how to save the world

What I’m planning on writing about soon:

• Finding & Working With Others to Save the World: Ways to enable billions to sync with us, on their own terms, in their own context, developing their own plan of action, and then to connect and collaborate in powerful ways, in experiments and in creating and refining working models in their own self-selected Earth-stewarding intentional communities, so that they no longer need the systems that are destroying our world.
• What a Fair Tax System Might Look Like: Taxing bads (to discourage socially and environmentally destructive behaviour) and excess wealth (to remedy the dire consequences of gross inequality): A tax system with a purpose other than funding war and corporatist handouts.
• Seismic Shifts of Worldview: The collective change of mind that seems to be spreading everywhere, even among conservatives and those afflicted by anomie. There’s something happening here.
• The Fourth Turning: The coming era ofrepression and violent reactionary tyranny?
• The New Agenda: Kunstler’s proposal that we begin thinking of entirely new and sustainable ways of living, and of doing everything differently, starting right now.
• More on Workarounds: The only way anything important actually gets done?
• Religion as a Form of Slavery: And technophilia as the fastest growing religion of them all.
• What I would be doing 10-15 hours per week if I wasn’t blogging (and why, despite that, I’m still blogging)

What I’m thinking about:

My much-neglected, written and re-written novel, The Only Life We Know, and why it’s still so far from being finished.

How much longer readers are going to put up with me not responding to comments and e-mails on a timely basis.

What’s keeping you awake?

1. Globalization’s Deadly Toll: Vandana Shiva, in a stunning speech to the Soil Association, explains how the disappointments and gross market distortions of globalization are causing a mass suicide of Indian farmers. Thanks to Avi Solomon for the link. And when you’ve read the speech, check out more of the great stuff at Transition Culture.
2. US Housing Collapse Could Precipitate Depression: The overextended US economy is staggering from the collapse of the housing market in several areas, which is leading to a credit crunch, a spike in foreclosures and mortgage defaults. When the principal asset of most Americans loses much of its over-secured value, the whole economy is threatened.
3. Wealth = Health; Poverty = Death: A rash of health and finance stories stresses this grim equation of inequality: 
• As Bush cuts health budgets, some states strive for universality against the neocon tide.
• Struggling nations object to giving affluent countries flu samples free so they can develop vaccines that the struggling nations won’t get and can’t afford.
• A new study proves that global overprescription of antibiotics is producing superbugs that are completely resistant.
• Vulture Funds in affluent countries are buying up struggling nations’ unrepayable debt and then holding them for ransom. (Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link)
• Kaiser Permanente insurance is underwriting a huge long-term study of the causes of skyrocketing chronic diseases in affluent nations. If they prove that environmental toxins are the cause, then what?
• And far too many citizens are so clued out they have no idea what’s going on. Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link.
4. A Prescription for the US Health System: A scathing review of what is needed to really reform the corrupt, bureaucratic, ineffective, profit-and-greed driven US health care system is offered by Mike Adams (Thanks to Mike Yarmolinsky for the link):
• End patent protection for genes, seeds and medicines
• Ban aspartame, water fluoridation and mercury fillings
• End FDA corruption and radically reform this criminal agency
• Require open source publication of all clinical trials, even the negative results
• Ban direct-to-consumer drug advertising
• Stop junk food and soda advertising to children
• Overhaul national dietary guidelines to benefit consumers, not Big Business
• Ban the use of known cancer-causing additives in the food supply
• End censorship for nutritional supplement manufacturers
• Require food manufacturers to list acrylamides, pesticides and heavy metals content on the label
• Outlaw cancer-causing chemicals and fragrances in personal care products
• Launch public service ad campaigns that teach consumers how to tell thedifference between healthy vs. unhealthy food and grocery products
• End Big Pharma’s FDA-enforced drug monopoly

Thought for the week (courtesy of Siona Van Dijk):

love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places

yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skilfully curled)
all worlds

    – e.e. cummings

This passage is spoken by Jess, the troubled teen in Nick Hornsby’s A Long Way Down. The novel is about four would-be suicides who meet by chance and then form a kind of wacky support group.

In my earlier review of the book, I asked whether these ropes, these people and things and circumstances that hold us back, are imposed on us or are self-imposed lifelines. I have often written in these pages We do what we must, then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. Hornsby’s thesis, which is consistent with this idea, is that those who are going to commit suicide are going to do it, and those who aren’t really up for it will not, no matter what others might do or not do to try to influence that decision.

I have argued that the modern world is in many ways a prison, and we are tugged along within its walls for most of our lives by a tension between three forces:

• The Centre, the force of conformity and obedience to and dependence on the status quo, at every social level (work, family, the political and economic system etc.)
• The Edge, the force of rebellion and individuality and self-sufficiency
• Disengagement, physical but mostly intellectual and emotional, the force of anomie and, often, hopelessness

Our fears pull us towards the Centre, our instincts pull us back towards the Edge, and our exhaustion pulls us towards Disengagement, and giving up. Play by the rules, make your own rules, or drop out of the game entirely.

Few of us spend our whole lives in any of these three places or states. When we are driven by insecurity (especially when we are raising a family) we gravitate to the numbing safety of the Centre, though those who are deeply insecure may spend much of their lives there, looking in vain for appreciation that that is the place they belong. During rebellious youth, and often again in reflective old age, we retreat to the Edge, try to find our own way, prove in vain that we don’t need anyone else, or at least don’t need the Man. On the cusps of these shifts we may slip into despair or nihilism and be drawn in that third direction, disengagement, hardly a part of the real world at all.

This is not surprising behaviour in a prison: When there is no chance for parole, the prisoner is likely to vacillate between acceptance (“this isn’t so bad when you get to know your way around and move up the pecking order”), resistance (“they will never do that to me again”), and despair (“I just can’t take this any more”).

My sense is that we largely create our own ropes, our own lifelines, which keep us from going too far in any of these directions. Instincts and idealism keep us from falling too far into the Centre and being eaten up by the system. Realism keeps us from sliding too close to the Edge, since if we over-estimate our self-sufficiency in this crowded world of dependence and scarcity we can easily fall off. And hopefulness keeps us from falling into a genuinely self-destructive state. We have been endowed with all of these qualities of human nature ñ if we were not, Darwin’s law would have made us into mindless robots, antisocial anarchists, or suicides, and our species would be extinct.

We see pockets of all three in modern society, but our nature keeps most of us from emulating them. Our nature, not liberal education, keeps us from falling irretrievably into the Centre. Our nature, not moral upbringing, keeps us from falling off the Edge. Our nature, not religious prohibition (or psychological healing), keeps us from just ending it all. Hornsby’s novel implies that it is we ourselves, not the systems and people around us, that construct our lifelines. Nature would never rely on human social constructs to keep us walking that delicate balance between the three extremes. She has programmed us to walk that balance intuitively.

So when we do something that surprises us, or when we fail to do something that we think, rationally or emotionally, we should be doing, this is not a result of social pressure, procrastination or other human ‘weakness’. We are simply doing what we must, then what is easy, and then what is fun. We are holding ourselves back.

Another Hornby novel, How to Be Good, is about a couple who, in different ways, sever their own lifelines, the self-restraints that are holding them back. The novel’s hard-working liberal wife embarks on a dangerous and tumultuous affair, and her husband, a cynic under the recent influence of a strange faith-healer, undergoes a metamorphosis, gives away all his money and vows to live a completely unselfish and generous life. The wife, seeing her bitter husband transformed into the man she once loved (except perhaps more so) is filled with remorse for her indiscretion and then filled with renewed anger at her husband for his lack of self-control. Their marriage survives as both characters pull themselves (not each other) back from the brink. What is telling (and what makes the book funny) is that the swings to extreme behaviour immediately strike the reader as such unnatural behaviour, not just in the context of the protagonists’ previous behaviour, but for any human.

What is holding us back? What is telling us not to walk away from a struggling marriage, not to have a fling with that new person who so delights us with their attentions and appreciation of us? What is telling us not to quit our jobs and go on a trek to Nepal or Nashville, or sign up to work with the terminally ill or the masses in struggling nations? What is keeping us from blowing up dams and fire-bombing SUV dealerships and kidnapping Exxon & Monsanto execs to hold for ransom for a trillion dollars in renewable energy and permaculture investment? What is it that will have us tomorrow doing much the same as we did today, instead of pursuing our lifelong dream, our passion, or instead of ending it all?

It is, I think, those survival lifelines we have crafted for ourselves. Our instincts are telling us we need these lifelines, these anchors, and that this is the wrong time (and perhaps there never will be a right time) to do the thing we’ve always dreamed of doing. Weare taught to distrust our instincts, but somehow we know better, and we do what they tell us.

And what happens when we lose our self-constructed lifeline? Exactly what happens now: We will do what we must. Things are the way they are for a reason. As Jess says, It’s not our choice.

Now What’s Going On Out There?:

1. A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest: That line is from a Paul Simon song, but it summarizes what Lakoff describes in his books about our inability to appreciate views and ideas inconsistent with our established worldviews. How else could you explain how 87% of elected Republicans in Congress believe that man-made global warming is a myth, and that number is rising? Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link.
2. When will we understand that technology will not get us out of this?: James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency, explains that most Americans still think of modern problems like global warming as a problem that technology needs to fix to allow the economy to continue just the way it is today. That thinking is fatal. “We have to make other arrangements for virtually all the common activities of daily life.” A brilliant and short synopsis of what ails us. Thanks to Jon Husband for the link.
3. The people find another workaround for corporatist gouging: When the music publishing oligopoly started gouging people by fixing CD prices, the market found a workaround for the distortion: file-sharing. The industry howled, but they have only themselves to blame. Now the Monsanto biotech oligopoly is howling because Indian farmers are bootlegging (and enhancing) their GM seeds, paying the oligopoly nothing. Another workaround for a market distortion. Alas, this one is scary, because the Frankenseeds threaten the entire Indian ecosystem.
4. When money loses its value, it’s the poor & middle class who suffer: Now that the US system of remuneration of executives is utterly out of control, with ‘average’ CEO salaries of $18 million per year and fired execs getting quarter billion dollar severances, the fallout is that, to this obscenely overpaid minority, money has no value, so they think nothing of buying $2000/pound valentine chocolates. This is runaway inflation for anything of quality: While a tiny minority bids up the price for a few quality goods to insane levels, the rest of us are left with Chinese crap. Of course, the inflation data published by the administration will never report this: what used to be expected durability and quality is now ‘luxury’, not part of the official numbers and out of reach to all but those who don’t appreciate it.
5. When something gets too big to manage, there are two options: There are natural limits to communities in nature, and creatures other than humans ‘know’ to rein in their numbers to keep themselves self-manageable. Our species has forgotten this, and the result is organizations and states that are huge, unwieldy and unmanageable. Gar Alperovitz, noting that US population could exceed one billion people by the end of this century, says there are two alternatives: break up or decentralize power. Ideally, he’s right, except that breaking a megalith into a dozen or a hundred slightly-less-massive entities merely creates that many more unmanageable units. The break-up has to be radical, right down to the community level, to the natural limits of self-organization. To that extent, Alerovitz’ two options are really one: we need to break large organizations and states down into community-sized units (150-1000people) and decentralize power to those units.

Cartoon by Wiley Miller from the strip Non-Sequitur.

You probably conclude that there’s nothing you can do. We face this every day when we get behind the wheel and witness close calls and hazards that are almost always gone before we can react. Too often, when an accident occurs, it might have been averted if the dangerous, careless or illegal behaviour that caused it had been reported earlier.

On a not atypical day this week, during one 45-minute early-rush-hour drive, I witnessed the following:

• Two vehicles making lane-changes blind because they hadn’t bothered to scrape or defrost their windows. 
• A guy (all alone) in his SUV watching a movie on his DVD player while he was driving (I am not making this up!)
• A cement mixer and a semi-trailer from two of our community’s biggest employers driving on no-truck routes, slowing traffic, gouging up the roads and prompting death-defying passing maneuvers on curves from cars trying to get by. 
• A truck from one of Canada’s “most admired companies” pulling onto the expressway with huge sheets of ice flying off its roof, causing cars behind it to veer off in all directions and nearly causing two accidents.
• A tailgater in the left lane of the expressway traveling at least 140 km and flashing his lights at cars ahead. 
• A hugely overloaded and unstable truck two lanes over, incapable of going more than half the expressway speed limit, weaving, its licence plate obscured with mud and wear, piled high with wooden pallets and other wood sticking dangerously out the rear, unflagged.

None of these actually caused an accident, at least not that I saw. So what to do? The traffic news radio stations don’t want to hear it. It’s not enough to warrant a 911 call.

I asked a couple of people I knew what they would do. They told me that they had been told:

1. The problem must be reported to the authority responsible for the particular road — but who knows who that is and what their phone number is (and what their non-emergency office hours are, which is of course never when these incidents occur)?
2. You are generally discouraged from phoning in such information to the police; you have to report it in person to prove you’re not a crank — but by the time you can deliver your report to a police station, it’s too late.
3. You need a licence plate number and driver details, even for trucks with lots of signage, for your report to be accepted — but with all the salt, many licence plates are illegible, and trying to see who’s driving a big truck is often impossible or dangerous.

Our community has a unique program called RoadWatch that provides a citizen report form for dangerous, careless and aggressive driving, which requires you to hand-deliver or (once they get to know you) fax in the form to the local police, regardless of who has jurisdiction on the road. But I suspect they don’t want to see reports that occurred once you crossed the municipal border, and if anyone knows where the closest police station is to every point in their travels it’s time they got a life.

So this is better than nothing, and I plan to use it, but it’s a local solution and far from perfect. My guess is if I turned in five reports in one day like the day I described above, I’d quickly be blacklisted.

We need something better. How would you design it? It needs to be simple and quick (i.e. something like a four-digit cellphone speed dial number), and there needs to be a way to get it out to others in the area so they can avoid and/or confirm the hazard, potentially reducing accidents and giving the police multiple reports to get the offenders off the road. It needs a mechanism to avoid abuse. And it needs to work across jurisdictions. It doesn’t even necessarily have to involve the police directly (though they would probably benefit from monitoring it) — it could just as easily be a peer to peer solution.

Any imaginative ideas?