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. 

 

 

 

 

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.

Toward a beauty-centric education

Sandra B. Lubarsky

 

The two statements I hear most often whenever I bring up the subject of beauty are "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and "Beauty is only skin deep."

Beauty, in other words, is subjective and superficial. End of discussion.

But until about the seventeenth century, most people thought that beauty was objectively present in things. In the East and the West, beauty was associated with holiness — and with the harmony and patterns of wholeness. The Buddha's friend and first disciple, Ananda, once remarked to his master that, "Half the holy life, O master, is friendship with the beautiful, association with the beautiful, communion with the beautiful." To this, the Buddha replied, "Say not so, Ananda, say not so. It is not half the holy life. It is the whole of the holy life."

For Westerners, beauty existed in the world because of God: God was understood as being both perfectly beautiful and the reason for all created beauty. The work of God was the kosmos, literally, the order of things, in contrast to primordial chaos. Now, the word "cosmos" has been claimed by the beauty industry: a cosmetologist is someone who puts your face in order. Likewise, the word "aesthetics" now refers to the art of manicure, facials, and eyebrow shaping. But the word literally means "to feel" — its opposite is anaesthetic.

For many reasons, beauty has lost its status as elemental to the structure of the universe. Our dominant value system today is one in which money and material goods are most coveted. We live in a world in which "time is money" and in which attention to detail and to the demands of beauty is considered unnecessary extravagance. Science tells us that beauty isn't objectively real because it can't be weighed or measured. In a scientifically oriented world, we are trained to seek clear definitions before we enter into sustained inquiry, but one of beauty's most notorious deficiencies is that it seems to be resistant to definition. Many feminists as well have happily washed their hands of beauty, having experienced the demeaning effects of beauty on women. In a world of genocide and ecological decline, many artists have felt that beauty is hardly adequate to the psychological and political landscape of modernity.

Any effort to teach about sustainability presupposes the resurrection of the natural world and its value. The shift from nature as machine to nature as organism must also include a shift from beauty as a subjective value, only in the eye of the beholder, to beauty as the value that clothes life itself. This is a dramatic shift, since we have practically lost our language for beauty and our confidence in speaking of it. But beauty is intrinsic to an ecological paradigm. Life is not value-neutral; to be alive is to embody intrinsic value.

While life and beauty are not one and the same, they dance cheek to cheek. In a rhythm of reciprocity, beauty enhances life and life reaches toward beauty. Life that runs away with itself, as in the unchecked growth of cancer cells, is self-destructive; it is life against life. Life that exists in harmony, coherence, and balance (all words associated with beauty) with other life is life-promoting. This is life that wears the mantle of beauty. We have called it by the name of health, too, and of wholeness, words that are in kinship.

If we endeavor to mould a civilization in which wholeness, coherence, relationality, and feeling are central concerns, in which refining and enlarging our sensitivities to the life that surrounds us and is in us, then beauty must be embraced as a guiding principle — not an aside or an "also" — but as a core aspect of inquiry in our educational systems.

Teaching about sustainability, then, requires more than teaching about ecosystem relations, biological processes, and policy development. Sustainable education involves teaching strategies for life affirmation. Such an approach moves us away from excessive dependence on what has become the standard goal and tool of modern education, critical thinking — which also has its philosophical home in a mechanistic worldview in which knowledge is the detached examination of parts. When critical thinking is our primary tool for understanding the world, we must wonder how we can avoid the mess on the shop floor — the motors, flywheels, screws, and gaskets lying helter-skelter after the lesson in taking the world apart. Education that is beauty-centric will not neglect to study the parts, but it will not mistake the part for the whole or the whole for a mere collocation of parts. Such wholeness is an aspect of both an ecological worldview and a beauty-centric education.

Wes Jackson, who runs the Land Institute in Kansas, often shows his audiences a photo of an old oil tank, rusting away in the middle of a farmer's field. For him, that tank is a symbol of the kind of farming that he is against — farming that depends on oil rather than renewable energy. But the tank is not only an image of unsustainable farming practices; it is also an image of ugliness. There is a relationship between sustainability and beauty, and we need to begin to speak that relationship in order to give emotional honesty to our ecological work. If we do not say, "This tank is ugly, and so are these buildings, and this land use," we continue to be yoked to the mechanistic worldview which deprived the intellect of an emotional life.

The psychotherapist James Hillman has posed the sorts of aesthetic questions that must be added to our educational agendas. "What is the cost," he asks, "to physical well-being and psychological balance of careless design, of cheap dyes, inane sounds, structures, and spaces? To pass a day in an office under direct glaring light, in bad chairs, victim of the constant monotonous hum of machine noise … among artificial plants … and then, at day's end, to enter the traffic system … fast food, project housing — what does this cost? What does it cost in absenteeism, in sexual obsession … overeating and short attention span, in pharmaceutical remedies and gigantic escapism industries of wasteful shopping, chemical dependency, etc? Could the causes of major social, political, and economic issues of our time also be found in the repression of beauty?"

For the past two hundred years it must be admitted that we have failed beauty. We have allowed it to remain in the background of almost every human endeavor. And in failing beauty we have become a culture that cannot distinguish between longing and craving. Perhaps worst of all, we have made way for a singular value system — economism. What has been left empty by the death of beauty has been filled by relentless acquisitiveness. Indeed, until beauty becomes part of the foreground of our cultural life, we will not see a successful shift to an ecological paradigm.

If beauty is a core dimension of life, then to diminish it and belittle it is to diminish and belittle our own lives. Allowing beauty to play a role in the kind of education that we offer, encouraging our students to contribute to the beauty of the world, is, I believe, one of our most important strategies for sustaining the world.

Sandra B. Lubarsky is founding director of a masters program on sustainable communities at Northern Arizona University (http://home.nau.edu/sus), where she is also professor of religious studies.  She has written on religion and the environment, pluralism, and process thought and is currently at work on a manuscript on "Beauty and Sustainability."  She can be reached at Sandra.Lubarsky@nau.edu.

This essay first appeared at http://www.ecoliteracy.org.

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?