Eye Trouble

This site is on temporary hiatus because I am having problems with my eyes. I will be back as soon as possible.

Advertising Works: That’s Why Companies Spend So Much Money On It

This year 29 entrants will vie to qualify for the grand prize race for the 10 million dollar Automotive XPrize to be held next year in 2010. There will be two categories: mainstream (four passenger and at least a 200 mile range), and alternative (two passenger and at least a 100 mile range). The winners must “exceed 100 miles per gallon, meet strict emission standards, and finish in the fastest time.”

Entrants must meet several specifications intended to encourage designs that are safe, reliable, and desirable — at competitive prices. This is one attempt to address the coming ‘twin peaks’ of peak oil and global warming by encouraging the development of cars that use less gas and produce fewer harmful emissions. While not a long-term solution, a 100mpg car would help a lot while we await the development of a good mass transit infrastructure.

(Parenthetically, I still think the idea of ‘train ferries’ makes good sense: that is, we take the train  long distances with our little ‘runabouts’ loaded onto carrier cars behind us. Then, when we reach our destination we are comfortable and relaxed. We unload our little cars and can explore the area with great freedom and convenience.)

There are five general types of cars that have been accepted to compete for the Auto Xprize. Eleven of them are hybrids, nine use alternative fuels, such as diesel, compressed natural gas, ethanol, etc. Four are electric cars and one is the compressed air car. And four use regular gas.

Perhaps the most depressing thing about this list is that several of the entries use no new technology at all. In other words, it has been possible to make a 100mpg car for some time. As the Auto Xprize publicity says, the reason we don’t have these highly efficient cars already is that “increases in energy efficiency have been ‘spent’ on increased vehicle power, acceleration, and weight, rather than in increased fuel economy.”

You will hear American auto industry apologists arguing that they only built SUV’s and pickups because “the public demanded them”. Which conveniently ignores the fact that they bombarded us with advertising for big vehicles. Why?  Because their profit margin was much higher on them. That advertising convinced many of us.

We have a wasteful society because it has been (and is) profitiable.

Walk In Beauty

The Transition Towns movement is attracting more people every day. And a big part of its success comes from the feeling of energy and joy that people get when they join in, roll up their sleeves, and get to work. It’s the same sort of exhilaration you feel on a canoe trip down a swift river — a feeling of being in control yet carried along by a great natural force.

It’s the feeling of working with nature, instead of trying to overcome obstacles. In this case, human nature — our natures. The Transition Towns movement has tapped into not one but two powerful streams within human nature. And “going with the flow” is not only exhilarating, it makes it possible to do much more.

First is the simple, but enormously strong power of attention. Whatever you choose to frequently focus the spotlight of your attention on broadens, deepens, widens, and proliferates in clarity and detail. Always. Naturally.

And the second great stream is the process of asking questions. As Michael Patterson says in the Global Ideas Bank, “Ask the question with deliberate genuine intent. You will get an answer. That’s just how your brain works.”

He goes on to suggest that you concentrate on practical questions, which is perfect for transition work. So begin your questions with “What?” or “How?” or “Where?” or “When?” or “Who?”.

Our lives, and ultimately our culture take shape from the kinds of questions we ask. Everything is constantly changing, and we influence the direction and content of those changes with our persistent questions.

So you may wish to join the Transition Towns movement. You may enjoy exploring questions like “How would I like my life to be?” and “What can we do in our community to make that kind of life more possible?”.

There is room for you, no matter what your interests are. Some are asking “How can we grow and distribute fresher, healthier, better-tasting food locally?” Others wonder “How can we have more comfortable homes and still save money and energy, and reduce global warming?” Or perhaps “What do we need to do next to develop a community-wide, non-polluting electrical system that is more reliable and less expensive to maintain?” Or “How can we support our local arts and crafts people and integrate them more into education and our daily lives?” Building local resilience has need for all of us.

Maybe we can model our overall goal on that of the Navajo and ask of each proposal “How will this action help us to walk in beauty?”

An Injury to One Is An Injury to All

A couple of presidential elections ago one of the political websites had an interesting presentation. As a visitor to the site you could take a short quiz about your own political convictions, then the website would pair you with the candidate who best matched your own views. (This was early in the primary, so there were several to choose from.)

“Go ahead,” the site said, “try it. You might be surprised.” I did. And I was. Very.

According to the answers I gave, the candidate whose views most nearly matched mine was Dennis Kucinich, a man I had never given any serious consideration to because he is presented in the media as a kook.

This made me realize what a powerful weapon ridicule is in the hands of manipulators. It also made me wonder what else I may be dismissing out-of-hand because propagandists have used ridicule to discredit it.

So I started exploring with more of an open mind. And I began to make some discoveries. Here is one (and I’ll present it to you as a set of questions).

Would you be interested in joining a group that:

• Teaches that whoever holds economic power also holds political power;
• Has as a motto “An injury to one is an injury to all”;
• Welcomes all races and religions, and includes women and gays as members – and always has;
• Fights for free speech;
• Practices grassroots democracy (self-management);
• Has always opposed militarism and condemns all wars;
• Is famous for its love of music and songwriting; and
• Counts among its more famous members Helen Keller, Gary Snyder, Dorothy Day, and Noam Chomsky?

If so (and if you are not an employer) you may be a Wobbly at heart. Yes, that is a description of several key position points of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). You can find out more about them at Wikipedia or at their own site.  And dues are only $9 a month!

But, I’m Not Using My Physics In My House

One problem with our media-heavy life is that good things come and go unnoticed because 1) they are buried amongst an avalanche of junk, and 2) we are always going on to something new.

But in order to make something our own we have to sit with it a while, chew it over some, set it aside, and then come back to it again with new eyes.

In that spirit, I’d like to revisit an Alan AtKisson interview with Bill Mollison published in In Context magazine in 1991. (There is a lot on this site that is worthwhile, and still relevant — check it out at:  http://www.context.org/

Back then Bill was always being asked  to define permaculture, and always struggling to do so. Part of his genius was that his mind was forever shooting off in a hundred different directions at once. So it was easy for him to see endless possibilities, but hard to catch and hold down one simple formulation that would satisfy inquirers. But by 1991 he was saying quite clearly that permaculture is a design system — a “Design for Living” (which is the title of the interview).

“Why is it,” Bill asked, “that we don’t build human settlements that will feed themselves, and fuel themselves, and catch their own water, when any human settlement could do that easily? When it’s a trivial thing to do?”

We (in Western cultures) need to change the way we see things, change the way we think, change the way we separate our knowledge from the way we live our lives.

Take physics professors, for example: “they may teach sophisticated physics at the university. But they go home to a domestic environment which can only be described as demented in its use of energy. They can’t [even] see that.”

“Once you’ve said to yourself, ‘But I’m not using my physics in my house.’ or ‘I’m not using my ecology in my garden — I’ve never applied what I know to how I live!’” the changes begin to “unroll like a carpet” in front of you.

So — permaculture is a design system and “One of the great rules of design is ‘do something basic right’. Then everything [following] gets much more right by itself. But if you do something basic wrong (a Type I error) you can get nothing else right.”

He also takes time to warn us against excess ‘individualism’. Permaculture, he says, means ‘complete cooperation’ with people and all of nature. “You can’t cooperate by knocking something about or bossing it or forcing it to do things. You won’t get cooperation out of a hierarchical system. You get enforced direction from the top and nothing I know of can run [well] like that.”

Why Should We Live With Problems We Can Solve?

Thanks to the mass media we are all aware of the Nobel Prize, awarded every year in six categories: chemistry, physics, medicine, economics, literature, and peace. 89% go to candidates from the ‘global North’ (North America and Europe) and 95% go to men. The first four categories recognize individual technological innovation and the latter two are heavily skewed by politics.

In the 1970s Jakob von Uexkull approached the Nobel Foundation to suggest two new awards, one for ecology and one for work aiding the poor majority of the world’s population. He offered to contribute financially, but the idea was turned down. So he sold his stamp collection for about $1 million, and in 1980 began the Right Livelihood Awards.  see http://www.rightlivelihood.org

The Right Livelihood Award presentation takes place in December in the Swedish Parliament on the evening before the Nobel Prize ceremony. The RLA has a completely open nomination process and no categories. Rather than searching the world for yet more technological innovation, the RLA jury screens the nominees with the question in mind, “Why should we live with problems we can solve?” The other criterion is that the recipients must be addressing the roots of global problems, not merely symptoms.

As a side note for those not familiar with the term, right livelihood is an ancient concept. It reflects a belief that a person should “follow an occupation consistent with the principles of honest living, treating with respect other people and the natural world. It means taking responsibility for one’s actions and living lightly in the world.”

Many wonderful people and groups have been Right Livelihood Award recipients. Some you may have heard of include Plenty International (USA), Leopold Kohr (Austria), the Self-Employed Women’s Association (India), Wangari Maathai (20 years before she got the Nobel Peace Prize), the Seikatsu Club Consumer’s Cooperative (Japan), Mary and Carrie Dann of the Western Shoshone Nation (USA), Ken Saro-Wiwa (Nigeria), the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP of India), Wes Jackson (USA) Amy Goodman (USA 2008 for developing a model of independent journalism), and of course, Bill Mollison (1981 Australia) co-founder of permaculture.

Looming Challenges

People who make money from fomenting and exaggerating political controversy are having a marvelous time with the “stimulus package” President Obama just signed into law. But all the boom and sparkle of the fireworks they generate is, I believe, drawing attention away from issues that need clear analysis and appropriate action.

It should be clear, for example, that if we want public services we must pay taxes. It should also be clear that the tax policies of the last eight years have been disastrous to our economy. It then follows that more of the same will not make the economy better.

I would also like to point out that many companies are downsizing or closing altogether because of a lack of demand for their products. A lack of customers. Not enough people willing (or able) to spend money to buy what they are selling. This cannot be fixed by giving more money and incentives to those companies. The companies were doing well – they had products that had been successful – the problem is that ordinary people became so hard-pressed that they could no longer afford to support those industries.

The simple fact is, without a large population with disposable income to spend, our economy cannot work. Emphasis on the large. When the 10% already own 90% of everything, the 90% can no longer support them.

The rich need to wise up – if they want to live in a functioning capitalistic society, they must tax themselves and their corporations enough to support a large and active middle class of entrepreneurs and consumers. Without them, the system implodes, as the present crisis makes perfectly clear.

That said, it may be too late. I think the present financial crisis will turn out to be different from previous recessions, because the reasons behind it include a very significant difference – the looming challenges of resource depletion and climate change.

Neither of these can be met with our present strategies – including the “stimulus package” – and certainly not with “business as usual”. To the extent that the present package encourages green energy and relocalization it will help, certainly.

But we desperately need to be learning how to live abundant lives within a “steady-state” economy, not stimulating the financial sector to restart economic growth.

We Are One In Song

I want to quote architect and sustainability guru Tom Bender –  http://www.tombender.org/ (I’ve changed a couple of words so that song refers to instrumentals as well as vocal songs, which he was originally talking about):

“Song is the voice of the soul. Song is a mingling of our hearts, a sharing, a giving, an affirmation. It is giving release and place to our emotions. It is as essential to community life as to our personal lives. Without song as an integral part of our lives there is no shared celebration of harmony, no balance to the small separating things of life that accumulate and can tear us and our society asunder. Song is part of work, part of celebrating, of joy, of pleasure. It is the expression and purging of grief, the vibrations healing our inner spirits. We are one in song.”

Oliver Sacks gathers evidence that music is an important part of being human in his book Musicophilia.  http://musicophilia.com/ As far as we know, music has been part of every human society .

I do know of two groups that tried to severely limit access to music – Hitler’s Germany and Islamic extremists, especially the Taliban. Both are far right-wing, authoritarian, hierarchical, women-denigrating cultures. Why does this kind of group fear music?

One clue, I think, is found in an interesting fact I learned from Oliver Sacks’s book. Unlike doctors, lawyers, or members of other professions, the brain of a musician can be recognized during an autopsy, especially if he began music at a young age. This is because his brain will have grown an unusual number of connections between the two halves (women’s brains also tend to have more connections between the halves than men’s).

It is theorized that these extra connections forge a more direct link between thinking and feeling – a necessary skill for interpreting music. But strong and direct connections between thinking and feeling naturally tend to lead a person to be more empathetic.

Also, making music is necessarily a cooperative endeavor. There is room for leadership, but of a shifting kind, and based strictly on practicality and competence. Music must be true to itself, not produced within a structure of arbitrary authority – such can be done, but it is invariably bad music, and every musician knows it.

So despots have two reasons to view musicians as a threat: 1) empathic and creative people are not likely to buy into a “party line” of arbitrary authority; and 2) it is dangerous for the despot to allow groups of people to learn that they can produce something good and valuable outside the rigid system, and do it cooperatively.

So sing! Take up an instrument! Support music education! Enjoy!

[check out      http://www.hungryformusic.org

True Believers

Reality surrounds us, but we each see only slices of it — and not always the same slices. “Eyewitness” experiments famously show that when ten people witness an event, they will give ten different (sometimes very different) accounts of it.

Have you ever taken a snapshot and then later found it was not at all how you remembered the scene? Then you know that we see only partially as we focus our attention on some things and ignore others. Furthermore, we distort even what we do see according to our own particular language, culture, background, and experiences.

Human senses only work within very circumscribed limits. I will never forget two pictures I saw in a magazine years ago — the first showed a flat lawn with a large leafy bush in the middle of it. The second was exactly the same area, but taken with an infrared camera — the way a snake would see it. Clearly visible behind the bush was the heat form of a man.

Bats can hear sounds too high for human ears, elephants can hear sounds too low. Bees can see polarized light. Dogs and pigs can smell much better than we can, and so on. Of course, we have instruments that can extend our senses greatly, telescopes, microscopes, infrared, X-rays, etc. but in daily life we don’t often think about the world in these ways. We experience a brick wall as solid, even though science tells us that it is made of mostly empty space filled with a pattern of electrons spinning energetically around the centers of their atoms like our planets circling our sun. Sitting still, we don’t perceive ourselves on a planet spinning on its axis while simultaneously orbiting the sun, swirling in a galaxy and rushing away from the original “big bang” point of origin of the universe. Nor do we remember all that most of the time.

We each use our normal sense perceptions and our minds to fashion the best picture of reality that we can — but it will always be only a limited picture, and will differ somewhat from person to person. This is inescapable and cannot be otherwise. We adopt our version of reality from our parents, friends, teachers, reading, etc. (as best we understand it) — and then work at adapting it to our own experiences.

But there are some of us who take one extra step — that one step too far. Having adopted and adapted a vision of “how things are” these unfortunate folks — forgetting or ignoring the always partial nature of human knowledge — decide that their version of reality is reality itself.

This is called mistaking the map for the territory.

That one step too far, taken in ignorance leads to a fall into the pit of spiritual pride, into a belief that “My way is the one true way!” This is fanaticism.

You Can’t Live Without Food and Water

You can live without a lot of things, but you can’t live without food and water. Whoever controls them controls you.

In the last few years there has been a dramatic increase in the concentration of ownership of our food and water into just a few giant international corporations.

According to Judith McGeary in Countryside Magazine, “A handful of corporations have an almost complete monopoly on the food supply for a majority of Americans.” These include Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Coca-Cola, Tyson, Phillip Morris-Kraft, Nestle, Del Monte, etc. – corporations that are rapidly taking ownership of (privatizing) our food and water.

As Canada’s Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) put it, “Access to food, health, and nutrition once considered a fundamental human right is now subject to the whims of the market system.”

And what a market it is! Annual retail value of global food sales is estimated to be two thousand billion dollars – over six times more than pharmaceutical sales. (Makes a seven hundred billion dollar bail-out sound almost trivial, doesn’t it?)

We know the results for the corporations, power and super-profits. But what are the results for the rest of us?

I quote from Food Facts, a non-profit report available here .  “The human toll of disease from poor nutrition is soaring. U.S. deaths from nutrition-related diseases (365,000 per year) are rapidly approaching the deaths attributable to the nation’s number one killer, tobacco.

Globally, the World Health Organization (WHO) reports soaring growth in three non-communicable diseases – heart disease, strokes, and diabetes. Unhealthy diets lie at the root of this surge.”

And once again, our government has played a significant role in this corporate take-over. Large government subsidies have made profitable the enormous increase in the production of high-fructose corn syrup and snack foods like corn chips. This makes junk food an affordable (albeit dangerous) choice over more expensive fruits and vegetables for many cash-strapped families .

Nor are those subsidies benefiting family farms. Between 2003 and 2005 66% of the $34.8 billion in U.S. farm subsidies went to just 10% of farmers.

So the large corporations are making big profits, the taxpayers are subsidizing them, average American eaters are losing – and 365,000 of them are dying each year – the ultimate losers. As RAFI put it, “Neglect of the public good is inevitable when the agenda is determined by the private sector in pursuit of corporate profits.”

What can you do? Garden and/or buy from your local organic growers. Here are a couple of web sites to give you a place to begin:
http://journeytoforever.org/garden_sqft.html
http://www.localharvest.org/