The Tyranny of Entitlement - Derrick Jensen

Reposted in full from Orion Magazine, January 2011

'I’m continually stunned by how many seemingly sane people believe you can have infinite economic growth on a finite planet. Perpetual economic growth and its cousin, limitless technological expansion, are beliefs so deeply held by so many in this culture that they often go entirely unquestioned. Even more disturbing is the fact that these beliefs are somehow seen as the ultimate definition of what it is to be human: perpetual economic growth and limitless technological expansion are what we do.

Some of those who believe in perpetual growth are out-and-out nut jobs, like the economist and former White House advisor Julian Simon, who said, “We have in our hands now - actually in our libraries - the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years.” And showing that, when it comes to U.S. economic policies, insanity is never out of season, are yet more nut jobs, like Lawrence Summers, who has served as chief economist at the World Bank, U.S. secretary of the treasury, president of Harvard, and as President Obama’s director of the National Economic Council, and who said, “There are no...limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind at any time in the foreseeable future...The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit is a profound error.”

Others are a bit more nuanced in their nut-jobbery. They may acknowledge that, yes, physical limits might possibly exist, but they also believe that if you just slap the word sustainable in front of the phrase “economic growth,” then you can still somehow have continued growth on a finite planet, perhaps through so-called “soft” or “service” or “high-tech” economies, or through nifty “green” innovations like a really neat nanotech gizmo that can be woven into your clothes and when you dance it generates enough electricity to power your iPod, ignoring the facts that people still need to eat, that humans have overshot carrying capacity and are systematically destroying the natural world, and that even something as groovy as an iPod requires mining, industrial, and energy infrastructures, all of which are functionally unsustainable.

Alongside the nut jobs, there are an awful lot of people who probably just don’t think about it: they simply absorb the perspective of the newscasters who say, “Economic growth, good; economic stagnation, bad.” And of course if you care more about the economic system than life on the planet, this is true. If, however, you care more about life than the economic system, it is not quite so true, because this economic system must constantly increase production to grow, and what, after all, is production? It is the conversion of the living to the dead, the conversion of living forests into two-by-fours, living rivers into stagnant pools for generating hydroelectricity, living fish into fish sticks, and ultimately all of these into money. And what, then, is gross national product? It is a measure of this conversion of the living to the dead. The more quickly the living world is converted into dead products, the higher the GNP. These simple equations are complicated by the fact that when GNP goes down, people often lose jobs. No wonder the world is getting killed.

Once a people have committed (or enslaved) themselves to a growth economy, they’ve pretty much committed themselves to a perpetual war economy, because in order to maintain this growth, they will have to continue to colonize an ever-wider swath of the planet and exploit its inhabitants. I’m sure you can see the problem this presents on a finite planet. But in the short run, there is good news for those committed to a growth economy (and bad news for everyone else), which is that by converting your landbase into weapons (for example, cutting down trees to build warships), you gain a short-term competitive advantage over those peoples who live sustainably, and you can steal their land and overuse it to fuel your perpetual-growth economy. As for those whose land you’ve stolen, well, you can either massacre these newly conquered peoples, enslave them, or (most often forcibly) assimilate them into your growth economy. Usually it’s some combination of all three. The massacre of the bison, to present just one example, was necessary to destroy the Plains Indians’ traditional way of life and force them to at least somewhat assimilate (and become dependent upon the growth economy instead of the land for their very lives). The bad news for those committed to a growth economy is that it’s essentially a dead-end street: once you’ve overshot your home’s carrying capacity, you have only two choices: keep living beyond the means of the planet until your culture collapses; or proactively elect to give up the benefits you gained from the conquest in order to save your culture.

A perpetual-growth economy is not only insane (and impossible), it is also by its very essence abusive, by which I mean that it’s based on the same conceit as more personal forms of abuse. It is, in fact, the macroeconomic enshrinement of abusive behavior. The guiding principle of abusive behavior is that the abuser refuses to respect or abide by limits or boundaries put up by the victim. As Lundy Bancroft, former codirector of Emerge, the nation’s first therapeutic program for abusive men, writes, “Entitlement is the abuser’s belief that he has a special status and that it provides him with exclusive rights and privileges that do not apply to his partner. The attitudes that drive abuse can largely be summarized by this one word.”

The relevance of this word applies on the larger social scale. Of course humans are a special species to whom a wise and omnipotent God has granted the exclusive rights and privileges of dominion over this planet that is here for us to use. And of course even if you subscribe to the religion of Science instead of Christianity, humans possess special intelligence and abilities that grant us exclusive rights and privileges to work our will on the world that is still here for us to use. Growth economies are essentially unchecked and will push past any boundaries set up by anyone other than the perpetrators: certainly the fact that indigenous cultures already are living on this or that piece of ground has never stopped those in power from expanding their economy; nor is the death of the oceans stopping their exploitation; nor is the heating of the planet stopping the exploitation; nor is the grinding poverty of the dispossessed.

And the truth is, you cannot talk abusers out of their behavior. Perpetrators of domestic violence are among the most intractable of all who commit violence, so intractable, in fact, that in 2000 the United Kingdom removed funding for therapy sessions designed to treat men guilty of domestic violence (putting the money instead into shelters and other means of keeping women safe from their attackers). Lundy Bancroft also says this: “An abuser doesn’t change because he feels guilty or gets sober or finds God. He doesn’t change after seeing the fear in his children’s eyes or feeling them drift away from him. It doesn’t suddenly dawn on him that his partner deserves better treatment. Because of his self-focus, combined with the many rewards he gets from controlling you, an abuser changes only when he feels he has to, so the most important element in creating a context for change in an abuser is placing him in a situation where he has no other choice.”

How do we stop the abusers who perpetrate a perpetual-growth economy? Seeing oiled pelicans and burned sea turtles won’t move them to stop. Nor will hundred-degree days in Moscow. We can’t stop them by making them feel guilty. We can’t stop them by appealing to them to do the right thing. The only way to stop them is to make it so they have no other choice.'

The Naked Presenter

Anyone who uses (or who has been subjected to BAD Powerpoint presentations, anyone? Anyone?) will love this! 'If Darth Vader did a Powerpoint it would look like this...' LAUGH!!

Sourced from Presentation Zen, 4 January 2011

http://vimeo.com/14493347

Credit Card Exorcisms

Credit card exorcisms!! But maybe they are necessary - according to this report, the US now has more shopping malls than high schools...

Sourced from YouTube, 30 December 2010

Equality and The Good Life

Excerpt from YES! Magazine, 4 March, 2010

'For decades, (British Epidemiologist) Richard Wilkinson has studied why some societies are healthier than others. He found that what the healthiest societies have in common is not that they have more—more income, more education, or more wealth—but that what they have is more equitably shared.

In fact, it turns out that not only disease, but a whole host of social problems ranging from mental illness to drug use are worse in unequal societies. In his latest book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, co-written with Kate Pickett, Wilkinson details the pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, encouraging excessive consumption...

Wilkinson: 'We quote a prison psychiatrist who spent 25 years talking to really violent men, and he says he has yet to see an act of violence which was not caused by people feeling disrespected, humiliated, or like they've lost face. Those are the triggers to violence, and they're more intense in more unequal societies, where status competition is intensified and we're more sensitive about social judgments...

This is about the psychosocial effects of inequality—the impact of living with anxiety about our feelings of superiority or inferiority. It's not the inferior housing that gives you heart disease, it's the stress, the hopelessness, the anxiety, the depression you feel around that...

What we've learned is that the real quality of life for all of us now depends on improving the social environment, and that we have a policy handle on how to do that. It's not that we all need to have more therapy to try and make us nicer people. Income distribution, an issue government or big corporations can do something about, really affects the psychosocial well-being of the whole society. But we can't just rely just on taxes and benefits to increase equality—the next government can undo them all at a stroke. We've got to get this structure of equality much more deeply embedded in our society. I think that means more economic democracy, or workplace democracy, of every kind. We're talking about friendly societies, mutual societies, employee ownership, employee representatives on the board, cooperatives—ways in which business is subjected to democratic influence. The bonus culture was only possible because the people at the top are not answerable to the employees at all...''

Paint, Power & the World We Want

Reposted in full from YES! Magazine, 12 May 2010

'“That’s public space. Nobody can use it.”

That was one Portland city official’s response when Mark Lakeman and his neighbors first began building unauthorized gathering places in their neighborhood in 1996.

To Lakeman, an urban designer, this seemed like a fundamental misunderstanding of public space. Together with his neighbors, he formed the City Repair Project, a volunteer-run nonprofit that set out to change the way Portlanders think about the places where people come together.

They started by reclaiming their own intersection, and were eventually organizing neighbors, building benches, and painting streets throughout the city. The goal, as City Repair’s motto puts it, was no longer just to preserve public space, but, by recognizing its character and identity, to transform it into Place: “inhabited, known, and loved by its residents.”

At the end of this month, City Repair will host its eighth annual building convergence, a ten-day festival hosting workshops and neighborhood improvement projects around the city. City Repair’s projects now include Depave Portland, which removes unnecessary asphalt to make way for urban gardens, and Upcycle Market, a monthly event where people get together to swap skills and supplies. Groups around the country are trying out City Repair's methods in their own neighborhoods.

And Portland itself? The city now sees public space—and neighborhood building projects—quite differently. Not long after City Repair was founded, the city passed an ordinance allowing neighborhoods to build gathering places in street intersections.

Brooke Jarvis: You called your organization City Repair—in what way are cities broken?

Mark Lakeman: For most of the history of humanity, we lived and worked in the same places, integrated, and everything we did would deepen our relationships to each other. The greatest product of that way of life was our cultural cohesion and our stories—we weren’t isolated the way that we are now.

But our cities and places are no longer ours. We’re not building our own places; we’re not designing them to fit our own needs. Our lives are zoned like we’re a resource to be managed. We're housed here, and then this is where we work in order to pay for the housing we barely get to live in. Mixed use here. Monocultural use here. Parking garage. Maybe a waterfront here. Park. Park. It doesn't add up. None of them are really whole.

So many of our phobias and issues come from separating the pieces of our lives. We’re less connected to the people around us, and we’re less connected to our work: the fruit of our labor goes into a landfill so that someone can buy a boat. It's the stupidest possible vision, and it plays out in terms of the holocaust of our creativity and of our experience of being alive. It's unfathomable how inefficient it is, and how painful.

Putting the public space back where it's supposed to be may not sound like a huge change, but it has a profound effect on the social culture.

I studied design, and for a while I was working on these big corporate design projects. They were very typical—in the cultural atmosphere they created, in the way they would impact the people that would work there. They weren’t inspiring or creative; they didn’t let people come together; they didn’t encourage people to do the work that would make them happy and make their communities better. I wanted to live in a world that was an expression of who we are.

Brooke: You started with a place that most of us don’t really think of as a place at all: the intersection of two streets. Why not change the places people spend time, like homes, parks, or offices?

Mark: Exactly. Why don’t we spend time in intersections? When I discovered I didn’t want to work on those typical design projects, I decided to look for something else: different patterns, a different perspective on what was possible. While I was traveling, I saw, over and over, that people's gathering places occur where their pathways come together and intersect. The idea of the crossroads is really ancient, of course; it pervades indigenous societies. It’s also a fundamental principle of urban design in modern societies, except it’s often obscured and denied. You're trying to control modern people, to keep them moving, not to let them gather like they would in a village.

When I came back from all these village-based cultures, I walked into the neighborhood where I grew up—a Roman-grid neighborhood, very typical in America, with straight, imposed lines but no gathering spaces—and I'm like, "The piazza is not here, where it's supposed to be."

In America, our great archetype is the main street, which is not really a center. It's just a flow. It's a movement corridor, and you have to yell across the street because there isn't a place in the middle. There isn't a social commons that you can attain and occupy.

10 Courageous Things You Can Do to Build Community

Putting the public space back where it's supposed to be may not sound like a huge change, but it has a profound effect on the social culture. Everybody needs it even though they don't know it's missing. I knew that from visiting other societies where it was present, where there is cohesion and vitality and integrated families and community structures. We know that Americans are more lonely and isolated than ever before, but we don’t realize that the absence of cohesion in American communities is totally related to the absence of places where people can actually build that.

Brooke: But if you can’t redesign the whole neighborhood, what do you do to change an intersection built for cars into a place where people can build community?

Mark: At our first project, the neighbors who lived around the intersection came out on the weekend, painted a design in the street, built all these structures around the corners—a bench, a lending library, a 24-hour tea stand, a children’s playhouse, a kiosk for sharing neighborhood information—and turned it into an interactive social space. And boom!

That was years ago. Share-It Square—that’s what we call it—is one of my favorite projects because I live right there, I get to see its evolution. Since then people have built saunas, put in gardens, helped each other paint their houses. Americans move every four to seven years, and that period of time is visibly lengthening right around that intersection because people want to live there. Families are clustering around it, having kids or bringing their kids, so there are more children—and more shared childcare, and more adults interacting with kids on the street.

Sometimes people living there disagree about what they want to do, and they wonder if that's imperfect. I think it's beautiful. People are learning about each other, and working things out. Sometimes it's a bunch of steps forward and a few steps back, and every step back is OK. It's like you're just setting foot a little bit more solidly before you take another step forward. It's wonderful.

Brooke: Did the city, and other authorities, feel the same way?

Mark: At first, everybody was telling us that we had broken the law, but once they saw what we’d actually done, they wanted to figure out how to do it again. The mayor saw it, and she's like, "You need to tell me what you've done, because I can see that it's good, but I don't understand.” The city had established all of these goals for livability and sustainability and walkability and safer streets and safer kids, but getting there was another story. You can't achieve those goals unless you do what we did. All the solutions to all those goals can only be generated by people right where they live, finally having power together.

The power of what we do is we start with the idea and the belief that we can make it happen.

There’s so much we need to change, but I really don’t think it's going to be all that hard. We just need to say, "There's nowhere to sit around here? Well, we need to create some places to sit. People aren't talking? Then we need gathering places." You look at the problem of a particular place and you address it. People start to get excited; the void starts to get filled. The projects are small, but they keep coming as revelations.

Brooke: So what did you say to the mayor? What had you done that was different from what the city did, trying to accomplish the same goals?

Mark: The city has a different method. People generate goals for their neighborhoods, which go into reports and onto shelves. And they sit there long enough that people forget about them. But the needs are still unmet, so they fundraise and they meet and they generate new goals—and those go into a report on another shelf.

The power of what we do is we start with the idea and the belief that we can make it happen. If it has a social basis, if your primary goal is to build networks and relationships, then you attract all the other forms of capital that begin with the social. That's the magic. That's the key.

After everything you see on TV or in politics, you would think that asking a group of Americans to sit down and work out something like this would be difficult. But it's not. People sit down for a potluck, and maybe that very evening they start talking about what they want to do. This year, we're going to reach a total of over 200 major sites and almost 300 little projects that have been built.

Brooke: Do you have any favorites, among the projects you’ve worked with?

Mark: Some of them are really simple things. Like, there's this wonderful intersection that has a painting of an oak tree, in honor of a tree that used to stand there. Everyone called it Ruth’s tree after their neighbor, who had planted it when she was a little girl. When she was in her 90s, she died. Shortly after, the tree fell over into the intersection. So the community comes out and paints this huge effigy of the tree, right there.

Then there’s the T-Horse, which is a mobile tea house—it travels around to different neighborhoods in Portland, and wherever it goes people gather to drink tea, or play Frisbee, or whatever. It’s a vehicle with enormous wings, so it really entices people out.

The Memorial Lighthouse is also beautiful. It's a solar-powered pillar of cob that glows at night, decorated with bicycle wheels and mosaic stained glass. It was built in memorial to a bicyclist who was killed there, by a truck. His mother and friends would bring flowers and gifts and leave them in the place where he died, and his mother would come and mourn him, just sitting there on the sidewalk. Finally the neighbors asked if one of the corners of the intersection—a corner of a person's yard—could be turned into a memorial to him and a place for his mother to sit. So this beautiful celebration of his life was created. He was a bicycle activist, so there's a strong bike theme.

And every one of them is as dear as that. When that one was built, a lot of us realized that up to that point there had not been one public memorial to any of the people we lived with in our community—they were all to dead presidents or wealthy people. So that one project not only turned a tragedy into a permanent celebration of someone’s life, it helped uncover all of these issues about inequity and political power. I don't know of one project that hasn't done that.

Brooke: As neighborhoods come up with their own projects, what is City Repair’s role?

Mark: It’s really upending the model I was taught—to be the author of someone else's project, the designer. What we do now is take calls for help. These days we convene dozens of neighborhoods at once—there are maybe three dozen projects happening around Portland right now. Our main role is facilitation, taking people through dialogues about fundraising or outreach or ecological design, teaching skills that communities can use on their own.

The focus that we have them constantly keeping in mind is that they're not building stuff. They're building relationships. How they treat each other is the most important thing, and what it looks like doesn't matter at all.

Brooke: It seems kind of telling that even when people recognize what’s missing and have great ideas about ways to fix it, we still feel powerless enough that we reach out to groups like City Repair for help. Why do you think we need that catalyst?

Mark: I think it’s a confidence issue. We hear so often in the media that we’re inadequate: Americans only have 15-second attention spans, or are more polarized than ever, or this is how often we hurt or kill each other. We see this as portraits of who we are and we believe that we’re not capable of working together. After what we’ve done with City Repair, I totally know that it can be very different.

But it’s not surprising that some people need a little bit of help to confirm their suspicions that we're good, or that we can be. Just to feel good about being human needs a little confirmation.

The same is true for our sense of our own power. It's always felt so absurd to read in the paper, "Here's something wrong, here's something wrong, here's something wrong"—and know we all feel helpless to do anything about it because we have to get back to work. That's the work. Every American neighborhood is characterized by this absurdity: There are children being victimized or there's domestic violence, but at the beginning of the day we get ourselves all ready and we go off to do something that we often don't even respect or enjoy. And at the end of the day we haven't addressed these bleeding concerns in our communities.

When did we stop believing we had a say in our own reality? What if someone asked you at the start of your life, "Where will your power reside? Will it be in you or someone else?" Given that choice, everyone would say, “Me.” And what would you do with that power? "Wow, I would help the world," is what a whole lot of people would say. If that were how we answered that fundamental question, our world would be so different. The beautiful thing happening now is that dozens and dozens and dozens of people saying, "Yes, I have my power," and then creating these physical expressions of what it actually looks like.'

The Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture

Excerpt from YES! Magazine, 1 February 2010

'Long before we could pronounce Betty Friedan’s last name, Americans from my generation felt her impact. Many of us born in the mid-1970s learned from our parents and our teachers that women no longer needed to stay home, that there were professional opportunities awaiting us. In my own school experience, homemaking, like farming, gained a reputation as a vocation for the scholastically impaired. Those of us with academic promise learned that we could do whatever we put our minds to, whether it was conquering the world or saving the world. I was personally interested in saving the world. That path eventually led me to conclude that homemaking would play a major role toward achieving that goal....

The Origins of Homemaking: A Vocation for Both Sexes

Housewives and husbands were free people, who owned their own homes and lived off their land.

Upon further investigation, I learned that the household did not become the “woman’s sphere” until the Industrial Revolution. A search for the origin of the word housewife traces it back to the thirteenth century, as the feudal period was coming to an end in Europe and the first signs of a middle class were popping up. Historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan explains that housewives were wedded to husbands, whose name came from hus, an old spelling of house, and bonded. Husbands were bonded to houses, rather than to lords. Housewives and husbands were free people, who owned their own homes and lived off their land. While there was a division of labor among the sexes in these early households, there was also an equal distribution of domestic work. Once the Industrial Revolution happened, however, things changed. Men left the household to work for wages, which were then used to purchase goods and services that they were no longer home to provide. Indeed, the men were the first to lose their domestic skills as successive generations forgot how to butcher the family hog, how to sew leather, how to chop firewood.

As the Industrial Revolution forged on and crossed the ocean to America, men and women eventually stopped working together to provide for their household sustenance. They developed their separate spheres—man in the factory, woman in the home. The more a man worked outside the home, the more the household would have to buy in order to have needs met. Soon the factories were able to fabricate products to supplant the housewives’ duties as well. The housewife’s primary function ultimately became chauffeur and consumer. The household was no longer a unit of production. It was a unit of consumption.

Housewife’s Syndrome

The effect on the American housewife was devastating. In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, documenting for the first time “the problem that has no name,” Housewife’s Syndrome, where American girls grew up fantasizing about finding their husbands, buying their dream homes and appliances, popping out babies, and living happily ever after. In truth, pointed out Friedan, happily-ever-after never came. Countless women suffered from depression and nervous breakdowns as they faced the endless meaningless tasks of shopping and driving children hither and yon. They never had opportunities to fulfill their highest potential, to challenge themselves, to feel as though they were truly contributing to society beyond wielding the credit card to keep the consumer culture humming. Friedan’s book sent women to work in droves. And corporate America seized upon a golden opportunity to secure a cheaper workforce and offer countless products to use up their paychecks.

The household was no longer a unit of production. It was a unit of consumption.

Before long, the second family income was no longer an option. In the minds of many, it was a necessity. Homemaking, like eating organic foods, seemed a luxury to be enjoyed only by those wives whose husbands garnered substantial earnings, enabling them to drive their children to school rather than put them on a bus, enroll them in endless enrichment activities, oversee their educational careers, and prepare them for entry into elite colleges in order to win a leg-up in a competitive workforce. At the other extreme, homemaking was seen as the realm of the ultra-religious, where women accepted the role of Biblical “Help Meets” to their husbands. They cooked, cleaned, toiled, served and remained silent and powerless. My husband and I fell into neither category, and I suspected there were more like us....

Meet the Radical Homemakers

I was right. I received hundreds of letters from rural, suburban, and city folks alike. Some ascribed to specific religious faiths, others did not. As long as the home showed no signs of domination or oppression, I was interested in learning more about them. I selected twenty households from my pile, plotted them on a map across the United States, and set about visiting each of them to see what homemaking could look like when men and women shared both power and responsibility. Curious to see if Radical Homemaking was a venture suited to more than just women in married couples, I visited with single parents, stay-at-home dads, widows, and divorcées. I spent time in families with and without children.

A glance into America’s past suggests that homemaking could play a big part in addressing the ecological, economic and social crises of our present time. Homemakers have played a powerful role during several critical periods in our nation’s history. By making use of locally available resources, they made the boycotts leading up to the American Revolution possible. They played a critical role in the foundational civic education required to launch a young democratic nation. They were driving forces behind both the abolition and suffrage movements.

Homemakers today could have a similar influence. The Radical Homemakers I interviewed had chosen to make family, community, social justice, and the health of the planet the governing principles of their lives. They rejected any form of labor or the expenditure of any resource that did not honor these tenets. For about 5,000 years, our culture has been hostage to a form of organization by domination that fails to honor our living systems, under which “he who holds the gold makes the rules.” By contrast, the Radical Homemakers are using life skills and relationships as replacements for gold, on the premise that he or she who doesn’t need the gold can change the rules. The greater one’s domestic skills, be they to plant a garden, grow tomatoes on an apartment balcony, mend a shirt, repair an appliance, provide one’s own entertainment, cook and preserve a local harvest, or care for children and loved ones, the less dependent one is on the gold.

By virtue of these skills, the Radical Homemakers I interviewed were building a great bridge from our existing extractive economy—where corporate wealth has been regarded as the foundation of economic health, where mining our Earth’s resources and exploiting our international neighbors have been acceptable costs of doing business—to a life serving economy, where the goal is, in the words of David Korten, to generate a living for all, rather than a killing for a few; where our resources are sustained, our waters are kept clean, our air pure, and families and can lead meaningful lives. In situations where one person was still required to work out of the home in the conventional extractive economy, homemakers were able to redirect the family’s financial, social and temporal resources toward building the life-serving economy. In most cases, however, the homemakers’ skills were so considerable that, while members of the household might hold jobs (more often than not they ran their own businesses), the financial needs of the family were so small that no one in the family was forced to accept any employment that did not honor the four tenets of family, community, social justice and ecological sustainability...

Rethinking the Impossible

The Radical Homemakers were skilled at the mental exercise of rethinking the “givens” of our society and coming to the following conclusions: nobody (who matters) cares what (or if) you drive; housing does not have to cost more than a single moderate income can afford (and can even cost less); it is okay to accept help from family and friends, to let go of the perceived ideal of independence and strive instead for interdependence; health can be achieved without making monthly payments to an insurance company; child care is not a fixed cost; education can be acquired for free; and retirement is possible, regardless of income.

Each home was the center for social change, the starting point from which a better life would ripple out for everyone.

As for domestic skills, the range of talents held by these households was as varied as the day is long. Many kept gardens, but not all. Some gardened on city rooftops, some on country acres, some in suburban yards. Some were wizards at car and appliance repairs. Others could sew. Some could build and fix houses; some kept livestock. Others crafted furniture, played music, or wrote. All could cook. (Really well, as my waistline will attest.) None of them could do everything. No one was completely self-sufficient, an independent island separate from the rest of the world. Thus the universal skills that they all possessed were far more complex than simply knowing how to can green beans or build a root cellar. In order to make it as homemakers, these people had to be wizards at nurturing relationships and working with family and community. They needed an intimate understanding of the life-serving economy, where a paycheck is not always exchanged for all services rendered. They needed to be their own teachers—to pursue their educations throughout life, forever learning new ways to do more, create more, give more.

In addition, the happiest among them were successful at setting realistic expectations for themselves. They did not live in impeccably clean houses on manicured estates. They saw their homes as living systems and accepted the flux, flow, dirt, and chaos that are a natural part of that. They were masters at redefining pleasure not as something that should be bought in the consumer marketplace, but as something that could be created, no matter how much or how little money they had in their pockets. And above all, they were fearless. They did not let themselves be bullied by the conventional ideals regarding money, status, or material possessions. These families did not see their homes as a refuge from the world. Rather, each home was the center for social change, the starting point from which a better life would ripple out for everyone.

Home is where the great change will begin. It is not where it ends. Once we feel sufficiently proficient with our domestic skills, few of us will be content to simply practice them to the end of our days. Many of us will strive for more, to bring more beauty to the world, to bring about greater social change, to make life better for our neighbors, to contribute our creative powers to the building of a new, brighter, more sustainable, and happier future. That is precisely the great work we should all be tackling. If we start by focusing our energies on our domestic lives, we will do more than reduce our ecological impact and help create a living for all. We will craft a safe, nurturing place from which this great creative work can happen.'

Bearing Witness: Chris Jordan on Art, Grief, and Transformation

Check out Chris's amazing work at www.chrisjordan.com

Reposted in full from YES! Magazine, 14 April 2010

'Photographer Chris Jordan is used to working on the large scale. His most famous works try to capture the sheer scope of American consumer culture: discarded circuit boards spread out like a city, teetering stacks of crushed cars, two million plastic bottles (the number Americans use every five minutes) compiled in a single photograph.

But with his most recent project, Jordan is narrowing his focus. Last fall, he led a team of artists to Midway Atoll, a tiny, remote island in the middle of the Pacific where throw-away culture is having a major impact: albatross chicks are dying by the thousands, choking or starving after trying to eat small chunks of plastic carried to the island by the North Pacific Gyre (also called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch). The result is a relentless series of photographs of decomposing birds with bright, colorful plastic where their stomachs used to be.

For Jordan, opening himself up to the horror of what’s happening on Midway—all the while recognizing that it’s “just one of the tragedies that’s happening in our world”—was painful and intensely demoralizing. But, together with the writer Terry Tempest Williams, he’s now planning to return several more times to further immerse himself in the island’s hard truths—and to discover whether transformation can be found on the other side of grief.

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Brooke Jarvis: Some might expect that, having seen one photo of an albatross killed by unknowingly eating plastic, you’ve seen them all. But it really does get sadder the more you see. What was it like to actually be there?

Chris Jordan: The experience of being out on Midway, for me, was mostly an experience of pure shock. Despite my efforts to allow myself to feel the tragedy that I was witnessing out there, I was working so much that it was difficult to be really present. It took a couple of months for the experience to really hit me on an emotional level. The way it happened for me, it was a kind of descent into something that looked a lot like hopelessness.

I’ve realized that the metaphor that I carried with me when I went to Midway was that Dante's Inferno scenario—you walk through the fire, and you come out the other side with renewed energy or perspective. What actually happened, though, is that I felt like I walked through the fire and then just burned up in it.

For example, I thought that after returning from Midway, I would much more rigorously eliminate my consumption of plastic. What actually happened was a feeling like, “No matter what I do, this problem is not going to be affected.” So I kind of let go—for a while there, I didn't even care if I used single-use disposable plastics. The problem was just so huge and overwhelming that I didn't feel like I could make any difference one way or another. It's taken me a lot of work to begin to have more of a perspective on that issue for myself personally.

Brooke: What has that work consisted of?

Chris: Right now I’m trying to focus on being more present, on trying to experience what's happening right now, on letting go of the future and circling the wagons in the present moment. For me, that means focusing on who I am and what my values are; working out how to connect with others and how to live with integrity; and keeping right on doing my work.

Brooke: When you went to Midway, you assembled a team of artists. Not, say, an artist and a biologist and an anthropologist. Why?

Chris: One of the fundamental problems of our world, underlying a lot of the disasters that are happening, is that we’re disconnected from what we feel. I think it would be fair to say that American culture is the culture that is most detached from its feelings of any culture in the world. We've become separated from nature and urbanized in this weird, new, overwhelming way—and the only way many of us have found to cope is to disconnect from the anxiety and the fear.

The nature of the information that we have to deal with compounds that disconnection even further. We converse daily in numbers of millions and billions as if we understand them. When I say we use 210 billion plastic bottles in the United States every year, I assume that I understand what that number means, and whoever is listening assumes they do, too. In fact it's totally incomprehensible. There are all these sociological studies that demonstrate vividly that the human mind cannot comprehend numbers higher than a few thousand. There are all these phenomena around the world, whether it's the 1.2 billion people in the world who lack access to safe drinking water or the 10 million tons of plastic that are swirling around in the Pacific Ocean. We can't see those phenomena, and the only information we have available to try to relate to them is in the form of numbers we absolutely cannot comprehend. It’s no wonder that we can’t relate to our global culture on any kind of feeling level.

That's where I think art comes in, and why I think it's so important right now, because feeling is the kingdom of art. I've gotten to meet lots of scientists who are uniformly wringing their hands in frustration at their inability to convey to the public any sense of the extreme urgency they feel about the issues that they're studying. The underlying phenomena are profoundly important, and yet the information we're receiving is fundamentally dry and incomprehensible. Art can act as a mediator between science and the public, translating what science can tell us into a visual language that we can understand, that allows for personal connection and feeling. My hope for all my work, and especially my Midway work, is to make the global personal.

Brooke: Your series Running the Numbers: An American Self Portrait dealt with the same problem: trying to literally, visually represent those vast numbers we can’t conceptualize. Now, it seems you’re saying that the best way to relate isn’t to try to show the whole problem at once, but to ask how we can understand a huge problem by looking at one very small, but more emotional, part of it.

Chris: I was looking at these huge global issues and trying to figure out a way to make them personal. To some extent, with the Running the Numbers series, I had to let go of the personal a little bit. If I were to critique it myself, there's a kind of conceptual coldness to that work. It felt like a sacrifice I had to make to be able to address those giant issues, but I wanted to figure out a way to get out of the conceptual and into something that's more about direct feeling.

You know, just an infinitesimally tiny percentage of all the plastic that's in the Pacific Ocean ends up inside the stomachs of dead baby birds on Midway Island. But where else is there? That’s what’s so hard about these mass cultural issues—there’s nowhere you can see the full impact of the problem. We try to relate to these issues through the neocortex, the intellectual part of our mind that analyzes numbers, but that’s not the part of our mind that feels things. I wanted to really feel the Pacific Garbage Patch. There's no way that I know of other than going to Midway.

Brooke: Earlier, you used the word “witness” to describe your role on Midway. Is bearing witness a useful way to think about your work?

I talk a lot about despair and shame and hopelessness. People come up to me and say they feel such a relief to talk about those emotions.

Chris: Yes—in fact, I spent time recently with the writer Terry Tempest Williams, who talked to me quite a bit about the value of bearing witness. It means more than just going there and seeing something. There's a kind of holding that happens, and a making of meaning. I stand in awe of how fearless she is to go all the way into grief and pain. I told her about my hope of going all the way into the horror and grief of what’s happening on Midway as a way of trying to come out the other side. And she said, "There is no coming out the other side. You just learn to live with the grief."

What I realize now, after talking to Terry, is that I need to go back there. The project is just not finished—there’s more to uncover, more to witness.

Brooke: In what way?

Chris: Well, when we were there we never saw a live albatross on the island. The birds are born in the spring and die through the summer, but decompose so quickly due to the heat, rain, and insects that by November or December there’s nothing left but piles of plastic. So we went in September, which happens to be the time of the year when all the albatross are out at sea.

Terry's going to go with me when I return there in June, and again in the fall, and possibly also for the winter solstice. By June the albatross will all be close to adults—almost a million of them. There will already by thousands of dead birds on the ground, and we’ll see more dying.

I’ve been told that we’ll actually see toothbrushes going down throats and chicks whose body cavities are filled all the way up to their necks with plastic—their parents try to feed them one more piece of plastic, one more cigarette lighter or magic marker, and the baby chokes to death. It's a long process of the babies just kind of flapping around, making an awful gagging sound, and then crashing into the ground and expiring. There’s a huge abundance of life and an overwhelming noise, day and night—and at the same time there’s death all around.

Brooke: And that emotional experience is very different from an intellectual one.

Chris: It’s the only way we really believe what’s happening, or how wrong it is. Even in the green movement, there's a tremendous amount of denial about how bad things are. I constantly hear the message, "We're just about to save the world. There’s going to be a giant transformation. It's just around the corner."

But there's a dark side that we aren't facing. Until we do, I don't think we're going to make any progress. You know what it's kind of like? The alcoholic who says, "I can stop whenever I want. It's going to be tomorrow. Please pass the vodka bottle." Until we start acknowledging the scope of our problem and face what we actually feel, the conversation can’t change.

Brooke: How can giving up on denial change the conversation?

Chris: I don't know. I don’t think we can know. It seems to me that that's a portal we have to step through. We have to let go of what's on the other side, and go through.

That’s the intention for my Midway work. I'm allowing myself to fully experience the horror of just one of the tragedies that's happening in our world. I'm letting go of how that's going to affect me.

How do we face our grief and despair without getting lost in them?

When I do my public talks, I talk a lot about despair and shame and hopelessness. People come up to me and say they feel such a relief to talk about those emotions. We’re all feeling lost and disempowered and like some things are fundamentally wrong. And yet people are pretending things are fine: The economic bailout's going to get us right back where we were a few years ago and we're going to keep right on with the party. But I think we all know that isn't going to happen.

I believe that we need to allow ourselves to feel grief deeply. Anger and rage and shame—those are surface feelings. Grief is deep. Grief and love might be the two deepest human emotions. When we allow ourselves to really grieve, it's a transformational experience.

People I've known who have gone through the long slow death of a loved one from cancer, who have fully grieved and fully said goodbye and fully experienced the process, have come out of that experience transformed. They know more deeply who they are and what their priorities are. The Dalai Lama is not the only person in the world who has access to that kind of wisdom. We all do, but it gets clouded and fogged over by our daily rush and the messages we keep getting from our consumer culture, that material things will bring us happiness. We're all so involved in this headlong rush to a more materially luxurious lifestyle that we forget who we are and what really matters. We so badly need to reconnect with that right now.

If the conversation is going to turn in the direction of collective cultural wisdom, I believe we need to grieve first.'

7 Billion - National Geographic Magazine

...although the perpetual use of non-Western faces to illustrate population is not telling the whole story...if those of us in high-consuming nations wish to keep consuming at the rate we do, perhaps it is we who are over-populated?

Sourced from YouTube, 27 December 2010

The Value of Sleep

Great talk by Arianna Huffington! Interesting connection between leadership, lack of sleep and one-upmanship of sleep deprivation...

Sourced from TED, January 2011



'In this short talk, Arianna Huffington shares a small idea that can awaken much bigger ones: the power of a good night's sleep. Instead of bragging about our sleep deficits, she urges us to shut our eyes and see the big picture: We can sleep our way to increased productivity and happiness - and smarter decision-making.'

The Empathic Civilization

Sourced from YES! Magazine, 4 November 2010



See related posts The Empathic Civilisation and The Empathic Civilisation: From Geopolitics to Biosphere Politics

'Jeremy Rifkin, economist and founder of The Foundation on Economic Trends, believes it is possible to expand the reach of our empathy to the entire human race, and beyond. He cites new research showing that humans are soft-wired with mirror neurons that cause us to empathize with one another. This emotion has evolved over time: What began as a feeling reserved for those of the same family has expanded to those of the same tribe, to religion, to nation.'

The Economics of Happiness

Sourced from the producers of The Economics of Happiness documentary, International Society for Ecology & Culture (ISEC).



'Economic globalization has led to a massive expansion in the scale and power of big business and banking. It has also worsened nearly every problem we face: fundamentalism and ethnic conflict; climate chaos and species extinction; financial instability and unemployment. There are personal costs too. For the majority of people on the planet life is becoming increasingly stressful. We have less time for friends and family and we face mounting pressures at work.

The Economics of Happiness describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, government and big business continue to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, all around the world people are resisting those policies, demanding a re-regulation of trade and finance—and, far from the old institutions of power, they’re starting to forge a very different future. Communities are coming together to re-build more human scale, ecological economies based on a new paradigm – an economics of localization.'

Debtris

Sourced from Information is Beautiful, 31 December 2010

A 'Tetris' of Debt...

The last two blocks to fall into place are just mind-blowing...makes a mockery of keeping an entire continent enslaved by debt, when so much more can be conjured up to fix the mess made by bankers. Appalling.

Humans Only Have 200-300 Years Left on Earth - Former UK Environment Minister

Reposted in full from The Ecologist, 22 July 2010

'Former environment minister Michael Meacher on the place of humanity in the universe, intelligent design, the survival of the human race, Gaia theory and uncertainties over climate change

Tom Levitt: Your new book is focused on the destination of the human race, but what is our role, if indeed we have one?

Michael Meacher: Well 99.9993 per cent of time since the origin of the universe elapsed before we even came on stage. That doesn't say that it took all that time to produce this wonderful human species but it does seem odd and I think it shows that we are part of a cycle which is continuing. Ninety-nine per cent of all species are extinct - I don't think there is any guarantee of our survival especially if we remain as irresponsible and foolish as we are at the moment.

Irrespective of that I would expect the evolution of life forms to continue alongside and possibly surpass us. But we are an important part of it - we are the first species on earth in all that time that has a sense of morality and spirituality. These are very significant features of the human species which mark us out as very special.

I don't think the whole universe is about us and that's where we come to Stephen Hawking's point about us being exceedingly insignificant because we are on earth - just one of 8 planets in a solar system going round a sun which is one star, just an ordinary star, of which there are 200 billion in our galaxy, the Milky Way. And there are about 100 billion galaxies...

When you think of it in these terms, we are totally insignificant and almost invisible. So you have a contrast and paradox that is the size of universe, beyond are imagination and yet at the same time we are a very unique species. There is something very special about us. You have to somehow combine those two facts. How is it that a species in such a minute part of the universe should turn out to be so significant in the evolution of life forms? I don't think there is any obvious answer.

TL: Does that lead us to believe in a creator?

MM: The religious answer is that God created us in His own image but it does seem very odd that we have a universe of vast size to produce us and that it has taken an inordinately long time to reach this stage of life forms. It doesn't mean it is impossible but it does seem very odd unless you take the view that time is immaterial and we are only at the beginning of it and it will revolve for ever.

I don't believe science has invalidated religion and it can't because they are two utterly different paradigms of existence. Science has enormously increased the wonder of the religious message. It doesn't force us to believe in it but it is compatible with it.

TL: What will happen to humans - can we survive?

MM: We have become very clever in our improvements in technology and engineering over the last 100 years and the level of productivity and extent of exploitation has increased rapidly. But while the earth is extremely bountiful, there are limits to how many resources we can extract without replacing them or enabling them to be recycled and to recover.

We have an overdraft with the earth something in excess of 130 per cent. We currently consume something like 30 per cent over and above what we are replacing and rather like an overdraft at a bank that can't go on.

I don't think we have learnt to keep within the limits. They are quite elastic but there is a point beyond which they will break and then you will get a complete and massive change in the climate in which the survival of human species might not be compatible.

I think with the current rate of exploitation and current disregard for sustainability that our economy and our civilisation has, I think we will easily reach that point in the next 200-300 years.

TL: Will we destroy the earth as well as ourselves?

MM: I don't think so. I think James Lovelock's idea - that when an alien virus invades the human body it fights back and usually manages to surround and destroy the alien - is more likely. Earth will do everything it can to survive with us being the virus it is trying to destroy.

Climate change is one way it is doing it. It is changing the climate - the atmosphere, temperature, ocean acidity and sea levels - all massive changes cumulatively saying to us that we cannot go on as we are. And we cannot go on as we are because we will lose the basic resources which are essential to our survival.

TL: Can we reverse this situation and stop ourselves from heading towards extinction?

MM: We can - we are an intelligent species. The question is whether there is the political leadership in countries to act on what the scientists say. It's not perfect - the description of the atmosphere and the interactions between so many parts of the climate is very complex and I don't think the science is 100 per cent there, but it's 80-90 per cent of the way there, and is being refined all the time. We certainly know plenty more than is necessary to apply the precautionary principle.

The issue is whether there is the political leadership to guide people. The knowledge is there for them but it is the difficulty in actually getting that change in way of life which political leaders by and large are unwilling to press. They prefer to win elections: people in the west like their comfort zones and way of life and political leaders are not willing to press very far.

I think that will only really change when the human races begins to suffer some of the extremely severe consequences of climate change which may be some decades ahead. They will then realise, as we have with the financial crisis, that we are up against the wall and hitting the buffers and we have got to change.

It would be nice if human beings realised those limits and began willingly to act in accordance with them in order to produce more a harmonious relationship with our environment and greater sustainability. But all the evidence is that we are not wiling to do this until forced to. So yes we can change but I doubt whether there is yet the political will.'

The Fixer's Collective

Sourced from Kickstarter, 30 December 2010



'The Fixers’ Collective is a social experiment in improvisational fixing and mending. Our goals are:

1/ To increase material literacy in our community by fostering an ethic of creative caring toward the objects in our lives.

2/ To displace cultural patterns that alienate us from our things, by collectively learning the skills and patience necessary to care for them.

3/ To promote a counter-ethos that values functionality, simplicity, and ingenuity and that respects age, persistence and adequacy.

4/ To encourage our communities to take liberties with designated forms and purposes, resulting in mended objects that exist both as art and within a utilitarian context.'

A Big Australia?

Reposted in full - Economics Editor Ross Gittins in the Sydney Morning Herald, 24 November 2010

'The Big Australia issue has gone quiet since the election but it hasn't gone away. It can't go away because it's too central to our future and, despite Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott's rare agreement to eschew rapid population growth, the issue remains unresolved.

This year Rebecca Huntley of Ipsos, a global market research firm, and Bernard Salt of KPMG, a financial services firm, conducted interviews with business people and discussions with 13 groups of consumers, showing them two markedly different scenarios of what Australia could look like in 2020.

In the ''measured Australia'' scenario, governments limited population growth, focused on making our activities more environmentally sustainable and limited our economic links with the rest of the world.

In the ''global Australia'' scenario, governments set aside concerns about the environment, promoted rapid economic and population growth, and made Australia ever more a part of Asia.

Not surprisingly, the business people hated measured Australia and loved global Australia. But even though global Australia was described in glowing terms - ignoring the environment apparently had no adverse effects - ordinary people rejected it. And although measured Australia was painted in negative terms - all downside and no upside - there were aspects of it people quite liked.

The message I draw is that if governments keep pursuing rapid growth to please business they'll encounter increasing resentment and resistance from voters.

Considering the human animal's deep-seated fear of foreigners, it's not surprising resentment has focused on immigration. It's clear from the way in the election campaign both sides purported to have set their face against high migration that they're starting to get the message.

But at the moment they're promising to restrict immigration with one hand while encouraging a decade-long, labour-consuming boom in the construction of mines and gas facilities with the other. And this will be happening at a time when the economy is already close to full employment and baby boomers retire as the population ages.

Their two approaches don't fit together. And unless our leaders find a way to resolve the contradiction there's trouble ahead.

Business people support rapid population growth, which really means high immigration; there's little governments can do to influence the birth rate, because they know a bigger population means a bigger economy. And in a bigger economy they can increase their sales and profits.

That's fine for them, but it doesn't necessarily follow that a bigger economy is better for you and me. Only if the extra people add more to national income than their own share of that income will the average incomes of the rest of us be increased. And that's not to say any gain in material standard of living isn't offset by a decline in our quality of life, which goes unmeasured by gross domestic product.

The most recent study by the Productivity Commission, in 2006, found that even extra skilled migration did little or nothing to raise the average incomes of the existing population, with the migrants themselves the only beneficiaries.

This may explain why, this time, economists are approaching the question from the other end: we're getting the future economic growth from the desire of the world's mining companies to greatly expand Australia's capacity to export coal, iron ore and natural gas, but we don't have sufficient skilled labour to meet that need and unless we bring in a lot more labour this episode will end in soaring wages and inflation.

Peter McDonald, a leading demographer at the Australian National University, argues that governments don't determine the level of net migration, the economy does. When our economy's in recession, few immigrants come and more Aussies leave; when the economy's booming, more immigrants come and fewer Aussies leave. Governments could try to resist this increase, but so far they've opted to get out of the way.

To most business people, economists and demographers, the answer to our present problem is obvious: since economic growth must go ahead, the two sides of politics should stop their populist pandering to the punters' resentment of foreigners.

But it seems clear from the Ipsos discussion groups that people's resistance to high immigration focuses on their concerns about the present inadequacy of public infrastructure: roads, transport, water and energy. We're not coping now, what would it be like with more people?

And the punters have a point. In their instinctive reaction to the idea of more foreigners they've put their finger on the great weakness in the economic case for immigration.

As economists know - but don't like to talk or even think about - the reason immigration adds little or nothing to the material living standards of the existing population is that each extra person coming to Australia - the workers and their families - has to be provided with extra capital equipment: a home to live in, machines to use at work and a host of public infrastructure such as roads, public transport, schools, hospitals, libraries, police stations and much else.

The cost of that extra capital has to be set against the benefit from the extra labour. If the extra capital isn't forthcoming, living standards - and, no doubt, quality of life - decline.

If we don't build the extra homes - as we haven't been doing for some years - rents and house prices keep rising, making home ownership less affordable. To build the extra public facilities, governments have to raise taxes and borrow money. But they hate raising taxes and both sides of federal politics have sworn to eliminate government debt.

The interviews and discussion groups revealed both business people and consumers to be highly doubtful about the ability of governments - particularly state governments - to provide the infrastructure we need. As well they might be.

At present, our leaders on both sides are heading towards a future that doesn't add up.'

No Community Consultation in 2011

I LOVE this guy!!

Sourced from David Engwicht's 'Creative Communities' newsletter, December 2010

'Let’s face it. Community consultation is a failed experiment. All it has done is train-up professional axe grinders, then given them a forum in which to grind their axe. In spite of the best intentions of dedicated, hard-working public servants like yourself, the community consultation experiment has resulted in disengaged residents (apart from the professional axe grinders), lowest-common-denominator solutions, and decision-making mired in endless debate...

‘But,’ I hear you ask, ‘What am I supposed to do if I don’t do community consultation?’

Good question. Here are ten suggestions:

1. Abandon customer model. Implement citizen model instead

Over the past thirty years, cities have dramatically changed the way they relate to inhabitants.

For centuries, the concept of the city was built on a notion of ‘citizenship’. For the Greeks, citizenship in the polis was not so much a rank or reward as it was like being in a school, a kind of discipleship that would cultivate a new kind of being: a cultured citizen. As a citizen of the polis, you were part of a cooperative enterprise in building a nurturing environment in which others (including yourself) could reach their highest potential. For the Greeks, the streets and squares were the democratic heart of the city – the place of genuine citizen engagement.

But all this has changed. Instead of relating to inhabitants as ‘citizens’, cities now relate to them as ‘customers’. For example, when traffic colonises a residential street, residents demand that the city calm the traffic. As customers, they have paid (through rates and taxes) for a product – slower traffic in their street.

Under the citizen model, people take personal responsibility for fixing their own problems. If young people burn rubber in the street, they ring the door bell of the young people and work it out. Cost to the city, zero. Under the customer model, these same people ring the council and demand that the city traffic calm their street. Cost to the city, $400,000. Note that the customer model is only viable under conditions of affluence. Outsourcing your civic responsibility is not cheap. Outsourcing civic responsibility also demands ‘community consultation’. Instead of an informal meeting on the doorstep of the offending youth, residents now attend a formal meeting with city authorities to debate where the speed bumps should go. The tragedy is that the real issues, the residents’ psychological retreat from their street and abandoning of their civic duty, is not addressed. The consultation is a smokescreen for avoiding personal responsibility.

Note that this move from the citizen model to the customer model has been a two way street: cities have taken a paternalistic role and residents have abandoned their civic responsibilities. However, the role that cities have adopted is an impossible role. A vibrant civic life is not a ‘product’ that can be delivered by a city bureaucracy. It can only be created by civic-minded citizens working cooperatively.

2. Create authentic place, not more plans

Most community consultation is a substitute for a genuine, authentic experience of place – that is a real experience of community and civic life. The Greek concept of the polis was that each time a person went into the public realm, they would come home a little more civilised and a little more cultured. In a forthcoming book on place, I discuss the power of place-ness to transform us.

I once erected a throne that folds out of a suitcase in a deserted Los Angeles parking lot, home to homeless people. A homeless lady sat regally on the throne, and in that moment was transformed from a homeless lady into Queen of Los Angeles. Every time this homeless lady comes back to her home in the parking lot and remembers the night she sat on the throne, she is transformed once again. This is the essence of place making: creating memorable experiences that are transformative. Place-ness snaps us out of our preoccupation with set plans for the future, and opens up cracks in the wall of our ‘reality’. Through the cracks in the wall, we glimpse possibilities we never knew existed. Who knows, but on that warm, muggy evening in the parking lot, a future mayor of Los Angeles may have been conceived.

Community consultation talks about creating these transformative place experiences. Place making creates the experiences. As Place Maker for the city of Wodonga, charged with turning the main street into the civic heart of the city, the ‘community consultation’ did not involve endless meetings. Instead we organised a street party every Friday night for 12 weeks. People were invited to bring their lounge chairs and reclaim the street as civic space. We watched how people used the street, and as ‘home-maker hosts’ we found ways to enhance that experience – including permanent changes to the streetscape.

Place making is like home making. Part of feeling at home in a space is that you stop being an observer and you become a participant in the experience offered by that space. So, for example, when someone puts their feet up on the coffee table we say they are ‘making themselves at home’. They are making themselves comfortable in the space by taking psychological ownership of it. It is a genuine experience of an authentic place. It is not a hypothetical conversation about what they think would need to change for them to have an authentic experience. The host works with them in helping them construct this authentic experience - organically.

3. Return to incremental planning

By very definition, if you involve the community in the authentic making of place (rather than hypothetical discussions about creating place) then the process will be incremental. In Wodonga we started with a ‘low-hanging fruit plan’, things that we could do instantly that we thought would get the reclaiming of the street moving in the right direction. We also constantly experimented with our Friday night events, watching what worked and what didn’t work, then instigating changes based on these observations.

Sure there is a place for some master-planning in a city for things like future rail lines. But this must be balanced with an incremental, organic approach to the way places evolve. For example, in Beach Haven, New Zealand, the city had $50,000 to spend on the revitalisation of a shopping street. Normally this money would have been eaten up in creating a master plan. I convinced the city to put this money in the middle of a table. I then educated a group of 40 residents on what created great public space and then broke them into teams. They competed to find the most creative way to spend the $50,000. By the end of one-and-a-half days they had reached consensus, and formed a group to oversee the spending of the $50,000. Instead of a consultant’s report, the residents got $50,000 worth of improvements, plus significant altruistic contributions from various sectors of the community. The project is incremental in nature and the residents are involved in the actual creation of their civic space.

4. Stop fixing problems and create DIY Kits

Cities should develop a range of self-help kits that show residents how to address a range of issues, such as traffic and anti-social behaviour. Whenever residents complain about these issues they should be given the DIY kit and told to come back if the kit does not help them resolve the issue. Residents should not get physical design interventions in their street until they have demonstrated that they are taking civic responsibility. This probably means abandoning the Traffic Calming Department and calling it the Department of Civic Responsibility.

5. Establish a Red Tape Reduction Party

The customer model requires increasing levels of regulations. Moving back to a citizen model requires handing back responsibility, which requires a serious commitment to reducing red tape. The Red Tape Reduction Party would be charged with reducing red tape by a set percentage each year along with being a ‘can-do’ trouble-shooting group that helps citizens overcome red tape when it stops them from taking civic responsibility. This would seriously change the culture in the organisation. The first port of call for addressing any issue should be to build citizen capacity, not to introduce new regulations.

6. Take out the traffic signs

The late Hans Monderman was a Dutch engineer who pioneered the removal of traffic control devices from villages. His grand vision was the ‘re-democratization of public space.’ He said, ‘As an engineer, it is not my job to try and forecast every potential problem the village may have in the future and resolve that potential conflict, in advance, through design. Every time I resolve a potential conflict through a new regulation or white line, I de-skill the community in resolving its own conflicts. And resolving conflict is at the heart of building robust, resilient communities.”

7. Change your relationship with developers

There was a time when the creator of a building was allowed to place their building wherever they liked. But they had a civic duty to place the building in a way that contributed to the magic of the public realm. The result was the organic streets and public squares of Europe, full of surprise and inherent genius.

Today developers no longer have a civic duty to ensure their building adds to the magic of the public realm. Instead the city tries to create this ‘civic benefit’ through regulations and master plans. The result is a sterile public realm because the developer, like a naughty child, sees how far they can push the boundaries.

Change your relationship. State exactly what you believe a developer’s civic duties are and what your city’s expectations are. Set the bar high. Then give developers a choice. They can go the regulatory route or the expectations route. The rewards for going the expectation route will be greater flexibility, faster turnaround, and the warm inner glow that comes from altruistic actions.

8. Ban red dots. Real action plans only.

A lot of community consultation has become farcical. Residents (usually the professional axe-grinders) are asked to generate wish-lists on butcher’s paper. They are then given ten red dots to spend on their favourite items on the wish-list. The result is a community vision, with priorities indicated by the clusters of red dots. The butcher’s paper is rolled up, taken back to the office and stuck under a desk. That night, the community consultation fairies come out and sprinkle magic dust on the items with most red dots, and hey presto, they magically spring into being.

I refuse to run community conversations that are bitch and moan sessions or simply result in wish-lists. I have created processes, like ‘Speed Dating Action Plans’, that force every individual to think about what they are prepared to do, and make a commitment to that action. (Detailed instructions are available at www.creative-communities.com/?page_id=69.) People are not allowed to discuss what other people should do. If people are not prepared to take civic responsibility, I give them an opportunity to leave the conversation and go home.

9. Ban public meetings. Parties only.

Meetings provide a venue for professional axe grinders to bitch and moan. Cut them off at the knees. Ban public meetings and have a party instead.

10. Ban stakeholders. ‘Real citizens’ only

Community consultation, as currently practiced, encourages people to wear a ‘single-identity-stakeholder hat’. Every issue a city is asked to deal with is the result of the clash between inherently contradictory human needs. We all have a need to move, and we all have a need to ‘reside’. A sense of place requires us to become rooted to a locality. The conflict between ‘motorists’ and ‘residents’ is not therefore a conflict between two groups of people in the city, but a conflict between different ‘modes of being’ that are deeply ingrained in our psyche. When people arrive at a community consultation meeting, almost everyone will be wearing a single hat: resident, motorist, parent, business owner, environmentalist, cyclist, pedestrian, lover-of-order, lover-of-spontaneity, etc. If we allow people to stay in this single-identity (or worse still actively encourage it by making them a representative of a stakeholder group), we aid and abet citizens in abandoning responsibility for their internal contradictions, and allow them to externalise the tension between their internal contradictions. So, for example, the tension between the motorist and resident in their head is externalised into tension between one group of people wearing their resident hat and another group of people wearing their motorist hat. The result is that each group grinds the other down towards grey neutrality – lowest common-denominator solutions. The only way for people to reach highly creative and sustainable solutions is to own their internal contradictions.

If I am asked to run an already established community consultation process, the first thing I do is find a way to get people out of their single-identity mentality. For example, I may get everyone in the room to exchange identities with ‘their enemy’ and for the rest of the process they must role-play that person (after all, ‘their enemy’ is the part of their psyche currently locked out of the discussion about whatever the issue is that they are struggling with)...

Imagine a world where there are no more community consultation meetings.

Imagine a world where children, those with a disability, the elderly, the disenfranchised are once again part of authentic community, authentic civic life, all happening in authentic places...

If you would like to be on the cutting edge of what is happening in our cities, I am running a series of two-day workshops in 24 cities worldwide in 2011.

David Engwicht
david@creative-communities.com
61 (0) 7 3366 7746

Rebuilding Families and Neighborhoods

Excerpt from YES! Magazine, 22 December 2010

'When family members do not work or live well together we sometimes call the family dysfunctional. We prescribe professional help for the family or advocate for social policies that would support it - child care, parental leave, extended unemployment insurance, debt forgiveness.

But the real challenge to the family is that it has lost its job. The functions of the family have been outsourced. The problem is not dysfunction - that’s just a side effect. The problem is non-function, and this has much to do with the growth of the consumer society.

The End of the Functional Family

Consumer society has put an end to the functional family. We normally think of consumerism as buying stuff we want but don’t need, but it runs deeper than that. The essential promise of consumerism is that all of what is fulfilling or needed in life can be purchased—from happiness to healing, from love to laughter, from raising a child to caring for someone at the end of life. What was once the task of the family and the neighborhood is now outsourced. Aunt Martha is forgetful? Little Arthur is restless? Get them a diagnosis and a prescription. In this simple act, we stop being citizens—we become consumers.

Creating a more community-based way to live and find satisfaction, even when surrounded by a consumer culture, requires only that we act as if each of us has what we need.

The cost of our transformation into consumers is that the family has lost its capacity to manage the necessities it traditionally provided. We expect the school, coaches, agencies, social workers, probation officers, sitters and day care to raise our children. The family, while romanticized and held as a cultural ideal, has lost its function as the primary place to raise children, sustain health, care for the vulnerable, and ensure economic security.

The Rise of Neighborhood Incompetence

The neighborhood has also lost its function. Our neighborhoods and communities are no longer able to support the family in its efforts. In most cases, we are disconnected from our neighbors and isolated from our communities. The community and neighborhood are no longer competent.

A competent community provides a safety net for the care of a child, attention and care for the vulnerable, the means for economic survival for the household, and many of the social tools that sustain health. The community, particularly the neighborhood, has the potential to provide the extended support system to help the family in all these key functions. The usefulness that used to reside in the neighborhood is now provided by the marketplace.

Outsiders Raising Children

“It takes a village to raise a child” is an African saying repeated as a matter of faith by American leaders of all persuasions. Yet most of our children are not raised by a village. Instead, they are raised by teachers and counselors in school, youth workers and coaches out of school, juvenile therapists and corrections officials if they are deviant, television and computers and cell phones if they have spare time, and McDonald’s if they are hungry. What this means is that the space that the family and neighborhood once filled has been sold and is now filled with paid professionals, electronic toys, and marketing.

Until the 20th century, the basic idea in rearing children was that they become effective grownups by connecting with productive adults and learning from them the community’s skills, traditions, and customs. Youth learned from the community and had jobs to do: caring for the elderly and young, doing errands for the household, working on machines, helping with food. When they became adults, they were equipped to care both for the next generation and for those who had cared for them.

What we now know is that the most effective local communities are those where neighborhoods and citizens have reclaimed their traditional roles. The research on this point is decisive. Where there are “thick” community connections, there is positive child development. Health improves, the environment is sustained, and people are safer and have a better local economy. The social fabric of neighborhood and family is decisive.

Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods

Creating a more community-based way to live and find satisfaction, even when surrounded by a consumer culture, requires only that we act as if each of us has what we need. We have the gifts, structures, and capacities to substitute for our habit of consumption. We can decide to shift our attention toward building the functions of our family and neighborhood...

Creating competence starts with making visible the gifts of everyone in the neighborhood—the families, the young people, the old people, the vulnerable people, the troublesome people. Everyone. We do this not out of altruism, but to create the elements of a satisfying life.

This thickens the social fabric. It makes the community’s gifts more widely available in support of the family. If we do it, even in small way, we find that much of what we once purchased is at hand: carpentry, Internet knowledge, listening, driving a truck, math, auto repair, organizing ability, gardening, haircutting, wallpapering, making videos, babysitting, house painting, accounting, soccer coaching, artistic abilities, cooking, fitness knowledge, sitting with the old or the ill, health remedies, sewing. And some of those things will come from the elderly, the young, the isolated, and the unemployed.

With the consciousness of our gifts and the ability to connect them and make them practical and usable, we experience the abundance of a community.

These local connections can give the modern family what the extended family once provided: A place with a strong culture of kin, friends, and neighbors. Together we raise our children, manage health, support local enterprise, and care for those on the margin.

When we become competent again and have families reclaim their functions, we see emerging from our community culture those essential qualities of a satisfying life: kindness, generosity, cooperation, forgiveness, and the ability to live with our common fallibilities. These will all be given a home and nurtured by families who have reclaimed their function.'