Pitchapalooza! « The Imagined Worlds of Michelle Yvonne Merrill

Pitchapalooza! « The Imagined Worlds of Michelle Yvonne Merrill.

A bit about the pitch for my latest fiction idea.  I’m developing a young adult novel for a couple of strategic reasons:

1. I think it’s the best way to reach the most people quickly with important ideas. (Of course, I’d be delighted to sell out, given the opportunity.  Just because I have a lot of disdain for the money culture doesn’t mean that having money would be a bad thing, given that it’s not going away tomorrow.)
2. It’s an even better venue for talking about both traditional permaculture approaches and the promise of sustainable technology.
3.  Honestly, I love the story and the characters, and I’m having so much fun writing it.

Twelve year old Severn Suzuki speaking at the UN Earth Summit (1992) « Critical Docs

Came across this on a kind-of wikiwalk… just… wow.  It’s still mostly in “Litany” mode, but I think this is getting at what I meant by the way the stories are told.

The girl who silenced the world for 5 minutes

For more info and a transcript, see:

Twelve year old Severn Suzuki speaking at the UN Earth Summit (1992) « Critical Docs.

(and, BTW, sorry ’bout that.)

Bill McKibben’s Extreme Weather Oped

Powerful Video of Bill McKibben’s Extreme Weather Oped.

Can we definitively say that any one “freak” record-breaking event was caused by the increased concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere?  No.  It doesn’t work like that.

Can we say the pattern which connects, the simultaneity and power of these outlier, 100-year whatevers, is very much the kind of thing that we expect, given what climate models have indicated are expected outcomes from increased greenhouse gas concentrations?  ’Fraid so, well, most likely anyway.  Other explanations strain the logic of probability.  More frightening still – a lot of it is going faster than many worst-case scenarios.  Sure, our models aren’t perfect yet.  It’s science – there’s no such thing as a perfect model or 100% certainty.  But we don’t need that to get off our butts and do what we can to prevent a highly-probably, totally awful future. The foot-dragging, hemming and hawing has got to stop.

Saying TATA to TINA (without looking like some kind of loony)

The Money Culture, Part 5

As the Cold War drew to a close and the Soviet Union began to collapse, Maggie Thatcher said of capitalism and the Washington Consensus “There Is No Alternative.”  The antidote to this is Susan George‘s “There are Thousands of Alternatives.”  While TINA and TATA make handy acronyms for these different perspectives, the TATA argument is all-to-readily dismissed by people who claim the mantle of history: “socialist” states collapsed, and even during the Great Recession it doesn’t look like the US, England or Germany are going to collapse this week, so we won, so that proves we were right and everything else is unfeasable, neener-neener-neener… (I exaggerate, of course, but only a little.)

This week, The Nation has a series of articles under the title “Reimagining Captialism.”  But with the exception of Eugene McCarraher’s article (and to some extent Dirk Philipsen’s article on replacing the GDP with something like Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness as a better measure of how well we’re doing), none of the other dozen or so authors dared to suggest that the solution to “the intractably mercenary nature of capitalism” might be to abandon capitalism altogether.

What some of the more radical thinkers to address this issue say is that neither capitalism nor socialism/communism as it has been practiced are tenable choices.  True, capitalism managed not to self-destruct quite yet, but the cracks are definitely showing.  But folks like Rianne Eisler and the Venus Project visonaries/loonies (and, hey, me too) posit that these economic systems have certain flaws in common, that they are both part of the same mindset.  According to the Venus Project, both were based on a model of material scarcity and the now-false notion that there isn’t enough food/energy/ingenuity to go around unless people work very hard to obtain it.  In The Real Wealth of Nations, Eisler explains that both capitalist and  have been based on a “dominator” model of human interaction (as opposed to a “cooperator” model). Or, as McCarraher  puts it:

Capitalism stands condemned most profoundly not by its maldistribution of wealth or its ecological despoliation but by its systematic cultivation of people inclined toward injustice and predation.

Donnella Meadows explained that many seemingly intractable problems are the result of systems wherein the function or goal is not defined well:

If the goal is defined badly, if it doesn’t measure what it’s supposed to measure, if it doesn’t reflect the real welfare of the system, then the system cannot possibly produce a desired result.  Systems, like the three wishes in the traditional fairy tale, have a terrible tendency to produce exactly and only what you ask them to produce. (Thinking in Systems: A Primer, p. 138)

This is part of the problem with GDP/GNPs and the advantage of alternatives like Gross National Happiness as the measure of system success.  To sum it up even more simply, Meadows said:

The best way to deduce the system’s purpose is to watch for a while to see how the system behaves.(Thinking in Systems: A Primer, p. 14)

How does the money culture behave?  What does it do?  What does it fail to do? They might say TINA, but it seems evident that capitalism and the money culture provide very poor ways to measure things that are actually desirable.

The Kitchen Curmudgeon is working on  GUTGWWW: The Grand Unified Theory of Getting What We Want (pronounced “gutgoo”), but her focus is on process.  What I’ve learned from Meadows’ work is that a better place to begin is articulating What We Want, and finding ways to measure and evaluate progress toward that goal that don’t just measure effort, but in some way signal that we actually are progressing. If “There are Thousands of Alternatives,” there should be some of those that have a better defined function/goal than the money culture.

Bhutan’s GNH Index sets out to measure the following nine dimensions that they decided were good cultural indicators of what they wanted:

GNH Domains 
- Time use 
- Living Standards 
- Good Governance 
- Psychological Wellbeing 
- Community Vitality 
- Culture 
- Health 
- Education 
- Ecology 

It seems like a place to start.

So, what do we want, and how do we define those goals? How will we measure progress?  Then let’s get to work on the GUTGWWW.

TATA for now!

“My bet is on the hairless monkey.”

From the Center for Pattern Literacy (Permaculture visionary and Gaia’s Garden author Toby Hemenway’s site) comes this refreshingly sober and calm blog entry on the realities of Peak Oil: Apocalypse, Not | Pattern Literacy.  It emphasizes the flexibility of our species (our ability to embrace the Anthropocene?) and the responsiveness and resilience of human eco-cultural systems, even in the face of TEOTWAWKI (“The End of the World as We Know It”).  The author may not know the difference between a monkey and an ape, but this post has some interesting things to say about shifting the idea of employment, economics and the “need” for work.

Humanity has reached the stage, finally, where basic survival is not in doubt for many people. We have not yet grasped that the struggle for survival is essentially over, and we have overshot. Instead of noticing that as a species we no longer need to labor all our waking hours for the basics of food and safe shelter, and to fight off disease and predators, we cannot get off the survival treadmill. So we just keep making more stuff, rather than looking up, taking a breath, and enjoying all the wonders possible from being a conscious, intelligent animal that has mastered survival. Perhaps Peak Oil, and a return to a time when resources are dear and labor is abundant, will remind us that there is much more to life than the manufactured desire to have more toys. Perhaps we can lose our small-minded obsession with getting and spending, and finally grow into maturity as a species. (Read this: Apocalypse, Not)

Embracing the Anthropocene

Embracing the Anthropocene – NYTimes.com.

An important look at our capacity to change our home planet, and how we choose to think about it.  Revkin’s thoughtful comments include:

Earth is what we choose to make of it, for better or worse.
Taking full ownership of the Anthropocene won’t be easy. The necessary feeling is a queasy mix of excitement and unease. I’ve compared it to waking up in the first car on the first run of a new roller coaster that hasn’t been examined fully by engineers.

What, you may ask, is the Anthropocene?  It’s a term coined in 2002 for the geologic epoch we find ourselves in, where humans have made sufficient changes to atmospheric and ocean chemistry, not to mention caused or contributed to the extinction of such a large number of species, that it will be detectable later in the geologic and fossil record.

“The Apocalypse?  You’re soaking in it.”
– Lindsay, Angel

Only, it’s up to us to decide how to cope.  We can even choose to build something better.  Or, as Stewart Brand once said:

We are as gods; we might as well get good at it.

To learn more about it, check out what National Geographic had to say on it – complete with photos!

Prevention, Unsung Heroes, and the Big Picture

I heard an NPR piece this afternoon about awards for outstanding work by air traffic controllers.  When they do their best, it doesn’t make the news.  Perhaps even the passengers in the planes are unaware of their close brush with disaster.  One assumes the pilots are aware of the tragedy-narrowly-averted.  At least in this instance, the near-miss is recorded and the one who prevented it can be recognized later.

I had earlier had a brief chance to talk with my friend Judy, sharing the news of an upcoming panel engagement at Bioneers, where I will be speaking as a representative of a “minority-serving institution” about how we are using the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment to foster sustainability at Cabrillo College.  I mentioned the unfortunate fact that the students and staff most engaged with sustainability on campus are probably the least diverse groups around.  Judy noted that sustainability issues are simply not a priority for people facing the kinds of challenges and injustices that minority students attending community colleges frequently face.  She’s not wrong.

I recall a similar conversation with another dear friend more than a decade ago.  When faced with such evident, day-to-day injustice and suffering amongst people, it’s nearly impossible to take a step back and see the more distant problems as being all that important.

And yet… the problems are still there, looming in the middle distance.  There are good reasons to believe that the arrival of food and water shortages, increasingly disruptive storms and floods, and the economic upheavals resulting from a failure to transition to more future-minded and sustainable ways of producing energy, food and basic necessities are going to create even more injustice, inequality, war and violence.  That’s what needs preventing.  That’s why we need to be changing things better, faster and smarter than we are now.  And that’s everybody’s issue.

So the challenge is to find a way to say that, a way that isn’t terrifying to the point of paralysis, a way that focuses on all the good we can gain from doing things differently.  At least, that’s what I’ve been working on for the last decade or so.  Green jobs, better health, stronger communities, all the positives that are part of doing things better and smarter.  And that seems to have some appeal in that LOHAS demographic (the folks who can “afford” to care) – it’s stylish and sexy to them.

It also has appeal in low-income communities of color, the folks served by People’s Grocery and Green for All.  They are overcoming injustice and building community, while nurturing the seeds of the kind of change that just might prevent the worst of the problems.  I think it’s sexy.  I think it’s heroic.

But nobody’s gonna listen to a white chick from the ‘burbs on this topic.  I want to foster that kind of change in the diverse communities where my students grew up… I just don’t have the street cred.

Aftershocks

The immense human tragedy of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan is just starting to fade from the headlines.  The crisis of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear facility is at a plateau, but still far from resolved.

As I reflect on the enormity of what happened on the other side of the ocean we share, I see some cause for my usual Cassandra-esque blend of gloom and repressed rage tinged with the darkest glimmers of optimism, some small bright linings to the heavy smog.

First,  the prevailing winds.  While there does seem to be radiation coming to ground on Japan, most of it is blowing to sea.  That’s the half-full. The half-empty is that… it’s going to sea.  Yes, as long as there are no major fires like Chernobyl, it shouldn’t be enough to pose an immediate threat to human health, at least in the short term.  But how will it affect small sea life (algae, krill, etc.) and the bigger things that feed on that and might concentrate it?

And the silvery glimmer… this was a wake-up call about Black Swan events and nuclear power plants.  In the last several years, I’ve been discouraged to see more greenthinkers turning to nuclear power as an option to prevent the worst effects of climate change.  Not only did they seem to be overlooking the high carbon price we pay to get the damnable things built out of concrete and keep them operational (and we still don’t know exactly what it will take to decommission them since we don’t have a good way of doing it yet), but they apparently forgot a basic tenet of the Precautionary Principle – if the outcomes of a mishap are intolerable, even if the perceived likelyhood of such a mishap is small, just don’t do it. “If the Japanese can’t build a safe reactor, who can?“ James Lovelock, Stewart Brand, et al. – what do you have to say for yourselves now?

Next, all that other stuff.  Videos show the tsunami grabbing and tossing things – heck, even the little one that tore through Santa Cruz harbor did that – and as it receded it pulled lots of those big and small things out to sea.  Now, my students in the Cabrillo Sustainability Council have been planning an event focusing on plastic waste and its impact on our oceans, so I’ve been thinking a lot about the gyre in the Pacific that lead to the formation of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  The big ocean current comes right off northern Japan, and moves across the central Pacific, and that’s where things that float just get stranded in the doldrums. Affluent, convenience-minded Japan had an awful lot of plastic to go around.  How much is this adding to our already awful mess in the middle of the mighty Pacific, and how will that affect marine ecosystems?

Finally, there are the economic ripples that will spread from this latest shock.  In our globally interconnected system, the disruption to Japan’s mighty industrial output is going to cause shivers and shudders worldwide.  Our ridiculously long and convoluted supply chains will experience gaps, though I’ll admit that they’re actually embedded in networks that provide some resilience – if you can’t get your widget from Japan, if you look around you can probably get one from India or Belgium or Argentina or Singapore or…  Now, economists say Japan’s economic woes won’t be big enough to derail overall global growth, especially when they consider all the GDP boosts from reconstruction in the coming months (yet another example of the twisted logic of money culture economics – horrific disasters are good for the economy!).  But I still have hope that Japan’s unexpected plunge into the Ω-phase of release and destruction in regards to their energy-intensive industrial economy might open the way for a very creative re-emergence in the α-phase.  After all, one of the seminal books on permaculture philosophy – The One-Straw Revolution – was penned there back in the 1970′s, so the seed of a new approach is already present.  And if permaculture gets big in Japan…

See, hope amid the rubble.  It’s not all gloom and doom, all the time.  As we begin the work to heal Japan, perhaps we can learn ways to heal some other world wounds, too.

Delenn, Muse and the Strange Lure of Fighting for the Cause

In general, I am a pacifist.  Intellectually I abhor violence.  Personally, I’m unable to cope effectively with even the mildest conflict.  At Bioneers last year, Lynne Twist asked us to decide where we stand on conflict, rating our reactions from 1: never engage in any form to 10: pugilistic, jonesing for a fight (I paraphrase, but it was something like that).  I’m a 2; I’ll only fight about something when all other possibilities have been thoroughly explored and exhausted, and even then, I really don’t wanna.  So no, I’m not a model revolutionary.

But… I think I’m just a little bit in love with revolution.  As a kid, the movies that had the biggest influence on me were the original Star Wars Trilogy and Gandhi – two very different models of rising up to stop the evil tyranny of injustice.

To this day, I always get teared up watching a movie or one of my TV shows (there aren’t many, and since I try to keep my exposure to commercials to a minimum, they’re on DVD or Netflix), when someone gives that rousing “we happy few”-type speech.  I can barely describe the strange elation I feel when Delenn appears just as the second wave of Shadow-allied-Fascist-Earthforce attackers are threatening Babylon 5 and she says:

“Why not?  Only one human captain has survived battle with the Minbari fleet.  He is behind me.  You are in front of me.  If you value your lives, be somewhere else.”

The ever-so-hokey call-to-arms speech in Avatar has almost the same effect on me.  Heck, even the war cries in Braveheart and Return of the King get to me a little.

And so do all those rabble-rousing songs by Muse.  Invincible, Uprising, Resistance… not only do I enjoy the music, I am moved in some inexplicable way.

They will not force us. They will stop degrading us. They will not control us. We will be victorious…

Flip the switch and open your third eye and see that we should never be afraid to die. Rise up and take the power back; it’s time the fat cats should have a heart attack… - M. Bellamy “Uprising”

So with the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, etc., in part I see the inevitable result of the demographics: educated, technologically-connected, underemployed, under-appreciated youth – with food prices rising, growing threats of water scarcity, the end of oil approaching and the wealth disparities increasing… of course they get a little feisty.  And as much as I’m ill-suited to any such thing (too afraid, too concilliatory, and getting too old), I envy them.  I wonder if that spirit of resistance will ever appear here in the overly-cushy U.S. of A – if the need to overturn an entrenched system of economic exploitation and environmental degradation becomes so urgent, for the sake of a livable future, that the young and frustrated see rebellion as a viable alternative, and they decide to take to the streets and demand change.

And if that comes to pass, where will I be?  What will I do?  I’m not a warrior.  I’m not a soldier.  I’m not a charismatic leader.  What’s my role, should revolution arise?

I came of age listening to punk rock (among other things): raging against the hypocrisy and injustice of the 1980′s status quo, but without a compelling vision of any alternative, only vague notions of an apocalyptic, nihilistic, MadMax future.  As a teacher, I now try to stay focused on what a better alternative might look like.  But sometimes I do wonder if the vision thing is just another opiate for the masses.

“I’m hungry for some unrest; let’s push it beyond the peaceful protest…” - M. Bellamy “Unnatural Selection”

But, honestly, I’m all about peaceful in my protest.  I’m not afraid to paint a sign and take to the streets (I’ve had to do that more than twice), but I don’t wanna be in an actual uprising.  Even verbal confrontation gives me the wiggins, so actual bare-the-canines-and-be-ready-to-back-it-up aggression is not something I could do, and not something I want anyone else to be doing either.

The protests of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. were effective only because so many were brave enough to stand in harm’s way when it was necessary.  They were able to lead those protests because they were that brave, too.  But I’m so acutely aware of the fact that those kinds of leaders usually get assassinated.  Closer to my own experience, there’s Dian Fossey, who tried to protect the apes she was studying and the habitat they lived in, and got the business end of a machete for her troubles.  I’m not brave enough to face that.  So does it make me a complete hypocrite to long for a leader that is, and to be so drawn to the fictional images of such courage and conviction?