The Act Factor

In our current times of so much uncertainty about the future, about so many unknowns and with so many threats, it is very easy to feel overwhelmed. The enormity of the problems is so that we become stagnant. We feel useless and think that whatever we try is won’t make any difference. And then, we become apathetic and just keep living as if everything is all right.

I believe that is the worst attitude we can take.

Let me share this little story about a hummingbird that Wangari Mattaai tells to children:

The story of the hummingbird is about this huge forest being consumed by a fire. All the animals in the forest come out and they are transfixed as they watch the forest burning and they feel very overwhelmed, very powerless, except this little hummingbird. It says, ‘I’m going to do something about the fire!’ So it flies to the nearest stream and takes a drop of water. It puts it on the fire, and goes up and down, up and down, up and down, as fast as it can. In the meantime all the other animals, much bigger animals like the elephant with a big trunk [that] could bring much more water, they are standing there helpless. And they are saying to the hummingbird, ‘What do you think you can do? You are too little. This fire is too big. Your wings are too little and your beak is so small that you can only bring a small drop of water at a time.’ But as they continue to discourage it, it turns to them without wasting any time and it tells them ‘I am doing the best I can.

There are many stories, quotes, poems and songs with similar messages. For instance, take the Gaviotas case, a legendary village in Colombia that was created by a group of visionaries lead by Paolo Lugari about 40 years ago, in the middle of the eastern savannas. After all these years, and after trying many things, among many amazing things, they have created a 20,000 acres forest. But the important thing here is that, as Lugari explains, he never intended for Gaviotas to serve as a blueprint for sustainable development, or even a clearinghouse of appropriate technologies. Instead, he wanted to show the world that is was possible to live sustainable by drawing on local resources, or as he describes, living within the economy of the near.

One of Lugari’s mantras for their work is A.V.V., alli vamos viendo, meaning we will see what happens as we go along.

All the extraordinary things in Gaviotas have not happened as a result of brilliant planning but of a trial and error process, replete with wrong turns and detours. It hasn’t been an orchestrated march towards a finished product, what has been important is only the process, the unpredictable evolution of strategies and ideas say Seth Biderman and Christian Casillas that recently visited Gaviotas.

Other examples:

Antonio Machado’ poem that says caminante no hay camino.. se hace camino al andar; meaning traveler, there is no road; the road is made by walking

An old Chinese proverb: the journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.

Dag Hammarskjold said never look down to test the ground before taking your next step; only those who keep their eye fixed on the far horizon will find their right road.

There is even an old Latin phrase that goes Solvitur ambulando, meaning it is solved by walking or the problem is solved by a practical experiment.

That is the key point, no matter how bad is the outlook, we must try something, we must take the first step.

We must hit the road and try our best. Caring and having empathy for future generations will help.

If we all took this approach, we will be building resilience and things can be very different.

Succession and Resilience

Our planet is sick, very sick. And it is basically our fault.

A few of the major symptoms are climate change, poverty, food scarcity, wars, peak oil and peak economy. Let me dare to suggest that the planetary disease is over consumption, overpopulation. In essence, our unlimited economic growth culture. And because of this, the planet is facing a global system failure: many interrelated systems are failing at the same time with a catastrophic result for Earth. Many people say this collapse will happen in this century and it will be a very different world after that.

A fundamental concept in ecology is something called succession, that refers to more or less predictable and orderly adaptive changes in the structure of an ecological community, or an ecosystem. After several of these changes, called seres, the ecosystem reaches a steady state called climax-community. For instance, after hundreds and hundreds of years, an old growth forest reaches its climax.

Extending this succession concept to social-ecosystems, we can say our society is currently going through a very rough change and nobody really knows how fast it’ll happen, nor how long, nor what will be the end result of it. I think the timeline could be quite long and it will take a few steps to reach its climax state.

A recent case of such succession is what happened in Cuba in the past 50 years or so. They were forced to tackle a sudden succession, when oil and many goods and services stop coming to their island, and they may be close to their climax state.

For different reasons, many other countries may face similar sudden successions, while others will go through long successions to reach its own climax.

The first step we are already facing is scarcity and high prices of many goods and services, and I am afraid it will only get worse. The next step we may face is something many people are calling a salvaging phase, where we will need to relearn, reuse, reclaim, repair old stuff, as there will be very few new things to buy. We may need to use manual tools, walk a lot, use horses and sail boats, since there won’t be much oil to keep running all our machines, and more. Our resilience level will be tested.

I haven’t watched the movie The Age of Stupid, but I have read it makes you think where the world is heading. I read that one of the passages in the movie is when this historian character is checking old films and contemplates the last years in which humanity could have saved itself from global ecological collapse. And then he wonders,

“Why didn’t we save ourselves when we had the chance?”
"Were we just being stupid?
or was it that “on some level we weren’t sure that we were worth saving?”

I think the answer has little to do with humans being stupid or self-destructive but everything to do with our current culture of over consumerism and overpopulation. And we know that as consumption has risen, more fossil fuels, minerals, and metals have been mined from the earth, and more trees have been cut down. For instance, a new report from Wordwatch Institute says: “the world extracts the equivalent of 112 Empire State Buildings from the earth every single day.” ! Yikes !

It seems to me that we need a fundamental change in our culture, based on ecology, not on economics. Based on caring, not on material possessions. In other words, what we need is a basic reshuffling of global priorities.

The more people is aware of what lies ahead, and accept the need for change, the better the chances to build resilience and make it easier for future generations to face the future.

We need to tackle this together, at the global and the local level, in true community, and most importantly, with an intergenerational scope.

BC's Green Juggernaut

I have been trying to understand the reasoning behind the recent announcement from Gordon Campbell on the Green Energy Advisory Task Force.

Campbell has included the "green" word to pretend this energy is clean and it will help with reducing BC' carbon footprint and fight global warming. If you read the News Releases about this Green Advisory Tasks Forces, it says they are “dedicated to ensuring BC remains a leader in clean and renewable energy”.

I am afraid that the core idea behind this Green Energy Advisory Task Force is for more economic growth in BC. And there is no question that there will be huge profits for a few corporations from the recommendations from this Task Force, unfortunately, the companies that will profit from all this will not necessarily be from BC, not even Canadian.

There are four task force groups, reporting directly to the Cabinet Committee on Climate Action and Clean Energy. These groups are:

1. Green Energy Advisory Task Force on Procurement and Regulatory Reform,
2. Green Energy Advisory Task Force on Carbon Pricing, Trading and Export Market Development,
3. Green Energy Advisory Task Force on Community Engagement and First Nations Partnerships, and
4. Green Energy Advisory Task Force on Resource Development

Boy, they know how to make very pompous, complicated titles, indeed!

No matter the way I read all this, I can’t see how these groups will make any improvement for the resiliency, or the sustainability, of this province. They don’t even use those terms, nor they mention anything about reducing our insatiable demand for more energy. To me, that should be priority numero uno for this Task Force.

As far as I understand it, Campbell is creating this "green machine" to justify more growth. For him, that is what progress means.

Let me share a few words from Dr. Richard Bruce Anderson that describes this situation very nicely. In his essay "Resisting the Juggernaut", he writes:

" the imperatives of growth and profit drive the behaviour of the whole system. Like a machine, the economy has all the awesome power of mechanism but also its inhuman indifference to consequences. The machine isn't evil, any more than a shovel or a hammer is evil, but it is complex enough to have its own agenda, which is not a human agenda. Because it's inhuman and because it has amassed so much power, it is, in mythic terms, the Juggernaut, beyond control, growing ever more vast and more destructive.
"To fulfill its simple imperatives for growth and profit, the machine must create insatiable desire. It must cause us to want more than we need, more than we've ever wanted before, and it must continue to do this forever in order to grow and generate profit.
"The influence of the machine is responsible for much of the psychic pain and dysfunction we encounter. Logic and reason have little effect on how it operates. To change our minds and hearts, the machine appeals to the worst aspects of human nature. Greed, pride, fear, sloth, lust --the deadly sins-- are the openings, the doors to demand for more products. The machine exaggerates the normal human tendency towards materialism. It encourages narcissism and self-indulgence. It displaces and subtly discredits healthy human attributes and practices such as compassion and thrift. The influence is more than sufficient to account for the malaise in society, in the same way that the physical effects of the machine's operation are sufficient to explain the destruction of the natural world."

He finishes the essay like this:

" and who's to say that nothing can be done, that we're helpless in the face of the Juggernaut? Our challenge in this time is to live with integrity, to face reality and to save and heal whatever we can"

What we need to understand is that Campbell has created this insatiable desire for more growth as his mantra, as his religion. He doesn’t get that there are actual limits to growth. And we need to stop him.

I expect that at least a few of the members of this Green Energy Advisory Task Force still have integrity, compassion, thrift, that they care for future generations, that they show their reverence for life, that they recognize there are limits to growth, and that they will have enough courage to stop this Green Juggernaut.

Breaking the Cycle

History has shown us that we have had an endless parade of Domination Cultures, meaning many Empires have come and gone. The key characteristics of an Empire are extreme arrogance, greed, lies, male supremacy and stupidity, driven by the belief that unlimited economic growth is possible. Being a conquistador has been a central component of humankind development, and still is.

Part of this Domination Culture is not caring about future generations, something that we may call intergenerational crime. Similarly, a domination culture doesn't care about trashing Nature, or annihilating many other species, and of course, any other culture. Worst of all, enforcing a new religion is frequently used as a legalization for these conquests. Fundamentalist religions still exist today and are at the core of many wars around the world.

These days we are seeing the beginning of the collapse of the present Domination Culture (call it the American Empire if you like). I could say the current Age of Stupid is coming to an end, and we are already seeing the early stages of the next Empires: the Chinese and the Indian...and a new cycle will begin with the same flaws and stupid behaviour.

Unknown and Wicked problems
Many of the problems we are experiencing have been known for years; we have been warned for a long time about them and have chosen to ignore them. Many other problems are known unknowns and there are other unknown unknowns, things we don’t even realize we don’t know. Obviously, when these type of problems become reality we have no idea what they are, nor what to do, and they hit us the hardest.

Now, the standard approach for solving problems is by using the same type of thinking, or same tools and technology, we used to create them. We always try to solve the symptoms; very rarely do we look for the root-cause of the problem. Examples include the economic bail outs to the banking system; or looking for alternative fuels to keep moving our cars. We should recall Einstein’s words: "We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

It is also very common to use a single-focus approach to solve problems, ignoring the inter-dependency they have.

To make it worse, many of the above problems, known or unknown, are also wicked problems, meaning very complex issues that have no standard solutions. A few characteristics for a wicked problem are:

- There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
- Wicked problems have no definitive solution.
- There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
- Every (attempted) solution to a wicked problem has consequences that may trigger new problems.
- Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
- Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
- The causes of a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways.

Many of the climate change problems are perfect samples of wicked problems. How many solutions that we have seen have caused new problems after they are implemented?

The Age of Consequences
The current Empire has caused so much damage in so many areas that we are already seeing that many social, economic and ecological systems are collapsing, and because none of these systems is independent, the synergetic result from these intertwined, failing systems is so massive that total collapse is inescapable. At the end of the Age of Stupid, we are now at the beginning of an Age of Consequences.

We are already seeing despair and suffering all over the world. Millions of people are experiencing terrible human conditions. Major corporations and financial systems are failing. Many ecosystems have deteriorated and many are dying because of the dramatic changes in the climate. Many species have become extinct and many more are at the verge of extinction. All these changes are causing tremendous impacts on the poorest countries in the world. Thousands of children in those countries don’t have access to basic things like water, food and shelter and are dying every day for starvation and illnesses.

At the same time there are millions of people still in denial, and are doing nothing more than waiting, or hoping, that all the problems will be solved by the governments, by divine intervention or by technological pipe dreams. Others still use the magical thinking approach of pretending everything is all right, and prefer the status quo.

Without a doubt, the current culture is blindly heading towards a cliff and many people are already taking the leap to the abyss, without knowing how deep it is. How come we fail to see that sometimes progress means taking a step backward?

All we know is that the collapse has indeed begun.

Can we break the cycle?
The situation looks quite awful, doesn't it? Are there any solutions? Can we still save this domination culture from self-destruction? Is it even worth it to try?

Maybe the best thing to do is just let it be. Maybe millions, or billions of humans need to vanish, for the sake of Earth and millions of other species to survive?

We cannot deny anymore the collapse is already happening, but we don’t gain anything by being worried and going into despair. No one can really predict how bad it will be, but many thinkers and scientists are telling us we all have to cope with major changes in our lifestyles, and that there is a high probability that the rich nations will be the ones that will have to change the most. We will need to give up many of the things we take for granted nowadays.

I have found a positive approach to take: instead of continuing to worry about collapse, accept that it is happening and then take action, in preparing myself, and others, to be able to adapt to the upcoming changes. We need to learn to be flexible. In other words, to become resilient.

Resilience is not about preventing change. It is about increasing our capacity to change and adapt. Resilience refers to a capacity for continuous renewal.

Taking this approach gives a new purpose or meaning to my daily life.

The concept of meaning for life became popular by Viktor E. Frankl in his book Man’s Searching for Meaning. Dr. Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist. He was sent to a Nazi concentration camp in 1942 with all his family. In 1945 he was liberated from the camp, but he was the only survivor in his immediate family. He then returned to Vienna and wrote many books with the main theme of suffering and he concluded that even in the most painful situation, life has meaning and even suffering is meaningful.

If Dr. Frankl was able to find meaning in suffering, I can find meaning in collapse, and this gives meaning to my life.

In other words, finding meaning in collapse tells me that, instead of continuing to fight the system (this civilization, this culture); instead of trying to bring it down; instead of trying to save the world; we could just try to be flexible, to yield and find a way to live alongside the failing system, without worrying about it anymore.

"Know when to yield to opposition, and you will overcome challenge" says Lao-Tzu.

If we follow this way we can make the transition to resilience: to a simpler, caring lifestyle and in community.

Working this way we may even break the perpetual cycle of Age of Stupid to Age of Consequences to Age of Stupid once again.

The new age could be called Age of Caring and Community.

Ranking Sustainability in a Small Community

The idea that all small, rural communities are sustainable, resilient and self-sufficient is not necessarily true.

Let me present the case of a few small communities in the West Coast of B.C., mainly in the Gulf Islands. I will rate the sustainability and self-sufficiency level of these communities using a simple exercise.

I will use the conventional categories Social, Economic and Ecological to group all the issues and opportunities.

For the Social component I will include food security, fresh water, health and education facilities, housing for all, waste and transportation. Maybe this is the weakest area of all for these islands, since we import the majority of our food; our fresh, underground water is limited; our health and education facilities are very limited; affordable housing is an never-ending issue; we export all our waste; public transportation is non-existent and the chances to have any is almost null, since our populations are so small that we don’t qualify for any provincial help in that area.

This means we are highly dependent on importing goods and services. At the same time, young families need to move to larger cities for higher grades of education for their children, and Seniors need to travel or move for medical reasons and other facilities and services lacking in the small islands.

The biggest concern is that many of these elements may be considered as "basic needs for survival".

On the other hand, we can also include in the Social area a very important component I like to call "the Caring Component". These are things like community spirit, spiritual and cultural feelings, sharing things and helping each other. Without a doubt, we are very strong in these matters.

The Economic component is also weak for these communities, since local industries and job opportunities are quite limited. The biggest industries are aquaculture and tourism. Forestry used to be very important, but it has decreased tremendously in the past few years. The problems with tourism are that it is not a year-round business and it causes some distress in many of these small communities during its peak Summer season.

The strongest economic component for these small islands may be the unpaid, or underground, local economy, mainly in the form of trading and volunteerism.

It is obvious the Ecological category is fairly well covered in these islands: we care a lot about Nature; we respect and try to protect the forest lands, ecosystems and other species; we have a fairly decent understanding of our inter-dependencies with Nature, and overall, those who live in these islands in a permanent basis try to have a small footprint.

However, if we also include the impacts of Climate Change in this category, the situation is a bit different, since we have a large carbon footprint as we produce lots of greenhouse gas emissions driving our cars and trucks everywhere; the lack of public transit; our ferries; the very large food-mileage of our food, and yes, many of us fly to warmer places in Winter.

Therefore, if want to grade the above components we may end with something like this:

For the Social component we get the following grades:
- Food security we get a D;
- Fresh water we get a C minus;
- Health and Education we get a C;
- Housing we get a B minus;
- Waste management we get a D;
- and for Transportation we get an F.

However, for Caring we get an A plus.

For the Economic component we get:
- Industries and Jobs, we get a C;
- Underground we get a B.

For the Ecological component we get:
- Nature we get an A;
- Climate Change we get a D.

This doesn’t look that good, does it? Overall, we have a failing grade and we can conclude these islands are not sustainable, not self-sufficient. At the same time, we can say we are Caring Communities.

Even if we want, there are physical limitations in these islands; there is no proper infrastructure for things like education, health and public transportation, and probably never will.

However, it is possible to work towards improving areas like food security by growing year-round food, to create alternative housing opportunities and to diversify our local industries and reduce our carbon footprint.

At the least, the above efforts will help to improve our resilience level.

Most of all, we need to understand and accept this truth, we need to recognize the need and urgency for change, and we need to start taking action… yesterday!

Creating a Resilient Community

Let me suggest couple of articles by Dave Pollard with the central theme of Creating a Resilient Community http:

//blogs.salon.com/0002007/2009/08/02.html#a2418

and

http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2009/08/09.html#a2421

He talks about Intentional Communities, the Transition Movement, a new Natural Economy, and many more important, interesting points indeed...

Time to De-Grow !

Time to De-grow ? Yes indeed !

I know, De-grow sounds like a concept many of us are truly reluctant to even consider, it sounds so un-AmeriCanadian, right?

However, it makes so much sense. Economist Serge Latouche gives us his viewpoints in this short interview


The Biggest Shift from North to South: 'Time to De-Grow'

Q&A: Claudia Ciobanu interviews economist Serge Latouche

Published on Monday, August 3, 2009 by Inter Press Service


BUCHAREST - Serge Latouche, professor emeritus of economic science at the University of Paris-Sud, is one of the main proponents of "the society of de-growth".

He calls for "abandoning the objective of growth for growth's sake, an insane objective, with disastrous consequences for the environment." The need for a 'de-growth' society stems from the certainty, he says, that the earth's resources and natural cycles cannot sustain the economic growth which is the essence of capitalism and modernity.

In place of the current dominant system, Latouche argues for "a society of assumed sobriety; to work less in order to live better lives, to consume less products but of better quality, to produce less waste and recycle more."

The new society would mean "recuperating a sense of measure and a sustainable ecological footprint," Latouche says, "and finding happiness in living together with others rather than in the frantic accumulation of gadgets."

Author of many books and articles on Western rationality, the myth of progress, colonialism and post-development, Serge Latouche describes the main principles of the de-growth society in his books 'Le Pari de la Décroissance'(The Bet of De-Growth) and 'Petit Traité de la Décroissance Sereine" (Small Treaty of Peaceful De-Growth) published in 2006 and 2007.

Serge Latouche spoke to IPS correspondent Claudia Ciobanu about de-growth society.

IPS: What are the features of the society of de-growth, and are any practices in the world today compatible with this vision?
Serge Latouche: De-growth does not mean negative growth. Negative growth is a self-contradictory expression, which just proves the domination of the collective imagination by the idea of growth.

On the other hand, de-growth is not the alternative to growth, but rather, a matrix of alternatives which would open up the space for human creativity again, once the cast of economic totalitarianism is removed. The de-growth society would not be the same in Texas and in the Chiapas, in Senegal and in Portugal. De-growth would open up anew the human adventure to the plurality of its possible destinies.

Principles of de-growth can already be found in theoretical thought and in practical efforts in both the global North and the South. For example, the attempt to create an autonomous region by the neo-Zapatistas in Chiapas; and many South American experiences, indigenous or others, such as in Ecuador, which has just introduced in its constitution the objective of Sumak Kausai (harmonious life).

All sorts of initiatives promoting de-growth and solidarity are starting to spread in the global North too: AMAP (The Associations for the Preservation of Peasant Agriculture in France, that promote direct links between producers and consumers, and organic agriculture), self-production according to the example of PADES (the Programme for Self-Production and Social Development, developed in France to help individuals and communities produce goods for themselves and others, eliminating monetary interchanges).

The movement of Transition Towns started in Ireland and spreading in England could be a form of production from below which closest resembles a society of de-growth. These towns are seeking firstly energy self-sufficiency in the face of depleting resources and, more generally, promote the principle of community resilience.

IPS: What would be the role of markets in the de-growth society?
SL: The capitalist system is a market economy, but markets are not an institution which belongs exclusively to capitalism. It is important to distinguish between the Market and markets. The latter do not obey the law of perfect competition, and that is for the best. They always incorporate elements of the culture of the gift, which the de-growth society is trying to rediscover. They involve living in communion with the others, developing a human relationship between the buyer and the seller.

IPS: What strategies could the global South pursue in order to eliminate poverty in a different way than the North has, at the expense of the environment and producing poverty in the South?
SL: For African countries, decreasing the ecological footprint and the GDP are neither necessary nor desirable. But from this we must not conclude that a society of growth must be built there.

Firstly, it is clear that de-growth in the North is a precondition for opening up of alternatives for the South. As long as Ethiopia and Somalia are forced, during the worst food shortage, to export feed for our domestic animals, as long as we fatten our cattle with soya obtained after destroying the Amazonian forest, we are asphyxiating any attempt at real autonomy in the South.

To dare de-growth in the South means to launch a virtuous cycle made up of breaking economic and cultural dependency on the North; reconnecting with a historical line interrupted by colonisation; reintroducing specific products which have been abandoned or forgotten as well as "anti-economic" values linked to the past of those countries; recuperating traditional techniques and knowhow.

These are to be combined with other principles, valid worldwide: re- conceptualising what we understand by poverty, scarcity and development for instance; restructuring society and the economy; restoring non-industrial practices, especially in agriculture; redistributing; re-localising; reusing; recycling.

IPS: The de-growth society involves a radical change in human consciousness. How is this radical change going to come about? Can it happen in time?
SL: It is difficult to break out of this addiction to growth especially because it is in the interest of the "dealers" - the multinational corporations and the political powers serving them - to keep us enslaved.

Alternative experiences and dissident groups - such as cooperatives, syndicates, the associations for the preservation of peasant agriculture, certain NGOs, local exchange systems, networks for knowledge exchange - represent pedagogical laboratories for the creation of "the new human being" demanded by the new society. They represent popular universities which can foster resistance and help decolonise the imaginary.

Certainly, we do not have much time, but the turn of events can help accelerate the transformation. The ecological crisis together with the financial and economic crisis we are experiencing can constitute a salutary shock.

IPS: Can conventional political actors play a role in this transformation?
SL: All governments are, whether they want it or not, functionaries of capitalism. In the best of cases, the governments can at most slow down or smoothen processes over which they do not have control any more.

We consider the process of self-transformation of society and of citizens more important than electoral politics. Even so, the recent relative electoral success of French and Belgian ecologists, who have adopted some of the de- growth agenda, seems like a positive sign.

© 2009 Inter Press Service
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/08/03-2