Happy Planet...

Happy Planet...

If you believe the world is going to hell in a handbasket, you're probably right. But you should watch this:



Makes me want to move to Costa Rica.

Best stuff out there...

Best stuff out there...

Right now I think some of the best stuff that is being published is by Krista Tippet on Speaking of Faith. Every week I download the podcast, and every week I'm inspired and moved by the content.

This week was Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, talking about Moral Math. Everyone should listen to it...

And then go back and listen to:
A Voice for the Animals, a conversation with Alan Rabinowitz about the Human - Animal bond.
The Ethics of Eating, Barbara Kingsolver on eating.
A Monastic Revolution, talking with Shane Claiborn about the new evangelicals.

How could I forget: Land, Life and the Poetry of Creatures with Ellen Davis and Wendell Berry.

So much good stuff.

Final Interview: The future of humanity is at the kitchen sink...

Final Interview: The future of humanity is at the kitchen sink...

INTERVIEW 3 - Jean Robertson, Founder, The Living Room Context
Story of Business Innovation: Write at least 300 words about the innovation itself. Please answer the following questions:
• WHAT is the innovation?
• HOW did the innovation emerge?
• WHO was involved in the creation of the innovation? What did they do?
• WHAT quotations from the interview best describe the innovation?

The Living Room Context is a self-educating, self-organizing network for experientially learning a new way of thinking. In the words of founder, Jean Robertson, “The future of human evolution is at the kitchen sink. If we can do it there, we can do it everywhere.”

The Living Room Context (LRC) is one aspect of Robertson’s vision for bringing about “Humanity 3.0”. The LRC is a learning community of people using a new way of thinking to explore how to act and live in a radically new collaborative culture.

The innovation is a clear definition of the two juxtaposed human operating systems: the Coercive Circle and the Collaborative Circle. Robertson explained: “The core (of this enterprise) is understanding from systems theory that a system has leverage points, and that the leverage points in human systems tend to be the assumptions – the world view that is driving the system. So at the heart of each of those circles, I’ve reduced it down to three core assumptions. They appear to be enough – along with certain dynamics – to actually generate the whole larger map of the complexity that we see. They are enough of an explanatory principle to explain why coercion works the way that it does, and also where the leverage for change is in that system would lie.”

Each system has powerful levers for driving the performance of the system. For the Coercive Circle, the three levers are inculcation of guilt and blame, the moral sense of wrongness. Robertson calls it “installing the guilt buttons.” Once the Guilt Button is installed, then the second lever is the division of the world into dualistic patterns: right/wrong, good/bad, and so forth. The third lever is establishing external authority as the arbiter of right and wrong. For Robertson, the Coercive Circle is the foundation of 10,000 years of human history and the root of the problems that humans are facing.


The Collaborative Circle


The Coercive Circle

The Collaborative Circle describes the view of the creative, life-long, explorative learner. This explorative dynamic is the first of the Collaborative Circle Levers. The second lever is the learner’s trust of self and the universe. Finally, the Collaborative Circle is based on a systems way of understanding

The definitions of the Collaborative and Coercive Circles form the core intellectual property on which the Living Room Context is founded. The Living Room Context is a collection of activities including workshops, seminars, and other educational events, as well as shared living quarters for some participants. The overall goal is to purposefully explore collaborative personal and social change and cultivate the skills needed to live in a collaborative, learning society.

Robertson views the Living Room Context and her core intellectual property in the tradition of Open Source Software: a knowledge kernel that she publishes and makes freely available to the world. As this knowledge kernel deepens and grows, she expects to spawn many businesses (consulting and training organizations, for example). She also expects it will become the core operating system for already existent businesses that have reached the limits of the coercive operating system.

Impact of innovation: Write at least 250 words about the impact of the innovation:
• WHAT was the impact of the innovation? What people or organizations were affected?
• WHAT were the short-term effects? What were the long-term effects?
• WHAT observable evidence suggests that this impact has occurred?
• WHAT quotations from the interview best describe the impact?


Robertson views The Living Room Context as very much in the Research and Development mode. As such, the impacts are by and large personal and anecdotal. Still she points to a number of indicators of success. For example, she is in contact with people who were exposed to the first LRC workshops nearly 10 years ago, and the ideas “have a stickiness” that keeps people from those early days connected to the movement.

Furthermore, the ideas continue to generate positive response from a diverse population. Robertson explained: “The two circles are powerful way to talk about the core conceptual thing in a way that people recognize. It brings out from them ‘let me tell you about my coercive experience.’ … I overlay the two circles and show how they interact… For the last 10,000 years it’s been mostly coercive with these benign cysts on the body politic that have had no effect whatever. They’ve gravitated together and grown so they’re equal circles that overlap. The overlap shows that you can’t get to one from the thinking of the other. When people get that from the map, there is a relief. People understand there is something to learn here. (They say) ‘Its not that I’m failing at being non judgmental; I have things to learn.’”

Finally, Robertson offered herself as a living example of the impact of the Living Room Context. “The biggest success is that if I weren’t living in what I now call Humanity 3.0 Consciousness with other people, I would live by myself. And I’m living with other people, and I like it.”

Motivation and Purpose: Write at least 250 words about the motivation, purpose or inspiration behind the innovation.
• HOW did the original idea come about?
• WHAT was the motivation or purpose for doing the innovation?
• Does the innovation relate to a sense of mission, purpose or meaning? If so, HOW?
• WHAT quotations from the interview best illustrate the motivation behind the innovation?


Robertson’s innovation came about as a result of a twenty-plus year search for ways to build community, as well as a deep understanding of systems thinking. This search included living on two continents, two marriages, and a couple of business ventures.

“What I’ve been doing all my life,” she explained, “is trying to figure out why human beings seem to think rather poorly together, and how we can do it better. I wanted to understand how societies turn dumb. I was looking at Why is my family dysfunctional? Why are families in general, apparently, dysfunctional? And then I discovered that businesses and governments seem to be dysfunctional as well.”

This search for community came into focus during a two-year period when Robertson was part of a small community that cared for a dying friend and family member. “In that time, the three of us were co-creating that space (caring for their friend) – that I actually experienced it. This is the thing that I’ve been pointing at and trying to experience. This is it actually happening, and we all knew it. That was the point at which we talked about ‘something needs to go on from this.’”

Immediately after the friend’s death, Robertson developed her core intellectual property and invited over a dozen people to a weekend retreat to explore the ideas. She found that by this time, “the readiness that was different than in the 80s or 90s. In the 80s,” she said, “the ideas were all out there. We had even purchased a whole quarter section of land to create an intentional community on. But we didn’t know how to do it yet. And the same thing happened in business in the 90s. We just weren’t ready.”

Headline: If your story were published on a front page of a local newspaper, what headline, or title, would you give it?

The future of humanity is at the kitchen sink

Interviewers Story: Tell us your story. Write at least 200 words about your experience:
• Why were you interested in interviewing this person?
• What did you learn or how were you inspired from the interview?
• What was the best quote you heard during the interview?
• What did you find most interesting about the story?


I first met Robertson about 3 months before this interview. My daughter had introduced me to her and some of her ideas and it was at that first meeting that Robertson first told me that she believed that “The future of human evolution is at the kitchen sink. If we can do it there, we can do it everywhere.” I was intrigued by that idea, and it seemed to rhyme with my own ideas that way we operate our businesses is critical to the success of the human race in the coming decades.

But the connection to Robertson’s ideas became more personal as I experienced first-hand how my daughter’s use of these ideas enabled her (young adult daughter) and I (middle-aged father) to relate in better and more productive ways. Anything that helps improve communication across generations is worth further exploration.

I was particularly impressed with Robertson’s commitment to embody Humanity 3.0. Although she is a highly intelligent and conceptual thinker, this is not an abstract, academic exercise. She has created a Petrie dish to live and work in, and uses it to develop and share her ideas. This came into focus for me when she said: “I could only further develop my kind of thinking, to think the way I do today, by actually being in such a group of people. So it was one of those bootstrap things – you had to get it going to see what would happen to the thinking and the interactions.”

Another interview - Inventing a new financial system…

Another interview - Inventing a new financial system…

INTERVIEW 2: Chris Meyer, Board Member, Common Good Bank

Story of Business Innovation: Write at least 300 words about the innovation itself. Please answer the following questions:

• WHAT is the innovation?
• HOW did the innovation emerge?
• WHO was involved in the creation of the innovation? What did they do?
• WHAT quotations from the interview best describe the innovation?

“Common Good Bank is an alternative financial system that is meant to facilitate strong, vibrant, sustainable local economies so that people can be consistent in all three ways they’re connected to companies.”

These words by Chris Meyer, Common Good Bank Board Member, hint at the audacity of the innovation that is Common Good Bank (CGB). This innovative financial startup is seeking seed money to launch operations, and is still very much in its infancy. However, once launched, CGB will provide a financial home for individuals and businesses who care about sustainability.

CGB seeks to provide a competitive financial system that saves the world from domination by publically traded corporations. In the view of Meyer and CGB, the number one reason we have an unsustainable economy is that public corporations exist solely to maximize wealth for their shareholders. They are legally bound to put their bottom line above everything else. This single fact forces business leaders to make decisions that maximize short term profitability and remove from consideration any other factor of consequence such as energy, pollution, climate change, or the health and welfare of employees, except where these factors impact short term profitability.

At the core, CGB aims to support strong local economies of independently owned businesses. This comes out of a mission to advance the greater good of the community. This mission impacts lending practices, decision making, profit-sharing, transparency, ownership, and business operations. CGB will also provide all the major consumer services of a financial institution like savings and checking accounts, debit/credit cards, mortgages and car loans. There will be incentives for green activities (fuel efficient vehicles, renovations that increase energy efficiency, etc). Also, the democratic nature of CGB will give members control of community lending priorities and which not-for-profit organizations the bank’s profits will fund.

Meyer’s entrée to Common Good Bank came after completing an undergraduate degree at Goshen College (Indiana). Meyer had been studying history, business, economics, public policy, ethics and religion. Immediately after college he entered a year of voluntary service in a rural setting in South-central Colorado helping low-income people write business plans and launch small entrepreneurial ventures. During this time he authored a white paper to capture his vision of a new, sustainable financial system that would work for the good of the community.

Meanwhile, at about the same time, William Spademan published his paper “Common Good Bank – A Society to Benefit Everyone” in the Friends Journal. (http://www.friendsjournal.org/common-good-bank-society-benefit-everyone). When Spademan and Meyer met in 2007 they immediately recognized the similarities in their visions, and Spademan invited Meyer to join his advisory board.

Impact of innovation: Write at least 250 words about the impact of the innovation:

• WHAT was the impact of the innovation? What people or organizations were affected?
• WHAT were the short-term effects? What were the long-term effects?
• WHAT observable evidence suggests that this impact has occurred?
• WHAT quotations from the interview best describe the impact?

The Common Good Bank is still positioning itself to begin operations. For this reason, we can’t point to specific, measureable impacts on people or organizations. However, the organization has taken some baby steps and we can point to those activities as signs of impact.

First, it has developed a corporate charter, bylaws, and a business plan. These documents have been reviewed and approved by bank regulators. They form the foundation for what the bank will become and how it will operate. According to Meyer, “There has been a lot of good work that has been done. We’re doing what we can without financing… When we get the capital, we’ll be ready to go.”

Second, this ground work has generated a great deal of interest in more than a dozen communities across the United States, as well as internationally in Sweden, Zimbabwe, and Brazil. From a small group based in rural, western Massachusetts the group has grown to nearly 3000 interested persons. This groundswell of support indicates the way the Common Good Bank ideas resonate with people who are frustrated with a financial system that considers short term impacts over all else.

According to Meyer, “One measure of success is that the bank is giving some measure of hope to people who have such negative attitudes towards banks and banking systems. Since this recession, a lot of people are fed up with banks and financial institutions. Common Good Bank provides an alternative to that and provides people with a little more control in their financial institutions. One of the things we have done is generate enthusiasm for a better type of financial institution, and a certain amount of hope in people who thought things were hopeless.”

Ultimately, Meyer says, “Common Good Bank will be an enabler of a lot of good things, if not directly doing them itself. It is more than a single business doing one or two things. It is facilitating the growth of an entire economy, which is the real meat of it – to be able to support everyone who is interested in creating a sustainable economy.”

Once launched, then this aim will make it easy to measure CGB’s impact by tracking the number of sustainable business ventures it supports.

Motivation and Purpose: Write at least 250 words about the motivation, purpose or inspiration behind the innovation.

• HOW did the original idea come about?
• WHAT was the motivation or purpose for doing the innovation?
• Does the innovation relate to a sense of mission, purpose or meaning? If so, HOW?
• WHAT quotations from the interview best illustrate the motivation behind the innovation?

Meyer is motivated to engage in the work of CGB because of his faith, and because of his prophetic insight into the current state of the world.

Since he was a very young man, he has had a vision that the world we know today is, in his words, “heading over a cliff.” Three things in particular make him think the world will change dramatically in his life time. Those three things are climate change, peak oil, and the collapse of the financial system. In his words, “We’re going to have to change – out of necessity. Whether that change is abrupt and very uncomfortable for many of earth’s people, or whether it is relatively smooth – I think that is the question. It’s not IF, but HOW.”

That insight met his faith during his undergraduate studies, when he had the opportunity to connect faith to business. For him, the connection happens in two important concepts: yieldedness and compassion. Yieldedness is the recognition that there is a higher being who loves us and calls us to do the right thing. Compassion is embodied in life and teachings of Jesus. Compassion is genuine caring and loving for all of life; a deep sympathy and kindness towards all of life.

For Meyer, that call to compassion makes him care about sustainability, the ecosystem, other humans – everything. Compassion “brings in the practical. Faith is not just believing something, but doing something.”

Ultimately, Meyer says, “The epitome of compassion is Shalom, where God, humans and creation are in fulfilling relationships. In trying to apply the Shalom concept to the modern world, I believe it mirrors the idea of sustainability. It’s a system of mutual benefit of all involved – that does not take away from future generations – that can exist perpetually.”

Given Meyer’s faith – his yieldedness – and his understanding of the call to compassion or Shalom, he fights despair with action: “Its hard a lot of times. There is so much to worry about. I feel the weight of the world on my shoulders. But we need to enjoy life too. And ultimately, is there anything else I’d rather do than work towards shalom? The answer is ‘No, there’s not.’ And any tangible progress along the way is heartening.”

Headline: If your story were published on a front page of a local newspaper, what headline, or title, would you give it?

Inventing an alternative financial system

Interviewers Story: Tell us your story. Write at least 200 words about your experience:

• Why were you interested in interviewing this person?
• What did you learn or how were you inspired from the interview?
• What was the best quote you heard during the interview?
• What did you find most interesting about the story?

Last year I met a person who was working on the Common Good Bank idea, and I was intrigued by the concept. As we talked about it, he identified Chris Meyer as one of the thought leaders of the movement. I knew of Chris as a newcomer to my church, but had not made the opportunity to speak with him. The BAWB interview provided a nice reason and structure to open a conversation.
I was impressed with the audacity of the vision: an alternative financial system. I went into the interview with the expectation that he was creating an alternative model for a bank. As we talked I came to understand that he was talking about more than an alternative financial institution – he was talking about a wholly new financial system. This new system is based on a foundation of justice and peacemaking – what in the Judeo-Christian tradition is called Shalom.
I was most inspired by how Chris consciously transforms despair into positive action. I identified with his comment: “Its hard a lot of times. There is so much to worry about. I feel the weight of the world on my shoulders… And ultimately, is there anything else I’d rather do than work towards shalom? The answer is ‘No, there’s not.’ And any tangible progress along the way is heartening.”

There is a lot to be pessimistic about in 2010. Chris Meyer and The Common Good Bank choose to say ‘No’ to pessimism and take positive actions to plant seeds for a wholly new economic model.

Something more positive...

Something more positive...

I've been doing some interviews for Business as an Agent of World Benefit as part of a course I'm taking. Here is the official purpose of the interview process:

The goal is to gather information on businesses that have recognized a social or environmental issue and have solved it by turning it into a business opportunity. By bringing to foreground stories of such innovative enterprises, Business as an Agent of World Benefit at Case Western Reserve University hopes to generate a conversation amongst like-minded individuals about ways businesses can form a synergistic relationship with society, environment and the world.

Business is a powerful institution that has potential for resolving the problems plaguing the world. By designing innovative business models, businesses can ensure profits for its shareholders as well as stakeholders by contributing to world benefit. Going beyond philanthropy, business ethics and corporate social responsibility, when business acts as an agent of world benefit both sides of the equation- society and environment as well as the business entity- emerge with more self-sufficiency and prosperity.

Here is my write up from the first Interview:

A new source for green energy…

INTERVIEW 1 – Tim Braun, CEO, Lucid Energy

Story of Business Innovation: Write at least 300 words about the innovation itself. Please answer the following questions:

• WHAT is the innovation?
• HOW did the innovation emerge?
• WHO was involved in the creation of the innovation? What did they do?
• WHAT quotations from the interview best describe the innovation?

Once in a while, a new idea comes along that holds the promise of addressing a number of important and seemingly disparate problems. A new product under development by a 14 person start-up company in Goshen, Indiana, holds that promise. The disparate problems are the need for clean energy generation and water distribution. The new product is Northwest PowerPipeTM (NWPP).

NWPP is an innovative new product – perhaps a whole new industry – that captures and commercializes the energy of moving water in situations where traditional turbine technologies cannot work. The new product is the brainchild of Lucid Energy Technologies’ management and engineering team with cooperation from Northwest Pipe Company, and will be the first commercial application based on the innovative Gorlov Helical Turbine in a pressurized water system.

The Gorlov Helical Turbine (GHT) was invented by Alexander Gorlov in 1996. Gorlov, Professor Emeritus of mechanical engineering and director of the Hydro-Pneumatic Power Laboratory at Northeastern University, was awarded the prestigious ASME Thomas A. Edison Patent Award for his invention in May of 2001. The turbine design, a combination of a wing foil and a DNA spiral, is highly efficient in low flow fluid environments making it a game-changing technology for distributed power generation.

Lucid’s innovation was to modify the GHT into a spherical shape for installation in gravity fed water conveyance pipeline and wastewater systems to generate electricity. In many communities, especially in California, water is stored for municipal water systems in reservoirs upstream of the community. These reservoirs sometimes have traditional hydroelectric (or hydropower) dams on them, and those dams, such as the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, incorporate traditional (or conventional) hydroelectric turbines. Water from these dams is also delivered for public consumption via large diameter pipes to downstream communities. The water in these pipes contains a great deal of energy, and NWPP will extract some of that energy to generate electricity.

While one system alone captures any where from 5 to 100 kW, multiple systems can be installed in series, still with minimal disruption in flow or pressure. Ultimately, the combined generating capacity may rival larger, capital intensive projects.

According to Braun, NWPP stands at the nexus of two pressing problems: energy and water.

“The more I learn about what we’re doing, the more I realize it’s as much of a water use issue as it is an energy issue. The water problem is as big as the energy problem. They’re inextricably linked.”

He went on, “Water conveyance is the single largest consumer of electricity in California. Water transmission and water treatment consumes 8 to 10 percent of all the electricity in the state of California. Water conveyance uses one third of the State of California’s electricity budget. So this is an immense energy issue. Most energy generation requires a lot of water. It also requires a lot of energy to supply water. Reducing the embedded energy in water is a major objective in the water scarce, population and agriculturally dense Pacific states. The fact that we have a zero water consumption electricity-producing device is a big deal. The fact that the device reduces the embedded energy in water is at a very interesting nexus of two problems.”

Impact of innovation: Write at least 250 words about the impact of the innovation:

• WHAT was the impact of the innovation? What people or organizations were affected?
• WHAT were the short-term effects? What were the long-term effects?
• WHAT observable evidence suggests that this impact has occurred?
• WHAT quotations from the interview best describe the impact?

Given that the product is still in development, it is too early to measure the contribution of NWPP to the energy grid. The company has installed a single prototype in one water delivery system (Riverside, CA). Though the output is relatively small, that prototype generates electricity at the expected rate, given the rate of water flow through the pipe. Furthermore, the NWPP system has an undetectable impact on the water flow. This is important because it means NWPP is able to extract energy from the water without degrading the water utility’s ability to deliver water to their customers.

In the meantime, perhaps the most important impact of the innovation is the creation of green energy jobs in Goshen, Indiana. Goshen is the county seat for Elkhart County, and the closest city to Goshen is Elkhart, just 10 miles away. During the economic collapse of 2008 – 2009, Elkhart has earned the dubious honor of being the “white hot center of the economic melt down Visited multiple times by President Obama during and after the 2008 presidential campaign, Elkhart County ranked near the top of nation in jobs lost during this period. The area has been heavily dependent on the recreational vehicle (RV) industry for jobs, and that industry was one of the first to collapse during the credit crisis.

According to Braun, the workers he “rescued” from the RV industry are exactly the people his company needs. They have the pragmatic, “can do” ability to solve mechanical and technical problems. He explained: “Most of our staff are former RV industry people. And they’re so much happier. They’d much rather work for a crazy, roller-coaster of a startup, and doing what we’re doing. Just working at the issue that we’re working at, employing people in jobs that they’re passionate about, in clean technology, in renewable energy, in downtown Goshen, in the heart of Elkhart County – the ‘white-hot center of the economic meltdown’ like the New York Times said – is an important success.”

The company’s invention has also attracted the attention of the U. S. Department of Energy. Lucid was awarded an SBIR grant in 2010, and Dr. Kristina Johnson, Under Secretary of Energy, cited the company in a presentation in April, 2010, with a CAD image of NWPP. She commented that NWPP is an emerging technology that the department is supporting. This is important validation of the company’s efforts.

Motivation and Purpose: Write at least 250 words about the motivation, purpose or inspiration behind the innovation.

• HOW did the original idea come about?
• WHAT was the motivation or purpose for doing the innovation?
• Does the innovation relate to a sense of mission, purpose or meaning? If so, HOW?
• WHAT quotations from the interview best illustrate the motivation behind the innovation?

Prior to joining Lucid, Braun had built a career in the socially responsible investment community. As an investment advisor with MMA Trust Company (a Socially Responsible Investment firm run by Mennonite Mutual Aid (MMA), and through involvement in the First Affirmative Financial Network, Braun had been exposed to businesses that were focused on sustainability in general, and renewable energy in particular. He had heard dozens of stories of entrepreneurs who had successfully built businesses designed to support a more sustainable world. For Braun, there came a point when he wanted to be closer to the solution, rather than being a middle man who was telling other people’s stories.

“I learned that the world has so many social and environmental problems that if you can figure out how to do this well, you can build a very successful business while pursuing your passions for a sustainable planet. I spent 10 years in the social investment industry, helping people get in touch with those stories of companies that are being very innovative in terms of social, environmental and economic objectives. And I got very tired of being the middle man and hearing all these stories, and conveying those to other people. I had a very viable role as the person helping leverage other people’s capital to bring things to the market who are doing good works. But at the same time, I wanted to write one of these stories. I wanted to get involved. I wanted to get my hands dirty, at the ground level. I wanted to be the story that somebody else is writing about, or telling their clients about.”

Headline: If your story were published on a front page of a local newspaper, what headline, or title, would you give it?
“Creative application of innovative turbine creates green jobs in the white hot center of the economic melt down”

Interviewers Story: Tell us your story. Write at least 200 words about your experience:

• Why were you interested in interviewing this person?
• What did you learn or how were you inspired from the interview?
• What was the best quote you heard during the interview?
• What did you find most interesting about the story?

I had met Tim several years ago. He was my neighbor and a passing acquaintance for a number of years and then I had run into him at a distant airport. We ended up getting bumped from the same flight and shared a round-about journey home together. That is when we first had conversations with him about sustainability. In the intervening years I had heard that he had joined this start up, and had been looking for an opportunity to reconnect and hear more of his story. The technology sounded amazing and creative and I wanted to learn more.

I was especially inspired by Tim’s passion to create something truly innovative and new in the green energy field. And he is facing huge hurdles to realize his dream. He has a great product idea, but due to the nature of water pipeline infrastructure his team has to design it to function with minimal maintenance for 25 years or more. So the technical challenges are enormous. And then the sales challenges are enormous. He has to find a perfect storm of circumstances of individual motivation, public readiness, and government support to get this product into use. And in the midst of that, he has to always remember that cash is king!

My favorite quote came near the end of the interview. We had been talking about theories of sustainable economics, and he said that he is very interested in questions of no-growth economics, and measuring the true costs of our current economic models. And then he said “However right now I’m just really focused on what do I have to do right now to be successful. I’m grateful that we’re working on a product that enables all these greater theoretical things that we’re talking about, but in reality, I just want to get the damn thing to work.”

Math and oil...

Math and oil...

Years ago I heard the guy on these videos. It took me a while to track them down because I didn't remember his name.

Thanks to http://fishsnorkel.wordpress.com/2010/02/03/dr-albert-a-bartlett-on-the-sustainability-of-population-growth/ for the links.

If it was my home...

If it was my home...

I ran across this site the other day and wanted to book mark it for future reference. It makes the gulf catastrophe a little more personal.

And then I ran into this post, which expresses some of my sentiment about the whole thing.

Optimism...

Optimism...

I'm cutting and pasting this from a 2004 op-ed piece in The Nation by Howard Zinn. Maybe they'll make me take it down. Maybe it is ok if I give them and the author full credit. At any rate, I am inspired and hope you are too. (Hat tip to my mother for passing it along.)

The Optimism of Uncertainty

By Howard Zinn

September 2, 2004

In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?

I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.

There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.

What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. A revolution to overthrow the czar of Russia, in that most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced imperial powers but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train to Petrograd. Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of World War II--the Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands), and the German Army rolling through Russia, apparently invincible, causing colossal casualties, being turned back at the gates of Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets of Stalingrad, followed by the defeat of the German army, with Hitler huddled in his Berlin bunker, waiting to die?

And then the postwar world, taking a shape no one could have drawn in advance: The Chinese Communist revolution, the tumultuous and violent Cultural Revolution, and then another turnabout, with post-Mao China renouncing its most fervently held ideas and institutions, making overtures to the West, cuddling up to capitalist enterprise, perplexing everyone.

No one foresaw the disintegration of the old Western empires happening so quickly after the war, or the odd array of societies that would be created in the newly independent nations, from the benign village socialism of Nyerere's Tanzania to the madness of Idi Amin's adjacent Uganda. Spain became an astonishment. I recall a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade telling me that he could not imagine Spanish Fascism being overthrown without another bloody war. But after Franco was gone, a parliamentary democracy came into being, open to Socialists, Communists, anarchists, everyone.

The end of World War II left two superpowers with their respective spheres of influence and control, vying for military and political power. Yet they were unable to control events, even in those parts of the world considered to be their respective spheres of influence. The failure of the Soviet Union to have its way in Afghanistan, its decision to withdraw after almost a decade of ugly intervention, was the most striking evidence that even the possession of thermonuclear weapons does not guarantee domination over a determined population. The United States has faced the same reality. It waged a full-scale war in lndochina, conducting the most brutal bombardment of a tiny peninsula in world history, and yet was forced to withdraw. In the headlines every day we see other instances of the failure of the presumably powerful over the presumably powerless, as in Brazil, where a grassroots movement of workers and the poor elected a new president pledged to fight destructive corporate power.

Looking at this catalogue of huge surprises, it's clear that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience--whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union itself. No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just.

I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is it just my friends?), but I keep encountering people who, in spite of all the evidence of terrible things happening everywhere, give me hope. Especially young people, in whom the future rests. Wherever I go, I find such people. And beyond the handful of activists there seem to be hundreds, thousands, more who are open to unorthodox ideas. But they tend not to know of one another's existence, and so, while they persist, they do so with the desperate patience of Sisyphus endlessly pushing that boulder up the mountain. I try to tell each group that it is not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement.

Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society. We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we don't "win," there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope.

An optimist isn't necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places--and there are so many--where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

State of the Union...

State of the Union...

I wondered what the President's speech would look like if we took a slightly different perspective on it:

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