Ten Lessons from Katrina on Our Ability to Cope with Crises

Posted on May 15, 2007 by Dave Pollard
hurricane stan
Relief workers in Guatemala rescue victims of mudslides caused by Hurricane Stan
 
Yesterday I provided my answers to the questions I will be asking others in upcoming Blog-Hosted Conversations about what we need to know, to learn, and to do to prepare ourselves and our loved ones for whatever the future will hold.
 
An editorial in today’s NYT, lamenting how little has been done to rebuild and protect New Orleans since Katrina, provides some important lessons about the current state of our civilization and its ability to cope with such crises. Here are, I think, the ten most important lessons:
  1. Our political, social and economic systems are incredibly fragile: The problem with big, centralized, ‘efficient’ systems is that they lack resilience and cannot handle external stresses well. In our hellbent effort to keep all these unsustainable systems going, and strip ever more cost out of them, we have pushed them to the breaking point. Natural disasters, political sabotage, environmental stresses, resource exhaustion, economic overextension — any of these can quickly cause these systems to collapse, and since they are so inter-dependent, a collapse of one can set off a cascade of others. Katrina was far from the ‘perfect storm’ but it has ruined one of the US’s largest cities, apparently beyond repair. On 9/11, a single spectacular act of sabotage by a handful of deranged ideologues has so far cost the US economy trillions of dollars, most of it utterly wasted. These systems are so thinly stretched and vulnerable they are an accident waiting to happen. And as we refuse to take steps to create resilience and let the vulnerabilities grow — the spiraling US debt and trade deficit, the ever-worsening state of our food systems, the exhaustion of the oil and water and soil on which our society is utterly dependent, the overheating of our atmosphere, the gap between rich and poor — the probability of a cascade of crises grows to virtual certainty.
  2. In a crisis, you’re on your own: Governments and other institutions are incapable of responding to emergencies. It’s not that their people don’t want to help: they cannot. Big, bureaucratic systems simply can’t move that fast, and they’re hopelessly inefficient to the point of dysfunctionality. FEMA is a joke. The CDC in a pandemic will be able to do little more than process information. In every crisis right back to the Great Depression, most of the responses of governments and other large institutions, public and private, have only made the problems worse. We need to create local, community-based emergency preparedness plans and training, and community-based systems that have the resilience to cope with crises effectively. And we need to get over our ‘learned helplessness’ that leads us to believe that, in the case of a crisis, the government will tell us what to do. This helplessness, and governments’ fraudulent claims to be prepared for crises, are not only unhelpful, they’re dangerous.
  3. The ‘free market’ is useless in a crisis: The untrammeled ‘free’ market does not rebuild, because it is never economic by its measures to do so. That’s why cities are full of brownfields and abandoned industrial and slum areas — it’s always cheaper to let them rot and instead develop new ‘virgin’ areas in ever more far-flung suburbs. That’s why you pay fire insurance premiums on your house based on a rebuilding cost wildly in excess of its market value. And as long as we remain averse to large-scale public investment in rebuilding infrastructure, that infrastructure will never be rebuilt by anyone. That’s why the population of New Orleans is still half what it was before Katrina. That’s why the ‘rebuilt’ levees for the remaining half are still incomplete and already eroding.
  4. It is not in our nature to prepare for crises: We did not prepare for the collapse of the levees in New Orleans, even though we knew that it was inevitable. We are not prepared for pandemic disease, or the End of Oil, or the impacts of global warming. We prepare only when the crisis is imminent and certain, and that is often too late. That is our nature. If we invested in the future we would have much less today, and our affluent nation economies would be much like those of struggling nations. We are not prepared to do that.
  5. We are over-extended only because we can be: Other cultures believe that we have a responsibility to all life on Earth and to future generations. Ours doesn’t. As a result, we allow ourselves and our governments to take actions that will have negative consequences for non-human life and for future generations. To incur debts that we cannot possibly hope to repay — resource exhaustion, pollution, financial deficits — is not immoral in our selfish culture. And only when we incur such reckless debts do we get over-extended, and hence extremely vulnerable to crises. We knew New Orleans would be swamped, and that the cost would be staggering. We just hoped we wouldn’t be around to see it. That debt suddenly came due in our lifetime, and we can’t pay it. Yet we expect future generations to pay the debts we are burdening them with. And those generations know they can’t repay them either, so they must plan on getting even more over-extended so they can push the repayment even further into the future. Or they must look to technology or the Rapture to save them, so they won’t have to pay.
  6. In any crisis, the poor have it worst: In New Orleans, as in the Great Depression, those who have money are least affected. And generally, the rich also have the political power to deal with the crisis, and are the least motivated to act. Although the disgrace of New Orleans today has strong overtones of racism, it is mostly about money and power and greed.
  7. We never learn from others’ mistakes: History is full of lessons that could teach us the folly of not being prepared, and teach us what to do when crises threaten and occur. But we don’t learn from them. We keep making the same mistakes over and over again. We only learn from our own, personal, first-hand experience. Anyone who wasn’t there, then, is unlikely to learn anything, and is likely to repeat the mistakes the next time, in the next place.
  8. We don’t know what we’re doing: We have no conception of the consequences of our collective actions. The Army Corps of Engineers has spent trillions on huge projects that have wrecked the environment and made us much more vulnerable to environmental and health crises. When we pollute, when we strip mine, when we create factory farms, when we add crap to our food and water and soil, when we dam rivers, when we wage wars, when we wipe out natural waterbreaks and replace them with flimsy man-made levees, we have no idea of the long-term implications of what we’re doing. We just make it up as we go along, hope for the best, and see what happens. When it goes wrong, we hire expensive lawyers or PR agencies to get us out of it, or deny responsibility. When it comes to complex systems, we are idiots.
  9. We are less and less self-sufficient: A few generations ago, most people knew how to grow their own food, make their own clothes. How to dig a well. How to fix things. When crises hit, they struggled, but they survived, because they could look after their own essential needs. How many of us today can say that?
  10. It will happen again.
Posted in Collapse Watch | 6 Comments

Interview Questions for Blog-Hosted Conversations

Posted on May 14, 2007 by Dave Pollard
podcast

The podcast conversations I want to host on this site are with, and between, people who believe we have a responsibility to begin acting now to cope with, and help our children and grandchildren cope with, the impending crises that our overpopulated society and overextended economy will inevitably produce.
 
I want to let these conversations go where they will, but to have a common jumping-off point — a ‘leading question’ if you will. In typical left-brain, analytical style, I had originally thought of asking people which crises they predicted we’d face when, and how they thought they’d adapt to them. 

But then I thought: What if the people who have some of the best ideas, those who will be best equipped to cope with these crises, are uninterested in predicting how they will unfold? I have argued for the importance of resilience and ability to Let-Self-Change, so perhaps what we are doing to prepare for future eventualities, to educate and enable those we love, or just to make the world a little better right now, is more important than the predicted context in which these abilities will be applied. Perhaps it might be better to avoid the prognostications and lead off the interview with questions like this:

  1. What do you think are the most important skills and capabilities that we, and future generations in this century will need in order to cope with whatever the future may hold?
  2. How do you see yourself acquiring these skills and capabilities, imparting them to loved ones and being a role model for our children and grandchildren? Do you envision needing to change where you live, how you live, or how you make a living to do so? How so?
  3. Given that our current political, economic and educational systems seem to be part of the problem, do you envision working to reform them, or rather disengaging from them to create a society that is more community-based and self-sufficient? Or do we have to do both? How do you think we should do either or both?
  4. What’s the most important life lesson you’ve learned so far?
  5. What’s the first, next step you think you need to take to pave the way for this, to make the world a little better? What’s holding you back, if anything?

These are tough questions. I wouldn’t want anyone to spring these questions on me in an interview, without having the time to consider my answers. So it’s only fair that I ‘interview myself’ first. Here are my answers:

Critical Life Skills

  1. I think the critical life skills people will need in the future will be much the same as the ones they needed in the past. They’ll need a broad understanding of how the world works. They’ll need self-reliance skills: How to grow your own food, make your own clothes, look after your own health, fix things when they break. They’ll need good imaginations and critical thinking skills. They’ll need the capacity to pay attention, to focus their senses and trust their instincts. They’ll need to learn to collaborate with others, and to form communities that work. They’ll need to learn how to make a living themselves, locally, in community, since there will be no one to offer them a job. They’ll need to learn to be patient, to educate themselves, and to be adaptable and resilient to rapid change. My generation, the boomers, were late in acquiring many of these skills, and some we haven’t picked up at all. I sense the generations that have followed us are even worse at these things. They’re better than we are at self-directed learning, fortunately, but some of these things can’t be learned on-line; they need hands-on practice. We’ll have to learn these skills and capacities ourselves, and then show them to the generations that follow. We also need to study and learn from the lessons of crises of the past: depressions, pandemics, natural disasters, droughts, famines, political brinkmanship. We have a lot to learn.
  2. I’ve been very fortunate all my life, so I’ll soon have the time and savings to learn these skills. It will be fun learning these things when I don’t have to, at my leisure, when the cost of failure is minimal. But many of my generation and those that follow are living beyond their means, and they won’t have pensions to fall back on. We’ll need to be the role models and teachers for those who can’t afford to be. The intentional communities and natural enterprises we create in our later years, starting very soon now, will be important laboratories, where our failures will be important lessons for all and our successes will be critical models for a future where failure won’t be an option. 
  3. I’m now at the point where I think it’s a waste of time trying to reform our political, economic and educational systems. They’re broken beyond repair, and hopelessly unwieldy. We need to start again at the community level, with the right, passionate people doing bold, disciplined experiments and creating radically simple model intentional communities, self-managed community ‘unschools’ and model natural enterprises that work.
  4. My most important lesson so far has been the importance of Let-Self-Change, instead of trying to change the system. Second most important: Reconnecting with my senses, my instincts, and all-life-on-Earth.
  5. I have a bunch of self-sufficiency skills to learn over the next couple of years to make me more well-rounded. And I want to get the Natural Enterprise book published and the Centre that will support that book and help people help each other to create joyful, responsible, sustainable businesses up and running. Then I’ll be ready for my first big step, co-creating a model intentional community. At that point my pension will kick in, which will give me more time to volunteer on various projects.

If you have experience as an interviewer, I’d welcome your thoughts on additional (or different) questions to ask, how far off track to let the conversation go, what types of answers and tangents to anticipate in advance, or anything else you can counsel before I start this process.

Another thought: I’ve been intrigued by some recent interviews I’ve heard on CBC where the interviewer’s questions are edited out. I wonder how this would work in blog-hosted conversations? Is it still a ‘conversation’ if all you hear is one voice?

Category: Other Blogging Articles

Posted in Using Weblogs and Technology | 5 Comments

Sunday Open Thread – May 13, 2007

Posted on May 13, 2007 by Dave Pollard
podcastWhat I’m thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon:

Just about the same as last week’s list — got sidetracked last week on some heavy metaphysical and epistemological internal dialogue. Needed to think out loud, and thanks to all for your forbearance and guidance on that. Still feeling that something big is about to happen in my life — many synchronicities happening all last week and the week before. Have to slow down and enjoy the ride, or as Siona advised — breathe. Here’s what’s coming up:

Good Working Models of Social Networking: I mentioned last week that what’s missing in Web 2.0 are good working models, ‘templates’, forms, stories that we can use to sell the concept and to illustrate to the unfamiliar what is possible with these tools and methods. I’ve done some research on this, because I may be doing a presentation on this now in the fall, or perhaps even an ‘unconference’. I realize that such models and templates are very context-specific, but they’re still valuable, even to those who don’t share the context. 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. Maybe we need to get together and co-design some for each other?

Staying Well: Lately I’ve been asserting that we don’t do anything unless and until we must, even if it’s good for us. Need that scare to get religion, and all that. Since I’m doing some work in emergency preparedness these days, this is a problematic point of view. It’s a challenge as well when you have a chronic disease you’re trying to determine the cause of and cure for, and are otherwise telling yourself and others of the importance of staying well because of all the important work we have to do (among other reasons). How do we take the steps needed to stay healthy (physically and mentally) when it’s not in our nature to be preemptive?

Blog-Hosted Conversations: Still planning on making my first few podcasts really focused on the subjects that intersect on this blog, and planning the way forward with readers who are where I am:

  • Let-Self-Change: Acquiring the skills, capacities and resilience we need as individuals to be able to contribute effectively to making the world a better place
  • Finding People: Instead of trying to do important things alone, finding the people whose passions and gifts complement our own, and who share our sense of purpose.
  • What Do We Do?: Deciding what’s possible, how we can contribute, how and when to act instead of just writing and thinking, to show instead of telling, to be a model for others.
  • Creating Natural Enterprise versus Walking Away: The role of work in a world where work seems to be part of the problem.

As I think about it, most of the important conversations I’ve had in the last few years have really been about these subjects.

I’ve received some great suggestions on BHC’s over the past week, and I’m still looking for more, including the best editing tool for sound recordings. What have your important conversations been about thesedays?
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 2 Comments

Saturday Links of the Week – May 12, 2007

Posted on May 12, 2007 by Dave Pollard
Shiled by WB Skinner
Photo: The Canadian Shield near Thunder Bay by WB Skinner

The Opposite of Poverty is Self-Sufficiency: That brilliant quip is from Sharon Astyk. Read why it’s so. Excerpt:

We need to recognize that our food dependence affects not just what we eat, but the fundamentals of our democracy and our political power. We should not owe our lives to entities we deplore. And the only possible escape from that bind is to declare food independence – to meet as many of our basic needs as possible ourselves, and through small, sustainable farms with which we have real and direct relationships. And that means not just growing food, but ensuring a stable food supply, reasonable reserves and a dinner that depends on no one.

Sharon also explains the paradox that the first sign of acknowledgement of Peak Oil may be an increasing exodus from rural areas to the city. Thanks to David Parkinson for the link.

All the Plastic Ever Manufactured is Still With Us and Always Will Be: Plastic, the garbage that never goes away, is aggravating the already horrendous crisis in our oceans. Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link.

Mothers’ Day’s Roots in Feminism: Long before it was co-opted by Hallmark, Mothers’ Day was created as a rebellion by women against the elite of war-mongering, hate-mongering, heartless, pro-slavery males. Some women are trying valiantly to make it that again. Here’s what they stand for:

We will be standing for the world’s children and grandchildren, and for the seven generations
beyond them. We dream of a world where all of our children have safe drinking water, clean
air to breathe, and enough food to eat. A world where they have access to a basic education to
develop their minds and healthcare to nurture their growing bodies. A world where they have
a warm, safe and loving place to call home. A world where they don’t live in fear of violence–in
their home, in their neighborhood, in their school or in their world.
This is the world of which we dream. This is the cause for which we stand

The Globalists’ Rush to the Bottom Forces Us to Eat More Poisons: Despite recent US lip-service to the need for social and environmental protection in so-called ‘free’ trade agreements, the clauses of such agreements continue to require dismantling of such protections. The latest casualty — Canada’s prohibitions on toxins in foods imported from the US. The US has some of the weakest regulations on pesticides and other poisons in food in the world, and Canada is not much better. Under NAFTA, both countries will have to lower their standards to those of the lowest country in the agreement, or face massive fines and penalties. Current limits are up to 1400 times higher than those in Europe. Now, they will become worse still.

…But We Still Can’t Match the Chinese as Deliberate, Deadly Poisoners: Every week it seems there is more and more evidence that the ‘free’ market in China is willing to do anything — even kill — for a profit. After last week’s report on deliberate spiking of food with toxic melamine, a zero-nutrition fake substitute for protein, comes a report of Chinese corporatists’ deliberate substitution of cheap and deadly diethylene glycol (antifreeze) for glycerine in medicines, killing thousands of unsuspecting patients, most of them children, most of them in struggling nations. We now have yet another reason to haltall imports from China.
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 1 Comment

Great Advice in Seven Words or Less

Posted on May 11, 2007 by Dave Pollard
tom toles food cartoon
WaPo cartoon by the brilliant Tom Toles
When I’ve asked for advice, I’m most likely to understand it, follow it, and remember it when it’s short and to the point (unless it’s really asinine, like “relax”). When I’ve been thanked for my advice, same thing. There is something about brevity that seems to bring with it credibility.

So here’s a challenge to you:

Tell us the best advice you’ve ever had, that you’ve followed, in seven words or less.

I started putting together a list of such advice, and was surprised to discover that often the shorter it was, the more compelling it was.Here’s my list, in increasing order of succinctness:

  • Want affection? Offer genuine attention and appreciation.
  • To persuade someone, tell a compelling story.
  • For unqualified love, adopt a shelter animal.
  • Don’t try to do anything important alone.
  • First, understand why it is that way.
  • Do one or two things really well.
  • Find a need and fill it.
  • Know what problem you’re solving.
  • Never be indebted to strangers.
  • Find and do meaningful work.
  • You can’t change a culture.
  • Try not to try too hard.
  • Find where you belong.
  • It’s never that simple.
  • Be good to yourself.
  • Change yourself first.
  • Trust your instincts.
  • Buy less stuff.
  • Stop at one.
  • Think critically.
  • Pay attention.
  • Live simply.
  • Be yourself.
  • Just begin.
  • Never lie.
  • Reconnect.
  • Practice.
  • Imagine.

Your turn.

Category: Let-Self-Change
Posted in Collapse Watch | 20 Comments

We Are Not Who We Think

Posted on May 10, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Not Who We Think
If you spend enough time thinking about instinct, and culture, and genetics, and language, and love, you begin to get pretty skeptical about ‘free will’. As the diagram above shows, we are the product of:
  • our culture (the language which determines how the neurons in our brains form, peer pressure, others’ ideas, and the educational, economic, political and social systems in which we live),
  • our genes (instincts, hormones, metabolism, emotions, physical structures and appearance — and don’t tell me that your appearance doesn’t shape who you are), and
  • our senses, experiences and memories.
Nature, nurture, and what we’ve been through make us what we are. The following poem by Montrealer Kezia Speirs, which I read today on the Toronto subway’s ‘poetry on the way’ poster, makes this point more lyrically:

We love as though we know not
better. A trick, biology, it claims
more worthy selves and gentler aims
and still this doom is ours. We sought
late wanderings and soft light, dim,
and then the first embrace, the touch
as if those hands were all the world — for such
their beauty seemed; he carried gods with him.
And these loves, so celebrated, sung
so painted, danced, idolatrized, these scenes
are but the tantrum of our genes,
which we their slaves embellish — strung
like puppets, till they break their strings
and all that’s left are our imaginings.
 
If our actions are indeed “the tantrum of our genes”, then where, in the ‘product’ that is each one of us, is us? If we are, as I would posit, simply our knowledge, our beliefs and our imaginings, figments of reality, and if these three fragile, fleeting figments are determined by our genes, our culture, and our senses, experiences and memories, and if in turn these figments determine what we do, and don’t do, during our too-long, too-short ‘lives’, what control do ‘we’ have over any of it?
 
And if we are fortunate enough to have the capacity to think, say and do what ‘we’ want, regardless of what ‘everybody else’ thinks, why do we value the ‘freedom’ to do so, so highly, when we are in part a product of the culture that is ‘everybody else’?
 
So if, say, our culture tells us that, for some specified reason, we have to do something (e.g. work hard for a living at a job we don’t like) or tells us that we cannot do something (e.g. travel to Cuba), why do we rebel at this? And then do (or not do) what we’re told?
 
Or if, say, we are seduced by someone to whom we are intuitively and/or hormonally drawn, and our culture tells us that it is inappropriate to act on that impulse (e.g. because we, or they, are already committed to someone else), by what logic can we say that our ‘ability’ to resist the temptation is an act of ‘free will’ or morality, rather than merely a resolution of the forces that control us, make us who we are, by sheer strength of that superior force, and not in ‘our’ control whatsoever?

And if ‘we’ want to save the world, is it a matter of defying the culture that normally tells us what to do, and trusting instead the other two forces: (a) our instincts & emotions, and (b) our senses, experiences and memories, both of which tell us, increasingly, that our culture is killing us? When our culture makes us so much who we are, can we even do that? Are we the gatekeepers, the honest brokers between the three forces in the diagram above, who decide which one(s) make ‘more sense’, and get paralyzed into inaction when they are in unresolvable conflict? Or are we merely their instrument, blown like leaves in the wind by all three forces in their combined vector of velocity?

For once, I’m not going to proffer any answers to these (admitted loaded) questions. They aren’t rhetorical. They may be recursive. They may be unanswerable. Perhaps how we answer them tells us who we really are. And who we thought we were, but are not.

Category: Being Human
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 9 Comments

Finding Ourselves Free

Posted on May 9, 2007 by Dave Pollard
Living on the Edge 2

In the latest (May-June) edition of Orion, Chris Cokinos writes about the unbearable grief for Gaia that so many of us feel, relentlessly. In a similar vein to Richard Bruce Anderson’s article, its goal is to help us get past the first three stages of grief (denial, anger and despair) to the fourth and final stage (acceptance). “Sometimes I feel that I’m supposed to save the entire biosphere”, Cokinos writes. “Sometimes I just hang my head in exhaustion and doubt…[But] too much grief for the world means less energy to help it along…I do what I can without going crazy…Of course it is never enough…Here’s what I know: I know that when you find yourself free of the poisons that too much angst can cultivate, then something marvelous happens…you can keep going on, you can keep doing the work you do in this universe, feeling despair, feeling — amazing — joy when you feel joy.” He admits it’s “hard to say” how to “find yourself free” to do “this right work that is calm” and achieve “this letting-go and holding-on all at once”.
 
He tries to give us some perspective on how we might do this by invoking the stories of the previous five great extinction events, and reminding us that over 99% of the species that have existed on this planet are now extinct, and that within a billion years, as our sun begins to go nova, any life on this planet will be burned up anyway. Somehow this is small consolation, and sounds at times more an attempt to help us  inure ourselves (inure means “to habituate to something undesirable, especially by prolonged subjection”) than to help us come to accept and understand what we’re doing and what we can, and must, do, to “find ourselves free”.
 
When I discovered Anderson’s article on Dave Smith’s site, I found it illuminating and, to some extent, consoling. I said then that I thought I was stuck at the third stage of grief (despair). Knowing your problem, they say, is half way to solving it. And since then I have become a happier person, more knowledgeable of what I can and cannot do to make the world better. But not, I believe, any less grief-stricken. I have not yet “found myself free”.
 
I suspect I am in good company in this. Someone asked me, in an interview a while ago, where I thought the world stood in understanding what we have done and are doing and what needs to be done. I replied that most are unaware, not out of ignorance but because they’re too busy dealing with the needs of the moment. Instinctively they know there is something wrong, but they haven’t the time or immediate inclination to figure out what it is. Perhaps there is a ‘pre-denial’ stage of grief where we’re only vaguely aware of impending tragedy, an ominous feeling of foreboding but nothing more. Perhaps six of the 6.5 billion people on the planet are at that stage.
 
Then there are those of us, the other half-billion, who have had either the good fortune of time, opportunity and resources to have come to grips with the utter tragedy and unsustainability of our civilization, or the good fortune to have lived largely outside of it and been able to see it for what it is all along, from the Edge. Our grief is more informed, and, like those drawn to a train-wreck, once we start to learn we strive to learn more, to understand why and what can be done, until we pass that threshhold that I call the point of unbearability and start to turn away, the point where more knowledge just deepens the grief and no longer informs or motivates us, no longer moves us to action.
 
That point varies, of course, with our circumstances. Mostly, it depends on how beholden we are to our civilization, how drawn by the great gravitational force always luring us away from the Edge to the seductive Centre, with its promise of wealth, fame, popularity, security (for us and our loved ones), creature comfort, excitement, distraction. The more attuned we are to our instincts, the more we will refuse to be seduced, and the closer we will come to the Edge. The motley crew closer to the Edge have the capacity to feel that grief more acutely, and it is this group that Anderson and Cokinos are addressing (and it is this group for whom I write, mainly, on this blog).
 
There have been moments when I have, briefly, “found myself free”, or at least relatively so. Moments of intoxicating love, of sudden understanding, of peace, of discovery, of awareness. The problem is that they are fleeting, and unsustainable, as the noise of the machine in our heads, and the realization of just how terrible this world is, rush back into our consciousness. We keep hoping for transcendence, and there are many self-proclaimed gurus and sellers of distracting and addictive products who will tell us how to achieve it, how to get past the grief forever and still be real rather than ‘comfortably disconnected’ as I described in yesterday’s poem.
 
Our austere, puritan, victorian, utilitarian culture teaches us that life is hard and we are sinful, and that moments of happiness are rare and incidental to our purpose. So perhaps we come too easily to accept that these brief respites from grief, these moments of freedom, are the best we can hope for.
 
I suppose it depends on how close to the Edge we can stay, and what we do with our lives, and the stuff we are made of. I’ve been unbelievably fortunate to be able to move, relatively easily, closer to the Edge as I’ve grown older. That’s just dumb luck, but it’s given me some financial independence and flexibility that few ever realize. I have also been blessed with few obligations or burdens. And I know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life, I’ve figured out how to Let-Self-Change and what I’m meant to do. Those less fortunate or less self-assured than I am can be excused for turning away from their grief and its cause, and doing what they must to stay sane and to look after the people they love who need them.

I have no such excuse, and I cannot, will not turn away. Grief is in our nature, because it is our reaction to the loss of love, the love that bonds us and makes us one with all-life-on-Earth, a consequence of our propensity to remember what is important (read When Elephants Weep if you want to understand this better), and our natural reaction to great and enduring stress. I’ll carry that weight, not because I’m brave or courageous or exemplary, but because I can, and must. I’m sure I’ll be in good company, a small but insufficient army of people trying to make the world a better place, “letting-go and holding-on all at once”, only occasionally “finding ourselves free”, but honoured to be able to do what we can to help. Crazy, perhaps, crazy in love with this wondrous, scarred, sacred, ruined, magical world.

Onward.

Category: Let-Self-Change
Posted in Collapse Watch | 2 Comments

Comfortable Disconnection

Posted on May 8, 2007 by Dave Pollard
broken egg shellBetween the idea
And the reality…
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

— TS Eliot, The Hollow Men

This culture is a suffocating fog
that wraps around my body
(like the blanket that I pull around myself
to shield me from the cold)
separating me from what is real and
disconnecting me from all-the-life-on-Earth,
it draws the very life from me.

So where do I belong?

This culture is a solid shell that insulates my body
(like the car I drive, alone, each day)
keeping me apart from others,
from their lives, their sorrows,
feelings, thoughts and knowledge, and their
touch and scent and worried stares
and sighs of resignation.

What reason can there be for this?

This culture is a concrete wall that isolates my body
(like the wood and stone and steel and glass
that separates me here, in this immense sad house,
from my real home, outside)
deluding me to think that I’m
apart from “the environment”, and nature,
and the creatures of all species
who are victims
of our grim, relentless progress.

Not dumbed down, but dulled down, muffled, rendered mute.

So I go on, still blind to all the consequences
of my actions and inactions
and to what I’ve lost
and long forgotten.

In this comfortable disconnection
I’m accustomed, now, to unreality.

Category: Poetry
Posted in Creative Works | 2 Comments

Making Government Work

Posted on May 7, 2007 by Dave Pollard
making government work
It is hard to believe that anyone still believes that the untrammeled market works in the best interest of anyone except the rich and powerful. Oligopolies gouging the customer and eliminating innovation and competition. Corporations bullying governments and regulators to eliminate or not enforce regulations that affect them, while at the same time prohibiting the customers and public from suing them for negligence, fraud, theft and disgraceful social and environmental conduct. Corporations stripping the nutrition out of and poisoning our food while subjecting farmed animals to unimaginable and endless cruelty — because it’s profitable. The whole capitalist system is a miserable failure, and it’s only the corporatists’ control of the media (and hence their ability to brainwash us into believing the system actually works), that has kept us from rising up and dismantling it.
 
Well, actually that’s not the only thing keeping us from overthrowing it: We don’t know what to replace it with. Socialist systems don’t seem to work. Totalitarian fascist systems certainly don’t work. So now we’re indoctrinated into believing that there are no other systems, and that we’re stuck with the capitalist (or more accurately, corporatist) system that is destroying our world (and eliminating the middle class in the process).
 
Not good enough. We have to find a better way.
 
I have written often about a model I call Natural Enterprise. The major differences between this model and the status quo are:
  • Natural Enterprise is a completely flat organizational structure, a partnership of equals with no hierarchy and collective decision-making. As a result it doesn’t scale well — it has to stay small, and if expansion is absolutely needed the Natural Enterprise splits into two or more small enterprises rather than growing into a big one. That’s a good thing.
  • Natural Enterprise is a steady-state, sustainable model. You need to be innovative to survive, but you don’t need to grow. If producing X amount meets the partners’ and customers’ needs this year, why should it ever be necessary to produce more than X?
  • Natural Enterprise is beholden to no one. It is organically financed and virally marketed, so it needs no ‘start-up’ or ‘venture’ capital from outsiders, and it needs and has no ‘shareholders’.
  • Natural Enterprise recognizes its inherent social and environmental responsibility as an integral part of a community. There can be no adversarial interest. If the Natural Enterprise is not contributing positively to the social and environmental well-being of the community, it is not doing its job and must change.
  • The objectives of a Natural Enterprise are set by its partners in collaboration with its customers and its community. Those objectives usually include being a joyful and fulfilling place to work, meeting an important, unmet social need, and providing enough (a sufficiency, as Princen would put it) to meet the needs of each of its partners. You aren’t paid according to how much you accomplish, you are paid according to what you need (e.g. partners who support children or elders will need more than partners who don’t). If you need more than the Natural Enterprise can afford to sustainably provide to you, your partners will either help you to become more effective (so it can) or ask you to leave the enterprise.
There is nothing terribly new about this model. This is how most ‘uncivilized’ cultures and almost all non-human cultures work. It is the model that was and is used by guilds and communes and co-ops, and even some non-government organizations (NGOs). It is a self-limiting, responsive, resilient model. Its time has come (again).
 
You’re probably wondering what all this has to do with the title of this article. The answer is that the Natural Enterprise model, with a bit of tweaking, could also be the model for how government could work much more effectively than it does today.
 
Over the last few months, in my contract work for the government, I’ve learned the following:
  • A lot of public sector workers really are committed to public service, to making the world a better place. They’re not doing government or NFP work for the money, for fame, to assuage guilt or because they’re too lazy or unqualified for ‘private sector’ work.
  • Public sector organizations, like private sector organizations, get increasingly dysfunctional as they get larger and more centralized. More and more effort is spent justifying, fighting over and allocating increasingly large budgets, and less and less is left to actually do anything.
  • Public sector organizations are severely constrained by the risk-aversion of politicians. If confidential customer information gets leaked by a private company, an employee gets fired, the company is embarrassed, but life goes on. When public information gets leaked by a government department, the opposition party makes it into a scandal and the government falls. So public organizations are relentlessly discouraged from knowledge-sharing and innovation.
  • Privatization of public service work is inherently foolish. As John Ralston Saul (The Unconscious Civilization) has shown in his research, the public sector is generally a little less expensive than the private sector at accomplishing the same work: salaries are lower, people are more altruistic, and no profit margin is tacked onto costs (offset in part by the fact that private sector people tend to be a little more skilled and hence a little more effective).
Much work has been done over the years to try to find ways to measure and improve the ‘efficiency’ (called ‘value for money’) of public sector work. This is driven in part by anti-government propaganda (from those who see profit in dismantling government completely), in part by big, overly-centralized (and sometimes understaffed) government bureaucracies, and in part by the presumption that, in the absence of a profit measure, some other measures and processes are somehow needed to prevent public sector people from just spending a fortune and doing nothing (that presumption coming often from people who need a profit motive to do good work — or any work — and hence project that same need onto everybody else). It’s basically catholic dogma — we are all inherently lazy and sinful and need to be coerced, whipped and watched carefully to make us ‘productive’.
 
But before I get to my undogmatic solution, I want to explain what many governments are doing to try to make themselves more efficient. They are dismantling (slowly) large departments and replacing them with a combination of three types of small, semi-autonomous public organizations:
  • Directorates (policy-makers who set standards for both the public and private sector),
  • Auditors (who monitor and enforce compliance with laws, standards and regulations), and
  • Agencies (with focused, specialized objectives who actually do the work that the private sector is either incompetent or unwilling to do — given the lack of profit).
Many of these new Directorates, Auditors and Agencies are still muddled about what they should do, or how to do it, but they’re learning, and the model itself is a pretty good one — mainly because the resultant entities are small and focused on doing one or two things very well.
 
So the challenge then becomes How can we best organize, staff and measure the performance of Directorates, Auditors and Agencies?
 
There are two opposing principles underlying the concept of ‘value for money’. The first is the idea of ‘critical mass’ — it requires achieving sufficient scale that people can focus on what they do best instead of having to do everything, and that there is enough expertise in the organization to be able to do everything it must essentially do competently without having to outsource.
 
The second is the idea of ‘diseconomies of scale’ — the ‘small is beautiful’ principle that says that beyond a certain size the amount of bureaucracy, support and lost information increases exponentially as the size, budget and numbers of staff and locations increase linearly. Anyone who has worked for a large organization knows this point is reached quite soon after the point of critical mass.
 
So there is a sweet spot, illustrated in the diagram above, between the critical mass point and the point of growing diseconomies, which represents the optimal ‘value for money’ on any human collective endeavour, whether in the public or private sector. That’s the spot we want to find in the Directorates, Auditors and Agencies (and probably in Natural Enterprises too).
 
That’s the horizontal axis — the amount of budget and resources we want to ‘invest’ in any organization. How about the vertical axis? In traditional corporations it’s profit. In Natural Enterprise it’s achievement of the set of agreed-upon objectives of the partners of the enterprise, the ones that attain their collective well-being as they’ve identified it. For Agencies the vertical axis could be, analogously, achievement of the collective well-being objectives of the Agency (the well-being of the Agency’s public beneficiaries). For example, in a university or school this well-being could include the learning and employment or self-employment success of the students. In a hospital or public health agency it could include an improvement in health outcomes (fewer illnesses, shorter wait times, faster and more complete recovery). In a police or security force it could include crime and war prevention, success at keeping the peace, and dealing quickly and effectively with crimes and hostilities when they do occur.
 
Likewise for Auditors: For environmental Auditors this well-being could include reduction in pollution levels. For corporate Auditors it could include reductions in fraud. For hospital Auditors it could include improvements in health outcomes. In the chart above I’ve called these objectives Collective Well-Being Outcomes.
 
How about policy-making Directorates? Because politicians are usually focused on what’s popular rather than what’s practical, they rely on government policy-makers to actually draft the standards and regulations (and sometimes even the laws) to reflect the political intent of the government of the day. I’m not sure we need such entities anymore. I recently suggested an Open Source government model that would take the place of such policy-making and regulation drafting, and open it up to public imagination and scrutiny. This model could essentially take over the role of determining, with each Agency and Auditor, what the specific standards of operation for these entities would be, and what Collective Well-Being Outcomes they should be striving for.
 
We the people would then have a say not only in the laws of the land, but in how the Agencies and Auditors that carry out public service work and ensure compliance with those laws do their jobs. They might even help these public organizations assess what the sweet spot in the diagram above is for each organization, and hence what resources it needs to best do its job.
 
The final challenge then becomes how to staff and how to evaluate performance of those staff. If these organizations are small, they should be able to self-manage just as Natural Enterprises do, and collectively select the best group of people, given the resources available at the ‘sweet spot’, to achieve their Collective Well-Being Outcomes. They should be given enough time to achieve those Outcomes — Rome wasn’t built in a day — but with continuous monitoring it may become apparent that even with time they are not going to be able to achieve those Outcomes. Then you send in the Auditor-General organization to figure out the problem: Are the Outcomes that have been set too onerous, or is the group just not the right group to achieve them? If it’s the latter, then the foundering Agency or Regulator should be allowed to fail exactly as a Natural Enterprise does when it repeatedly fails to meet its Collective Well-Being Outcomes — it should be dissolved, and tenders invited for a new group to try. The Auditor-General that pulled the plug would have the authority to select the winning tender. But as an Auditor, it, too, would have its own set of Collective Well-Being Outcomes set for it through the Open Source government model: Its success as an evaluator of tenders would determine whether it, too, was doing its job effectively enough to continue as Auditor-General.
 
Conservatives won’t like this model, because it assumes that most people want to do a good job and can be largely trusted to self-manage. Liberals may not like it because it makes government entrepreneurial. But the existing corporatist model (deregulate and privatize government) has only led to a crippling of public services, an out-of-control, dysfunctional and unsustainable corpocracy, and the disengagement of many who might believe in and excel at a life of public service.
 
We have to do better. The old models don’t work, any of them. It’s time to try something new.
Posted in How the World Really Works | 3 Comments

Sunday Open Thread – May 6, 2007

Posted on May 6, 2007 by Dave Pollard
podcastWhat I’m thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon:

Good Working Models of Social Networking: The other day I prescribed a methodology for introducing Web 2.0 social networking applications into your organization. But what’s missing are good working models, ‘templates’, forms, stories that we can use to sell the concept and to illustrate to the unfamiliar what is possible with these tools and methods. So, for example, is there a way to ‘pre-structure’ a wiki for a particular purpose (say, to enable virtual collaboration on an intractable organizational problem) so that it will be more likely to succeed in that purpose? Is there an ideal layout or template for a group blog for a particular purpose (say, to integrate and leverage the work of a disparate community of practice) so that it will be more likely to succeed in that purpose?

Making Government Work: I’ve been doing government contracting for a while now, and two things have impressed me about the people I work with:

  • The number of my colleagues who really understand that government work is public service, and who work for a fraction the money they could get in the private sector to be of service, to make the world a better place.
  • The realization that government is inherently dysfunctional for two reasons: (a) it is usually too big and too centralized, and hence is ineffective and inefficient for the same reasons big centralized private organizations are, and (b) the risk-aversion that prevails because the party in power hobbles civil servants from doing anything bold (in case it somehow backfires and embarrasses the government and led to its downfall in the next election).

This is leading to an interesting reformation of some government organizations from huge bureaucracies to a curious blend of (a) small stewardship Directorates that really do nothing except set policy and regulate adherence to it, and (b) small, autonomous Agencies that actually do things that the public sector can do more effectively than the private sector.

Blog-Hosted Conversations: I’ve been talking about having, recording and posting .mp3 files of conversations with fellow bloggers, colleagues and gurus, on a variety of subjects I care about, for a long time. I think it’s time. Now I need to learn more about how recording, editing, and .mp3 creation software has evolved over the past two years, and where to store the conversations to link to from here. Advice welcome on this. Rather than the ambitious list of subjects I had proposed to have conversations about, I’m think of making my first few, at least, really focused on the subjects that intersect on this blog:

  • Let-Self-Change: Acquiring the skills, capacities and resilience we need as individuals to be able to contribute effectively to making the world a better place
  • Finding People: Instead of trying to do important things alone, finding the people whose passions and gifts complement our own, and who share our sense of purpose.
  • What Do We Do?: Deciding what’s possible, how we can contribute, how and when to act instead of just writing and thinking, to show instead of telling, to be a model for others.
  • Creating Natural Enterprise versus Walking Away: The role of work in a world where work seems to be part of the problem.

These conversations will be for those of you who have come to accept that our civilization is in its last century and that there are very hard times ahead, and therefore important decisions and steps we need to starttaking now. They will be about planning the way forward.

Let me know your ideas on this, and anything else you’d like to read/hear about. Or just tell us what’s on your mind.
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 5 Comments