Although I’m in favor of gun control — for what I think are pretty obvious reasons, like not wanting to get shot by some crazy person at the movie theater — I’ve never spent much time thinking about it. But listening to the current discussions and debates in Congress and in the media has left me thinking that there’s something missing in this conversation.

The argument for people freely owning guns rests, supposedly, on “protecting our Second Amendment rights.” But what if it infringes on my rights to have guns readily available to a small minority of the society, that is seemingly angry, or fearful, or likes to kill animals? Don’t I have a right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that takes precedence over any other person’s right to carry a gun? And given that the Second Amendment was explicitly intended to refer to “a militia” to ensure that America remains a free state, how does it make sense to let people have guns for any other purpose?

In other words, what’s missing is asking some fundamental questions, and formulating them in a way that opens up additional modes of thinking. The ones I’ve mentioned might seem like the sorts of questions we might ask high school kids to think about, except that we don’t. And without well thought-out and principled arguments to counter those of the gun lobby, we allow the latter to carry the day; and whether they believe the pro-gun propaganda or not, politicians use the specious arguments that are forever being offered as justifying what amounts to criminal inaction.

I say this because politicians who cave to the gun lobby are materially assisting people in killing one another, and for the most part the victims are innocent and undeserving of an early termination. This is an argument that ought to appeal even to the pro-life crowd: if you believe that fetuses have the right to be born, don’t you also believe in the right of those already born to live out a natural life, so long as they’re not harming others? I am personally not in favor of the termination of anyone’s life unnecessarily (e.g., except in self-defense), but you don’t have to be opposed to the death penalty to recognize that it ought not to be imposed on completely innocent people.

I think the majority of Americans have, moreover, the innate decency to recognize that this is so. The issue then, is articulating the arguments in favor of meaningful and rational gun control in such a way that even gun advocates are forced to recognize and acknowledge them. Even though these arguments may seem obvious to the residents of most other civilized nations, they need to be stated in America, and applied to our present conditions. We already have over 300 million guns in the country, and there’s evidently not much we can do about the ones already out there and in the wrong hands, except perhaps for buy-back programs. But the only way that we’ll ever really be safe in America is if we make sure that the guns are only in the hands of emotionally-mature individuals who constitute a “well-regulated militia” dedicated to ensuring the security of our freedom from tyrannical oppression, which however you look at it isn’t what we have today.

It’s not clear to me what “well-regulated” was actually intended to mean, or what it ought to mean nowadays, but it’s beyond question, in my mind, that gun owners ought to be regulated in a great many ways, and that this can be done without “infringing on their right to keep and bear arms.” In other words, if you want to own or carry a gun, you should be required to register it, and obey the “rules of the road” in much the same way as you are when driving today, without infringing on your right to go anywhere you want (except on private or restricted property).

So let’s look again at what the Second Amendment says, what it means, what it was originally intended for, and how it ought to be implemented today. It seems to me that this is part of what’s being submerged by the NRA’s massive funding and presence on Capitol Hill, which of course greatly exceeds that of the gun control advocates, who are themselves struggling to get their messages heard. But the promise of democracy is that, by citizens themselves speaking out, it’s possible to change our social order for the better. This means that it is important for all of us to articulate cogent and responsible beliefs, and make the politicians listen to us. This isn’t the only place we need to do this, but it’s an important one. We can’t do anything about any other issue if we’re dead.

So here’s the official language:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Is there anything in this that suggests that “the people” ought to be able to keep and bear arms without anyone checking to see if they’re generally law-abiding, or even sane? Or that those who do “keep and bear arms” ought not to be mustered from time to time, given training in what it means to secure “a free state,” and expected to behave responsibly toward others? Indeed, shouldn’t we be able to revoke someone’s license to keep a gun if they fail to behave that way; and review people’s behavior from time to time, and require them to renew their licenses, the way we do for drivers?

This won’t eliminate all crimes, of course, any more than relicensing drivers prevents all accidents; but it’s a good start toward a society in which guns were only used responsibly, and fewer people were killed by them. What we need now is for others to speak out as to what really makes sense, in today’s America, and share their views with others. With enough voices speaking up we will be heard; and more sensible gun control will truly be an idea whose time has come.

Being distracted, when so much is actually occurring in the world, is one of the most serious problems of our time. The recent media frenzy over the “fiscal cliff” was a perfect example of this: while Syrians were killing each other in record numbers, while machine guns are being sold in record numbers to crazy people, and while climate change is bearing down on the planet at a record speed, our attention is being held captive by the posturing and obstructiveness of a small faction of fiscal fanatics, who are daily trying to convince us that “the deficit is the biggest problem we have and the only thing that matters.”

In reality, of course, what actually determines whether or not we can, as a society, pay our bills and invest in the future is the health of the overall economy — including the numbers of people employed (and profitably self-employed), the amount of capital being invested in growing the economy, and what that economy is actually producing (including greenhouse gases).

So what can we actually do about this? It’s hard to avoid the huge distraction of the media, and of the advertising that supports it, and of the kabuki theater that much of our politics has descended to. It’s even more difficult, it seems, to avoid being “distracted” by one’s personal circumstances, in the form of working at a job doing things that we would otherwise not be willing to do, or of “looking for work” of this sort, which is usually the only kind that pays — and usually an always diminishing amount. It’s often occurred to me that my entire generation was distracted from its vision of a peaceful, transformational, enlightened revolution by the need to make a living. It’s almost as if maintaining the population in a state of financial scarcity is a deliberate tactic to constrain prosperity, and thereby require the vast majority to enter some form of indentured servitude.

But this can’t really be the case: there’s no “conspiracy” on the part of the 1% to impoverish the 99%. It’s just “the way things are.” The wealthy buy into it along with the rest of us, and push wise or stupid policies depending on whatever social reality they’re living in. If they’re Warren Buffett, they’re arguing for more progressive tax policies mainly for reasons of fairness; if they’re the Koch brothers, they’re funding massive disinformation campaigns designed to confuse, paralyze, and above all distract people from seeing the truth.

As we recall from transformational analysis, people act based on an engagement with the world that is occurring for them. As we noted earlier, what we pay attention to is what exists for us. This “paying attention to” stuff is what determines the difference between an Alan Greenspan and a Paul Krugman — whether or not they actually recognize what’s going on, and can provide relevant solutions to the underlying problems. To be sure, their own fundamental belief systems determine what they see and take in, and it’s hard to alter those. But as we deal with stuff on an everyday basis, it’s usually a question of what “bucket” we put it in that determines what we do about it.

In The Three Laws of Performance (2009),  Zaffron and Logan argue that these decisions and interpretations “arise in language,” and can be altered only by altering the language in which we are framing them. In other words, you can’t convince a Tea Partier that they’re wrong (because in the world that they are experiencing they’re not wrong), but you can potentially shift their focus so that they see the problems they’re preoccupied with in a different way.

Indeed, we can only shift our own beliefs and perspectives about things by “framing” them differently, so that we don’t put them in the wrong bucket, which is potentially an even more serious problem. We spend a lot of time worrying about why other people don’t see things the way we do, and trying to change them, when in reality we may be misperceiving things also, and advocating for the wrong things. It may be disturbing when we start to doubt ourselves; but let’s face it, if we actually saw stuff as it was and could share that point of view with other people, wouldn’t we have already solved most of our problems.

Werner thought he could help by pointing out the difference between “what’s so” and how we have interpreted it. You can make this pretty concrete if you’re willing to acknowledge that there are some “hard realities,” like the ceiling and the floor. But the rest — the global tapestry in institutions and policies and transactions — is entirely made up. And we’re the ones making it up. So we should wake up to how we’re doing it, and make some conscious choices about our own actions.

In short, the solution to the problem that Apollo Robbins poses is to recognize the deceit, the distraction, and to look at what’s actually there. But how do we make this distinction in the first place? Especially when it’s not a deliberate deceit, but is really a sort of confusion? Werner’s answer here is to connect action, or behavior, to what we’re committed to, regardless of how we “feel” about it, or how that little voice in our head keeps complaining about it.

In other words, it’s a matter of making some hard choices, by looking at the commitments that, if we pay attention, are already there, in the very fabric of our being, in the depths of our souls. (Well, I added the last part. Werner doesn’t talk much about souls.) If we want to do something about our communities, for example, we need to take action; it’s not enough to just talk about it. But “taking action” does include talking about it, so how we talk about it matters.

In thinking about how the Landmark Forum works — or indeed any other effective workshop — it’s about focusing the attention of many people on an outcome that is capable of altering each person’s experience irrevocably. We can’t do this by “convincing” people to believe something outlandish, by only by showing them the way to unmask their own self-deceptions, and get in touch with what all humans are truly capable of, unconditional love and appreciation for everything that is and the desire to make a difference, to do something that matters, and discover what matters to them.

In short, we’re unleashing people to do what calls to them, what inspires them, what their hearts tell them is possible. This is something of a radical idea, since sometimes if people are free to do whatever they want, they will do things that are profoundly irresponsible. But this is actually the idea our society is supposed to be founded upon; and at least in a free society we can point out those things that are irresponsible in a way that you can’t in a totalitarian society. Which is why a free society is potentially self-correcting, while a totalitarian one is ultimately self-destructive.

Note the word “potentially,” however. There’s nothing that guarantees that we won’t go over the climate cliff, and unlike the fiscal cliff the climate’s tipping point is not one that’s reversible by an act of congress. So we need to liberate and empower people to take responsible action — action that is consistent with their strengths and beliefs and knowledge but is also guided by the ultimate desire to benefit the whole, and the ultimate need to maintain the integrity of the ecosystem that we’re a part of.

This is a choice, of course. We can debate what’s responsible, e.g., in terms of rebuilding the Shore communities, regenerating the economy, and planning for a greener future. But as long as we are discussing these things, and continue to be open to new information  and new perspectives, we’re moving in the right direction.

We know that the new economic and ecological realities we face require us to do something different in business, which in some cases also means doing business differently.

Certainly it’s possible to use a conventional business model to manufacture and install solar panels, build windfarms, etc., and we certainly need these kinds of things “at scale,” as they say, sufficient to offset the energy we get from coal, oil, and nuclear. But other kinds of businesses — local, community-based businesses focusing on food, energy conservation, community banking, and other elements of local “economic, social, environmental, and cultural development” — these it seems need a different approach to doing business altogether.

For one thing, getting people to invest in local projects is surprisingly difficult under the conventional business model. It’s just much easier, and assumed to be much safer and more profitable, to “diversify your investments” by putting them in mutual funds, bonds, and publicly-traded companies. What we need are local investments that are either super-secure, or where the risk can be spread over many different enterprises and investors.

Focusing attention on the local economy is one of the central tenets of “financial permaculture,” a movement that is growing out of the tradition of permaculture derived from the work of Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in Tasmania in the 1970s.

Wikipedia describes permaculture as:

Permaculture is a branch of ecological design, ecological engineering, and environmental design which develops sustainable architecture/human settlements and self-maintained agricultural systems modeled from natural ecosystems.^[1][2]

The core tenets of permaculture are:^[3][4]

• Take care of the earth: Provision for all life systems to continue and multiply. This is the first principle, because without a healthy earth, humans cannot flourish.
• Take care of the people: Provision for people to access those resources necessary for their existence.
• Share the surplus: Healthy natural systems use outputs from each element to nourish others. We humans can do the same. By governing our own needs, we can set resources aside to further the above principles.

— and certainly these are goals of financial permaculture as well. The central goal is, however, to develop economic structures that are enduring and resilient because they are designed around these principles.

In January I’ll be speaking at the 2013 Financial Permaculture & Local Business Summit in Miami, and working with Earth Learning, the South Dade Economic Development Council, the Financial Permaculture Institute, and Miami Dade College at an ” integrative learning experience” to build resiliency in the local community.

As the poster states, “We will address the economic and ecological challenges of
the 21st century as we explore creating money cycling, local investments, and
forward-looking businesses that optimize the local natural systems and human capacities to implement models of regenerative business and local resiliency!” This is certainly what we need; the challenge is now to translate this into practical reality.

My experience is that it’s a lot easier to talk about “regenerative business” than it is to create one. To begin with, it must actually do something to regenerate the ecosystem, and ideally also the culture and the community, and for many of us these are elusive and difficult realities. What is a community, really? Is it geographically bounded, or defined by economic interrelationships, or is it something entirely in our minds, a form of agreement? Is it what’s conscious, or what’s unconsciously accepted to be real? Is it defined by administrative boundaries, or by cultural ones? These are difficult questions, like defining obscenity: we know it when we see it.

Then there’s the problem of making money, which is often the stickiest one: if it’s a business, it has to make money. And this may be true even if it’s not; in our society, to keep anything alive, even a nonprofit, it has to make enough money to “break even,” even if all of it comes from grants or donations. We are, as Buckminster Fuller frequently pointed out, the only species that has to work in order to have the right to eat. And of course it’s not just a matter of making enough money; it also has to make money “the right way,” which is to say in way that does not harm others or the environment and sustainably generates a surplus.

This leads us back to the question we started with, which is how and when we need to do not just different kinds of business but also to “do business differently.” Building a windfarm can be treated as just another business; it takes the same sort of planning, investment, and implementation as building a gas-fired power plant. But building a windfarm that returns its profits to the community — like some of the rural coops — requires a different kind of thinking. Similarly, having a local currency, or a community-owned bank, or a full-scale eco-community, means a different approach to business. It’s not about maximizing absentee shareholder value, but about maximizing stakeholder value, where the stakeholders include not only all the individuals who are affected but also future generations, other species, and nature itself. Creating this kind of business is hard, but it’s worth doing.

If you’re interested in attending the Miami event, or want to learn more about Financial Permaculture, please visit http://www.financialpermaculture.com/cms/

Or, I could possibly more easily ask, what am I not grateful for? Because life itself is such an extraordinary gift — in all its chaotic, disturbing, and often cruel outcomes, as well as its moments of sheer joy, awe, and exuberance — that it seems difficult not to be grateful for any of it.

In thinking about my own life, the phrase that comes to mind is just this, that it’s a work in progress. Like most people, I can’t point to one overarching accomplishment that defines my life. There are lots of small things I am proud of, and many others of which I am less so. I suppose that if there is anything I am not grateful for, it’s my own inadequacies, my own foolish weaknesses, the distractions that I have allowed to divert my thoughts and my energies from the singular pursuit of understanding who and why I am, and what I am doing in this world.

When I was growing up, for a long time I felt like an observer of the world, like I did not quite belong to it, nor did it belong to me. It was a deliberate choice to abandon that stance, to commit myself to being a part of the world, and giving some significance to my own actions. From being a spectator I wished to become a player, and did so largely by recognizing that I already was one. The idea that I could somehow stand outside life or history or the flow of time and observe it seemed to me one of the most seductive of illusions: since we totally absorbed in watching, we forget that all we are doing is watching, and that meanwhile life is passing us by.

So I determined to act, and adopted the view that my actions mattered, that I had to choose sides. It no longer made sense to me to stand by and watch the planet be dominated, exploited, and destroyed. I felt I should do something about it. So I went, in the first instance, from being a journalist to being a much deeper student of life, of history, and of human psychology, to get a much deeper sense of who we are, and how we have arrived at the present impasse.

This has, truthfully, been an extraordinary journey — not as artfully coherent as that of Forrest Gump, perhaps, but being privileged to have witnessed the last sixty or so years as a world citizen, as an independent social entrepreneur, and as a curious skeptic is in itself remarkable. And if I have not done more good with it, it’s my own fault. Existence, the universe, is whole and complete in itself; it embraces everything in it, including my unfulfilled and perhaps unfulfillable striving. Yet what good is it to me — or I to it — if I leave it without accomplishing something of value equal to its magnificence?

Yet is it not an illusion to think that we can impact anything except our own actions? As I’m writing this I’m watching yet another phase of the Middle East conflict — Israel bombing the Palestinians in Gaza, and the Palestinians firing off missiles — that they must have procured from someone, either for some money or because another, wealthier nation sees this as its form of charity. In Syria, the rebels are, surprisingly, more or less holding their own against a military than even the West is reluctant to take on. Can any one individual make a difference? Are we not simply doomed to watching these acts of self-destruction play out on television, with their disturbing scenes of newly-created orphans and injured children?

Perhaps what matters is that we come to understand these as acts of self-injury and self-destruction, the species turning against itself as mercilessly as it has turned against nature.

_______________

One of the consequences of having so many projects is that most of my work is now elsewhere, and I don’t have time to update this “vanity” site on a regular basis. (Who needs a vanity site anyway, if the real goal is getting things done?). But it’s probably still worth listing some of these things out here, if only for my own interest. And this is where I turn when I’m not sure where an item or an article belongs.

Take the Dead River Journal, for example. My last post there is A Common Framework for Global Change? — from around this time last year. I started something on going after the Tea Party crazies, like the one I ran into at a clean energy seminar in Old Bridge, but couldn’t see the need to actually publish it.

Maybe this really belongs there, but my current thinking is focusing more on showing how the system is rigged, and figuring out what we can do about it. As a number of authors have noted, the behavior of any complex system is a function of the rules according to which it is structured. We can’t expect it do what it isn’t set up to do; and we can’t expect it not to do what it is designed for. Understanding how the system is designed to be dysfunctional (from our standpoint, but highly functional from another), can perhaps give us some insight into the systems we need to design to avoid the crises for which we are headed.

More broadly, it seems that we need to shift the basic assumptions we have about nature and ourselves, if we are going to alter the course that humanity seems embarked on. We face not only a practical crisis but also a profoundly spiritual one, as deep and as disturbing as that of earlier ages but of accelerating urgency. Where I should like to speak of this is perhaps at the Sustainable Leadership Forum, where I’ve been seeking to engage an expanding circle of thinkers and practitioners in a conversation about creating more sustainable neighborhoods and communities, right here and right now. But this is much broader than that, and goes to the heart of who we think we are, what we think God or Nature wants from us, and how we should live our lives. In service to what? And where’s the right place to talk about this?

(You can find the original article here: Demanding Change, and the experimental work on the new economy here: Altonomy.com. I welcome your thoughts and comments.)

This idea grew out of thinking about the development of a “Common Currency” and a “Common Currency Exchange” (and coincidentally trying to find a way to unite and evolve the energies of the Occupy Movement). What if we had a way to convert local and alternative currencies to each other and to the established national currencies of the mainstream world? What if we had a way to establish and provide abstract value that did not depend on control by the wealthy, but was in fact engineered to produce “the greatest benefit for the greatest number”? Wouldn’t people want to migrate to it?

Now of course the immediate reaction to this idea might be that it’s utopian, or that it’s illegal, or that it’s impossible because of human nature. I think we can address each of these issues; but I also think there’s both deeper and wider challenges.

The deeper challenge is how we create and sustain this alternative economy in the real world; the broader one is how do we bring about all the other changes that are needed to make this alternative economy possible. Addressing the broader one is how I arrived at the idea of the Common Framework. If we can create a currency exchange, why not an idea exchange? Can’t we incorporate every idea that is genuinely useful—i.e., in Dave Buck’s terms, “to take care of everyone and do no harm,”—into an overall framework for the purposes of understanding and discussion? Imagine a sort of “wikipedia” of social change: what do we need, and how do we get it?

There is at least one stab at this that I know of, and that’s Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century (2006, edited by Alex Steffen), the latest edition (2011), and the web site built around it, which has now been taken over by Architecture for Humanity and its founder, Cameron Sinclair. Having found the original hopelessly daunting, it’s a relief to learn that

In 2011, green is the starting point, not the destination. This second edition of the bestselling book is extensively revised to include the latest trends, technologies, and solutions in sustainable living. More than 160 new entries include up-to-the-minute information on the locavore movement, carbon-neutral homes, novel transportation solutions, the growing trend of ecotourism, the concept of food justice, and much more. Additional new sections focus on the role of cities as the catalyst for change in our society. With 50 percent new content, this overhauled edition incorporates the most recent studies and projects being implemented worldwide. The result is a guided tour through the most exciting new tools, models, and ideas for building a better future.

And all of this is encouraging and useful. So what else do we need?

Well, unfortunately it seems that we are still headed in the wrong direction. So there’s something more that’s needed than simply a compendium of great ideas. We also need the compelling motivation, as a species, to embrace these and other changes that will safeguard the planet. That’s what the idea of the “common framework” may help to provide, and what the work on designing an alternative economy is all about.

As noted above, you can find the original article here: Demanding Change, and the experimental work on the new economy here: Altonomy.com. I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Despite the failure of climate change legislation to pass the Senate and become law, the Obama administration remains clear that the problem is an urgent one. In a speech on September 20, 2010, Education Under Secretary Martha Kanter led off the “Sustainability Education Summit” with the following:

In last year’s address at the U.N. Summit on Climate Change, President Obama left no doubt: it is imperative that we act now to create a sustainable future.

He said: ‘Our generation’s response to [the challenge of climate change] will be judged by history, for if we fail to meet it — boldly, swiftly, and together — we risk consigning future generations to an irreversible catastrophe. ‘

As the President made clear, we must not let this happen, and we will not.

But we need to commit ourselves to a Call to Action to answer the following questions:

Who will prepare the scientists, technicians, engineers, entrepreneurs and global humanitarians that can convert urgency into opportunity, replace fossil fuel dependence with clean energy innovation, and rebuild our economy and society on a new and greener foundation? Who will educate citizens ready to master these new realities and ensure exemplary stewardship of our planet for now and for future generations? [http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/citizenship-and-pathways-green-economy-remarks-under-secretary-martha-kanter-sustainab]

While there are some interesting programs being pursued, these remain limited and preliminary, intended to demonstrate the possibilities rather than to fully realize them:

Through the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education, our Office of Vocational and Adult Education is funding a green-focused technical assistance academy. Right now, the Department is working with five states – Ohio, New Jersey, Oregon, Georgia, and Illinois – over two years, to develop replicable models for taking ‘green” programs of study to scale from high school to 2 and 4-year programs of study. [ibid.]

Still, this represents considerable progress over the attitudes of the Bush administration, and President Obama seems to have a knack for coming back to politically difficult problems and finding a way through them, even though he has so far failed to inspire the nation to take up these kinds of challenges on a societal scale.

But policies coming out of Washington and realities on the ground are two different things; and in the end its not the rhetoric but the results that count. On this front we are, of course, still losing ground, and the question is what to do about it.

Let’s take the case of energy. We have a lot of different initiatives taking place, especially within individual states, but these are not always driven by any kind of clear or coherent vision. In New Jersey, where I live, the policies have been quite far-sighted though not fully coherent; the programs, on the other hand, have been a combination of manipulation and incompetence — a boondoggle for the solar PV industry (which is the least efficient renewable), an administrative nightmare for contractors and homeowners looking to weatherize or upgrade their homes, and very little progress on any other front.

In this context it’s helpful to get a broader view, which is what former Bush administration energy secretary Spencer Abraham tries to do in Lights Out! Ten Myths about (and Real Solutions to) America’s Energy Crisis (2010). Part of what’s notable about this book is that it reflects the mainstream view very clearly and coherently, and may well portend the shape of things to come as America continues to try to “muddle through” without a real national debate or national policy.

Indeed, the American ideal is to avoid anything like a rational discussion of alternatives and let “the invisible hand” of the market sort things out for better or (as it is turning out lately) for worse. Only when it looks like things are going irretrievably badly do people like Abraham call for government intervention; but at least it’s notable that he does so in several areas.

Abraham’s own story is instructive. A former senator from Michigan, he was completely surprised to be chosen as energy secretary, rather than be assigned labor or transportation. For one thing, as a senator he had sponsored a bill to abolish the Department of Energy. To his credit, he acknowledges that he had to dance around this and use some personal charm to get confirmed; and that once in office he had a lot to learn.

In the end, however, his prescriptions are dismally conventional ones, aiming at achieving a mix of 30% nuclear, 30% renewable sources (including hydro), and 30% “natural gas plus coal gasification (with full carbon capture)”—and he suggests that half the cost of achieving this implausible mix be borne by the federal government: essentially a right-wing, pro-industry approach somewhat disguised as an even-handed, “fair and balanced,” all-of-the-above kind of strategy that takes us further down the wrong path.

Unfortunately, this is pretty much the path that the Obama Administration has been pursuing as well, although perhaps with a clearer recognition of the goals that a transition to clean energy will need to meet. None of the policies currently in place will lead to anything like the stabilization (never mind the reduction) of greenhouse gas emissions. What’s needed is a huge wave of innovation, not just in the technology for generating and distributing energy, but also in the way we use it, and the things we choose to use it for.

Which brings us back to the fundamental need for a shift in our collective thinking, to put the engines of science and the economy to the service of sustaining life rather than exploiting it, and for leadership in clearly articulating this alternative vision. It’s not just a question of doing more with less; it’s also a matter of doing less—but doing what’s smart and what matters, not what’s wasteful and unnecessary. This is going to be difficult to decide. But unless we choose what we can do without, nature (or the economy) will decide for us.

One of the most remarkable ones is OpenEcology.org. which is “a network of farmers, engineers and supporters, that for the last two years have been building the Global Village Construction Set, a set of the 40 industrial machines that it takes to create a small civilization with modern day comforts,” including machines that can be used to build a village, grow food, and generate energy in sustainable ways.

As they note, in an article written for Interesting Times magazine, “this is a real experiment, and product selection is based on us living with the given technologies. First, it is the development of real, economically significant hardware, product, and engineering. Second, this entire set is being compiled into one setting, and land is being populated with the respective productive agents. The aim is to define a new form of social organization where it is possible to create advanced culture, thriving in abundance and largely autonomous, on the scale of a village, not nation or state.” All of their knowledge and information is “open source”: they are building tools anyone can replicate and use to build their own community.

This idea of creating social experiments that demonstrate the abundance, viability, and vitality of ways of life that are in tune with nature is essentially the same as that of the New Wealth Game that we proposed at the December meeting of the Sustainable Leadership Forum. As they put it, “Our goal is nothing short of paradigm-shattering. And together we can make it a reality at the cost of scrap metal and proper use of ubiquitous, local resources. The GVCS is applicable anywhere soil, sunshine, and water are found, which is just about everywhere. Unfortunately, we cannot do this alone—nor would we want to. It will take global knowledge and cooperation. We challenge you to join us at Open Ecology—see our results for yourself and share it with others; get involved and critique away, then add to the momentum; if you like what you see then give support by becoming a True Fan. Now that we have shared our vision with you—assuming it resonates within you—it is your obligation to do something—anything. What’s truly stopping you? Perhaps nothing at all. We believe the only limit is our imagination and we won’t stop until we’ve empowered the masses. Whatever your beliefs, ideas or talents; we are ready for you. With all our hands and all our brains, we can create a more regenerative and resilient world for all. Let’s show the rest of the world what it really means to evolve to freedom!”

In short, if “ecological economics” is something we can base real wealth on, then let’s put it to work to create our own future, and leave the “gray economy” to wither away under the weight of its own increasing unsustainability and irrelevance. Open Ecology has also proposed that the Global Village Construction Set be used as the basis for a game, and are submitting their concept to the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, an annual $100,000 award “to support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems.”

The Buckminster Fuller Institute is itself another example that should be considered in assessing the state of the movement. It is “dedicated to accelerating the development and deployment of solutions which radically advance human well being and the health of our planet’s ecosystems”:

We aim to deeply influence the ascendance of a new generation of design-science pioneers who are leading the creation of an abundant and restorative world economy that benefits all humanity.

Our programs combine unique insight into global trends and local needs with a comprehensive approach to design. We encourage participants to conceive and apply transformative strategies based on a crucial synthesis of whole systems thinking, Nature’s fundamental principles, and an ethically driven worldview.

By facilitating convergence across the disciplines of art, science, design and technology, our work extends the profoundly relevant legacy of R. Buckminster Fuller. In this way, we strive to catalyze the collective intelligence required to fully address the unprecedented challenges before us.

“Design” is fundamental to the sustainability movement: “Cradle-to-Cradle” (McDonough & Braungart, 2002), Biomimicry (Janine Benyus, 2002), and the granddaddy of them all, Permaculture (Bill Mollison, 1978), which now has hundreds if not thousands of practitioners worldwide, including in Haiti.

Haiti is an extreme example of the failure of the modern global economic development model to provide minimal standards of health, education, food, and security for the millions of people who live outside of the “developed” world. As Peter Haas has pointed out, the principal cause of the damage in Haiti was not the natural disaster but a failure of engineering. It was not the earthquake that killed 230,000 people, injured 300,000 more, and displaced more than two million others, over half of whom continue to live in makeshift tent cities nearly 12 months later; it was the shoddy design and construction of the majority of the buildings in Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas. Haas, who founded AIDG, the Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group, has been working in Latin America and the Caribbean since 2005, and fielded multiple teams of engineers immediately after the earthquake.

While governments have proven largely incapable of providing adequate assistance to mitigate a growing number of man-made “natural” disasters, from Hurricane Katrina to the flooding of one-third of Pakistan, private groups have sprung up to respond to these calamities, and to put systems in place to avoid future catastrophes, even with the meager resources available to them. (Of the $11 billion promised by the international community for the rebuilding of Haiti only a tiny amount has actually been forthcoming; even the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, which raised more than $50 million, has actually spent less than $5 million in reconstruction efforts to date.) The good news is that some of these efforts are progressing, despite the political turmoil, the erosion of hope, and the challenging business environment. Our own Sustainable Haiti Coalition has made some small but important advances, representing two companies seeking to establish operations in Haiti and partnering with a third to create a vehicle to assist businesses through the process.

According to Thom Hartmann, in the Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight (1998), Haiti even before the earthquake was a harbinger of what awaits all of us if we fail to resolve our ecological problems. The deforestation, the poverty, and the lack of literacy, suggest that extreme ecological damage could mean not only catastrophic weather events but regression to an earlier and primitive way of life. The fundamental issue, according to Theodore Rozsak’s 1992 study of ecopsychology, is that we have become deaf to “the voice of the earth,” psychologically estranged both from nature and from ourselves; as child psychiatrist Madeleine Lansky puts it today, we are suffering from a kind of collective insanity that is leading us dangerously close to ecocide. In my view this includes both the widespread denial of man’s impact on the biosphere and the blind optimism that technology and the market economy will end up resolving all these problems.

Yet it is equally pointless to sink into despair. Human action has gotten us into this mess, and it’s only human action that can get us out of it. Indeed it is in some ways the consequence of humanity’s growing scientific knowledge and mastery of technology — including the technologies of the agricultural and the industrial revolutions — that have led us to this impasse, by allowing us to grow the human population beyond the capacity of the planet to support us, at least in the manner to which those of us in America have become accustomed. The institutions that wield these technologies are, for the most part, large corporations, so it’s encouraging to discover that increasing numbers are joining such alliances as The Sustainability Consortium, the UN Global Compact, BSR, and others. The promise of such associations is that, working together, companies can establish some ground rules that protect the environment, seek to end poverty, hunger, and disease, and provide education and opportunity for all.

The question then is whether accumulating more knowledge and engineering capability is sufficient to accomplish this, and have us reverse the unintended consequences of our civilization’s hubris; or whether we also need a more profound transformation, a shift in our experience of what it is to be a child of the universe and our awareness of what it might mean to become more fully self-realized as humans.

There is of course a sense in which these questions are as old as humanity itself; yet the way they land on us today is what reveals the unique historical character of our time: sustainability, it seems, is about to become the touchstone of the age (or else there won’t be anyone around to report on our failure to achieve it). Once again, welcome to 2011 — and may it be the year of the tipping point (as well as, incidentally, the International Year of Forests), the emergence of a stem strong enough to support the full flowering of the species, without collapsing under the weight of its material accumulation… The fear I hear expressed is that China will create another 300 million middle-class “consumers” in the next five years, exacerbating global warming and then selling us the technology to mitigate it.

The December 20-27 issue of The New Yorker magazine has an article by David Owen on the so-called Jevons Paradox, according to which increasing efficiency in the use energy and materials only leads to greater use. This is purported to be an argument against such folks as Amory Lovins, who believes that greater efficiency is not only better for the planet but is also more profitable. But if it’s also more profitable, the argument goes, it will inevitably seek to keep expanding, and we’ll end up using more energy and materials than ever — presumably accelerating our downfall rather than slowing it. Though we probably won’t notice until it’s too late, because we’ll all be too busy enjoying our increased well-being.

The silliness of this argument is best summed up in the description of Jevons’ argument by Len Brookes: “When we talk about increasing energy efficiency, what we’re really talking about is increasing the productivity of energy. And, if you increase the productivity of anything, you have the effect of reducing its implicit price, because you get more return for the same money—which means the demand goes up.”

Of course, if we always sought more of everything that was cheaper just because it was cheaper, without regard to whether we actually wanted it or believed it was useful to consume it, we’d have a parody of even our own crassly commercial society, which at least appears to be struggling to escape the dismal “laws” of economics and take into account the less fictional laws of ecology, which permit sustainable prosperity on condition that we nurture that which provides it. Certainly, there is much more to be said about this [1]; but what’s obvious is that the framework of conventional economics is simply not large enough to take into account most of reality, and its hypotheses do not adequately predict outcomes because in reality such outcomes are the result of people interacting and exchanging ideas and information.

A much better model for understanding economic behavior might be that of microbiology, in which bacteria continuously engage in the exchange of DNA, enabling them—quite remarkably—to adjust to local disturbances on a global scale within a relatively short period of time. As Nadeau points out, in The Wealth of Nature (2003):

In the life of bacteria, bits of genetic material within organisms are routinely and rapidly transferred to other organisms… Because the whole of this gene pool operates in some sense within the parts, the speed of recombination is much greater than that allowed by mutation alone, or by random changes inside parts that alter interaction between parts. The existence of the whole within parts explains why bacteria can accommodate change on a worldwide scale in a few years. (p.153, emphasis added)

Understanding the nature of ecosystems can help us better understand the dynamics of the human behavior that occurs within them, including the reasons why we sometimes persist in getting it wrong.

The behavior of large populations, of markets, of businesses and financial institutions, and of national and international policies are all critically important questions: too important, in fact, to leave to any single discipline—in particular one that is frequently arrogant, doctrinal, and simply wrong. That many practitioners of mainstream economics continue to perpetuate discredited frameworks and assumptions is a matter of historical observation; what’s important is to offer alternatives that are more accurate, more functional, and more persuasive. In the case of the Jevons Paradox, it’s to reexamine efficiency and consumption within the broader framework of ecological economics, and resolve the “paradox” in terms of the system as a whole. Greater overall consumption of energy may be compatible with natural cycles if the energy is drawn from them, instead of from fossilized reserves of carbon; more importantly, the uses of energy need to be restorative and regenerative of the natural environment in order to conserve the possibility of expanding wealth, education, and innovation everywhere in the world.

The triple bottom line? Economically, we’re in the midst of a severe recession, and of a long term realignment of factors and conditions, requiring a paradigm shift in both thought and practice to avoid continuing crises and global failures. Environmentally we remain on a collision course with climate change, species extinction, sea-level rise, and other factors that, unchecked, are most likely to lead to ecological collapse. And socially and politically we are struggling to awaken to a collaborative modality of action, that combines learning, planning, and entrepreneurial initiative to provide for a more sustainable outcome.

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[1] None of this, for example, is meant to suggest that we ignore economic reality; only that contingent regularities in economic behavior do not reflect “inexorable laws,” like the laws of thermodynamics or the law of gravity. A much simpler and more plausible statement of the Jevons Paradox is stated by Spencer Abraham (former Energy Secretary under George W. Bush) in his book Lights Out! (2010):

I often ask audiences what would have the greater impact on their fuel consumption, cars that get thirty miles to the gallon or cars that get five. I’m being facetious, of course, but a case could be made that we would see a lot less fuel consumed if people could only get five or ten miles per gallon of gasoline, instead of thirty, because the cost per mile driven would be higher. My real point is this: The notion that we can dramatically reduce our consumption by increasing fuel efficiency standards is wrong. A 20% to 30% increase in fleetwide fuel efficiency will have an impact. But the simple fact is that if you make cars more fuel efficient you make them cheaper to drive, and when you make something cheaper you tend to incentivize its use. (p.91)

Stated this way, it’s apparent that (a) price changes are important, but never occur in the absence of other factors (e.g., SUVs have been getting five miles to the gallon, and as long as overall prices were within what was perceived as a low range relative to other expenses, consumption continued to go up), and (b) the correct policy approach is to phase in the ecological cost of carbon-based fuels so as to reflect this price in the markets. Markets cannot work without rules, and will not reflect true costs without intervention; since “ownership” is a human construct, not a fact of nature, the value of the so-called “free” natural resources we share as a global commons need to be factored in by policy calculations. (More on this to come in Part 3.)

The first thing that stands out, of course, is that we are no longer likely to speak of sustainability as either “humane” (“marked by compassion, sympathy, or consideration for humans or animals”) or principally “cultural.” We are now perhaps more inclined to speak of it as “human,” in the sense that what is at stake is the very survival of our species; and we would now speak more broadly of “sustainable development” rather than “sustainable culture,” which seems faintly archaic in this world of increasingly globalization and cosmopolitanism. The “movement” (which is no longer a widely used term to characterize the current focus on sustainability either) is now much broader and more diffuse; it is also much larger and more widely accepted, and perhaps even on the verge of becoming mainstream.

But of course to its opponents it remains a movement, and one that is advocating “dangerous interventions” in the market such as taxing carbon or introducing cap-and-trade; that is alarming people about global warming; and that is looking to constrain economic growth.

But what is this movement really? When it is as much led by businesses such as Walmart and BASF and Waste Management; when it is being integrated into school and university curricula across the world; and when it is the subject of heated debate in Congress and of clamor in the councils of the world—this is not the kind of “movement” we were used to discussing during the 1960s. It is, profoundly, a movement of ideas, a transformation of the assumptions our society is based on, and a widespread series of changes in community action, lifestyle trends, and cultural values — occurring concurrently with a dozen other technological, spiritual, and economic revolutions throughout the world. “Sustainability” is a way of unifying these trends, of connecting them in the search for a world of continuing viability and enduring possibility.

In 1990, Gilman felt that he was to some extent conjuring up such a movement, by writing about what he “believed” existed, and could be discerned in the work of “participants [who] are all too diverse and changing to be pinned down by a set of words.” Today there is no doubt that there is a global community of actors engaged in the quest for sustainability. This community includes the “more than two million groups and nonprofits” that Paul Hawken speaks of in Blessed Unrest (2007), and describes as “the largest movement in the world that no one saw coming.” But it also includes many others who would consider themselves part of the emergence of a 21st century megatrend toward greener communities and a greener economy but who are not part of any of these groups.

In 1990 the “movement” consisted, according to Gilman, of

• a small number of researchers, innovators and activists
  
• who have taken a whole-systems approach to
• the challenge of developing human systems, technologies and lifestylesthat can provide high quality and environmentally benign ways of life for all of humankind, now and many generations into the future.

To compare this with Hawkens’ vision is to begin to appreciate the magnitude of the change that already appears to be upon us, yet remains largely unrecognized and underappreciated. Comparing the emergence of human rights, social justice, and environmental groups to address the manifold ills of the biosphere to the body’s immune response, Hawken argues that life itself has an inherent ability to restore itself, and that increasingly we are recognizing humanity’s role as that of becoming aware of the needs of the biosphere as primary, and taking action to reverse the damage that humans are doing to it on an everyday basis.

The whole-system approach thus remains central, and the number of researchers, innovators, and activists has grown exponentially, yet the challenge largely remains. Arguably, in some areas much progress has been made, but overall things have gotten worse, to the extent that some experts now believe that staying below the critical 2° threshold has ceased to be possible.

Several of the main features of the sustainability perspective remain similar to those Gilman outlined twenty years ago; yet perhaps our expression of them has become more nuanced. For example, he states that:

Closely associated with the movement’s whole-systems perspective is the high value it places on learning and innovation as a response to problems, rather than critique and complaint. The movement certainly has many who are skillful at criticism, but criticism is used as a tool, not an end. For the movement is basically vision-oriented – it is motivated by a desire to build a better world, not just tear down the one we have. The movement is not peopled by Pollyannas: it faces our culture’s problems squarely, with a hard-nosed realism, but it is decidedly optimistic about our capacity to learn and grow.

This optimistic bias is especially reflected in the movement’s “make it better” attitude towards science and technology. There is much in present day science and technology that the movement strongly criticizes, but it is nevertheless at home with the spirit of empirically-tested exploration that characterizes science at its best. Interestingly, a significant number of those who are most visibly active in the movement come out of conventional scientific careers – Wes Jackson, Dana Meadows, Brian Swimme, Amory Lovins, David Spangler, John Todd, and Danaan Parry, to name just a few.

Several of these remain at the forefront of sustainable thinking today, and the commitment to finding scientific solutions to human and environmental problems is just as strong if not stronger. But the optimism has in some ways become a matter of strategy rather than an article of faith. We are exhorted to act “as if” solutions were possible, whether we think them likely or not. As Paul Hawken said in his 2009 commencement speech at the University of Portland:

Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

More than just “making things better,” we realize that we need to make many of them over, and perhaps we may even need to stop making some of them altogether.

Finally, Gilman seeks to distinguish the sustainability movement from the environmental movement on the one hand, and from the “new age movement” on the other. The latter, of course, no longer seems to have any traction whatsoever; and while there is a growing intermingling of the sustainability and the environmentalist perspectives, some of important differences remain. As Gilman put it then:

…there are important ways in which the sustainability movement is different and distinct. It insists on a whole-systems approach, whereas the environmental movement has focused on the human impact upon non-human systems, and the new age movement has focused on spirituality and personal growth. Unlike much of the environmental movement, it is vision- and solution-oriented. Unlike the new age movement, it is primarily concerned with the nuts and bolts of ecological and cultural health. People in the sustainability movement are generally happy to work with these and other social movements, but in doing so we retain our commitment to a practical, positive whole-systems approach.

Somehow this seems a bit more “superior” and “rah-rah” than most of the sustainability authorities and activists I work with today, but the essence is clearly there. We’re focused on whole-systems outcomes, on regeneration rather than merely on preservation, and on humans because all of the problems the planet now faces are traceable to them, and are the cumulative consequences of our own actions. (Including our American resistance to fully acknowledging this and responding to the challenges with commensurate changes in our actions.)

Prescient in many ways, Gilman hailed the recent acceptance of the idea of “sustainable agriculture” by the USDA, and the World Bank’s embrace of “sustainable development” — though in neither case, twenty years later, has sufficient progress been made. Amongst other things he looked forward to

Increased attention to redesigning human institutions, especially in economics and governance. The bottleneck to developing a humane and sustainable world is clearly no longer technological nor ecological – though ecological imbalances may cause great trouble in the years ahead. But while we know a great deal about what could be done in such areas as energy efficiency and environmental restoration, we know a lot less about the design of humane and sustainable human institutions – institutions that could both implement the needed solutions quickly and effectively and provide an ongoing vehicle for a fulfilling and environmentally sane quality of life.

Unfortunately, in 2010 this is still where we are today. Human systems are vastly harder to change than technological ones. Machines don’t fight to preserve obsolescence, whereas humans are averse to discarding beliefs and practices even when these are demonstrated to be misguided and harmful. The struggle to free ourselves from the ideas of dead economists continues unabated. As Keynes said,

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

In The Wealth of Nature (2003) and other books, Robert Nadeau has made a compelling case for abandoning the assumptions of neoclassical economics as simply inadequate to the task of describing the real economy, let alone prescribing wise policies. Most importantly, the treatment of “parts” and “wholes” in traditional economics is completely at odds with what physical scientists have come to understand about the universe as a whole, and with what ecologists observe everyday, namely that the vitality of organic systems at any level is not simply a matter of additive atomistic components, but involves a higher-order patterning that emerges from the interdependent interaction of the parts. As he puts it, incorporating ecological realities into economics

will require the development of a new economic theory premised on the assumption that parts exist in embedded relationship to the whole and manifest as new wholes with different emergent properties on ascending levels of scale and complexity.

If assumptions about part-whole relationships in the neoclassical economic paradigm were commensurate with the actual or real dynamics of part-whole relationships in the global environment, there would be no need to develop and implement an environmentally responsible economic theory. But because the assumptions are utterly different from and wholly incompatible with these dynamics, there is simply no basis in this paradigm for coordinating global economic activities in ways that could lead to a sustainable environment. (The Wealth of Nature, p. 110)

In other words, mainstream economics is based on pseudo-scientific categories and beliefs that can no more accommodate ecological realities than alchemy can yield modern chemistry. While science has moved beyond the simplicities of Cartesian dualism and Newtonian mechanics, into the realm of quantum “potentialities” and “probabilities” that only materialize in relationship to the participant-observer, economics is still struggling to shed its adopted blinders, and come to terms with the much more complex interaction of factors, including its own ideas, that lead to increasingly widespread instability, inequity, and system collapse. But we are clearly still just at the beginning of this critical paradigm shift, and the more traditional economists continue to resist intelligent solutions even if they recognize the looming reality of catastrophic environmental problems.

In the end “ecological economics” will need to carry the day, if we’re going to be around to continue operating an increasingly complex and interdependent global economy; but it remains marginalized in most policy, academic, and financial discourse, in large part simply because traditional economists have become masters of rationalization and obfuscation in promoting the triumph of “unfettered capitalism.”

Of course this assessment of where we are today versus where we were twenty years ago is something of a cursory one, and leaves out all of the details of the many advances in renewable energy, appropriate technology, and environmental protection that have occurred over the past two decades, along with many setbacks and standoffs in policy issues along the way. But I think it’s at least a starting-point for discussing the progress of the movement as a whole, and getting a broader picture of both the challenges and the opportunities of our era. And perhaps what’s most significant is that we can now foresee the end of the sustainability movement, in its ultimate diffusion throughout the enterprise and society, though this may still be a long way off and far from certain.

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The central question of our time is really whether we can accomplish the transition to a sustainable economy within the existing societal framework, or whether we need a fundamental shift in human consciousness in order to heal our relationship with nature (if not with each other). There are good arguments to be made on both sides, and there is even a case to be made that changing our behavior will do more to alter attitudes than either advocacy or education. But the reality is that we need both: we need to make the practical changes, in the way we handle energy, water, waste, food production and distribution, and in financial incentives; but we also need the transformation of consciousness as well, so that we are living “from” the recognition of our absolute dependence on nature, and living “within” the given of limited resources, a fragile web of life, and a biosphere that needs our collaboration to maintain itself.

My colleague and friend Doug Cohen, a lifelong agent of change, just drew this quote to my attention:

This has of course been true in every era, but that it seems especially relevant today suggests that we stand at the edge of a chasm and must somehow find a way to build a bridge across to the other side. The easy solutions of the past will not help us much here: though we must use everything we know, we need to invent a new possibility for human civilization that allows us to progress beyond the model of domination and estrangement from nature, to a new model of harmonious collaboration, that mirrors the remarkable symbiosis that is biological life (and is perhaps indeed also the model for the sustainable expansion of the universe itself).

There is no doubt that the acceptance of sustainability has made great strides in the past two decades; but we’ve made just enough progress to begin to recognize just how much further we still need to go. We are at the very beginning of a great transition — as a great as that of the agricultural and the industrial revolutions, if we are indeed to continue the expansion of human accomplishment beyond wrenching catastrophes that we are already seeing emerge in the the 21st century — but only at the very beginning. And the outcomes of history are not predetermined; we’ll either span the chasm or we’ll fall into it, and it’s likely we won’t even know until and unless we reach the other side. But as Kuntsler pointed out in his year-end assessment last winter, we’re simply not able to turn around and go back to the way things were. Welcome to 2011.

(Reprinted in the Dead River Journal, 20 December 2010.)

Click here for Part 2.

Download a copy of the paper here: NJSustainableEconomicStrategy23Aug2010b. If you have any comments, or want to to reference this in your own work, please email jcloud@jonathancloud.com.