MoonRaven's Social Alchemy Blog

Learning from Modeling

2012-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00

I've recently been reading The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge (which I hope to review at some point). I've also just read Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows, which was wonderful but I was borrowing somebody else's library book. I know I'm going to have to get it.

So I was excited when Peter Senge began referring to work by Donella Meadows. I knew that Thinking in Systems came out after The Fifth Discipline so I was curious what he was citing. It turns out he was referring to an article that she wrote, "Whole Earth Models & Systems", in the Summer 1982 issue of CoEvolution Quarterly. I have lots of old CQs which I treasure, so I flew to my horde, and there was Summer 1982. I read the article and learned a lot from it. I was particularly impressed by her reference to seven very different "Global Computer Models" that various people had made. She pointed out that these were "made by people with different political and cultural persuasions and all extremely biased, but in different ways." She goes on to say that these "modelers themselves, who generally started out hostile and critical of one another, have been surprised at the extent to which their conclusions overlapped." She then lists 12 statements that she thought everyone who has done the modeling would agree to. (Apparently this list is also included in a book of hers that I wasn't aware of entitled: #Groping in the Dark: The First Decade of Global Modeling.) I want to quote extensively from this list (but not everything, just to conserve time and space) because I think it supports a lot of what I wrote in my previous series on Beyond Fuels.

Her list (excerpts--and remember this was written in 1982; if only we acted then...):

1. "There is no known physical or technical reason why basic needs cannot be supplied for all the world's people into the foreseeable future. These needs are not being met now because of social and political structures, values, norms, and world views, not because of physical scarcities."

2. "Population and physical (material) capital cannot grow forever on a finite planet."

4. "Continuing 'business-as-usual' policies through the next few decades will not lead to a desirable future - or even meeting basic human needs. It will result in an increasing gap between the rich and the poor, problems with resource availability and environmental destruction, and worsening economic conditions." (Unfortunately, all this wisdom from 1982 reminds me of John Michael Greer's remark that "...the collective response of most industrial nations to the approach of the limits to growth would turn out to be a thirty-year vacation from sanity..." See Beyond Fuels 7: The Muddling Path, 12/26/11, for the whole quote.)

5. "...Over the next three decades the world socioeconomic system will be in a period of transition to some state that will be not only quantitatively but also qualitatively different from the present."

7. "Owing to the momentum inherent in the world's physical and social processes, policy changes made soon are likely to have more impact with less effort than the same set of changes made later. By the time a problem is obvious to everyone, it is often too late to solve it."

8. "Although technical changes are expected and needed, no set of purely technical changes tested in any of the models was sufficient in itself to bring about a desirable future. Restructuring social, economic, and political systems was much more effective." (Only too true...)

9. "The interdependencies among peoples and nations across time and space are greater than commonly imagined. Actions taken at one time and on one part of the globe have far-reaching consequences that are impossible to predict intuitively, and probably impossible to predict (totally, precisely, maybe at all) with computer models." (Parenthesis and items within it were part of the original quote. My thought: I think this says we need to think globally, act locally.)

10. "Because of these interdependencies, single, simple measures intended to reach narrowly defined goals are likely to be counter-productive. Decisions should be made within the broadest possible context, across space, time, and areas of knowledge." (It's all connected, it's all connected...)

11. "Cooperative approaches to achieving individual or national goals often turn out to be more beneficial in the long run to all parties than competitive approaches." (If only more people thought about the long run.)

12. "Many plans, programs, and agreements, particularly international ones, are based on assumptions about the world that are either mutually inconsistent or inconsistent with physical reality. Much time and effort is spent designing and debating policies that are, in fact, simply impossible."

She goes on to say that "To nearly anyone with the education and time to think about the world as a whole, these statements are not surprising. ... What is surprising is the lack of congruence between these descriptions of the world and the view of the world reflected in policy - nearly every policy of every nation, enterprise, and individual."

I hope to write more about systems thinking, and the work of Peter Senge and Donella Meadows, in the future. In the meanwhile, I hope that at least some of this is still useful as we try to figure out what we can do now in working toward a better future.

Quote of the Day: "The bottom line message of the global models is quite simple: The world is a complex, interconnected, finite, ecological-social-psychological-economic system. We treat it as if it were not, as if it were divisible, separable, simple, and infinite. Our persistent, intractable, global problems arise directly from this mismatch." - Donella Meadows

Three Versatile Blogs

2012-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00

I'm deeply honored to have gotten my second blogger award in six months.

Jerry at SoapBoxTech awarded me the Versatile Blogger award in his post "I'm Blushing Here!" Thank you so much, Jerry!

The award comes with two rules: first, to pass it on three more bloggers, and second, to offer seven pieces of obscure information about yourself.

My three choices for versatile blogs:

First, Austanspace. Austan runs a very versatile blog; as she puts it she writes about: "...ponderings, massacres, cool things, rants, family news, international incidents, outrages, general strikes, fart stories, that sort of thing." How much more versatile can you get? (And besides, she was the one who gave me my last award.)

Next is One Smoot Short of a Bridge. Eeka claims she writes about "Culture, social justice, queer issues, disability rights, arts, Boston, and stuff I think is cool."--but the truth is she writes about all sorts of quirky things, and generally has cute comments on them. (One of my all time favorite of her posts was from August, 2009: "The MBTA trip planner had too much coffee this morning". I think that post deserves an award in itself.) Versatile and entertaining.

And finally, Cracker Lilo's Front Porch. Okay, I'm used to folks writing about queer and pagan stuff--but how many of them combine it with NASCAR racing and hockey? I think that's beyond versatile. (My only concern is that CrackerLilo hasn't written in her blog since November. I hope that she hasn't gone off the 'net.)

Now, as to seven obscure things about me:

1) I was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts--although my family moved from there when I was three.

2) I've lived eight different places in Somerville, although I'm not living there now.

3) In the nine month period between May, 2007, and February, 2008, I lived at five different addresses--a feat I hope to never repeat.

4) Ninety percent of the time, I wear black jeans.

5) It would surprise many people who know me, but I actually like getting dressed up in a shirt, tie, and jacket or suit. I think of it as my version of 'drag'. I actually have a closet full of dress clothes.

6) However, I'll try to never wear a bright red tie--because I had to wear one for nine years as part of a Catholic elementary school uniform.

7) I have dragons and unicorns all over my room--including a little stuffed dragon and a little stuffed unicorn.

I hope that was obscure enough.

Quote of the Day: "You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process, is its own reward." - Amelia Earhart

Beyond Fuels 12: Summing It Up

2012-01-23T01:00:00.001-05:00

We need to learn to live without fossil fuels because, whether we like it or not, it's going to happen. The biggest question beyond fuels is whether we get there by wrecking the planet--fracking, burning low-grade coal, stripmining everything we can, extracting from tar sands and shale, causing ever-greater climate change, and massively polluting our world to get those last drops of fuel--and then, eventually, running out out of available fuel anyway, or we choose to change and live sustainably by making the adjustments now and begin creating a different future.

My hope is this series has been useful in giving some ideas about what each of us can do to change and prepare for life without fuels: learning to use simple tools, to fix and build things ourselves, to use our muscles instead of oil, etc, and to envision a 'post-carbon' world. I've looked four pathways forward, and as I said in my last post, I think we need to draw from all of them: curtailing our consumption while creating community, looking realistically at possibilities ahead while also seeing the opportunity to create real social change, and most importantly, realizing that much of this will be done by small, slow, incremental changes--'muddling', if you will, our way forward. None of this will be easy, but it needs to be done and, if there's anything we've learned, we can't expect government or business to lead the way.

It's up to each of us to begin, little by little, to build that world beyond fuels, just as it's up to each of us to work toward a world where everyone gets what they need, where people are not hurt or oppressed, and where we work with nature and natural systems, rather than believing somehow we can control everything. Another world is not just possible, but essential. Things are going to change, the only question is whether the change is toward the world we want to live in or a world that will bring horrors to upcoming generations. Each of us has to choose. We are moving, right now, day by day, beyond fuels--but it will be our actions that will determine what lies there.

Quote of the Day: "We cannot predict outcomes but some things are coming clear and that clarity is beginning to rattle us: The shock of melting ice caps and dying penguins, of leveled rainforests and species wiped out daily before we've met them, of children armed in genocidal war, and children dying of hunger even as we feed over a third of all grain to livestock...[sic]all of this is sinking in, and more and more of us know the time is now--that we act powerfully now or we see our fate sealed...
"...the real problems facing our planet can only be met by the ingenuity, experience, and buy-in--the contagious engagement--of billions of us." - Frances Moore Lappé

Beyond Fuels 11: Where The Paths Converge

2012-01-18T01:00:00.001-05:00

The four paths I've just described (aka the four books I've just reviewed) have a lot in common. First of all, they all are clear that we can't continue on as we are, using fossil fuels like they're endless, because they're not. On the other hand, no one is predicting sudden collapse, the destruction of everything we've known, and plundering hordes of barbarians. Although John Michael Greer is the clearest on this (see also his book The Long Descent for another take on this), all four of these authors talk about a long, slow pathway toward a future beyond fuels.

In essence, I think each of these books focus on a different element of that pathway. Muddling toward Frugality emphasizes the slow, indirect route we will need to take. Plan C emphasizes what we will need to do (curtail consumption and create community). The Great Turning emphasizes the opportunity here to use this unavoidable decline to move toward the society many of us want. The Ecotechnic Future emphasizes the probable stages ahead.

Where they disagree (and there are plenty of these places), they illuminate one another and push us toward examining our own values and biases. None of them suggest their view is what's going to happen (Korten: "The Great Turning is not a prophecy; it is a possibility." Greer: "...the logic of dissensus applies to my own ideas just as much as much as anyone else's..."); all of these paths are really just hypothetical routes. And what JMG refers to as "the logic of dissensus" makes all of these paths valuable because each author has sketched pieces of the potential terrain ahead--the greater the diversity of options available to us, the more likely some of these routes will prove useful.

Which is why I've read and reviewed all of them, as well as why I've been writing this series. I think that, year by year, we will be dealing more and more with less and less fuel sources available to us. All of these authors would agree that beginning to prepare for this now will help us tremendously as we move beyond fuels.

Quote of the Day: "The goal of foreseeing the future exactly and preparing for it perfectly is unrealizable. ...
"The future can't be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. ... We can't surge forward into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them." - Donella Meadows

Beyond Fuels 10: The Ecotechnic Path

2012-01-10T01:00:00.001-05:00

Surprisingly, the most practical, rational, and hard-nosed of these four paths comes from a book written by a druid who also writes books about the occult (his recent books focused on UFOs and Secret Societies). This is actually the 'Archdruid' John Michael Greer who I've blogged about several times (see A Magical Way of Thinking, 8/3/08 and The Archdruid Report, 8/5/08).

I've referred to Greer (aka JMG) in two of my previous posts in this series since he has commented on the writings of both Warren Johnson and David Korten (the former positively and the latter negatively). The Ecotechnic Future is his attempt to look at life beyond fuels and he subtitles the book 'envisioning a post-peak world'.

The title is somewhat misleading however since he never really describes what an Ecotechnic Future is. The closest he comes is in the introduction where he says that "an ecotechnic society... will support a relatively complex technology while maintaining rich and sustainable relations with the rest of the biosphere." But Greer's real interest in writing this book is describing the path to that future, particularly focusing on what we can do now and in the immediate period ahead. He uses history and particularly the evolutionary perspective of succession to look at several stages that he thinks we will go through before we even near his ecotechnic future.

Greer sees us now in 'The End of Affluence' moving into a time of 'Scarcity Industrialism' where we will continue as we have been but with less and less resources and needing to get the most out of anything we have. As these resources run out, we will transition to an 'Age of Salvage' where people will recycle many things in ways they were probably not intended for--because he thinks at this point we won't have the resources to create many of the things we now take for granted. (He envisions a time when steel girders, for example, will be hacked free and then used by blacksmiths to forge nails, plows, knives, etc.) Only when we have used up most of what we can salvage are we likely to begin building an 'Ecotechnic Future'.

JMG then looks at how we can find, create, and use resources such as food, housing, and energy, as well as maintaining community, culture, and science through these changes. He thinks that 'dissensus' (which he defines as 'the deliberate avoidance of consensus') as a useful tool since he sees the period ahead (and indeed the whole future) as quite unpredicable and having different people exploring a variety of paths makes it more likely that some of these folks may stumble on the right thing to do in their own situation. He also thinks that different strategies may well work in different areas, so he doesn't think that anyone (including himself) would be able to come up with a plan that would work everywhere. Greer supports what he calls 'the mariner's two hands'--that is, having one set of skills and tools to deal with whatever crisis we may be facing at the time, while preserving other 'legacies of the modern world' for future generations that may be able to use them.

He also writes a section on work where he talks about what skills might be useful to have in the immediate future. (He calls this section 'the deindustrial want ads'.)

All in all this is a very useful book to think about both the intricacies as well as the difficulties in creating a path beyond fuels. JMG's notion of dissensus applies to his ideas also (as he freely admits), which is just as well because I'm not ready to agree with some of his ideas about community and culture. Still, this is absolutely worth reading--and, in fact, balances out some of the optomism of the previous three books nicely without falling into the trap of gloom, doom, and collapse.

In my next post I want to see what we can learn from looking at all four paths together.

Quote of the Day: "The road to the ecotechnic future can only be guessed at in advance, and will have to be built step by step as the human societies of the future struggle to adapt the legacies of our age to the hard limits of a finite planet and the unguessable possibilities of their own time. What we do now, or leave undone, may have a potent influence on their successes or failures. Challenging though it will certainly be to take action on that basis, I can think of no task more richly worth our efforts." - John Michael Greer

Beyond Fuels 9: The Turning Path

2012-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00

David Korten's The Great Turning is probably the most ambitious of the four paths to the future. This isn't exactly the same as Joanna Macy's version of 'The Great Turning', but in my post about it (see The Great Turning, 11/15/09), I wrote: "David Korten admits he got the term from Joanna Macy, and said that when he asked her to use it, she said that it 'should be a public term that is used by everyone and owned by no one.'"

Korten subtitles his book, 'From Empire to Earth Community', and this is the choice he puts before us. He gives his take on history and the growth of Empire, as well as laying out how the United States fits into all this. He begins with discussing the 'imperatives' of peak oil, climate change, terrorism and a world we can't conquer, and increasing inequality and economic instability.

While he sees this as a crisis, and is well aware that we need to go beyond fuels, Korten also sees this as an opportunity to create what he calls 'Earth Community'. He's not talking utopia here. He lays out a framework that includes vibrant community life (mutual trust, shared values, connection, and secure civil liberties), vocations that contribute to the well-being of the community and insure basic needs are met, strong and stable families, civic engagement, and a healthy natural world. He says "...this list may read like a radical utopian fantasy but only because it contrasts so starkly with our present experience. ... each condition aligns with core values shared by both conservatives and liberals. If any of them seem alien, it's only because they all depend absolutely on cooperation and sharing." Yet he believes that cooperation and sharing is possible. It's only our brainwashing by the values of 'Empire' that keep us from seeing this.

David Korten goes on to say that what we need to do is to challenge the stories of Empire and begin telling stories of what could be, putting our visions clearly out to people. In fact, he titles the last chapter "Change the Story, Change the Future". Simply challenging the stories isn't enough, of course, but people (and thus society) are not going to change until they have at least some idea of what's possible.

It's a broad and far-reaching vision and sometimes he goes a bit far. He begins with a psychological view of human development that, while I think it's mostly accurate, can give the impression of a favored few being superior to the rest of us. One person who, unfortunately, got that impression is John Michael Greer (I'll look at his path forward next) who writes "... David Korten's The Great Turning, insists that certain people have reached a higher 'developmental stage' than the rest of us and are thus naturally fitted to run the world." However, Korten doesn't say this at all. What he says is "Although persons of a mature consciousness are generally averse to the competitive struggle for dominator power, they are strongly attracted to leadership roles in social movements engaged in challenging Empire's dominion." While I still have some qualms about seeing some as more developed than others, there's a big difference between being 'fitted to run the world' and being 'attracted to leadership roles in social movements'. The model David Korten puts out is based clearly on 'partnership' rather than 'domination'.

Still, for whatever faults there may be, I'm glad to have this vision out there. In some ways I don't think he goes far enough, and I'd like a more radical outline for how we could be living. However, I really think this book gives a good overview of some of the possibilities of how we could be living in a world beyond fuels, and lays out clearly some of the next steps we need to take to create the path. As Korten himself says, "...we humans are path-breaking pioneers in uncharted territory."

Quote of the Day: "In the days now at hand, we must each be clear that every individual and collective choice that we make is a vote for the future we of this time will bequeath to the generations that follow. The Great Turning is not a prophecy; it is a possibility." - David Korten

Beyond Fuels 8: The 'Plan C' Path

2011-12-31T01:00:00.000-05:00

Pat Murphy's Plan C talks about four different plans we could choose. Plan A is what he calls 'Business As Usual', where we continue doing what we're doing, assuming that economic growth is infinite, or at least indefinite, and what we're doing is okay. Plan B uses 'Clean Green Technology' to rescue us from the mess we find ourselves in. (In a footnote he claims that his version of 'Plan B' is not about the book of the same name by Lester Brown and that the comments he makes about Plan B do not 'necessarily apply to him'.)

Plans C and D are wonderfully alliterative: Plan D he refers to as 'Die Off', and I would add, Death, Destruction, and Doom. (I think we are all familiar with that one, so much so that there is a group of peak oil believers commonly called 'Doomers'.) What Pat Murphy advocates is Plan C, 'Curtailment and Community'. I have it up on my door these days as: Conserve by Curtailing Consumption and Create Caring Community.

Thus, the path of Plan C is two fold: first we need to cut our consumption and consumer habits, rather than expecting some new technology to save us, and second, we need to rebuild community around us, since that's what is most likely to support us through the difficult times ahead.

While it talks about peak oil, peak gas, peak coal, peak uranium, peak economy, and peak empire (not to mention climate change and inequality), the book focuses on what each of us can do to forge the path beyond fuels. It looks in particular at the ways we use energy in buildings, transportation, and food--and how we can change what we do. There are lots of graphs and technical details. (Pat Murphy says in the preface that "This is definitely a numbers book.") Much of the beginning of the book will be familiar to those who follow peak oil and climate change. But the book's strong point is its emphasis on what we can do, even going as far as giving 'six steps' we can take to change our food habits (eat less, change our diet [eliminating soft drinks, snack foods, fast foods, and highly processed foods], reduce meat consumption, purchase local organic food, preserve and store food, and create a garden and/or a henhouse).

He does go on a few tangents I found a bit overly focused on specific solutions (the Smart Jitney, for example, or devoting a whole chapter to 'Kicking the Media Habit'), but ends with chapters appropriately covering 'Localization' and 'Reviving and Renewing Community'. All in all this is a useful book, I think, for charting out the path beyond fuels.

Quote of the Day: "We are facing multiple grave world crises--peak oil, climate change, inequity and species extinction to name just a few. ... Twenty year of so-called sustainability conversations have led nowhere, and green has degenerated into a marketing term. ...
"Our problem is cultural, not technical. It is a character issue, not a scientific one. ... We have allowed cheap fossil fuels to change us from citizens into mere consumers. ...
"Plan C offers an alternative perspective to the ever more frantic technical proposals for continuing our soul destroying and life endangering way of living. ...
"I envision a society based on cooperation and care of the planet rather than competition and exploitation of planetary resources." - Pat Murphy

Beyond Fuels 7: The Muddling Path

2011-12-26T01:00:00.000-05:00

Muddling Toward Frugality is a book originally written in 1978 by Warren Johnson. From searching online it seems like it's been recently republished with a review by Edward Abbey (also from 1978) tacked on as an introduction.

The scary thing about re-reading this book is realizing how clear it was, even back then, what we needed to do, and how little of it has been done in the last thirty-two years.

Warren Johnson took the title of his book from a paper written in 1959 by Charles Lindbloom called, "The Science of 'Muddling Through'". It was about the way administrators of various types actually make decisions as opposed to the way academic theorists described ideal decision making. As Johnson says, "The only trouble is that this is rarely the way decisions are made, primarily because it is rarely possible." Administrators need to deal with conflicting demands and priorities and seldom have the time or, indeed, the needed information, to make ideal decisions. The result is that "Even with the best of intentions, the administrator ends up by taking only a modest step (well checked out by the powers that be), ... that at least makes a marginal contribution to the issue at hand. In the process of reaching a decision, the administrator becomes practical and political as well as rational. The result is muddling through." And this is basically the process that Johnson suggests for dealing with the coming crises.

This book really is practical and makes a lot of sense. However, as one reviewer noted, Johnson also muddles his way through the book--making detours through history (not that I haven't done it in this blog) and his opinions on a number of issues (some of which I can't say that I agree with). But his point is if we all make small steps in the direction of using less resources and living on a smaller, simpler scale, this will move us to a future beyond fuels far better than trying grand schemes and failing.

Last year, John Michael Greer (see my posts A Magical Way of Thinking, 8/3/08 and The Archdruid Report, 8/5/08, for more on JMG--and note that one of the paths ahead is his) wrote a post in his blog, The Archdruid Report, referencing this book. I want to quote a little of it, since it puts the book in perspective. Greer wrote: "Warren Johnson’s Muddling Toward Frugality has fallen into the limbo our cultural memory reserves for failed prophecies; neither he nor, to be fair to him, anybody else in the sustainability movement of the Seventies had any idea that the collective response of most industrial nations to the approach of the limits to growth would turn out to be a thirty-year vacation from sanity in which short-term political gimmicks and the wildly extravagant drawdown of irreplaceable resources would be widely mistaken for permanent solutions.

"... His strategy, though, still has some things going for it that no other available approach can match: It can still be applied this late in the game; if it’s done with enough enthusiasm or desperation, and with a clear sense of the nature of our predicament, it could still get a fair number of us through the mess ahead; and it certainly offers better odds than sitting on our hands and waiting for the ship to sink, which under one pretense or another is the other option open to us right now." And this summarizes the best reason that I can think of for re-reading this book. Seeing the direction we still need to move in and making moves in that direction, no matter how small, may (if anything does) make a difference.

This is the simplest of the four paths I'll look at. Can we muddle our way to a life beyond fuels? What other choices do we have? Let's look at some other, more recent explorations of the path ahead.

Quote of the Day: "Above all, it can be a good life. In effect, we will be exchanging the grand achievements of large scale technological society for modest accomplishments on a more human scale. ... Above all, we will have the comfort of knowing that our relationship to the environment is sustainable, and that the earth is a true home to us." - Warren Johnson

The Long Night

2011-12-22T01:00:00.000-05:00

I'm interrupting this series on life Beyond Fuels to observe the Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year.

I usually blog at this time about the darkness and the light. (In fact, last year's post was called just that: The Darkness and the Light, 12/21/10.) There are definitely blessings to the darkness, but it is also true that what we celebrate now is the returning of the light. There are traditions where folks wait up all night to see the return of the sun at dawn. Somehow, it always seems that if we wait long enough we will get through the darkness into the new day--even on the longest night.

And beyond this is the winter, here in New England the coldest time of the year, but if we can just hang on, the spring will come.

And this makes me think that even this is connected with my current series on life beyond fuels. Certainly there are rough times ahead, but I believe that if we persevere there will be a new day beyond it, and even a new spring. We can survive the long night, we can grow in the darkness, and the cold, and we can be there for a new day--not only for this current long, cold night in this confusing, surprising year, but for the nights and days to come.

Welcome Winter, Happy Solstice, Happy Yule, and to all, a good, long, night.

Quote of the Day: "If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome." - Anne Bradstreet

Beyond Fuels 6: Four Paths

2011-12-15T10:56:00.004-05:00

So we've gotten our tools together, flexed our muscles, and looked at some of what may lie ahead. Now where do we go?

The truth is no one knows. I like the book title (about the Mondragon cooperatives) "We Build the Road as We Travel." Still, a number of people have attempted to provide roadmaps.

In the next few posts I want to look at some pathways that we could take as we move beyond fuels. The four routes that I want to look at are far from identical. Yet I think that looking at what they have in common, as well as where they differ can help us think about the road ahead of us. One of the authors of the four books I will profile (John Michael Greer) talks about 'dissensus', the idea that in a situation (such as what we are facing) where none of what might happen is clear or predictable, the more divergent options we pursue (collectively), the more chance that one or another will work. More important, what works in one place may not at all be what works in another.

With that in mind, let's look at four different views of where we may (or should) be going as we move beyond fuels. After I cover them, I'll write a post on my thoughts about why, in spite of their divergences, I think each of these maps of the future is useful. If nothing else, they provide a good starting place for thinking of directions and preparations we will need as the age of fossil (and nuclear) fuels comes to an end.

Quote of the Day: "...the human sense of what satisfies, the human sense of ultimacy, requires what Rosemary Ruether called 'the conversion to the earth'. ... It will only be powerful enough to save the time and space which that future can unfold if our work on collective structure taps the energy at once of judgement and of hope. ...
"At this point calls to conversion and sacrifice only have a chance of being heard if they are inscribed with the language of desire. Desire not just for the sake of an abstract future, but because a new community already begins to form in the practice of ecojustice. That is, to sort through our garbage, to make choices based on awareness of the sinister and/or beautiful web of connections of our food to our weather to our starving and tortured fellow humans to women's bodies and the homeless ... this multi-dimensional work of recycling releases new ways of being together, a new sense of common goal, of being on the edge together, of consoling and delighting each other in our edginess. We find together the spiritual practices which allow us to ground, quite literally, in our bodies and our earth, the anxieties of the unknown future. ... We are here to claim, to defend and to renew our earth home, the inhabited whole." - Catherine Keller

Beyond Fuels 5: Post Carbon

2011-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00

Last Christmas, two young adults that I helped raise gave me a lovely present. They presented me with a book I had never seen before, The Post Carbon Reader, by Richard Heinberg and Daniel Lerch.

I'd never heard of the book, although I certainly knew of Richard Heinberg and have blogged about him in here (see for example, Peak Everything, 7/30/08). But when I turned the book over, the back cover made it clear that Heinberg wasn't the only author in this book I knew.

This book is an anthology and includes Rob Hopkins (see Transition Towns, 10/16/08), Michael Shulman (see Going Local, 7/26/08), Bill McKibben (a writer and a journalist who has become one of the leaders of the climate change movement), Stephanie Mills (a former editor of Co-Evolution Quarterly, one of my favorite publications ever), Wes Jackson (who has written extensively on agriculture's impact on sustainability), David Orr (a key figure in the ecological literacy movement), Chris Martenson (creator of the Crash Course, an online course that is the best introduction to peak oil, economic collapse, and personal preparedness, that I know of), and Tom Whipple (an ex-CIA analyst who writes a column for the Falls Church News Press, which pops up regularly on my peak oil news searches).

It also includes some folks that I'd like to pay more attention to, like Erika Allen (who works with Growing Power, a local food initiative focusing on low-income communities), Michael Bomford (a researcher in Kentucky working on organic agricultural systems suitable for small farms with limited resources), and Deborah and Frank Popper (who have came up with a concept for the Great Plains states to manage declining population and economic shrinkage by creating land reserves emphasizing ecological restoration and native species, and are now working on 'Smart Decline' strategies for urban areas).

This book is a primer on issues we will need to deal with as we move beyond fuels: climate change, water, biodiversity, food, population, energy, economics, transportation, waste, health, and education--as well as looking at the effects of culture and behavior, the changes needed in cities, towns, and suburbs, and ways to build resilience in the midst of major change. It ends with a 'Call to Action' written by Asher Miller, executive director of the Post Carbon Institute, the initiators of this book. He states, "Our vision is of a world worth inheriting, where people not only survive, they thrive." There's a direction for going beyond fuels. He ends the book with, "Now put this book down and go do something. Anything." Hopefully something informed by all you might learn from this book.

Quote of the Day: "Resilience in the face of social upheaval resulting from peaking supplies of traditional energy and climate disruption requires that we protect our landscapes and ensure that the services they provide are sustained. ... We can do this now and be better for it, come what may. And it's essential that we act now; the unraveling is well under way." - Gloria Flora

Beyond Fuels 4: Human Power

2011-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00

In a world beyond fuels, we will need to figure out what we can use to keep what we want and need going. One method might be human-powered machines.

The Human-Powered Home by Tamara Dean gives a very useful overview of what can be accomplished by using muscles to power things. Solar power isn't always reliable and neither is wind, and hydropower assumes that you are near a river or stream that you can tap into, but when all else fails, there is always what my mother referred to as 'elbow grease'--or in the case of many of these appliances, 'knee and leg power'.

The first two chapters of this book give a history of using muscles to power things, and an overview of what you need to understand in order to build human-powered machines. These should be read by anyone who has ever thought about the amount of energy that can be raised by pedaling, stomping, or hand-cranking. The author gives clear and useful information about how all these things work--as well as what doesn't work and what hasn't worked.

The next three chapters concentrate on plans for actual devices (and stories about similar ones) to power things in the kitchen, the garden, and around the house. The final chapter focuses on recreational devices and, more importantly, devices for 'emergency preparedness'.

I became aware of this book when I found out one of my friends was using plans from it to build a bicycle-powered electrical generator. (I wanted to help but I didn't really know much about electricity. I spent nearly a week with my head in books about electricity and electronics--not really something I wanted to study!)

When you think about Peak Oil, etc, (see my posts on Peak Oil, 7/18/08, Peak Everything, 7/20/08, and Collapse, 7/5/10, for more on this concept and its reprecussions) you may start wondering whether we can salvage any of what we've learned in the last couple of hundred years and whether there will be a place for technology in the future. I think this book point the way to a technology that will always be available to us--using our arms and our legs.

Quote of the Day: "Replacing motors with muscles can even be considered a political act. Gandhi urged his fellow Indians to spin and weave their own cloth, endorsing local self-reliance as a means to defy the British textile industry which had crushed cottage industries and changed the nature of Indian society. He called this self-sufficiency 'swadeshi'. Through swadeshi he believed India could gain its independence. Each day he sat at his spinning wheel and practiced it himself. Perhaps we can claim hand-cranking our coffee mill each morning or pedal-powering our laptop in the evening as our own personal swadeshi." - Tamara Dean

Beyond Fuels 3: Handy Books

2011-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00

Right across the street from my new place is the city recycling center. It's really convenient but unfortunately they have a book section and everytime I visit, I come back with more books. (It's an addiction, I tell you!)

Two books I picked up fit the theme of this part of the Beyond Fuels series: Handyman: Complete Guide to Home Maintenance (Banner Press, 1975) and, for those who are very ambitious, How to Build Your Own Home, by Robert Reschke.

Once you've learned how to use tools (see my last post, The Tools Beyond Fuels, 11/28/11), it's time to start learning how to fix things--particularly around your house.

I'm not recommending these particular books, but there are lots of books out there on fixing things, home repairs, and home maintenance. Others that I've seen include books from Reader's Digest, Time-Life, and Sunset Publishing. You should be able to find something easily at used bookstores, yard sales, or even giveaways. These old manuals give lots of useful tips for do-it-yourselfers, and as fuels go away, a lot more of us are going to have to do it ourselves.

In imagining a world beyond fuels, I'm imagining a world where we do a lot of the work around our own homes, the way it was done not so long ago before repair people would arrive with their trucks and vans. When I talk about building a new world beyond fuels, sometimes that actually requires a hammer and saw.

Quote of the Day: "One key ingredient is confidence. You gain this by a combination of knowledge and practice. You learn by inquiring and you learn by doing. ...
"As implied earlier, it is more satisfactory to work in pairs than alone. You exchange knowledge and know-how, and beat the weariness and discouragement..." - Robert Reschke

Beyond Fuels 2: The Tools Beyond Fuels

2011-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00

My former housemate Jon is a very handy guy to have around. He's good at fixing things--in fact, he fixes things for a living. When I expressed interest in learning these kinds of skills, he loaned me two of his books. (It's been sort of a long-term loan as I borrowed them quite a while back.)

The Way Things Work by David Macaulay is an introduction to the basic physical principles of tools. While it does explore electricity and nuclear power plants (and the newest edition focuses on computers) the early chapters give a basic understanding of how simple things actually work.

In fact, the first part is called The Mechanics of Movement and discusses the Inclined Plane, Levers, Wheels and Axles, Gears and Belts, Cams and Cranks and Pulleys, and Springs and Screws and Rotating Wheels. If you can ignore the overly cute mammoths, this book will give you a clear and simple picture of the physics behind the tools and machines we use. Even better, it shows how some of these very basic concepts are used in many complicated machines. Later sections explain how boats and pumps and toilets and thermostats work. All in all, incredibly useful to someone who has no real knowledge of why and how tools (and machines) work. And if fossil fuels go away, knowing the use, care, and repair of tools and simple machines is going to be very important.

The other book Jon loaned me is a very old, very useful book called A Museum of Early American Tools by Eric Sloane. Eric Sloane points out that the word 'museum' used to mean a printed collection of facts. His book is a collection of information about the tools used in the US before mass production took over. They were hand made with care and each was one of a kind. The book gives a lot of information about the functions of tools and what was used for what--particularly which implement was used to fashion what before power tools took over. Each page has beautiful drawings of the tools and is filled with information on their use.

If fuels are going away, so are power tools. To live beyond fuels means that we can't take any technology for granted. Not just power tools, but even things like assuming the lights will work and we can just purchase what we want. Knowing how to make and craft things, how things work and how they are repaired, and how to do this all using simple tools will be essential. We will need an real understanding of what basic hand tools are and how they work. Once they were how everything were made and built. I believe that this is how they will be again.

Quote of the Day: "The Civil War period marked a turning point in tool design... Before that time, the word tool meant an implement that could make one thing at a time; mass production tools then entered the scene, and the word tool, which had meant only 'hand tool', took on many added meanings. ...
"Generally speaking, hand tools made after the Civil War period lacked the simple beauty of those of the ante-bellum period. Things were made to sell quickly, things were made in large quantities so that they could be catalogued identically, and hand-made implements began to disappear. ...
"When we consider tools, we are dealing with human benefactors of the most primary sort. Tools increase and vary human power, they economize human time, and they convert raw substances into valuable and useful products. ...
"An extraordinary awareness of life and time permeated our early days; when something was made and the maker was satisfied, it wasn't complete until his mark and the date were added. Nowadays things are almost obsolete before they leave the drawing board." - Eric Sloane

Beyond Fuels 1: New Living and Old Learnings

2011-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00

We need to learn to live without fossil fuels. (Or nuclear fuels, for that matter.) Whether you look at peak oil (and Peak Everything--see my post of 7/20/08), or climate change, or all the pollution these fuels cause, or what the industrial world is doing to our lives, it's clear (at least to me) we need something different.

I wrote about Walking Away (8/23/11) and taking The First Step (9/3/11) a few months ago. While there is no way to accurately describe or predict where we are going and what lies in a world beyond fuels, in this series I want to point to some resources that give some general directions on where we're headed (or could be headed).

A lot of this will be looking at re-learning the tools and skills from times before nuclear energy and fossil fuels. There's a lot of good stuff that we've abandoned--and not just from a long time ago. Some of this series will also talk about things developed in those heady times in the sixties and seventies when we began exploring alternatives that seemed to have been dropped for our current high tech, high stress lifestyles.

I also want to point to new things that are being created. The future is not going to look just like the past, even if there are similarities. We've learned more than a few new things that don't require fuels to make them work.

The future will be built on what we can harvest from the sun and wind and water and muscle. And it will be built on having less and enjoying it (and each other) more. It will probably be harder, but it could be more fun.

Quote of the Day: "The transition to a post-carbon, post-growth future means relocalizing and reinhabiting certain places, learning where we're at....
"With careful, concerted action on and help from nature's phenomenal capacity for regeneration, the transition beyond fossil-fuel-dependent industrial civilization to a stable world of flourishing, land-based communities may find our descendants inhabiting a planet that still hosts a variety of life and culture." -Stephanie Mills

Coming Together

2011-11-19T01:00:00.001-05:00

Over the course of this past week, the house I'm living in has started to take shape as a community. I've had interesting discussions with several of the folks, I taught composting to one person and I'm planning a sheet-mulched raised-bed with another. We finally have a chore list and we have a long awaited house meeting scheduled for Sunday. We've gotten through at least one tricky conflict and people are feeling good about each other.

The thing about community is that it's organic--and that means it moves on its own timetable. I need to keep remembering this. The things that are happening now are things I expected to happen in September, but that only goes to show that I'm not in control of how community unfolds.

It feels really good and I need to remember that there is much more to come, and a lot of it won't be what I expect. I remember a quote I read years ago that said (and this is from memory): "When venturing into the unknown, by definition, you don't know what you'll find." It's a good description of building community from scratch.

Quote of the day: "Keep in mind that our community is not composed of those who are already saints, but of those who are trying to become saints. Therefore let us be extremely patient with each other's faults and failures." - Mother Teresa

Darkness and Despair

2011-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00

No, I haven't disappeared from the face of the earth. Life at home has been stressful and my quiet job has gotten very, very busy. I haven't had the time to put into this blog. Life will probably quiet down but it might not be until December--or next year.

I started writing the intro for a new series on 'Life After Fuel', and I have lots of ideas for it (and lots of resources), so hopefully when I get the time I can plunge into that.

Meanwhile, I almost always write something this time of the year to honor the pagan feast of Samhain. (Pronounced, for some reason having to do with celtic languages, like 'sow-wen'. See Darkness, 11/1/08, Out of Darkness, 11/1/09, and Death, Decay, and Impermanence, 11/1/10 for my previous posts.)

One aspect of darkness I want to look at is the feeling of despair. This is not an easy feeling for me--or for many people, I imagine. I have a natural optimism that keeps finding reasons for hope, no matter what. I also fear that if I felt some of the real despair that is all around, I would sink into it and become depressed and hopeless.

Yet the despair is there. I'm not sure we (the human species) are going to make it and I am sure that if we do, it will be through a lot of pain and suffering, and I often feel like there isn't much that I can do to affect that. I don't want to deny those feelings, but I also don't want to sink into them and give up. I am not going to give up hopefulness, but I wonder if there is a way to hold to both hope and despair and not give up (or give into) either.

As the darkness, and the cold, and the winter rolls in, I want to acknowledge my despair, and my grieving over the way we are stuck in what we are doing, and continue to do it, even if it means our destruction. I want to feel those feelings and also the hope that even the little I can do may make some slight bit of difference.

I've had the thought (occasionally) that if we are doomed, we should treat each other the way we'd treat someone who is dying. Like hospice work, we need to give comfort and care to each other. If we are going to disappear as a species, it's worth being gentle and supportive to people and allow ourselves to die out with dignity. Of course, I still want to work to make this not happen, but I think it is worth feeling the uncertainty, and the despair, and remain open to the possibility that we are not going to make it. And whether we do, or we don't, loving each other is the best way to go. And for now I will try to remain open to the darkness and despair.

Quote of the Day: "We are bombarded by signals of distress--ecological destruction, social breakdown, and uncontrolled nuclear proliferation. Not surprisingly, we are feeling despair--a despair well merited by the machinery of mass death we continue to create and serve. What is surprising is the extent to which we hide this despair from ourselves and each other. ...
"Despair in this context, is not a macabre certainty of doom or a pathological condition of depression and futility. ... Rather, as it is being experienced by increasing numbers of people across a broad spectrum of society, despair is the loss of the assumption that the species will inevitably pull through. ...
"So long as we see ourselves as essentially separate, competitive, and ego-identified beings, it is difficult to accept the validity of our social despair, deriving as it does from interconnectedness. Both our capacity to grieve for others and our power to cope with this grief spring from the great matrix of relationships in which we take our being." - Joanna Macy

Synergize!

2011-09-15T01:00:00.001-04:00

This is my sixth post on the Seven Habits book. I am going to copy what I wrote in my last post on this (Seek to Understand, 11/11/10) because it's so relevent to what I'm going to write in this post.

"As I've been reading through Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, very slowly, trying to deeply understand each chapter, each of the habits seems to have resonated with what was going on in my life, right at that time.

"Covey's first habit ('Be Proactive') came as I was trying to take control of my life and after being highly influenced by a workshop I took with 'David' (see my post on Deciding, 2/19/10, for more on this). As I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, I was reading the chapter on 'Begin with the End in Mind' (see my post, Goals, 5/4/10). Then, as I began to try to figure out how to organize my life, there was his chapter on 'Put First Things First' (which I wrote about in Priorities, 6/26/10). I talked about wanting to take a break from writing about these 'habits' but then I started a thread on this blog about how we could be in a world headed for collapse, which begin focusing on how we could benefit others, and his next chapter, on 'Think Win/Win', fit so beautifully in with this, I had to write about it (see Win/Win, 7/30/10)."

I then wrote how well Covey's fifth habit fit in with the work I was doing with Nonviolent Communication. It's been over ten months since I wrote that last post, but I have been working with trying'seek to understand' and listen and communicate better.

Now, I am in a house full of eight people that is struggling to become a community. I've been thinking for a while I wanted to write on Covey's next habit and when I re-read it, once again it was amazing how much it spoke to what is currently happening in my life.

We are currently trying to schedule our first house meeting. It's a complicated, confusing process. I like everyone and think they each offer something special but I'm afraid that the whole thing isn't going to gel or will take off in some direction that will not be what I want at all. I get anxious and worry. I keep looking at what I've posted by my door: "I can relax and see what unfolds". (See Watching the Process Unfold, 8/1/11.)

This morning, as I was re-reading The Seven Habits, I find this: "Most all creative endeavors are somewhat unpredictable. They often seem ambiguous, hit-or-miss, trial and error. And unless people have a high tolerance for ambiguity and get their security from integrity to principles and inner values they find it unnerving and unpleasant to be involved in highly creative enterprises. Their need for structure, certainty, and predictability is too high." Bingo! A friend of mine said that "Structure Binds Anxiety" is a psychiatric saying. The truth is, I need to build my own inner structure, rather than relying on having a structure around me.

Stephen Covey subtitles the chapter on this habit, "Principles of Creative Communication". He begins by saying; "What is synergy? Simply defined it means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It means the relationship which the parts have is a part in and of itself. It is not only a part, but the most catalytic, the most empowering, the most unifying, and the most exciting part.

"The creative process is also the most terrifying part because you don't know exactly what's going to happen or where it is going to lead. ... It takes an enormous amount of internal security to begin with the spirit of adventure, the spirit of discovery, the spirit of creativity. ... You become a trailblazer, a pathfinder. You open new possibilities, new territories, ... so that others can follow."

Now I just need to remember that as the chaos of building a community continues. Thank you, Stephen Covey. This is just what I needed.

Quote of the Day: "Synergy is everywhere in nature. If you plant two plants close together, the roots will comingle and improve the quality of the soil so that both plants will grow better than if they were separated. ...
"Ecology is a word which basically describes the synergism in nature--everything is related to everything else. ...
"Synergy works.... It is effectiveness in an interdependent reality--it is teamwork, team building, the development of unity and creativity with other human beings." - Stephen Covey

The First Step

2011-09-03T01:00:00.000-04:00

I'm sure that there are some people who, if they read my last post (Walking Away, 8/23/11), would wonder what I was talking about. Even if they agreed with my analysis of what's wrong with this society, there is the question of how can you actually walk away from it--I mean short of heading out for a desert island.

I am going to suggest that the first step in walking away from this society is to stop buying all the stuff that they're trying to sell you that you don't need. If fact, stop buying stuff from the big corporations period. (See my post Boycott Corporate America, 9/12/08.) Start trying to figure out what you need and don't need, and buy what you need from small local businesses--or make it yourself, or reuse it. (See Reduce and Reuse, 11/24/09.)

As far as what we don't need, my guess is that we don't need most of it. What impresses me most is the folks that are determined to live on 10% of what the average American lives on. Back in 2007, Sharon Astyk and Miranda Edel started an online challenge to get their emissions down by 90% of the American average. They got several thousand people to participate in this. (See Riot!, 9/28/08.) Now Sharon Astyk is doing it again. She's challenging folks to use 10% of the transportation energy, use 10% of the electricity, use 10% of the heating and cooking fuels, use 10% of the water, create 10% of the garbage, use 10% of the food from the mainstream industrial food system, and buy 10% of the consumer goods that the average American does.

The 'Rioters' aren't the only ones looking at this question. Laird Schaub, a consultant on group process and consensus decision making who lives in an intentional community called Sandhill Farm, just wrote a six part piece in his blog on "My Summer of Sustainability", where he explicitly mentions the question of "How to create a vibrant, satisfying lifestyle that uses only 10% of the resources that the average American is currently consuming."

What we are talking about here is people in the US (and other countries in the 'developed world') living the way much of the rest of the planet does. What we are talking about is (to paraphrase Elizabeth Seaton) 'living simply so that others may simply live'. It won't get us to a new world by itself, but it's the first step.

Quote of the Day: "The lower we get our energy and resource consumption, the better prepared we are for our emergent future in which we are constrained by limits of climate, resources and wealth. If you recognize we cannot go on as we are, we must not wait for someone else to lead the way - it is time to make the changes that are needed ourselves." - Sharon Astyk

Walking Away

2011-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00

The world is in a mess, yet what is offered to us--at least the priviledged ones in developed countries--is a garden of consumer delights. Maybe the TVs and junk food and luxury items from around the world and computers and McMansions and SUVs, etc, etc, etc, will distract us from noticing all the pain and suffering around us, as well as the fact that we are making the earth unlivable and we are running out of the fossil fuels that make it all possible. (See What We Need and Don't Need, 9/4/08, as well as Peak Everything, 7/20/08.)

But even those who notice feel caught by this society. What else can we do? We can organize protests, we can try to fix the worst of the stuff, we can try to destroy this oppressive society, we can try to create a revolution.

Or another possibility is that we could just walk away from all this. I have seen this suggested by John Michael Greer (see A Magical Way of Thinking, 8/3/08, and The Archdruid Report, 8/5/08), by Daniel Quinn (see Beyond Civilization, 1/3/11), and by David Korten (I hope in the future to write a post on his book, The Great Turning). Just don't participate in this society. Create something new, something to replace it, something that doesn't use as many resources and something that doesn't exploit people. Something small and local. Something simple, egalitarian, communal, and sustainable. (See Interconnections, 10/8/08.)

Walk away from all we don't like about this society. Walk away from corporate capitalism, patriarchy, white privilege, and that garden of consumer delights. Walk toward a new world--not knowing exactly what it will be like but believing we can create it. Walk away, deciding we want a world that works for everyone, and that's what we are walking toward.

Ursula Le Guin wrote a short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas", in which she imagined an urban paradise, which she called a 'city of happiness', where all seems wonderful, utopian--but the happiness is maintained by torturing one small child in a basement somewhere, and every inhabitant of the city learns of this as they come of age. Most, somehow, rationalize this as important for the well-being of everyone else, but the story ends by focusing on the few who can't. Some of these just get up and walk out Omelas, this 'city of happiness.'

Quote of the Day: "They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas." - Ursula K. Le Guin

Three Small Blogs

2011-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00

Austan, from AUSTANSPACE, recently gifted me (and two other bloggers) with the Liebster Blog Award.

The award goes to three blogs with less than 300 followers. The honor of having gotten it goes with the duty of honoring three more small blogs. One of the first blogs I would have honored with it is AUSTANSPACE--but, obviously, that's already been done.

I don't have the time to research to find out which other blogs have already been given this award, so I may be giving this to a blog which has already gotten it in the past, but I am going to simply pick out three favorite small blogs.

And here's my three honorees:

The first is SoapBox Tech. I think Jerry is doing some amazing things out there and I would love to join him in doing some of it but since I'm in New England (USA) and he is in Alberta (Canada)--several thousand miles away--I am glad that he's documenting it in his blog so we can all learn from it. I also enjoy his rants.

Then there is Michaelann Land. Michaelann is a social justice warrior, someone who has spent her life fighting against poverty, exploitation, oppression, and destruction of the environment, and still manages to have the occasional post about theoretical physics.

Finally, there is The Wheeling Traveller. Blues has not written much in the blog yet, but what's there is a deep exploration of the pain of disability. This is a perspective that many of us need to learn. Blues, consider this a nudge toward writing more.

Quote of the Day: "There are beautiful wild forces within us. Let them turn the mills inside and fill the sacks that feed even heaven." - Francis of Assisi

Impermasysteming

2011-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

I've written several posts on Permaculture. (Permaculture, 7/22/08, and Permaculture Principles, 12/24/09, and one entitled Attitude, 8/31/10.) The word Permaculture is a combination of the words Permanent and Agriculture, or sometimes Permanent and Culture. I think the intent of the word 'permanent' is to imply sustainable.

But the definition I found online for permanent (from Merriam-Webster) was: "continuing or enduring without fundamental or marked change". The trick is that nothing continues without at least some marked change.

I've blogged also on impermanence. (See Impermanence, 7/9/10, and Death, Decay, and Impermanence, 11/1/10.) While this is a basic Buddhist concept, the truth of it quickly becomes apparent to anyone who pays attention. Everything changes, everything is in flux, very little endures without changing.

Everything is also connected, also in relationship to everything else, and also changing everything else. It's all a grand and glorious dance.

To me this all relates to systems thinking. I think of Permaculture as just another way of looking at systems theory--in the same way I think of complexity science, ecology, ecofeminism, etc, as other ways of looking at systems theory. (See my post on Systems, 12/14/09, for more on this.)

The problem with talking about systems is that systems is a noun (a plural noun) and nouns seem static, fixed. Nouns are usually "used to name a person, animal, place, thing," or an "abstract idea." (From an online definition provided by the University of Ottawa.) To me a noun is a snapshot of something--an instant picture that doesn't change in our minds.

I have a snapshot in my room of myself carrying a four year old girl on my shoulders. It's a cute picture--the problem is that neither of us look like that anymore. She's now a twenty-one year old woman and my hair has fallen out since and my beard is now snow white. Everything changes. Everything changes and systems are always changing, always in flux. As I said, it's a dance.

Buckminister Fuller said, "I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process..." As far as I'm concerned, systems are definitely verbs, changing, evolving, processing, unfolding, systeming. Everything is connected, everything is in relationship, everything is moving, everything is unfolding, everything is changing, and nothing is permanent. The trick is to relax and enjoy the ride.

Quote of the Day: "The process nature of reality became clear--its continual flow, the radical impermanence of all things, with no element or entity aloof from change. ... All the factors of our lives subsist, therefore, in a web of mutual causality. ...things do not produce each other or make each other happen, as in a linear causality; they help each other by providing occasion or locus or context, and in doing so, they in turn are affected. There is a mutuality here, a reciprocal dynamic. Power inheres not in any entity, but in the relationship between entities." - Joanna Macy

Watching the Process Unfold

2011-08-01T01:00:00.000-04:00

For the last two months I have been living in this quirky, interesting building, trying to be patient. Finding housemates has been a slow process and even slower has been the waiting for them to actually live here.

One person did move in and I also found a sublet for the summer to cover the rent and to have people around until others were ready to move in. Both are folks that needed a lot of time to themselves and so until recently, I have not been seeing much of either. Recently, I have been connecting with my new long-term housemate and, as of today, two more of my housemates are scheduled to move in.

We have been conducting group interviews while looking for our last housemate and this has been a good process for us. In the process of telling our stories to the people we are interviewing we have been learning about each other.

This is all such a wild gamble. I don't really know any of these people and we have no systems in place--not even how we make decisions, let alone whether we do meetings or food sharing or how we manage chores. My anxiety has occasionally been really up, wondering whether this all has been a big mistake.

I put a sign up in my room that says "I can relax and see what unfolds". Doing it, however, is another matter.

My goal is to really listen to and learn about each of these precious people, each of whom bring something to the house, each of whom have hidden gifts that will only appear as we begin to trust one another. Community will emerge as the connections slowly happen. I just need to be patient.

Quote of the Day: "The aspiration to communicate with another person--to be able to listen and speak from the heart--is what changes our old stuck patterns." - Pema Chödrön

Doing it!

2011-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the sudden change in plans, but it looks like I will be taking a break at this point. It could be permanent but probably not. I really do have a lot of stuff I still want to blog on, but there are things that are much better than blogging.

One of the best is to do a lot of the stuff that I've been blogging on. Out of the blue (almost) someone who had noticed all the workshops I'd been offering on intentional communities offered to rent her house to me to create an intentional community in. (She and her family are actually moving to a rural community in another state.) How could I turn that down?

So now I have the opportunity to do a lot of what I've been blogging on--starting with doing it with love and compassion. (I write this as a reminder for myself as much as anything.)

Yes, this will be about Simplicity, Equality, Community, and Sustainability. Yes, I will try to find ways of embracing Complexity, Diversity, Individuality, and Practicality. Yes, this will be about starting Small and Local. Of course, I will try to apply Permaculture and NonViolent Communication and anything else I can think of to our situation. Of course, I want us to be eating locally, growing food (at least sprouts), conserving energy and water, and most importantly, taking care of each other, learning from each other, and listening to each other.

This house comes with a host of quirky things and a big bunch of challenges. The location is very urban and there isn't a lot of space for a garden--or much of anything. But as I wrote in my post on Attitude (8/31/10), a Permaculture Principle is: "Every resource is either an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on the use made of it. ... Disadvantages can be viewed as 'problems' and we can take an energy-expensive approach to 'get rid of the problem', or we can think of everything as being a positive resource: it is up to us to work out just how we can make use of it." The other Attitudinal Principle is "Permaculture is Information and Imagination-Intensive". We will need creativity and imagination (and some information as well) to deal with the challenges of this house, but if I can get a good mix of people for this community, we should be able to do it. Now I just need to find them.

Maybe my next post will be an update of how this is working out. Meanwhile, if anyone reading this is interested in being a part of this emerging community (or might know someone who is), please email me.

Wish me luck.

Quote of the Day: "How are you practicing what you preach--whatever you preach, and who exactly is listening? ... It is not going to be easy, but we have what we have learned and what we have been given that is useful. We have the power those who came before us have given us, to move beyond the place where they were standing. We have the trees, and water, and sun, and our children. ... We are making the future..." - Audre Lorde

Survival Resources 13: Survival Summary

2011-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00

At this point, I am going to end this particular series on Survival Resources. It's not that I won't discuss this stuff again, it's just that it's time to go onto other things. I have a long list of other topics I want to blog about--of course the biggest problem is finding time to write about it all...

So what conclusions do I have? What have I learned? What have you learned?

I think most of this falls into three categories: things we can do something about now, things we can learn (better and better over time), and things that we won't know until we get there.

The two things anyone can do now: 1) Get (or get out from the library) and read some some of the books about survival. My top recommendations are When Technology Fails (see When Technology Fails, 2/13/10) and Deep Survival (see my post on Wilderness Survival, 3/11/11). While you are at it, work on developing a survival attitude. And 2) Create a 'survival kit' (see Survival Kits, 5/6/11).

Most of the rest of what's in these posts are skills you can learn over time: foraging (see Foraging, 1/11/11), winter tree identification (see Winter Tree ID, 1/18/11) and tracking (see Tracking, 2/9/11), studying and learning the land around you (see Learning the Land, 2/27/11) as well as learning 'primitive skills' (see Primitive Skills, 4/13/11) for wilderness survival (see Wilderness Survival, 3/11/11). The only way to learn these things is practice, practice, practice. (I said this in the posts too.) Also, some of these skill can only be practiced at certain times--I've been joking with my friend who I studied buds and winter tree identification that it's too late to practice learning the buds now--it's May and all the trees are in bloom. But winter will come around again--and it's a very good time to start practicing foraging.

Finally, there are some things we will only know when we get there. Reinventing Collapse (see Reinventing Collapse, 5/12/11) is good to read and think about, and the lessons from the collapse of the Soviet Union may prove useful to our survival if and when collapse happens here, but unfortunately we won't know anything for certain until something like that happens.

The frustrating thing about emergencies, technology failing, sudden crises, and even complete collapse is that none of it is predictable. Certainly the thing that you really want to do is try to avoid any of this happening in the first place. Still, being prepared is always useful. I hope this series helps some folks to think about preparations they could be taking--and maybe this will help if they find themselves in a crisis.

Meanwhile, I think that the best way to prepare for collapse is to live as if it has already happened. I want to think about what life would be like in a 'Post-Carbon' world--a world without oil or fossil fuels. What skills would we need to learn, not only to survive but to thrive in a very different world? The ideas and skills involved in that is another whole series that I hope to write in the future.

Quote of the Day: “We all need food, water and shelter, but the needs of a family in west Texas in July are vastly different than the needs of a family in western Massachusetts in January. You have to think about what you’re preparing for.” - Kathy Harrison

Survival Resources 12: Reinventing Collapse

2011-05-12T01:00:00.001-04:00

Of course, part of the reason I am doing this series on Survival Resources is that there is a good chance at some point in the future, the corporate-industrial, oil maintained US society will collapse. (See my posts on Collapse, 7/5/10, and Peak Everything, 7/20/08.) Being prepared for this possibility and having some idea how it might happen would certainly help increase our chances for survival.

Dmitry Orlov has a unique perspective on the question of social collapse. Having grown up in the Soviet Union (he immigrated to the US at age 12) he understands the culture and the way the society worked. He visited Russia several times in the 1980's and 1990's after the fall of the USSR. In his book, Reinventing Collapse, Orlov talks about the parallels between the collapse of one 'superpower' and the impending collapse of the other--the US. (He talks about the question of when "the second superpower shoe would be dropping".)

This is a perceptive, cynical, and often very funny book. Orlov has a dark Russian sense of humor that is usually on target. (Sample: "I have had a chance to observe quite a few companies in the US from the inside and have spotted a certain constancy in the staffing profile. At the top, there is a group of highly compensated senior lunch-eaters. ... They often hold advance degrees in disciplines such as Technical Schmoozing and Relativistic Beancounting. ... Somewhat further down the hierarchy are the people who actually do the work. They tend to have fewer social graces and communication skills, but they do know how to get the work done. ... More often than not, the senior lunch-eaters at the top are native-born Americans and, more often than not, the ones lower down are either visiting foreigners or immigrants.")

The book has a bunch of useful insights. An early one is "when faced with a collapsing economy, one should stop thinking of wealth as money. Access to actual physical resources and assets, as well as intangibles such as connections and relationships, quickly becomes much more valuable than mere cash." He backs this up with stories from his visits to Russia around 1990.

He also suggests that a nomadic lifestyle with several 'bases of operation' may be safer and more secure than one permanent location. He even suggests life on a boat, saying "there is no such thing as 'waterway rage'" and "Having a moat around you provides a remarkable amount of both privacy and security". He gives ideas about how to adapt to rapidly declining circumstances and talks about what skills and working conditions might prove useful in a collapse.

While I hardly agree with everything in the book (I know I can be critical of American society, but I think he downplays even some its more useful aspects while extolling what he sees as the Russian character--but, of course, he is Russian), nevertheless I think it is really worth reading. There are lots of books about different people's ideas about social collapse. Dmitry Orlov is reporting from experience.

Quote of the Day: "True necessities are those few items found at the base of Maslow's hierarchy: oxygen, water and food, in that order. The order is determined by seeing how long someone can stay alive when deprived of any of these: a few minutes for oxygen; a few days for water; a few weeks for food. These are followed by non-necessities such as shelter, companionship, opportunities for sexual release and meaningful activities, such as exercise, play or work. Most people can survive without these for months, perhaps years; I even know some people who have survived for their entire lifetime without work. Cars, water heaters and flush toilets are not anywhere on this list." - Dmitry Orlov

Survival Resources 11: Survival Kits

2011-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00

Almost by definition, emergencies come unexpectedly. The trick for survival in such situations is to plan ahead. A very useful tool, especially in the event of an unexpected emergency is a survival kit.

Yes, you can buy survival kits online or in stores, but you can also put one together yourself. The advantage of doing this is that not only will you save money, but you are more aware of your own needs than any manufacturer.

In a plastic bag in the library in my house, I have tossed together a bunch of things that I think would be useful in an emergency. I know where it is and I know what's in it and so I know where to go for stuff if something goes wrong.

Here is a list of what's in my kit. As I said, your kit should reflect what you think you might need--my list is only an example.

Inside my bag:
Britta filters (see my lastpost on Safe, Clean Water)
Candles (and candle holders)
Matches
A magnesium fire starting kit (in retrospect, I am not sure how useful this is)
Twine
Fishing line
A Swiss-army knife
A compass/whistle pendant

Nearby I have two oil lanterns with oil in them.

I also have a Swiss-army knife, a CPR shield, and a micro LED flashlight on the key chain that I always carry in my pocket.

Some things I would like to add to my survival kit include a small first aid kit (fortunately one of my housemates keeps first aid supplies near the kitchen) and one of those reflective 'space blankets'.

Matthew Stein has a whole chapter in his book When Technology Fails devoted to 'Supplies and Preparations'. (See When Technology Fails, 12/13/10 for more about the book.) It's a good source for figuring out what you should have in your survival kit.

Quote of the Day: "No one really knows what the future will bring. You can't plan for all possible scenarios, but a wise person plans for several of the most likely possibilities and stores at least a few basic supplies for emergencies." - Matthew Stein

Survival Resources 10: Safe, Clean Water

2011-04-28T01:00:00.001-04:00

When I was writing about 'Needs', I did a post on Water (5/10/09) where I mentioned 'the rule of three': "you can only live 3 minutes without air, you can live 3 days without water, and you can live 3 weeks without food." Recently I repeated a similar rule in my post on Wilderness Survival (Survival Resources 8, 3/11/11), "A person can go a few minutes without air, a few days without water, and a few weeks without food..." What these rules don't tell you is that if you do drink water and it's contaminated, you could be very sick for several days, or even die.

Unless you can figure out a way of capturing rainwater in a container that is absolutely clean, then the water you are drinking may well contain stuff that's really not good for you. The issue isn't so much about finding clean water; the issue is how to clean the water you have so it is safe and drinkable.

There are two ways water can be contaminated, and so there are two different ways to clean it. The first way that water can be contaminated is by water borne pathogens. There are many organisms that live in water that can cause diarrhea or worse.

A major method for treating infected water is called SODIS or solar water disinfection. This method uses clear plastic (PET or polyethylene terephthalate) bottles which are filled to three-quarters with the water in question, shaken (to aerate), and then completely filled. Water that is turbid (not clear) should be filtered until clear before doing this. The bottle should be placed at an angle on a reflective metal surface (a corrugated metal roof is ideal) for six hours on a sunny or partly cloudy day, or for two whole days if the day is mostly to completely cloudy. This method is used on a world wide basis for safe drinking water.

The second source of contaminants for water is chemical--heavy metals, organic compounds, and even the chlorine that municipalities add as a method of water purification. The question of the health hazards of chlorine is controversial. The American Chemistry Council insists that the amount added to drinking water is safe, but other sources (especially from companies that sell water filters) disagree. Wikipedia notes: "Disinfection by chlorination can be problematic, in some circumstances. Chlorine can react with naturally occurring organic compounds found in the water supply to produce compounds known as disinfection byproducts (DBPs). The most common DBPs are trihalomethanes (THMs) and haloacetic acids (HAAs). Due to the potential carcinogenicity of these compounds, drinking water regulations across the developed world require regular monitoring of the concentration of these compounds in the distribution systems of municipal water systems." The woman who taught me water and soil testing when I took RUST (see my post on RUST, 7/13/10) was adamant about the dangers of carcinogenic substances in chlorinated water.

SODIS is no help with chemical contaminations--here some type of filter is needed. The most common is some sort of 'charcoal filter'--the commonly sold Britta filters are an example--and there are many more expensive, sophisticated types out there.

The combination of using SODIS to disinfect the water and a filter to get rid of chemicals should result in safe, drinkable water. There are other methods that work as well (such as solar stills). For more information on making sure water is safe, see the chapter on Water in When Technology Fails by Matthew Stein. (I reviewed When Technology Fails on 12/13/10 at the beginning of this series.)

(I want to thank my friends at DIO Skillshare for giving me much of this information.)

Quote of the Day: "Until roughly ten years ago, no one ever considered it unsafe to drink directly from mountain streams. You could stretch out on the bank of a high mountain meadow creek and just push your face into the water to drink. ... But no longer can we ... drink even a drop before purifying it without running the risk of getting sick." - Kathleen Meyer

Survival Resources 9: Primitive Skills

2011-04-13T01:00:00.001-04:00

(For regular readers: Again, I'm sorry about the long delays between posts. I have been busy with other things--and then I got sick. I have a lot to write on--just less time to write it. I'm hoping that may change in the future but we'll see. Meanwhile the posts will be coming out s-l-o-w-l-y.)

A lot of what I have been writing about in the most recent, back-to-nature posts can be referred to as 'primitive skills'; that is, simple ways of working with nature that hunter-gatherer people and others knew, but 'modern' folks have little knowledge of.

Wikipedia claims: "Primitive skills is a term used by naturists and 'back-to-the-landers' that refers to prehistoric handicrafts and pre-industrial technology. Primitive skills are those skills that relate to living off the land, often using handcrafted tools made from naturally gathered materials. Examples of primitive skills include: gathering and foraging native plants and animals for food, skinning and preparing game, basketry and pot making, constructing shelters, fire making, and useful plant identification."

The question is where can we learn these skills that our ancestors knew so well? Unsurprisingly, a number of schools have sprung up willing to teach them. Maine Primitive Skills School (in Augusta, Maine), is a key one near me. There are also lots of internet resources for this, including Primitive Ways, Primitive Outdoor Skills (from NatureSkills.Com), and The Society of Primitive Technology. There is even a website just devoted to Links to "every Primitive Skills site on the Net".

And, of course, there are lots of useful books as well. I went looking for my copy of Tom Brown's Field Guide to Living with the Earth which I was going to review but seems to have gotten lost while I was sick, but there are a bunch of books like this. Tom Brown has several others, as does Thomas Elpel. Wilderness Survival by Mark Elbroch and Mike Pewtherer, which I reviewed in my last post has bunch of short essays on varius primitive skill.

The point is relearning these skills. And, of course, the point is to learn them and then practice, practice, practice. Slowly we may reintroduce these skills to the world.

Quote of the Day: "According to anthropologist Stanley Diamond, the average man of the hunter-gatherer-pastoral African Nama people is 'an expert hunter, a keen observer of nature, a craftsman who can make a kit bag of tools and weapons, a herder who knows the habits and needs of cattle, a direct participant in a variety of tribal rituals and ceremonies, and his is likely to be well-versed in the legends, tales, and proverbs of his people.' Diamond goes on to say, 'The average primitive... is more accomplished, in the literal sense of that term, than are most civilized individuals.'" - Chellis Glendinning

Survival Resources 8: Wilderness Survival

2011-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

Learning the Land (see my last post) as well as Tracking (see my post of 2/9/11), Winter Tree ID (see my post of 1/18/11), and Foraging (see my post of 1/11/11) all become crucial if you get stranded somewhere out in the woods or if for any reason you need to live outside for any extended period of time.

This is life stripped to its bare essentials. It takes me back to my posts on Needs (the series begins with Looking at Needs, 5/4/09, and ends with Our Needs: One Last Look, 9/19/09). Indeed, two of the books that I have been reading on surviving in the woods (Wilderness Survival by Mark Elbroch and Mike Pewtherer and Keller's Outdoor Survival Guide by William Keller) both begin with lists of what you need to survive, and for the most part these lists agree. They both say that the most important thing that you need to survive is a positive mental attitude (I will say more on this), followed by shelter, water, fire, and food. This is the order that Elbroch and Pewtherer prioritize; Keller says that: "Each may take precedence over the others in a given situation, and each requires preparation, practice, and experience to efficiently fulfill." On the other hand he also says: "A person can go a few minutes without air, a few days without water, and a few weeks without food, but if you are in an environment in which you will freeze to death in minutes, then clothing and shelter become top priority." (A fire will help, too.) Elbroch, Pewtherer, and Keller all put food as the lowest priority, but Keller also points out that changes if you have a medical condition such as diabetes or hypoglycemia.

Laurence Gonzales has written a whole book (Deep Survival) on why some people survive a disaster and others don't. His whole book is on attitude and why it makes such a difference. (Matthew Stein, in When Technology Fails, highly recommends this book claiming, "...it could save your life someday.") The first half of the book is an analysis of what goes wrong in even what seems like low-risk situations that ends in people being killed or severely injured. A lot of what Gonzales looks at is how we do things that seem irrational and why. There is a good bit of chaos and complexity theory here--why simple systems can develop complex (and unexpected behaviors) and how we are more controlled by our emotions than we want to admit. He focuses on how we behave according to the model of the world that we have built, which is fine as long as these models approximate reality. The problem is when reality shifts and our models don't.

At one point Gonzales mentions a little book he and his six year old daughter were writing that they called The Rules of Life. The first rule was, "Be Here Now". Pay attention to what is rather than what you want to see. Their second rule was "Everything takes eight times as long as it's supposed to". He points out that it is often people's desire to make things happen faster that causes fatal accidents. The real problem, as he points out, is often you can get away with these things, and that can give a false sense of security so when the system suddenly becomes more complex you aren't paying attention--and often pay the price.

Gonzales points out: "We are the domestic pets of a human zoo we call civilization. Then we go into nature, where we are least among equals with all other creatures. There we are put to the test. Most of us sleep through the test. We get in and out and never know what might have been demanded." Unfortunately, in any extended wilderness stay we do find out what can be demanded, and our survival depends on being ready.

The second half of the book, details the stories of survivors. Here it becomes apparent how important attitude is for survival. In one chapter of Gonzales' book, he talks about going through two wilderness survival courses, one in Virginia using US Air Force survival training and the other in Vermont based on 'ancient native skills'. Gonzales says, "Although they seem superficially different, I think they share important similarities." Both are about paying attention and both are about having what the Air Force officially calls 'Positive Mental Attitude'. Both teach you skills but more importantly, get you to think differently. One of the skill the Vermont school teaches is using stories to create a mental map. Walk a short way into the woods and pick a spot. Make up a story about it. Move a short distance to the next spot and figure out a story about it. Slowly, story by story, make a mental path through the woods. Even if you get lost, you can find your way back by moving back a story at a time.

The book Wilderness Survival also has two parts, but they are interwoven. Mark Elbroach's journal of an extended survival trip that he did with two other men (Mike Pewtherer is one) is interspersed with Pewtherer's detailed survival tips. These are short little essays on building shelter, making fires, purifying water, making canteens and baskets and acorn flour, and many tips on hunting and fishing (not exactly thrilling to a vegan like me).

William Keller (who wrote Outdoor Survival) is an Emergency Medical Technician and a veteran member of search-and-rescue services and the stories in his book are often about people that he needed to rescue--although he writes of his own survival stories as well. He writes about shelter, fire, and food and water, but he also has a long section on First Aid in the wilderness. He is clear that this is no substitute for taking actual first aid and CPR courses which he strongly recommends. He also includes a useful chapter on what to do if you get lost.

Of course, each of these books is clear: the best way to learn wilderness survival is to practice, practice, practice. All of the skills, but especially having the right attitude. A native of the rainforests, and, for that matter, our ancestors, knows (or knew) skills for survival that we have never been taught. Maybe it's time to learn a few of them.

Next: 'Primitive' skills.

Quote of the Day: "Most of what I discovered through... research and reporting was not new. ... The principles apply to wilderness survival, but they also apply to any stressful, demanding situation...
"It's easy to imagine that wilderness survival would involve equipment, training, and experience. It turns out that, at the moment of truth, those might be good things to have but they aren't decisive. ... The maddening thing for someone with a Western scientific turn of mind is that it's not what's in your pack that separates the quick from the dead. It's not even what's in your mind. Corny as it sounds, it's what's in your heart." - Laurence Gonzales

Survival Resources 7: Learning the Land

2011-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00

Tracking (see my post of 2/9/11), Winter Tree ID (see my post of 1/18/11), and Foraging (see my post of 1/11/11) are all about seeing what is around you, about re-learning our connections to the land in which we live. If our survival depends on the earth, we need to pay attention to it.

There's a lot that has been written about this. Starhawk's The Earth Path (see my post on One with Nature 2: The Path, 12/28/08) gives a pagan perspective on learning the land. Bioregionalism (see my post about this from 12/11/08) is another way of trying to pay attention to what is around us. There is a great quiz that was originally in Co-Evolution Quarterly and Home! A Bioregional Reader that can now be found online. There's what looks like a photocopy of the Home! version as well as an adapted Australian version available. Working through these questions will get you thinking about what is going on around you in the natural world.

I started a book on that I thought was on tracking by tracker Paul Rezendes, called The Wild Within. It really doesn't have much about tracking (he's written another book called Tracking and The Art of Seeing, that I'm sure does), but is more about paying attention to nature around you. The book begins as a journal of his explorations of the forest ecosystem but eventually becomes a spiritual book--because we, too, are part of nature (something we tend to forget, particularly those of us who live in cities).

Of course, the best way to learn the land is not from any book. Walk into the woods. Pay attention. Look around. Listen carefully. Sniff the air. Feel the bark on the trees and the breeze on your cheeks. Taste anything you forage. The best way to learn the land is to go to out and learn from it directly.

Quote of the Day: "Everything around us is always speaking. We can heal only by first learning to hear, to understand, and, in time, to respond. As we do, the world becomes richer, a more complex and vibrant place." - Starhawk

Survival Resources 6: Tracking

2011-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00

(For regular readers: Sorry about the long delay in posting. Life is busy these days--but I have lots I plan to post on. Posts just may be coming out slowly.)

Tracking is the art of identifying animal tracks. This is a useful survival skill for several reasons. If you are desperate for food, you can track animals to hunt. I know some committed vegans who are also very survival oriented that were talking about hunting rabbits if necessary to survive. A different reason is to know what might be stalking around in the woods where you are--instead of being the hunter, you might be prey for some other critter. It's good to be aware of what's around you.

I think the best reason for learning tracking is to learn about what lives in whatever area you do. I will talk more about learning the land in my next post but I do think that the more that you know about the natural world (see Survival Resources 3: Back to Nature, 1/6/11), the better your survival chances may be. In spite of the fact that a lot of eco- and agricultural literature focuses on plants, there are many nonhuman animals that we share the world with and this is a great way to begin learning about them.

I think that one of the best resources that I've found to begin learning tracking is Tom Brown Jr and Brandt Morgan's piece on Animal Tracking. It starts with what they call the ABC's of tracking--looking at families of animals and the common tracking patterns within those families. In fact, the website that I got this from is an incredibly useful resource for tracking--it's called Wildwood Tracking.

Another resource that I would recommend is Track Finder: A Guide to Mammal Tracks of Eastern North America which can be gotten from Nature Study Guild Publishers[ for $4.95 or (as I mentioned in my last post) as part of the Winter Finders Set (which I mentioned in my last post) for $12.95. They also sell Mountain State Mammals for the Rocky Mountain Region and Pacific Coast Mammals for the Pacific Coast.

Of course, the best way to learn tracking is to do it. Many state parks, adult education programs, and nature study centers offer programs on tracking (I recently attended one offered through a Boston natural areas association). Like anything else, the more you do it, the better you will get.

Quote of the Day: "It is difficult to identify an animal by a single print. A print's shape is influenced by the surface it's made on and by the animal's gait. Front and rear prints of the same animal may differ. ...
"(Remember that even human foot sizes vary!) A footprint may look different on sand than it does in loose snow. Be observant..." -Dorcas Miller

Survival Resources 5: Winter Tree ID

2011-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00

In late November, a friend and I went on an expedition to learn some foraging and other outdoor skills. She asked me how well I could identify trees. I said that was easy; I could tell a maple from an oak and...

Then I realized how I could tell the two trees apart was by their leaves--but at this point in the season, the trees didn't have any leaves. That's when she began to teach me winter tree identification.

The first thing she taught me was 'MAD Cap Horse'--this is a mnemonic to help remember which trees and shrubs have opposite leaves and branches: Maple, Ash, Dogwood, Caprifoliaceae, and Horse chestnuts. (Caprifoliaceae is a group of plants that include honeysuckle and elderberries.)

After that we began looking at buds which are pretty interesting unto themselves. Beech buds are long and pointed, maple buds often look like little three fingered mitts, oaks have clusters that are really complex looking, dogwood have buds that look like tiny sculptures of onions, and magnolia have soft, fuzzy buds.

I am just beginning learning this process, but I think it will prove useful in many ways--including how to identify tree that have an edible inner bark. (See my last post on Foraging.) But I also think this is part of recovering our basic ecological literacy.

A useful resource for learning winter skills (at least in Central and Eastern US and Canada) is the Winter Finders Set from Nature Study Guild Publishers. This includes a Winter Tree Finder, a Winter Weed Finder, and a Track Finder--all of which have a useful format to help you identify what you are looking at. (Each of these little booklets can be purchased separately.)

Quote of the Day: "Have you explored the miracle of buds? Observing eyes quickly find them, large and small, on bushes and trees in a variety of sizes, shapes, and colors. To identify buds it is important to notice their arrangement on the twig. ...
"A few inches from the tip of your twig you an discover several lines or rings close together. These growth rings were left when the bud scales of last year's terminal bud fell off. They show last year's growth or how much the twig grew in one year. Now look for the next ring further down. That marked the end of the twig two years ago. Starting at the tip of the twig, count the growth rings to get the age of the twig." - Marjorie Smith

Survival Resources 4: Foraging

2011-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

The way most people know to get food is by shopping. A step more basic, and one that certainly will help with survival, is to grow food yourself. But, even more basic than that, and more useful in a crisis, is the ability to find edible plants in the wild--or even on your own lawn.

Ironically, it turns out that many of the weeds we dig out of our gardens are not only edible, but very nutritious. Dandelions, lamb's quarters, and purslane, for example, have a higher nutrition content than many of the garden vegetables.

If food becomes scarce, knowing how to forage could be lifesaving. Other useful plants to know include burdock root, groundnuts (apparently groundnuts kept the Pilgrims alive through their first winter in North America--although I've also heard that this wasn't through foraging; they may have stolen a supply the natives had harvested), watercress, chickweed, and curled/curly dock. Cattails and bulrushes, found in swamps, have edible parts. Most seaweed (for those who live near the ocean) is also edible. A lot of unusual things are also edible--the shoots of Japanese knotweed, the leaves of linden trees, and even parts of Stinging Nettle (but be careful while harvesting!).

Some useful books on foraging (at least if you live in North America):

Roger Tory Peterson and Lee Peterson, Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants: Eastern and Central North America

Gregory Tilford, Edible and Medicinal Plants of the West

Thomas Elias and Peter Dykeman, Edible Wild Plants: A North American Field Guide

Steve Brill with Evelyn Dean, Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places

Sam Thayer, A Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting and Preparing Edible Wild Plants

and, of course, the Euell Gibbons books, starting with Stalking the Wild Asparagus

Your local library may have many of these books. I also want to single out two very local Boston area/New England books that I have found useful: Russ Cohen, Wild Plants I Have Known... and Eaten, and David Craft, Urban Foraging.

Matthew Stein, When Technology Fails (see my post, SR2: When Technology Fails, 12/13/10), has a couple of nice little sections on foraging. (It was also my source for many of the books listed above.) And Toby Hemenway, Gaia's Garden (featured in my post on Gardens, 11/19/09), has a bit of information on edible weeds.

But now it's winter, here in New England. This is a challenge--what can you forage now? A friend of mine called Russ Cohen with this question and his basic answer was, not much. His big recommendation was cattails--the sprouts near the base of the stalk are available all year round and the roots pack quite a bit of starch in them during the winter. Matthew Stein advises pine needles (which have a lot of vitamin C) and the inner bark of trees--especially aspens, birch, willows, slippery elm, tamarack, maples, spruces, pines, and hemlocks.

Okay, so here's a question. It's the middle of a snowy New England winter, and you want to find a maple to check out the inner bark. How do you know which tree is a maple?

That's what I'll look at in my next post.

Quote of the Day: "Foraging will greatly sharpen your observational skills as you begin to take note of factors that influence when and where the wild edibles can be found. You will learn to keep closer track of the seasons of the year, weather forecasts and patterns, and plants that share similar habitats. After a while, you may develop a sort of 'sixth sense' for foraging. One day, while walking a trail, you will pick up clues that an edible plant you are looking for is likely to be nearby. You'll go around a bend in the trail and, sure enough, there it is." - Russ Cohen

Survival Resources 3: Back to Nature

2011-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00

Our greatest resource for survival is the earth itself. When times get hard, when technology fails (see my post, When Technology Fails, 12/13/20), we need to look to the earth, to nature, to the land that surrounds us, for what we need to survive.

Surrounded by a 'man-made' world (buildings and streets and vehicles and 'infrastructure'--all of which is pretty fragile) we have lost contact with the ecosystem that we still (buried behind this facade) rely on for our day to day survival.

If we are going to make it through the rough times ahead, we are going to make it by learning to get what we need directly from the earth. If we are going to create 'a world that works for everyone', we are going to create it by working with nature. (This is part of what Bill Mollison and Reny Mia Slay call the basic philosophy of permaculture : "...working with, rather than against nature.")

The first step is that we need to develop a realization that the earth will provide, because the earth always does. And if the earth ever does stop providing, we won't last long no matter what we do.

All of which means that the next step is that we need to learn how nature works. We need a practical 'ecological literacy'. We need to know what the earth provides--and when and where.

My next few posts will address this.

Quote of the Day: "We need to foster a bosom friendship with land and water and air. ... I remember the telling words of Chief Luther Standing Bear of the Oglala Sioux:
We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, and winding streams with tangled growth, as 'wild'. Only to the white man was nature a 'wilderness' and only to him was the land 'infested' with 'wild' animals and 'savage' people. ... Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery." - Kathleen Meyer

Beyond Civilization

2011-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00

Now that we are into the new year, I want to head back to my Survival Resources thread, but first, I want to ask: why are we interested in surviving? As in, what are we working toward? What are we surviving for?

Beyond Civilization by Daniel Quinn is a fascinating, thought-provoking, infuriating book. I agree with the basic thrust of what the author is saying and disagree with many parts. It is definitely worth reading, particularly if you are thinking about where to go beyond this capitalist, hierarchical, industrial society. Quinn subtitles his book, 'Humanity's Next Great Adventure'.

He is particularly taken with Richard Dawkin's book, The Selfish Gene, and his idea of memes. A meme is a concept or belief which is a social/cultural building block that has a life of its own. Daniel Quinn believes that what keeps civilization going is a bunch of memes, which include "Civilization must continue at ANY cost and must not be abandoned under ANY circumstance.", "Ours is the one RIGHT way for people to live and everyone should live like us.", and "Civilization is humanity's ULTIMATE invention and can never be surpassed." To counter these, he proposes a different meme, "Something BETTER than civilization is waiting for us." (I like this--it reminds me of "Another world is possible.")

Although Quinn says clearly "There is no one right way for people to live", he also clearly advocates living tribally, saying that this is the way that human beings haved lived for millions of years and that this works better than our current 'civilization'. He claims that the Maya, the Olmec, the Hohokam, and the Anasazi all tried some version of civilization and then abandoned it. He sees tribalism as a 'social organization' which functions without hierarchy--which is something that I find very appealing. He also sees most circuses (especially the small ones) as an example of a tribal organization. His definition of a tribe is "A tribe is a coalition of people working together as equals to make a living." (I think this definition might surprise some hunter-gatherers who might not think that 'making a living' was their reason for working together--or living together.)

I like Daniel Quinn's unorthodox approach to homelessness: instead of rousting the homeless out of makeshift refuges and into 'shelters' that don't work for most of them, we should 'Let them house themselves'. (A great line: "Don't try to drive the homeless into places we find suitable. Help them survive in places they find suitable.") Quinn also sees allowing the homeless to flourish in an environment of their choosing as "the first great movement of people to that social and economic no man's land I call 'beyond civilization'."

One of the things that makes this book both easy to read and more than a bit disconcerting is the fact that it is divided into page long little sections, a lot of which gradually unfold ideas, a bit at a time and rather chaotically. But, as it unfolds, there is a lot of useful stuff in this book.

On the other hand, Daniel Quinn seems to have an antipathy for 'communes' (which is, as anyone who has read a bunch of this blog would know, a particular passion of mine). He claims that "Yes, a commune can definitely be a tribe; it's just a problematic way to begin." This is because Quinn's definition of 'a tribe' is about making a living. Using this definition he says "it will be luck rather than design if they actually have some occupational interests and skills in common." He also rejects the idea of the Amish as a tribe because "If you apply for membership, they'll be much more interested in your religious beliefs and your moral character than in your agricultural ambitions." It's not that I don't think that there can be tribal businesses such as circuses (I think that Mr. Quinn is on target there) but I don't think that's the only way to build a tribe, anymore than there's one right way to live.

Still, for those who want to build something new, 'a World that Works for Everyone', this is an important read. Now back to Survival Resources.

Quote of the Day: "Daniel Quinn teaches that no single person is going to save the world. Rather (if it's saved at all), it will be saved by millions (and ultimately billions) of us living a new way." - Daniel Quinn

Love in Action

2010-12-31T01:00:00.000-05:00

This will be sort of a wrap up post--at least for this calendar year, although I will be referring to a lot of posts that I wrote through the two and a half years of this blog.

My last post was on the importance of love (Love is the Source, 12/25/10). But in my very early post on Loving-Kindness and Social Change (6/24/08) I pointed out that love wasn't enough. You need to work as well. You need to put love to work.

Freud said, "Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness." Kahlil Gibran puts it even better, "Work is love made visible." So my question is, how do we take our love and make it work in the world?

The first, and a very important way as far as I'm concerned, to put love into action, is through forgiveness. I wrote a post on this a couple of years ago (Forgiveness, 8/7/08) where I quoted Martin Luther King as saying, "Forgiveness is not an occasional act: it is an attitude." Being forgiving and taking an attitude of forgiveness seems a very real way of making love visible.

The Buddhists have some very definite ideas about making love visible. One of these is doing a loving-kindness meditation. (I wrote about this in my posts on Spreading Love, 3/26/10, and Resources for Loving-Kindness, 3/30/10.) They also talk about the 'Brahmaviharas' (or Four Immeasurables/Boundless Virtues/Heavenly Abodes,etc). These are loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity--or as I put it in my post, The Four Gardeners (2/14/2010), simply Love, Compassion, Joy, and Serenity. I later talked about Patience, Forgiveness, Generosity, and Healing, in a post I called And Their Four Offspring (2/24/10), since I saw them proceeding from the four 'boundless virtues'. The more that we practice all of these the more that I think we can spread love in the world.

Rachel Naomi Remen (see my post on Blessings, 3/9/10, and More Blessings, 3/23/10) doesn't talk much about love, but she does talk about blessing others and serving others which I think are marvelous ways of putting love into action. The Dalai Lama uses the phrase 'to benefit others' (see Benefiting Others, 7/21/10) which I think conveys much of the same thing.

Another direct way of showing love is through physical affection--both nonsexual affection and sexual affection. (I have written about this in my posts on Love and Affection, 7/28/08, and Touch, Affection, and Sex, 6/30/09.) In fact, I think any form of closeness can show love. (Also see my post on Intimacy, 7/3/09.)

A great way of demonstrating love and creating closeness is by simply listening. I've written about it in my post on Listening to Each Other (6/7/10). I've also written about it in terms of Stephen Covey's fifth 'habit': 'Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood' (see Seek to Understand, 11/11/10) and in terms of Marshall Rosenberg's 'Nonviolent Communication' (also known as 'Compassionate Communication'--see my post on Nonviolent Communication, 11/25/10). When we really listen to each other, when we truly seek to understand another person, we are doing more than simply showing them respect. In a very real way we are loving them. (I have been studying and trying to practice Tonglen which is a very radical Tibetan Buddhist meditation where you imagine yourself taking in all the hard and awful things in the world, and send out good stuff, like love, joy, and healing. I realized a little while ago that when you can listen to another person's tales of woe--their irritations, upsets, worries, fears, and stories of maltreatment--and respond with compassion and caring, you are doing tonglen.)

Finally, as we go beyond loving each person to loving the whole world--not just the people but the animals and plants and microorganisms and the entire ecosystem--we are truly spreading love. Joanna Macy talks about seeing the 'World as Lover' (see World as Lover, 1/15/10) Yes, I believe that we can love the entire planet--and this means we need to show our love by taking good care of it. I've been thinking a lot about what I will call the great triple love: loving ourselves, loving each other, and loving the world--and in action that becomes caring for ourselves, caring for each other, and caring for the world. This is what I see as major social change, and what I see as love in action.

May you have all the love you could ever want and may you spread much love through the world in this upcoming year.

Quote of the Day: "We cannot avoid Using power,
Cannot escape the compulsion To afflict the world,
So let us, cautious in diction And mighty in contradiction,
Love powerfully." - Martin Buber

Love is the Source

2010-12-25T01:00:00.000-05:00

When I began this blog, my third post was on Loving-Kindness and Social Change (6/24/08). My very first quote in my very first post was from the Dalai Lama, "My religion is kindness." While I've been clear that this blog is about social change, I've also been clear that love, kindness, forgiveness, and compassion are at the base of any real change.

I think that love is at the core of most spirituality. Many religions acknowledge this. In the Gospel of John, Christ tells his apostles to "Love one another." In fact, in the First Letter of John, he says it outright: "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love." This goes all the way back to Leviticus in the Torah, "Love your neighbor as yourself..." Love even extends to our 'enemies'. In Matthew, Christ says to "Love your enemies" and in the Torah, in Exodus, God tells Moses, “If you come across your enemy’s ox or donkey wandering off, be sure to return it. If you see the donkey of someone who hates you fallen down under its load, do not leave it there; be sure you help them with it." (In other words, be kind and helpful even to those who hate you.)

The Qu'ran begins with the line, "In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate..." and most of the following chapters (or suras) begin with this also. In Islam, in other words, God is mercy and compassion. The Sufis are particularly taken with love. I've heard it said that to the Sufis, God is Love, Lover, and Beloved. In my post on Rumi Night, a few days ago (12/20/10) I quoted from Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, Sufi poet and mystic, "Love comes on strong, consuming herself, unabashed."

The Buddhist scriptures contain a whole piece on Loving-Kindness, the Metta Sutta, which says, "Even as a mother protects with her life, her child, her only child, so with a boundless heart, should one cherish all living beings..." In Hinduism, Bhakti Yoga is focused on love and devotion. Practitioners (according to the Bhagavad Gita) need to be "devoted to the welfare of all beings" and be someone who hates no one, "is friendly and compassionate... and... forgiving". (Chapter 12, The Way of Divine Love)

The witches I've hung around with follow the Charge of the Goddess that proclaims, "My love is poured out upon the earth..." and "...all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals." Thorn Coyle, a witch from the Reclaiming and Feri traditions says that "Love is that which uses the life force well, and for the good of all. ... It is a sharing, the underpinning of life that infuses all."

Some very radical folks also speak highly of love. Emma Goldman called love "the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy..." Che Guevara said, "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love." Malcolm X said, "...understanding creates love, love creates patience, and patience creates unity." And Martin Luther King claimed that "Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend."

It's Christmas, which seems to me a celebration of love. Whatever path you follow, may it be a path of love. I believe that love is the source, the very foundation of what we need to do in the world. Whatever you do, do it with love. Loving one another is social change.

Quote of the Day: "The success of love is in the loving - it is not in the result of loving. Of course it is natural in love to want the best for the other person, but whether it turns out that way or not does not determine the value of what we have done..." - Mother Teresa

The Darkness and the Light

2010-12-21T01:00:00.002-05:00

I have blogged about the Solstice before (see Winter Solstice, 12/21/08, and Yule, 12/20/09) as well as blogging about darkness (usually at Samhain at the start of November; see Darkness, 11/1/08, and Out of the Darkness, 11/1/09). For me this time of the year is a magical combination of darkness and light.

As un-sustainable and un-ecological as it is, I love the holiday lights and pretty much the gaudier the better. I also love candles and starlight and even bonfires, and I am very aware of how important darkness is to all of these. There is a reason we never see the stars during the day and candles at noon go unnoticed and Christmas lights look silly in daylight and even bonfire are not impressive. We need the darkness to see these lights, and it is the mixture of darkness and light that makes these so inspiring.

This year, the winter solstice was supposed to come with one of the most impressive displays of darkness and light in four hundred years: a full moon with a lunar eclipse right at solstice. Unfortunately, here in New England, we are getting a snowstorm and won't be able to appreciate it. Still the snow is beautiful in its own way and very appropriate for the solstice.

What does any of this have to do with social change? Just that this is why I do my bit towards it--so that we may all have a world where we can appreciate the seasons, and the darkness and the light.

May you have a blessed holiday season whatever you celebrate.

Quote of the Day: "This is the night of Solstice, the longest night of the year. Now darkness triumphs; and yet, gives way and changes into light. ... This is the stillness behind motion, when time itself stops; ... We are awake in the night. We turn the Wheel to bring the light. We call the sun from the womb of night." - Starhawk (Miriam Simos)

Rumi Night

2010-12-20T01:00:00.001-05:00

(There will be a break for a while in my series on Survival Resources while I publish some posts on other matters but I have a bunch more to come on it.)

I have been Sufi dancing a lot lately.

On Friday night, my local Sufi group held a Rumi Night. Apparently, December 17th, 1273, was when Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi, Sufi poet and mystic, died. Every year at this time, festivals are held in his honor.

We were asked to bring a poem of his and be prepared to recite it. I didn't recite my poem (shy person that I am) but I did memorize one, and I want to post it here:

Love Is Reckless

Love is reckless; not reason.
Reason seeks a profit.
Love comes on strong, consuming herself, unabashed.

Yet, in the midst of suffering,
Love proceeds like a millstone,
hard surfaced and straightforward.

Having died to self-interest,
she risks everything and asks for nothing.
Love gambles away every gift God bestows.

Without cause God gave us Being;
without cause, give it back again.
Gambling yourself away is beyond any religion.

Religion seeks grace and favor,
but those who gamble these away are God's favorites,
for they neither put God to the test
nor knock at the door of gain and loss.

Quote of the Day: "Come, come, whoever you are.
"Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving — it doesn't matter,
"Ours is not a caravan of despair.
"Come, even if you have broken your vow a hundred times,
"Come, come again, come." - Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi

Survival Resources 2: When Technology Fails

2010-12-13T01:00:00.000-05:00

Most people don't stop to think about how reliant we are upon technology; the computer that I'm writing this on and the internet you are reading this on are only a fraction of what we depend on day to day. In New England, whether our houses are heated by gas, oil, or electricity, there is technology behind it. Unless you organically grow all your own food, you are dependent on technology to eat. There is technology behind the water that comes out of our faucets and the toilets that get rid of our waste products. Not to mention how technological our health care system has become.

And what happens if any of that technology stops working? What happens if a disaster occurs? Are we ready to deal with any of it?

The book, When Technology Fails, by Matthew Stein, deals directly with these issues. This is a big, comprehensive (and a bit expensive) overview of what's behind technological uncertainty and ways to cope. It includes checklists, information on 'survival kits', survival strategies and survivor personalities, emergency measures, and lots of information on water, food, shelter, first aid, low-tech medicine, clothing, energy, and much, much more. Stein also talks about 'Making the Shift to Sustainability'--proactive ways of living more sustainably and thoughts of how to help our society shift in that direction. (There is a lot more about this book on its website which has some of the main points of the book, plus ideas and interviews with Matthew Stein.)

When I first skimmed this book, I thought it was a pretty superficial overview--that all the information in here could be found in more detail in other places. Now that I am actually reading it, I am amazed by the detail and careful consideration in it. Of course, there are limits to what can be fit in one book, but the author includes annotated references and resources at the end of each chapter to encourage exploration in more depth.

If you are interested, I'd suggest first checking it out of a library so you can look over it yourself. I know several libraries in my area have the book (although a few have the first addition which, I suspect, is not as comprehensive). If your local library doesn't have this book, you could suggest that they get it. After you've looked through it, you may well decide this is a book you should have--and I would recommend it because I think it would be good to have this on hand as you prepare for possible emergencies.

Quote of the Day: "Disaster prep is like car insurance. Everyone hopes that they will never get into an accident, and will never use their insurance, but they thank God they have insurance if the day comes when they get into a wreck." - Matthew Stein

Survival Resources 1: The Need

2010-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00

I wrote this summer about the notion that there was a collapse coming and, in fact, we might well be in the middle of it. (See my post, Collapse, 7/5/10.) A friend of mine is organizing a band of people who want to learn survival skills in preparation for a time when things may get worse.

I think this is a really good idea, for several reasons:

First, it's better to prepare for the worst and not have it happen, then not be prepared if something really bad does happen.

Second, these same skills may also be useful even if the bad events that happen are personal or local rather than societal. (For example, a fire or flood or earthquake.) There has been a lot of this happening within the last decade--the destruction of the World Trade Center and Hurricane Katrina being some US examples. Of course, you can argue that much of this is related to societal collapse--the increase in the number and severity of hurricanes being a function of climate change and the attack on the World Trade Center coming in response to the US interventions in the Middle East (which I would argue are related to peak oil).

Finally, many of these skills are also skills related to living simply and sustainably, and I think they will be useful even if the social collapse is slow and gentle--or if it doesn't happen and we need to take this abusive system we live in apart and create something new.

So I am going to spend the next series of posts exploring skills and resources that may be useful as we look at ways to survive no matter what happens.

A final question: What's the difference between what I am talking about and those militant survivalists holing up with years worth of supplies, waiting for the world to end? My answer: Most of those survivalists want to make sure that they survive--or maybe that their families survive. I want to see to it that as many people survive as possible--that we look at the idea of community survival rather than just individual survival. Therefore the wider these ideas are spread the better. I want to see 'a World that Works for Everyone' and I think these tools may help us get there.

Quote of the Day: "...for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive..." - Audre Lorde

Day of Mourning

2010-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00

This year I took the opportunity to attend an event that I have heard of for many years: the 'National Day of Mourning'.

I wrote last year about my ambivalence about Thanksgiving: on one hand, it's important to be grateful and thankful for all we have, and on the other hand the irony of a holiday where we are grateful for what our ancestors took through genocide and slavery. (See Giving Thanks, 11/26/09.) I mentioned the Day of Mourning that is held by the United American Indians of New England. This year I went.

It's important for white US folks to pay attention to how we ended up with the privileges that we have. When I wrote my series on US History I covered the treatment of those who were living here when the Europeans arrived. (See USH3: Finding a New World, 1/9/09, and USH5: The Nation Grows, 1/17/09.) Basically the native people helped them out and the Europeans enslaved and killed them in return.

For Thanksgiving, 1970, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts held a banquet to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims. An Aquinnah Wampanoag man named Frank James, or Wamsutta, was asked to speak. However, when they got a copy of the speech ahead of time, they 'disinvited' him, claiming "...the theme of the anniversary celebration is brotherhood and anything inflammatory would have been out of place." The inflammatory things that he pointed out included that "The Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod for four days before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors and stolen their corn and beans. Mourt's Relation describes a searching party of sixteen men. Mourt goes on to say that this party took as much of the Indians' winter provisions as they were able to carry."

On Cole's Hill in Plymouth, Massachusetts, is a plaque that explains the rest: "Since 1970, Native Americans have gathered at noon on Cole's Hill in Plymouth to commemorate a National Day of Mourning on the US Thanksgiving holiday. Many Native Americans do not celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims and other European settlers. To them, Thanksgiving Day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of their people, the theft of their lands, and the relentless assault on their culture. Participants in a National Day of Mourning honor Native ancestors and the struggles of Native peoples to survive today. It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection as well as a protest of the racism and oppression which Native Americans continue to experience."

It was an honor to be part of this remembrance. Unfortunately, most of the native people in the US today are among the poorest people in the country. They are still treated badly. We need to change that, just as we need to change the way we treat immigrants, African-Americans, poor and working class people of whatever color, etc, etc. I don't ever want to forget that there were a people living here that are still living here and they cared for the earth and still do. We need to be honoring them, and learning from them, and asking their pardon. We need to do more than just treat them better. We need to support them.

Quote of the Day: "This is a time of celebration for you - celebrating an anniversary of a beginning for the white man in America. A time of looking back, of reflection. It is with a heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People.
"... We, the Wampanoag, welcomed you, the white man, with open arms, little knowing that it was the beginning of the end; that before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoag would no longer be a free people." - Wamsutta (Frank) James

Nonviolent Communication

2010-11-25T01:00:00.000-05:00

In my last post (Seek to Understand, 11/11/10) I talked about the connection that I saw between Stephen Covey's ideas about 'Empathic Communication' and Marshall Rosenberg's 'Nonviolent Communication' (also known as 'Compassionate Communication' and 'NVC'). In some ways, Rosenberg's writings seem an expansion of Covey's 'habit' of Seek First to Understand.

There are two parts to NVC: expressing what we want honestly and 'receiving empathically'. In the book Nonviolent Communication, Rosenberg seems to reverse the order that Covey set up in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People as 'Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood'. Marshall Rosenberg begins his book by first teaching people how to communicate requests effectively. There is a chapter each on how to give clear observations, how to express feelings, how to clarify the needs, values, and desires behind the feelings, and how to make clear and reasonable requests. Only after all of this has been described does the book go on to listening. Yet Rosenberg writes, "I would recommend allowing others to fully express themselves before turning our attention to solutions or requests for relief."

I think the reason that the lessons on expressing ourselves come before paying attention to others in the book is because Rosenberg believes that it is essential that we can differentiate observations from evaluations and judgements, that we can tell what is really a feeling from an interpretation disguised as a feeling (he points out that terms like 'misunderstood', 'ignored', and 'abused' are all interpretations, whereas 'hurt', 'sad', 'irritated', and 'discouraged' are real feelings), and that we can identify the needs and beliefs behind feelings rather than putting the responsibility for our feelings on others. The need for this becomes clear as Rosenberg trains us to then listen for feelings and needs as others speak. Similar to Covey, Rosenberg suggests that we should reflect back to others by paraphrasing as well as asking questions that try to clarify the observations, feelings, needs, or requests that we hear in the communication of others.

Not that this is easy to do. I mentioned in my last post that I have become part of a group focusing on learning NVC. One of the members of our small group is a housemate of mine. Unfortunately, at our last house meeting I lost it about some trivial request another housemate was making. She was very attached to doing it one way and we started yelling at each other before I realized that it really wasn't that big a deal and I backed down. Afterwards, the housemate that I am in the group with said to me, "Don't worry, I won't report you to the NVC police." It was pretty funny, but I was also wishing that I had been able to listen to my other housemate's needs and feelings rather than get so caught up in my own stuff. Understanding all this is one thing, actually being able to do it is another.

In another real life example, I was also part of a group that fell apart rather dramatically one evening (with four group members walking out on us). I felt helpless and even think that some of what I did may have made things worse. But one woman in the group was marvelous--she stayed calm and compassionate and really seemed to be listening and being right with each person.

I asked to get together with her in the wake of the group's demise, so we could try to figure out what happened. When I pointed out to her how helpful she had been that evening she said, "I've been studying Nonviolent Communication..." When it works, it's powerful.

Quote of the Day: "I continue to be amazed by the healing power of empathy. ... What is essential is our ability to be present to what's really going on within--to the unique feelings and needs a person is experiencing in that very moment." - Marshall Rosenberg

Seek to Understand

2010-11-11T01:00:00.001-05:00

As I've been reading through Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, very slowly, trying to deeply understand each chapter, each of the habits seems to have resonated with what was going on in my life, right at that time.

Covey's first habit ('Be Proactive') came as I was trying to take control of my life and after being highly influenced by a workshop I took with 'David' (see my post on Deciding, 2/19/10, for more on this). As I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, I was reading the chapter on 'Begin with the End in Mind' (see my post, Goals, 5/4/10). Then, as I began to try to figure out how to organize my life, there was his chapter on 'Put First Things First' (which I wrote about in Priorities, 6/26/10). I talked about wanting to take a break from writing about these 'habits' but then I started a thread on this blog about how we could be in a world headed for collapse, which begin focusing on how we could benefit others, and his next chapter, on 'Think Win/Win', fit so beautifully in with this, I had to write about it (see Win/Win, 7/30/10).

Now I have taken a break, mostly because I have been struggling with the content of Covey's next habit--one that may be critical to the way I want to make my life and one that's been very hard to for me to implement. Fortunately, without any planning on my part, a small group coalesced around me and we have been focusing on 'Nonviolent Communication' (aka NVC, which I will write more on in my next post). NVC, which was developed by Marshall Rosenberg, seems a deeper, more developed version of Covey's fifth habit, which he calls, 'Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood'. The amazing back and forth of reading Covey and Rosenberg, reminds me on the way I was supported on learning Covey's first habit by my workshop with David. It's almost as if life really wants me to learn these habits and is giving me the support that I need, right as I need it. (I will talk more about this in my next post.)

Covey talks about four 'autobiographical' (as in, more related to what is going on with us than what the other person is saying) responses that we usually give others: we evaluate (do we agree with this?), we probe (asking questions that come mostly from our own frame of reference), we advise (counseling others from our own experience), or we interpret (figuring others out by how we see motives and behavior).

He also talks about the four stages of what he calls 'empathic listening': the first is just to mimic content--reflect back just what the person is saying. More advanced is to rephrase what the person is saying. Even more advanced is to reflect back the feeling from the person rather than the content. Covey's fourth, and most advanced stage, of empathic listening is to combine a paraphrase of what the person is saying with reflection of the feeling.

Stephen Covey is clear here that this just can't be a technique. You need to be serious and sincere to do this right. That's why this is the fifth habit in the book. All the character building of the first four habits are used here. You need to be real, you need to be present, you need to listen, and you need to let the other person know you are listening through giving them back both the content of what they are saying and the feeling behind it. Sometimes you won't get it right but you need to stay with the person and what they are saying until both of you are clear that you indeed understand.

Beyond this, you need to be able to then make yourself understood, but only after you have let the other person know (through empathic listening) that you have understood them. Covey cites a Greek phrase: ethos, pathos, logos. Ethos is your character, your ethics. Pathos is the emotional, empathic response. Logos is logical, rational side of the explanation. He points out that the order is very important. First, build your character, then, really understand the other person's feelings, and only after all that, apply reasoning to what you are trying to say.

All this is related to his last habit, 'Think Win/Win'. First, you have to believe it's possible. This is how to achieve it.

Quote of the Day: "'Seek first to understand' involves a very deep shift in paradigm. We typically seek first to be understood. Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. ...
"Empathic (from empathy) listening gets inside another person's frame of reference. You look out through it, you see the world the way they see the world, you understand their paradigm, you understand how they feel. ...
"Empathic listening is so powerful because it gives you accurate data to work with. Instead of projecting your own autobiography and assuming thoughts, feelings, motives and interpretation, you're dealing with the reality inside another person's head and heart." - Stephen Covey

Deserving Love

2010-11-07T01:00:00.000-04:00

Turil has a blog that I sometimes comment on, just as she sometimes comments on my blog. A little while ago she wrote a post entitled 'Why do you deserve to be loved?' She raises a lot of good points in this post: the fact that many people grow up without understanding that they deserve love and the fact that many who are bullied about their sexuality commit suicide, feeling that they are unlovable. She asked readers to respond to why we deserved to be loved.

My response was (and she asked me to clarify it) was that being loved was our birthright, that we deserve love simply for being human. For me real love is unconditional--we don't 'deserve' it any more than we 'deserve' food or air.

This isn't to say that we always get unconditional love. Unfortunately many parents, who themselves have never gotten unconditional love, put a price on their affection ('I will love you as long as you... ') or, worse yet, give the message to their children that they are unlovable.

But love is not about conditions. Love is not about being good or bad or being any particular way. Love is, as someone said, like the sun, it shines on everyone.

Love is at the core of most religions. According to one source I found on line, it says to 'love your neighbor' eight times in the bible. My favorite is where Jesus say to "love your neighbor as yourself" which, I think, clearly implies that we must love ourselves. Jesus even says to love our enemies. And the Dalai Lama claimed, "My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness." Love, kindness, and compassion are what real spirituality is about.

This is a blog about social change, and I believe that love is also at the heart of real social change. Che Guevara put it, "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." Love is what changes the world.

It is simple, as far as I'm concerned. Everyone needs love and everyone deserves love.

Quote of the Day: "Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life... Love needs no protection; it is its own protection. So long as love begets life no child is deserted, or hungry, or famished for the want of affection." - Emma Goldman

Death, Decay, and Impermanence

2010-11-01T01:00:00.000-04:00

While my spirituality has been changing recently (see my post Evolving My Spirituality, 3/5/10, for more on this), I still have a pagan soul. Each year I have written a post on Samhain (see Darkness, 11/1/08, and Out of Darkness, 11/1/09), which is one of them most important of the pagan and witch feasts.

Samhain (it's a Celtic word and actually pronounced sow-wen) is about darkness, death, and decay. Many believe that it is a time when 'the veil between the worlds is thinnest'. This is the time of the year when the leaves fall and the trees are bare, when the plants die and the earth becomes dormant.

For me this relates strongly to the Buddhist concept of 'impermanence'. (I wrote on Impermanence on 7/9/10.) Nothing is static, everything changes. We are born and we die. We suffer loss. The book that I've been reading by Pema Chödrön is entitled, When Things Fall Apart. And they do.

All this has been brought home to me lately by events in my life. I joined a group looking at how we are traumatized by this society and the group dissolved in conflict. (This brought back painful memories of how the intentional community that I enjoyed the most slowly came apart through constant conflict. See my last post on Post-Mortems.) I tried to bring some healing in the aftermath of the group dissolving and my efforts brought more anger and pain. I went to work on a community garden in a neighborhood in Boston and found everyone in mourning because a young man had been shot dead the night before, two houses away from the garden.

A couple of nights ago I attended a Samhain ritual where the leader reminded us that at anytime we are only seconds away from death and given that, what do we need to do in our little time left.

Death and impermanence are reminders that we need to treat each other well, that we need to value and cherish those around us. They may not be here that long. And we may not be here that long.

Quote of the Day: "When impermanence presents itself in our lives, we can recognize it as impermanence. We don't have to look for opportunities to do this. When your pen runs out of ink in the middle of writing an important letter, recognize it as impermanence, part of the whole cycle of life. When someone's born, recognize it as impermanence. When someone dies, recognize it as impermanence. When your car gets stolen, recognize it as impermanence. When you fall in love, recognize it as impermanence, and let that intensify the preciousness. When a relationship ends, recognize it as impermanence. There are countless examples of impermanence in our lives everyday, from the moment we wake up until we fall asleep and even while we're dreaming, all the time. This is a twenty-four-hour-a-day practice." - Pema Chödrön

Real Models 4: Post-Mortems

2010-10-29T01:00:00.001-04:00

I mentioned in my last post (Real Models 3: Other Models) that we can learn a lot from models that aren't around any longer. In this post I want to talk about four attempts at community that I have made and what I learned from each. Therefore, this post will be longer and much more personal than my usual writings.

I dreamed about community for years but my real community adventures began in 1988 when someone visiting my then housemate turned to me and said, "If you really want to build community, you should talk with R."

R was a man in the same political group that I was in and I knew him vaguely. I was not particularly impressed with him but I really wanted community and at that point would talk with anyone.

The day I got together with R, the two of us laid out the parameters (personal growth, social change, spiritual diversity) that would guide our community building together over the next twelve years.

Our first attempt at community happened the next year. There were 4 of us (myself, R, a man I'll call C, and a woman, J) rented an apartment (with space for six) and embarked on a very structured, detailed attempt at community. Community1 lasted six months--by that time J had left and another woman, V, had joined us, only to see the community fall apart just after she became part of it. Two learnings I got from this were to get the people before trying to build community, and not to try to do everything all at once, right from the beginning.

But R and C and I all wanted to try doing it again. In looking for a place to live, I ended up sharing an apartment with A, a man that I came to really like and still one of my best friends. After I moved in with A, I kept talking about the community we had built and how we wanted to do it again, and I got A intrigued. Eventually, R and C and I gathered a group of people (including A) and we began holding events and formally organized ourselves as Community2. Everyone was interested in personal growth, social change, and spirituality, and everyone was also interested in community. We got to know each other very well over the course of the next couple of years. (Unfortunately, during this time, C, who early on helped us find many of these people, became less involved with the group.) Finally, having built a network of folks and some trust among each other, R and I approached the others suggesting that we all live together.

That's when we discovered that although everyone said they wanted community, there were at least four different ideas among us about what community was. R and I saw it as us all living together rather communally. Others saw it as us living in close proximity to each other but everyone having their own space (what I will call the 'cohousing' model). At least one person thought that just doing all the events we were doing was the community--we didn't need to do anything more. (I think of this as the 'network' model--community as people involved with each other's lives through get togethers, etc.) But it seemed like the bulk of the folks responded to R and me by saying this was all new to them, they were learning so much about community from us, they weren't sure what they wanted to do, and, by the way, they thought they might be moving out to California next year.

Ironically, Community2, lasted (as a network) for over fifteen years--even though that wasn't the community R and I wanted. A real learning from this is that community evolves, often in ways that you can't predict.

Finally, as R and I were considering just having a place with the two of us, we found some folks (especially S and her family) who were really interested in what we were talking about. Five of us (myself, R, S, her then husband, G, and a woman I'll call P) spent a year planning a structured, communal community--but one that would begin simply and grow more detailed as we went along, unlike the 'do-it-all-at-once' approach of Community1.

Community3 lasted five years. Although there was a core of three of us (R, S, and I) the rest of the cast changed from year to year, eventually including A (my housemate from when Community1 collapsed). A became close with both R and S as well as me and we were hopeful he would become part of our core group. But after what I saw as a wonderful year and most of my housemates saw as a very stressful year (there was lots of conflict during the whole life of the community, but that year was particularly bad), we were left with six of us: myself, R, S, A, and S's two children. (By this time S and I were a couple.) We decided to keep it that way for a year while we regrouped and looked for some new people.

Midway through the year (after some unsuccessful attempts at finding others) R announced that he didn't want to do this any more. This was very painful (for different reasons) for S and I. We turned to A, hoping he would help us rebuild community, but he said that he had realized that he didn't want to live with that many people again. Eventually, the house (which had been a three family) reverted to three units with R having one unit, A having another, and S and I and the kids having the third. S and I had always seen our relationship as being part and parcel of community and so this wasn't what either of us wanted. (I made jokes at this time about unintentional nuclear families, but I wasn't laughing. I was as close to being depressed as I ever have been in my life.) It felt like we never had the critical mass we needed (beyond the core group of myself, S, and R) and one learning from this experience was a truism--you can't build community without people. Having looked at other communities since, I also think that while we were bothered by the ebb and flow of people during the five years of Community3, this is a normal part of most communities and while a stable core is what grounds a community, you have to expect continual change.

Eventually, S and I realized that she wanted to try living on her own with the kids and I wanted to still find community, and I moved into the first of several co-ops that I have lived in since. Co-ops are nice but they are not the communal community that I am looking for.

After life in a couple of them (and just as I was considering just moving to Twin Oaks!), I met two folks from Vermont that seemed to want community. Thus began the attempt at building Community4. These two convinced me to trust them and go with the flow and not try to plan at all--all of which ended up with me realizing (after we had bought a house together) that what they wanted wasn't what I wanted at all. Like Community1, this was a six-month disaster. I did learn that while it's not always a good idea to structure everything beforehand, it's also not a good idea not to be clear, at least about your bottom lines.

So this leaves me, once again, living in a co-op and wanting community. I am seeking others who want it as much as I do--but I am also clear about my bottomlines (unsurprising to anyone who follows this blog, I'm looking for simple, sustainable community). Recently someone who knew me through these adventures asked me if I really wanted to keep doing this and did I think I would ever find community? My answers are yes I do and, really, I don't know. I hope so, but at this point the pursuit of community needs to be worthwhile to me, because it's all I have for now.

Quote of the Day: "Community, particularly intentional community, has been a bitter experience for many people and we ignore that fact at our peril. ...
"It is painfully clear that however sincere we may be in our attempt to community ideals into practice, these efforts do not, by themselves, create that better society we are striving for. Noble intentions and community involvement do not automatically free us of the baggage that we all carry with us... This contradiction has spelled the end of countless experiments in collectivity, with some people coming to the tragic--and mistaken--conclusion that such alternatives run counter to human nature.
"...in order to make possible the fundamental changes in our all relations which alone can form the basis of viable communities, we need to continually develop our understanding of what must be changed and why, as well as our determination to live and interact differently in our daily lives.
"...integrating action and reflection is, I think, necessary for building sustainable and life-affirming communities." - Helen Forsey

Real Models 3: Other Models

2010-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00

Although I concentrated on Twin Oaks (and other FEC communities) and Gaviotas in my last two posts (9/30/10 and 10/6/10), I want to make it clear that they are far from the only models out there. In this post I want to explore a variety of other models--some of them not as close to my simple, equal, communal, and sustainable society as I might like but all of them real, interesting, and holding lots that we can learn from. To use John Michael Greer's term again, here we have more Dissensus in Action. (See my post of 9/27/10 for more on the term and a very different example of dissensus.)

To begin with, there is the Fellowship of Intentional Communities. The FIC (a much larger and more expansive organization than the FEC) tries to be open to all types of 'Intentional Communities', which it defines as "an inclusive term for ecovillages, cohousing communities, residential land trusts, communes, student co-ops, urban housing cooperatives, intentional living, alternative communities, cooperative living, and other projects where people strive together with a common vision." Their website includes a directory which list hundreds of 'ecovillages, communes, cohousing, and co-ops'. Diversity and dissensus, indeed.

Aside from the FEC communes, I'd like to single out one very different, very long term community, The Farm in Tennessee. Here is another example of a 'hippy commune' that hasn't disappeared and is in fact flourishing, with around 200 residents and a variety of organizations serving its principles of nonviolence, respect for the environment, and living lightly on the earth. It is, however, an example of a community that has evolved and gone through great changes as it evolved. It began as a very communal spiritual community under the leadership of Stephen Gaskin, who had been teaching a class in San Francisco on psychedelic experiences and world religions called the 'Monday Night Class'. Over time, and especially through rethinking and reorganization in the eighties, it became a more democratic and less communal model. It currently bills itself as an ecovillage and is involved in many service projects throughout the world.

Going from the communal to the more individual, I want to point out the Riot for Austerity as an example of a group of people who took on the goal of living (at least temporarily) at the level of 1/10th of what the average American lives on. (For more on these folks, read my post of 9/28/08, called Riot!) Another inspiration to me is man named Colin Beavan, who calls himself 'No Impact Man' and began by attempting to live in a way that would cause 'no net impact on the environment' while living in New York City. His attempt to do this with his family in tow has been made into a book and a movie.

Some of the most amazing groups, as far as I'm concerned, focusing on sustainablity are the Rhizome Collective in Austin, TX (which is in the process of undergoing some major changes) and the Radix Ecological Sustainability Center in Albany, NY, and the training they have created which is called RUST--Radical Urban Sustainability Training.[] (I've written about the Radix Center and RUST in my post entitled RUST, 7/13/10.)

A somewhat different group that also focuses on sustainability is out in Portland, OR. City Repair believes "that localization - of culture, of economy, of decision-making - is a necessary foundation of sustainability." These folks do 'intersection repair', 'de-paving', natural building, and 'placemaking'. They also hold a Village Building Convergence every year.

Another vision of what can be done is Growing Power, an urban farm and greenhouse in Milwaukee, WI that states its mission as "Inspiring communities to build sustainable food systems that are equitable and ecologically sound, creating a just world, one food-secure community at a time." It involves young people, elderly, farmers, and community folks, and has expanded to include farms in Chicago and rural Wisconsin, and is networking with farmers across the US through their Rainbow Farmers Cooperative. Boston's version of this is The Food Project, which I wrote about in my post on Feeding Ourselves in the Future, 7/24/08.

We can also learn from real models that are no longer around. Many community groups have been inspired by the utopian communites of the nineteenth century. For anyone who thinks that the hippies in the sixties were the first to build communes that practiced 'free love', some of these groups may be a revelation. Above all we should know that these models are really not new. (One of my favorite models is the Diggers from seventeenth century England.) For more on communities in the 1800s, see my post on Utopian Communities and New Religious Groups, 1/25/09.

Two experiments in sustainability from the 1970s are also models for me. The Integral Urban House was a project begun in 1974 in Berkeley, CA, that included solar power, composting toilets, a vegetable garden, chickens, rabbits, and beehives, all in an integrated system. The book, The Integral Urban House, recently republished by New Society Publishers, is a classic of eco-homesteading. At around the same time on the east coast of the US, the New Alchemy Institute was exploring "renewable energy, agriculture aquaculture, housing and landscapes." New Alchemy lasted twenty years (from 1971 to 1991) and was a major influence on many of the ideas I and other people have on sustainable living.

When I think about the utopian communities of the 1800s and the eco-experiments of the 1970s, I try to learn what worked, and what didn't, as well as why they ended. I think these 'post-mortems' can be useful before you try new experiments, and I will focus on this (on some of the living experiments that I've done) in my next post.

I know there are lots more models out there, and I am feeling pressed for time these days. But I do want to single out some Boston area (ie, local to me) models that are inspiring me. First of all there is the eco-homestead of my friends who do the DIO Skillshare. These folks live very simply and sustainably--growing most of their own food, collecting rainwater, reusing waste materials, and living with very low consumption, and they do this in an urban setting. Similarly, the JP GreenHouse crew try to also live as sustainably as they can. (I've written a bit about them in my post on Passive House, 1/24/10.) Haley House began in 1966 as an radical, spiritual attempt to help the homeless, and now has a live-in community, a soup kitchen, food pantry, low-income housing program, bakery training program, and organic farm. They model integrating service, social justice, and spirituality. And finally, the Pueblo group in Jamaica Plain models community building on a neighborhood level. I have been working with them to create a community garden from an abandoned piece of land near Egleston Square. They are encouraging relationships between people living around there and also encouraging people to buy houses in the area. They are looking into land trusts and other ways of creating community ownership.

All these groups and more are models of what can be done. Now we just need to get more people to do it.

Next: Post-mortems, what we can learn from no longer functioning alternatives.

Quote of the Day: "An appropriate symbol for the process of celebrating life, enduring limits, and resisting injustice ... is the beloved community.... The beloved community names the matrix within which life is celebrated, love is worshipped, and partial victories over injustice lay the groundwork for further acts of criticism and courageous defiance." - Sharon Welch

Real Models 2: Gaviotas

2010-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00

In 1971, a Columbian visionary made a decision. As he put it, "They always put social experiments in the easiest, most fertile places. We wanted the hardest place. We figured if we could do it here, we could do it anywhere." The place that Paolo Lugari selected was in the middle of the empty savannas east of Bogota. He recruited scientists, crafters, engineers, technicians, thinkers, inventors, artists, laborers, local peasants, and homeless street children. They built a sustainable community in this desolate prairie setting, using solar power, wind power, and very innovative technology. They called it Gaviotas after a river bird native to the region.

One of the problems that these dreamers faced as they were building Gaviotas was getting water. Brackish water was all around them but there was a water table filled with clean fresh water beneath the land--all they needed to do was pump it out. Rather than using pumps that ran on electricity or fossil fuels, the technicians invented a bunch of pumps that ran on various types of manual labor. My favorite was one that was attached to a seesaw, so that the village children would pump water as they went up and down.

More impressive than the tools the Gaviotans created is the planting work that they did. Beyond simply planting food, they planted trees, including a Caribbean pine tree that slowly took to the savanna. In ten years, they transformed grassland into the beginnings of a rainforest. Species that had nearly disappeared from Columbia began appearing in their forest. In fact the native species were crowding out the imported pines--and it seems like an amazon type jungle (and the Amazon region lies due south of Gaviotas) is slowly emerging.

All this makes the process sound easy. The process is documented in the book Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World by Alan Weisman and it was anything but easy. The Gaviotans tried many, many experiments and almost as many were failures as were successes. But they worked together, replacing hierarchy and competition with solidarity and community. The twists and turns as Gaviotas emerged remind me of the twists and turns Kat Kinkade chronicled in her books on Twin Oaks. (See my last post on Twin Oaks.)

Reading Weisman's book makes me want to be able to experiment with others and build community. Sure for every place like Twin Oaks and Gaviotas that succeeds, a dozen crash and burn. Yet, like the Gaviotans that made progress by failure after failure and keeping going, the only way to create a new future is to try new things, and when something doesn't work, try something else.

Twin Oaks and Gaviotas are each unique in their own way, and hardly blueprints for anything else. But they are models of real, thriving alternatives. The only way we will create real social change is to have the courage to follow new paths, to persist (as both Twin Oaks and Gaviotas did) even when things aren't going well, and to have a vision that will sustain us. These are real models to hold onto and be inspired by, even as we forge new and different models for our own unique situations.

Quote of the Day: "Gaviotas isn't a utopia. Utopia literally means 'no place'. ... We call Gaviotas a topia, because it's real. We've moved from fantasy to reality." - Paolo Lugari

Real Models 1:Twin Oaks

2010-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00

The Transition Initiative and all the Green Wizardry stuff I talked about in my last post (Dissensus in Action, 9/27/10), are directions and responses to things like peak oil, climate change, rampant consumerism, and various social ills. Most of the ideas for social change that I've written about fit into this category: we could or should do this or that.

A another way of looking at things is to create models of what a different world would look like. Some examples of this are the various utopian visions that are out there. (For more on fictional utopias see my posts on Why read Utopian Fiction?, 7/12/08, and An Annotated Utopia, 7/14/08. For a bit on some historical utopias, see Utopian Communities and New Religious Groups, 1/25/09.) There are lots of visions of how things could be but real life examples are harder to come by.

As far as I'm concerned, one example of how things might function in a very different way can be drawn from the various communities in the Federation of Egalitarian Communities. (For more on the FEC, see my post on Egalitarian Communities, 10/22/08.) For this post I want to focus on Twin Oaks, a community in Virginia and FEC member that was founded in 1967.

For those who make fun of the ephemeral nature of most of the hippie communes of the sixties, Twin Oaks has been around for 43 years now and is going strong. Kat Kinkade, one of the founders of Twin Oaks, chronicles the beginning of the community in her book, A Walden Two Experiment. (Yes, the inspiration for Twin Oaks was BF Skinner's fictional utopia.) In a chapter on 'The First Two Years...', she gives a month by month recitation of the events involved in establishing Twin Oaks. By her account there were several points where they almost didn't make it.

Kat Kinkade's second book on Twin Oaks, Is It Utopia Yet?, is a good overview of how Twin Oaks operates (although it's a bit dated now, since it was published in 1994). I've been to Twin Oaks a couple of times, and know other people who have as well, and it's a fascinating place. I strongly suggest that anyone interested in creating alternatives to this society read these books, not because I think we should duplicate Twin Oaks (it has become so idiosyncratic that it would be hard to duplicate) but because the process and community evolution is laid out so clearly, warts and all. Creating this type of situation isn't easy, and Kat Kinkade made that clear in the books. But reading these books inspires me because if they could do it, others could do it. And, as I said, Twin Oaks is still growing and evolving. (Unfortunately, Kat Kinkade, who was in on the founding, not only of Twin Oaks, but of the FEC, and FEC member communities, East Wind and Acorn, died in 2008.) Twin Oaks and the various other FEC member communities provide real models of how we could be doing things. None of them are utopia, but all of them are real.

Quote of the Day: "Obviously Twin Oaks isn't Paradise. ... Ordinary mortals can't create Paradise. We can, however, strive for Utopia. Never mind that we haven't quite got there yet. We're working on it." - Kat Kinkade

Dissensus in Action

2010-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

Last month I wrote a post about John Michael Greer's new project, Green Wizardry (8/26/10). I was very excited about what I saw as an attempt to spread skills and pull new people into the alternative energy/organic farming/re-skilling/post oil movement. One group that's been doing a lot of work around this in the Transition Initiative. (See my post on Transition Towns, 8/16/08.)

Therefore, I was quite surprised to find one of the founders of the Transition Initiative, Rob Hopkins, wrote a post that was quite critical of the idea of green wizardry. I found out about it because John Michael Greer (JMG from here) wrote a post in response.

The back and forth between these two is fascinating and actually underlines (as several people have noted) a concept that I have picked up from JMG: dissensus. I wrote a bit about dissensus in my post on What Gives Me Hope (12/30/08).

Briefly, dissensus (the opposite of consensus) is about having a variety of opinions, methods, and/or practices and not trying to reconcile them. I related it to the old statement of 'agreeing to disagree'. Dissensus is important when things are unclear (like what life might be like in a post oil future) because who knows what will work. (Rob Hopkins is the first to admit that he's not sure that the Transition Initiative will work.) Dissensus, in a nutshell, is diversity in action.

The Transition movement and the Green Wizards project are very different approaches to the idea we need to move beyond fossil fuels--and certainly not the only ones. Reading the posts of these two men who have thought so much about possible futures is an education unto itself, including their critiques of each others ideas. Even better is reading the comments of their readers, many of whom pointed out the importance of valuing both approaches.

If you want to expand your ideas about possibilities for the future, I can't imagine a better way than reading these two posts and all the comments. Here is a variety of ways to go--true dissensus in action.

Quote of the Day: "Clearly Transition, Green Wizardry, Low Carbon Communities, engagement in local politics, green social enterprises, etc. etc, are all approaches that might, hopefully, combine into a viable response. I agree entirely that putting 'all our eggs in one basket' would be fatal, and have always argued for Transition as one response, not THE response, not ‘the only show in town’. Heaven forbid. My sense is that this exchange has highlighted the areas where Transition and green wizardry overlap, which has been very useful." - Rob Hopkins

From the Ground Up

2010-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00

For the last thirty years of my life I have thought of myself as a radical. Liberals and reformers assume that the system has problems but can be repaired. Radicals (from Radix, root) believe that the system is beyond repair and we need to return to the roots, to start all over from the ground up.

This isn't to say that there isn't a lot of useful stuff in various reform movements--as Joanna Macy points out, one of the three intertwined strategies of the Great Turning (see my post on The Great Turning, 11/15/09) is "Actions to slow the damage to Earth and its beings". But she also talks about "A Shift in Consciousness" and "...the creation of structural alternatives". As I've pointed out here on several occasions, I see a need to build something quite different from what we have now (see Creating Social Change, 7/2/08), and to build it from the bottom up (see Social Change: My View, 6/29/10).

My vision is of intentional communities of people creating alternatives, living simply, equally, and sustainably, (see Interconnections, 10/20/08) growing food, using fewer resources, composting and creating no waste, helping each other, and healing each other. As part of this we need to find new ways of relating to each other and new ways of relating to the earth, the world, and becoming part of the world, the whole ecosystem. Just one integrated part of the whole.

These thoughts were inspired by my recent time of being sick and lying in bed reading. I have been re-reading My Name is Chellis & I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization (see One with Nature 1: Recovery, 12/26/08). I'm also continuing to read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (see my posts on Deciding, 2/19/10, Goals, 5/4/10, Priorities, 6/26/10, and Win/Win, 7/30/10) and The Rodale Book of Composting. An odd combination, you might think. And it seems that way, especially if you try to find a link between The 7 Habits and composting. But Chellis's book is that link. She talks about our need to find better relations with each other and better relations with the earth. Composting is a natural process. So is reaching out to each other and trying to communicate with each other. (I will write a post soon on the Habit I have been working on, "Seeking First to Understand" which Covey also refers to as Empathic Communication. It's probably not an accident that at the same time I am doing some growth work with a couple of other people and we are currently focusing on Marshall Rosenberg's book, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Nor that as I am working my way slowly through Pema Chodron's book, When Things Fall Apart, the section that I come to as I'm doing all this is on 'Widening the Circle of Compassion'. Her claim: "There's nothing more advanced than communication--compassionate communication." Incidently, 'compassionate communication' was an alternate name used for Marshall Rosenberg's techniques.)

I've said over and over again that everything is connected. I see all the social movements from civil rights (see USH18: Starting the Sixties, 3/10/09 and USH19: It All Breaks Loose, 3/14/09) to the transition initiatives (see Transition Towns, 10/16/08) as pointing us toward something, just as I see the work of Covey and Rosenberg and others, and ideals of the Buddhists and Sufis and Quakers and Pagans and Witches and Renewal Jews and Liberation Christians as pointing us toward something. Something new and radical, something that guides us in an alternative direction, toward a different kind of world. A blueprint, if you will, for building a new way of living. From the ground up.

Quote of the Day: "This urge to wholeness is with us still; in the face of runaway psychological dysfunctions and ecological disasters it is emerging now with perhaps more urgency and effervescence than ever. Many of the social and cultural movements of the twentieth century are expressions of it: Gandhian nonviolence, the worker's movement of the 1930's, the kibbutz, Martin Luther King, Jr., the anti-war efforts, the hippies and yippies, the women's movement, the human potential movement, back-to-the-land, natural foods, Earth Day, permaculture, bioregionalism, the men's movement, voluntary simplicity. So too is the vast arising of passion for spiritual pursuits: Tibetan Buddhism, drumming circles, wilderness quests. And then there are today's social and psychological uprisings: the call for democracy and environmental justice, ... the rising of indigenous identity and self-empowerment.
"...let us be clear, at heart these effort express an irrepressibly human desire for a return to a state that can be known to us by the documentation of history, but that most especially resides in our memory, intuition, and dreams. ... The psychological qualities we so painstakingly aim for with our therapy sessions and spiritual practices are the very qualities indigenous people have always assumed. The social attributes we struggle to attain with our social-justice movements are the very ones that defined nature-based cultures for 99 percent of our existence as human beings.
"By all accounts, we want to recover from western civilization." - Chellis Glendinning

Bicycles

2010-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00

Yes, it's been a while since I posted anything here. I've been sick for a bit, but since I'm feeling better, and have thought of a bunch more things to write about, here we go again.

This is another topic I can't believe I haven't written on long ago. Well, I did write bit about it in my post on Transportation (8/17/09, part of my series on our real needs), but I think it deserves its own post. I will try not to duplicate much of what I wrote in my Transportation post.

How is riding a bicycle part of social change? To start with, if you believe in peak oil, human powered vehicles (such as bikes) make a lot of sense. Bike riding doesn't contribute to climate change. Better yet, bicycle riding is simple as well as sustainable.

I ride very frequently: to work (in the nicer weather), to Boston to be involved in activities, to the co-op and farmer's market for shopping (in the Transportation post I mentioned my delight in living in a house where we have a bike trailer that can carry six bags of groceries), and even to my relatives, who live many miles away, but I can take a commuter train to stations relatively near their houses, and then bike the rest of the way (since bicycles are allowed on the commuter rail). I don't own a car and while I do have to pay for occasional bike repairs, I don't have to pay for: gas, insurance, parking, parking tickets, traffic citations, car repairs, maintenance, etc. I think that using a bike rather than a car probably saves me hundreds of dollars a year. Not to mention what it saves the environment.

It may save me money on doctor's bills as well. At the least, it's great exercise. And at one point I needed to go to see a specialist in a distant part of town about a question about my lungs. When she found out how far I had biked to see her, she said that she didn't think that I needed extensive tests, considering how 'athletic' I was. (Which is the first and only time I've heard that word applied to me!)

Imagine how different things would be if most people biked instead of riding in cars.

And if you think that you are too old to learn to ride a bicycle, my friend Susan McLucas runs a Bicycle Riding School which specializes in teaching adults how to ride. (She's had students as old as in their 80s and from all across the US.)

Yes, I think that bicycle riding is part of social change, if only because the automobile is so much a part of the society that we're trying to change.

Quote of the Day: "McLucas is an activist who has protested more than one war and who 11 years ago started the nonprofit Healthy Tomorrow to end the mutilation of women's genitals in Mali. Teaching people to cycle is a sort of activism, too: 'It's part of getting rid of cars,' she said, 'and making bikes rule the world.'" - Emma Brown

Going Organic

2010-09-03T01:00:00.001-04:00

With all I've written about food and growing things, it's a bit strange that I haven't written specifically about organic agriculture until now.

For some reason, growing food organically is generally perceived as a bit exotic. It's often differentiated from 'conventionally grown' produce, a name that makes it sound like using tons of pesticides and chemical fertilizer was the way things had always been grown. In fact, organic gardening is really the most basic way of growing anything, and the way that food was always grown until recently. It's probably the way that you would grow vegetables in your yard if you were just starting out. It's generally about planting seeds, watering, and occasion weeding or other simple plant care.

There are lots of problems with 'conventional agriculture'. First of all, pesticides and chemical fertilizers are made from oil. And with a future where oil might be harder to come by (see my posts on Peak Oil, 7/18/08, Peak Everything, 7/20/08, and Collapse, 7/5/10), I think organic gardening is more than just a tradition from the past; it's likely to be the wave of the future as well.

Also, pesticides are dangerous. A recent study linked pesticide exposure in mothers to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in their children. There have also been studies about the harmful effects of pesticides on children and farmworkers. In addition there is an enormous impact on the environment.

And chemical fertilizers don't help the environment either. They have been been implicated in eutrophication and can actually damage the plants if too much fertilizer is added.

While apparently there hasn't been a lot of difference found between conventional and organic produce in term of nutritional quality, there is a lot of difference in terms of its effect on the environment and farmworkers.

Occasionally there's a choice that needs to be made between buying organic food trucked in from far away and buying locally, grown non-organic food. If I really have to make a choice, I'd probably go with the local but not organic. But buying food that's local and organic is so much better. And if oil supplies get tight, we may not have much choice anyway. We might as well eat local and organic as much as we can now and prepare for how we'll be eating tomorrow.

Quote of the Day: "The foundation of the chemical agriculture and chemical fertilizer industry rests on the assumption that what a plant removes from the soil can be analyzed and replaced in chemical form. Though this would seem to be a logical assumption, it fails to take into account the complex biological processes and mechanisms through which the chemical transactions are performed, processes and mechanisms aided by finely tuned and highly specialized living organisms whose operations cannot be duplicated or even completely understood. In general, the use of synthetic fertilizers short-term rapid growth for long-term gain in structure and soundness." - Deborah Martin and Grace Gershuny

Attitude

2010-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00

I've blogged a bit on Permaculture (7/22/08) and Permaculture Principles (12/24/09). It's amazingly useful stuff.

I was recently reading Bill Mollison and Reny Mia Slay's book, Introduction to Permaculture, which begins with a chapter on 'Permaculture Principles'. The principles were all familiar to me (in one form or another) and all listed at the beginning of the chapter--except two, which are snuck in at the end. These are referred to as 'Attitudinal Principles'. The authors go on to say that the principles that they've outlined so far "...deal with the site, or the environment, or the actual design. The following are people-oriented principles, and deal with the principles of attitude." (Italics in the original.)

The first 'attitudinal principle' is "Everything Works Both Ways". According to them, "Every resource is either an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on the use made of it. ... Disadvantages can be viewed as 'problems' and we can take an energy-expensive approach to 'get rid of the problem', or we can think of everything as being a positive resource: it is up to us to work out just how we can make use of it."

If you are having trouble imagining how you might use some things, that may in itself be the problem. Their second principle is "Permaculture is Information and Imagination-Intensive". The authors say that "Permaculture is not energy- or capital-intensive... It is the quality of the thought and information we use that determines the yield, not the size or quality of the site. We are using not only our physical resources, but our ability to access information and to process it."

Of course, these principles (like much in permaculture) are not limited to agriculture or growing things. Some of this reminds me of Stephen Covey's ideas, especially 'Think Win/Win' (see my post on Win/Win, 7/30/10) and a habit I haven't really delved into yet, that he simply calls 'Synergize' (or Creative Cooperation). A lot of this is simply saying that the most useful tool we have is creativity (or what Richard Heinberg terms, 'ingenuity' and 'artistry'--see my posts on Peak Everything, 7/20/08, and Scarcity and Abundance, 8/11/10). Seeing everything as a possible solution and using our imagination and all the information we can gather, means there is a lot more possible than we may think at first. It's all in our attitude.

Quote of the Day: "Information is the most portable and flexible investment we can make in our lives; it represents the knowledge, experience, ideas, and experimentation of thousands of people before us. If we take the time to read, observe, discuss, and contemplate, we begin to think in terms of multidisciplines, and to design systems which save energy and give us yields.
"... The only limit on the number of uses of a resource possible within a system, is in the limit of the information and imagination of the designer." - Bill Mollison and Reny Mia Slay

Green Wizardry

2010-08-26T01:00:00.001-04:00

I've written about John Michael Greer a number of times, most recently in my post about Collapse, 7/5/10. His blog, The Archdruid Report has been a major influence on me and this blog. (I wrote a review of The Archdruid Report on 8/5/08 and another post on some of his ideas, entitled A Magical Way of Thinking, on 8/3/08.) He is usually up to something interesting in his blog, and I think that his current explorations are a very different, fascinating way of looking at some of the things I've been writing about. He is quite deliberately repackaging them (and I am talking about ecosystem thinking, appropriate technology from the seventies, scientific theories about matter, energy, and information, composting, mulching, and, in his latest installment, Two Agricultures, Not One, the difference between extensive farming and intensive gardening) as a training program for 'Green Wizards'.

Beginning with his 6/30/10 post Merlin's Time, Greer outlines a curriculum for modern day wizards. He admits that he wants "to have a certain amount of fun with the wizard archetype in the posts to come. Still, that’s an example of what the Renaissance alchemist Michael Maier called a lusus serius, a game played in earnest, a dead serious joke." He talks about creating a 'grimoire', a 'book of ancient and forgotten lore'. Playing with the work of horror/fantasy writer H.P. Lovecraft, who makes frequent references to a book he calls the Necronomicon, Greer proposes to call his grimoire the Gaianomicon, a book “concerning the laws of Gaia”. He suggests that his readers study it "with the same total intensity your average twelve-year-old Twilight fan lavishes on sparkly vampires." He also suggests they "obsess about the way an old-fashioned computer geek obsesses about obscure programming languages."

In some ways, I feel that he is trying to appeal to gamers and fantasy folks as well as the eco-types. And why not? We need to pull new people into the endeavor of social change, and these are bright folks who are willing to put a lot of effort into things. I hung out with the Trekkers at one point and almost got sucked into putting on a costume and pretending I was on a starship. Why not get them to use the energy they put into pretend earth saving into real earth saving? If you can devote your life to acting out space battles or magical quests, why not devote it to something that will make a real difference?

Some people may object and say that he is making light of a very serious situation, one where people are talking about the possibility of starvation and 'die-offs'. I think this is brilliant, a great way of coping with something that could be awful, without getting sunk in it. It reminds me of stories that I've heard about the Holocaust where parents who tried to flee the Nazis with their young children would try to make a game of it. "Now see how quiet you can be as we walk through here. Remember, you don't want to get caught."

I do think that the times ahead are going to be difficult and I also think a light touch may be just what we need. If the Archdruid can recruit a bunch of 'green wizards', (and he might, considering Blogger claims he has 1140 followers,) and can teach them a whole lot of practical skills under the guise of wizardry, then I am all for it. Goodness knows we are going to need all the help we can get.

Quote of the Day: "What’s needed ... is a Gaianomicon... if you will, a manual of the theory and practice of applied human ecology. Like Lovecraft’s tome, the Gaianomicon exists only in fragments, and your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to gather enough of those fragments to make a start on your education as a green wizard." - John Michael Greer

What If?

2010-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00

I have a cartoon that someone sent to a mailing list I'm on. It shows a 'Climate Summit' where the speaker is pointing out the benefits of change: "Energy independence, preserving rainforests, sustainability, green jobs, livable cities, renewables, clean water, clean air, healthy children, etc, etc" and some guy stands up and says, "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?"

This pretty much sums up the way that I feel about climate change and peak oil and all those controversial things. I mostly believe in them, but I also think that it doesn't matter whether they are right or wrong. What if climate change doesn't happen? What if peak oil is fifty or a hundred years off, or doesn't happen at all? What if we create a simple, sustainable world filled with equality and community and peak oil and climate change turn out to be myths? So what? I'm not supporting social change because I'm worried about climate change. I'm not pushing sustainability just because I think peak oil is coming. Whether peak oil happens or climate change happens, I know we need to change how we are living. As far as I am concerned, a lot of the way that we are living now is just plain wrong, and I truly believe that a better world is possible.

Of course, if we make those changes and we lessen climate change and are prepared for peak oil, so much the better. But I'm not going to worry about all the big questions of the future. I'd rather make the changes out of hope for making a better world than fear of things getting worse. I am well aware that fear will motivate some people to change, and I am okay with that. I don't care why you make the changes, I just want to see us moving in a positive direction.

I know I'm going to keep working for the world that I want to see no matter what. What motivates you to make changes? What if climate change was a myth? What if peak oil never happens? Are you still going to want to change?

Quote of the Day: "When you have your vision, that's one step; as you go through one, it'll go to the next step. And if you follow it, nothing gonna be unturned; everything will work in place." - Rachel Edna Bagby

Compost Happens!

2010-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00

For my birthday this year I taught a workshop on composting. Well, almost. It was actually my birthday (although no one but me knew it) and I was asked to give a workshop on composting but warned (because it's the summer) no one might show up. As it turned out, a few people did show up and we had an informal and meandering discussion on compost (among other things). I did have a handout which I gave out and that's the material below. Most of it has been taken from other handouts I've gotten. (I've also talked some about composting in my post about Waste, 5/25/09.)

Yard waste and food scraps make up almost a third of our household waste. Composting turns them into rich, earthy organic material that improves the soil and nurtures plants. It also stops organic stuff from going into landfills where it gives off methane, which is a lot more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide!

There are many different ways of composting, but the most important thing to know, is that it's not hard. Whatever you do, compost will happen. Organic stuff is just going to decay. There are things you can do to make it faster, and less smelly and messy, but it's going to turn into compost whatever you do.

Of course, you don't want your compost to smell bad. To make certain that it isn't going to be smelly or messy, you want to be sure that what you are composting gets plenty of fresh air, and that you mix things with a lot of nitrogen (often called 'greens' or wet stuff) with things that have a lot of carbon (often called 'browns' or dry stuff—however, some brown stuff, like manure, is actually high in nitrogen). Food scraps are high in nitrogen so it's good to mix them with dry leaves, or saw dust, or wood chips, or paper towels, or cardboard, or shredded newspaper. A good mix isn't too wet or dry, and can get some air, doesn't smell bad, and will eventually create 'humus', which is a moist brown material that looks and smells like good soil.

Two main ways of composting are using compost bins and using worm bins.

Compost bins are big outdoor bins that will take lots of materials. If you only put yard waste in it, you don't need much covering but if you add food scraps you need to make sure animals can't get in it. Because you don't want to attract animals, don't put meat, bones, and oily, fatty stuff (cheese, dairy, etc) in urban composts.

Check your compost now and then. It shouldn't smell, it should be moist (like a wrung out sponge), and it should have plenty of life in it. You may see earthworms and all sorts of bugs in your bin (don't be surprised to see pillbugs, sowbugs, springtails, or millipedes scampering around), but there is lots of microscopic life in there as well that's busy breaking things down. All this vibrant life is good! They do the actual work of creating finished compost.

Your compost is done when there aren't many bits of things and it just looks like a rich earthy dirt. If there are still bits of stuff in it (eggshells, sticks, corncobs, avocado skins, etc), you can sift it with a screen and get very fine humus.

Composts can be 'cold' or 'hot'. A cold compost takes a long time (as much as two years), requires little work (just a layer of 'greens' and a layer of 'browns'), and little or no turning. A hot compost can be done in months, maybe even weeks, depending on how much work you are willing to do (constant turning, cutting scraps up before composting, paying a lot of attention to the carbon:nitrogen ratio and the moisture level, etc.) A hot compost can get very hot—you can get temperatures of up to 150 degrees in the center, hot enough to burn your hand.

Big 'industrial' composts run very hot and can breakdown meat and bones, as well as 'compostable' plasticware and chip bags, that will not compost in your backyard compost bin.

Worm bins (also known as vermicomposting) are small, shallow bins that you can keep in your house. The worms in these bins are usually red wigglers, which are different from earthworms. (Don't dump these worms in the soil when you are done—red wigglers are actually an invasive species.) Make sure that the bin has holes (and cover with screen to keep out flies). Fill with shredded newspaper, moisten and fluff. Add worms. Feed them food scraps (vegetable and fruit scraps—no meat or dairy—and they also don't like onions, garlic, peppers, citrus fruits, avocado or eggplant skins, spicy foods, or anything fermented or moldy). These worms like a temperature between 40 and 80 degrees and their 'bedding' should be kept slightly damp. When everything looks like compost, harvest the 'worm castings', put in fresh newspaper strips and food scraps and start over.

You can put your finished compost on top of the soil around your plants and let the nutrients wash down, or you can mix it with regular soil before you plant. Either way your plants will thrive on the rich soil that the compost will create.

Happy composting!

Quote of the Day: "I hesitate to use 'home vermiculture system' exclusively because the term itself might frighten away some who would feel more comfortable with 'worm bin'. It sounds a lot less intimidating to just build a wooden box with holes in the bottom, add moistened bedding and worms, bury garbage, harvest worms, and set up bedding as necessary." - Mary Appelhof

Cleaning

2010-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

I've spent much of the day cleaning the house and I still have a bunch of cleaning to do. I really like cleaning.

What does this have to do with social change, spirituality, personal growth, permaculture, or peak oil?

A friend just read me a passage from Jack Kornfield's book, After The Ecstacy, The Laundry. While I appreciated what she read me, I also appreciated the title of the book. I remember a Doonesbury comic from many years back (probably the seventies) where one of the characters in the collective was asked to do the dishes and she muttered something about "After the revolution..." The other character replied, "After the revolution, the dishes will still need to be done." (Or something like that; it's been a long time.)

Come peak experiences or peak oil, when it's over, even when the Transformation or The Great Turning happens, we will still need to do the dishes and the laundry, and we will still need to clean.

And there is something very satisfying about cleaning. Unlike the messiness of personal or social change, you can see progress as you clean. You make the world a little better and you can see it as you do it. Too often, while working with changing people or society, it feels like nothing will ever change. Maybe then it's time to do a little cleaning, where you can see what you have accomplished.

Quote of the Day: "I long to accomplish a great and noble tasks, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker." - Helen Keller

Scarcity and Abundance

2010-08-11T01:00:00.000-04:00

In my last post (Win/Win), I wrote about needing an Abundance Mentality and quoted Stephen Covey on the difference between 'the Scarcity Mentality' and 'the Abundance Mentality'. Yet I was aware as I wrote it that six posts earlier I wrote about impending collapse. (See Collapse, 7/5/10, for more on this.) How can I talk about having an Abundance Mentality when I've just said that affluence is over, we've passed not only 'peak oil' but 'peak everything' (for more on this, see my posts on Peak Oil, 7/18/08, and Peak Everything, 7/20/08), and the economy is slowly collapsing?

I think that the big question is what kind of 'abundance' and what kind of 'scarcity' are we talking about? In my post on Peak Everything I mentioned that Richard Heinberg sees declines in not only oil, and coal, and uranium, but "population, grain production, arable land, wild fish harvests, fresh water, climate stability, and yearly extraction of copper, zinc, platinum, silver, and gold". But he also points out that there are things that aren't going to peak, such as "community, cooperation, ingenuity, artistry, ... intergenerational solidarity, personal autonomy, leisure time, happiness..." In fact, some of these things may increase, if having less material goods means we decide spend less time trying to accumulate stuff and social status, and more time building relationships. What I referred to as 'the Four Gardeners of the Great Turning' (Love, Compassion, Joy, and Serenity) and 'Their Four Offspring' (Patience, Forgiveness, Generosity, and Healing) will not be affected by peak oil, climate change, or economic crisis. (See my posts The Four Gardeners, 2/14/10, and And Their Four Offspring, 2/24/10.) An Abundance Mentality sees all these things as overflowing.

And why not? In some ways these are more important than many material things and we really won't run out of them.

This is not to say that there aren't material things that we do need. I spent months last year trying to enumerate our real needs. (See my series of posts on Needs, beginning with Looking at Needs, 5/4/09, and ending with Our Needs: One Last Look, 9/19/09.) Take food for example. Many writers see food shortages coming as the oil that fuels our transportation system (not to mention the fertilizers, pesticides, and tractors many farmers use to grow the food) begins getting more and more expensive. Yet we could prioritize growing food and there are lots of possible ways we could make sure everyone gets fed. (See for example my posts on Feeding Ourselves in the Future, 7/24/08, Food (Soil and Seeds), 5/13/09, and Biointensive, 2/10/10.)

Gandhi claimed that, “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed.” And this may be the real point. Having an Abundance Mentality isn't the same as trying to get more, more, more. Having an Abundance Mentality is really more about being satisfied with what we have and what we really need, and working to make sure that everybody gets what they need. Love isn't going to run out--in fact, as Malvina Reynolds puts it: "Love is something if you give it away, You end up having more." And we can have an abundance of material things as well, if we make our needs few and we are willing to share. And much of what is going to become scarce is things we don't really need anyway: McMansions, SUVs, giant screen TVs and home entertainment centers, etc.

I think that cultivating an Abundance Mentality begins when you realize what real abundance is.

Quote of the Day: "Our terrible affluence is at the root of your current crisis. Somehow most people in the rich world have gotten the impression that we're not here to care about others or do good work but to get 'ahead' and accumulate stuff. Most of our energy use goes to make us a bit more comfortable, not to meet essential needs. Perhaps the most important work we can do is to distinguish between wants and needs, and to find something besides consumption to value and put at the center of our lives. My suggestion is that we put our hope for the future there, and begin to live our lives as though we hold the world--and our particular piece of it--in trust for future generations." - Sharon Astyk

Win/Win

2010-07-30T01:00:00.002-04:00

After my last three posts on Stephen Covey's 7 Habits (see Deciding, 2/19/10, Goals, 5/4/10, and Priorities, 6/26/10), I decided that I would wait a while before writing another post on the books. But as I've been writing this latest series of posts (starting with Social Change: My View, 6/29/10, and going through Benefiting Others, 7/21/10), I could see a direction emerging and realized that Steven Covey's fourth habit (the next one in the series) fits in very well at this point. He entitles this habit 'Think Win/Win'.

Covey sees his first three habits as basic to personal change and collectively groups them in a section he calls "Private Victory". His fourth habit marks his movement toward habits that he sees as affecting what we do in the world and so this is the first habit he puts in the section he calls "Public Victory".

Stephen Covey claims that there are six 'paradigms of human interaction': Win/Win, Win/Lose, Lose/Win, Lose/Lose, Win, and Win/Win or No Deal. Most of us are familiar with Win/Lose--it's the competitive mentality that is prevalent in this society. Lose/Win is the converse, the 'I give up, you win' mentality, what Covey refers to as 'please or appease'. Lose/Lose is worse--it's the 'if I can't win, you can't either' mentality of embittered revenge. 'Win' is the mentality of the driven person who doesn't care if you lose or win as long as they win--this is also the disaster mentality where someone can only focus on saving themselves and their family.

Win/Win is the cooperative, community vision which assumes that the best possible outcome is one in which everyone wins. This is very closely related to a couple of the principles that I talked about when I started this blog, that we are all selfish and we are all connected (see Two Basic Principles, 6/30/08). Win/Win sees this and sees that, since we are connected, we win as others win. In a very real sense, we can only win when everyone wins.

This 'habit' is based strongly on Covey's first three habits. You need to be proactive and focused in order to be able to keep the promises and commitments you need to do in order to practice Win/Win. Covey claims you need integrity and maturity to be able to 'Think Win/Win'. He defines maturity as "the balance between courage and consideration". Someone with a lot of courage but little consideration probably thinks 'Win/Lose', just as someone with a lot of consideration but little courage probably thinks 'Lose/Win'. Covey believes the 'Lose/Lose' people have neither courage or consideration. In order to practice Win/Win, you need to be able to 'empathically understand' and also be willing to 'courageously confront.' Covey also claims that you need to have an 'Abundance Mentality' to really do Win/Win well. (I plan on writing more on the Abundance Mentality in my next post.)

There's one paradigm that I mentioned above that I haven't covered, and that's what Covey calls 'Win/Win or No Deal'. This lets you have a fall back in case you can't reach an agreement with someone. It means either you come up with a solution or agreement where everyone wins, or you agree to disagree and just go your separate ways. While this isn't always possible, sometimes it makes a difficult situation easier. When it just isn't possible to get Win/Win, this is much better than moving to Win/Lose or Lose/Win.

The most important thing about Win/Win is that it's all about relationships. It's all about building trust. It's all about seeing the possibility of everyone winning. And, yes, it's about benefiting others--and benefiting yourself as part of this. If you see us as all connected, I think that it's the only way to go.

Quote of the Day: "Most people are deeply scripted in what I call the Scarcity Mentality. They see life as having only so much, as if there were only one pie out there. And if someone were to get a bigger piece of the pie, it would mean less for everyone else...
"The Abundance Mentality takes the personal joy, satisfaction, and fulfillment of Habits 1, 2, and 3 and turns it outward, appreciating the uniqueness, the inner direction, the proactive nature of others. It recognizes the unlimited possibilities for positive interactive growth and development, creating new Third Alternatives.
"Public Victory does not mean victory over other people. It means success in effective interaction that brings mutually beneficial results to everyone involved. Public Victory means working together, communicating together, making things happen together that even the same people couldn't make happen by working independently..." - Stephen Covey

We Interrupt This Blog

2010-07-24T01:00:00.002-04:00

This has little to do (at least directly) with the themes that I have been writing about--but I just want to share this.

There's a young woman that I helped raise when I lived in an intentional community years ago (and still have a good relationship with).

Corina just turned twenty last week. I sent her a birthday card and she gave me a call to say thank you. What she didn't tell me is that she had been arrested a couple of days before that.

Corina lives in Oakland, California. On New Year's Day this year, a young black man was being held down by a transit police officer--face down--at a BART station in Oakland. Another police officer pulled out his gun and shot and killed the man being held down. All this was recorded clearly by bystanders.

The trial was held in Los Angeles, 300 miles away, and the officer was convicted by a jury that was composed of seven white and five Latino jurors--no African-Americans were on the jury and supposedly four of the jurors were reported to have police officers among their friends and family. The officer received a sentence of 'involuntary manslaughter' for shooting this young man in the back. Some commentators said they were surprised he was convicted at all.

Needless to say, the community of Oakland was not pleased. There was a protest that night that included a bit of looting and destruction. The Oakland police response was to have hundreds of officers (including police from towns as far as an hour away) out in full riot gear.

This is the scene Corina walked into. Her story is that she saw the police assaulting an older woman. A young man nearby linked arms with the woman and my young friend linked arms with him. The police arrested all of them. She spent the night in jail. Seventy-eight people were arrested. Her crime was apparently "unlawful assembly and failure to disperse." (Corina wrote me, "...I don't know if I was in the right place or the wrong place but man the cops sure were in the wrong place. They seemed to be focusing on arresting a lot more peaceful protestors than looters and people who were actually acting dangerously.")

A blog on the Oakland Tribune site has over a hundred pictures from the protests. One of them shows an older woman with her arm linked to a long-haired young man who in turn has arms linked to a young woman (yes, Corina) who has linked her arms to another young man. In back of them are rows of police in riot gear. As her mother put it, "...she looks strong and powerful..." She certainly looks determined in that picture.

There seems something so right that she would do that. Her mother is very proud of her. I am too. She saw injustice and she stepped in. She was arrested for that.

Welcome to adulthood, Corina. It's a pretty messed up world.

Quote of the Day: "...I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength.
"...My silence had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you." - Audre Lorde

Benefiting Others

2010-07-21T01:00:00.002-04:00

Continuing on from my last post (Responses), the question is, who are we interested in benefiting? Simply ourselves (or ourselves and our family), or do we want to widen this? I've seen sociologists who suggest that conservatives are extremely loyal to their group--they would want to benefit them, but not others outside their group. How wide do we want to be working for?

It's important when we look at benefiting others, that this is not seen as versus benefiting ourselves. We need to take care of ourselves as well. Rachel Naomi Remen, in her book My Grandfather's Blessings (see my posts on Blessings, 3/9/10, and More Blessings, 3/23/10), points out that the airlines announce, when they demonstrate the low-pressure face masks, "Put your own mask on first before you try to help the person next to you." She claims that, "Service is based on the premise that all life is worthy of our support and commitment." All life includes ourselves.

We need to take care of ourselves in order to take care of others. In fact, this is how we grow in interdependence--from only taking care of ourselves, to taking care of others as a way of taking care of ourselves, to taking care of ourselves in order to help others.

In one of my earliest posts (Two Basic Principles, 6/30/08) I talked about the twin ideas that everyone is basically selfish and that we are all connected. Therefore, in taking care of others we are taking care of ourselves. In benefiting others, we are benefiting ourselves. And, as I just said, in taking care of ourselves, we help care for others. This is what it means to be interconnected. This is want it means to be interdependent. This also changes our notion of what 'self' means.

In my post on Impermanence (7/9/10), I mentioned the Buddhist 'Three Marks of Existence', one of which I called 'lack of a separate self.' Traditionally this has been called no-self or egolessness. But it is hard to talk about 'myself' without a self--or others as well. They certainly exist, as I do exist. Joanna Macy helped clarify this for me in her books on Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory (see my post on Mutual Causality, 12/18/09) and World as Lover, World as Self (see my post on World as Lover, 1/15/10), where she points out how the self always exists in relationship to others. (And she is not the only Buddhist teacher that I've heard refer to this as there being no separate self.) It's not that there is no self, it's that there is no self apart from others. We are always interconnected. This isn't about the idea that there is no individuality; this is about the idea that there could be separation, isolation, removal, the strange idea that we could exist without others and without the natural world.

So, how wide do we want to open ourselves up? We are blessed to be alive. Do we want to share those blessing with others? With just our family? With just our group? With strangers? With those we dislike or find difficult? With everyone possible? This is about compassion as well as social change, or rather compassion as social change. This is about realizing that we are all in this together.

Quote of the Day: "Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to have woken up, I am alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it, I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others, to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings, I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry or think badly about others, I am going to benefit others as much as I can." - H.H. the XIV Dalai Lama

Responses

2010-07-17T01:00:00.002-04:00

If you connect the threads of the last three posts, I think it's clear that there are changes, challenges, and problems ahead, and that there are also tools (like the ones I learned at RUST and stuff from permaculture, etc) to deal with these changes and challenges. The question I'd like to address in this post is what is the scope of how we deal with this?

I think there are two possible responses to peak oil, climate change, economic collapse, etc. The first is to use the appropriate tools to make sure that you survive and perhaps even thrive. Sometimes this gets extended out to insure the survival of your family, those you love. The second response is to use those tools to make sure that the community, and even better everyone, or at least everyone possible, survives.

Individualist survivalists abound. If all you are interested in is protecting yourself, or yourself and your family, then there are lots of companies that will sell you the equipment, and lots of websites with information and plans.

But if your goal is general survival, community survival, the survival of everyone, while some of the tools are similar, the tactics are different. We need to reach out to one another, educate one another, and listen to one another.

There are folks that support a community survival approach. RUST (who I blogged about in my last post) is one. The Transition Initiative (see my post on Transition Towns, 10/16/08, for more on this) is another. The permaculture folks really get this (see my posts on Permaculture, 7/22/08, and Permaculture Principles, 12/24/09). It's not an accident that both RUST and the Transition Initiative came from folks trained in permaculture. And Joanna Macy's Great Turning (see my posts on The Great Turning, 11/15/09, and Social Change: My View, 6/29/10, for more on this) supports the idea of us working together to deal with the changes and to create positive change.

Working for community survival is a lot more challenging than making sure that you and your family survive, but it's the only way to create '... a world that works for everyone.'

Quote of the Day: "Community is not a simple solution to the world's problems; we know that simple solutions don't exist in any case. What it may be, though, is humanity's next evolutionary step, giving us the opportunity and the challenge of reconnecting with each other and with our environment, in recognition of what native people refer to as 'all our relations.'" - Helen Forsey

RUST

2010-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00

This past weekend I took the Radical Urban Sustainability Training (also known as RUST) offered at the Radix Ecological Sustainability Center in Albany, New York, by Scott Kellogg, Stacy Pettigrew, and Juniper Lauren Ross. It was an amazing educational experience, almost too much to take in during one weekend.

We looked at food systems, including 'urban agro-forestry' where I learned about fruits and nuts I'd never heard of that Scott said would grow in the northeast US: pawpaws, hardy kiwi, gooseberries, and hazelberts; 'aquaculture'; and urban chickens and goats; water systems, including an overview of global fresh water issues; rainwater harvesting; and greywater and constructed wetlands; and waste treatment issues, including 'humanure' and composting toilets; bioremediation by low-tech methods using plants, compost, compost tea, etc; and several types of composting, including cold composting, hot composting, worm composting, and using soldier flies. I took miniworkshops on testing water and soil, and alternative sources of power, including wind turbines, passive solar, rocket stoves, and biofuels. A man named Travis also came by to discuss gentrification with us, and offered some useful insights.

As I said, a bit much. I am going to be digesting all that I learned for a while. I'm hoping to get to use some of what I learned over the next little while as well. Still, I think that I might take the Training again--there's an unbelievable amount of information in it.

The next training is going to be the weekend of October 2nd & 3rd. That's too soon for me, but I'd recommend it--especially if you read the Toolbox for Sustainable City Living book first. Then you might have some sense of what all the stuff that is thrown at you is all about.

Quote of the Day: "We need to build a society ... that can meet human needs while simultaneously increasing ecosystem health." - Scott Kellogg

Impermanence

2010-07-09T01:00:00.003-04:00

There is a basic Buddhist teaching that all things have three characteristics (known as the Three Marks of Existence). These are impermanence, dissatisfaction, and lack of a separate self.

Impermanence is the easiest of the three to demonstrate, but one of the hardest to come to grips with. We find impermanence and change everywhere around us. Pema Chödrön, who I have been reading and has been a great influence on me, points out that "People have no respect for impermanence. We take no delight in it; in fact we despair of it. We regard it as pain. We try to resist it by making things that will last--forever, we say--things that we don't have to wash, things that we don't have to iron. Somehow, in the process of denying that things are always changing, we lose our sense of the sacredness of life. We tend to forget that we are part of the natural scheme of things."

Of course, the alternative is to embrace impermanence, to embrace change. Yep, go with the flow. People talk about doing it all the time, but it ain't easy. But what if we could? Pema's suggestion: "Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, ... not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time..." Imagine that. Relaxing with impermanence. Relaxing with change. Relaxing with chaos. (I almost entitled this post 'Relaxing with chaos.') Learning to be fine with the fact that there is nothing permanent and everything is changing all around us. (I keep hearing the Jefferson Airplane lyric, taken from science fiction author John Wyndham, "Life is change, How it differs from the rocks...") The question is, can we relax with chaos, impermanence, and change? It's going to be there anyway. The only thing in question is our response.

I see this post as a continuation of my last post, on 'Collapse'. I'll let you connect the dots.

Quote of the Day: "Impermanence is the goodness of reality. Just as the four seasons are in continual flux, winter changing to spring to summer to autumn; just as day becomes night, light becoming dark becoming light again--in the same way, everything is constantly evolving. Impermanence is the essence of everything. It is babies becoming children, then teenager, then adults, then old people, and somewhere along the way dropping dead. ...
"Impermanence is a principle of harmony. When we don't struggle against it, we are in harmony with reality. Many cultures celebrate this connectedness. There are ceremonies marking all the transitions of life from birth to death, as well as meetings and partings, going into battle, losing the battle, and winning the battle. We too could acknowledge, respect, and celebrate impermanence." - Pema Chödrön

Collapse

2010-07-05T01:00:00.001-04:00

In my last post I mentioned the possibility that the system--and, in fact, this society--might collapse on its own. It's not just peak oil theory that leads me to suspect this.

In fact, I am coming to believe that the collapse is already happening and you can see it if you pay attention. Part of the problem is that people think that collapse is going to be a sudden, dramatic event. I have been appreciating the viewpoint of John Michael Greer, author of the book, The Long Descent, and writer of The Archdruid Report. (For more on The Archdruid Report, see my post of 8/5/08.) He claims that there is a collapse coming, but it won't be the sudden, dramatic collapse that some of the 'doomers' predict. Instead, it will be slow and gradual, punctuated by sudden events, but mostly apparent only in hindsight.

Having done a long review of American History in this blog last year, I can see ways in which we are already into the collapse. I'm an old guy. I remember the fifties and sixties and they were quite different from life now. Not a golden age, but one with a very different economic reality. People seldom worried about their jobs disappearing, corporations, by and large, took care of their workers, and prosperity seemed to be increasing for everyone. Oh, there was a lot wrong with this time, which is why the rebellions of the sixties and seventies were so dramatic (see my posts, It All Breaks Loose, 3/14/08, and Social Movements in the Seventies, 3/30/08, for more on this), but something changed in the seventies. Nevermind peak oil, I think that the fifties and sixties were our 'Peak Economy'--a time of general affluence that we will never see again. The change is so clear it can be pinpointed to a particular year. (See my posts on 1973, 3/22/09, and Economic History of the 20th Century, 4/19/09.)

My series on US History began with a question: how did the sixties end up with the eighties? The answers, of course, are found in the seventies. I think that it's interesting that I've been to a bunch of conferences on energy, the environment, etc, where people will propose something and an old dude will get up and point out that whatever it is, it was done in the seventies. The question then arises, what would things be like if we continued doing those things, instead of stopping them in the eighties and trying to reinvent them now? The short answer seems to be that we wouldn't be in the unprepared mess we are now.

None of this stuff really disappeared totally in the eighties, but most of it (systems theory, alternative energy, conservation, intentional communities, creative shelter, etc) got scaled way back. Some of it was 'the Reagan Revolution' and corporate/Republican destruction of anything that threatened them. Some of it was the hubris of the designers. (See my post on Hubris, 12/30/09.) But I think that a big part of it was that people did not want to hear anything about needing to do with less. President Carter told the American public that they needed to turn down their heat and begin car-pooling and using public transit. Energy usage certainly went down, but Carter lost to Reagan by 91% of the vote. (See my post on The Rest of the Seventies, 3/29/09.) Telling the public to do with less has been political poison since then.

It's not that we could have the affluence we had in the fifties and sixties, only with solar and wind power (something that some folks in the alternative energy community seem to claim--see my post on Bright Green, Dark Green, Deep Green, 11/10/09, for a bit on the 'Bright Green' folks who seem to believe that the right technology will save us). Rather, I think that if we learned from the seventies, we would be better able to deal with the changes that are going on now.

For those who don't believe we are well past 'Peak Economy' and may point out the affluent periods of the eighties and nineties, I ask that you notice that those who prospered were a small segment of the population--quite unlike the general prosperity of the fifties and sixties. There were 'economic bubbles' then and there may yet be a few economic bubbles in the future that a few folks can take advantage of for a while, but like any other bubbles, they're temporary, and eventually burst. What we saw in the last years of the Bush administration and are still seeing today, is a result of some of those bubbles bursting. While I'm not a big fan of Obama, I doubt that anyone could do a lot better with this economy.

And for those who might say, how could a collapse be going on and be unnoticed, I say, look around. We are currently involved in two wars in the Middle East (one of them the longest war in US history) and experiencing one of the greatest ecological disasters the US has ever experienced, and life goes on as if nothing is happening. Sure there are some things that make people take notice (the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001 and the economic woes of the last decade--especially the collapse of the housing market, to cite a couple of examples). I'm sure there will be more in the future. But, by and large, the collapse that is occurring will only be noticed by comparing the past with the present and realizing that there will be less in the future. This doesn't necessarily need to be a bad thing. Certainly, we don't really need much of what will be disappearing. But we need to be ready (as I pointed out in my last post) to replace it.

Change happens.

Quote of the Day: "This is the way civilizations decline and fall. ...

"Nearly all of our ancestors lived in times when there was no bright future on the horizon; nearly all of our descendants will experience the same thing. The great majority of the former and, no doubt, of the latter as well, found other reasons for living. That’s an equally viable option right now, given a willingness to think the unthinkable, recognize that the age of abundance is ending, and consider the possibility that doing the right thing in a time of crisis, no matter how uncomfortable or challenging the right thing might be, may be a more potent source of meaning than waiting for magic to make a bright future arrive." - John Michael Greer

Social Change: My View

2010-06-29T01:00:00.001-04:00

My blog contains the title 'Social Alchemy' as a metaphor for transformation and social change. (See my post on Bodhisattva Revolutionaries and Social Alchemists, 6/22/08, for more on this.) If you've started reading this blog recently, you can be forgiven for wondering what I mean by social change. This year, just in the posts labeled 'Social Change', I've written about listening to people, having empathy for conservatives, gardening, healing, personal growth, spirituality, prisoner's dilemma, values, weatherization barnraisings, and complexity theory--and some things that are just hard to categorize. So what does this all have to do with social change?

Long term readers, please forgive me. (Or maybe you'll appreciate the recap.) Here is a lot of what I think about social change with references to some posts that say more.

My view of social change is based on two things: change needs to happen from the bottom up, not the top down, and the three things you need to create social change are analysis, vision, and strategy.

Top down social change has been tried--again and again. It results in dictatorships and doesn't accomplish the type of change I am advocating, that is '...a world that works for everyone.' Systems theory and complexity theory support this. (See my posts on Systems, 12/14/09, Original Virtue, 9/14/08, Catalysts and Network Weavers, 8/31/08, Clustering and Coping, 8/13/08, and Complexity Theory, 7/16/08.)

I talk about analysis, vision, and strategy in my very early post on Creating Social Change. (7/2/08) Basically I think that there is a lot of good analysis around (the bulk of which supports the idea that things are a mess) and a lot of pretty good visions. (Among other things, you can check out my two posts on utopian fiction, 7/12/08 and 7/14/08.) The problem area is in strategy--how do we get from here to there?

In my post on Creating Social Change I mention the slogan, "Agitate, educate, organize." I pointed out that while the left has been pretty good at agitating (and lately the right--in groups such as the Tea Party--has been picking up on its tactics), we have not been very good at educating or organizing.

If top-down change doesn't work, tearing down the system and expecting that something better will spontaneously emerge works even less well. (Just as some socialists still think we can create positive change if the right people got in power, some anarchist still believe that if we just 'smashed the state', a better society would appear.) I sometimes think of Alexander Berkman who thought that shooting corporate heavy, Henry Clay Frick, would inspire the workers to revolt. What actually happened was the workers beat Berkman senseless. (See my post on Robber Barons and the Gilded Age--1/29/09--for that story.) I believe that if alternative structures aren't in place, whether we tear down the system or it collapses on its own (see my posts on Peak Oil, 7/18/08, and Peak Everything, 7/20/08, for more on this possibility), people will try to replicate what they know, what we are conditioned to believe, and we will end up with more of the same, if not worse. (I like this quote from Audre Lorde: "For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures.")

Therefore, I think the most important work in social change is to organize and create alternatives and to educate people about them.

When I learned about Joanna Macy's vision of The Great Turning (11/15/09), I was interested in her 'Three Dimensions' of social change: Actions to slow the damage to the Earth and its beings, Analysis of structural causes and the creation of structural alternatives, and Shift in Consciousness. I immediately related these to agitating, organizing, and educating.

I do think that 'holding actions' (agitating, trying to slow the damage) are important and I want to support anyone doing them. But they are just not enough. We need to create and organize structural alternatives, and educate people, in order to create a shift in consciousness. We need to have structures in place (as well as a good deal of education done) before things really fall apart, if we want to have any hope of positive social change.

I've written in detail on my vision of the world I want to see and how I think we can get there. (See my posts from 9/22/08 to 12/19/08, also collected in my zine, Bodhisattva Revolutionaries and Social Alchemists, Volume Two, 'What I Believe'. Volume One, 'Some Theory' contains the early posts that talk about what I've learned about social change, complexity theory, peak oil, etc.) In addition, I have written a long sequence of posts (5/4/09 to 9/19/09) on what I think our real needs are and how to meet them. (I hope someday to collect these in a zine as well, if I ever get the time.) I think that meeting our real needs is social change, it is creating a world that works for everyone.

I've mentioned wanting to write a whole series on education, on what might accomplish a shift in consciousness, but I may never get to it--especially as I am getting busier helping to create alternatives. It's not my strong point anyway--my hope is that someone else, someone who knows more about this stuff, will write it. Or maybe they already have. I will certainly link to it if and when I find it. In the meanwhile, this blog is my own attempt to do a little education.

So I write about gardening, feeding people, energy-efficient housing, personal growth and spirituality, complexity and systems theory, community, simple living and sustainability, and anything else I am inspired to write, in the hopes that some of this will be useful as we slowly build the framework of a different way of being.

Quote of the Day: "...structural alternatives cannot take root and survive without deeply ingrained values to sustain them. They must mirror what we want and how we relate to Earth and each other. ...
"The insights and experiences that enable us to make this shift are accelerating, and they take many forms. They arise as grief for our world, giving the lie to old paradigm notions of rugged individualism, the essential separateness of the self. ... And they arise in the resurgence of wisdom traditions, reminding us again that our world is a sacred whole, worthy of adoration and service." - Joanna Macy

Priorities

2010-06-26T01:00:00.004-04:00

This is the third in a series of occasional posts based on Stephen Covey's book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I've written about his first 'Habit' in my post on Deciding (2/19/10). I tackled his second 'Habit' in a post called Goals (5/4/10). One of the first things Stephen Covey makes clear is that his third Habit comes directly as a result of the first two.

First, you have to decide that you are going to be the person you want to be. Then, you have to decide what your goals, your personal mission, your vision, is. Once you have done those two things, then, if you really want to achieve your goals, you need to prioritize.

My friend Susan should be famous for this quote: "Sometimes what you decide not to do is as important as what you decide to do." I've often said that people can do anything (almost) that they want; they just can't do everything that they want.

Steven Covey entitles this Habit as "Put First Things First". (And, in fact, he has co-authored another book entitled, First Things First.) This means deciding what you are going to do and what you're not going to do. It means establishing priorities and keeping them in mind as you go through your day.

He claims that most activities are defined by whether they are urgent and whether they are important. Obviously, the things that are both urgent and important get our attention first, as well they should. But Covey points out that things that are urgent but not important also easily claim our attention. And sometimes, when we are overwhelmed or burnedout, we escape into activities that are neither urgent or important. What gets neglected are the things that are important but not urgent.

When we prioritize, we focus on what is important to us--urgent or not. Covey makes it clear that when we take care of the stuff that is important but not urgent, we can cut down on the amount of urgent and important things, mostly because we dealt with them before they became urgent. He also urges that we cut the things that aren't important out of our life--urgent or not.

How do we know what is important? It's back to Habit 2--is this something that will move us toward our goals?

A lot of this chapter is about organizers and Covey's version of important and urgent as 'Quadrants' but I think what is important here is to find a way to focus your life, to establish and follow through on your priorities. He suggests weekly planning. I now start each week with a to-do list based on my roles in life (which are defined by goals) with columns for daily activities, things for the week, and long-term--but you'll need to find something that will work for you. The hard part, and the most important part, is to really focus on what is important to you and to priorize that and let go of most of the rest.

Quote of the Day: "Returning once more to the computer metaphor, if Habit 1 says 'You're the programmer' and Habit 2 says 'Write the program,' then Habit 3 says 'Run the program,' 'Live the program.' And living it is primarily a function of ... our self-discipline, our integrity, and our committment--not to short-term goals and schedules or to the impulse of the moment, but to ... our own deepest values, which give meaning and context to our goals, our schedules, and our lives." - Stephen Covey

Summer—and Two Years

2010-06-21T01:00:00.001-04:00

It's the summer solstice, and it's hot! This has been fairly warm year so far, and summer is just starting. It's enough to make you believe in global warming.

Two years ago on the solstice, I started this blog. It's been a busy couple of years.

And my life is getting busier. I notice that I don't post that often on my blog any more. It's not that I don't have anything to say--I've got a growing list of things that I want to blog on. And I still have one more zine (using the posts I wrote on our real needs) that I would like to publish.

But I am busy doing things, connecting with friends, building raised bed gardens, helping weatherize buildings, serving food, doing stuff at and for the co-op I live in, etc, etc--not to mention that it's been busy at work as well.

I do have some posts I hope to write soon, but we will see how busy my life remains.

I also have one exciting adventure later this summer. I have plans to attend the Radical Urban Sustainability Training (RUST) in Albany, NY, at the beginning of July. This is being run by the folks who wrote the book Toolbox for Sustainable City Living and helped found the Rhizome Collective. (I mentioned the book in my post of 10/18/08 on Sustainable Resources.) I'm very excited about this and will have to blog about it when I get back.

If I have time...

Quote of the Day: "This is the time of the rose, blossom and thorn, fragrance and blood. Now on this longest day, light triumphs, and yet begins the decline into dark. ...we have planted the seeds of our own changes, and to grow we must accept even the passing of the sun." - Starhawk

Do Something

2010-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00

I read something on a blog a while ago that quoted Larry Santoyo, a permaculture teacher, as finishing his classes by saying: "Blame no one, expect nothing, and do something." Turns out that this may have been a quote from Bill Parcells when he was with the New York Giants. (I've also seen it attributed to other people.)

Regardless of the source, I think that it's good advice. I've been playing around with it a bit and now have my own version that reverses the order and adds some stuff:

Do something
Expect nothing
Blame no one
Love everyone
Do something more
and be patient and forgiving with everyone--including yourself

I've put it on my door. It's a reminder to me of how I want to live.

Quote of the Day: "Therefore the sages
act without doing anything;
teach without saying anything.
All things unfold without control
and emerge without possession.
The wise act but don't expect.
When their work is done, they forget it,
but it never goes away." - Lao Tzu

Listening to Each Other

2010-06-07T01:00:00.001-04:00

Sometimes I think that the most radical, the most revolutionary thing that we can do, is to listen to people. We are at a point where people are being bombarded with folks telling them what they should think, what they should believe, and what they should do. If I go to people and tell them that they should be living simply and sustainably, I am just one more competing voice.

How much more radical it is to go to people and ask them what they think. And then listen to them.

I wrote in my last post about the need for compassion, even for conservative people. I also wrote about the need to understand them. But we need to try to understand everyone. I'm sure that I will write in a future post about Stephen Covey's 'Habit' "Seek First to Understand", but the principle is clear.

Margaret Wheatley, in her book turning to one another (which I also intend to write a post on at some point), lays out her principles of conversation--which I think are good points to remember as we listen to people:

we acknowledge each other as equals
we try to stay curious about each other
we recognize that we need each other's help to become better listeners
we slow down so we have time to think and reflect
we remember that conversation is the natural way that humans think together
we expect it to be messy at times

These are great principles to have both people in a conversation adopt, but even if the other person isn't ready or able to do this, I think that one person willing to listen and adopt these principles, will move change forward. It's worth trying anyway.

I believe that each person has worth--and so it is worth listening to each person. And I believe that sometimes someone may change, just because they were listened to.

Often, being listened to allows a person to think for themselves--thinking that they may not have been able to do when everyone is telling them what to think. Being supported in thinking things through may result in deeper and more profound changes than would happen if they simply changed as a result of you telling them to. And, who knows, the result may be a better one (for that person at least) than what you might tell them to do.

And, above all, even if they don't change, you will learn something. And that may help you change.

This means having faith in people. It means believing in people. And, above all, it means listening to people.

Imagine a world where we really listened to each other.

Quote of the Day: "When I'm in conversation, I try to maintain curiousity by reminding myself that everyone here has something to teach me. When they're saying things that I disagree with, or have never thought about, or that I consider foolish or wrong, I silently remind myself that they have something to teach me. Somehow this little reminder helps me to be more attentive and less judgemental. It helps me stay open to people, rather than shut them out." - Margaret Wheatley

Empathy for Conservatives

2010-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00

My friend Susan sent me a link to Tikkun Daily at the beginning of last month (April), knowing that I might be interested in the interview with Starhawk about permaculture. I was, of course, but I was also taken with several of the other articles being put out at that time, particularly one called 'Empathy from Left Field — A Response to Helen Smith' by Miki Kashtan, which was originally posted in Miki's blog, The Fearless Heart. In turn, Miki's post is a response to a post by Helen Smith called 'How Should Conservatives Deal with the Left’s Disrespect and Lack of Empathy?'.

Miki Kashtan begins by saying "I love a good challenge" and admits that she knows many liberals who do seem to lack empathy for conservatives. Unfortunately, I think that this applies to radicals as well. I think that having empathy for conservatives is a really radical thing to do.

She goes on to point out that "...in much of the Left media, conservatives are regularly referred to as stupid (at best), backward, uncaring, or unevolved." We stereotype conservatives, make jokes at their expense, and dismiss them as human beings, and then complain about how *they* treat others.

None of this is to dismiss the harm that the institutions that conservatives support do nor is this to say that I believe in 'compassionate conservativism' or any of the other euphemisms often employed to justify oppressive behavior. But we also need to remember that conservatives, even reactionary right-wing conservatives, are human beings, often hurting others because they themselves have been hurt. Loving them, caring about them, and trying to understand them, is important, even while we oppose the damage they often do.

All this being said, the Helen Smith article that Miki Kashtan refers to seems to me to be mostly about branding liberals as insensitive, if not worse. She compares liberals with psychopaths several times in the article, although carefully saying that although liberals are like psychopaths, she doesn't actually think they are psychopaths. But she goes on to use the 'mistreatment' of conservatives by liberals as a justification for "...making sure consequences are dealt out to those liberals who lie and treat conservatives with disrespect." Several conservative sites (two examples) have reprinted it with a prologue that begins "Helen Smith makes some generally reasonable points below but fails to see that hate is what motivates the Left -- so their behaviour is entirely to be explained by that. They hate people who find anything worthwhile in the status quo -- and you don't expect respect or empathy from haters."

Helen Smith cites Jonathan Haidt's article on AlterNet, particularly focusing on where he finds that conservatives have an easier time putting "themselves in the shoes of liberals", than vice versa. That's a sad statement if it's true. The lines I quote about people on the Left being motivated by 'hate' makes me wonder about it, however. But the Haidt article is worth reading on its own because it is so thought-provoking. I may write a post devoted to it at some point.

Miki Kashtan has since written two more articles on working toward dialogue and respect between liberals and conservatives. I admire her persistence. Certainly I believe that listening to each other and trying to understand each other are, indeed, part of social change. And this, of course, means having empathy for conservatives.

Quote of the Day: "Empathy calls on us to open our hearts and imagination to others’ humanity. It’s easy to understand and show care for those similar to us. The challenge of empathy is precisely in the face of differences. How can we show care for others needs even when we say 'no' to what they want? How can we understand and remain open and respectful even when we believe others’ positions are potentially harmful?" - Miki Kashtan

Feeding Each Other

2010-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00

Last week, one of my housemates had a guest at dinner, a young woman who lives and works down south. She was involved with lots of social justice projects, many involving food. At the end of the meal, she made a comment (which I saw as both a reference to the meal and a reference to her work) about how nice it was that we got to 'feed each other'.

Last Friday, I got to be part of helping with a meal prepared by Hearty Meals for All, a group in Somerville, MA, that serves nutritious meals to whomever comes in. Earlier this month, I also helped with a meal prepared by some of the local co-ops for a homeless coalition. I've talked a lot about food as one of our most basic needs. (See for example my posts on Feeding Ourselves in the Future, 7/24/08, and Food (Soil and Seeds), 5/13/09.) Most of my post have been about growing food (most recently Kale, Carrots, and Chard, 3/17/10, and Gardening as Social Change, 5/7/10) but there is something to the idea of just feeding people, particularly those who need it.

When I lived up in Brattleboro a few years ago, I was part of their annual tradition of preparing a Thanksgiving dinner for everyone in the town who wanted to come. Homeless folks wandered in and I've heard that former Bratt residents drove in from New York in their Volvos and Saabs. Volunteers brought meals to housebound folks as well as people (like police and firefighters) who needed to work that day. I enjoyed every minute of it.

I have been inspired by two groups that combine a radical (pretty much anarchist) analysis of society with the work of serving others: Food Not Bombs (the Boston Chapter is having its 30th anniversary celebration soon) and the Catholic Worker Movement (our local affiliate is Haley House). Few people would lump these two groups together but I see them as very similar in spite of the fact that one is a secular group and the other is very spiritually oriented.

I believe that we need to make sure that everyone is getting their real needs met and one of the most basic of those needs is food. Growing food is essential, but feeding each other is wonderful.

Quote of the Day: "There is a lot that happens around the world we cannot control. We cannot stop earthquakes, we cannot prevent droughts, and we cannot prevent all conflict, but when we know where the hungry, the homeless and the sick exist, then we can help." - Jan Schakowsky

Gardening as Social Change

2010-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00

One bored day last month, I did something that I haven't done in a long time. I opened the paper and read the comics page. And I almost dropped it. I'm talking about The Boston Globe, a fairly mainstream paper. And there on the comics page is a character trudging water to his garden, muttering "No more fast food! No more processed junk! No more factory farming! No more corporate monopoly!" (Jimmy Johnson, Arlo & Janis, 4/13/10) I couldn't have put it better myself.

When most people think about gardening, they hardly see it as a radical activity. It's often viewed as a harmless way to get a little fresh food. But it is also a direct counter to the food industry, a way to move from supporting Agribusiness to growing our own and taking care of ourselves. And, if the peak oil folks are anywhere near correct, it's preparation for a future where we will all be growing our own food.

Richard Heinberg predicts that there will be 'fifty million farmers' in the future. (See my post on Peak Everything, 7/20/08.) Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton have written a book called A Nation of Farmers that argues the only way we will be able to keep our families from going hungry as food crises continue will be by growing food. They further argue that any real equality can only come about when we live simply, and that means (among other things) growing our own food.

This is why I have been writing posts on Permaculture (see my posts of 7/22/08, 11/19/09, and 12/24/09 for more on Permaculture), Biointensive Gardening (see my post, Biointensive, 2/10/10), Soil (in my posts of 5/13/09 and 3/13/10), and even Kale, Carrots, and Chard (3/17/10). Food is one of the most basic of our needs. Someone needs to grow the food, since we need food to live, and the question is--will it be Agribusiness or you? I strongly believe in supporting farmers, in CSAs and Farmer's Markets and Food Cooperatives, but I think that soon we will all need to contribute to feeding ourselves--and others. It can start with a little plot in the backyard (if you have a backyard), or at a community garden, or even doing container gardening, but we might as well all get started gardening now. This is a small but important step toward a future where we feed each other. And, I think it would be good to begin learning now, because if there is a food crisis coming, that is not going to be a good time for learning.

Quote of the Day: "...most rich world denizens would prefer not to live in a society with a high degree of equity, since this means a major shift in their wealth. Most Americans, quite reasonably have no desire to live on $2-$5 per day with 9 billion other similarly poor people. Now that $2 a day figure is a bit misleading—it can cover a surprising range of life situations, from the hellaceous to the pretty comfortable. ...if you live on a small farm and grow almost all the food you eat, produce the heating and cooking fuel you need and need just a little money, you might not have such a tough time." - Aaron Newton and Sharon Astyk

Goals

2010-05-04T01:00:00.001-04:00

I am slowly making my way through Stephen Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (aka Seven Habits). I've decided that I will write periodic posts on my take on each of the habits. (If you want Stephen Covey's take, read the book. Honestly, it's a really useful read.)

I wrote about the first habit, being proactive, in my post on Deciding (2/19/10). This post is about the second habit, which Covey calls 'Begin with the End in Mind'.

Covey starts by talking about the difference between leaders and managers. He thinks that they're both necessary--and each of us needs to be able to lead and manage, at least in regards to our own life. To illustrate what he is talking about, he pictures producers (the ones doing the work) as cutting their way through a rainforest with machetes. The managers are the ones who make sure that they are well supplied with sharp machetes and anything else they need in order to do their work. The leader is the one who climbs the tallest tree and surveys the land around them. And sometimes the leader realizes that the situation is not right and yells, "Wrong jungle!" And Covey claims that the managers and producers, more often than not, yell back, "Shut up! We're making progress."

The first step in remaking your life, is to be proactive, but once you have decided to be proactive, the next step is to figure out what your goals are. Without doing this, you can make lots of progress, but still be in the 'wrong jungle'. It reminds me of when someone wanted me to join a revolutionary organization and I wanted to know what their aims were. I didn't care what great actions they were doing as much as where they were headed. I feel the same way about intentional communities--I want to know what they want to achieve. I've made the comparison to getting on a bus; I wouldn't board a bus in the city before I checked its destination.

So what are your goals? How do you know what you want to be doing? What are the key values that you live by? Covey suggests making a 'Personal Mission Statement' to make sure that you have your direction clear. I found this useful to focus on what I find most important and to shape my life from there. (Yes, corporate executives write Mission Statements, but I suspect their missions are quite different from mine. I think anyone could benefit from trying to figure out what is important to them and using this to organize their lives.)

He further talks about 'Roles and Goals': what roles do you play in your life and what are your goals for each of those roles? The point is to have all this in line with what you see your mission as.

I first read Seven Habits years ago, but I wasn't ready to focus my life at that point. Now, with a clear sense of mission in my mind, with my life's goals in front of me, I am able to focus myself on accomplishing what is important to me. Before I try to start accomplishing things, I look to see if I am in the right 'jungle'. The next step is to begin the work.

Quote of the Day: "How different our lives are when we really know what is deeply important to us, and, keeping that in mind, we manage ourselves each day to be and to do what really matters most." - Stephen Covey

Life and Love

2010-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00

Once again, May begins. As I have written in the past, this is Beltaine, one of the pivot points of the pagan year, along with Samhain (aka Halloween). Where Samhain is about darkness, decay, and death, Beltaine is about light, life, and love. This is the time when everything is in flower--high spring as it were.

As someone who would like to see us return to a more natural, organic way of life, more connected to our world, our bioregions and ecosystems, the changes in the seasons are important to me.

Industrial society seems to pretend that we can divorce ourselves from the life around us. When we pave the earth with concrete and asphalt, and live in buildings where we are sheltered from the weather--and the natural environment--in wood, glass, brick, and steel cocoons, we lose touch with true reality. When we live our lives from numbered grids on pieces of paper, claiming this is the day, the month, the year, we lose touch with the true seasons. Meanwhile, the earth changes around us. We get inconvenienced by 'weather events'--rain, snow, and hail put crimps in our plans. We can try to avoid this by traveling in steel and glass enclosures such as cars, buses, taxis, trains, and planes, and, indeed, there are people who enter their vehicles in enclosed garages, drive to somewhere, pull into a parking facility, and never have to experience the 'outside world' at all.

However, our activities are beginning to have repercussions. There seem to be a lot of 'extreme weather events' happening--hurricanes, tornadoes, rapid cycles of 'unseasonable weather' that many believe are linked to climate change. I'm even wondering about all the earthquakes and volcanoes that are occurring. Mother Earth does not seem happy with us.

We have lost our connection with the earth, we have lost our connection with nature, and I fear that we are losing our connections with each other.

It's time to rebuild those connections. Time to let in life and love, to touch the earth and the people around us. Time to be physical, sensual, organic, connected. Time to spend some time in nature. Time to get away from the artificial world constructed around us. Time to spend time with those you love. I can't think of a better way to begin May.

Quote of the Day: "All things are interrelated, and a change in one entity ultimately affects all others, however spatially distant.
"The interrelatedness of all things in a living, organic universe implies the need for humans to be sensitive to the rest of the natural world in order to maintain its harmony." - Judith Todd

Mystery

2010-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00

When I wrote my post on Evolving My Spirituality (3/5/10), I mentioned that I felt like my spirituality had four sources: Love, Community, Nature, and the Earth. Later, in my post on Second Thoughts (4/14/10), I said that I wanted to add Mystery to my spiritual sources and would write a post about Mystery in the future. This is it.

However, it's not like Mystery is something new to my spirituality. I can remember as a teenager, looking up at the endless blue sky or the star-filled night sky or immense ocean, and realizing how small I was and how big the universe is. These were some of my earliest spiritual experiences. Yes, some of this was about Nature and that's why I include Nature in my spiritual sources--but the wonder involved is more than about just Nature. For me it was about realizing that we will never fully understand the universe.

The book of Job ends with Job questioning God and God, in turn, questioning Job--asking where are the foundations of the earth (or the universe, for that matter), and where are the springs of the sea? Where does the light and darkness come from? What controls the stars? Who feeds the lions and the ravens?

Scientists are now working on answering some of these questions, but each answer opens up new questions. Who feeds the lions and the ravens, for example, opens up all the questions about how ecosystems work. (See my post on Systems, 12/14/09, for more thoughts about this.) Sure, we can say that this all evolved, but how does that work? Many scientists would argue it all happened by chance--and even that is marvelous and mysterious. But contemporary complexity theorists (see my posts on Complexity Theory, 7/16/08, and At Home in the Universe, 1/29/10) now believe that there is an implicit order in things that helps systems like this emerge out of the chaos, a phenomena of 'self-organization'. They would say that the world is evolving, but there is direction in that evolution--although we have no idea how that happened.

Or take the whole beginning of the universe (it's foundation, if you will). Sure, it seems likely it came out of the big bang, and scientists can describe what happened up to trillionths of a second after the big bang occurred, but I think that most admit that they cannot describe or even guess what happened at the actual occurrence--much less what gave rise to the big bang. What we are left with is mystery.

There are many who would name that Mystery as God. I'm not ready to go there.

Someone that I lived with several years ago had a sign in his room that said: "Radical Agnostic: I don't know and you don't either". I'm not even ready to be that definitive. I am very concerned with 'hubris', in this case the idea that we can know it all. I don't even think I can know that you don't know. My version of the sign would be "I don't know and I suspect that you don't either". But who am I to be definitive? Who am I to say that you don't know? All I know is that I don't know--and that Mystery, that not knowing and perhaps not even being able to know, is at the core of my spirituality.

Years ago, I attended a talk by Stephen Levine. He was discussing death and dying and mentioned spirituality. Someone asked him what his definition of spirituality was. He said something to the effect that spirituality was openness to the Unknown.

That has been my definition of spirituality since.

Quote of the Day: "...everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding..." - Dorothy Thompson

Going to the Balcony

2010-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

I will admit it. I'm a very reactive person. I'm calm around calm people and anxious around anxious people. When I get hit by a blast of emotion from someone, I react. I'm not sure how not to, but that is what I am working on now.

Stephen Covey's first habit in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is to 'Be Proactive'. (For more on this, see my post of 2/19/10, on 'Deciding'.) He talks quite a bit about the difference between reactive and proactive people. But perhaps his most important point is "Between stimulus and response is our greatest power--the freedom to choose."

But this means that you need to stop between the stimulus and the response--not just immediately react. Pema Chödrön points out (in the book When Things Fall Apart) that "...there is something between the arising of the craving--or the aggression or the loneliness or whatever it might be--and whatever action we take as a result. There is something in us that we don't want to experience, and we never do experience, because we are so quick to act." She makes it clear (as do other teachers) that meditation is one way to stop the reaction, to expand that gap between the stimulus and the response, and pay attention to what is there. That gives us enormous freedom to decide how we want to act.

I recently started reading the book, Getting Past No, by William Ury. I haven't gotten very far, and it will be quite a while before I review any of it, but I noticed he claimed that there were five common barriers that interfered with cooperation and the first one he labeled, "Your reaction". His strategy for dealing with this is: "Since the first barrier is your natural reaction, the first step involves suspending that reaction. To engage in joint problem solving, you need to regain your mental balance. A useful image for gaining perspective on the situation is to imagine yourself standing on a balcony looking down..." Naturally he calls this strategy 'Go to the Balcony'.

I think this is a useful image for any reactive situation. When you can gain perspective, you can make decisions out of clear thinking rather than simple reaction. You have a chance to be proactive. Sitting there looking at your reactions during meditation, or in counseling or therapy, can be one way to get that perspective. Just taking a time out when you find yourself reacting can be another. Either way, the point is to change our habitual behavior, to change the way that we respond to situations.

What does all this have to do with social change? I think that too often our social change strategy is just reaction. We react to capitalism, we react to oppression, we react to climate change, peak oil, social inequities, the military-industrial complex, the corporations, the government, the system, etc. We react to whatever the situation is. I sometimes think these crises are designed to keep us in reaction mode. This isn't a strategy. Here's a clear example of where we need to 'Go to the Balcony' and take in the whole situation, and try to figure things out from there. Going to the Balcony gives us a chance to strategize rather than react.

As I have noted before, this is another example where a similar process is useful for both personal and social change. The less we react, the more we open that space between the stimulus and the response, the more we are able to Go to the Balcony, then that will enable us to think clearly, make good decisions, and be proactive. It will allow us to be in the world how we want to be and not to be defined by the situation.

Quote of the Day: "Because of mindfulness, we see things when they arise. Because of our understanding, we don't buy into the chain reaction that makes things grow from minute to expansive. We leave things minute. They stay tiny. They don't keep expanding into World War III or domestic violence. It all comes from learning to pause for a moment, learning not to just impulsively do the same thing again and again. It's a transformative experience to simply pause instead of immediately filling up space. By waiting, we begin to connect with fundamental restlessness as well as fundamental spaciousness.
"... Part of being awake is slowing down enough to notice what we say and do. The more we witness our emotional chain reactions and understand how they work, the easier it is to refrain. It becomes a way of life to stay awake, slow down, and notice." - Pema Chödrön

Social Change as Healing/Healing as Social Change

2010-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00

An online dictionary defines Healing as "To restore to health or soundness; To set right; repair; To restore (a person) to spiritual wholeness. [Also:] To become whole and sound;" Wikipedia claims: "Physiological healing is the restoration of damaged living tissue to normal function. It is the process by which the cells in the body regenerate and repair..."

What does all this have to do with social change? Years ago, I thought of my self as a revolutionary, someone who believed that what we needed was a revolution. The trouble with revolutions (and this has now been shown several times) is that they tend to replicate the structure they were replacing, only with a change of people. If you keep an animal caged for a long time, they will often stay in the cage when the door is opened. It's familiar to them. (I've heard the same from former prisoners--in some ways they want to return to prison, it's what they've learned as normal.)

We need a total structural change of society, and it needs to be built from the ground up. But it needs to be an organic, natural process or it won't take. Capitalism and industrialism, for all their destruction, appeal to people on a visceral level. They appeal to fear and greed, but this is more successful than an appeal to reason and logic.

What we need to realize is that people have been hurt. The natural world has been hurt. If we are going to change things we are going to need to do it by healing those hurts. I think these days about transformation. I think about evolving new systems that will appeal to people because they will be generous, and fun, and challenging (not to mention sustainable and connected). These systems also need to be healing. Any change that is going to be sustainable has to take into account the many wounds and wounded people in the world. We need to find a way to care for them. We need to restore them to health.

I like the word healing, because it speaks to social change as an organic process, as opposed to fixing something. You fix a pot that is broken, but when a bone breaks you try to create a situation that will allow it to heal itself. I think that society (not to mention the natural world) is a living system that has to be nurtured and supported as it changes. We need to restore and repair society, to make it healthy again, to set it right, to bring it back to wholeness, to regenerate and repair and restore damaged living systems to full, flexible functioning, to resiliency. I have talked about the 'Healing of the World' (see my post on 'The Four Offspring', 2/24/10). This is how I see social change. I see social change as a way to heal the world and its people; and I see supporting healing (of individuals, of society, of natural systems, of the planet) as a process that will support social change.

Quote of the Day: "Healing yourself is connected with healing others." - Yoko Ono

Personal Growth and Social Change

2010-04-19T01:00:00.001-04:00

During the late sixties/early seventies, I was into social change, at least peripherally. Later in the seventies, I became involved in humanistic psychology and the 'Human Potential Movement'. When the eighties came, I saw this as a time with the potential to fuse the personal and the political, to combine individual and social change. (Yes, I was disappointed.) In the nineties I was an important part of three attempts at building community based on personal growth, social change, and spiritual diversity.

Why do I see personal growth and social change as connected? One reason is that I saw too many organizers from the sixties that hadn't dealt with their own stuff, who ended up alienating people rather than inspiring them. I still see that, unfortunately. On the other hand, there are also people who believe that you can only change yourself, or that you have to get yourself totally together (an impossible project) before attempting to change society.

For me, personal and social change are inter-connected. There were political groups that I found in the seventies and eighties that got that. Movement for a New Society, a political group that I became involved with during the early eighties, saw personal growth as a part of its social change strategy. (For example, in the book Resource Manual for a Living Revolution, by Virginia Coover, Ellen Deacon, Charles Esser, and Christopher Moore, the authors point out that "A successful program for change depends on the self-discipline of its members, including their courage, patience, persistence, and skill level. The loving support of others provides the environment in which growth on a personal level takes place, but each of us is ultimately responsible for how and in what areas that growth proceeds." But they also point out earlier in the book that social change doesn't happen directly through personal change, and cite Charles Reich's The Greening of America as an example of that fallacy.) Another group that saw the connection was the National Organization for an American Revolution, a multi-cultural group founded in the seventies by James Boggs and Grace Lee Boggs. One of the many pamphlets published by the organization is entitled "Change Yourself to Change the World".

In many ways, personal and social change have to happen together. We try to do work on the world, and we run into our own short comings. But as we work on ourselves, we become more and more aware, and one of the things we become aware of is all the things that need to change in this society. So it becomes a back and forth process--we work on the world and the world works on us. We work on ourselves, to prepare for our next engagement with the world.

Right now, having come up against my stuff, I am doing a lot of work on myself (thus so many postings on personal growth). Most of this is because I am readying myself to do more work in the world. I realize that if I want to build community and support social change, I will be the instrument doing this work--and I want to try to be the best that I can. But I also realize that I will never be free from stuff, that I need to plunge back into the fray, as flawed and imperfect as I am. I am looking for others to work with, because I think that together we can increase our impact. But as I work with others, their stuff and my stuff often collides. What I am learning is that I can't do much about their stuff (other than encouraging them to work on it and supporting that work). But I can continue to work on my stuff and model the change that I want to see.

Quote of the Day: "Of course, even when you ... posit a fundamental separation between liberation of self and transformation of society, you can still feel a compassionate impulse to help its suffering beings. In that case you tend to view the personal and the political in a sequential fashion. 'I'll get enlightened first, and then I'll engage in social action.' Those who are not engaged in spiritual pursuits put it differently: 'I'll get my head straight first, I'll get psychoanalyzed, I'll overcome my inhibitions or neuroses or my hangups ... and then I'll wade into the fray.' Presupposing that world and self are essentially separate, they imagine they can heal one before healing the other. ...
"It is my experience that the world itself has a role to play in our liberation. Its very pressures, pains, and risks can wake us up--release us from the bonds of ego and guide us home to our vast, true nature. For some of us our love for the world is so passionate that we cannot ask it to wait until we are enlightened." - Joanna Macy

Second Thoughts

2010-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00

This isn't one of the posts that I was planning to write. (See my last post, 'Step Back and Look Ahead', for more.) But a couple of things happened.

The first is simple. I was trying so hard to get a post out, I put it up before I realized there were a couple of other things I wanted to include.

I realized that a few of the things that I put in recent posts, I've rethought. No big changes, just a little tweaking. In fact, much of what I do day to day, I tweak regularly. For example, if I was writing the post 'And Their Four Offspring' (2/24/10) now, I would probably make the offspring, Kindness, Patience, Forgiveness, and Generosity--I see Healing as something that comes out of the practice of these virtues, an emergent property, if you will. I am planning to write an upcoming post on Healing and Social Change. I would also add Mystery to the sources of my spirituality (see the post Evolving My Spirituality, 3/5/10). And, yes, I plan to write a future post on Mystery.

However, the bigger reason I am writing this, is an abrupt shift in what I am doing. I am still (perpetually) seeking community. Recently I gave notice at my house (see my last post) and started to look for an apartment to have to create a small, 'proto-community'. I wasn't very successful at this. The final blow was when I real estate agent informed me that I would need to have housemates to finalize a deal with a landlord (who would want to meet all these people). I realized that I needed the place in order to advertise for the people but it seemed like I needed the people in order to secure the place. The agent said it wouldn't be a problem if it was only going to take a couple of days to find the people--the problem was I expected to take a month finding them. I know how long housemate searches take, and I expected mine to take even longer since I was starting from scratch. Leaving the agency, I realized what was feeling wrong. I have never done this by myself before, and it stopped making sense. I had said that I didn't want this to be 'my community' but here I was doing it alone. This wasn't how I wanted to build community.

I went back to my house and asked if I could retract my notice. At this point the others had one interview with someone they liked (but who wasn't urgent about moving) and were preparing to have dinner with the person in hopes this could be a simple process. I was embarrassed and worried that my housemates would be annoyed. Instead, the first one I spoke with said she was relieved, a second said he was very happy and gave me a big hug, and the third sent me an email entitled 'Welcome Back' and said she was 'Dee-lighted' with my decision. My friends have been supportive and also relieved. I am still embarrassed but I think that it was the right decision. Everyone (including my housemates) is clear that I do plan to try to do this again in the future, but first, I plan to find at least one person (maybe more) to begin doing this with. I've always said that you can't build community by yourself--the biggest need in community is people. Yet, this time I had to be hit in the face with it.

When I ask one of my housemates why something-or-other didn't happen, she often replies "It's an evolving situation". This is life. I am trying to do a bunch of things and learning along the way. Sometimes I have second thoughts. Hey, "It's an evolving situation."

Quote of the Day: "All is flux; nothing stays still." - Heraclitus

Step Back and Look Ahead

2010-04-11T01:00:00.000-04:00

This is a busy time for me. I've given notice at the house where I live. It's sort of jumping without a parachute. I don't have a place to live and I don't have people to live with. I could be in trouble.

The goal is to build a simple, sustainable community that mirrors the world that I want to see happen. I have lived in community before so I do know that it's possible. Also, there must be some other people who also think that this is worthwhile. I don't think that I am putting out anything that unusual.

But, the first step is finding a place and that's where I am stuck. I thought that the Cambridge neighborhood where I know some other people living in a simple and sustainable manner would be perfect. It turns out that: a) there aren't many four bedroom apartments there, and b) most apartments available (even three bedrooms) are way too expensive. How can I advertise for people interested in simple living and offer a place that charges a bundle for rent? So I am trying to extend my search.

Plus work has been busier than usual, so I haven't had a lot of time to write posts. I have a bunch of them in mind, so when things slow down (at work or in my life) I will start rolling them out.

One thing that I am aware of is that I have been more inwardly focused in my blog lately--doing a lot of posts on spirituality and personal growth. I do intend to address this in an upcoming post. And I also have more posts planned of this nature--it speaks to what I am currently struggling with.

Another hope of mine is to put out another, and perhaps final, issue of my zine this summer. I want to get the information I researched and wrote about regarding 'Real Needs' out in paper copy.

And at some point I plan to write a post about this attempt at community building--but first I have to see how it all works out. This could be the start of something worthwhile or it may be a disaster in the making. I will let you know.

Quote of the Day: "Your daily life is your temple and your religion." - Kahlil Gibran

Resources for Loving-Kindness

2010-03-30T01:00:00.001-04:00

In my last post I talked about doing loving-kindness meditation. I think that it's easy to learn--and, in fact, it is easier for me to do than the sitting-and-following-the-breath, mindfulness meditation most Buddhist teachers encourage people to do.

There are a lot of books around that describe this meditation or variations on it. (Tibetan influenced Buddhists have some amazing meditations that go far beyond loving-kindness--I might write more about this at some point.) Here is an annotated list of some of the books I have read that talk about loving-kindness meditation. For more on the Four Brahmaviharas (or The Divine Abodes, among other names) see my post on 'The Four Gardeners' (2/14/10).

Pema Chödrön, The Places that Scare You Here Pema covers Lovingkindness, as well as Compassion, Sympathetic Joy, and Equanimity, and gives an overview of the Tibetan practices of Tonglen and Lojong which extend loving kindness to a place of taking in suffering and sending out love and happiness.

Gavin Harrison, In the Lap of the Buddha Gavin covers basic insight meditation, but also looks at what he calls 'The Divine Abodes': Lovingkindness, Compassion, Sympathetic Joy, and Equanimity, and Forgiveness practices as well. Written by an HIV positive abuse survivor, it is filled with love and compassion. It has a very nice section on Generosity as well as the Five Buddhist Precepts.

Stephen Levine, A Gradual Awakening A good, basic book on meditation written in a warm friendly tone. Mostly covers basic mindfulness meditation, but he devotes two chapters to Loving-kindness, one of which is a 'guided meditation'.

John Makransky, Awakening Through Love This book begins with the identification of our 'benefactors' followed by an initial meditation on the love given to us by our benefactors. From there he develops the meditation to include mindfulness and loving-kindness meditations, but the initial portion where love is given to us makes these meditations more powerful--once we are filled with love it makes it so much easier to pour love out on the world.

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living A book with a bit of everything, from the author's stories about himself and others to looking at how Buddhist meditation has been studied by western science, to chapters on how to meditate. He has a chapter on Loving-kindness and Compassion meditations that also covers Tonglen and Aspiration Bodhicitta. He also includes a chapter on 'The Biology of Compassion'.

Sharon Salzberg, Lovingkindness This is a classic text on loving-kindness meditation. Covers the Four Brahmaviharas in some detail. Also covers forgiveness meditation.

Quote of the Day: "It takes strong insight and often a good deal of courage to break away from our habitual ways of looking at things, to be able to respond from a different place. Imagine if we dropped our need to be right, our easy perpetuation of what we’re used to, our urge to go along with what others think, and tried to practice what the Buddha taught: 'Hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love.'" - Sharon Salzberg

Spreading Love

2010-03-26T01:00:00.001-04:00

I am not a believer in an afterlife or reincarnation, but I was intrigued when one of my housemates told me he used to do past-life regressions. He claimed that when people were asked the purpose of that particular life, 90% said the purpose of their life was to learn how to love. (The other 10% said it was to learn how to use power more wisely.) Rachel Remen, in her book My Grandfather's Blessings (see my last post and my post of 3/9/10), claims that "According to those who have returned from a near-death experience, we are all here to grow in wisdom and learn how to love better." (Her definition of wisdom is, "Wisdom is not something that we acquire; it is something that over time we may become. It involves a change in our basic nature, a deepening of our capacity for compassion, lovingkindness, forgiveness, harmlessness, and service. ... Our capacity for wisdom naturally grows throughout our lives.")

I am still not ready to buy into an afterlife, but I am intrigued by the notion that the purpose of life is to learn to love better.

I have been practicing meditations on Loving-Kindness everyday for a while now. I have actually started to teach this (occasionally) to other people. It is a wonderful practice. You begin by sending loving-kindness to yourself, then extend it to a beloved person--a mentor, teacher, or very dear friend; then a close friend or a family member that you are close to; then a 'neutral person', someone you have no particular feelings about; then someone you are having difficulty with; finally, extend wish of well being for all 'sentient beings'.

As you work with it, you can just extend that wish for everyone's happiness and well-being into a constant refrain repeated throughout the day. As one teacher I heard said, just repeating it often re-patterns our brain.

Now, I do various versions of this several times a day because I badly need to do them. You can read all my posts on love, compassion, and forgiveness and you might think that I'm this amazing, constantly loving person. I'm not. If you met me in person, you might find that I am often an anxious, frantic, frustrated mess. I can be rude, self-absorbed, controlling, and judgmental. I do all these meditations because I need them. I remind myself to be patient and forgiving with everyone, including myself. I try to be joyful and loving--my latest goal is to look at everyone I meet with 'love and delight'. I don't always succeed, but this is an 'aspiration' meditation. This is my goal and I am slowly working toward being that cheerful, loving person I want to be.

I truly think this is some of the most important work that I need to do, perhaps the work that all of us need to do. Spreading love isn't enough, but it is a profound beginning. I do think that if we could get to a place where most people lived simply, treated everyone equally, acted cooperatively, and practiced sustainability, a place where everyone's basic needs were met, it would make the world far, far better, even without love. I also believe that only when we start spreading love will the real healing of the world begin.

(I hope to put out a list of resources for doing loving-kindness meditation in my next post.)

Quote of the Day: "When the rivers and air are polluted, when families and nations are at war, when homeless wanderers fill the highways, these are traditional signs of a dark age. ...
"Practicing loving-kindness toward ourselves seems as good a way as any to start illuminating the darkness of difficult times.
"... There's so much resentment and so much resistance to life. In all nations it's like a plague that's gotten out of control and is poisoning the atmosphere of the world. At this point it might be wise to wonder about these things and begin to get the knack of loving-kindness." - Pema Chödrön