Plan C

Roadmap To Creating Sustainable Change From the Inside Out: Part 2

Find Your Reset Point

Nick Kettles and Pat Thomas

Amidst the turmoil of debate, the successes and setbacks, the hope and despair in creating a more sustainable society – and set against the backdrop of protesters actively occupying the financial districts of the world – what is the value of retreat? 

What is the value of actually pressing the pause button completely to disengage from the world, including your quest to make it a better place? Of learning how to turn the mind inwards, and take refuge within the silence, the reset point, at the centre of your very being? 

How any of us achieve this is personal and unimportant. Some people like to meditate, others engage in mindful activities such as making bread. Still others like to walk in Nature and contemplate its beauty. What’s important is that you do it.

At first blush, the benefits seem profoundly individual, even selfish. But a choice to prioritise your personal peace, taking a retreat from the inherent madness of the modern world, is not a way of escaping our responsibilities. It is, instead, a profoundly revolutionary act.

Once the surface noise of our angry or despairing thoughts about the environment, or modern world, begin to quiet down, we begin to detach from the outcome we want to see and a more reflective and creative state of mind can emerge, one that can be applied, once again, to our quest for a better, fairer more sustainable world. 

Once we begin to trust the silence within as a source of nourishment, our fear and sense of vulnerability about the planet can be embraced as confirmation that we are, in fact, deeply connected to the web of life everywhere.

Above all, each time we turn inwards and retreat we challenge the prevailing paradigm that wants us to believe that moments of quiet reflection are purposeless and self-interested, that disengaging is synonymous with boredom, lassitude, lack of choice and the greatest sin of all: being out of touch with the next ‘new’ new thing. 

When we affirm that the emptiness inside doesn’t need to be constantly filled with the ephemeral whims of consumption, we give permission for others to also discover it as a resource rich in energy. In the silence, ideas which can galvanise our sense of purpose have space to grow.

Try stopping for 20 minutes, 3 times a day, to reflect and quieten your mind, in your own unique way.  In what ways do your thoughts and feelings about the environment change?

Roadmap To Creating Sustainable Change From the Inside Out: Part 3 ‘Adopt a new aesthetic’ coming soonish. 

 

 

 

 

Roadmap To Creating Sustainable Change From the Inside Out: Part 1

Accept Your Pain About the Environment is a Reflection of Your Own Suffering

Nick Kettles and Pat Thomas

 

When the Earth is seen as sick and dying, we position ourselves as in charge, and the Earth subject to our will. Humanity is in charge. Humanity caused the problem. Humanity will fix it. Humanity has misused the earth’s resources, now humanity will redistribute them more fairly.

Taking responsibility for our impact is an essential part of our evolution as a race, no doubt, and yet our awareness of who we are, in relation to what we are taking responsibility for, can make a big difference. Our perception of the Earth's suffering may actually reflect our own deepest feelings. It’s not the Earth that’s dying but our worldview.

Our sense of urgency for the 'fragile' Earth, is actually a projection of our own deep sense of fragility and of loss; of the pain that the institutions and way of life that we have invested so much faith in, are in fact crumbling, and no longer systemically sustainable. Our belief that we can 'fix' things with a lot of angry, unexamined, frenetic activity is just one example of the need to control that sense of loss. Indeed it's the kind of meddling that got us into trouble in the first place.

Consider for a moment, the possibility that the Earth is in charge, and we as a species, subject to Her will. Consider what it would be like if we knew intrinsically, that we were a part, an intimate part, of Her whole? A dynamic part of an ecosystem which includes all Her species?

If we recognised this, we can as Satish Kumar says move from an egocentric worldview, where I am separate from the world, and my needs are more important than yours, to an ecocentric worldview, where my comfort doesn’t come at the expense of another, and who I am is determined by my ability to relate to Other, including the Earth.

This may sound like the ramblings of dyed in the wool greenies, like a touchy-feely paean to deep ecology – like that made popular by the blockbuster movie Avatar – and yet, it is absolutely necessary if we are to rediscover our integral place within the web of life.

Rather than play the hero and act to rescue a dying planet because, yes, it’s the right thing to do morally and intellectually, but also maybe to glorify ourselves and our resourcefulness as a species, do we have the courage to restore our interdependent relationship with Nature instead?

Can we take the time to accept Nature as a teacher, by observing Nature’s cycles, by growing our own vegetables, making our own bread, staying long enough in Nature to see it with new eyes, until its interconnective web, of which we are a valued and important part, is revealed?

The act of saving ourselves may in the end be a passive one, one where we do less not more. And having stepped back in that way, would we then, secure in the knowledge that we truly belong, act less from fear, and instead with greater awareness of the best use of our time, energy and resources?

Take time to consider from what perspective you are viewing your relationship with the Earth?  Is She broken?  Are you the saviour? Is She able to heal Herself?  And if so, is our part in that active or passive, or both? What have you to learn from Her? 

Roadmap To Creating Sustainable Change From the Inside Out: Part 2 ‘Find Your Reset Point’ coming soonish. 

Plan C’s Road Map To Creating Sustainable Change From The Inside Out

Nick Kettles and Pat Thomas

It’s over 18 months since we began our quest at Plan C to shift the focus of environmental debate from ‘what kind of world do we want?’ to ‘what kind of people do we have to become to make that world and then live in it sustainably, peacefully, intelligently and courageously?’

During that time our intuition that who we are being in relation to our cause, is equally as important as what we are doing, has only strengthened.

Our discussions - on this site and off - have taken us into deep territory. From the nature of beauty, via our responsibility not to see the earth as a victim, to the role of intuition in guiding us forward, we have begun to recognise certain themes, certain signposts, pointing the way for people who are also beginning to intuit that sustainable change is only possible from the inside out.

Proposing a fixed road map, a prescriptive formula for how to become the dynamic intersection for the political, economic and environmental transitions we need to make today, is not our objective at Plan C.

However, it seems wise to try and articulate the terrain we see. Make clear some of the path.  Point out the pitfalls we've noticed that prevent us from being more effective in our collective quest to create a more sustainable and loving society.

Over the next few months, or however long it takes, we’ll be posting our Road Map to Creating Sustainable Change from the Inside Out, part by part.  You are welcome to read these thoughts as a set of linear steps to follow, or, enjoy them as different facets of the same jewel. 

We look forward to your comments and feedback.

 

We don't need another...video

Pat Thomas

 

I should have loved the Wayseer Manifesto video – which aims to unite those of us who stand outside the mainstream into a powerful, creative movement. But it left me cold and I think I know why. This is what happens when a 'gathering of the tribe' becomes a dysfunctional marketing exercise...

Once, in a former incarnation, I sat in a room full of pregnant women. I was facilitating a workshop on the practical, emotional and spiritual aspects of home birth. During the course of the afternoon it became apparent that many of the women felt keenly just how outside the system their thinking and their actions were and how disapproving so many of the people around them were. I asked, half joking, “How does it feel to be a freak?”. As we began to explore the F-word in more detail half the women in the room burst into tears.

I saw my own life experience being mirrored back to me.  “Don’t be such a dreamer”. “You’re being impractical”. “You romanticise everything”. “What do you mean you ‘just know’?”. “That’s not the way we do things”. "You've got to learn to fit in”. “Don’t be so sensitive”. “You just have to develop a thicker skin”. My mother told me, repeatedly, that I would never have a husband because I was too clever.

I’ve lived with it all my life. I know, as these women did, that the very traits that society says are my weaknesses are actually my strengths. In fact, I sometimes think that women, living in what is still such a macho society, know this best of all. We either believe in ourselves, love ourselves, or we die a slow, agonising pseudo-death which leaves us walking around in the world with nothing holding us up but that thicker skin so highly prized by the patriarchy.

So why did I feel so mad when I watched the new video, Wayseer Manifesto by author Garret John LoPorto?

This ‘manifesto’, aiming to unite the freaks of the world into a powerful creative movement, was posted without comment on one of my favourite websites just to see what everyone’s reaction would be. It’s an alternative web community so most of the reactions were from the same dozen people who always react in the same old way “Fucking brilliant” “Just what I needed” “WOW!”.

One newbie waded in saying it seemed more like Bono-like proselytising, reminding everyone that the main purpose of the video was to sell the book and that the video would probably end up being the template for the next Apple or Nike advertising campaign.

In fact, it has already been an Apple ad. 

Said newbie was given short shrift by the ‘community’. So was I when I made a small joke about the length of the video being incongruent with holding the attention of a community of people with ADD/ADHD, bipolar, schizophrenia, OCD, dyslexia, narcissism, Asperger’s, anxiety, depression, risk-taking and sensation seeking tendencies and addictive personalities. Some of them may well watch it 20 times in a row and decide that LoPorto is their new guru, but some may lose interest or feel overwhelmed or decide to go off and make their own video after the first couple of minutes.

Garret LoPorto, it turns out, is an advertising exec/inventor whiz kid who, like many of us outsiders, has come to the conclusion that when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. So he has chosen to focus on the strengths of his own Attention Deficit Disorder rather than its weaknesses, and encourages others to do the same.  It’s a good plan. I like that he advocates dealing with mental illness through something creative, something other than drugs. But at the same time I’m not sure a high-octane, fast-cut video is the best way to sell the message to what is a very specific crowd with very specific needs.

What is more, not all outsiders have a mental illness. Not all are unable to function in the world. Some of us simply choose not to participate. Some of us just think – and therefore act – differently. 

The kind of upheaval we are seeing in the Middle East and in parts of the US where workers are fighting for a basic right to join unions and organise, makes us all ache for change – a change of thinking, a change of direction, a change of scenery, of values, patterns and narratives in our lives. We want it and we want it now, with the ease of a mobile phone upgrade.

Not only that, but the way this upheaval has been framed in the media makes us think that change is fast – and linear and lasting. It isn’t. Anyone can throw a stone or hold up a banner. Anyone can make a video about how crap their life is and how misunderstood they are and post it on your tube, anyone can tweet about revolution. Real changemakers are, by their nature, a rare thing. They are often very insular and their influence like water on stone; drip-drip-drip until the shape of a thing begins to change.

As influenced as we are by media it is all too easy to be sucked into an uncritical assumption that if someone says something loud enough and long enough and makes a flashy video where his own face is intercut with iconic footage of John Lennon, Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Mohammed Ali et al, he must be saying something profound. Time will tell.

Meanwhile the clock ticks and the water drips...I’m still trying to figure out what made me so mad.

I think it was the idea that 90% of society is wrong and we – the 10% of the population who for whatever reason see things differently and have to endure being called crazy for it – are right. The truth is creative, crazy geniuses need some sort of anchor or structure for their great ideas to take form, otherwise all you get is the crazy without the creative. Every crazy fucker who ever had a crazy idea for change, had a wife or a mother or mentor or an agent who held the rest of their life together – who did the dishes and paid the rent and reminded them to eat and bathe once in a while – so they could be totally free to think big thoughts and buck the system.

I think also it was the way that the Wayseer Manifesto – underneath the feel good message and the glamorous presentation – was promoting EXACTLY the kind of exclusion behaviour and derision of others that has caused so much damage and pain to those of us who stand outside the mainstream. Is this the new tribe, the new generation, the leading edge? Or is it just “Meet the new boss...same as the old boss”?

If the continual environmental disasters and political upheaval we’ve been witnessing over the last few years tells us anything it’s that none of us is immune, that the personal is political and vice versa and that we are all in this together. When the next nuclear meltdown happens, when the next wave (real or symbolic) sweeps over us, it’s not going to care who is a ‘freak’ and who is ‘straight’. Screwed is screwed. Dead is dead. We have to find a way to stand together or we fall alone. And to be part of the group whilst maintaining personal integrity and resilience – and the confidence to be whomever you might be – requires tough inner work and feminine receptivity, not slick superficial sloganeering and macho posturing.

This post was originally featured on Pat's wbesite, Howl at the Moon. See here.

 

This is the show, and it's not going to get any better, any time soon, without you. SO STOP WATCHING THE TV AND GET ON BOARD!

Nick Kettles and Pat Thomas

Have you become a natural disaster junkie?  It makes compelling viewing doesn't it?

Check the body count for a few days after the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand.  Monitor news daily to see if the fourth nuclear reactor has blown up in Japan, after the recent tsunami.

Did you keep track of how many flights were grounded last year, when the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano in Iceland erupted?  Shake your head as the Haiti earthquake death toll rose to 250,000 plus. Hold your breath over last year’s Sumatran earthquake and the resulting tsunami; would it be as devastating as the 2004 Indian Ocean quake/tsunami the force of which was helpfully measured by the scientists as being the energy of 23,000 Hiroshima-type atomic bombs, claiming at least 225,000 lives? And what about those Chilean miners and their two months underground?

Be honest, are you secretly pleased by every new distraction that our earth is offering up with increasing frequency?

These are devastating acts of nature – for which we believe there are no explanations and over which we have no control. In many ways it is easier to live with the cold quantification of these disasters, the body counts, millisieverts leaked, the tonnes of wreckage, the cubic litres of ash, hours of oxygen left than it is to feel anything real.

Yet, perhaps, this is to be expected. The natural human tendency to stand like a deer in the headlights, in front of a truck rushing towards us does seem to beggar belief, but should we really wonder?

Afterall, Hollywood has done such a fine job of anaesthetising us to the reality of significant weather and earth based phenomena, with an endless stream of disaster movies, dating back beyond Towering Inferno from the 70s, that we are left unable to distinguish the difference between a tsunami in the film 2012, and the tsunami that destroyed so much of Sendai last week.

Emotionally numb we may at best be moved by one event – but dare we connect the dots and not just consider whether they are related, but whether we are culpable; whether human-created climate change is driving these disasters?

But how could they be?  A volcano in Iceland, surely can't be connected to an earthquake in Japan, or a flood in Australia?  We can relate, perhaps to a hurricane being linked to climate change, but a causal chain including earthquakes, and or volcanoes is harder to grasp and more often the domain of people who knock at your door and invite you into a discussion about the Old Testament.

And yet the possibility that the greenhouse effect causes the earth's tectonic plates to shift is something that serious scientists are now willing to speculate on, see here and, here.

It’s possible – but hey, why wait for the data before deciding what to do?

You know the moment it comes in someone's going to dispute it, and even if they don't, it won't lead to anything more than incremental change on a governmental level, so why not do something completely different as the basis for making your own mind up.

Granted, this something isn't that easy when your head's full of the latest news reportage, so you may want to switch off your TV set before you try it.

What we're proposing is that you listen to your intuition.  That's right.

Undervalued and at best recognised as a so called soft skill in the business world, intuition, or our gut instinct or sixth sense, is probably the most powerful barometer of what to do that we have today.

It takes courage to say, y'know, I don't care whether the idea that Climate Change is man-made is disputed, or whether there are in fact cyclical patterns of extreme weather historically, I'm still going to change my behaviour in relationship to the earth, because that's what my intuition tells me to do.

Today, our hearts tell us that humanity has a reciprocal and interdependent relationship with the earth, and that if we all acted in harmony with Her we would experience a fundamentally different world.

We'd cling less to dramatic headlines and the comfort of our TV experts, we wouldn’t blur the lines between natural disaster and man-made catastrophe, we'd sync into natural cycles and JUST KNOW what our place in all this was.

Humans are the only living things that compulsively live and work against their own natural cycles, and as such against their own well being. Homosapien is an entire race of Homer Simpsons sticking its fingers into a light socket over and over again to see if maybe THIS TIME we get a different result. Intuition cuts through this crazy behaviour.

Our hearts tell us that living simply and closer to the land is not just common sense but ultimately the key to lasting happiness and a fulfilled life.

That individual rights and social responsibility are not mutually exclusive, and that in fact loving service of others is the key to Self discovery.

Our intuition tells us to reject the idea that we are all helpless victims of life. And most importantly that we don't need another extreme weather event to verify our intuition to live in harmony with the earth.

As the earthquake rocked Japan and split open her nuclear reactors, Nick arranged a barter with his neighbour, to acquire his first Bee hive that will soon help to pollinate his family's vegetable plot and increase its yield.

Pat planted seeds. Just three windowsills and some pots – but in the middle of the city this is her Eden, her way of staying grounded and putting something back.

What does your intuition tell you to do?

 

 

 

Seeing stars

Pat Thomas

 

Early in January BBC2 broadcast Stargazing Live, a three-night experiment in looking at the stars. The programme, truth be told, was nearly as dull as the night skies over that period. Until...

Dara O'Briain said it first: “Let’s get this straight once and for all, astrology is rubbish”. Then Brian Cox, agreed: “in the interests of balance on the BBC, yes astrology is nonsense.”

This was the second time I’d heard the normally pleasant Brian Cox say something like this and while I admire both men, they completely lost me at that point. I switched off.

Offended is too strong a word. I’d have to care about their opinions to be offended. So, 'miffed' maybe. Because I enjoy astrology as a hobby, and who the fuck are these big-headed blokes to tell me that my hobby, something that I derive pleasure from, is “nonsense” or “rubbish”?

I was miffed, also, by the beside-the-pointness of it all. If Madonna had exposed her breasts on stage, or Russell Brand had humiliated yet another unsuspecting victim live on radio we would all have dismissed it as a tiresome and rather desperate grab for attention. Since the clouds in the sky failed to part during their three-day, mid-winter experiment in real time astronomy, maybe that’s just what it was.

The Guardian’s ‘proper science’ bores got involved in the ensuing controversy this week. When the British Astrological Society started up a small petition to ask the BBC to apologise for this unnecessary, ignorant outburst,  reporter  Martin Robbins, the ‘Lay Scientist’ (surely an oxymoron, since in the 'proper science' club the right credentials are sooo important) said he wanted to start his own petition for people who think astrology is rubbish.  

Robbins marvelled at the “continued ability of the astrological industry to lift hundreds of millions of euros, pounds and dollars out of the pockets of customers each year.”

All I can say is phew!, and thank goodness that ‘proper science’ hasn’t been corrupted by money. It would be a disaster if it ever got hijacked by the corporate machine and started concluding conclusions that were predetermined by whoever footed the bill.

For instance like in the 2005 a survey of 3247 publicly funded scientists, published in the journal Nature, which found that 15.5% of those questioned admitted to altering design, methodology or results of their studies due to pressure of an external funding source. Nature light-heartedly referred to it as Scientists Behaving Badly.

The same year the New England Journal of Medicine explored what it called Academic Medical Centers' Standards for Clinical-Trial Agreements with Industry and revealed that a similar proportion of the 107 medical research institutions questioned were willing to allow pharmaceutical companies sponsoring research to alter manuscripts according to their interests before they were submitted for publication.

Think things have got better in the ensuing 5 years? See the report Science and the Corporate Agenda: The detrimental effects of commercial influence on science and technology by Scientists for Global Responsibility. 

Glass houses? Stones? Cleaning up you own back garden first? Anyone? Seems to me that it’s not astrology that needs defending. Or criticising.

With that in mind I would venture, however, that good, intelligent astrology – as opposed to the pap that the Coxes/O’Briains/Robbinses unfailingly hold up as relevant examples – is a journey into in perception and non-linear thinking. It is a journey into symbolism, metaphor, alchemy and psychology. It is also a journey into humility, since it reminds us that we are not masters of the universe but simply, humbly part of a greater whole.

I enjoy Brian Cox and Dara O'Briain for their entertainment value – except possibly when they are doing a double act, which was frankly lacking in any real chemistry – human chemistry, that is, rather than the kind that gets so lavishly funded by Monsanto, Bayer, Dow, DuPont, BASF, Syngenta and all the rest. 

But clearly they are both very limited, linear thinkers and, it seems to me, deeply – if unconsciously – insecure about the limitations this places on their understanding of the world. Why else would they choose to make such beside-the-point interjections about astrology on a show about astronomy? The only thing that would have been more beside-the-point would have been one of Dara's famous rants about herbal medicine.

Linear thinkers are, frankly, last year’s models. Linear thinkers’ obsessive focus on what is makes it impossible to envison what could be. The world is more complex and more wondrous than any of us can know and the creative, non-linear thinking that disciplines like astrology, mythology and psychology (not to mention all of the arts) require is what's in demand to solve our current and future problems. Sir Ken Robinson, an internationally recognised leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources, refers to the need for more non-linear thinkers as our learning revolution.

I for one would hate to look up into the sky and only ever see a bunch of rocks, dust particles, ice crystals and gases (though I appreciate the wondrousness of these things too). I want to look up and feel inspired, awed, comforted, proud of my human sentience but likewise humbled by how little I really know and full of anticipation of how much I have yet to learn.  

Humans have a long history of making sense of their lives through storytelling, metaphor and symbolism. It’s helpful particularly in situations that are complex or where there are overwhelming emotions to deal with, or new territory to negotiate. Some of us make sense of our lives by comparing our stories to those we see on TV or in the movies.  Others prefer older stories, symbolism and myth. Indeed Carl Jung the founder of modern psychology, believed astrology was an early human attempt at understanding the psyche and making sense of the world. He studied astrology in relation to his work on projection and collective archetypes. He noted in his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul: "We are born at a given moment, in a given place, and we have, like the best wines, the quality of the year and the season which witness our birth."

For some of us the stories and symbolism of astrology are just that bit richer, deeper and more consistent than EastEnders or Jordan's most recent love trauma or the latest Posh and Becks saga.

To dismiss something that, at worst, is a harmless pleasure for many and at best a means to genuine insight for others is not just insensitive, it’s crass. I broadly agree with the British Astrological Society. The BBC should own up to encouraging a kind of ‘profiling’ that characterises anyone with an interest in astrology as a brainless kook while holding up those who choose to criticise it as intellectuals. I doubt the BAS will get satisfaction. There is nothing in the BBC Charter that says you can’t be an arrogant asshole on TV.

Logic has its limits, as Edward De Bono would say. There’s room for all of us, for a whole diversity of interests and ways of looking at things. And I’d certainly match my brain, my ability to reason, my logic and my perception against that of Brian Cox or Dara O'Briain or the geeks at the Guardian who see themselves as defenders of some absolute, unbending 'truth'. Whatismore, it amuses me that none of these men seems to possess enough insight to ‘get’ that the need to somehow protect ‘proper science’ from astrology is indicative of just how fragile and unsteady and biased and unreliable that science has become.

More open-minded and less (pre)judgemental, boys – isn’t that the basis of all good science?

This post first apeared on Pat's website, Howl at the Moon.

How to find spirit in the sludge

Pat Thomas

 

It was with some trepidation that I recently  tweeted an unconventional prayer for the Gulf of Mexico. Bang goes my badass eco persona. And possibly my intellectual credibility.

It’s extraordinary that those of us who identify as ‘spiritual but not religious’ (SBNR – there’s even a facebook page) are so often afraid to admit to our esoteric sides for fear of being dismissed as incapable of rational thought or scientific understanding – or worse lumped in with the extreme end of the spectrum goofy narcissistic new-agers.

Nuts to that – I won’t be pigeon-holed.

My longheld belief is that we need to look at and understand the world, and each other, and current events from a lot of different perspectives in order to keep our thinking sharp and our souls courageous.

Besides, it wasn’t just that the poem that moved me. It was also my growing unease with the media scramble to be first with the biggest exclusives, the freshest perspectives and the hardest facts on the Gulf disaster. In newsrooms across the globe you can smell the testosterone, even amongst the women, as everyone elbows everyone else out of the way in the battle for a prominent byline and a place in the history of the event.

For politicians, likewise, the BP disaster is an opportunity to tough talk the spill in terms of national pride, economics, political gain and stock market prices. It’s a hot potato in the apparently ‘special’ relationship between the US and the UK. Same again with social network sites like Twitter which, at their best, can be rich sources of different perspectives and original thought, but which have become awash with received opinions and endless retweets of the same old (BP) stories.

The melee has plunged us into information overload. We are drowning in a sludgy sea of everything from number crunching the gallons of oil lost, to the bookies' odds on which endangered species will drift into extinction first. It’s an overwhelming tidal wave of ever longer strings of adjectives describing the horror of unfolding events.

I think I must be suffering from Gulf Fatigue, and I can’t help but wonder: if we continually respond from our heads, or worse from our competitive, cavemen (and cavewomen) selves aren’t we in danger of reinforcing the same kind of cultural shallowness and even arrogance, that led to the explosion in the first place? Doesn’t the overload follow the same dreary business-as-usual way of being and threaten to endanger certain things in us as human beings? Perspective for one. A thoughtful felt response for another. And I suppose a sense of spiritual wounding as well.

When I talk about a spiritual response to the Gulf, I am speaking less about lighting candles and burning incense and chanting and more about a well-rounded response that includes the raw facts, the number crunching, certainly, but also one that acknowledges the fear, the shock, the symbolic nature of the event and the grief. I am speaking of both head and heart.

Thus, in my state of spiritual and emotional Gulf exhaustion, those recent stories that have really grabbed me have been the ‘softer’ ones which are rich in the symbolism of the event and help connect, in a human way, with a disaster that would otherwise be abstract and incomprehensible.

For instance at Planet Waves, where civil action and political commentary meet thoughtful astrology (and a touch of liberated sexuality), the inimitable Eric Francis  riffed on the totem meanings for Pelicans (help us float above the surface of the water when life's trials and tribulations get intense), Turtles (guardians of time, and representative of the Great Mother) and Dolphins (guardians of breath, which take us to another dimension of reality) and looked at the watery overtones of the current planetary setup and the watery emotional dimension of the spill:

“Now we have an uncontrolled toxic release from below the bottom of the sea, contaminating the realm of feelings, dreams and visions. More significantly, the sensitive, fertile meeting places where land meets water are taking the worst beating, and will take the longest to return to a position where they can sustain life. This region where land meets water is where we go for inspiration, rejuvenation and those rare moments of relaxation. And now that space, on the Earth and in our psyches, is being fouled.”

At Common Dreams, Jill S. Schneiderman, Professor of Earth Science at Vassar College described the spill as “as a bellwether of slow violence” – a term coined by Rob Nixon to describe acts whose “lethal repercussions sprawl across space and time.”

She writes:

“Devastated communities and environmental refugees, dead or injured living beings, and absolutely altered land, water, and air...brutality in the guise of slow-moving and spatially extensive environmental transformations that are out of sync with the nano-second attention spans of the 21st century. But what will enable us unflaggingly to confront slow violence?

“In her memoir, Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience, Sharon Salzberg writes, ‘When we stand before a chasm of futility, it is first of all faith in this [the] larger perspective that enables us to go on.’ Some might scoff at the idea that faith has any place as a healing quality, a refuge, during this calamity and in the future it foreshadows. But human beings must begin to live and act in accordance with the reality of connectedness famously articulated by John Muir: ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself we find that it is bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe.'"

Amen. This is writing for the soul – as necessary as writing for the mind and too often absent from the ‘news’  in times of crisis.

What is more, this isn’t the SBNR new-ageism of yesterday with its 'me, me, me' overtones. With its spiritual materialism and chanting for abundance, for that lottery win and for that shiny new Hummer in the garage. This is intelligent spiritualism focused more on 'us, us, us'. On our interconnectedness, on our interdependence, on the solid understanding that our actions have consequences and on the bigger picture.

As the markets continue to collapse and BPs’ shares take a nosedive, there are some groups and individuals who are focusing on a nexus of economics and spirituality and who believe that the economic life of a nation is reflective of its spiritual attitudes. There are a lot of hurdles before we can start humanising economics; not the least of which is what green economist Molly Scott Cato calls the Rational Economic Man (REM) – the antithesis of the Earth Mother, who lives obsessively in his head and not in his body and nurtures a self-image of invulnerability and intellectual superiority. For me at least, the image of REM made the issue of economics personal again and reinforced my belief that we can’t get through all the tough times ahead by thought alone.

When we tackle the crises like Deepwater Horizon with our heads only we are aping Rational Economic Man, or Rational Political Man (or in the case of my profession Rational Journalist Man) winning at all costs but failing to get to the heart of things, failing to see where change needs to happen, and failing to feel our own sense of connectedness and responsibility. Without that spiritual and emotional IQ we’re only half as smart as we think we are.

It’s spiritual maturity or bust for our planet and its people. You choose. Which is it going to be?

A longer version of this piece can be found at Pat’s website Howl at the Moon, here.

Let’s talk about failure

David Key and Osbert Lancaster

with PatThomas

"I tell clients we can beat climate change, I don't say we might fail",  says a leading sustainability adviser. "It's like coaching a football team going up against strong competition, you tell them they can win. You don't tell them the opposition's tough and they're likely to be thrashed."

Variations on this analogy dominate discussion of climate change – especially communications to build public support for a strong and binding deal in Cancún in Mexico in November: “We've got to win, if we all try hard enough we will win...”; “Don't mention failure, no one will be inspired and we'll fail...”

As Football World Cup fever grows, flags are waiving and the chants of “win, win, win” are getting louder. But lose at football and you can play again. Lose at the climate challenge and climate related disasters affect hundreds of millions of people;  economic impacts could be hundreds of billions of dollars and sea level rises could affect 1 in 10 of the world's population.  And there’s no rematch.

'Got-to-win' is simply the wrong approach to communicate about situations where the possibility of failure is real, the impact of doing so significant and the opportunity for recovery limited.

We need honesty about the possibility of failure. Unless failure is an option, you can't make contingency plans. Without realistic contingency plans in development we lose valuable time if things do go wrong.

This notion of failure raised its head recently in the lengthy debate between George Monbiot of the Guardian newspaper, Paul Kingsnorth of the newly established Dark Mountain Project and a multitude of readers. The debate itself began with Monbiot’s question of whether Dark Mountain Project’s call to withdraw from the fight against climate change and instead concentrate on building a culture that was strong enough to withstand the inevitable changes was an effective way to go. Monbiot thought not and suggested that a ‘sit back and wait’ approach simply conspired in “the destruction of everything greens are supposed to value”. Readers’ comments became more aggressive and focused on ‘got-to-win’ as confusion between a political movement and a cultural one became more entrenched.

Plan C’s Pat Thomas weighed-in briefly with a question about ‘failure’. She wrote: “Although superficially positioned as a response to the world out there, Dark Mountain seems to me to be more of a projection of an inner struggle that a many of us are currently facing. If what we have devoted our lives to, and what we know, has no real influence, if what we try to do isn’t working, or not working fast enough, if we have failed to communicate effectively, have we failed and, more significantly, are we failures?”

The question was ignored in a show-down between George and Paul that was just so... male. Even more of the same intellectual, techno-scientific, oppositional thinking that has created the mess in the first place.

At Footprint, our feeling is that the Dark Mountain Project challenges something fundamental and shadowy in environmentalism and in the wider world: the myth of control – and by association, of doing, of winning at all costs. It’s fascinating to see the environmental movement struggle with this myth – when control is a feature of the very system most of them are trying to oppose!

The challenge is to integrate into our lives our increasing clarity about not being in control. But this needs to be done in a healthy way rather than a nihilistic one.

The qualities of relationship that are healthy are always the same, whether they refer to our relationships with ourselves, other people or the rest of nature. Trust, empathy, compassion, humility, acceptance of a power greater than the individual – apply these to any relationship and healing will emerge.

In this respect, the idea of palliative care for our species is powerful and helpful. The obvious conclusions about death are easy to draw. But the truth is that palliative care – because of the emphasis on Being (the relational qualities) rather than doing – can lead, counter-intuitively perhaps, to healing. This is not uncommon. This healing arises from authentic acknowledgement and acceptance of death itself. 

Acceptance is the starting point to healing, not the point of resignation to the apparently inevitable.

It’s not that we should 'do nothing', nor should we enter some manic cycle of eco-anorexia where we all starve our souls in the process of trying to save all that we perceive as external (the planet). Like the Dark Mountain Project, we need to be honest about the likely outcomes of our current path (which we show no signs of stepping off) and start the hard work of accepting and then integrating this realism into our lives. 

The delightful irony is that this integration is likely to be congruent with living more lightly. It is not congruent with 'doing nothing' which requires the same type of denial as 'doing until you drop'.

In the mean time the debate around the Dark Mountain Project will either continue to polarise until it ossifies and gets totally stuck, or acceptance will dawn and, after a period of anger, sorrow and despair – a process of grieving – the healing can begin.

Perhaps this grieving is what we are witnessing now. Let’s hope so.

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David Key and Osbert Lancaster are directrors of Footprint Consulting, the mission of which is to promote ecological sustainability and social justice through personal and organisational development.

Spitting on a Forest Fire

Pat Thomas

Ethical consumers, says a small story in the Guardian, are more likely to indulge in selfish behaviour than those buying conventional products and may even be more likely to steal and lie.

The claim is based on a study by researchers at University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, which used a series of computer games to test the theory that green consumers were more altruistic and ethical than non-green consumers.

In one test participants were given $6 to spend in online shops and to share with other participants. Those who browsed, but did not buy, in a store with green products shared more money than those who had browsed the store with conventional products. But those who actually made purchases from a green store tended to share less money with others than those who bought from the conventional store. Thus the selfishness.

In another experiment participants were asked to look at a split screen on a computer. An image of dots would flash up quickly on the screen and the goal was to identify which side had more dots. Guess right and you could take money out of an envelope containing $5 in loose change. Green shoppers were more likely to reward themselves for being right – even if they weren’t – and came away with on average an extra 83 cents in their pockets. Thus the lying and stealing.

One has to wonder at the timing of this story in a major newspaper, what with all this data about supposed climate change scepticism floating around. In fact, this study was published in August 2009 and has been available online since at least October. So why now?

But let’s save that analysis or another day and get back to those selfish green consumers...

Is it better to buy green poducts than planet-destroying ones? Yes. Probably. Sort of. But the notion of a ‘green consumer’ is, itself, something of an oxymoron since most ‘greens’ recommend shopping less and even opting out of the conventional economic system whenever possible. Such recommendations include time banks, LETs schemes, local and alternative currencies (including gold coins) and simple person-to-person barter, as well as adopting a ‘mend and make do’ attitude. ‘Green’ shoppers generally don’t represent such values and beliefs. In fact, green shoppers are more likely to represent a niche group within the larger body of our consumer society, rather than a subgroup of the larger body of environmentalists. And consumer society is inherently selfish.

But why, possibly, would green a consumer be more selfish than those buying conventional products? Likely the green shopper is reacting to a deeper knowledge that this business-as-usual response to crisis is the economic equivalent of spitting on a forest fire. When you feel ineffective you will do anything to feel powerful again, including stealing and cheating. In the wider human community people commit such crimes precisely to feel powerful and in control of some aspect of their lives.

It may be hard to square this view with news stories of the phenomenal growth of ethical consumerism. But when you are starting from zero, almost any growth can seem phenomenal. The bottom line is that ethical consumerism makes up such a small percentage of actual overall consumerism as to be a meaningless blip on economic and environmental radar. According to the Co-operative Bank’s annual Ethical Consumerism Report 2009 whilst green spending has continued to rise and UK consumers now spend more than £6bn per annum on products with an ethical pedigree, this amount still accounts for less than one percent of total household expenditure. 

To really get to grips with this study we need ask what is going on under the surface. The authors of the study framed the selfish actions of the green consumers as a kind of exaggerated sense of entitlement, a license to do bad.

Certainly the green consumer can be seen as an eco-narcissist; someone who buys to be seen to be green. Through shopping they indulge in the biggest ego-stroke of all: the fantasy that they are saving the world. So why should we be surprised or even disappointed that such people might lie and cheat on a computer game or express a distorted sense of entitlement when it comes to being rewarded for ‘good’ behaviour?

In psychology what drives the kind of slingshot effect seen in this study, where ‘bad’ behaviour follows closely on the heels of ‘good’ behaviour, would be linked to shadow material. The shadow is all the stuff that we repress, not just our ‘bad’ thoughts and feelings, but all our greatest unlived potential, as well as things we know but try not to think about or feel anything for because it is too painful or too complicated. Every time we slip into this kind of unexamined consciousness – the very consciousness that allows a consumer society to flourish – the shadow will rise up and slap us the head.

A green consumer in quiet moments of reflection (providing they have such things) may wonder why, if they are making the 'right' choices, the world is still so 'wrong'. The frustration at this ‘wrongness’ – which is often unexpressed – may lead to an overwhelming sense of resentment, anger and grief; to the need for soothing of some sort, the need for recognition of every effort however minor, and the unbearable feeling that nothing they do matters anymore. And if nothing matters anymore, why not steal and cheat and lie?

No matter how much we seek to celebrate it, the truth about green shopping is that it makes us think less, not more, about the issues. Think of green consumerism like a fat-free cookie. We assume it’s good for us because it doesn’t have any fat. In fact, that cookie seems so wonderfully guilt-free, even healthy, that we have no problem in hoovering up an entire box or three in one sitting, oblivious to the number of calories we are consuming and their eventual effect on our health.

It’s the same with green shopping. We buy more and more of this stuff only to find only to find that our lives and our homes are still overwhelmed with junk we don’t need. And in the world ‘out there’ nothing has changed.

In the end it’s hard to see what can really be gained from this bizarre series of tests. It’s almost impossible to measure morality in a lab. It may even be that the green shoppers (university students after all) lied and cheated more because they spent so much on ethical goods that they couldn’t even afford a cup of Fairtrade coffee.

In a fairer world, all goods would be ethical goods, the words ‘retail’ and ‘therapy’ would never be crunched together and we’d all be spending a lot less time worrying about keeping up with the Eco-Smythe-Joneses. We would, as Duane Elgin so eloquently suggests in his book Voluntary Simplicity, simplify our outer world in order to facilitate a much richer inner world and studies like this would become even more redundant than they are today.

If you meet a climate scientist on the road, kill him.

Pat Thomas

 

MPs’ expenses, Tony Blair’s illegal war, obscene bonuses for bankers, Tiger Woods, John Terry and Climategate. The characters change, but the story remains the same.

It’s a story of arrogance and ignorance, selfishness and greed, laziness and lack of foresight, and when we read about it we are outraged, we demand resignations that (usually) never materialise and life and the media lurches on in search of the next outrage.

Now Climategate has morphed into Glaciergate with the revelation that the last IPCC report included bogus information about the rate at which the Himalayan glaciers were melting. For me the most outrageous aspect of the ongoing story is the naivety of those who believe that all scientists are rational, infallible, incorruptible and above using clever ‘tricks’ to make their point.

Climate sceptics and holier-than-thou environmentalists have joined together to rail against the use of ‘grey literature’ as if this was an ‘offence’ on a par with genocide and paedophilia. Everyone seems to have forgotten that many significant discoveries begin life in the ‘grey’, as intuition, anecdote and hypothesis. Endless pages are being devoted to the call for more and better peer review, the resignation of Dr Rajendra Pachauri and new leadership of the IPCC.

I have my doubts, particularly when it comes to peer review. So many atrocities which have blighted our world and our lives – nuclear radiation, dioxins and PCBs, GM, thalidomide, the green revolution, to name but a few – have been ‘proved’ to be effective, progressive and safe through peer review. Conversely, some momentous scientific discoveries – for instance those by Albert Einstein and Watson and Crick – were never peer reviewed. Most recently a group of 14 stem-cell researchers published an open letter charging that the process delayed or denied the publication of truly innovative scientific discourse.

In truth, for more than 200 years, peer review has been an old boys’ network where some reviewers are more equal than others and which broadly functions as a way of keeping dissent and views that challenge the status quo out of the public arena. On such foundations is the belief that science will save us built.

The overaching narrative reveals a battle not about who is right but about who is less wrong. And the struggle of the average man is not so much about who you can believe these days, but whose lies or errors of judgement you feel most comfortable living with. It’s a precarious place to be.

What becomes clear is that our view of science suffers from the same distortions and hero worship as our view of sportsmen and celebrities. The Tigers, Terrys but also the Pachauris, groups like the United Nations and professions like bankers and scientists are so often blank canvases onto which we dump all our hopes and aspirations, our desires to be ‘right’ and ‘best’, all our unused potential, but also our darkest, most unconscious stuff, and our deep frustration with life. And perhaps what frustrates and angers us most is that these figureheads are failing to be the type of people we are not willing to be ourselves.

It’s not peer review but personal review that is most needed.

One place to start would be with the Zen koan about killing the Buddha on the road – as apt for climate gurus and environmental heroes as it is for other types of figureheads. Wherever we are on our journey, when we look for enlightenment ‘out there’, often in the form of some person or group who is going to think and act on our behalf, you can bet it will end in disappointment. The most effective thing we can do is ‘kill’ the misconception that these ‘others’ are our salvation.

Yes, the media preoccupation with tearing down figureheads and 'idols' is tedious. But looked at in another light it could also be an instinctive response to this deeper truth. The problem is, because so much of what drives this effort to reveal what lies beneath is unexamined and is happening on an unconscious level, it comes out looking more like a brutal fox hunt than a sincere search for truth.

I’m not saying that we need to deny ourselves heroes – heaven knows so much of environmentalism is already framed in the language of denial. But would it kill us to raise our awareness of how much these figureheads carry that really belongs to us, and reclaim it for ourselves?

Like Corporal Jake Sully, the hero in Avatar, it may be time to ask ourselves: ‘How far out there am I willing to put myself to live in a better world?’ – and then come up with an answer that doesn’t involve the miracle of CGI.

What if, for instance, voters decided to boycott the next election unless politicians could demonstrate a greater sense of environmental awareness? What if we actively encouraged alternative economic systems like LETs schemes and local currencies or took our money en masse out of big banks and put it instead into small community or cooperative banks (harder in the UK than in the US but still doable on some level)? What if for one month we all didn’t use supermarkets, or for two months we all didn’t buy petrol?

We could constructively tear down a system that is killing us by degrees. But we better make sure we have something in place to support us if we do. Therein lies the problem. We have become very skilled at tearing things apart, but frighteningly deskilled at being builders and co-creators.

The first step away from endless exhausting outrage and towards practical and creative ways of building a better future is to claim back all the stuff that we have projected onto these ‘others’ and stop waiting for them to make the world right for us. Instead we need to make it right in our own lives and encourage our families, friends and neighbours to do the same. We are, as the poem goes, powerful beyond measure.  Isn’t it time to stop being afraid of our own light?

 

No, really, tell me a story...

Pat Thomas

My great grandfather was an oil baron. No, really. He was a rootin’ tootin’, bar room brawling, gun-toting Texan that made JR Ewing look like a pussy. Elsewhere in my family was a biochemist who devised a method for turning beets into sugar. Deep in the past, deep in the Southern states of the US, my family were farmers and slave owners. The wills of my ancestors show them bequeathing “negro” men, women and children to their own children and their heirs “forever” – along with parcels of land, cattle, feather beds, bridles and saddles. 

When I eventually married I married into a family whose renowned ancestor, in the late 1800's, founded an arms company that produced the rifles that helped ‘tame the west'.

In a wonderful ironic twist, the rifle manufacturer eventually bought the sugar factory in California that once engaged the services of my beet-distilling ancestor. By then he'd stopped making guns and was instead making tyres for these new fangled automobiles that everyone seemed to be driving around in.

Ask me why I'm inclined towards a career in environmentalism and all I can say is: with Karma like that what else could I legitimately do?

Even though the momentum of life seems to push relentlessly forward, we sometimes need to look back. We need to listen to our past, to make sense of our own stories, in order to move forward in awareness and with good intent. We also need to listen to the stories of others, because in the act of listening we engage with and locate ourselves in something bigger than ourselves.

But these stories from ‘others’, where exactly do they come from? The wannabe fiction that is Pop Idol or X-factor? The continual angst of soap operas like East Enders? Reruns of ‘everything will work out OK in the end’ Friends? Magazines that crank out an endless stream of celebrity garbage about who has gained or lost weight, and which A-lister beat up his wife this week? Are these the stories we live by? And if so, is it any wonder we have lost the ability to imagine ourselves as solid, powerful, resourceful and able to find a way out of our current crises.

So many forms of 'entertainment' are just forms of social control. We sit down at the appointed time, in the appointed place, laugh and gasp and clap and take our intervals in all the right places (as true in the theatre as it is in the front room). When Kurt Cobain snarled, “Here we are, now entertain us” he was tapping into this conformist mentality that has rendered entertainment an increasingly passive, sterile and meaningless experience.

The internet is supposed to free us from such constraints and expand our entertainment and information horizons, allowing us to time shift, to download, legally or illegally, and surf endless new horizons for the next interesting thing. But the web comes with its own set of social contrivances and expectations, namely that we should abandon our interest in detail and context and be willing to spend hours connected to increasingly smaller screens so that we can be the first to know and the fastest to respond. We have to switch off so much of ourselves in order to stay switched on.

So a while ago I began to look for something more fulfilling. Real instead of virtual. Truth instead of fiction. Obscurity instead of celebrity. It was with this need to connect with the collective in a more honest way that I stumbled into Spark, a small monthly storytelling event in London.

None of the people who get up on stage are famous. Not all of them are polished or confident. There are no costumes, cameras or flashing lights, no audiovisual enhancements. But once a month, I find myself laughing or crying or just sitting transfixed as yet another courageous sole shuffles up onto the small stage and tells a true story. This is what entertainment should be – and in a future, energy-constrained world, where we may have to make stark daily choices about whether we turn on the TV or have hot water (or cold food), it may hold the key to what entertainment will be. Personal, local, real, impactful, intimate, open to and initiated by anyone and everyone rather than controlled by an elite few.

Similar initiatives are beginning to blossom elsewhere. The Dark Mountain project, for instance, is founded on the belief that we have “herded ourselves to the edge of a precipice with the stories we have told ourselves about who we are: the stories of 'progress', of the conquest of 'nature', of the centrality and supremacy of the human species.” Its aim is nothing less than 'uncivilisation' – a movement of writers, artists and creative thinkers who are willing to deconstruct the current paradigm and envision something more relevant to the challenging times ahead. That the notion of 'uncivilisation' has been taken by some to mean anarchy, simply illustrates how far we have become detached from metaphor and symbolism as a powerful way of understanding of the world and its problems, and imagining a tomorrow that isn’t merely an 'upgrade' of our dysfunctional today.

This month another regular story night, 5x15, is being launched. Five speakers get 15 minutes each to tell their tales of passion, obsession, invention, adventure and achievement. Some of the storytellers, such as Rupert Sheldrake and Beth Orton, are well known. Others, like green energy guru Jeremy Leggett and eco-suffragette Tamsin Omond, are known mostly in their specialist fields.  But the emphasis remains on the truth behind the tale and its ability to empower and inspire us in our own lives. I’ve already booked my tickets.

Although it has become something of a cliché, the personal really is political. We can’t remake the world unless we realise that everyone counts and that we are all in this together. To do this we need to start talking to one another; and we need to start listening. We need to revive and revere human sentience, the awareness that allows us to feel our way, to see the patterns in the chaos, to sniff the wind and sense exactly what's going down in the collective, and where we fit in to it (or not). We need to share and create new visions together for our sanity and for our salvation. And what better way to start than by sharing a good story?

 

Green. With Envy.

Pat Thomas

Climate scientist James Hansen once went on record to condemn the scientific reticence that stopped so many scientists from saying what they knew about the scale and speed of climate change.

 

This reticence, he said, muddied the debate and cost the world valuable time that could have been spent looking for solutions.

 

It’s not just the science of climate change that suffers from reticence. So does the psychology of change, which may be why, when there seems to be so much activity around climate change, so much undeniable evidence that we must change direction, so few are doing anything constructive.

 

Reports by groups like the American Psychological Association have looked at the psychological drivers of and reactions to climate change and why, even when faced with such overwhelming evidence of a need for change, we don’t. They say it’s anxiety and helplessness, rather than ambivalence or apathy, that are the biggest barriers to effective action.

 

But it’s not like we haven’t heard these words before. Anxiety, helplessness powerlessness – words that just wash over us these days, barely sticking long enough to make an impact.

 

Let’s pick a new word: envy.

 

Acknowledging the psychology of climate change, of how we got here in the first place would seem crucial, but so often this is dismissed as a bit too 'touchy feely' – not practical when there is so much ‘real’ work to be done in the ‘real world.’

 

And yet everything you need to know about our inability to act is summed up in this word.

 

Envy is like gravity – a powerful force that affects everything it touches. It arises when a person feels they lack what the other has and either longs to possess it or wishes that the other person did not possess it.

 

Most crimes are based on envy, our politics are based on envy, our economy and consumer culture is certainly is based on envy, indeed we have institutions called advertising agencies whose sole purpose is to stimulate and regulate envy amongst the population in order to stimulate growth.

 

Ironic, since envy is the one emotion most likely to stunt real growth over the longer term.

 

We envy our children too.

 

That’s a fact, though of course we deny the depth of what that means. Nevertheless, we envy them their future, their connection with nature, their creativity, their strength and vitality, and the possibility of global healing, dare I say ‘world peace’, that we have never grasped.

 

By doing nothing in the face of climate change we are in fact enacting a very malicious form of envy that has become an important driver of so much of the environmental devastation we face today.

 

Envy poisons the river, uses up the resources, privatises the commons, scars the landscape. It sucks emotional intelligence dry and dehumanises whatever it touches. Destruction of the natural world is envy directed at making sure our children can’t have what we can’t have – the future. Framed in this context, envy is a desire to be finished with this world before it is finished with us.

 

The drive from which envy springs is very human, but that doesn’t mean we have to give in to it, or worse ignore it.

 

In a very different world – the world that has to emerge and quickly – we would be staking a claim in the future through our children and acting not only to preserve the future, but to equip our children with the tools they need to thrive.

 

And, by the way, that doesn’t mean the latest IPhone apps.

 

It means leading by example, being parents instead of pals, teaching that our actions have consequences both intended and unintended, it means morphing our pride in ‘my son the lawyer’ into ‘my son the farmer’, insisting on schools that teach our children to think critically and divergently, to encourage environmental literacy and for God’s sake stop faffing around with debates about whether climate change and peak oil are real or not.

 

Yes, of course it is overwhelming, and given our envy-based society, it’s so easy to feel anxiety, helplessness and powerlessness – and then do nothing about it.

 

What’s harder to ‘get’ is that this pervasive sense of helplessness, depression and just plain exhaustion is a direct result of a life lived in envy. Envy doesn’t just suck the life out of the envied; it sucks the life out of the envier. It disconnects us from our humanity, makes authentic relationships with others nearly impossible and drives the sort of addictive behaviour that we find it hard to save ourselves, let alone our children, from.

 

Is it any wonder we don’t have the energy to fix the world?

 

The bottom line is: you can’t be green with envy. The level of self awareness required to be ‘green’ is completely incompatible with a life lived in envy. And although people who feel empty in themselves often find it difficult to be generous, the more we give of ourselves, the more the world returns to us.

 

Acknowledging our responsibility to the future also frees up amazing reserves of energy that we can invest in a more meaningful now.

 

Let’s give our kids a break. Let’s give our communities, our economy and our planet a break. Let’s give it up envy for good.

Welcome to Plan C - Creating Sustainable Change From The Inside Out

Everywhere you look people are talking about change. 

These days it’s often preceded by the word ‘climate’ but it could just as easily be ‘political’, ‘economic’, ‘religious’, or ‘cultural’. The way we live our lives, the way we envision the world, our communities and ourselves really does have to change. And while the issue of change is being addressed on lots of different levels something is still missing.

Plan C’s aim is to address this void by looking a little deeper at the Consciousness, Creativity, Connection, Curiosity, Choice and perhaps most importantly Context that’s bubbling below the surface. Above all, it acknowledges the human element that is central to change, and which provides the dynamic intersection for the political economic, environmental transitions we need to make.

Most people don’t make changes until they have some kind of ‘ah-ha’ experience. Often just a brief moment when they can see themselves as part of the bigger picture and understand how they effect and are affected by the world around them. Often, in these moments of clarity, we find there is nowhere to go to make sense of them; no one with a plan for how to move forward from there.

Of course, lots of people have plans.

For most of the political, and business community Plan A is still in force – get back to normal, business as usual, reassure a worried public that it should keep consuming. This plan, of course, fails to link up the symptom – economic collapse – with the multiple causes – belief in a growth economy that depends on the exploitation of the earth’s limited resources, unrestricted trade, unquestioned waste and unpunished pollution of the natural world. Business as usual will further entrench us in catastrophes of climate change, peak oil, water shortages, population explosion and a polluted landscape.

So what about Plan B?  It’s only six years, since environmentalist and founder of the Earth Policy Institute, Lester R Brown, published Plan B, Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, and only a year since its third edition, Plan B 3.0, Mobilizing to save Civilisation.   With its hard message that only a complete restructuring of our taxes and fiscal priorities will impel the market to tell the ecological truth, the best use of our time, it suggests, is to lobby our elected government representatives.

While our actions at a local level should not be underestimated, only big government can enact the necessary changes. It’s a radical, seemingly all encompassing solution, and yet, given our propensity as a race to fight and squabble over the Earth’s natural resources, who is to say that having undertaken such a massive external restructuring, and overcome the challenges of peak oil, we won’t simply project our internal malaise onto something new such as water, or who owns the sun’s rays?

This is the paradox which informs Plan C and makes it different. 

The question that drives our enquiry is not just ‘what kind of world do we want?’ but also ‘what kind of people do we have to become to make that world – and then live in it sustainably, peacefully, intelligently and courageously?’ Increasingly we sense that who we are being in relation to our cause, is as equally important as what we are doing.  In short, that true sustainable change is only possible from the inside out.

This website is an exploration, an inspiration, a way of visioning the world through a different lens, listening to language in a new way, seeing new pictures, the pattern which connects, in the apparent chaos all around us. It is about acknowledging our contradictions, our everydayness but, at the same time, our power and uniqueness in the world, especially at this time of great change. 

This doesn’t mean we aren’t interested in the big issues of the day; we just look at them differently.  

To this end Plan C advocates a kind of slow media, with thoughtful content, that puts the human experience at its centre. It is a place for enquiring minds, fresh proposals, and the willingness to be honest, complex and sometimes even wrong. Plan C is a work in progress, a place where thoughtful journalists, campaigners and change drivers can come to grapple with the bigger issues free from the usual constraints of the mainstream media.

We may not always be ‘right’ in our conclusions, but from a journalistic point of view, a new more discursive tack is required when it comes to reporting the environment and global climate change; one which attempts to pull back the veil of polarised debate, to reveal the deeper, underlying currents and forces for change. 

This is our objective at Plan C.

                             

                 Pat Thomas                                     Nick Kettles