Plan C

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.

Breeders of the world unite..

Nick Kettles

Statistics damn statistics. 

Without them they’re would be no environment debate. 

They set the parameters of where we’re at, and where we’re heading, and, at the same time, their ability to objectify the beauty of human relationships as a series of mathematical formula is simply spectacular.

At no time has this been more clearly illustrated, than in the environment movement’s very own bête noire, the debate about population growth and its impact on climate change.

The facts are in. 

Today, there are nearly 7 billion people and rising. It's estimated by 2050, there will be upwards of  9 billion. The UK's Optimum Population Trust estimates the world's sustainable population is 5 billion. 

According to the Earth Policy Institute's Lester Brown, Population growth, "contributes to water shortages, cropland conversion to non-farm uses, traffic congestion, more garbage, overfishing, crowding in national parks, a growing dependence on imported oil, and other conditions that diminish the quality of our daily lives."

Join the dots: More people equals more carbon CONSUMPTION.  Less babies less carbon CONSUMPTION.  People who have them are selfish, so stop having them.  

Indeed, a recent study at Oregon State University has concluded that in the US, the carbon footprint of having an extra child, is almost 20 times more important than any other actions a couple might take in their entire lives: things like driving a high mileage car, recycling, or using energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs. Moreover, they conclude, the long term carbon footprint of a every child born  - along with all its descendants – is likely to have more than 160 times the impact of a child born in Bangladesh.

So, there you have it. 

Children, like commodities, carry their own carbon rating, and therefore parents should, where possible, think before they make their purchase decision.

However, based on logic like this, for those of us who are already parents, there’s little place to go.   

The chances of breeders like me ever achieving the same moral high ground as eco-heroes such as Cameron Diaz, who claims she may never have children, on the grounds the planet doesn’t need anymore, or the woman who actually decided to have herself sterilised to ensure she would not overburden the planet any further, are slim indeed.

My partner and my carbon rating will remain lumped alongside Hummer drivers, Lear Jet riders, and other eco-criminals, while my daughters, and in particular my second daughter, will inherit the carbon debt burden our hasty decision to expand our circle of love has created.

Who ever said mathematics wasn’t an emotional subject?

But, is this narrow view truly representative? 

This debate is possibly wider and more complex still. 

Of course, it’s is true that the world cannot sustain a larger population at business as usual levels of consumption and waste, but by the same token, taking a ‘Round Up Ready’ approach to population control does nothing to address the economic system which impoverishes the third world in the first place.

One reason why people in the developing world may have more children is that a lack of sanitation and general healthcare means they die in greater numbers.  Children are part of the workforce in some countries and not to have them means not to have enough hands on the farm.  In short it’s cash not copulation we should be controlling. 

Of course, Oregon University’s statisticians neglect to say what happens if someone in a Western country adopts a homeless Bangladeshi child, to help them relieve the burden of over-population.  Presumably, some kind of carbon credit or trading scheme will be on offer to assuage the impact of bringing up this child in the bosom of the capitalist West.

Like I said, it’s complex.

And, while not having children to save the planet is a noble act, it assumes, that we are already doomed.  There is little we can do, because that’s what climate science tells us. 

Based on what we know about human potential, this is a fair assessment, however, based on what we don’t yet know about human potential, it risks condemning the current and future generation of children hopeless to effect change. Thankfully human potential is not like oil: it doesn’t have a peak point where it starts to run out.  We may not have found the resilience, courage, creativity, and resourcefulness to create the world anew, but future generations might, if we are willing to instil these qualities in them. 

Maybe developed countries actually needs more parents who conceive children, for the purpose of instilling strong values in a new generation who may yet, change the world,  and not those who have children because they forgot to use contraception, got drunk, wanted a house from the government, or to please their parents eager to be grandparents.

Oh, yes, and then there’s those countries like France who are not ashamed to say children are our future.  Compared with the rest of the developed world, they recognise their declining birth-rate means they will soon face problems paying for the pensions and care of their ageing population.  France’s unofficial ‘third child policy’, implicit in their tax system, guarantees exponential tax breaks for larger families. 

Shoring up a system doomed to bust anyway, or ensuring a big enough labour pool to take over all those beloved but at risk, artisanale Boulangeries, Charcuteries, and Cafés which lovers of sustainability believe should be at the heart of every community?

And while it may appear that adoption is the middle way solution, excluding our right to procreate, also denies fundamental choices, which remain intrinsically political.

I applaud Cameron Diaz, for speaking out about her choice possibly not to have children, and right that she should, but she has no less moral fibre in my mind, than my wife’s decision to have our children awake and naturally, because she wished to affirm her ability, which she shares with every other woman on the planet, to give birth free of the control of male dominated obstetrics. 

Which is greater?  Neither.  Both rightly assert a woman’s right to choose – the same choice that has been suppressed by the same forces of progress which delivered this sorry mess we’re in, in the first place.

While statistics often paint a bleaker picture of what’s possible, the human spirit is far stronger and deserves a chance to fully show itself.  This can only truly happen if we recognise that the continuity of our race is really about human connection, and especially the sharing of wisdom and love from one generation to another.  This more than anything needs to be at the heart of a sustainable society.

And for those who rightfully assert your right not to be parents, on environmental grounds, feel free to step in and enjoy the role of being extended family to some children in your community. 

When Words Fail Us

David Key

On Banks Island, in the Canadian Arctic, environmental shifts are happening so fast that the Inuvialut inhabitants do not have the words to describe what they now see around them.

So often words are the first and most obvious companion for a journey to the edge of Being, but sometimes they fail us.

To run out of words is to stand at the edge of the unknown, at the cusp of The Mystery. There is something both frightening and exhilarating about this: The excitement of an impending adventure, the fear of formlessness.

Where the words finish and the white page is left, where the blizzard-filled sky meets the pure white of a snowy horizon: at this edge we can choose either to enter a dead end of desolation and nihilism, or a space filled with infinite possibility – the ‘potential space’ for creating a new form of consciousness altogether.

Language has it’s limits, just like the human beings that use it. When we reach these limits, the words run out. Now that we are experiencing the unsettling symptoms of global climate change and of the Earth’s finite capacity to support us, should it be any surprise to find ourselves speechless?

It’s not just the Inavialut culture that is lost for words.

While we have been busy evolving our post-modern languages to communicate the onslaught of technology and the giddy ecstasy of our own apparent cleverness, we have missed the fact that the world we have learned to describe – the world we have apparently evolved to live so well in – is increasingly a virtual world created by seductive marketing and the haphazard structural violence of our post-industrial culture.

A language unhitched from the simple ecological realities of life.

English has been abused, it has been moulded to fit an arrogant, abstract, disconnected, technocratic, dominating and violent culture. It is less now a language from the land, more a trade-marked and branded servant of industrialism: from text to txt.

We are left unable to articulate the complex ecological danger we are in – a bewildering experience for our seemingly sophisticated species. Our intellectual separation of mind from matter and of body from spirit, has led to a chasm between our contemporary description of selfhood and the blood and soil of our own Earthy existence.

Language emerges through humans from land, an expression of our connection to place.

To be lost for words is a call to reconnect with home.

The Inavialut language’s short comings in describing a rapidly changing human ecology point not to its inability to evolve, but to the way it connects a specific place with a specific language. When the exotic curiosities of another land suddenly arrive, the language cannot cope.

Lightning, Barn Owl, Hornet, Robin, Elk, Salmon, Wasp, Thunderstorm

These are words in English that the Inuvialut have no equivalent for in their own language; English words that describe things that have been displaced by climate change – change that is exceeding the speed of industrial evolution.

Some languages are still connected, still embedded. ‘The Okanagan word for ‘our place’ and ‘our language’ ‘, writes Jeanette Armstrong, ‘is the same. The Okanagan language is thought of as the ‘language of the land.”

In Siberia, it’s a shift in emphasis that reveals the ecological change:

‘In Chukotka, where the natives speak Siberian Yupik, they use new words such as misullijuq — rainy snow — and are less likely to use words like umughagek — ice that is safe to walk on.’

There is less ‘umughagek’ , less safe ground: We’re all on thin ice.

Many contemporary indigenous languages connect to concepts in ways that are geophysical. In modern European languages, Kenneth White calls this ‘geopoetics’ and suggests that poetry is the path to re-engage with land.

‘More than ‘poetry concerned with the environment’, more than literature with some sort of geographical content… Geopoetics is concerned, fundamentally, with a relationship to the earth and with the opening of a world.’

This is the way home: Opening through poetry to a new consciousness. A new language of the Earth, born of the Earth.

Poetry sits at the periphery of language, the last linguistic outpost before silence, before blank white space.

William James wrote in 1902 that one of the four characteristics of a mystic experience is, “Ineffability – its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or transferred to others.”

Poetry is the metaphysical edge of human language, a conduit to the mystic, a place along the continuum of expression just before the point where experience becomes ineffable.

A loss of words indicates the presence of powers beyond human control, powers that contain human Being, along with the collective unconscious of the whole Universe. When we meet these forces in the physical realm, we are humbled – in any language.

Our wordlessness is testament to this threshold and at this point the balance of power in the socially constructed dualism between humans and Nature is dissolved. We go, as indigenous Australians say, “back in”.

In poetry, it is not so much the words themselves, but the whiteness around them, the spaces between them, where the possibility of a new language lies. It’s there in The Void, in the linguistic wilderness, that form can start to take shape around the nuclei of a new ecological consciousness.

It’s in the physical wilderness too that the same ecological consciousness can take root.

It’s fascinating that in the vast white snowscape of the arctic, where the language of the Inavialut embeds them in their oikos, their home, there lies a similar parallel ontology of white space.

Nothingness, no-thing-ness.

To transcend the numbing complexities of human existence, the philosopher Martin Heidegger would take his students skiing. The ski tip breaking track in the snow, he proposed, was the closest he could get to a description of human Being. He called the space created as the ski tip broke the snow, ‘the clearing’.

Poetry signs the way into the clearing. Entering the whiteness of the page parallels a journey into wilderness, deep into the choice between nihilism and infinite possibility.

Is the poetry of the wild then, the clearing into which the new languages of the Earth can manifest? Is our loss of words not a loss at all, but the opening of a window into a new Earth consciousness?

David Key is a founding director of Footprint Consulting.  A longer version of this post, inc references first appeared at EcoSelf.Net

David thanks Mary-Jayne Rust in creating this post.

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?

 

To rescue or to restore..

Nick Kettles

How we talk about the Earth and the language we use probably determines and influences our relationship with the Earth more than we think.  

Contrast the idea of the earth being sick, the subject of a brutal rape by the forces of progress, with the view offered in the draft resolution, entitled Harmony with Mother Earth  (A/C.2/64/L.24) which Bolivia presented to the United Nations in November last year (2009). 

“One of the greatest discoveries of civilization was the realization that the Earth is not flat and that we live on a globe. Today we are in the midst of a much larger discovery regarding the nature of our home. To know that Earth is not only round but it is a WHOLE.”

Yes, you read that correctly.  WHOLE.  Meaning, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, complete, in an unbroken or undamaged state, with no part removed.  

Take a moment to consider this.  If the Earth is Whole, how can it be fragile, raped, dying? 

Is it possible She can be both of these things at the same time? That may be possible in the realm of theoretical quantum mechanics, but what’s more likely is that we perceive that the Earth is suffering, because that’s actually how we feel.  It’s not the Earth that’s dying but us.   

Our sense of urgency for the 'fragile' Earth, is actually a projection of our own sense of deep hurt about our place in the world and perceived sense of impotence in our ability to make a difference and play our part.  Our sense of disempowerment by the relentless drive of progress that insists we sacrifice well being for wealth, and our health for happiness. 

Perhaps for some, these feelings are rooted in a deep sense of loss, that the institutions and way of life that we have invested so much faith in, are in fact crumbling, dying; no longer systemically sustainable.  

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.   

But who really is in charge here?  Is it really us?   

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.     

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?    

With such a view, would our approach to addressing the impact of climate change be any different?   

Rather than act to rescue a dying planet, because it’s the right thing to do morally and intellectually, would we instead act to restore our interdependent relationship with Nature?

Where once the idea of rescuing fair maiden Mother Earth, provided the clarion call the environment movement needed to mobilise itself, today it’s more likely to impel the kind of evangelism which can and does cause people to switch off and disengage.  It is not that the urgency of those who want to rescue the earth is misplaced – it’s better to act than do nothing – it’s just the idea of rescuing anything suggests that the perceived victim cannot help themselves, and that in turn can leave us feeling helpless at the enormity of the task at hand. 

What’s more likely, in fact, is that without us (humanity) the Earth would do just fine and recover to a relative state of Harmony quite quickly, with the number of species that benefitted significantly exceeding the number that suffered.  Even genetically modified crops would, in the absence of spraying (for which they are resistant at a metabolic cost to the plant), be disadvantaged and probably die out.  

It may be the idea that the Earth needs us and cannot survive without our intervention is perhaps another projection of our own deep seated and egocentric need to be needed.  Not only to be seen, heard, and useful, but to feel that we matter, that we can play an important role, and fulfil our part in the Whole.  This too, is a perfectly human urge to have, and yet, again our point of view makes all the difference.

As Satish Kumar has often said, it only takes one letter to move from egocentric with an individual worldview, where I am separate from the world, and my needs are more important than yours - to ecocentric, 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.

It's quite possible that an ecocentric world view is what emerges when we see that the best role we can play in combating climate change, is not to take up arms on the street, but to actively seek to restore our relationship with the Earth. 

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 it’s inter connective web, or which we are a valued and important part, is revealed.

Would we then, assured 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? 

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?

 

Anything but normal

John Naish

Hooray, we are going to get back to ‘normal’. That’s what the UK’s political leaders are promising us in the run-up to the general election: a return to economic normality after the global crisis. But I don’t want normal. I want anything but normal.

A sniff of panic does funny things to humans. Thanks to the credit crunch, broad debate about alternative social futures has all but disappeared. Fear has instilled mass amnesia, forgetting how our constant-growth economy is not sustainable physically; forgetting that our constant-striving lifestyle is not sustainable emotionally (hence our spiralling rates of depression, anxiety and related ills such as hypertension).

Politicians are eager to help us to forget. They do not want to imperil votes by declaring that the normal system they lead is kaput, that our consumerist model keeps crashing itself and burning our planet. Instead, we get confident reassurance. Early in the global financial crisis, the Bank of England declared: “This is just a transitory period of subdued growth. We will get through the other side and the growth will resume to more normal levels.”

Normal levels? Despite the financial meltdown, carbon emissions from fossil fuels rose by 2 per cent last year to an all-time high, reported scientists in Nature Geoscience in November. This leaves us on a worst-scenario track for global warming, says the Global Carbon Project (GCP), a collaboration of more than 30 climate specialists. It also says that the capacity of the world’s oceans and forests to absorb greenhouse gases is fading.

But still we want to return to normal. Western-led culture might benefit instead from attending some kind of Econ-Anon meeting. It’s stuck in a destructive, addictive cycle of repeating the same behaviour over and over, thinking that the behaviour will get it out of the problems that the behaviour creates. This bears remarkable similarities to individual human addictions to things such as alcohol or bad relationships.

There is some emerging evidence of consumer cycle-breaking. A newly published report, A Darwinian Gale, by the influential marketing forecaster, The Futures Company, says we are moving from an “era of indulgence” to an “era of consequences”. Instead of never worrying about credit, consumers will increasingly take economic risk into account when buying things, it predicts. “Even if consumers don’t make different choices, the process of arriving at those choices will be different,” it adds.

That’s hardly a revolution, though. It’s still the unsustainable norm. John Maynard Keynes, the great 20th-century economist, would be sorely disappointed. He thought that we would have learnt enough by now to realise that fundamental social change is needed. In a 1930s essay, “On the Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”, he predicted that in three generations’ time (i.e., about now) we would have solved the “economic problem” – the problem of allocating scarce resources so that everyone has enough to satisfy their needs and basic desires. Once past that point, he thought that we would dump growth and instead evolve intellectually, to explore the greater potentials of humankind. And how we’d flourish, into the arts, into culture, into perfecting the ultimate refinements of beauty and friendship.

But our culture is stuck in consumer addiction. It lacks the insight needed for us to break the cycle. I believe that much of the fault for this lies in the present state of religion and spirituality, which effectively encourage us to feel disengaged from each other and from our planet. Organised religion obsesses about dogma and about splits over dogma (Anglican Catholicism versus Anglican Evangelism being the latest example). This leaves many feeling alienated and unmoved. More and more people explore their spirituality as individuals – as in, “I’m not religious, but I am spiritual”. This denies them the shared communality of human transcendent experience and often leaves them prey to consumerist bauble-selling – magic crystals and “how to be happy” guides.

Without any strong alternative voice, consumer culture is free to prey on isolated people’s fears, to tell them constantly that they are alienated, atomised individuals whose identity lies in competing with each other to achieve self-realisation (remember Mrs Thatcher’s “There is no such thing as society”?)

The radical alternative is to embrace our human commonality, to be encouraged to look into the eyes of strangers and see someone astonishingly like ourselves staring back. This sense of interconnectedness spreads wider, to a sense of “interbeing”, which embraces all living things, all dynamic systems and ecosystems, all pasts and futures. It makes us realise that we are not alone, that our every action is part of a universal web of consequences. It’s the sort of higher human potential, of true spiritual awareness, that Maynard Keynes describes.

This may not do great things for the global economy. But we don’t know. The developed world’s leaders have poured around £1000bn into propping up our current system, but not a cent on getting some of the world’s best economic brains to design sustainable global alternatives from a blank sheet. Whatever emerged from such a fundamental redesign might not, I freely admit, look normal. But right now, our normal is in fact an aberration.

 

John Naish is a journalist and author of Enough: Breaking Free from the World of More (Hodder & Stoughton)

 

Will a barefoot politician please step forth?

Nick Kettles

It’s quite possible the Copenhagen Climate Change summit is doomed to failure before it has even begun but not for the reasons everyone expects. 

Copenhagen will fail for the simple reason that none of the delegates from the 192 countries represented will truly be able to represent the interests of the earth.  Even if the delegates are genuinely concerned about climate change, their overriding and narrow objective will continue to be how to leverage as little negative economic impact on their own country as possible.

The fact remains that having a concern about the facts of climate change, doesn’t always translate into a deep and lasting concern for the continuity of all life on earth.

It’s true that intellectual discourse can provide the basis for a deeper awareness of our intimate connection with nature, as Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface Carpets, eco-epiphany clearly shows.  Ray Anderson claims the impact of reading Paul Hawken’s “The Ecology of Commerce” literally felt like a “spear to the chest” and awoke him to the urgent need to set his company on a new course toward sustainability.

But there is no guarantee that it will always be so.

Abstract concepts based on data sets and statistical analysis, are just too easy to disconnect from the world they represent.  If scientific facts could emotionally move politicians sufficiently to take decisive action, then they would have already taken such action a decade ago. 

What kind of action might the delegates at Copenhagen take if they felt as deeply about the planet as the indigenous tribes people, who met in Anchorage earlier in 2009, to make their own declaration on climate change?

“We reaffirm the unbreakable and sacred connection between land, air, water, oceans, forests, sea ice, plants, animals and our human communities as the material and spiritual basis for our existence.”

Of course we hear of Obama and Gordon Brown ‘growing their own’ in the gardens of the White House, and 10 Downing Street, but just how often do they actually get on their knees and get their own hands dirty to till the soil?  Or harvest the fruit of their labour with their own hands, and then prepare it for their family to eat? 

What’s more likely is that they are like the vast majority of the human race, who environment writer David Nicholson Lord suggests spends less than one day in a lifetime in sensory contact with Nature.  If this is the case, then it’s likely these forays into the garden, are little more than PR exercises designed to mollify the green lobby they hope will keep them elected.

Politicians, mostly male, middle class, wearing their immaculately groomed uniform of suit and tie spend most of their time disconnected from the earth, gathered around synthetically made conference tables, sitting on pump chairs, in largely synthetic environments, where the air, according to German Chemist, Michael Braungart, co-founder of cradle to cradle design, is likely to be more toxic than a smog filled city.

Will the conference centre in Copenhagen be any different, or are we more likely to get more sick solutions from men in sick buildings? 

The fact is that we desperately need our politicians and leaders to get out more.  We desperately need them to forge a deeper and more authentic relationship with the earth, because it’s clear that when they do, they act decisively. 

It’s claimed that after camping in the open air in Yosemite Valley with naturalist John Muir, in 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt was more receptive to addressing the state mismanagement of the valley and rampant exploitation of the valley's resources.  Snow fell on them the night they camped there near Glacier Point.  It was, according to President Roosevelt, the greatest day of his life:  “There can be nothing in the world more beautiful than the Yosemite, the groves of the giant sequoias and redwoods, the Canyon of the Colorado, the Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Three Tetons; and our people should see to it that they are preserved for their children and their children's children forever, with their majestic beauty all unmarred.”

Being emotionally moved by nature’s beauty, can awaken the same instincts to nurture and protect that we might feel for an infant or a child.  This is the kind of instinct that is infinitely harder to deny, than the rationale of hard science.

Living in mud huts and wearing hemp trousers is not my personal vision of what a sustainable society might or should look like, but when it comes to our world leaders and Copenhagen delegates, this might not be a bad thing in helping them develop a more authentic relationship with the earth.

What kind of discussions might unfold when if Barack, Gordon and other members of the G8, gathered round the camp fire they’ve made themselves? 

An end to oil as soon as humanly possible?  The radical transformation of urban landscapes into green sustainable cities? The possibility that we might frame our sense of well-being, by the depth of our relationship to the earth and all its creatures?

What chance an eco-epiphany at Copenhagen?  Will a bare footed politician please step forth to lead the way?

Nick Kettles is a freelance writer and co-founder of Plan C.

Protest 2.0: The Fine Art of Activism.

 

Corrina Gordon-Barnes

 

Why do we protest, or engage in any form of activism? Is it simply to change something in our world, or does it fulfil a deeper need?

 

When ecstatic shoppers descended upon the brand new Primark store in Cambridge last weekend, they were in for a treat. Just outside the main doors, in the middle of the busy high street, was laid out a ‘Free Shop’ consisting of a table and a clothes rack offering items that people could take for free and with no obligation. There was also a sofa so people could sit down and enjoy guitar renditions of Hey Mr Tambourine Man. The ambience was one of surprise and delight.

 

No-one likes to be told that what they’re doing is wrong. There is every difference between waving placards at shoppers with sweatshop labour statistics, and creating this curious, seductive scene which draws people into conversations about whether it would be more interesting to shop less and live more.

 

When creativity and protest intersect like this, it’s not only a more impactful way of engaging the naysayers and the misinformed into more meaningful conversation, it's also more impactful for those of us protesting ourselves. If we feel empowered by the experience, we are more likely to do it again and engage more deeply. 

 

Indeed, here in Cambridge we seem to be getting the hang of this kind of activism.  

 

In the market square on Sept 21st, many of us participated in a ‘flash mob’; at exactly 12:18, our mobile phones started ringing and strangers emerged from all sides, holding high those ringing phones. Our common goal was to send out an unexpected ‘wake up’ call about the need for a fair and ambitious global climate treaty. Across the globe, other paralleled events took place simultaneously.

 

This is Protest 2.0 - more collaborative and engaging than its predecessor. And the scope of creative protest is limited only by our imaginations. 

 

Rather than campaigning against Dow Chemicals, we could record a press conference as a spokesperson from Dow, announcing that we take full responsibility for the Bhopal Disaster and that we are paying compensation to the people affected, and thus provoking Dow to deny, again, that they will ever pay any compensation.

 

Stunts like these provide us with moments like those in the film ‘The Truman Show’ when cracks start appearing in the fabricated reality. The veil slips. Chinks of light break through. The sleepwalker starts rubbing her eyes.

 

This is activism which entertains in order to engage.  Like any superb teacher knows, these are the conditions needed for deep, experiential learning - for real change to happen. 

 

By using creativity, the novel and the surprising, we can respond to that which repels us in our environment without needing to look directly at it. We can channel our instinct to innovate and influence in the direction of our common enemy: stagnation. We can learn how to disarm the status quo without taking up arms ourselves. 

 

So, rather than sending a petition around about the dangers of swine flu vaccination, we could post a video to YouTube entitled ‘How To Make Your Own Flu Vaccine’, a hilarious ‘infomercial’ showing ingredients such as mercury and detergent merrily being whisked into a substance that will be syringed into our arms. 

 

Protest 2.0 makes us like martial artists - we stand in our own centre and our very refusal to push and fight is what causes the great unworkable to topple over. We can find ways of challenging situations without threatening the people within them; instead of aggressively tearing down the old, this is creatively and gentling dismantling it so that no-one need be the accused or the victim. This is the “Why don’t we....?” and “What if we....?” approach to evolving our world. 

 

How we measure the success of any activism is impossible - and reassuringly so. We can never know the impact of our actions so it is wise to put arrogance aside. Instead, we can use a different measure: how much are we impacted by our involvement? 

 

Both the Free Shop and the Wake Up call experiences left me feeling more empowered, more connected with others and more alive. 

 

Protest itself can also fuel a very healthy and necessary part of our human spirit - that part which is unapologetically revolutionary, fiercely able to make our hopes and needs known.

 

As activists, we need to concern ourselves just as much with our evolution as with changing ‘out there’. We want to walk the talk, become the kind of people others want to live with: those who can handle conflict and disagreement in a participatory and inclusive way, knowing that they are essential ingredients of our societal evolution.

 

We will never arrive at some ‘finished’ society where everything is sorted out and fixed. For most of us, it’s a relief to recognise that there will always be the need for creative activism. Our desire for the next best material thing can be replaced by a craving for the next great radical act. That spark of the revolutionary within each of us can continue to lead us forward in exciting and radical directions. 

 

May that never, ever end. 

 

Corrina Gordon-Barnes is a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach (CPCC). 

 

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