Photos

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

The Lazy Man's Guide to Sustainability

Sustainability seems so rigorous, like scaling a rock wall when you’d rather watch TV. It sounds so virtuous, like passing up bacon, eggs and hash browns for a tofu scramble. It sounds so boring, like having two basic outfits, both black. It sounds so unsexy, like sensible shoes and cotton underwear. It sounds so constraining, like penny pinching and calorie counting and going to AA. Party’s over, now let’s get down to… ugh… sustainability. Not.

Take them trying to pass off “less is more” for what we all in our guts know is the truth: “more is more” and “bigger is better” until you can’t even fit into your elastic waist pants or afford to fill the tank on your monster truck.

Or take their idea of staying home and staying put and living local and having potlucks as a way to save money and energy. Me, I am a Southwest fun-fare junkie. Take me, oh symbol of freedom, to the year-round playgrounds of the planet… to Minneapolis to shop at the Mall of America, to Texas to party during spring break, in winter to Hawai’I for surfing and Colorado for skiing, in August to Paris when the Frenchies have cleared out and left the Champs to us. As long as my credit card holds (the one from Southwest where I earn free trips, whee!) Local is for yokels. Local is taking out the garbage, cleaning house, yard work and work work. Lemme outa here! Oh, did I mention night life? Unless local is the Big Apple, you risk having nowhere to go after midnight in the gazillion bergs and burbs of America.

So less and local sounds like starvation and house arrest.

How about lazy? Lazy sounds good. Lazy is staying home with a beer watching TV. Lazy could even be having no lawn to mow by covering the whole thing with compost. It’s throwing out some lettuce, carrot, tomato and cucumber seeds for salads and zucchini and cabbage and Chewbaca (or is that bok choy?) for some hot veggies, throwing straw over the whole thing, letting the rain come and getting dinner out the door without having to go to the mega market in the mega mall. And it’d be free. I like free. Lazy is buying everything online and having it delivered to the door, never making the effort to drive and shop. Lazy is Netflicks. Lazy is E-bay. Lazy is going over to your neighbor’s house to watch the game, or down to the corner sport’s bar – let them make the Buffalo Wings. Lazy is not buying new clothes for every g’dam wedding, it’s just wearing what you had last year… if it still fits.

Lazy is telecommuting to your desk job – why not, everyone else does it? You don’t shave, work in your PJs and as long you get your assignments in on time, heck, why sit in traffic two extra hours a day to go to an office burning up that friggin’ expensive gas? Lazy is lounging with your kids in bed on Sunday, tickling and giggling, rather than going to Disneyland.

Lazy is forming a car coop so you don’t have to take care of a hunk of steel that spends most of the day sitting around degrading in your driveway – let someone else drive it sometimes and gas it up and take it to the car wash. Lazy is buying food in bulk; less hauling of huge garbage bags of packaging out to the curb or to the dump. Lazy is sharing errands with neighbors – by picking up their photos at the drug store this time, they’ll get your eggs the next. Half the trips. Well, come to think of it, lazy is a digital camera so you don’t even have to take your photos to the drugstore.

Or take electricity – lazy would be getting those curly compact fluorescent bulbs. They last so long you may never have to change them. Put some solar panels on your roof and let the sun handle your electricity. It’s putting out energy anyway, why not take some of those free rays rather than paying a bundle for the old rays stored in fossil fuels. It’s called ‘fossil’ for a reason. Very very old. And hard to get. In fact, on sunny days the electric company will pay YOU for your extra electricity – lazy is getting the power company to pay you. Yep. That’s ultra-lazy. Charge up that electric car and have some rays left over. Use that extra income (earned in your pajamas, a big criteria for lazy living) to get someone to double glaze your windows. Or caulk your house. Heck, you could make a quick pot of chili and throw a caulking party and get your friends and neighbors over to help. Community is way lazy – share the work, spare yourself the lonely drudgery of breaking your back doing it all solo. A very lazy dinner might be inviting the neighbors to a pot of chili even if they don’t work. They can bring a salad, dessert and, yes, Buffalo Wings and have a total feast. Eat your heart out, Denny’s, we’re staying home and pigging out. Wait, no, is this what those sustainability loonies call a pot luck? Whatever, if they want to live lazy too, they are welcome to it. Cards anyone?

How limits make life simpler

How limits make life simpler
The American soul longs for liberation. We represent to the world maximum personal freedom – the right to do, say, have and plan what you please as long as it’s not against the law and doesn’t hurt anyone. While this aspiration is sublime for the soul and invigorating for creative enterprise, it’s turning out to have a lot of costs for the body, society, the environment and our global reputation as reckless and rapacious.

Freedom, though, can’t be wrong! It’s too necessary for responding to changing times, for science and technology to flourish, for the sheer joy of existence. Life without freedom is no life at all. If freedom is suppressed, revolutions will come. Freedom will out, like grass that comes up through cracks in the sidewalk and eventually can crack and crumble any binding structure, returning all to nature.

It turns out that the problem isn’t freedom, but our definition of freedom as no limits. “No limits” is actually impossible anywhere but the human mind and spirit. On earth, life is full of limits, and we depend on them for order, predictability, safety, protection, property, sport, art, architecture, cities, marriage, organizations and all the civilizing aspects of human society and personal existence. Natural law, too, depends on limits: gravity and magnetism, for example. Even the limit of death is essential for renewal of life. As intoxicated as we might become when the lid comes off, when we are released from frustrating or debilitating constraints, we actually don’t want a life of no constraints. We want to have a say over which constraints we choose to protect, connect, respect, reject and select in shaping of our personal and community lives.

People who have chosen to live more simply are all about choosing limits. They are free from excess. They know who they are and this truth sets them free. They are free in their relationship because they respect others’ limits. They have a sense of purpose, knowing what freedom is for. On a daily basis they wield limits with discernment. They limit the hours they are wiling to work for money so they have more hours for human fun and frolic. They limit the cost of living by not buying things they don’t need. They limit the intrusion of the commercial world into their homes by turning off the TV and reading, playing games and talking with their family. They limit what they buy from to products with limited toxins and pollutants and exploitation of others in their production. They limit ugliness by living in homes elegantly appointed with that Goldilocks esthetic of not too much, not too little, just right. They limit the cost of gas by buying fuel efficient cars, riding bikes, taking busses, carpooling, telecommuting and walking when possible. They are masters of limits, not slaves of the “more is better and it’s never enough” mentality sold to us by corporations eager to harvest our hard earned dollars for their often unnecessary products.

What do they get for all these limits? Freedom to be blissfully real, authentic, balanced, relaxed and healthy.

In fact, if more people chose to limit excess in their lives, we’d limit war on the planet. When we live beyond our natural means, how else will we keep our way of life going than to take from others’ minerals, oil, timber, labor, etc.? If we want to limit war – and who but the arms dealers wants war for heaven’s sake! – we need to limit our appetites for material excess. We’d also limit the public health problems that arise from toxics in our food, our carpets, our cleaning products, our air, our water and even mother’s milk which, were it tested by the FDA, would be deemed unfit for consumption.

Now of course setting limits isn’t simple at all. It takes sophisticated deliberation and decision making to maximize freedom while minimizing harm to humans and other living things. It takes great honesty in studying and reporting accurately the effects of our actions and making agreements to limit harm – as we have with the Kyoto and Montreal Protocols and eventually the Oil Depletion Protocol which protect life on earth from harm from climate change, ozone thinning and diminishing cheap energy reserves. Limits in fact are the tools grown ups use for morality and ethics and compassion and wisdom. Promising freedom without limits is like crying fire for fun in a crowded theater – a prank that reckless teenagers might find cool but society wisely prohibits. Prisons are one way society protects itself from the dark expressions of freedom: domination, license, predation, taking what isn’t yours.

Simple living is simply ahead of the curve. People who live simply design with limits, cooperate with limits, participate in limit-setting in their household, communities and politics. They are masters of limits the way a black belt martial artist or a skilled doctor or a fine architect are masters of their crafts. Such simplicity is more enjoyable than getting whacked by limits when you transgress the natural and human laws meant to make life exquisitely worth living. Such simplicity is the ultimate expression of freedom.