Letter From the Future for Martin Keo book, pub tbd

Dear Reader,
I was musing on what to write for this essay when an email came in with the subject, “Letter from Vicki, 2030.” No, it’s not a hoax. I opened it and now offer it to you as better than anything I might write in 2008. I hope you find it as heartening as I did.
Vicki Robin
Langley, WA March 2008


Dear Vicki,
Hello from 2030 from your 85-year-old-self (yes, we still have our teeth and still dance). We just got the inter-time communications system up and running and every one of us alive gets to write one free letter to our younger self. There are so many restrictions on what we can say. I can’t tell you exactly what is happening. I can’t try to “change history.” You can’t write me back. Rules! As you can see, anal bureaucrats are still with us, but I understand their reasoning. We’ve made it into a very decent future but had to cross quite a desert to get here. Out of pure love we’d all like to spare you the suffering and change the past, but the GWC (Global Wisdom Council) says that if we eliminate the stripping away we might damage the peace we’ve made with living here.

Even though I can’t steer you (as if you would ever let anyone do that!) I can shine a light on the choices you are already making -- sort of like, “Nudge nudge, hint hint, step there.” I can’t tell you about the stunning innovations and twists of fate that got us to quite a grand 2030. I can only talk to you about what you already know. Don’t ask around to see if anyone you know got a similar email. A lot of them just didn’t make it into the future and they’ll feel bad knowing that. Of course, by getting this you know that you, my dear, will survive another 22 years. After this, lord knows what will happen to “us.”

If you are about to hit delete, thinking this is a hoax, please at least read this quick and dirty key to your future: less, local and love. Use less, live local and love other people, because they are what sees you through.

Hint One: Save – and make - energy
You made a good choice in 2008 to do an Airplane Fast and not fly for a year. The irony of flying around the world to lecture people on sustainable living finally got to you. You learned to travel electronically while letting your body stay more still. From that you started to belong where you are and, as you’ll see later, community is what the future is all about. I think now of the David Waggoner lines “Stand still. The trees ahead and the bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here.” Here, though, is now everywhere as well. The web is humming on levels you can’t imagine and frankly there’s been a big sigh of relief that air transport is constrained for… well, I can’t say. Think of the innovations in the last five years – YouTube, Wikis, Blogs, Webcams. Consider Moore’s Law (computing power doubles every 18 months). Add the intuitive capacities you’ve seen in young children – and yourself. And contemplate what “here” might mean to me. Planes to use seem like jalopies.

While staying home, you’d also do well to follow those impulses to make home more energy efficient. Hint, don’t buy any more lamps for screw-in bulbs; more efficient lighting is coming soon. Hint, just drive your 50-mpg Honda Insight until it dies; you’ll be amazed what’s next in mob-tech (that’s mobility technology). Here I just have to bite my tongue. I’ll just say that if someone we know invests in some Wind Farm Venture on her island or in some Solar Installation business she might be set for life. It used to be location location location. Now It’s local local local. By staying home you will see many opportunities to retrofit home for a Post-Peak-Oil future. You’ll also find yourself getting political, because shared solutions for energy are better than just putting solar hot water on your roof – as you will anyway.

Hint Two: Grow food
We’ve now studied the behavior of our species in transition and have discovered that a spike in “lawns to lunch” (home garden acreage) is a leading indicator of impending resource constraints. The future casts a shadow for those who pay attention to the horizon, and when people hanker after land and gardening like they used to hanker after opera and travel, you know a shift is coming. Follow all your impulses to grow food, to organize local food systems, to sidle up to neighbors with lawns and suggest you could find a young farmer who’d love to turn that useless mono-crop of grass into breakfast, lunch and dinner. Save seeds. Go ahead, if you want, and buy land to grow food, but frankly you have a talent for growing kale and zucchini – and not much else. Support CSAs. Partner with other singles to do a share. You’ve been thinking about raising chickens. All I’ll say is, “Not a bad idea.” Or join that goat coop, take that cheese-making class and buy up all the used canning jars at the thrift store. Think food. Dream food. Do food. Eat food (but less).

Hint Three: Make peace with your past – and future
I’m not going to kid you. Some really hard knocks are coming. Some are just as you imagine, others are not. A way of life based on treating finite resources as infinite is ending, and we are still living with the shocks and aftershocks of it. We were slow to move on the mandate of 80% reduction of carbon by 2050 and are reaping the consequences. Yes, there have been environmental catastrophes (but there have also been “benestrophes” – unexpected accumulations of good). Yes, many have died; some at their own hands, since living within the means of the planet didn’t seem like living at all. Be prepared to live through this, knowing that in the larger scheme of thing - and nature - it’s quite natural for populations to overshoot and collapse. Death itself isn’t as tragic as living in fear of death and allowing suspicion and greed to flourish in your mind. Cultivate a calm and caring attitude, even while you rail inside against it all (I can guarantee you’ll rail, weep, get mad… you’re human). Making peace now with the future means accepting now the many losses that will come, so that you won’t be in shock and useless. Be like the musicians on the Titanic. Create beauty, because those who will die and those who survive both need that. Clearly, since I’m writing, you and others survive – actually, life is grand. Making peace with the future also means that you will roll with the good stuff ahead as well.

So here’s some things you’re doing that I’d suggest you keep doing:
Your practice of frugality – getting the maximum pleasure out of every morsel consumed – puts you in a good position to welcome limits as sanity, not deprivation, and to surf the waves of change. Keep teaching your “high joy-to-stuff” strategies. A lot of people listen to you. Give them something real to chew on.
There is nothing wrong in your past – it’s all useful. Appreciate everything you’ve done and see what good can come of it. That goes for your relationships, of course - but I also mean (and I can’t say too much about it) the whole exuberance of the oil-enabled industrial growth model. Stay open to the good in every technology and every innovation because they may be precursors of the future light-structures. Question your assumptions, abandon your Luddite tendencies and ask about everything, “What’s good about you that brought you into being?”
Joe Dominguez used to point out to us (you and me… funny to talk with you this way) that when there was 25% unemployment in the 1930’s Depression, 75% of the people were employed. In other words, use your bright mind to see the opportunities in obstacles. In fact, the future is friendly to people who evolve and evolution tends to favor the braver – those willing to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Pay attention to what is being born, even as you tenderly allow all that is passing away to go.
The future will also be friendly to those who shift from “me” to “we.” Be an opportunist – but on behalf of your community. Which brings me to…

Hint Four: Treat everyone within 50 miles like you love them.
You will need them as your friends. They are the raw materials of a sane future, if you want to be purely pragmatic. They are also your brain; alone you’ll never know enough to survive, but within 50 miles of home is all the intelligence and information you’ll need. If you’re friendly and generous these neighbors will come to trust you. Of course friendliness actually takes guts – not the guts it takes to protest (which you will still do for years), but the guts it takes to risk rejection, care first, forgive, apologize, ask before you attack. In other words, loving the ones you’re with requires tolerance, acceptance and letting go of selfishness. I might also point out that among the 3 million people within 50 miles of you now are probably every friend, lover, dance partner, big thinker or young person you’ll ever need. Go find them. Trade with them. Network with them. Play with them. Help them through hard times. Share meals and homes. Call them to see how their interview or operation went. Ask them to coach you in reaching for your dreams. Even though they aren’t “exotic”, they’re actually interesting, remarkable, smart, kind and skilled. Every one a gem.

Pay attention to “co” words. They are the future. Cooperation. Communion. Community. Collaboration. Communication. Your Conversation Cafes don’t quite fit the word pattern but they are important for people to practice and learn all the other “co” words. Console will also be needed.

Do all you can in pairs and teams. Do work parties and cleaning parties and shedding stuff parties and investing clubs and buying groups and service groups. The era of the Lone Ranger and the Great Hero is passing. Build community. “If you invite them they will come.” Alone you are brittle. Together you are supple.

Hint Five: Pack your personal ark
Just as airlines have a baggage weight limit, to cross the great ocean of time and catastrophe into the future you’ll need to pack carefully. What of your current life must you have in a future governed by “less, local and love?” I can’t tell you what’s coming but I can say this: Scenario A is that you muddle through and your daily life doesn’t change that much in 25 years. The rich get richer and the poor poorer, but life goes on. Scenario B is that catastrophes (and “benestrophes” – overwhelmingly good things) do come. Your weather does change, the seas do rise, energy shortages do occur and the dollar isn’t what it used to be. Select what you want for either case. If it’s A, well, you’ll have the things you need and have shed of a lot of excess baggage. If B, you’ll have the things you need – and need them. Here are some categories to consider:
Seeds: heirloom, open pollinated
Books: reference, how-to and inspirational
Tools: to build things, fix things, make things (good girl, you got a treadle sewing machine in 2007), study things, kill things (a rifle, butcher knife and fishing pole), roll things (wheels save your back and feet)
Clothes: warm, durable, layers, good shoes, glitter for parties
Furniture: durable, comfortable, multi-purpose
Household: durable. Really useful things with cords are okay (we’ve never been without that blender), but hand tools will be needed… like wire whisks and wooden spoons and good chopping knives.
Health care: stock up on and freeze must-have prescription drugs, buy basic medical books. You’ll be surprised at how little you pop in your mouth is still needed. Remember what Norman Cousins said, “85% of all illness is self-limiting,” - and for the rest, I’d say that painkillers and antibiotics are heaven’s gift to the creaky.
Beauty: brushes and combs. Keep all those scarves and earrings (and a coupla lipsticks) to feel pretty, which is water for the soul.
Energy: batteries, yes - but everyone should have one back-up solar panel and/or hand- crank generator for communications technology. Get a solar cooker. Insulate whatever you live in. Double-pane windows. Use the last hours of ancient sunlight (Thom Hartmann’s name for oil) to create a low-energy environment for the future.

You get the drift. Buy and keep what will last. Buy and keep what has multiple uses (like a knife and pot rather than a Cuisinart and electric rice cooker). You’re not packing a real Conestoga Wagon so you can keep everything you have now if you want. Remember your old Your Money or Your Life idea of enoughness? Not just survival. Not just adequate. Truly rich in everything from basics to luxuries, but nothing in excess. Shed the surplus early and often. Scenarios A and B both favor living lightly.

Hint Six: Make yourself useful
Head’s up. A local future belongs to the person who makes herself truly useful to real people, not to the one who can market some useless gadget to unsuspecting consumers. You’ll find it hard to trade your knack for inspiring others for bicycle repair, but don’t worry. If you can make people laugh, you’ll always be taken care of. Hone all people skills (see Hint Four above). The future needs facilitators, negotiators, re-framers, therapists, counselors – anyone with patience in the face of human suffering. The future also needs: handymen, emergency management specialists, nurses, gardeners, inventers, record keepers, geeks and techies of every ilk, musicians, athletes, mechanics, engineers, cooks, team players, canning, inventers, teachers, midwives, writers, body workers, artists, project managers, inventers, story tellers, hunters and fishermen, builders, farmers, inventers, designers of every sort imaginable, healers of every sort imaginable, pathologists, emergency medical technicians, inventers. There’s no lack of good work here in the future.


I do hope this all gets through. The censors may zap anything I say that gives you too much information. But here’s what I can tell you about now. The birds are singing. The children are healthy. They don’t blame us for our mistakes – we now know for certain that our generation did our best with what we had and what we knew. This new generation understands that blame is toxic and they simply don’t do it. It makes them seem like angels, really. They know they are making the future – and that’s what gives meaning to life. They are actually watching over you now. Yes, we in the future travel in time to care for you. We do our best to help without interfering. You are loved. All of you. Have courage. Keep going. It’s working out.

Vicki

A Manifesto for this moment in time

I just rediscovered this writing from at least 5 years ago, written in the context of the work of the Turning Tide Coalition, a think/feel tank of social innovators wanting to address the complex interconnected challenges and opportunities of our time. We asked "What is the intersection of utter necessity (what we must do to survive), new possibility (what we can do now that we couldn't before) and human longing (what people would do in an instant if they only knew how)? Out of our work came many spin offs, including the Conversation Cafes, several books by other members and the Pachamama Alliance's Symposium. I discovered that the Symposium is using this "manifesto" I drafted in their material.

First Draft of a Manifesto For Our Times

By Vicki Robin

You’ve heard the bad news. Yes, it’s bad. Everywhere you look, problems are multiplying faster than technology can wipe them up, faster than laws can contain them, faster than wisdom can put them in perspective. Everyday people – you and me – feel disconnected and powerless. But there’s good news. We’re a healthy species. We’re a young species. We’re designed for success. And every single one of us is a member of the species, so we all have the capacity to think and feel and experiment our way into a future that’s healthy for all life. Here are some principles you can count on.

1. We’re not dumb. Ask anyone what the biggest challenges facing the world are in the next decade and you’ll get the same list. We know what’s wrong. We even know a bit of what “right” would look like. It’s a child’s vision of happiness: sunshine, family, flowers, friends, good stuff to do. The problem seems to be a sense of powerlessness. We’re up against a wall. There is no door. We want to do what’s right but every day we contribute to what’s wrong by doing what we must – driving our cars, working for large corporations, buying food grown with poisons, sending our kids to inadequate schools, watching stupid, violent TV programs to numb out. There must be a way to put into practice what we want to be real, what we know to be right. Therefore, we are people committed to creating a door in the wall and opening it so that everyone can have a decent life.

2. We are not greedy. We are a generous species, given half a chance. Once we know we have enough and feel secure that it won’t be taken away (which is totally possible in the world as it is), simple playground fairness tells us we won’t ever be really happy until everyone has enough. Physical appetite teaches us that over-consuming leads to belly aches. You can’t get enough of what you don’t really want. Once you have enough to meet your real and perceived needs, you can liberate yourself from building personal material security and devote yourself to assuring the collective material security for all life. In this context, barter, sharing, gifting, generosity all make sense and are a source of real wealth. Therefore, we are people who pledge to understand and have compassion for our needs, to fill them wisely and to devote the ample overflow of intelligence, care, attention, creativity, love and inventiveness to contributing to the health, sanity and sustainability of life on earth.

3. Good work and good works. We’re a helpful bunch. We like to work (but not all the time, for Heaven’s sakes!). The purpose of work is not just to make money. CEO’s know that. Child care workers know that. Unpaid volunteers know that. We work to learn, to participate in the work of the world, to challenge ourselves, to pass the time, to get out and meet people, to prove ourselves, to play. Therefore, we are people who pledge ourselves, to the best of our ability, to work for the good of the world while assuring our own well-being and that we meet our financial obligations.

4. Success. We are not the “best” species, but we are a wonderful species – full of creativity, compassion, tenacity and devotion. The fact that we are, in this moment, contributing to a major die-off of other species and degradation of the biosphere isn’t proof that we are bad. It shows that we are immature and need to grow up. The young of any species must learn the consequences of their actions. As a young species, our task is to face the dark side of our expansiveness and become collectively as wise as our great wise ones: Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, and Confucius – to name just a few. We are people who pledge ourselves to face our errors, to correct our errors and to become wise and generous companions to other people, cultures and species.

5. We are the Natural World – we recognize that the economy is embedded in the natural world, not vice versa. We recognize that “economy” originally meant “household management”. Through the economy, we fill our needs. We launched the Industrial Revolution to win our “battle with nature.” Nature, to some, seemed cruel and unpredictable. The Industrial Revolution (run by manufacturers and machines), and later the consumer economy (run by the current priests, economists), ironed out so many wrinkles so well that we’ve forgotten that our survival DOES depend on a healthy ecosystem. We need clean air, clean water, rich soil, biodiversity, and the web of life. If we treat the natural world like a bottomless cookie jar and a vast sewer system, WE will grow ill. If we eat the seed corn, we won’t have crops in future years. If we tear the siding off our house to feed the wood stove, eventually we won’t have a home. Therefore, we are people who pledge to discover how to achieve real fulfillment of every real need while preserving the integrity of our home, the natural world.

6. Connection. Everything is hitched to everything else. We separate things to control them, but our hearts know that life is a seamless whole. Through the scientific method, we learned to solve one problem at a time. But New Science teaches that life is a complex web, not a simple machine. This reflects our current reality; our ingenuity, together with liberalized trade and sophisticated technology, can create new solutions and therefore new problems at unimaginable speed. Indeed, our imaginations are exhausted. We can barely cope. So we leave the future to “those in the know.” Instead of being overwhelmed, however, we can learn to walk and chew gum at the same time. We can hold contradictory information in our awareness without having to settle on one thing. We can hold six world problems and 12 world solutions in our awareness and watch new patterns form. We can, as groups, recapture the innocence of fearing and hoping and thinking together about everything that troubles us. Therefore, we are people who pledge to grow our capacity to simultaneously think and feel about the state of our world without going numb, to engage in seeking solutions with the joy of a young child feeding ducks by a pond, to absorb the pain of one another’s ignorance and yearning, and to shift from hopelessness to possibility as our ground of being.

7. Spirit. We are a species who creates value and meaning through stories. Who can contemplate the 15 billion year unfolding of our universe without an overwhelming sense of awe? Or the mysterious emergence of life, the miracle of a nurturing earth and the unpredictable capacity for love of our species? Whatever other species make of this journey through time and evolution, humans everywhere have invented and collected tales, true and mythic, to help us understand this mysterious gift we participate in. It’s called religion. It’s called spirit. It’s called “the gods.” Whatever name we use, the truth is the same. We have values, things we hold dear, hold sacred. We feel shame and remorse when we violate our own truths. We worship. We pray. This is as true about humanity as our biophysiology, our institutions and laws, our material creations. Therefore, we are people who acknowledge our humility, who will incorporate our reverence along with our passion and intelligence in our work of healing the world.

8. Freedom. We are the species that can change its mind; we have the capacity to choose. Pretty awesome! The only catch is that if we choose only our own good to the exclusion of the good of others, the system (be it democracy or the natural world) stops working. So, it turns out we are free to choose the high road or the low road, what’s good for all or just good for us. Could we choose to amend the rules of the game to create a society that values people over profits, life over pollution, mutual care over guns and prisons, vision over dysfunction? Can we use our freedom to dream a new dream for all of life? Therefore, we are people who will claim our freedom to recreate the world in the image and likeness of health, sanity, diversity, joy, sufficiency-for-all, connection, spirit and wisdom for all.

9. Courage. Deep heart, passionate action on behalf of ideals. We have what it takes. We can face our own shadow. We can grieve and release our past, acknowledge our shortcomings, rely on one another as an expression of strength. We are not a nation or planet of sheep, satisfied to be spoon fed mental pap in exchange for security. We rise to the occasion. And this moment in time is one helluva occasion. Therefore, we are people who act on our best information and intuition on behalf of the evolution of life.

10. We have a future. Our children, grandchildren and many generations to come will continue to be the crew of Spaceship Earth. Evolution isn’t over. There is much to discover, within and without. We can’t do it in one generation. We will, for better or worse, pass on unfinished business to the next generations. We are wayfarers. Campers in an ancient and ongoing forest, both natural and human-made. Therefore, we are people committed to leaving this earth in better shape than we found it.

Airplane Slow...

Now the challenges begin.

I thought this morning that I should schedule a retreat after Conversation Week. Somewhere beautiful, relaxing, uplifting, surrounded by grand people.

This afternoon an invitation came in for all that - for free. The only hitch is... it's in upstate New York. I checked the train. It would be 3 days from here to New York City. Only $312. Sitting up all the way. I wrote the organizer, thanking him but guessing I might pass on it. He wrote back:
"i took a sabbatical earlier this year and to get to europe i sailed. let's just say that i will forego europe entirely before sailing there again!"

So where can I go closer to home? There's the Korean Spa in Lynnwood. No joke. It's total self care for under $100. I could organize a gaggle of girlfriends to take a day together there and maybe go to a show in Seattle. Then I checked out Breitenbush. Yep, I could take two days there ($100 plus gas and massage) before speaking in Vancouver, WA.

In the old days (and maybe the future) I'd travel if the destination, purpose and the people appealed and somehow it was 'free'. I hid from myself that it wasn't free to the earth and it wasn't free really as it took those two travel days and two pack/unpack days to make the days away happen. I was a tad enthralled with these unbidden opportunities for high play, good work and deep conversation. In the new days of this Airplane fast I'm discovering it's like most other 'diets.' You substitute one pleasure for another and discover tastes for things that formerly seemed ordinary or invisible. Like people who now vacation in their cars because flight and hotels and exchange rates are through the roof, will I gush eventually about all the beauties close to home?

I also recognize that this constraint is voluntary for me and imposed for most others. I understand that fasting in this way is as much an expression of my privilege as flying. We all live in the ambiguity of the times.

Pick the Questions for Conversation Week

Hey everyone, please go to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=vZIiOzEV1pL0LV_2f17vLcLQ_3d_3d and rate the 50 questions there (selected from 600 submissions from around the world) to help select the 10 most important questions in the world today. And then send the link to 10 more friends... and ask them to send it to ten more. Imagine hundreds of thousands of people in the next two weeks voting on these questions. Imagine knowing the list we'll use for Conversation Week includes questions people the world around really loved! And then imagine hosting a conversation where you live.

Watch more videos like this at www.quantumshift.tv

My 2008 Airplane Fast

Kurt Hoelting http://www.insidepassages.com/ last Fall told me his plan to not travel more than 60 miles from home in 2008, and not drive anywhere. I knew the minute I heard him that my goose was cooked. The worst thing I do in terms of Global Warming is fly around the world educating people on lifestyle change. I decided that in 2008 I would not fly - and promptly went to Brazil, then California, then Florida. Enjoying them all the more knowing that in weeks I'd be grounded.

I will still travel as the need or desire arises, but only by car, boat, train or bus. Mostly, I wanted to do this fast to see what would show up in by slowing down an activity I'd come to count on for stimulation, novelty, respite, a bit of admiration when I'd speak, and the sense that despite the evidence of daily life, I was making a difference. Not flying felt more radical in this era of excess than anything I'd accomplish by flying. Not only that but my average of 10 trips a year meant at least 20 days of travel and 20 more days of packing and unpacking. That's over a month i'll get back. For what? good question. Beyond that, those days are fairly mindless and increasingly uncomfortable. If I want to be mindless with less impact, there's plenty to do at home.

Will my apartment be cleaner? Will i write more? Will I spend more time with my local friends, developing those intimacies i truly desire? Will I read and learn more, seeking the stimulation of great and rich minds rather than mindless novelty of ... what? another airport, another rental car, another city with Green and White Interstate signs. Further, can i keep connected with the people and cultures I love through other means? More phone calls (I've got my Skype set up and the videocam is coming soon), more letters (with stamps?). We'll see.

When I bounced up and down in silver sausages with wings on behalf of YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE I used to do a prayer for take-off and one for landing. On take off I'd express gratitude for this great gift of soaring above the earth, viewing her beauties from on high. On landing I'd pray that every person on this plane would achieve their highest intent for travel - even if they are all self-canceling. Even then I knew I could stay home and if the guy beside me going to a sales meeting for marketing useless widgets that pollute the earth in each moment of their brief life from oil, to factory to WalMart to the dump would stay home. But his drive to make a living by making a dying for the earth seemed to require us to file together onto planes and do our work. I'm finally acting on that irony. Of course, I also don't have a best selling book to tout, but even if I did - or do in the future - is there a way to stay home physically while traveling electronically?

I'm just 7 weeks into the experiment. I've canceled one teaching trip, the result of which was the organizers "discovered" someone in their hometown who also teaches YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE. Hmmm. Does flying famous people around diminish our capacity to see the rich intelligences in our hometowns? I've declined to fly to CA to a quarterly meeting with a think/feel/be tank I've been with for 7 years. I'll go once on the train. But amazingly, at least one member of this group is going to be in my area and I've been invited to an afternoon of deep reflection with her. And I'll hang out with others more on the phone.

I've already been on the web and plotted my next trip to Brazil. A train to Miami and a boat to Rio will take me a few weeks, but then it's not 'traveling' in the dessicated sense of flying hither and yon, but rather a road trip, a cruise, an adventure all by itself. I'm even thinking of getting in my car a bit more and driving to vacation locally.

Pablo Neruda's poem applies...

KEEPING QUIET

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let's not speak in any language;
let's stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about...

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with
death.

Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go

BRAZIL, WOMEN, TRANSITIONING AND TALKS

I am writing this on the long flight home from Brazil, just 6 hours into a 16 hour haul. Given that air travel shoots my Ecological Footprint from eco-heroine to eco-hog, from the decency of a Northern European to the gas-hog habits of North America, I have wondered often in this trip if it is my last. I am considering going on an airplane fast for a year and with oil prices rising, by the end of that experiment I might not be able to afford the flight, even if the planet could.

As with all my inner and outer conversations about resource constraint in the future, I've gotten a lot already just by contemplating life after air travel. I have actually lived through the air travel boom. My first flight was when I was about 7 years old. I was dressed in MaryJanes and white gloves and a dress with a white peter pan collar. It was elegant to fly. My first trip to Europe when I as 16 was on a Flying Tiger prop plane left over, I was told, from WWII. It took nearly a day and we had to stop for fuel in Iceland. Today that flight takes about 6 hours. The next time I went to Europe at 19 for a year of study in Spain, I went on a student ship which took, I believe, around a week - but what a week. We partied and had classes and flirted and by the end of the journey I had new friends and a boyfriend. Not bad. Several years after college, I took my Great American Road Trip with guy, dog and van which became the Great American Alternative Life with "back to the land" living and spiritual exploration and deep inquiry into the cultural and political norms and community. For 20 years I didn't fly. Then YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE came out and off I went again into the wild blue yonder, flying so much that for a while I had United Airlines Elite status. So flying became a habit. Leaving the earth's surface in an aluminum sausage at first felt like that early experience of luxury, but became a norm. So it is within my life experience that airplane travel is rare and special - and traveling the globe is possible without leaving its surface. So returning to Brazil might mean a train to Miami and a boat to Rio. That would likely take 2 weeks. Not 2 weeks of cramped suspension of normal life, but 2 weeks of adventure, relaxation, reflection. Of course that would require a less crammed to the gills life. I think the phenomenal wealth of resources we've learned to transform into daily comforts has given us, rather than the leisure society, the overworked society.

I have gone on about this as I think our imagination about life with less - less oil, less natural gas, less convenience, less variety of ready made products - has become impoverished. We become panicked like a smoker who's run out. We forget that people just like us - and even us - lived 60 years ago with far less and actually had interesting, intellectually stimulating, loving, happy, challenging lives. My father, for example, was the classic 1950's do-it-yourselfer who subscribed to Popular Mechanics and had a full shop in the basement. He built the furniture for my bedroom. He fixed everything. He even assembled from either a kit or a set of plans our first television which had a 5 inch screen with a magnifier in front of it to make the picture big enough for a family viewing experience. If we view the luxuries of highly technological existence as habit and not necessity and recall that less won't mean being bombed back to the stone age but rather put into a situation just 3 generations ago found normal, we might be willing to engage creatively in the changes that are coming due to resource constraint.

Why this meditation on the plane? I am so deeply imbued with the "living well on less" idea - from my mother's depression era training to my rural hunting/foraging/gardening days to my teaching frugality days - that I think about this the way an artist might notice how the afternoon light brings out the ochres. These days that conversation has gone from alternative to mainstream. Less is the order of the day. Of the future. Living in the US we may feel the constraints later than countries that have neither the money nor the military power to commandeer others' bootie much less protect their own from the global piracy called capitalism. On a finite planet, though, logic says even the last man standing eventually falls.

In Brazil there is greater recognition of coming collapse and of the insane strategies being used to delay it. Taxi drivers - the great popular informants about what is really going on - talk of Lula's folly of making a deal with the US to turn Brazil into a sugar cane plantation to feed ethanol into the world's cars. Productive orchards and farms are being transformed into mono crops. Cattle production is being driven deeper into the rain forest so more acres of the earth's lungs are being cut down.

I was surprised by how many end-times conversations I had in Brazil. The three questions are:

How soon will the collapse come?

How many will die?

What are you personally doing?

I think about these things, but do so mostly in secret as the dominant conversation is still so bullish on technology and growth. Even the Ecological Footprint, which is a clear, sharp mirror of our condition of overshoot (using more than the earth can restore), is not inspiring sufficient adaptation and planning. There is a wide gap between what a fair share for every human would be and the tinkering going on in most public and private enterprises.

The general answers to the questions are:

Within five years

Over half of all humans

Moving to rural communities

God, I don't know. As if to underscore the point, though, after writing the above the second film of the 9 hour flight came on. EVAN ALMIGHTY is about an unlikely congressman being chosen by God (Morgan Freeman as God) to build an ark to save us from a flood. Maybe it really is the end of the world as we know it time. Maybe, it is as unbelievable to us that life could REALLY change, that we could REALLY be thrown back on local resources with our current communication and transportation and technology luxuries cut down dramatically by the coming constraints. I've joked with some seriousness that we are in a frantic game of Musical Chairs but can't afford to stop dancing as most of the chairs now have disappeared while we've invited more and more folks into the dance. "Pick your chair" I've said, because soon you're gonna sit down and stay there. I've not so much picked mine as having followed an intuitive trail since getting cancer that landed me in a small village on a semi-rural island. As for timing, my guess has been that we will be in transition for several decades and that life and the global money system are far more elastic and resilient than 'doom and gloomers' would predict. As for die off, yes, I do think global populations will be decimated, though my hope would certainly be that

1. the decrease is through people my age and older kicking the bucket naturally rather than hanging on through resource intensive medical interventions (yes, I do get the implications) and making room for stronger, younger and less addicted to stuff people. and

2. that enough people wake up and change voluntarily in communities to build local arks.

I also found that people who asked these questions were, like me, beyond rage at having this predictable and preventable outcome here upon us and were into a sort of unreasonable lightness of being. Not giddy. Indeed, with much sorrow about the pain ahead. But engaged in the changes, and in opposing further destruction, with love instead of hate.

Well, even though I am probably more vigilant and informed than most on the topic, I am still on an airplane returning from my beloved Brazil.

The final week was 4 back to back lectures, three long interviews (Istoe, the Brazilian TIME, Folha-the NY Times of Brazil and Vidas Simples magazine) and several fascinating meetings.

My primary sponsor was AKATU, a Brazilian organization concerned with conscious consumption, in cooperation with my publisher, CULTRIX. In preparation AKATU did a study linking three values - simplicity, environment and post-materialism (think new cosmology or integral spirituality) - with consumption choices and found that committed to and interested in these values were of conscious consumption - voluntary simplicity, environment and post-materialism (think new cosmology or integral spirituality) - to consumer choices. Their event on Wednesday was very high class wtih simultaneous translation and half a dozen VIPs coming to the stage to welcome and praise and take a bit of credit. Helio Mattar, founder and honcho of AKATU leads a team of several dozen, nearly all women, and his comments on the panel and the event reflected that. He said feminine values were the key to conscious consumption and it was quite by design that women were presenting today. Here was reference to the feminine again, so frequent in Brazil. Was I attracting it? Was it a particularly Brazilian take on the future? Or was it a pointer to some key?

As always in Brazil, we started late but that didn’t blunt people’s openness to a fascinating morning of lectures. Samyra Crespo, President of GreenPeace of Brazil offered the history of the environmental movement and an analysis of the deep ecology vs policy and technology types of consumers. Lia Diskin offered a rousing history of the Universe, Western thought, and perplexities of the science of consciousness. I wound up the morning with a brief overview of the "voluntary simplicity" and YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE, which the Brazilian publisher changed to "Money and Life" (and will hopefully change back with the next edition).

Afterwards i went out lunch with four AKATU employees - yes, all women - and we reflected on what, if anything, feminine values had to do with the transition to conscious consumption. We tallied the feminine values that seem so important now: household resource managers, nurturers, whole systems thinkers, care, and cooperation. These values can't compete in the masculine world of commerce, ambition, winners and losers - indeed, when imposed through domination techniques they seem to lose their inherent beauty and generosity and become simply different cards in the same game. Then we looked at what ways Brazil itself is feminine - flow, spontaneity, affection, warmth, ease, the capacity accept/include it all. Perhaps this is another reason why the feel of that country is so dear to me.

My thoughts turned to why Brazil – which was also the “new world” exploited by Europe – turned out so differently from the US in spirit. Last year friends pointed out that it’s the difference between the British and the Portuguese. The British were spreading Empire. The Portuguese were getting in, getting the gold and getting out. So you have the difference between Northern and Southern Europe. And then there were the slaves. Brazil has, as with everything else, less inner conflict about that time in their history. In the US we are so wedded to our ideals and our founding documents are nearly biblical to us. Brazil has no such illusions about itself as a nation – it’s culture is where it hangs its hat, and the African influence in Brazilian culture is very well loved.

I did two other talks in Spanish (I’m fluent having lived in Spain), one where no one was around to translate the Portuguese for me. Imagine being on a panel where the audience and other panelists speak a language you can barely understand. Imagine it’s a very animated discussion. The topic is one where you are something of an expert. People in the audience are sharing deep insights. And suddenly the microphone is handed to you for your comments on it all. Good thing I was Brazilian enough by then to just flow with it J.

The final presentation was in a huge downtown theater as part of an every Saturday inspirational seminar where a popular talk show host brings in speakers. Very professional, very fun and very good it was the end of the trip as I was ready to stop!

So now I’m back, still infused with the perfume of Brazil. Boat next year?

And I’m deep into Transition Whidbey. Sign up at http://twhidbey.collectivex.com to see what we are doing.

BRAZIL, BRUNTLAND AND THE POWER OF THE FEMININE

Last night in Sao Paulo I heard Gro Harlem Bruntland speak, invited by the BANCO REAL, a Brazilian bank that is leading the financial institution pack in implementing sustainable development.

For those who don’t know Bruntland’s name, she led the UN World Commission on Environment and Development in the mid 80’s in the search for win-win-win rather than zero sum solutions to economic growth, social justice among a growing population and environmental integrity. They held hearings around the world (not in the US as here there was no support) and published 20 years ago the watershed OUR COMMON FUTURE which brought forth the global conversation about and conversion to sustainable development. She went on to head the World Health Organization and participated in the UN Commission on Global Threats.

I encountered this report in 1989 at the Globescope Pacific Assembly – the first US hearing on it – and it changed the direction of my life. I learned there from the UN and NGO glitterati that the biggest driver of unsustainable development was the level and pattern of consumption in North America, but, given our economy’s addiction to consumerism, that problem couldn’t be touched with a ten foot pole. Yet there I was, in the back row, knowing that Joe Dominguez’s financial program had, for a decade, helped thousands of Americans lower their consumption by 20% and have a better life. I was on a mission!

Needless to say, I was thrilled to have the chance to hear her assessment 20 years later.

Overall, she was firm, clear and determined. Given how deep we are now into unsustainability, I found her measured positive outlook inspiring – if only for the dignity of it.

She started by talking about Al Gore and the IPCC winning the Nobel Peace Prize (in her country) 10 days ago. Gore, she noted, awakened the conscience of the world. The IPCC demonstrated what a respected international institution, working steadily for years across boundaries and cooperatively, can do in creating change. She seemed to be saying need morality, good science and resolve to change in these times of threat.

She then reviewed other recent Nobel Peace winners – Wangaari Mathai, Shirin Ebadi and Mohammed Yunus – pointing out that now Peace in this world is far beyond simply resolving conflicts, but has to do with environment, human rights and closing the gap between the rich and the poor. Peace is now connected to every issue facing us – they are all connected. She also pointed out that these three laureates mobilized women for peace – and the essential role of women as both the victims of “man-made” crises and the strongest voices for a more whole-system way forward.

She went on to talk about her roles after the WCED. As the head of the WHO she participated in the first global convention on health regarding tobacco. Having worked on both UN and US government consensus documents that involved hours of debate over every word only to have the final reports gather dust, doing nothing to change anything in the short term, I have sworn to never again pour months of my life into such apparently useless palaver. Yet hearing her I saw that work from the view of a woman and bureaucrat who stakes her life and reputation and hope for the future on building institutions with good governance practices that can, over time, with patience and resolve, move the world steadily towards justice and sustainability. I could see that forming commissions, developing clear principles of operation (respect, transparency, fairness and such), developing clear objectives/targets/timelines, engaging the research community in providing high integrity, accurate information, issuing recommendations that are then monitored and hopefully resourced – all of this slowly moves the human enterprise towards comprehensive solutions. In short, I admired and went to school on her maturity, patience and reason.

She told the story of the WHO’s response to SARS. She called the outbreak a ‘sharp, short shock’ and as such it mobilized a collaborative effort across normally competing governments and labs which, in 6 brief months, eliminated the threat. This story showed how human systems, once mobilized to address a clear threat, are capable of miracles.

In her view, Global Warming is such a whole system shock that must be addressed. It creeps upon us so response has been too little by a very long shot, but now the sharp short shocks of Katrina and the IPCC report and the Stern Report and the rapidly melting glaciers and ice caps has the world on alert. She recounted her work on Global Threats that showed that there is no such thing as an isolated threat anymore – that terrorism for America is not isolated from starvation or environmental refugees or droughts. We are in an interconnected world and Global Warming is the perfect expression of how we need shared solutions to this biggest threat to our collective survival.

She recounted as well the story of smokestacks in the industrializing UK. Health officials showed how the smoke was affecting the health of the villages around factories so they solved the problem by building taller smoke stacks. The villagers’ health improved… however the downwind countries like Norway were now feeling the effects. A great deal of debate and demands and denials ensued until the science minister told Margaret Thatcher that beyond a shadow of a doubt the downwinder’s claims were correct. She could no longer assert the science was equivocal and not be caught with her knickers down. Soon she promised to reduce sulfur by 30%. In other words, Bruntland was showing us again and again how solid science coupled with consistent pressure from public and private sectors coupled with democratic processes can and will solve our problems.

But, she absolutely added, we haven’t a moment to lose. What is now different is that we know that we have a global warming problem. That debate is over. Even Bush, she said, has changed some of his tune this last year (though with great restraint she did not add “but not enough by a long shot”). So we must mobilize the world community to face this threat while strengthening democratic institutions.

On the face of it, this was nothing new, nothing bold, nothing dramatic. But as a wise global grandmother she was taking us all by the ear and sending us upstairs to wash our faces of lies and clean up our dirty hands (our actions).

THE RETURN OF THE FEMININE

This message so resonated with insights I had over the weekend in Florianopolis. Three days ago I engaged in an all-night ceremony with musicians and singers chanting and praying and seeking visions for their lives, supported by the most amazing lightening and thunder storm that sent buckets of purifying rain down upon the hut we were in. Pachamama, Mother Earth, they said, was calling us. The phrase “longing for limits” came to me in the night as I contemplated the very global, interconnected and seemingly out of control problems that Bruntland feels we can address through good science, good governance and good will. Our Western Enterprise looked to me like children – boys mostly – out of control on a playground, exhausting themselves, engaging in ever more destructive games, sensing danger but unable as a gang to stop themselves. A sort of Lord of the Flies scenario but instead of sticks and stones we are playing with weapons and wealth and carving up the spoils of the earth while ignoring the obvious longer term consequences. Deep inside, like spent children, we know we have to stop but as long as the frenzy continues, stopping seems more dangerous than keeping on. I could see that the mature feminine – the mother or grandmother – needs to bring her full compassion coupled with stern rebuke, saving the boys from their mounting violence by telling them they must stop, come inside and go to bed. Now! Some aspect of humanity must call a halt to the dangerous games and men in gangs are notoriously unable to stop themselves from collective evil that no one of them would ever commit on his own. Mob violence unleashed. Only the grandmothers – the mature feminine – can call these boys to account. Only the grandmothers can forgive them their excesses – knowing they themselves are heartsick, spent and lost - while making them face the consequences and clean up their damage.

Many these days recognize that the feminine – be it in women or men – is the antidote to the hyper-masculine domination of the earth and her peoples. Women are finding in themselves new strength to confront the wrongs without vengeance or fear. Women are finding their voices, singing sweetness as well as saying in no uncertain terms what must be done. Women are exercising the power of the mature feminine, unmovable yet full of love. Women are the creators and preservers of life. They care for the family. The steward the resources so all the children flourish. They are wired for whole system thinking and connectivity – the very qualities that Bruntland in her own way both demonstrates and calls for. The woman knows how to hold, contain and constrain with fair, no nonsense love. I could feel in myself, in this most warm and feminine place – Brazil – a call to be in my own way a grandmother to my rowdy tribe of guys. And I got from the gathered group a profound reflection of this same energy I carry – of warmth, compassion, love and clear calling to account. These don’t feel like marching orders. These feel like rocking orders. Like gathering in with love those I might touch through my words and actions, making them safe and also making them look at, mourn and correct the messes we’ve made.

OTHER CONVERSATIONS

The evening before this powerful ritual I spoke to a dozen people about consumerism and the YMOYL approach to recovering from this powerful addiction. These days, as I pay more attention to the complex issues around Peak Oil, I see how oil has been our binge food of choice. It has enabled this massive expansion beyond our social and biological limits. I used to see credit cards - unsecured debt - as the biggest enabler of excess but I now see below that the gush of oil through the human enterprise and of course, the ideology of 'freedom as no limits' as key components.

A fascinating dialogue ensued between a sociologist and an Earth Mother artist woman. It was about Bolivia. In his view, a social and political approach is needed to the wealth gap to lift the poorest people out of poverty. He cited Bolivia where apparently the poverty is comparatively profound. He had statistics to prove it. The artist, who had traveled extensively in Bolivia, begged to differ! In her view, the subsistence way of life there supported rather than inhibited people's survival. To her, the culture was rich, the communities strong. To him, infant mortality was high and diets were restricted. It showed me again how our worldviews influence our strategies for 'fixing' what is clearly going wrong globally. Were these people my artist friend saw as rich impoverished? It reminded me of my first trip to Latin America when I had an opportunity to take take a journey with a shaman in Ecuador. A sociologist would have judged his family and tribe in the worst condition possible - all sleeping on one platform bed in a hut without walls, the children dirty, the women clearly serving men who lounged around 'doing nothing.' Yet within the space of the ceremony was the richest, more lavish experience of the divine one could ever imagine. One way I resolved that incongruity - and still do - is to ask myself, an educated and relatively well off westerner, to use my knowledge, capacities, intelligence, skills and connections to make sure the way of life the Achuar prefer continues to be available to them. To make sure they have the money to send representatives for their interests to international meetings, to make sure their stories are told in ways that bring respect and protection to them. And all the while, making sure i am open to what they have to teach me so that my life can be ever more beautiful and useful and humble.

Then, on my way back to Sao Paulo from Floripa I was stuck in the airport waiting for two hours, fortunately by a young man who spoke flawless English. He's a middle class Brazilian who has taken to studying and playing the stock market to better himself - a real critic of central government planning (that's spelled corruption, by the way) and a real booster of the free market's capacity to create wealth and well being. He gave as an example iron mining in Brazil, a major extractive industry. He criticized the locals for their resistance to the big corporation engaged in mega extraction. If they aren't getting enough money, well, it's their leader's fault for filching it, not the corporation's fault since they are being quite generous with the local people. I told him two stories from my own experience. First, how the American military, when negotiating treaties with Native Americans, had to first rearrange the Indian's culture of decision making since they had no leaders who were empowered to negotiate with the hierarchical army - they decided as a community using consensus. Eventually the army had to find those in the tribe most willing to sell the others out for a price, name them chiefs and having them sign papers that held up in hierarchical American courts of law. And so the West was lost to those who lived there. The other was how tribes in Ecuador are successfully resisting the oil companys' claims on the oil under their parts of the jungle. To whom do resources belong? To the people who live in the land, or to corporations with money to exploit whatever resources there are wherever they are? The young man smiled at both stories. "Of course you are right" he said. Here again are the clashes of cultural norms that reveal very different stories about fairness and the good life. I am ever with the question of a way forward that has integrity.

IN SAO PAULO
These next few days I will give several talks in and around Sao Paulo to large groups of people. I now have copies of the Portuguese translation of YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE in hand; it is beautiful … and I can even read it. I hope to mobilize my masculine capacity to make waves with my feminine capacity to make hearts melt – we shall see.

Plans A and B at Visao Futuro

Plans A and B in paradise

I am sitting on the veranda that surrounds the dining area here, feeling the peace of the air, the rolling landscape, the pond with the windmill. Murals of a jungle paradise are painted on the walls where the food is served – vines, flowers, animals and if you look, a small person as much a part of the landscape as the colorful birds. The columns holding up the tiled roof are wound with bright mosaics of vines and flowers. Paradise.

But wait. The water catchment pond where the windmill lazily turns is half empty. Yesterday we had a brief thundershower, but not enough. It’s been dry here for far too long. The rains usually begin in august. Now it is October. And its hot. The pond reminds me that this exquisite retreat center that has awakened the hearts of probably thousands of Brazilians depends on the rains. The climate. Has enough of the rainforest been taken down to affect the weather here, far, far away? Amalia da Souza who works with Global Greengrants is here again (we shared a room last time I was here) and she confirms that the American appetite for biofuels (enabled by a deal between Lula, formerly the champion of the workers, and Bush) is turning so much cattle land into crop land that cattle ranching (for McDonald’s burgers) is encroaching further into the jungle. No, she said, it is not anywhere near a tipping point, but the destruction continues.

Susan Andrews, the visionary and source for this whole center, told me as we talked about the underpinnings of the global economy, that she and her staff are thinking about Plan A and Plan B. Plan A is that everything continues more or less working over the long haul. It simply acknowledges that no matter how bad the signs and signals of ecological or economic collapse, both nature and financial markets are far more elastic than we can imagine. In Plan A, people from all over Brazil still drive and fly, still have disposable income, still come here for restoration and spiritual education. The rains still come, the students still come, everything works. But they are now developing Plan B. In Plan B oil production diminishes year by year, disrupting the basics of the industrial way of life. With transportation more expensive, people’s livelihoods and lifestyles become more local and possibly more difficult, time consuming and closer to the bone. Global financial institutions and money flow is disrupted. In that scenario, this center might be less a retreat for city dwellers and more of a survival unit for the people in this area. I can look around and see that here as well. The dormitories become living quarters. Some of the meeting rooms become production factories for necessities – cloth, rope, clothes, building materials, etc.

When I met Susan at the airport just two days ago, she was returning from Fortaleza where there is a VisaoFuturo center and also where Neem trees grow. The Neem tree is knows for its many uses, including medicines. Vandana Shiva has taught us all a great deal about this tree as it is crucial to village life in India yet it is being patented (not sure the status of this fight). Susan is increasing the production here of Aryuvedic medicines, as this treatment system is part of her teaching. Growing the Neem tree works in both Plans A (this becomes an Aryuvedic teaching, treatment and medicine center) and Plan B, these medicines are used to treat those who live here.

While my friends and I don’t talk that much about it, I do think about plans A and B for where I live, Whidbey Island. Plan A would be business as usual – a growing tourist and commuter economy, a shrinking agricultural economy, land prices increasing as more and more people with wealth buy up retirement and second properties, young people moving off ‘the rock’ to seek their fortunes elsewhere because housing gets ever more expensive, a place known for the arts where artists can little afford to live… you know, the development story everywhere. In the midst of that, people like me will create home based businesses using their minds and their technology to create value for others scattered around the world. The arts will flourish because every other person sings or acts or dances or writes poetry. In Plan A, all the relocalization efforts we engage in will, of themselves, add value. More gardening means more fresh food means more health. More local currency and local businesses and local exchanges will weave tighter the bonds of community. More bicycles and solar electricity and heating and wind power will mean more health and self sufficiency. More catching water from roofs in cisterns to water gardens will mean protection for limited island water supplies. None of our efforts will be wasted and life for those who pay attention to these shifts to “less, local and love” will simply have more wonderful lives. Plan B will for a while look like Plan A, but eventually be necessary, not just nice.

And that is it for today. My lecture went famously this morning. I am now officially half Brazilian as everyone has welcomed me into this softer more loving culture with open arms.

Visao Futuro - Dreaming the Future Center Brazil

I am at Visao Futuro again and feeling so at home in many ways. Greeted by a soft, spacious landscape, friends from past years, some familiar routines and discovering that somehow my Portuguese has ripened even while on the shelf and I can speak and understand far better than practice would predict.

This is a rural yoga/meditation/spiritual education retreat center about 2 hours from Sao Paulo, drenched in natural beauty and the years of love invested by the founder, Susan Andrews, and the staff and the maybe thousands of students who've refound themselves here. Susan and I met 'by chance' on a ferry when she was attending a future visioning events in Seattle nearly 10 years ago and we created a sisterhood in that short water crossing. We are the same age and bent - passionate about spiritual/social transformation. Her path post Harvard led her to India and PK Sarkar, a guru in the tantra tradition and social philosopher (google PROUT). After his passing she was inspired to live and teach in Brazil and create what he called a Master Center, a self sufficient rural, ecological and spiritual community - what we might call and ecovillage.

Engaged as I am in "relocalization" - imagining a flourishing future with less oil and therefore more local production of "the good life" - I am looking with new eyes at this center. The teaching of profound spiritual truths here happens as much via the arts as it does via traditional spiritual practices. There are always actors and dancing and ceremony and play mixed in with Susan's lectures on biopsychology and principles of yoga and long meditation, yoga and changing sessions. Right now on the lawn in the spring sunlight and heat perhaps a hundred people have just done a patty-cakes game and are now doing a joanna macy exercise.

To decorate for this spring festival (it's the day of the child here in Brazil so the spirit is childlike), they painted old 2 liter pop bottles and then sliced them like peeling an apple in one piece so they hang like bright corkscrew streamers from the trees. A "bulletin board" was made by lashing bamboo poles together with twine (made from coconut shells) and stretching fabric over the frame. Flowered fabric was also cut in strips and has wrapped all the building poles. In other words, an oil-depleted world may be an art-rich world where the leftovers from industrial society become the art materials. While I haven't been to Bali, I am told everyone there is an artist. We humans have had paint and fabric and twine - not to speak of hugging and laughter and games - for thousands of years. We have to remember that easy cheap oil has brought us new and easier ways to do what we have always done - communicate, create, care for one another, grow and harvest food.

The design of this center is also a model of ecological living. They process gray water through purification ponds and reuse it for everything but drinking. They have dug several water cachement ponds to supply the center which hosts a hundred or more people every weekend. Organic gardens grow most of the food we eat and the growing, cooking and cleaning employs dozens of locals who otherwise might have migrated to the favelas of sao paulo to survive. They have photovoltaics and solar hot water. i believe many of the bricks for building were made here.

Ahh, everyone is dancing now towards the next activity. it's a day of theater and play celebrating spring and to the degree i can understand (sometimes I'm helpless but someone will point me right) I will participate.

Ate mais! Seeya soon.

My Fall Workshops, Lectures, Conferences

IFG Teach-In on CONFRONTING THE TRIPLE CRISIS
September 14-16, Washington DC
http://ifg.org/events/TripleCrisisUpdatedSchedule.pdf
My workshops are Sunday Morning

• Consumption Addiction with Thomas Princen and Michael Maniates
• "Rethinking Freedom in a World with Limits"
  
• We live in the era of limits, of the consequences of our actions, addictions and avoidances of the truth. Freedom as no limits, the American cowboy, cornucopia and individualist ethic, has hit a wall of reality. Oil, gas, water, fisheries, agricultural land are all stressed. The nation and individuals are so far in debt financially and ecologically that our "structural adjustments" will be fierce. And soon. The good news, though, is that life after excess will be better. Amazing breakthroughs can happen as we hit the reality wall if we know how to absorb the shock of limits and transform them. Authentic freedom is the mastery of limits. Facing the death of a way of life will take inner work as well as outer change. Getting sober after our addiction will return us to our families, communities and integrity. There are skills of feeling free in a finite world. We can practice stopping when we are stopped, looking at how we got here and the clear instructions written on the wall we just hit, and listening for wisdom to learn the lessons we need to live well locally... on less stuff ... but with a large spirit of possibility and opportunity. Activists who learn the concepts, tools, techniques and processes of liberation at limits will lead the way in their communities. Without facing limits and finding authentic freedom, all actors in the system will make matters worse.
  

WHAT'S THE ECONOMY FOR ANYWAY? CONFERENCE
October 5-7, Washington DC
http://www.timeday.org/economyconference/agenda.asp
Dare to ask the BIG QUESTION: What’s the economy for, anyway? Is it just about having the biggest GDP or the highest Dow Jones average? Or is it about providing for a healthy, happy, fair and sustainable society?

My lecture October 6 at 9 AM "What Does Freedom Mean?"

• Freedom as "no limits" is the toxic mindset that drives hyper-consumption, hyper-competition, hyper-individualism and hyper-speed. They all lead to "hyper-whatever", an inability to develop shared cultural values and a lax permission for consumerism and "more is better" to continue as our one shared story of the good life. "This is a free country" we say as though that entitled us to compete for the last ounce of goodness in the commons. But "freedom within limits" is actually and always the truth, and transforming our economy will come naturally as we understand our limits and work with them rather than straining against them. Insanity is trying to enact limitlessness - a spiritual truth - in the material world. America leads the world in this cowboy, cornucopia freedom. Our debt and domination of the rest of the world's resources is testimony to our failure to grow up and show up as a mature global player. The good news is that once you are clear about your limits, you are free to put them where they will channel the essential freedom at the heart of the Universe towards healthy ends - like shorter work time, healthy living, great relationships and lots of fun. We need to give up what we never had - the freedom to go beyond all limits.

GREEN FESTIVAL
October 5-7, Washington DC
My workshop is Saturday October 6^th at 3PM in room 204AB.

Speaking – and Listening – Across the Divides

Red-Blue. Rich-Poor. Culture wars. Nimby. Money. Power. Resources. The issues we care about most are dying on rhetorical battlefields. Are our efforts to fight pollution, corruption, destruction, genocide being lost because of our un-civil wars of words? How can we speak our truth without polarizing? How can we win without assassinating our adversaries in our minds – and words? What strategies work for softening rigidity and discovering fresh solutions? When have your ideas prevailed without antagonizing ‘the other’? Share your stories of speaking and listening across your front line divides. Learn ways to invite ‘the other’ into conversation, to pose questions that open minds and hearts, to turn down the heat when tempers flare, to turn polarization into inquiry and to move your message non-violently

Simpler Living in Tougher Times

Reflections on Katrina, System Breakdowns and Simpler Living

September 15, 2005

Amidst all the shocking, infuriating, moving emails and news stories since Katrina struck, a few have resonated more deeply with me - and together suggest a place to put our feet as we walk forward from this event.

The first, surprisingly, was at Op-ed by David Brooks on Sept 4 NY Times called The Bursting Point. Brooks is a conservative commentator often dismissive of ideas and actions that make perfect sense to me and mine. He likened this moment to the early 70's when Vietnam, Watergate, and the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and MLK woke us from the dream of America as the innocent, optimistic, good guy nation. We lost faith in our institutions and those breakdowns opened political and cultural space for breakthroughs... some to our liking, some not. He suggests to those with a new vision for America that 'now is the hour' - strut your very best stuff.

The second was from Deena Metzger. Katrina, she said, isn't an event that happened to a few of us. It's part of an unfolding reality that's been happening for decades to all us. She suggests the best speed is slow, and the best approach is sobriety and community We need to discover, together, better responses to crisis through sitting in "council" - circles of conversations - that go as long and as deep as necessary. I quote:

How do we proceed? We do not know. When wise people are
confronted by situations that are beyond them, they admit their incapacity and
they call councils. We must call councils. We must call the elders,
wise ones, scientists, et al, the experienced ones of the world community to
confer with us and each other. Wise cultures call councils especially when
they are, as we are, in grave danger of escalating the damage by taking
short-term methods that can produce even greater devastation… We
must ask each other to set aside, entirely, our personal hopes for our future,
for our security, for our advancement. Let us all be like those who have
lost everything. We are those who have lost everything. We have all lost
everything. We have. There is no future unless we understand that we have
lost everything and we have to begin again. No one and no system in the
living world are safe at this
moment.

The third article I will insert below in its entirety. It's from Bill McKibben, a journalist in the Cassandra tradition who for decades has given us well researched, deeply human books and articles to show us where our society's preference for money as the measure of meaning and value was taking us. He locked on to the Global Warming issue long ago and earned his right to use Katrina as a portend of the environmental whirlwind that's coming. His other occupation - a Methodist Sunday School teacher - I believe gives his journalism a prophetic yet protective quality that speaks to me.

Before Bill's article, I want to tell of a few recent experiences of my own. They may seems 'beside the point' (as much of our daily lives do in times of crisis), but make a point eventually.

The weekend before Katrina hit I attended the Fifth Annual Simplicity Forum Congress - a group of educators, activists, authors, academics, and organizers committed to "honoring and achieving simple, just and sustainable ways of life." In the middle of this intense, strategic meeting we took a break to enjoy our beautiful setting in the High Rockies. Half the group hiked down to a river and literally chilled together with their feet in the water. Suddenly a large dead tree toppled right into the middle of the group, injuring several and hitting one woman directly on the head. Quickly, people arrayed themselves according level of injury and according to skills and capacities, forming a spontaneous team of nurses, wilderness medics, transporters, runners, counselors, witnesses and such. The badly injured woman was stabilized and carried up and out, then ambulanced to the hospital. The group processed the shock while continuing to work very effectively as a team on building the Forum. Of course, in the background everyone wondered what it meant that a near tragedy literally descended into our midst. By the end, it was clear. Simple living doesn't mean that nothing bad happens anymore in your life. It's the low-ego, high-equanimity and community way you go through what happens. It allows the best to come from even bad situations. A tree falls in the forest, and people who live more simply seem to respond naturally with directness, resourcefulness and skill.

Two weekends later, I spent 4 days in the hospital for a high-tech surgical repair way beyond woodsy simplicity's capacity to deal. It was revelatory, though, in what hospitals no longer do. It sometimes took an hour for overworked nurses to respond to my call button. After the response, I'd often find the call button, pain med button and/or phone left out of reach. Hygiene was a packet of heavy-duty handy wipes given to me on day two for me to use. No teeth brushing or hair brushing. One procedure was stymied because the right tool wasn't available. My discharge doc had done his internship at a Community Hospital in LA. He said that such conditions were so common there that sadder-but-wiser nurses and aides would buy supplies at Costco - at their own expense - so they'd have what they needed to care for patients. "You're a writer," he said, "write about that. Someone has to tell that story." I realized that America is closer than ever to the conditions in less 'developed' countries where family members must accompany you to the hospital to do your nursing care. Will busy Americans, as the tempo of such breakdowns increases, need to take back their time for basic caring duties of family and community?

Katrina showed us many things. One was that the systems we have empowered to care for us have gotten careless to the point of being cruel and inhuman. Real humans want to take care of their sick and dying, but we've come to believe that someone else, somewhere else, is in charge and knows better. So people died in the streets, in the Stadium, in the hospitals, in their homes and were left for days. There are big changes we should have made decades ago that could prevent what McKibben warns is coming. Now these are dead snags just waiting to fall. Worse, though, is that we seem to lack to political and social will to make the sober, mature changes needed to deal the "trees that fall" with competence and good grace.

Simpler living seems tied to the expectation that oneself is the grown-up in one's own life. That if change is to be, it starts at home and is practical as well as philosophical. That big systems must be understood for what they can and can't do - and never be allowed to leave us more vulnerable, less able to respond intelligently. I've always said that the last place to look for financial independence is in having a pile of money. If you don't accumulate critical thinking, clear communication, loving relationships, an understanding of give-and-take, networks of friends and mutual help groups - all parts of 'resilience' - no amount of money will protect you in a destabilized world.

As David Brooks says, now is the time to face up to the dark side of America and make sober changes - and hope the forces of intelligence and good sense will mobilize more vigorously than the forces of fear and manipulation. As Deena says, in times like these wise people know that none of us knows what's going on but all of us, in deep conversation, will learn together a way through. As McKibben's article below indicates, Katrina might be the recognized surfacing of an era of breakdowns of a magnitude we never thought possible. As my small experiences indicate, if we rely less on ego and more on community, human resilience and good sense, we can mobilize ourselves to achieve small greatnesses right where we are. If we ask large systems to do only what they are best at - complex surgery, for example, or complex policy making for global conditions - and give as much resource as possible to the people on the local front lines of care, we may be able to weather the coming "perfect" storm.

Where each of us acts in this shifting landscape of crisis is really up to each of us. I trust us to know our neighbors better, to develop skills that will be truly useful in the years ahead, to open our homes to what needs our care, to stay calm, to contribute what we know and get out of the way of those who actually know better. Where can we turn in crisis? To one another, actually. Not letting large systems off the hook on their responsibilities and failures, but not forgetting that at least here in America, it's still "the consent of the governed."

Y2K. 911. Katrina. Are we listening? Every free individual for him or herself is now a loser strategy of enormous magnitude. Simplicity, community, common sense, calm, resilience are really the core curriculum for survival. People in other lands have not had the luxury of forgetting these basics. We have. Katrina was a pop-final. We failed. But we are wired for survival through connection, council, community and what my friend Tom Atlee calls co-intelligence. It may be too late to have predictable future, but we can wise up together. For some great ideas from Alan Atkisson on a community revisioning exercise that's now relevant to rebuilding "the Big Difficult" , go to http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003425.html


and now, Bill...

Not Our America?
by Bill McKibben
September 07, 2005

http://www.tompaine.com/

Bill McKibben is the author of many books on the environment and related topics. His first, The End of Nature, was also the first book for a general audience on global warming. His most recent is Wandering Home, A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape.

If the images of skyscrapers collapsed in heaps of ash were the end of one story—the United States safe on its isolated continent from the turmoil of the world—then the picture of the sodden Superdome with its peeling roof marks the beginning of the next story, the one that will dominate our politics in the coming decades of this century: America befuddled about how to cope with a planet suddenly turned unstable and unpredictable.

Over and over last week, people said that the scenes from the convention center, the highway overpasses, and the other suddenly infamous Crescent City venues didn't "look like America," that they seemed instead to be straight from the Third World. That was almost literally accurate, for poor, black New Orleans (whose life had never previously been of any interest to the larger public) is not so different from other poor and black parts of the world: its infant mortality and life expectancy rates, its educational achievement statistics mirroring scores of African and Latin American enclaves. But it was accurate in another way, too, one full of portent for the future. A decade ago, environmental researcher Norman Myers began trying to add up the number of humans at risk of losing their homes from global warming. He looked at all the obvious places—coastal China, India, Bangladesh, the tiny island states of the Pacific and Indian oceans, the Nile delta, Mozambique, on and on—and predicted that by 2050, it was entirely possible that 150 million people could be "environmental refugees," forced from their homes by rising waters. That's more than the number of political refugees sent scurrying by the bloody century we've just endured. Try to imagine, that is, the chaos that attends busing 15,000 people from one football stadium to another in the richest nation on Earth, and then multiply it by four orders of magnitude and re-situate your thoughts in the poorest nations on earth. And then try to imagine doing it over and over again—probably without the buses.

Because so far, even as blogs and websites all over the Internet fill with accusations about the scandalous lack of planning that led to the collapse of the levees in New Orleans, almost no one is addressing the much larger problems: the scandalous lack of planning that has kept us from even beginning to address climate change, and the sad fact that global warming means the future will be full of just this kind of horror. Consider the first problem for just a minute. No single hurricane is "the result" of global warming. But a month before Katrina hit, MIT hurricane specialist Kerry Emmanuel published a landmark paper in the British science magazine Nature showing that tropical storms were now lasting half again as long and spinning winds 50 percent more powerful than just a few decades before. The only plausible cause: the ever-warmer tropical seas on which these storms thrive. Katrina, a Category 1 storm when it crossed Florida, roared to full life in the abnormally hot water of the Gulf of Mexico. It then punched its way into Louisiana and Mississippi—the latter a state now governed by Haley Barbour, who in an earlier incarnation as a GOP power broker and energy lobbyist helped persuade President Bush to renege on his promise to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

So far, the United States has done exactly nothing even to try to slow the progress of climate change: We're emitting far more carbon than we were in 1988, when scientists issued their first prescient global-warming warnings. Even if, at that moment, we'd started doing all that we could to overhaul our energy economy, we'd probably still be stuck with the one degree Fahrenheit increase in global average temperature that's already driving our current disruptions. Now scientists predict that without truly dramatic change in the very near future, we're likely to see the planet's mercury rise five degrees before this century is out. That is, five times more than we've seen so far. Which leads us to the second problem: For the ten thousand years of human civilization, we've relied on the planet's basic physical stability. Sure, there have been hurricanes and droughts and volcanoes and tsunamis, but averaged out across the Earth, it's been a remarkably stable run. If your grandparents inhabited a particular island, chances were that you could too. If you could grow corn in your field, you could pretty much count on your grandkids being able to do likewise. Those are now sucker's bets—that's what those predictions about environmental refugees really mean.

Here's another way of saying it: In the last century, we've seen change in human societies speed up to an almost unimaginable level, one that has stressed every part of our civilization. In this century, we're going to see the natural world change at the same kind of rate. That's what happens when you increase the amount of heat trapped in the atmosphere. That extra energy expresses itself in every way you can imagine: more wind, more evaporation, more rain, more melt, more... more... more. And there is no reason to think we can cope. Take New Orleans as an example. It is currently pro forma for politicians to announce that it will be rebuilt, and doubtless it will be. Once. But if hurricanes like Katrina go from once-in-a-century storms to once-in-a-decade-or-two storms, how many times are you going to rebuild it? Even in America there's not that kind of money—especially if you're also having to cope with, say, the effects on agriculture of more frequent and severe heat waves, and the effects on human health of the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue fever and malaria, and so on ad infinitum. Not to mention the costs of converting our energy system to something less suicidal than fossil fuel, a task that becomes more expensive with every year that passes. Our rulers have insisted by both word and deed that the laws of physics and chemistry do not apply to us. That delusion will now start to vanish. Katrina marks Year One of our new calendar, the start of an age in which the physical world has flipped from sure and secure to volatile and unhinged. New Orleans doesn't look like the America we've lived in. But it very much resembles the planet we will inhabit the rest of our lives.