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.