoring North American jobs and importing cheap Chinese crap to replace the goods once made domestically) to offset the higher costs of energy, $3.50/gallon gasoline has not affected any corporate or individual behaviour.

But suppose it were to double again, to $7/gallon, over the next few years. $20/bbl oil translates to $0.40/gallon gasoline. $40/bbl oil in the 1970s translated to $1.25/gallon gasoline. Now $60/bbl oil is translating to $3.50/gallon gasoline. Do a regression line through these relative rates and we can project the following:

$80/bbl oil will translate to $5.50/gallon gasoline
$100/bbl oil will translate to $8.50/gallon gasoline
$120/bbl oil will translate to $12.50/gallon gasoline

Would we be able to absorb these increases as easily as the increase from 2002’s $1.75/gallon to today’s $3.50/gallon?

This article (thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link) argues that $6/gallon gasoline is just what we need. At first blush, it would seem to be a good idea. But what would its effect be, not just on consumer spending at the pump, but on the entire economy?

Well, for a start, industry won’t be able to finance further energy cost increases on the backs of North American (and Chinese) labour. China is running into a wall of skill shortages, massive suffering of its huge underclass, an insatiable demand and skyrocketing cost of all kinds of scarce resources, and environmental devastation on a scale unprecedented in human history. Except for some services, savings from offshoring to cheap nations will be more than offset by the staggering cost of moving raw materials and finished goods back and forth around the globe.

So an increase in oil and gasoline costs will mean an increase in producer costs and hence in consumer costs. No more Wal-Martization room remains. And a jump in consumer costs means a jump in inflation and hence in interest rates.

Now, let’s look at what we buy that’s made from oil. In this post, I listed the top 10 uses of oil (many are surprised to learn that the cost and energy content of oil used in agriculture exceeds the wholesale price and energy content of the food it produces, thanks to $150B in annual subsidies to Big Agriculture in North America alone). In this post, I listed the average expense budget of a North American household. Putting them together, here’s how the average costs of living in North America break down, per $100 in household income:

Expenses heavily dependent on oil: $52

Food $10
Transportation $22
Heating / Air Conditioning $5
Health Costs $4
Clothing $5
Furniture & Home Maintenance $3
Cosmetics & Household Products $3

Expenses dependent on interest rates: Housing $24

Other expenses: $28

Taxes $15
Insurance, Child Care and other service $13

Total expenses per $100 of household income: $104.

Altogether, North Americans now spend $104 for every $100 they earn. Now what will happen if, say, oil prices rise to $90/bbl and gasoline prices consequently double to $7/gallon?

Let’s assume, conservatively, that a doubling of gasoline prices means just a 50% increase in the $52 of expenses heavily dependent on oil. That would increase average household expenses by 26%. With no room for further cost cutting, producers would pass on their cost increases fully to consumers — after all, their shareholders expect them to continue their double digit annual profit increases — the stability of the stock market depends on it.

Obviously, individuals cannot afford to spend $130 ($104 + $26) for every $100 they earn. The overspending in recent years has been made possible only by a sea of irresponsibly-granted consumer credit secured by overheated house prices. It can’t continue when house prices are falling, and when essential living expenses jump 26%, demand for houses, and house prices, will plummet, meaning credit will be reined in, further reducing consumers’ ability to pay these increased costs. If you’ve been following the news, this has already begun, and a bunch of the more reckless lenders are teetering on the edge of collapse as bad debts soar.

Wage demands will soar as workers insist on earning enough to provide for their families. We saw this in the 1970s, as costs of living jumped sharply. What happened next? Inflation, fueled by rising costs and wages. And then, a spike in interest rates, which more than doubled in two years in the late 1970s, to the 15% range.

If inflation jumps to double digits (to reflect the 26% increase in costs), interest rates will go higher than that, since investors need to earn more than inflation just to break even. Anyone remember what 15% interest rates did to the housing market in the early 1980s? Inflation and interest rate jumps will further erode house prices and will double the cost of mortgages as they come up for renewal (and immediately for variable-rate mortgages). So now the $24 housing cost per $100 of household income becomes $48.

I think you get the idea. Consumers will have no choice but to buy much less. Corporate profits will plummet. The stock market will do likewise. Foreclosures, already jumping by leaps and bounds, will soar. Fortunes made in real estate and the stock market will vanish, along with the entire net worth of most North Americans.

And the interest rate on the US government’s staggering debt, and more staggering trade deficit, will become crushing.

The bottom line is that, while $3.50/gallon gasoline was a cakewalk (just a catch-up after decades of after-inflation price decreases), $7/gallon gasoline will be nightmarish. Not because we can’t afford to pay $140 to fill our gas tank, but because we can’t afford to pay twice as much for the oil we eat, the oil we wear, the oil that drives our entire economy. And our economy is stretched so tight, and is so over-extended and over-leveraged, we have no room to manoeuver.

This is the incredible bind we’ve gotten ourselves into: Coping with global warming and the End of Oil (before the nightmare outlined in The Long Emergency befalls us) demands a large increase is the price of energy to dampen our appetite for it. But that large increase could easily plunge the world into another Great Depression.

There is no way out of this mess. This is what happens when you crank economic systems to their fragile limit and find yourself with no resilience, no room to maneuver. A responsible response would be to own up to our recklessness, launch a major austerity and conservation program (including limiting corporate mark-ups and ROIs to levels commensurate with risk), and invest mightily in public transportation and renewable energy. The Bush & Harper doctrine is instead to publicly deny global warming and Peak Oil, privately acknowledge we’re fucked, and shove the whole massive problem into the laps of future generations.

So the real problem is not that gasoline prices are too high, or that they are too low, it’s that we think the price of gasoline is thereal problem, and that changing that price will solve it.

Category: Understanding Economics

Posted in How the World Really Works | 15 Comments

Making Short Unconferences Work

Posted on May 22, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Dear Conference Participant: Based on your expressions of interest for topics at the Knowledge Innovation Unconference session October 22nd at the Old Town Conference Center, we have matched you with others with similar interests and complementary competencies and developed your personal Unconference program as follows. Click on your Discussion Partners’ names to learn more about them:

	Topic	Discussion Partner(s)	Location
1:00 pm	Preconditions for Innovation	Liz Lawley	Walk – front commons
1:30	The Innovation Process	Chuck Frey	Starbucks – concourse C
2:00	How Knowledge Drives Innovation	James Robertson Euan Semple	Breakout room 6A
2:30	Why is Big Business Innovation-Averse?	Jon Husband Johnnie Moore	Dining Room (snack buffet)
3:00	Innovation Tools	Ross Mayfield	Walk – Innovation Museum
3:30	Creating Space for Innovation	Mark Brady	Breakout room 7D

Last year I wrote an article about ‘unconferencing‘, including a suggested approach that involved having discussion leaders instead of speakers, whose job is

to briefly introduce, and hand out information about, 2-4 aspects of the unconference’s chosen theme,
to ask a question or throw out some new information or a provocative statement to stimulate discussion among attendees (and keep doing so until discussion ensues), and
to facilitate the resultant discussion(s).

This has worked for me when the audience is small, engaged, reasonably informed, and know (and trust) each other. But what do we do when the audience is there to learn about something they know little about (or just because it’s a chance to get away from the office)? Or when the audience is too large and diverse to converse meaningfully with each other without being sidetracked with a lot of context-setting information?

The pat answer is to ‘break up into small groups’, using some organizing principle to do so like Open Space (where people stand and propose discussion topics, are assigned a place and time-slot, and then attendees sign up for the ones that appeal to them, and ‘vote with their feet’ if a session fails to live up to its promise). This tends to mix the informed with the uninformed, and get people focused on subjects they at least think they care about. In a short unconference, however, doing this would use up most of the available time just hearing the topics and deciding which sessions to attend.

David Gurteen has written about the idea of ‘conversation meetings’, where there is a pre-set ‘menu’ of topics around a common theme, and people pre-select the topics that interest them, which are posted on a large board (real or virtual). Then participants can select others interested in the same topics to ‘pair up’ with for conversations in break-out areas, over meals or on outdoor walks. Presumably the pairs could be pre-selected by the unconference organizer, and groups of perhaps three or four might also be accommodated, to avoid conversations of uninformed pairs with no ‘content provider’.

David also writes about network badges, where you write something about yourself, your objectives or your interests on your name tag, to allow others at a conference to identify areas of affinity with you and cut through the small talk. I remember reading about an electronic version of these, where you identify your conference interests in advance and, when you come close to another participant, the areas of common interest are displayed on both badges (can’t find this online anymore — did the company that made them go under?) If common interests could be captured in advance of a ‘conversation meeting’, the ‘pairing’ process might be automated, and made more effective.

Suppose you had a group of, say, 100 people willing to sign up for a half-day ‘unconference’ session. How would you organize it? Would you get people to ‘profile’ their interests (and depth of knowledge) in advance? Since there wouldn’t be time for Open Space topic-setting, would you use a virtual board and matching algorithm (see fictional illustration above) to schedule the conversations and do the pairing of participants, or would the participants prefer to (or insist on) choosing their own conversation partners, even if that takes time? Since these conversations are relatively intimate, compared to the safe anonymity of a large conference, would participants balk at them? Could they be relied upon to show up for one-on-one conversations with ‘strangers’?

How could we make this work? And perhaps most important, if we could make it work F2F, could we then use desktop video and make it work virtually?

Category: Collaboration

Posted in Working Smarter | 5 Comments

Vignette #1: The Spin

Posted on May 21, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Blame it on global warming I guess. I don’t remember it ever being so windy, so often, so persistently. Not gusts but more like a constant near-gale that lasts for hours. It’s a beautiful, warm, sunny spring day, a Tuesday, noon, and everyone is out walking but the wind is fierce, whistling through doors and blowing over sandwich boards on the sidewalks.

I’m in the office building where I’m currently on contract, but I’ve come downstairs for a cell phone call — for privacy and because the signal is lousy inside the walls ten stories up. I’m down by the large picture window that faces obliquely onto busy Yonge Street North, away from the revolving doors, staring at the windblown people walking by, and talking with my agent. The older people outside are struggling, their oversized clothes working against them like sails. People fussed about their hair are holding on to it tightly, especially a guy who looks like he wears a hairpiece. But it’s so lovely outside that almost everyone is smiling, or maybe they’re squinting against the bright sun and wind, it’s hard to say.

Two uniformed schoolgirls walk North, probably on lunch break, or out for a smoke or to use their cell phones, now banned on school grounds. They have that look that says they know they’re being looked at, and are trying to be nonchalant about it. Their hair, long and straight, is blown almost horizontal by the wind, streaming out behind them. They are chatting and laughing, and I can’t take my eyes off them. They both wear their skirts high, flashing a lot of leg in that exhibitionist way that has fueled generations of fantasies. The blonde, the taller of the two, has shortened hers considerably more than the dark-haired girl.

The wind picks up even more and both girls’ skirts blow up, like something out of a movie. My eyes, and those of others, I sense, look quickly at the ground beneath them, looking for the sidewalk subway grate, the hidden camera, but there is none — this is purely the wind’s mischief. Both girls instinctively move to smooth them back down, and the dark-haired girl, her hands free thanks to her backpack, gives us only a brief flash of pale pink underwear.

But the blonde, carrying an armload of books cradled in front of her, hesitates, and then, with a quick look of pure delight, moves her hands back up to where they were. Her skirt rises almost vertically and stays there, as if drawn by reverse gravity, flapping lightly as the wind whips around its defiant owner. She is wearing white string bikini panties (surely not part of the uniform?, I think), a mere wisp of material, and it is as if time stops. People all around whirl and stare. A couple of cars honk. The girl’s companion looks at her friend, astonished, and her hands jump up to cover her mouth. They both laugh, facing each other now, the dark-haired girl with embarrassment, the blond with unabashed pleasure.

Now, freed again, the dark-haired girl’s skirt flips up as well, and though she moves to smooth it down again, her friend’s stare freezes her, dares her to do nothing, to show off, to be the centre of attention.

I’ve stopped listening to my agent, and I’m wondering how long the wind can keep the two skirts so neatly plastered up against the girls’ blouses, revealing panties so smooth and sculpted I would swear I can see every bone, every hollow on the two long-legged young bodies. There is a half-foot of midriff visible, too, displaying wondrous, breathtaking, intoxicating curves, angles and shadows. I feel guilty staring — they’re so young — but I can’t stop. A group of guys on the far side of Yonge Street have stopped walking and are now standing, clapping and cheering the spectacle. The blonde bows in their direction in acknowledgement of the applause.

And then, to my disbelief, the dark-haired girl, not taking her eyes off her friend’s face for a moment, raises her arms over her head and smiles with sudden exuberant joy, and then whirls around, again and again and again. I gasp, my gaze going back and forth from her face to her body as she spins. As she completes her figure skater’s move, the wind calms, briefly, and the girls embrace, convulsed in laughter.

They start walking again, and their skirts keep flapping up. My stare follows them until they pass out of range of the window, and I realize I have been holding my breath, and have no idea what my agent has been saying. Caught between the messages of my genes and those inculcated by my culture, I’m not sure how to feel.

Photo: Follow Me, by QueenofNight

Category: Short Stories

Posted in Creative Works | 2 Comments

Sunday Open Thread – May 20, 2007

Posted on May 20, 2007 by Dave Pollard

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

My writing is a reflection of what I’m doing and what I’m becoming, and as a result much of the future subject matter of this blog will be the results of my Let-Self-Change activities. Two of the skills I want to learn are paying attention and better story-telling. The best way to deepen one’s skills is through practice. My practice, paying attention and telling stories, often takes the form of vignettes, very short stories where I recount something quite simple but extraordinary that I’ve noticed by paying attention, focusing on and memorizing the details, and then deepening those memories by retelling these internalized accounts. Like good short films or poems, these vignette stories need to have a point: there has to be something important (usually not obvious, often ambiguous) about them. My holiday Monday post tomorrow will be my latest vignette.Improv: Another skill I want to learn is improvisation, the ability to adapt, to converse, to do things spontaneously and effectively without planning. That has a lot to do with listening and paying attention, and even more to do with practice. I’m not sure how I’m going to do this yet (any ideas?) but when I do, I’ll be documenting it.

Good Working Models of Social Networking: We are capable of replicating success by analogy if we have a good story to work from. But when it comes to good working models of wikis and blogs in organizations, I’ve found very few good success stories, and some of the ones I’ve investigated are suspect. Is social networking unable to make its case in big companies, or are the managers of big companies just not listening?

Blog-Hosted Conversations: I’ve now got the tools, thanks to readers’ advice, especially Lavonne and Johnnie Moore: Pamela for recording the Skype conversation, Audacity for editing, and the Internet Archive for hosting the big .mp3 files. 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.

What are the skills you’ve been trying to develop, the changes you’ve been trying to bring about in yourself, the important conversations you’ve had recently?

New Yorker cartoon by Robert Weber. You can buy prints ofhis work here.

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 7 Comments

Saturday Links for the Week – May 19, 2007

Posted on May 19, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Portrait of Final Fantasy character Tifa Lockhart by Canadian digital artist sleepar. Reality is no match for the imagination.

What’s Important This Week:

Losing the War on Disease: Inevitably, an NIH/WHO study shows, almost all dangerous infectious diseases are morphing to forms that are resistant to all antimicrobials, leaving their victims, mostly (for now) in struggling nations, condemned to die. Part of the problem is overprescription and misprescription of antibiotics and antivirals. Part of it is ignorance and poor hygiene. But part of the problem, the one we refuse to acknowledge, is that it is unnatural for any creature to live in crowded conditions. Infectious diseases are nature’s way of saying “too many, and too close together”, and solving the problem to rebalance populations for the benefit of all-life-on-Earth. When will we listen, pay attention, change?

The Fragility of Having to Spend More Than You Earn: A NYT story profiles a family that, like the average US family, now spends more each year than it earns, and depends utterly on increases in value of their home and their investments and low interest rates on ever-growing debt. If these things start to drop in value, as they are now, or if inflation or interest rates spike, there is no way out except bankruptcy.

Yet More Poison from China: This week it’s diethylene glycol, a cheap, toxic replacement for glycerin, in toothpaste. Time to shut the door on these criminal corporatist clowns, and jail the negligent importers, before thousands die.

Last Chance to Prove String Theory?: Scientists refuse to believe that nature would play the ultimate trick on us: Making space infinitely large and complex and the microcosm infinitely small and complex, with no start, no end, and no ‘fundamental building blocks’. If she has done that (and my instincts say she has), our much-sought ‘grand unifying theory of everything’ will elude us forever. As Liz Kolbert reports in the New Yorker this week, string theory, the wildly convoluted and complex theory requiring 11 dimensions, is on the line when the hugely expensive new European CERN accelerator tries once again to prove the existence of hypothesized particles. If they fail, theory may end up being just that, forever unprovable, and the end of the line for those seeking Nobels for making further theories unnecessary.

Discover What Toxins Are In Your Cosmetics: EWG’s Skin Deep cosmetic safety database rates the safety of 25,000 brand-name cosmetic products and tells you what dangerous and untested ingredients are in each. (Heh…now we need a Deep Throat food safety database to tell us about the ingredients in fast and processed foods.)

Corporatists Telling You to ‘Cease & Desist’? Here’s Help: More and more oligopolies are suing customers who find workarounds to their price-gouging. Now, the Berkman/EFF Chilling Effects Clearinghouse can translate the threatening letter you received intounderstandable terms and tell you how — and if — to respond to their threats. Thanks to my sister-in-law Morva Bowman for the link.

US Health System the Worst of Affluent Nations’: A lesson in how to let greedy health industry oligopolies give you less for more.

Thoughts of the Week (both, as it happens, appear on the same page of this week’s New Yorker):

From ‘Atheists with Attitude’ by Anthony Gottlieb, reviewing several recent books on the problems of modern religion (yep, including The God Delusion):

God is merely the answer that you get if you do not ask enough questions.

Unknown Age, by WS Merwin

For all the features it hoards and displays
age seems to be without substance at any time

whether morning or evening it is a moment of air
held between the hands like a stunned bird

while I stand remembering light in the trees
of another century on a continent long submerged

with no way of telling whether the leaves at that time
felt memory as they were touching the day

and no knowledge of what happened to the reflections
on the pond’s surface that never were seen again

the bird lies still while the light goes on flying

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 4 Comments

Designing for Emergence

Posted on May 18, 2007 by Dave Pollard

In his post today, complexity guru Steve Barth suggests that since it is not in our nature to prepare for emergencies, we should instead try to design for emergence. In other words, since we know that we won’t know what emergencies will arise, or when, or how severe they will be, or how we will react, nor can we possibly envision or plan for all eventualities (such as telephone switches being under ten feet of water, for a month, after a hurricane) we should, instead of planning, figure out how we are going to figure out what to do when the emergency occurs. We need to be ready, which is different from planning.

I replied that there are probably five ingredients in a prescription for how to figure out how to figure out what to do:

Establishing trust: If you have a community whose members know and love each other, trust is not a problem. But if you don’t know, or don’t like, your neighbours, it’s going to be iffy whether in an emergency, you will work with them, or even know what each of you is capable of doing (and what each of you urgently needs) so you can work together effectively.
Learning to improvise: In some ways improvisation is the opposite of planning. It’s about staying resilient and adapting to what others do, trusting our instincts and increasing our emotional intelligence. And if you’re a planner not an improviser, and (shades of FEMA & the Iraq occupation) your plan fails, at least have the sense to get out of the way of those who can improvise.
Improving our attention skills: We need to study and learn about how nature, and how cultures that deal with emergencies regularly, cope with them. When an emergency happens, we need to be able to draw on this knowledge and focus our attention on what needs to be done. That means listening, seeing what’s really happening, noticing and communicating what’s urgent and what’s important, and keeping everything in perspective. We’re pretty good at doing this when we have to be, but we can always improve.
Improving our collaboration skills: We are so used to divvying up work and doing almost everything individually (though hopefully in a coordinated, cooperative way), that we rarely really collaborate in real time. Team sports help with this. We need to learn that there are things that we can do together that we cannot do, no matter how well coordinated, separately.
Practicing: Those with the foresight to practice (and/or previous experience) handling an emergency will be much better equipped when the next emergency occurs. In areas where emergencies are frequent, communities regularly practice what to do, over and over, as a social occasion, so they’re ready. There is no substitute.

So what would a ‘design for emergence’ that incorporates these ingredients look like? I’m just starting to think about this, but I think finding an answer to this is important. Help me, and Steve, co-design it?

Category: Complexity

Posted in Working Smarter | 6 Comments

Learned Helplessness and Your Chances of Dying

Posted on May 17, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Yesterday I received an intriguing report whose purpose was to point out the very real risks in taking medications as part of a preventative or disease management regimen. The article researched the risks of various ‘voluntary’ activities: non-critical medical therapies, job and transportation choices, and hobbies, and computed the comparative risk of fatality (in annual deaths per 100,000 persons engaging in these activities for an average length of time each year). Some of the data are shown in the upper part of the chart above.

These data are global averages, and clearly the danger varies greatly according to your place of residence and work, your age, current health and other variables. Nevertheless, it was an interesting illustration of the degree to which we mentally miscalculate the risks we face in our everyday lives, seeing some things as much safer than they really are (e.g. firefighting) and other things as much more dangerous than they really are (e.g. drowsy driving).

I’ve written about this before, reviewing Gladwell’s article on Learned Helplessness, and I concluded then:

This delusion of danger, and the illusion that something can or has to be done, that someone — British cows, Canadian farmers, Chinese cats, Firestone, Saddam Hussein — must be brought to account in order to give us back control, is literally making us all crazy. It causes us to believe we cannot let children out of our sight even for a moment. It causes us to wildly change our diets, to avoid visiting whole countries, to fingerprint whole nations of visitors, to suspend civil liberties, to put barbed wire around our communities, to drink only bottled water, to wear masks, to introduce five levels of increasingly hysterical ‘threat’ to everyone’s safety.

So, for example, insurance company stats show your risk of fatality is significantly lower in a convertible than in an SUV, because (a) the convertible is more agile than the clumsy, overweight SUV, so it can avoid accidents the SUV can’t, and (b) since you feel safer in the SUV, you tend to drive more aggressively in it. Nevertheless, people continue to buy SUV’s as ‘safe’ vehicles and shun convertibles as ‘unsafe’.

Since we seem somewhat preoccupied these days with infectious diseases, I thought I would add the comparative data (as best as I can determine it — data for some countries is iffy and diagnoses sometimes overlap and are often wrong) for the top 7 groups of infectious diseases. The results are shown in the lower part of the chart above.

A number of obvious conclusions:

The chances of dying from any of these things (unless you commute to work by motorcycle) is very small, at least in affluent nations. Worldwide, you are twice as likely to die of cancer (ten times as likely if you live in an affluent nation) and twice as likely to die from heart disease (ten times as likely if you live in an affluent nation) as from lower respiratory infections, the #1 infectious disease group.
The chances of dying from murder, war or suicide varies enormously between demographics, from near the top of the list (for a few geographic areas and age groups) to negligible (for everyone else). As most of us know, if you are murdered, it’s almost certainly by someone you knew well and who you considered very capable of murder, rather than by some crazed suicide bomber or terrorist. The US has spent, in recent years, a trillion dollars in a futile ‘war on terror’, ostensibly to reduce the risk of terrorist attacks on the US. The amount it has spent on the the much higher risks in the chart above is paltry by any standard.
In struggling nations, or if you’re poor, the chances of dying from the infectious diseases above rises dramatically, by a factor of 10 or more.
As I said yesterday, don’t take medications you don’t have to.
You have a lot more control over the risks you face than you think. Alert driving (i.e. not driving when you’re sleepy; not using a cell-phone or fooling with your radio or mp3 player while you drive; not being distracted by others in the vehicle) reduces the risk by at least 75%, far more than any combination of safety devices. Most of our learned helplessness is illusory, and plays right into the hands of politicians, preachers, fearmongers, marketers and corporatists.
It is no accident that we have no idea where to put very profitable (politically and/or economically) hazards on this chart, because the data is unavailable: consumption of foods, medicines and cosmetics full of toxins and untested ingredients, the toxins we use in our homes and yards, chronic exposure to air and water pollution, staying in an abusive family etc. If we could isolate these data, I’m sure they would rank near the top of the list. But if we found that most cancers, heart diseases and immune system related deaths were due to agricultural and industrial toxins (picture a bar at the top of this chart twice as long as the motorcycle commuter one) what would we be prepared to do about it?

Although bioterrorism risks aren’t on the chart (and throughout history, as deadly as war is, it rarely catches up to disease as a killer) there’s a new book that lists the seven most deadly potential bioterrorism diseases (anthrax, botulism, hemorrhagic fever, plague, radiation poisoning, smallpox and tularemia). That’s because there’s no ready antidote to any of them, and because, if weaponized, they could spread rapidly and be extremely virulent (read Richard Preston’s Demon in the Freezer). Even more deadly (perhaps 100% fatal), but even harder to harness, are the prion diseases (like mad cow and CJD).

It there a real risk here? Of course, but for all kinds of reasons it’s improbable, like the equally potentially catastrophic but low-probability threat of an earthquake on the Eastern North American fault lines. And if bioterrorist activity happens, you can bet it will be an inside job, and probably small-scale. Risk = consequence x probability. Low probability, low risk, no matter how horrific the consequences. We could also be invaded by aliens, or struck by a meteor, tomorrow, but it is foolish to lose sleep over it.

When it comes to infectious disease, however, more sizeable threats are the candidates in the ’emerging diseases’ lottery that suddenly emerge or re-emerge every year. Our arsenal against these diseases is dwindling rapidly as we exhaust more and more classes of antibiotics and antivirals — these clever, adaptive creatures can mutate much faster than our science can keep up with them. The size of the candidate list is impressive: dengue, e coli, flesh-eating disease, hantaviruses, hep C, lassa, lyme disease, meningitis, MRSA, mumps, nipah, salmonella, SARS, West Nile, as well as the endemics we currently seem to have under some control: AIDS, influenza, malaria and TB. A little bit of nature’s ingenuity and any of these could evolve into a new, virulent, resistant strain that could jump to the top of the chart above.

If there’s any justification for learned helplessness, it’s these little bugs. If we continue to sit by and allow industry and agriculture to poison us and destroy our immune systems, and continue to help diseases morph in new and dangerous ways by our reckless and extravagant use of antimicrobials, we’ll soon be justified in feeling helpless. That’s why I’m so interested in pandemic preparedness: It’s only a matter of time, and worldwide we know so little and are still so unready.

Until then, we have no excuse for learned helplessness — if we really want to live in a world that is healthy and safe, we need to stop the politically expedient and insanely expensive distractions of the ‘war on terror’ and the ‘war on drugs’ and the ‘war on crime’ and focus on the real, and very controllable risks, we create for ourselves: cleaning up our planet, taking responsibility for our own (and our loved ones’ and community members’) health and safety, putting corporate polluters behind bars and shutting them down, and making it easier to eat right, easier to know when we shouldn’t be driving or working, and easier to know when medical treatments are moredangerous than the disease.

Category: Our Culture

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 2 Comments

Twelve Ways to Stay Well

Posted on May 16, 2007 by Dave Pollard

It took 55 years and contracting a chronic disease, but I’ve finally learned to look after my health. The steps required to stay well are pretty intuitive, and it makes sense to invest effort and money keeping people well, instead of treating them when they get sick. But you’d never know it from reading most healthcare websites. While some might believe that’s deliberate (Big Pharma and a lot of doctors would be out of business if we stopped getting sick) I think the main problem is the blind spots that those in the healthcare industry have, because they’re too close to one perspective to see the forest for the trees.

So here’s my simple, obvious list of twelve ways to stay well:

Don’t manage your stress, reduce it: Live simpler. Get an easier job close to home. Do less. Learn to say no. We are not by nature well-endowed to handle chronic stress, so managing it is a losing battle. Get rid of the stresses that come from self-imposed demands and expectations.
Keep the right company: Avoid or dis-associate yourself from people who are vexatious and demanding. I appreciate that if you’re a caregiver for a needy child or senior that’s impossible. But for the rest of us, life is too short to put up with people who get pleasure from others’ unhappiness. Surround yourself with loving people. Be physically affectionate. Don’t spend too much time alone. And cherish the excellent company of young children and animals.
Exercise.
Eat well: At least eat moderately, foods with variety and balance. Better still, eat local foods, those that you know where they come from, and organic foods (I know, sometimes you have to choose between local and organic). Even better, go vegetarian or vegan, and free yourself from unnatural and addictive products.
Drink lots of fresh, clean water: Remember, bottled water isn’t necessarily better. Do your research on what you drink.
Live in the right place: Probably not in the city or downwind or downstream from it. And probably not a place where you have to spend most of your life indoors or in your car. Visit and live in different places so you know what you’re missing. When you find a place that’s peaceful, unpolluted, natural, you’ll know it’s the right place. Discover it. Explore it. Make it where you belong. But avoid spending too much time in the sun.
Get rid of the toxins: The pesticides and herbicides and artificial fertilizers in your yard. The poisonous, antibiotic cleaning substances that you soak your body and clothes in. The carpets and upholstery and paints and other ‘home furnishings’ that make the air in the average house unhealthier than the average smoggy outdoors.
Wash your hands often: Wash for at least fifteen seconds with a natural soap and hot water. You wouldn’t believe what the average handshake, shopping cart, door handle or deck of playing cards can transfer.
Self-monitor, self-diagnose, and self-manage your health: Don’t rely on the experts. Every body is different, and health professionals (including a lot of shady ‘alternative’ medicine practitioners and snake-oil salesmen) can only guess what’s really right for, and wrong with, you. Take responsibility for your own health.
Avoid crowds: That sounds like silly advice, but it’s true. Travel as rarely and as short a distance as you must. Skip the malls and the bars and other crowded, anonymous places. Bicycle. Stay away from doctors’ offices and hospitals unless you have no choice. Spend time with the people you love in the place that you love.
Take as few drugs and other unnatural substances as you can: More on this tomorrow, when I reveal some astonishing data on the fatality risks you run when you unnecessary ‘preventative’ drugs. Don’t buy Big Pharma’s “ask your doctor if X is right for you” bullshit.
Get lots of rest: Sleep in. Do calming things. Enjoy doing nothing but enjoying the passage of time and the beauty of the world.

I’m doing all these things, and I’ve never felt better, never been in better physical condition and (according to my recent tests) never been in more perfect health. Don’t wait until you’re 55. Stay well.

Categories: Let-Self-Change and Health

Posted in Collapse Watch | 13 Comments