how to save the world

What I’m planning on writing about soon:

• The Role of Art and Artists in Social Change: Was Eminem’s failure to get Kerry elected the beginning of the end?
• Experience-Based Decision Making: It seems an obvious choice, until you understand why the alternatives hold sway.
• Making Blog Comments and Forums and Wikis Work: Do we need groundrules to enable real conversations, and would anyone follow the groundrules if we did?
• Ways of Thinking, Imagining and Communicating Without Words: Other species manage just fine without language. Maybe it’s time we (re-)learned.
• Love: Can we be in it, and be activists at the same time?
• Survey Results: The winner of the contest I ran a year ago to predict what would happen during 2006.

What I’m thinking about:

Too Many Chiefs: More and more people, Stephan Harding tells us in Animate Earth, a book praised by James Lovelock, Fritjof Capra, David Abram, Jon Porritt and Lynn Margulis, are recognizing the urgency of dealing with the imminent crises precipitated by our political, economic and social systems, and recognizing Gaia theory as a means to do so. But the bookstores and the blogosphere and the works of philosophers and knowledge managers and social network theorists and economists and political scientists and ecologists (not to mention my e-mail inbox) are now full of a dizzying array of diverse models, standards and principles for diagnosing, understanding, coping with and surviving our fragile civilization. There is no cohesion to these models, and, it seems, a thousand sellers of ideas and analysis for every buyer.

But we don’t need more leaders, more gurus, more one-size-fits-all prescriptions. They’re for simple and complicated problems. For complex problems we need something better, more emergent, more democratic. We need ways to enable billions to sync with us, on their own terms, in their own context, developing their own plan of action, and then we need ways to let those billions connect and collaborate in powerful ways, in experiments and in creating and refining working models in their own self-selected communities, so that they no longer need the systems that are destroying our world, so that we can all walk away from them and build new sustainable ones. But how do we do this? Certainly not the way we’ve ever tried to solve a problem of this type and scale before.

One of these conflicting models is laid out in U of Toronto professor Thomas Homer-Dixon’s book The Upside of Down, which I’ll write about a bit next week. What’s interesting about it is that (like me) he’s resigned to the inevitability of the collapse of civilization in this century, and therefore preoccupied not with preventing it but with contingency plans to enable a “healthy renewal”after the collapse. More soon.

What’s on your mind this unseasonably warm January?

The very metaphor of a ìlong tailî cries out impotence: The tail never wags the dog. The tail is the end, the part near the rump, always trailing the leaders, always behind those in front.

That’s why I prefer the circular metaphor of the Centre and the Edge, with their conflicting centrifugal and centripetal forces in uneasy balance. The Big Head is the Centre, those with power and authority, the Centre of Attention, the A-List. The Long Tail is everything else, from the circles caught between Centre and Edge to the Edge itself.

Those outside the Centre have superior numbers but, because of our diversity, these numbers carry no advantage ñ we are at least as likely to disagree strongly with others outside the Centre as with those in the Centre.

The Long Tail doesn’t reflect the subtlety of the many constituents who are neither in the Centre nor on the Edge, but are either somewhere in between, or are, in different respects, both in the Centre and on the Edge. Like those politically in the Centre (left or right side) but socially, economically or philosophically way out on the Edge ñ such as the poor and sick still seeking justice working within the system. Or like those wealthy progressives politically and philosophically and technologically estranged from most of their economic cohorts ñ who don’t think tax cuts for the rich are a great idea.

The Long Tail is a ‘markets’ way of looking at populations, not a social network view. I recently saw a guy wearing a T-shirt that read “I am NOT a consumer demographic”, and I wanted to go over and hug him. In the Long Tail, we are each a population of one, infinitely diverse and unique.

So there are two problems with being outside the Centre, in the Long Tail, that prevent us from being a force proportionate to our numbers:

1. We lack cohesion, and an effective way of finding truly like minds, so we are impotent, and hence ignored by the mainstream media (and just about everyone else); and
2. None of us is completely outside the Centre in all respects or for all our lives, so there is no affinity to the Edge the way there is among those in the Centre, where their relative unity of worldview (and sense of being outnumbered) makes them cling together in self-congratulatory and self-supporting economic, political or technological unity ñ to the point they are defined, connected and entrenched by their rarified affinity

The key point here is that, on the Edge or in the Long Tail, important stuff (ideas, issues, information and connections) gets no attention, or at least no sustained attention: There is just too much stuff for the important to be discovered and kept in public view. Two days ago my readership spiked 50% because of a flurry of readers of two different articles I wrote months ago, one that had been ‘discovered’ by an A-lister and the other that appeared on one of the ‘whatís hot’ social bookmarking lists. But a day later the attention was gone, the same as it is for those in the real-world Long Tail who get their fleeting fifteen minutes of fame in the mainstream media or some brief celebrity on YouTube.

It doesnít matter that the Long Tail represents, in aggregate,  more people, more page-views, more wealth than the Big Head could ever dream of. When there is no attention, or when it is too broadly or quickly dissipated, there is no opportunity for significant impact or change or coherent action. So many of us end up aspiring to the popularity of the Centre, to the point we are willing to compromise everything just to attain it, not (just) because we crave the attention and appreciation, but because we know itís essential to get attention first if we want to change anything. We become reluctant whores to the Centre because only through the Centre’s potent infrastructure can we reach the others outside it.

What we need is a model, a process, a capacity to identify, connect and collaborate with those outside the Centre without being co-opted by the Centre to achieve it. Iíve looked for examples, but theyíre hard to come by. Until then, weíll remain impotent, disenfranchised, andfrustrated. The hinterland (from the German words meaning ëthe land behindí) may be beautiful, but itís not, at least not yet, where itís happening.

These numbers include both direct effluents and consumption and the pro rata share of industrial and commercial effluents and consumption used to sustain a median lifestyle. This is a massive ‘footprint’ for each additional human added to the American mosaic. I’ve tried to show this graphically and approximately to scale (1:1500) above, with consumption depicted as arrows coming in and emissions as arrows going out (to be even visible at this scale, the baby is shown supported by his/her parents). Density data is from the Internet and calculations have been double-checked.

Multiply these numbers by the 1,000,000,000 humans being added, net, to Earth’s population every 15 years (of course they don’t all consume at US levels, but meanwhile there are 6 billion more mostly aspiring to increase their wealth and consumption to those levels) and you’ll understand the meaning of unsustainability.

The authors don’t attempt to quantify how much each child added to the population contributes to species extinction, for the simple reason that we are extinguishing species at a rate faster than we are discovering them, so we will never know how many species we’ve extinguished, in aggregate or per capita.

Every $100 spent by Americans on goods and services entails the use, on average, of 50 litres (13 gallons) of petroleum or equivalent energy. Next time you carry in your grocery bags, imagine the volume of oil consumed to produce and distribute it: You’ll appreciate why Richard Manning’s groundbreaking Harper’s article on the inefficiency of our food production systems is called The Oil We Eat.

In the Population & Environment article, the authors debunk the arguments that more efficient technologies will reduce this per-capita ‘environmental impact’, and that public pressure or commitment to improve conservation or reduce pollution will have any net effect on this impact.

They conclude:

For me, this has been a year of momentous personal change: I got sick, and cured myself, changed careers and lifestyle and got myself into the best condition since my 20s; I learned some important lessons about indigenous cultures and the Great Depression; and I concluded that what we need to do to save the world is more about Let-Self-Change and about creating ‘working models’ of better ways to live, than about bringing about radical political or economic revolution (which is, I now believe, an impossible dream).

These changes came about because I had no other choice: We do what we must. Had I not made the commitment to personal health, I would probably be either dead or useless today. Had I not learned and changed my ideas about saving the world I would probably have given up blogging and either sunk into a terminal depression or been arrested for some fruitless extreme act. Now it is time for me to make some commitments, not resolutions, to act on my evolving social, political and economic understanding and beliefs. I have learned to free up time for what is urgent, and now I must apply that learning to free up time, and energy, for what is important.

So here are my commitments for 2007:

• I will find the necessary sponsors and partners to successfully launch the Canadian Centre for Entrepreneurship, an organization to promote the establishment of Natural Enterprises, and make this my ‘full time’ job.
• I will find the necessary sponsors and partners to bring together and host an Open Space event on Preparing for Civilization’s End, that will ultimately spawn ‘working models’ for post-civilization society (Intentional Communities, Natural Enterprises, a Generosity Economy, a curriculum on Understanding Gaia & How the World Works, Finding Partners & Real Social Networking, Let-Self-Change and Radical Simplicity). These models will be fun to work on.
• I will find at least ten more people with whom I would like to live in community, and will spend at least four hours per week in genuine conversation with such people, opening, paying attention, listening, learning, and Letting-Myself-Change.
• I will spend at least four hours per week in silent undistracted contemplation, as much of it as possible in natural places. PucPuc has taught me how much you can learn without uttering or hearing a word.

To make time for these commitments, I will spend less time trying to convince others, in writing and in debate, of anything they are not yet ready to believe. This blog already contains lots of material for those who are ready to partner with me and with others in activities like those noted above, and I will endeavour to make the blog’s future content less evangelical and more useful (and it will likely be less analytical and more narrative).

And I will be spending less time reading, especially reading newspapers. Looking at the ‘news’ of the past year, I’m hard put to find anything (even the trouncing of the Republicans in the recent US election) that will really matter to any of us in five years. The ‘news’ is mostly useless information, entertainment designed to distract us from what is really important.

We do what we must, then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. We live in a terrible world where there are many things that must be done, but few that must necessarily be done by any designated individual or group, so these imperatives mostly don’t get done by anyone. I’m accepting a responsibility to make some of these collective ‘musts’ my own. To do the same, all you have to do is free up the time from other personal ‘musts’. This is easier, I’ve learned, than you might think. Just make a commitment, an intention, and begin. Even better, find and get together with others of like mind and take it on as a shared responsibility.

Yesterday morning, as I was outside running, I heard two chickadees uttering their plaintive three-note song, alternately, and then, astonishingly and improbably, in lovely and perfect unison. Even they sounded surprised, and went back hastily to alternate songs. And then they sang again, precisely together. After the second stanza, they were silent for a long time. In fact, everything suddenly became silent. It was almost as if every creature was taking note of this discovery, this synchronicity, this perfect andunexpected harmony.

Silence the noise of the machine in your head, and pay attention, and discover and learn wondrous things. And when you’re ready, ‘send yourself over’.

Happy New Year, everyone.