From WILLIAM KOTKE
CarolynBaker.net

Humans must create paradise or they cannot live on the planet Earth. Paradise here is described as a human community that lives in perpetuity and in peace on one place on the earth, over many generations. In the modern view, generated from the Alternative Culture and Cultural Creatives, we have a permaculture design in a valley that has been ecologically restored and has added additional trees in different ecological niches to create a food forest of fruits and nuts. Under the forest canopy are tall bushes also of fruit and nuts. Under this, the lower berry bushes and vining plants grow. Lower, are the forbs: perennial vegetable plants that grow year after year and require no disruption of the soil community. Below this are the perennial tuber plants and also down in the soil are the edible mushrooms. This is a perpetual food design that will produce more food per acre than the industrial agricultural system, without digging, disrupting and damaging the thousands of species of the soil community, and at the same time, continually building soil fertility and preventing soil erosion.

Next, we add hand made housing of straw-bale, adobe, log, rammed earth, or other local material, along with attached solar green houses according to many successful contemporary designs. The humans, of course, maintain a stable population and live with a stable biological unit.

Then we add a new human culture based on aiding the life force rather than its consumption and destruction.

Paradise is obviously not a new idea. Richard Heinberg in his book Memories and Visions of Paradise says, “ We are faced with some extraordinary facts. In virtually every culture on Earth we encounter a myth telling how humankind originated in a time of peace, happiness, and miraculous power and, because of some mistake or failure, degenerated to its present condition. Moreover, nearly every tribe and nation reveres the sayings of some ancient prophet who foretold the corrupt human world will one day be consumed in a purifying cataclysm to make way for a renewed Golden Age. And, as if the similarities of these ancient myths and prophecies were not remarkable enough, we are confronted by the additional fact that much of our civilization’s greatest literature and many of its most inspiring theories and experiments seem to derive their vitality and appeal from these mysterious memories and visions of paradise.”

This paradise can be done now. All of these systems have been worked out in the thousands of ecovillages around the planet and in many other similar designs. The above permacultural design has the effect of putting us in biological adaptation to the planet Earth. This is the key and crux of the matter. We as a species must be biologically adapted to the biological energy flows (food chains, biological webs) or we as a species cannot live on the earth. This is not to say that we must adopt a loin cloth and eat roots and berries such as the incredibly successful two million years of our ancestors, but it does mean that we somehow must biologically adapt to the earth. This means that the very foundations of our human culture of materialism must change.

THE CULTURE OF LOOTING
Human agriculture has been one of the most ecologically destructive disasters to hit the planet. When agriculture began and the first plow or digging stick was struck into the breast of Mother Earth, the destruction began. Soil scientists say that it takes between three hundred and a thousand years to accumulate each inch of topsoil in optimum ecologies. This is what agriculture drains from the earth. Surpluses from the life force of the earth is what the civilized are after and have been after for eight thousand years, draining the fertility of the earth through agriculture, overgrazing and deforestation The more surpluses that members of the empire can haul to the capital city, the more their social stature, in a materialistic society. Now that ninety per cent of the large fish in the ocean are gone, we are down to ten per cent of the planetary forest and soil erosion, exhaustion and desertification are racing ahead on all continents, even the unconcerned can see the problem. “Civilization,” since its inception has accomplished its growth by sucking the fertility out of the life force of the planet.

The phrase, “survival of the fittest,” was taken up out of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and made into a violent cultural norm by the British Empire. “Social Darwinism” soon followed. Those who ruled by violence, theft and lies, considered it obvious that they were the ‘best,” and on the forefront of evolution, since they ruled. Those who ruled Babylon in the now ecologically destroyed “fertile crescent,” the Han Chinese who ruled a country that was once half covered by a fertile temperate zone forest and those imperial rulers who occupied the once fertile Indus River, no doubt thought they were the “best” – eight thousand years ago. That human culture has descended through the years to the point that “pioneers” on their way to loot the U.S. west, killed thousands of buffalo, took their tongues to market for money and left the carcasses to rot on the plains. This is an appropriate image of the culture of civilization and its ten thousand year project of killing the life force of our planet.

A CULTURE OF ADAPTATION
Another part of Darwin’s theory – that the English ruling class neglected – is the value of biological adaptation. When the banker leans on the farmer, the farmer leans on the soil, for more surpluses.

The city dweller eats some of the food and throws the scraps, along with all other organic material in the landfill where its mass becomes an ecological problem. This is a simplified version of the whole of the culture of empire. There is no reward for the upstream supplier of biological energy, there is simply looting.. The ecology that provided the soil is not rewarded with the organic material so as to continue its growth. In many cases the old growth forest that originally provided the topsoil is gone.

In a great cultural turn-around, thousands of ecovillages have sprung up around the planet, pointed toward reversing the civilized cultural values and seeking adaptation to the planetary biology. Biological adaptation is the only way that the human species can be on this planet in perpetuity.

Much concern has been expressed recently about economic collapse, but the big collapse right behind it is what most people in the materialistic society do not see. This is the biological collapse of the life force of our planet. In this late stage of the “crisis of empire,” the only beneficial act one can do is seek biological adaptation in some manner. All other activities are frivolous and pointless. As the culture of looting crashes in flames, our hope is that some of the thousands of ecovillages around the planet will survive the cataclysm to thrust a new pattern of cultural values, and a new adaptation to the life force, into the future.

William H. Kotke is author of The Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future, and Garden Planet.
~~

From DAVE SMITH
Ukiah

[It has been over two years now that a few of our extremely knowledgeable local citizens made recommendations for solarizing our county. What could be more important than securing the energy future of our citizens? Yet this comprehensive report has been filed away in some metal cabinet and ignored, along with a report put together by Ike Heinz to capture methane from our dump. A new courthouse? A multi-hundred-million dollar freakin' courthouse? You've got to be kidding! -DS]

Energy Usage and its Impact on Mendocino County Including General Plan Recommendations Prepared for the Mendocino County Planning Department by the Mendocino County Energy Working Group

The Energy Working Group (EWG) is a group of Mendocino County citizens brought together (under direction of the Board of Supervisors) to provide guidance for the General Plan update. Each member of the EWG group represents some aspect of the greater county and brings various aspects of energy expertise, ranging from renewable energy, engineering, and government.

The volunteer group worked under the guidance of (and with special thanks to) Patrick Ford of the Mendocino County Planning Team.

This paper is a working document that is intended to present the results of the EWG’s county-wide energy and emissions inventory and to outline recommendations for the General Plan update and general policy. Where possible, the pertinent narrations appear in the main body of the document while the details are relegated to the appendices. In creating this paper, every measure has been taken to ensure the accuracy of the information presented as well as the feasibility of the steps. Should errors or questions arise, we would appreciate them being brought to our attention so that they can be corrected or elaborated on.

Energy Working Group Participants:
Kate Collins (Laytonville/Willits) — Kate@GaiaEnergySystems.com
Steve Heckeroth (central coast) — steve@renewables.com
Jim Koogle (south coast) — jimkoogle@sbcglobal.net
Doug Livingston (Boonville) — livingstonconsulting@hughes.net
Janet Orth (Willits) — janet@redinet.org
George Reinhardt (north coast) — georeinhardt@comcast.net
John Schaeffer (Hopland) — john@realgoods.com
Cliff Paulin (Ukiah) — cliffpaulin@hotmail.com
Brian Corzilius (rural central interior) — bcorzilius@corzilius.org

With special thanks for the inputs from the various county economic localization groups, including CELL, GULP and WELL as well as Ecology Action, Live Power Farms and many more.

The latest version of this document is available at:
http://www.greentransitions.org/Papers/EWG2007_FReport.pdf
~~

From ROSALIND PETERSON
Redwood Valley

1) The United States is committed to implement qualified economy-wide emissions targets for 2020 to be submitted to the United Nations by January 31, 2010.

2) The U.S. Senate will be under the gun to pass their Cap & Trade, Energy & Jobs bill (S1733 or another similar bill) prior to January 31, 2010 to be in compliance with this Accord.

3) The current bill before the U.S. Senate will not reduce any pollution emissions until 2017 and then only a 17% reduction of 2005 identified greenhouse gas emissions (water vapor, a greenhouse gas, is excluded from this legislation). Thus, no action is planned by the Copenhagen Accord or the United States in reducing any greenhouse gases until 2017 or 2020.

4) The EPA, without any passage of legislation and under authority from a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, is now on track to immediately begin to reduce all pollution from every greenhouse gas source. Without interference from Congress or the White House compliance with the Accord will begin in 2010, and could put the United States in the lead in taking immediate action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution. The EPA model could set and example for the entire world and the United States would be immediately demonstrating its commitment to protecting the environment.

5) The Accord is weak in that no implementation of greenhouse gas reductions is to take place until 2020.

6) The Accord will use various approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions “…including opportunities to use markets, to enhance the cost-effectiveness of, and to promote mitigation actions…” This means that (S1733) a Cap & Trade System will be used in lieu of actual immediate reductions to allow polluters to “Buy & Sell the “Right to Pollute” between 2010 and 2017 or 2020. No pollution reduction will take place until either of these target dates.

7) This long term wait for any small reduction in greenhouse gases means that the threat is not considered that important by the proponents of this Accord or the United States. What is more important is establishing a “Cap & Trade money market scheme to enrich private corporations, banks, and the stock market.

The Accord does not call for an assessment of implementation until 2015, another indication that the reduction in greenhouse gases is not considered a top priority for immediate reductions for greenhouse gases to be implemented.

9) The Accord plans to fund “adaption and mitigation” through the establishment of the Copenhagen Green Climate Fund. The United States has agreed (U.S. Secretary Hillary Clinton Deal), to contribute to this fund with U.S. Taxpayer funds.

10) To accomplish this goal a “carbon tax” on U.S. citizens to fund this agreement will be included in the updated Cap & Trade Bill to be brought before Congress in January 2010. Thus, the funds raised from any taxes won’t go to alternative energy funding, be refunded to U.S. taxpayers, or finance new jobs in the United States. The entire substantial tax paid will go to the Copenhagen Green Climate Fund and to pay for the printing of money in the form of free “offsets” which will be given to polluters in the United States so that they can continue to pollute at current levels until 2017 or 2020. (This will benefit banks, the stock market, and carbon trading venture capitalists-the only jobs that will be created with the scheme.)

11) Senator Kerry, on his Website, December 2009, states: “…A significant gap exists “between the international climate funds committed in the President’s FY10 budget (approximately $1.2 billion) and the expected revenue that will be generated from a cap-and-trade program beginning in 2012…The United States Congress has already indicated its support for such a package. The House of Representatives dedicated 7% of the allowance value from a cap and trade system to international efforts to promote clean energy technologies, reduce emissions from deforestation, and address adaptation needs. The legislation moving through the Senate includes similar levels of funding for these priorities.

12) Senator Kerry is removing the wording Cap & Trade and replacing it with Pollution Reduction Investment (PRI). This is defined in part by Senator Kerry: “…PRI creates powerful incentives to spark new investment(s)… Every voucher the government issues will allow us to invest in the energy future of the country without adding to the deficit…Instead of using a ‘command and control’ model where government tells individual companies where and how to reduce pollution (EPA current model and mandated by U.S. Supreme Court Decision), PRI is designed to let the private sector seek out the most cost-effective ways to meet our pollution reduction goals. Major polluters will be required to turn in one ‘carbon credit’, essentially a voucher for the right to pollute one ton of carbon…” Note that under S1733 free vouchers will also be printed and our tree credits can be used as carbon offsets to be bought and sold on a carbon market to allow polluter to buy and sell the right to pollute.

Kerry States: “…These vouchers can be bought or sold, giving companies the flexibility in how they reduce pollution. Those that can’t quickly or affordable do so can buy vouchers instead. Other companies better able to cut pollution can sell their vouchers to those who need them…” This allows the corporations to buy and sell the right to pollute and profit as well especially when some of the offsets or credits are given to these companies at no cost.

For more information:

http://kerry.senate.gov/cleanenergyjobsandamericanpower/pdf/PRI.pdf

13) The only offset for the taxpayer will be a carbon tax. The money to be transferred to the Copenhagen Green Climate Fund under the Copenhagen Accord. This will mean that corporations can buy and sell the right to pollute for the next 17-20 years with no pollution reductions required until 2017, all to be funded by the “carbon tax”. READ THE CAP & TRADE ENERGY BILLS (4 VERSIONS) PASSED BY THE U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES IN 2009, AND THE NEW ONE (1733) INTRODUCED BY SENATOR BARBARA BOXER IN 2009. S1733 or a similar bill will be brought before the U.S. Senate in January 2010, to implement this tax and to promote the buying and selling of the right to pollute. In addition, a carbon tax will be necessary to fund the Copenhagen Accord.

14) Once passed funds will be transferred to the Copenhagen Green Fund where the United States and other countries are directed to use “markets” to promote mitigation actions. No pollution reductions will occur in the United States as corporations will have a free pass to continue to pollute. And there will be no funding left to fund alternatives energy, immediately reduce pollution here in the United States.

15) If this bill passes the EPA will lose its mandate to immediately reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. And the end result will be the gutting of our U.S. Clean Air and Water Acts.

A more sensible approach is to let the EPA regulate polluters, reduce pollution, and protect our Clean Water and Air Acts to protect public health and help with climate issues. This will happen with no congressional action because this is mandated by the U.S. Supreme Court. This approach will demonstrate to the entire world that the United States is taking immediate action to reduce greenhouse gases and would also be an example to other nations in what they can do to reduce pollution in their own countries. And it shows that there is concern about the environment and climate that is a priority in this country.

~
See also How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room→
Thanks to Janie
~~

From CHUCK BENBROOK
The Organic Center

Three times before lunch on most days I encounter another dose of pro-biotech, anti-organic hogwash inspired directly or indirectly by the multiple global PR campaigns now underway in an attempt to re-position public attitudes about genetically engineered crops.  The messages are always some variation on three themes  –

• Population growth is eroding global food security and only high-yield, GE crops and concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) can spare the remaining forests and wild lands from despoliation and rescue the world from famine and environmental catastrophe.
• Organic farming is backward and elitist and not productive enough to make a meaningful contribution to bridging the gap between global food supplies and food needs.
• Only conventional agriculture, and in particular the biotech-seed-pesticide industry, is committed to exploit science and technology in the effort to increase food production and promote global food security.

Left unchallenged, more and more people will come to accept these assertions as reasonably accurate reflections of reality.

During my trip to Europe earlier this month, I was impressed by the thoughtfulness of arguments encountered wherever debate flared up over the relative contributions of biotechnology and organic farming to global food security.  My sense is that both sides are well represented in the debate, dug in, and likely to hold their own for the foreseeable future.

Here in North America the general public, government agencies, scientists, farmers, and thought leaders are not engaged in this debate to the degree their counterparts in Europe are.  As a result, contemporary “discussions” of how to promote global food security are closer to diatribe than debate in the United States.

High-yield agriculture, as practiced in the industrialized nations, evolved over five decades with the benefit of, and in order to exploit the profit potential inherent in yield-enhancing inputs manufactured with relatively cheap energy.  The era of cheap energy is coming to an end.  If America is going to help developing countries meet their food security challenges, we have to start with the realization that the resources accessible to farmers in the developing world are, and will remain fundamentally different than those available to U.S. farmers, both now and over the last half-century.

Despite the largesse of the Gates Foundation and the sum of all foreign assistance and World Bank lending targeting rural areas, the development of agricultural systems and infrastructure in food insecure regions of the developing world will have to be paid for largely by self-generated profits from farm production.  Generating such profits on a sustained basis will, in turn, depend largely on improvements in soil quality and water management, rather than purchasing and applying energy-intensive inputs.

For sure, more inputs will be part of the development equation, but in the new “greener” revolution, they will play a supporting, rather than the leading role.  Restoring soil quality and fertility will drive development as far as it goes.

In the world’s food insecure regions, the principles of organic farming have much more to contribute in the effort to build soil quality and productivity than today’s hi-tech and high-priced seeds and other energy-intensive production inputs.  But some will turn this point around, and argue that proponents of organic farming are anti-science and are, moreover, oblivious to the plight of the chronically undernourished.

No, “This is not true!!” we shout from the highest rooftop, but mostly through our own newsletters, reports, and meetings.  This core issue must be engaged more effectively in order to spare the world, and U.S. taxpayers, from another round of flawed interventions and miss-placed development investments in the name of promoting global food security.   In Europe, there are many people from all walks of life, including several Lords and even a Prince, making this case forcefully and backing up claims made with sound data and analysis.

Here in the U.S., the absence of a diversity of well-informed, respected and informed voices is allowing a slick but shallow PR campaign shape public opinion, drive the scope and tenor of media coverage, and constrain the debate over public policy options and priorities.

To turn the tide, we must begin by putting forth the science and technology driving innovation on organic farms and in organic food manufacturing plants, where tremendous strides have been made in the last decade toward systems that produce more food with fewer resources and less waste, and food that is better tasting, more nutritious, and safer.

Ultimately the public, governments, companies, and foundations will choose, hopefully on the merits, those areas of science and technology that deserve added support in the quest for food security.  Right now, the biotech industry has the ball, the discretionary income to pay for PR and political influence, and is, to a large degree, dominating the debate in the U.S.
~~

From ANDREW SULLIVAN
The Daily Dish

Jon Cohn gets down to specifics:

A family making $50,000 will have to make serious sacrifices to find $10,000 [the amount you're likely to spend for an insurance policy under the new law]. But it’s better–light years better–than finding $25,000 or more [the amount you'd have to find without the new law]. It’s potentially the difference between having to give up your home, get an extra job or declare bankruptcy. Just knowing the bills that could come will be the difference between getting care you need–and skipping it, at grave risk to your health.

I keep waiting for this obvious fact to sink in. What Obama has done is force the existing system to insure 30 million more people at a modest cost, and to include a swathe of (still-insufficient) varieties and strategies of cost-control. This is huge – the biggest first year achievement of any president since Reagan. If you consider that he did this while also managing the steepest down-turn in decades, revamping America’s image in the world, preventing a banking implosion, and prosecuting two unresolved wars in the face of almost deranged opposition, it’s pretty damn impressive.

This seems clearer to me after a break from the Intertubes. Maybe others will feel the same way after the holidays.
~~

From MICHAEL LAYBOURN
Hopland

FITs( feed in tariffs, REPs(renewable energy payment) & So Forth…
Or, How to Create Jobs So We Can Operate Our Own City and County Energy

Another update on providing solar/renewable energy for Ukiah and possibly even Mendocino County:
When we left this last April Gainesville Florida had become the first US city to try the feed in tariff system to jump-start the solarization of that city…

From an article in the Alliance for Renewable Energy website:

March 08, 2009
Gainesville Solar REPs Program Meets Target Before Launch

On March 1, Gainesville, FL officially became the first city in the U.S. with a solar REPs law. Utilities in the city are required to purchase solar energy from registered producers for $0.32 per kilowatt hour through 2010. This 2009 tariff rate will be adjusted over time but program profits are guaranteed for 20 years. At the commencement of the program, Gainesville now sees an influx of completed applications to request connection to the electricity grid that would sum up to a total of 4MW of generated solar energy, which is the first-year target of the program.

GRU modeled the their gross feed in tariff program on similar strategies that have been successful in European countries such as Germany. Under the program, the utility will buy all of the electricity produced by registered solar power systems at an initial fixed rate of USD $0.32 per kilowatt hour. The program offers guaranteed payments for 20 years. GRU’s experience has by no means been an isolated case, demonstrating the incredible popularity of gross solar feed-in tariff programs and their potential to rapidly increase the uptake of renewable energy in any country by home owners and businesses. Ontario, Canada’s feed in tariff program experienced a similar response where a 10 year target of 1,000 megawatts was reached within a year.

This sounded so good to me, I wrote about it and wondered why it wouldn’t work here as Ukiah owns its own utility like Gainesville. As the months rolled by, I continued to read about this way of energizing a shift to solar energy, I became more convinced that this could work in our county.

The City was going to look into it, but didn’t get back to me, so I decided to call up Gainesville and see how this really worked. How happy were they with the system and did it really create jobs?

I talked to a woman in the Gainesville Regional Utility office and mentioned there was some interest out here in Mendocino County(at least I was) and that I would write about this interview. Could I ask her some questions?
“Of course”
Is GRU happy with the FIT results?
“We sure are,” she said, “The program is full — clear out to 2016.” She then explained that they limited the program to 4 megawatts a year, to keep the costs down.
(The rule of thumb in California is that one megawatt can power 750 homes during peak hours, – Sean Gallagher, Sterling Energy Systems.)
Is this working to provide jobs, I asked.
“It has provided work for hundreds of jobs and the installation companies are still hiring”.
How about local manufacturers?
“Not Yet”.
How did you finance this?
“We stopped our rebate program which wasn’t working as quickly as we wanted, then added about 84 cents a month to our electric bill so the cost would be small and spread out. We did a customer survey asking about $1 a month increase for this ability to go solar and it was completely positive.”

Now the income paid to a solar electric producer in Gainesville is 32 cents a kWh. That is around $300/month on the average, with electrical usage of about $100. That leaves $200 profit or $200/month to pay off a loan for the solar system. Feed-in tariffs like this have long been the primary tool for financing renewable energy projects in Europe, and they are the reason Spain and Germany have become world leaders in wind and solar. Advocates say the system is simpler, more effective and less expensive than traditional U.S. incentives for renewable energy, which are often a Byzantine mix of tax incentives, rebates, state mandates and utility programs. They simply don’t work as well. Who needs a tax rebate in this economy?

In Gainesville, solar projects abound. Paradigm Properties, a residential real estate company, plans to install photovoltaic arrays on fifty local apartment buildings and its downtown headquarters. Achira Wood, a custom carpentry outlet, is plastering the roof of its workshop—roughly 50,000 square feet of galvanized steel—with solar panels. Interstate Mini Storage is doing the same with its sprawling flat-roofed compound. Tom Lane, who owns ECS Solar Energy Systems, a local solar contractor, told me he’s planning to expand his staff from eleven to at least fifty. “The activity we’ve seen is just explosive,” he said. “I’ve been in the business thirty years and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Would this really work here in Mendocino County? Why not? Especially if the City of Ukiah and the County and possibly PG&E, would get together and set up the system. It works everywhere.

“People hesitate to call anything a panacea,” says Toby Couture, an energy and financial markets analyst at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “But if you’re interested in creating jobs, getting capital flowing, and expanding renewable energy, feed-in tariffs get the job done—often more cost effectively than other policies.”

Then… Local banks can invest and create low-interest loans. The college can train installers and entrepreneurs in solar technology. Jobs can be created for installation and possibly manufacturing. Taxes from good jobs begin to help our local economy.

Let me once again echo the Florida folks:
“… We call on the Ukiah City Council and the Mendocino County Supervisors to make Ukiah and our County the solar gem of California. We do not need to look any further than the Gainesville or German experience to see what really works. All we need and expect is leadership.”
~~

From DAVE POLLARD
How To Save The World Blog→

[Repost: Nested within a longer post, Four World Changing Questions (well worth the read), is an update on this Pollard classic. -DS]

Knowing and Learning:

1. Understand What’s Happening: Before you can engage others and act purposefully and effectively you need to understand how the world really works (not what they tell you in school or in the media about how it works). The world is complex, and understanding and embracing complexity is a challenge to our culture’s predilection for oversimplification and dichotomy.

2. Imagine What’s Possible: Next, you need to be able to imagine a better world, one that is not addicted to growth and consumption. If you can’t imagine it, you will never be able to decide how to achieve it.

3. Be Pragmatic and Realistic: There are many things you can do, and many wonderful-sounding but unenforced, unenforceable and/or ineffective regulations and actions, so you need to learn what actions actually work. This takes a lot of time and energy, and to do it you need to stop doing some other things you are doing that are distracting you from learning these important truths.

4. Know Yourself: Then, to assess what you can do about all this, you need to know yourself, which means giving yourself the time and space to discover who you really are, what your true gifts, passions and purpose are, and therefore what you’re meant to do.

5. Build Personal Capacity: And finally, once you’ve learned all this, you need to discover and acquire the additional capacities you need to be effective at bringing about change in the world. This doesn’t entail changing yourself to be what you’re not, but just learning some new skills and abilities that will equip you to accomplish more with less effort.

Most of us never have the opportunity to do any of this, so we end up doing ill-informed, half-hearted, non-time-consuming, and largely ineffective things. We complain, we sign a few petitions, we feel guilty, but none of that gets us anywhere. We say we’re doing our best given the other commitments on our time, resources and energies, but are we? Until we have done these five knowing and learning steps, we can’t possibly know.

Teaching and Sharing:

6. Converse and Tell Stories: Once we have learned these things, we can start to engage others. Conversation, discussion, talking, explaining, showing — these aren’t ‘doing’ actions, but they are essential. Until we engage others in meaningful dialogue, our efforts are atomized, fragmented, isolated. The purpose of conversation is not to persuade, but to inform. And people will only listen to you if you are knowledgable, articulate, reasonable, fearless (not afraid to bring up prickly, complex, messy, controversial subjects in any social environment), authentic, enthusiastic (energy and passion are contagious and without them we have limited credibility) and persistent. As I have explained elsewhere (and others have explained better than I can), stories are usually the most effective way to convey information, ideas, and perspectives. They are subversive in their power.

7. Engage Obstructionists: There is little point arguing with people who are not yet ready to listen to you (as Daniel Quinn has explained). If you are talking with politicians or business people, you will often find that the best way to engage them is to show you care, but not get carried away by your emotions. In my experience, these people appreciate and relate to discussions that present them with new, objective information, framed in the context of sustainability (in the broader sense of ability to continue to exist without the need for constant effort to prop it up) and risk (what could go wrong). Proffering positive ideas to make our whole society more sustainable and to assess and address risks, will general garner attention and careful consideration by most people in the political and business arena, because this approach appeals to their self-interest and areas of competency, responsibility and authority. Trying to appeal to their moral sense is, in most cases, an unnecessarily more difficult tack.

Doing:

8. Be an Activist or Pioneer: Once the knowing and talking is done, it’s time for action. I recently wrote about what activism entails and why it’s important. Activism is intentional action designed to bring about political, social, economic, health care or educational reform. It generally entails confronting people (usually people with power) with information, ideas, proposals, challenges and/or demands. It is often a tactic when conversation and information-sharing (step 7 above) has proved fruitless. It is an expression of political power in the face of power, and hence almost always requires organization and force of numbers, though in some cases an individual or small group confrontation can actually galvanize others and produce the organization and numbers needed to demonstrate that the confrontation has popular support. Such individual or small group activism is a form of pioneering — showing people the way by experimentation and example.

9. Create Responsible, Sustainable Enterprises: Most of us spend a large part of our waking hours working, and one of the most effective ways we can bring about change is in the decision about what work we choose to do. Years of experience and work have convinced me that rather than trying to make existing organizations more responsible or sustainable, it is more effective to create new ‘natural’ enterprises that allow us to do the work we are meant to do, and at the same time to stop supporting, with our labour and our tax dollars, unsustainable organizations and organizational practices.

10. Be a Model: Ghandi famously said that we should be the change we want to see in the world, to model that behaviour. Good models for a better world are sufficient (they live comfortably but not extravagantly or wastefully), loving, tolerant, attentive (they listen more than they talk), responsible (no complaining, just doing), and sustainable. These models also recognize that having more than one child in this dreadfully overcrowded world is an irresponsible, unsustainable act.

11. Create a Model Community: Likewise, we need to create collaborative communities that are models for others, alternatives to the wasteful, ineffective, alienating, isolating ‘neighbourhoods’ of wary strangers living near each other solely because of a mutual proximity to their place of work. The ‘development’ industry treats our communities’ land as an asset that has value only when it is razed, overbuilt and then liquidated. We must find better models of community, where people choose to live and work together and exercise collective stewardship of their land on behalf of all life on it and the future generations that will live there.

12. Be Good to Yourself: Finally, it is essentially that we be good to ourselves and those we love. We cannot be effective if we allow ourselves to be consumed by guilt, or despair, or grief, or neglect our health and well-being. An essential element of making the world a better place is celebrating our achievements, our efforts, and the astonishing joy of life itself. We have to pace ourselves and look after ourselves, and each other, if we hope to continue to make a difference.
~

See also You’re not here to become an entertainer→
~~

From SHARON ASTYK
The Chatelaine’s Keys
Thanks to Dave Pollard

My friend Pat Meadows, a very, very smart woman, has a wonderful idea she calls “The Theory of Anyway.” What it entails is this – she argues that 95% of what is needed to resolve the coming crisis in energy depletion, or climate change, or whatever is what we should do anyway, and when in doubt about how to change, we should change our lives to reflect what we should be doing “Anyway.” Living more simply, more frugally, using less, leaving reserves for others, reconnecting with our food and our community, these are things we should be doing because they are the right thing to do on many levels. That they also have the potential to save our lives is merely a side benefit (a big one, though).

This is, I think, a deeply powerful way of thinking because it is a deeply moral way of thinking – we would like to think of ourselves as moral people, but we tend to think of moral questions as the obvious ones “should I steal or pay?” “Should I hit or talk?” But the real and most essential moral questions of our lives are the questions we rarely ask of the things we do every day, “Should I eat this?” “Where should I live and how?” “What should I wear?” “How should I keep warm/cool?” We think of these questions as foregone conclusions – I should keep warm X way because that’s the kind of furnace I have, or I should eat this because that’s what’s in the grocery store. Pat’s Theory of Anyway turns this around, and points out that what we do, the way we live, must pass ethical muster first – we must always ask the question “Is this contributing to the repair of the world, or its destruction.”

So if you told me that tomorrow, peak oil had been resolved, I’d still keep gardening, hanging my laundry, cutting back and trying to find a way to make do with less. Because even if we found enough oil to power our society for a thousand years, there would still be climate change, and it would be *wrong* of me to choose my own convenience over the security and safety of my children and other people’s children. And if you told me tomorrow that we’d fixed climate change, that we could power our lives forever with renewables, I would still keep gardening and living frugally. Because our agriculture is premised on depleted soil and aquifers, and we’re facing a future in which many people don’t have enough food and water if we keep eating this way. To allow that to happen would be a betrayal of what I believe is right. And if you told me that we’d fixed that problem too, that we were no longer depleting our aquifers and expanding the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, I’d still keep gardening and telling others to do the same, because our reliance on food from other nations, and our economy impoverishes and starves millions, even billions of poor people and creates massive economic inequities that do tremendous harm. And if you told me that globalization was over, and that we were going to create a just economic system, and we’d fixed all the other problems, and that I didn’t have to worry anymore, would I then stop gardening?

No. Because the nurture of my piece of land would still be the right thing to do. Doing things with no more waste than is absolutely necessary would still be the right thing to do. The creation of a fertile, sustainable, lasting place of beauty would still be my right work in the world. I would still be a Jew, obligated by G-d to Tikkun Olam, to “the repair of the world.” I would still be obligated to live in way that prevented wildlife from being run to extinction and poisons contaminating the earth. I would still be obligated to make the most of what I have and reduce my needs so they represent a fair share of what the earth has to offer. I would still be obligated to treat poor people as my siblings, and you do not live comfortably when your siblings suffer or have less. I am obligated to live rightly, in part because of what living rightly gives me – integrity, honor, joy, a better relationship with my diety of choice, peace.

There are people out there who are prepared to step forward and give up their cars, start growing their own food, stop consuming so much and stop burning fossil fuels…just as soon as peak oil, or climate change, or government rationing, or some external force makes them. But that, I believe is the wrong way to think about this. We can’t wait for others to tell us, or the disaster to befall us. We have to do now, do today, do with all our hearts, the things we should have been doing “Anyway” all along.
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From DERRICK JENSEN
Orion Magazine

If you’re in love with the world, fall in love with trying to save it

Years ago I was interviewed by a dogmatic pacifist (note to self: bad idea), who in his (grossly inaccurate) write-up said he thought I wanted all activists to think like assassins. That’s not true. What I want is for us to think like members of a serious resistance movement.

What does that look like? Well, to start, it doesn’t have to mean handling guns. Even when the IRA was at its strongest, only 2 percent of its members ever picked up weapons. The same is true for the Underground Railroad; Harriet Tubman and others carried guns, but Quakers and other pacifists who ran safe houses were also crucial to that work. What they all held in common was a commitment to their cause, and a willingness to work together in the resistance.

A serious resistance movement also means a commitment to winning, which means figuring out what “winning” means to you. For me, winning means living in a world with more wild salmon every year than the year before, more migratory songbirds, more amphibians, more large fish in the oceans, and for that matter oceans not being murdered. It means less dioxin in every mother’s breast milk. It means living in a world where there are fewer dams each year than the year before. More native forests. More wild wetlands. It means living in a world not being ravaged by the industrial economy. And I’ll do whatever it takes to get there (and if, by the way, you believe that “whatever it takes” is code language for violence, you’re revealing nothing more than your own belief that nonviolence is ineffective).

That’s fine, Derrick, but what do you want me to do?

Part of me wants to tell you to bring down the industrial infrastructure, the engine driving the destruction of the planet, converting so-called raw materials-read: living beings, biomes, and indeed the world-into products for sale. But there’s also a part of me that doesn’t want to suggest that, because I’m guessing you wouldn’t do it anyway. And besides, I don’t know you, and no one who doesn’t know you should ever tell you what to do (and if they do, you shouldn’t listen). In any case, ignoring what I have to say may not be such a bad idea, since what I really want is for people to think for themselves-not to bring down the industrial infrastructure because I tell them it’s killing the world, but rather for them to deeply attend to our current crises and come to their own conclusions about what we must or must not do, what we must unmake and what we must make anew.

But, Derrick, what do you want me to do right now?

Okay, here’s a list:

A lot of the indigenous people with whom I’ve worked have said to me that the first and most important thing any of us needs to do is decolonize our hearts and minds. Decolonization is the process of breaking your identity with and loyalty to this culture-industrial capitalism specifically, and more broadly civilization-and remembering your identification with and loyalty to the real physical world, including the land where you live. It means re-examining premises and stories this culture handed down to you. It means seeing the harm this culture does to other cultures, and to the planet. It means recognizing that we are living on stolen land. It means recognizing that the luxuries of this way of life do not come free, but rather are paid for by other humans, by nonhumans, by the whole world. It means recognizing that we do not live in a functioning democracy, but rather in a corporate plutocracy, a government by, for, and of corporations. Decolonization means recognizing that neither technological progress nor increased GNP is good for the planet. It means recognizing that this culture is not good for the planet. Decolonization means internalizing the implications of the fact that this culture is killing the planet. It means determining that we will stop this culture from doing that. It means determining that we will not fail.

And this is just the absolute beginning of decolonizing. It is internal work that doesn’t accomplish anything in the real world, but it makes all further steps more likely, more feasible, and in many ways more strictly technical.

Next, ask yourself what are the largest, most pressing problems you can help to solve using the gifts that are unique to you in all the universe. People sometimes ask why I write instead of blowing up dams, to which I reply that my only D in college was in quantitative analysis chemistry lab, meaning you don’t want me anywhere near explosives. Some people have said I should be an organizer instead of a writer. These people have never seen my work space; if I can’t keep track of my pens, how would I possibly keep track of anything more complex? Likewise, I’ve filed dozens of timber sale appeals, but it was a very laborious process for me; it took me twelve hours to do what others could do in two. And I write terrible press releases. I can, however, write books. Harness your gifts, and put them in the service of your landbase.

My third suggestion is to ask yourself: what do I get off on? One reason I don’t burn out as an activist is that I love what I’m doing. I was out one day with a wetlands specialist. We were trying to stop a developer from ruining a forest. The specialist dug into the soil, rubbed some between his fingers, and compared the color to a chart, which would help him determine if these were wetlands. I asked, “Do you get off on this?” He laughed and said digging in dirt was his second favorite thing to do after playing with his dogs. I laughed too and said I wouldn’t like to do that work. I, on the other hand, have condemned myself to a life of homework: I get off on trying to figure out, for example, the relationship between perceived entitlement, exploitation, and atrocity.

My next suggestion is to make protecting the land where you live-and by extension the rest of the natural world, since protecting the land where you live will be insufficient to protect anadromous fish, migratory songbirds, or anyone in a world being burned alive by global climate change-the most important thing in your life. That may sound drastic, but we’re talking about life on the planet here. There can be nothing more important than this.

So, Derrick, what exactly do you want us to do?

I want you to make the time to find what or whom you love-whether it’s salmon, sturgeon, a patch of forest, survivors of domestic violence, your own indigenous tradition, migratory songbirds, coral reefs, or Appalachian mountaintops-and I want you to dig in and defend your beloved with your life, and, if necessary, with your death. I want for your actions to positively contribute to the health and defense of the planet. I want for you to figure out how to make it so the world-the real, physical world-is a better place because you were born, and because you lived here.

All of this leads to the point, which is, put simply, to do something. Several years ago I was giving a talk to several hundred people about bringing down civilization. The audience was excited. The atmosphere was like a rock concert. I suddenly stopped and asked, “How many of you have ever filed a timber-sale appeal?” Four or five. “How many have worked on a rape crisis hotline?” Ten women. “How many have done indigenous support work?” Three or four. And so on. It’s all well and good to talk about the Great Glorious Revolution, but what are you doing right now?

The big dividing line is not and has never been between those who advocate more or less militant forms of resistance, or between mainstream and grassroots activists. The dividing line is between those who do something and those who do nothing.

Do something.

That’s what I want you to do. That’s what the anadromous fish and the Appalachian mountaintops want you to do too.
~
© 2009 The Orion Society
Derrick Jensen lives in northernmost California and is the author of, most recently, Songs of the Dead.
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From MARK T. MITCHELL
Front Porch Republic

Tis the season to be jolly. And the jolliest fellow of all is that rotund elf in the red suit. He’s happy. He’s spry. He binges on cookies and milk. It turns out, though, that if St. Nick put on weight at the rate of the American population, he’d have to add a few reindeer to his team and he would, if he is susceptible to human ailments, be at high risk for cancer, diabetes, and a host of other obesity related diseases.

A study released last month based on research by Dr. Kenneth E. Thorpe of Emory University suggests that if we want to control health costs it is imperative that we do something about obesity, “the fastest growing public health challenge the nation has ever faced.”

Indeed, it seems that Americans are doing pretty well if girth is any indication of success. We are heavier than ever before and packing on the pounds at a rate that is staggering. Here are a few of the findings:

• Obesity is growing faster than any previous public health issue our nation has faced. If current trends continue, 103 million American adults will be considered obese by 2018.
• The U.S. is expected to spend $344 billion on health care costs attributable to obesity in 2018 if rates continue to increase at their current levels. Obesity‐related direct expenditures are expected to account for more than 21 percent of the nation’s direct health care spending in 2018.
• If obesity levels were held at their current rates, the U.S. could save an estimated $820 per adult in health care costs by 2018 ‐ a savings of almost $200 billion dollars.

What could be causing such an increase? Well, it doesn’t take much of an imagination, but the study lays it out in case anyone is puzzled: “Obesity is attributable to inadequate activity, unhealthy eating habits, and changing food alternatives.” In other words, we Americans are spending more and more time sitting on our ample bums while eating more and more crap. It doesn’t take a researcher to figure out that this is a pretty good recipe for obesity.

Now what makes this all so very interesting is that our leaders are currently locked in a debate about overhauling the health care system to prevent spiraling costs and to insure some 40 million uninsured Americans. But this discussion of obesity forces us to ask a fundamental question: what is health care? Or perhaps we can ask something even more fundamental: what is health?

If, when we speak of health care, we think only, or even primarily, in terms of doctors, medicine, surgeries, and such, we have missed the mark, for health care should primarily be concerned with staying healthy and not recovering a health that has been lost. And the best means of achieving health is to, well, eat healthy foods, limit intake, and get regular exercise. If we neglect these basic rules and imagine that health care begins when we are in need of a doctor, then health care costs will continue to spiral upward even as our health declines. Health care must be concerned with health, and health does not, generally, come from a prescription or one more visit to the doctor. Health, like so many other good things, begins at home.

As it turns out, obesity is tied to plenty of expensive ailments. Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States after heart disease, which, as everyone knows, is exacerbated if not caused by obesity. A study by the American Institute for Cancer Research considered the link between diet, exercise, and fatness and estimated that obesity causes more than 100,000 cases of cancer in the United States each year, and the number will likely rise as Americans get fatter.

In July, federal and other researchers estimated that obesity-related diseases account for nearly 10 percent of all medical spending in the United States or an estimated $147 billion a year.

So why is this issue of national obesity not at the center of our health care debate? Because Americans take offense at anyone telling them what they can and cannot eat. They take offense at anyone suggesting that poor choices are at the heart of many of our physical problems. We want health care without caring for our own health. We want our cake and, of course, we want to eat it too. All of it. We demand the freedom to do as we please and then we expect our state-of-the-art health care system to rescue us from our bad choices. But freedom is not free. It requires either responsibility or a nanny to wipe the crumbs from our flaccid chins. And the nanny is not cheap.

Dr. Thorpe has suggested that if the obesity rates among the American population were to return to 1987 levels, the savings would pay for the health care of all those who are currently uninsured. Did you get that? He didn’t say we’d have to return to the hungry days of the Great Depression. He didn’t say we’d have to become vegetarians and give up french fries to boot. We would merely have to return our national girth to what it was in the balmy days when the Gipper occupied the White House, and we could take care of those uninsured for whom so many are concerned.

It seems like a pretty simple prescription: eat less, cut down on the junk, exercise regularly. But because we refuse to put down the Twinkie, our nannies in Washington are only too willing to saddle us with a health care bureaucracy that is as obese as we are. That’s not healthy.

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