Four years ago I read and reviewed Keith Johnstone's book Impro, in which he explains how pervasive dominance and submission behaviours are in human interactions. He describes an example of physical dominance and submission (status displays) in our encounters with strangers:

Imagine that two strangers are approaching each other along an empty street. It's straight, hundreds of yards long and with wide pavements. Both strangers are walking at an even pace, and at some point one of them will have to move aside in order to pass. You can see this decision being made 100 yards or more before it has to. In my view the two people scan each other for signs of status, and then the lower one moves aside. If they think they're equal, both move aside. If they both think they're dominant (or if one isn't paying attention) they end up doing the sideways dance and muttering apologies. But this doesn't happen if you meet a frail or half-blind person: You move aside for them. It's only when you think the other person is challenging that the dance occurs. I remember doing it once with a man in a shop doorway who took me by the forearms and gently moved me out of the way -- it still rankles. Old people tend to cling to the highest status they have had, and will deliberately 'not notice' others while clinging fiercely to the (often walled) inside of the walkway. A bustling crowd is constantly and unconsciously exchanging status signals and challenges, with the more submissive person stepping aside.
Shortly thereafter I read and reviewed Peter Collett's The Book of Tells that teaches you to read status displays in body language, and specifically these six displays:

• Dominant/Threatening-Possessive (DT) signals -- "I'm the boss, do what I say or else"
• Dominant/Relaxed-Confident (DR) signals -- "I'm the boss, so I can let my guard down"
• Dominant/Controlling-Protecting (DC) signals -- "I'm the boss, and I make the decisions"
  

• Submissive/Deferring-Inviting (SD) signals -- "You're the boss, make your move"
• Submissive/Anxious-Shy (SA) signals -- "You're the boss, don't hurt me"
• Submissive/Helpless (SH) signals -- "You're the boss, what should I do"

The picture above (selected randomly off the net), for example, includes several dominant displays (sitting very straight, turning away, arms raised or extended, sitting slouched back with legs extended, sitting at end of table) and several submissive displays (slouching forward attentively, sitting in middle of long side of table, sitting with legs drawn up beneath chair).

Collett includes, in addition to body, hand, eye and face signals, some examples of spoken signals of dominance and submission:

• Dominant: talking first, talking most, interrupting, speaking loudly, speaking deeply
• Submissive: talking breathily, high-pitched speech, ending phrases with upturn in pitch, dropping names, ingratiating speech

In my review of Impro, I lamented: "What disturbs me most is what this bodes for us idealists trying to establish non-hierarchical, leaderless political and economic structures -- communities of peers. Are such structures unnatural? Or do we simply need to learn to recognize the pecking order for what it is -- a primeval tool for minimizing conflict and deciding who will do the breeding -- and what it isn't -- a license to take an unfair share of wealth and power?"

Since then I have been speaking about the importance of Love, Conversation and Community, and specifically the integration of the three: Facilitating non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer conversations among people in community (i.e. with shared passions, shared objectives, or shared problems) who care about each other and their community. Today I asked myself:

Are these status displays, and our apparent unconscious need to make them, interfering with communication, and undermining the achievement of consensus, collaboration and non-hierarchical problem-solving?

Since our bodies are always 'saying' much more than our words, even if we monitor and try to extinguish (as facilitators) more obvious dominance behaviours (bullying) and submissive behaviours (wallflowers), there is almost nothing we can do to reduce non-verbal signals. Yes, we can create circles and get rid of tables, but you will still see a ton of such displays, in posture, eye, face, hand signals and tone of voice. 

The courses I have taken in facilitation don't teach you to recognize or try to alleviate such behaviours, perhaps because it would be an impossible task. I know I am prone to slouch back, legs extended, hands on head with elbows out like antlers, a multiple dominance display. It must be very confusing to others when I try consciously to speak in an inviting, questioning, open-minded way while making such an aggressive non-verbal display!

Likewise I have witnessed people speak passionately and articulately about something, but leave the audience unimpressed because their body language betrays a lack of self-confidence in what they're saying. In particular I have watched a woman speak in a soft voice (raising her voice slightly at the end of each phrase) and be completely ignored and discounted, while a man a few minutes later, speaking in a soft, measured voice, said the same thing and was hailed as brilliant, everyone scribbling down what he said word for word.

So what do you think: Are there things we can do, both as facilitators and as conversationalists, to suppress power displays and displays of submission, so that listeners focus on what is being said, not how it is said or by whom?

Last Saturday I mentioned an article by Andrew Campbell that retrieves and elaborates on a fascinating model by Vincent Kenny on 'Dead Language' vs 'Live Language' and how power politics in conversation 'deadens' the language and dialogue and saps its power, creativity and usefulness. Language in conversation, the article explains, is sometimes wielded as a weapon, to stop thought and creativity and sharing and connection and everything else it is valuable for.

This is a second, more explicit 'abuse of power' in conversation. You know how it works: There are amazingly effective conversation-killers that those uncomfortable with change can use to stomp it out in a way that is almost impossible to defend against. "We tried that last year and it was a disaster." "If we allowed people to do that, we'd have chaos on our hands, costs would soar and productivity would fall." "We'd need to get the authority to do that from x and for reason y that would be almost impossible to get." Andrew's article provides more examples.

This raises a second question: Are there things we can do, both as facilitators and as listeners, to challenge and reject 'dead language' that stifles energy, innovation, courage and other collective qualities of a group necessary to bring about change?

I am very good at imagining possibilities (and throwing them out for consideration) and for gently (and not so gently) provoking people to want to change (themselves), prodding them to intend to act. I think these capacities are helpful in conversations in community. Maybe I'm meant to do these things in conversations, rather than being a 'neutral' facilitator. But since my imagined possibilities and provocations often produce these hostile dominance displays and 'dead language' responses, if I really want my ideas to get traction, I think I need to learn how to deal with these behaviours. What's your experience?

Category: Conversation

The Back of the Napkin, by Dan Roam

"Visual thinking means taking innate advantage of our ability to see, with our eyes and our mind's eye, in order to discover ideas, develop those ideas quickly and intuitively, and share those ideas with others in a way that they simply 'get'" This book is a brilliant elaboration on Bill Buxton's idea of sketching, with a catch.

The brilliance is in the simplicity and elegance of the model:

• people understand things better, and find them accessible, when they're sketched, competently and articulately, one step at a time, by hand
• collect everything you can look at that's relevant, lay it all out, organize and orient it, and then do triage on it
• define the problem using the 6 questions in the chart above, and illustrate it with the 6 corresponding types of graphic
• explore the 5 dimensions of ways of looking at the problem: simple/elaborate, quality/quantity, vision/execution, individual/comparison, and change/as-is
• when presenting the results of your problem-solving, start looking aloud, keep seeing aloud, continue by imagining aloud, and close by showing aloud (i.e. recreate the process you used to solve the problem) and then ask the audience if they agree with what you've shown (show, don't tell, and this question answers itself)
• this works best for complex problems
• all good pictures do not need to be self-explanatory, but do need to be explainable

This may seem a bit cryptic, but a single read through the book and this is all you need to use this powerful technique for both solving (or at least coming to grips with) problems, and getting buy-in for your solution.

The catch? The drawings in the book are simple but beautiful. Doing this well takes lots of practice, both in conveying your meaning graphically (the expressions on your stick men, and their poses, are critical to the audience's appreciation and understanding), and in using this technique to solve seemingly intractable problems. I intend to try it, but I'm so poor at drawing that it will take me a long time to get my sketches right. Fortunately, I'm really good at imagining possibilities, so my only problem with the technique will be my artwork. Really recommended.

Landscape & Memory, by Simon Schama

This hugely ambitious work was recommended to me by three friends. The notes and bibliography of this book alone are longer than some books I've read. Schama attempts to show, through a rigorous and detailed study of history and human behaviour, that we are all innately naturalists, that our bond with Gaia has always been powerful and that our sense of 'apartness' from nature is illusory. He says, at the outset:

If the entire history of landscape in the West is indeed just a mindless race toward a machine-driven universe, uncomplicated by myth, metaphor and allegory, where measurement not memory is the absolute arbiter of value,  where our ingenuity is our tragedy, then we are indeed trapped in the engine of our self-destruction. At the heart of this book is the stubborn belief that this is not, in fact, the whole story.

Many of the stories he tells are rooted in his own ancestors' stories, and the book is intensely personal. He takes us through millennia of passion for nature and place, and our apparent fear and loathing of it. But right up to modern times this ambivalent relationship and "being-a-part ness" still resonates, he says:

The designation of the suburban yard as the cure for the afflictions of city life marks the greensward as a remnant of the old pastoral dream, even though its goatherds and threshers have been replaced by tanks of pesticide and industrial strength mowing machines.

I was not impressed by his arguments, which seem somewhat nostalgic to me, in this age of relentless and ruthless ecocide. But he is an amazing story-teller, and teller of the stories and lessons of history, and the book is compelling even when it is not persuasive.

Even more compelling are the stunning artworks which run through the whole book, such as the one above, that argue much more powerfully than words the inseparability of human spirituality from our love of and roots in nature. The book is an armchair visit to a vast science and history museum, and its stories of human altruism, savagery and struggle to live within and without nature, rootless and yet inexorably drawn to place, to home, stay with you a long time.

 
Edible Forest Gardens (Books 1 & 2), by Dave Jacke with Eric Toensmeier

What is most remarkable about this exhaustive and practical course in temperate climate (zones 4-7) permaculture is that only about 40 of its over 1000 pages are about the work of planting and maintaining an "edible forest garden" ("a perennial polyculture of multipurpose [native] plants"); the rest is understanding what to plant, when, and why. The whole idea of these gardens is to enable you to harvest an abundance of varied foodstuffs with almost no maintenance.

The theory takes up the whole first volume and needs every page. The challenge, you see, is that even what we might perceive as 'wilderness' is in fact nothing of the sort. Humans, right back to First Nations thousands of years ago, have utterly altered the vegetation that now looks so wild and 'natural'. On top of that, climate change has, since the ice ages, been continuously changing what grows where.

In order to allow nature to provide you, effortlessly year after year, a harvest of abundance, you first need to discover what naturally grew and what naturally will grow where you live. You need to study the botanical history of your home. Then, since it cannot be quickly 'restored' to natural, sustainable state (succession goes through many long intermediary stages and can take centuries to achieve equilibrium), you need to be smart enough to plan for a 20-30 year 'hurry-up succession' that will chivy the process along. You have to plant in stages, knowing that early stages are just preparing the soil, the ecosystem and the ground cover and canopy for later stages, and that some of the first things you plant won't be around at the end of the succession at all if you've done your job right. This takes serious knowledge and study, a lot of patience and relearning what our ancestors learned as a matter of course. It's in many ways a course in what Derrick Jensen has called "listening to the land".

There probably isn't anything you could learn that would be more important, for your soul, for your community, for your resilience in the coming age of climate change and other disasters that will require us all to become much more self-sufficient than we are today. Start now, and when cascading economic, social and ecological catastrophes hit us in the 2030s and bring existing food production and other systems to their knees, you'll be ready to gather the fruits of your labour.

Category: Activism: What You Can Do

Delivered By Hand

To all employees:

Beginning August 1st, you will no longer be able to send an e-mail to another employee of our organization. After some study, we have concluded that such e-mails are almost never the most efficient or effective way to obtain, provide or exchange information. In fact, we estimate that as much as 20% of our employees' time is wasted reading, writing and answering e-mails, beyond the time that it would take to communicate the same information using more appropriate means.

A face-to-face meeting, or, failing that, a telephone conversation, is almost always a more cost-effective way to convey or acquire information than e-mail. Our study suggests that in 95% of cases, a telephone call or impromptu meeting can communicate the needed information without the need for a formal appointment. Being available for such impromptu consultations is an essential part of every employee's work, and beginning this year our 360 degree performance reviews will include an assessment of/by all the people you work with, regardless of level in the organization, on their/your accessibility, which will factor highly into overall performance appraisal.

Effective August 1, all employee Calendars will be visible to all other employees, and any employee will be able to book time in another employee's calendar, with the invitee having the option of rescheduling or proposing another means to converse or meet, but not rejecting the appointment outright. We trust all employees to use discretion in the use of others' time, and to use this Calendar booking option only when attempts to reach the invitee by a visit to their office or by phone have failed. To avoid excessive 'telephone tag' our voice-mail system will also, effective August 1, no longer accept messages between employees of our company.

Please note that, in addition to face-to-face appointments, phone calls and Calendar bookings, there are a number of other technologies available for communications:

1. For simple, unambiguous, straightforward requests for information, approval, appointments or instructions, and replies to such requests, you can use the company's Instant Messaging system. The system should not be used for more complicated matters -- if it takes a respondent more than one minute to reply, it is an inappropriate use of this technology.
2. For conversations that cannot occur face-to-face and which require looking at documents together, you can use the company's Desktop Video & Screen-Sharing system. This tool requires no pre-booking and can allow users to 'share' the contents of each other's screen while they converse.
3. For 'FYI' type communications, the documents should be posted to the appropriate category of the company's E-Library, where those interested in the document who have subscribed to it by RSS will automatically receive notification about it. If you think someone should subscribe to a category they are not subscribed to, suggest this through an Instant Message.
4. For surveys, where you are seeking consensus, in those rare cases where a face-to-face brainstorming is not a much more effective means of achieving it, you can use the company's Instant Survey tool.
5. For group training or sending of instructions to a large number of people, you can use the company's E-Learning tool for asynchronous training, or, if interactivity is expected, the company's Desktop Video & Screen-Sharing system for real-time events.

Because e-mail and voice-mail have been used for so many things for so long, it will take some practice to wean ourselves off these sub-optimal technologies, and they will continue to be available for communications with those outside the company. You may be surprised to learn that e-mail has only been the principal medium for business communications for ten years. You will, we believe, find it liberating to be able to go home each day, and come in each day, with nothing in your inbox.

Let us know (drop by or phone us) how we can help you cope with any lingering e-mail addiction. Enjoy the freedom!

Respectfully yours,

The Management



(well, we can dream anyway)
Category: Communications Technology

Photo from birdstar.org, one of the amazing shots from the Bond brothers of SW Ontario.

Disparity, Poverty and Environmental Health: I'm reading Hervé Kempf's How the Rich are Destroying the Earth (review next week). His message, from France, is essentially the same as Ian Welsh's in his new article There Was a Class War. The Rich Won. The message, and the messages that naturally flow from it, are:

1. For the last 30 years, everywhere in the world, income and net wealth for the poorest 95% of the population has been, in real terms declining, even as income and net wealth for the richest 5% has doubled and redoubled. Disparity of income and wealth has never been higher. The top 1% in the US alone now receive almost 25% of its total national income.
2. This economic improvement for 1-5% has come at an astronomical environmental cost, a massive increase in pollution and waste, the desolation of much of the Earth, surpassing the climate change tipping point, increasing global indebtedness to staggering proportions, pushing us over the edge to the End of Oil and Water, ruining ecosystems in much of the world and accelerating ten-fold the biodiversity loss that heralds the sixth Great Extinction in the planet's recorded history.
3. There are no economic 'market' or technology fixes for either the economic disparity or the environmental devastation that continue to accelerate every day. What is left is belief in violent political revolution, belief in a collective new social consciousness that will drive a spontaneous plunge in global consumption and a massive redistribution of wealth, belief in the Rapture, or belief that our civilization is inevitably in its last century.

You know which I believe. Thanks to Jon Husband for the link.

A Plague of Economic Locusts: Andrew Leonard at HTWW adds up the factors that have caused me recently to liquidate most of my investments. Favourite quote: "Faith-based economics seems like an unsound management philosophy, for those of us without the power to part the Red Sea and make a getaway from a falling dollar, rising oil prices, and insolvent banks".

A Symbol for Gaia: When I write about a better way to live, or about wilderness, or the need to connect with all-life-on-Earth, I've been using a photo of a temperate rainforest in the US Pacific Northwest Olympic range to "illustrate" the article. This is because there doesn't seem to be a symbol or logo for Gaia, for living in balance with nature. When I did a search I found the old 1960s environmental symbol (a take on the Greek letter omega). I also found the symbol at right, developed by gaia.com member (and author of the Gaia Girls book series published by Chelsea Green) Lee Welles. I really like the logo, since it taps into the aboriginal importance of quartets (four elements, four seasons, four directions etc.) and is based on a circle. During the search, Barbara Dieu pointed me to flickrcc, which shows you a collage of photos on any subject you key in. Birds in flight, forests and waterfalls prevail for photos tagged 'Gaia'. To me this is a fascinating way to capture "the wisdom of crowds" about a subject visually.

Booking Time for Real-Time Chat: Google now allows you to put a badge, like the one below, on your blog to indicate if you're available for an IM/VoIP chat via GMail/GTalk. You don't even have to have a GMail account to ping me. Problem is, I'm not available for such chats very often. So before I put the badge on my sidebar, I need to add to it a Google Calendar showing my 'conversation office hours', the times when I will be available. Ideally, it would be interactive, allowing readers to say what they want to chat about, so I can invite others to join in. May take awhile for me to set up.



Imagine, blogs as a medium for real-time conversations! Thanks to Theresa Purcell for the link.

Manipulative Language, and the Abuse of Power in Conversation: Andrew Campbell retrieves and elaborates on a fascinating model by Vincent Kenny on Dead Language vs Live Language and how power politics in conversation 'deadens' the language and dialogue and saps its power, creativity and usefulness. I'm learning how to listen more attentively to conversations, their nuances, what is said and implied and unspoken, unconsciously conveyed. Now I'm discovering I must also learn to observe the way in which language in conversation is sometimes wielded as a weapon, to stop thought and creativity and sharing and connection and everything else it is valuable for.


The Wrenching Photography of Amy Stein: The photo above is an example of Amy Stein's disturbing and ominous photographs. Her full collection entitled 'domesticated' is here, and if you're not faint of heart it's worth a look. Don't say I didn't warn you. Thanks to Emily & Daisy at Our Descent for the link.

Why Is It Called a "Retreat"?: Evelyn Rodriguez writes about the need to turn off the noise from external sources, and to withdraw to our true selves, to rediscover them, to find our true bearings, our centre, before reconnecting with others, in order not to become too much Everybody-Else.

Geoff Brown Sketches the Civilization Bubble: A fascinating Nancy White style drawing by Geoff (above) shows us within Gaia, as a bubble, and the ways in which nature is pushing back against our unsustainable 'inflation' are depicted as pins, each threatening to burst the bubble if it expands any further. Brilliant.

Games for Change: If we're going to spend time playing video games, why not make them informative and get that energy directed at ways that can make the world a better place? Thanks to Graham Clark (who also supplied the quote in the thought for the week below) for the link.

This is the World Now: Another delightful miniature in words and images by Pohangina Pete. The world now does not make sense.

Thought for the Week: variously ascribed to Al Rogers or Eric Hoffer:

In times of profound change, the learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

Bowen Island by Richard Smith

I'm going to be on Bowen Island, near Vancouver BC, September 28 through October 1, for an Art of Hosting event. The program teaches several interactive meeting and facilitation technique skills -- World Café, Circle, Open Space Technology, Appreciative Inquiry -- and it would be great to have the chance to meet with as many of you as possible while learning something new and useful (and inexpensively!) together at the same time. Please look at the invitation, and if you decide to go, let Chris and me know ASAP -- it's not a large venue, though it is astonishingly beautiful. Hope to see you there!

PS: If you can't make that, I'll be in San Jose September 23-25 for KMWorld & Intranets, Quebec City August 8, Montreal September 18 and Vancouver September 26-27. Let me know if you're available for a meetup!

In May 2005 I wrote this post that, after it was picked up months later on Digg and other popularity lists of web articles, turned out to be my most-visited article ever:

Our minds are like our bodies -- fail to exercise them and they atrophy and break down. We live in an age of specialization, where we are encouraged to narrow our interests and our activities, to focus and limit ourselves to doing things at which we are very competent. So parts of our brain get a lot of exercise and other parts very little. What's worse, this can actually narrow our comfort zone, the range of things we enjoy doing or thinking about and are competent in. Many of our cultural activities and artefacts: political debates, win/lose competitions, hierarchies, laws, religions, 'best practices', systematization, uniforms, and monolithic architecture and design -- all tend to reinforce 'one right answer' thinking that discourages and ultimately excludes and prevents us from thinking differently. Even the mental exercises we do as we get older are designed to stem the loss of analytical skills and memory rather than broadening our thinking or our thinking ability. We live in a world of stultifying sameness and uniformity: physically, ideologically, intellectually. There is little motivation, little day-to-day need, to exercise the parts and processes of our brain that rarely get a workout.

Read the Twelve Ways

Kathy Sierra over on Twitter has been throwing two types of teasers at us this week. The first are what she calls 'rules that aren't always useful', that I'd call 'false myths and limiting generalizations', such as:

• don't feed trolls
• two heads are better than one
• nobody reads the manual
• there is no money in [x]
• the customer is always right
• grow or die
• you can't be both profitable and socially responsible

In case you think 'false myth' is a redundant expression, a myth (literal meaning= word of mouth) is anything that has received such a wide degree of acceptance, or such passionate acceptance, that it is rarely questioned. Some myths are true.

The problem with the false myths are that they can blind you to the truth if you accept them uncritically. They can constrain your imagination of other possibilities that are contrary to the false myth 'conventional wisdom'. They can lead you to make very bad decisions.

The problem with limiting generalizations is that they can lead you to oversimplify ("to get ahead in business women have to think and act like men"), to draw false dichotomies ("we either have to find new domestic oil or be forever dependent on foreign suppliers")  and to stereotype ("working class whites will always vote Republican" which can lead you to draw false inferences from correlations, to write off classes of people, and to inhibit your creativity.

The second teasers Kathy has been tweeting are what she calls 'perspective hacks' that I'd call 'reframing questions', such as:

• What might change if you view the Big Thing You're After as a component/subsystem of a greater whole?
• That really cool very specific thing you learned... what happens if you ask what else that might apply to?
• Instead of trying to change this behaviour, what if we tried to understand how it came about and adapted ourselves accordingly?

Kathy has a flair for this type of thought-provoking meme. As I thought about what I'd put on my list of false myths and limiting generalizations, and reframing questions, it suddenly occurred to me that these two are linked: for every false myth or limiting generalization, there is at least one reframing question that can get you out of the uncritical, unimaginative thinking trap and help you discover new possibilities and achieve breakthrough perspectives.

Here, for example, are ten false myths and limiting generalizations that I encounter nearly every day in business, and how, instead of arguing with those who spout them, I might reframe the discussion with a question to show those people, gently, another way to see the situation.

false myth or limiting generalizationreframing questiontalent shortage: if you want smart people to work for you, you have to pay them a competitive rate for their timewhat if you could produce an invitation so compelling that smart people would be willing to come together and solve a problem for free?business needs hierarchy: without instruction and supervision, work just won't get donewhat if you gave people an interesting, challenging, attainable objective and just trusted them to figure out how to achieve it?if you have a new business idea, you need to find 'angel investors' to finance it or there is no hope of it succeedingwhat if you got the prospective customers for your new idea to 'invest' in it, in return for a say in design and a better rate of interest than the bank pays?if you want to deploy a social network tool in the organization, you need to produce a 'business case' showing ROI and addressing security issueswhat if you just did an experiment, outside the firewall on your own time, using young tech-savvy employees, and then just showed everyone how easy, inexpensive and useful it is?marketing is expensive: if you can't achieve an x% market share with a new innovation in y months, it's not worth the riskwhat if you just developed a simple, inexpensive demo/beta/prototype, and showed or gave it away, and relied on word of mouth to 'sell' it?a company needs to provide an ROI to shareholders  that is commensurate with its risk, or no one will buy shares in itwhat if you organized the enterprise as a cooperative, with members who received products for their investment instead of shareholders demanding profits and dividends?to make a new technology successful, you have to persuade management to make training compulsory for all, because otherwise people won't use it properlywhat if you only used technologies that are so simple and intuitive that they need no training, and are open source and public so they need no development?you need performance objectives and bonuses to motivate people to work hard and work smartwhat if you made work fun, and let people choose their own hours, and then asked them what else it would take to get them to do their best?a business that doesn't grow is doomed to diewhat if you set the objective of the business to grow better without growing bigger, and left it to the employees to figure out how to do that?you need to show your finished, quality product to customers; they won't ever buy an 'idea'what if you abolished the idea of 'customer', and instead partnered with the people who might buy your product and co-developed it with them
Isn't this cool? It's a bit like the technique in some martial arts of parrying with a deflection, defusing the attacker's momentum by changing the rules of the contest and putting them off balance.

What are the false myths and limiting generalizations that you are struggling with, and how might you use appropriate questions to reframe them, disempower them, put them to rest?

Category: Our Culture

Take a look at this article from salon.com, written by UC Prof Mike Davis. The words that came to mind when I read it were succinct, witty, provocative, and well-researched. He manages to capture the essence of what has led our civilization to the brink of collapse in just two pages, packed with data, rhetorical questions and persuasive argument. This is the kind of writing that moves people to action, to change their minds, and to pass along the essay or its contents in conversations with others, virally.

Davis is, I expect, preaching to the largely converted. His work is rhetoric, which despite its modern negative connotations means simply persuasive, effective oratory (the word predates the printing press and hence initially referred to speech, not writing). Whereas some people believe that debate is the best means of persuasion, I have come to believe that most people will only accept an assertion or idea if they're ready for it. If they're not, a debate will only tend to polarize their view, put them off. Rhetoric at its worst can inflame ignorance, but at its best it can inform and stimulate those who are already inclined to believe something, so that they can then decide how to act on it, and pass on their learning, rhetorically, to others who are so inclined.

A rhetorical question is not (necessarily) one for which the answer is self-evident, but rather one presented for persuasive effect, to provoke thought consistent with the arguments the speaker has just made or is about to make. It is intended to evoke emotion, either positively or negatively. If the audience is ignorant, inclined to groupthink, insecure, frightened or incapable of critical thinking, it can be dangerous ("Are we going to let these people take what we worked so hard for?")

If the audience is informed, independent, self-confident and thoughtful, however, such questions are powerful and useful, because they force you to think, and sometimes to challenge conventional wisdom, to think differently. They are often preceded or followed by another useful device, the rhetorical or oratorical pause. Such a pause (which many speakers are afraid to insert into oratory in case it merely causes audience discomfort) is intended to cause tension, to force the audience to try to anticipate what will come next, or to reflect on what has just been said that was presumably important.

Davis' article is so compelling, I think, because of a combination of new information, provocative questions, and great rhetoric.

Recently I've been listening, paying more attention to conversations: their flow, their pacing, their iteration of ideas and comprehension and meaning, the power politics often present inside them, their effectiveness. Because Generation Millennium has somewhat rediscovered (texting notwithstanding) the oral culture of the pre-Gutenberg era, I've been listening to them practice conversation. Their ability to achieve comprehension (largely by successive approximation, iteratively, Q&A, action and reaction, until consensus is reached) is extraordinary: very effective and hopelessly inefficient, but done so quickly that it succeeds. But it is the opposite of rhetoric. Good rhetorical oratory rarely contains the most frequent two words in Gen Millennium speech: "I mean".

I also find that modern conversation contains few rhetorical questions or pauses: There is simply no time for them. And there is little time for information. When information is presented that is new, and not consistent with the worldview of the listener(s), and not presented in the context of a simple "A or B" dichotomy ("Is Obama better or worse at...?"), it is as if the audience simply doesn't know what to make of it. If you listen to this speech (thanks to David Parkinson for the link) you can see how new information that makes an oversimplified debate more complex leaves the audience (in this case mass media talking heads) utterly dumbfounded. If the new information doesn't fit, it is discounted, ignored, considered as outrageous, an affront. You didn't answer our simple dumb question!

Which of course it is: It is intended as an affront (literal meaning of affront: in your face). While this may not work in the context of dumbed-down mass media reporting, it can be extremely effective when the audience has the patience, curiosity and self-confidence to be affronted.

Generation Millennium has learned one traditional (and now rare) conversational skill: storytelling. They have discovered that the easiest way to create a context for understanding is to tell a straightforward ("and then...") story, instead of preparing and presenting an analysis. They 'get' that if they understood what happened, and what should be done about it, then so will the audience if they hear an accurate narrative that 'recreates' the speaker's learning.

Recently I've learned of another effective means of communicating information in a presentation or conversation: the use of simple visuals. I would highly commend to you Dan Roam's new book The Back of the Napkin, which explains how to use elementary visuals, skilfully sketched by hand on a napkin or whiteboard while the audience watches, to convey information and to persuade (the illustration above is from that book, and a video explaining the ideas in the book is here). It draws on the fact that we are all programmed, in our pre-civilization DNA, to learn, discover and understand visually, not by reading text. One of my most popular conference presentation subjects is Adding Meaning and Value to Information (largely through visuals), and most of my presentations now have no bullet points, just pictures that I talk to.

So in short I think there are five techniques that can be used to make a point effectively, in a conversation, presentation or written article:

1. Present new information, clearly and articulately.
2. Ask provocative questions.
3. Tell memorable stories.
4. Use visualizations to convey meaning. 
5. Employ powerful rhetoric -- be clear, logical, clever, funny, well-paced, original, truthful, concise, provocative, and passionate.

All of these things take practice. There is no better way to get better at them than by putting yourself out there, and asking your audience for their honest assessment of what you did well and how you could do better.

How would you score yourself on the use of each of these five techniques? I think I'm pretty good at #1. I don't do #2 nearly enough, or well enough. I'm still poor at #3 (I need to craft and memorize my stories). I'm getting better at #4 but I need to practice sketching, and making my visualizations clearer and less dense. Dan Roam says: "All good pictures do not need to be self-explanatory, but they need to be explainable." And my rhetorical skills need a lot of work: I still often lack the courage of my convictions, and I tend to be too serious and too long-winded.

How about you (that's a rhetorical question)?

Category: Conversation & Language

I've written before about the idea of creating a responsible, sustainable, joyful, Natural Economy, and about how difficult it is to 'get there' because the brutal industrial economy we live under is The Only Life We Know.

Most of the prescriptions for getting there require (or involve entirely) top-down, government actions. Yes, ideally we should have import duties that prevent products produced by slave labour in ruined environments from coming in. Yes, ideally we should have a tax regime that taxes bads, not goods, and redistributes wealth. Yes, ideally we should have land ownership reform that prohibits absentee ownership and speculative trading. Yes, ideally we should have laws that break up monopolies and oligopolies, and that put megapolluters and corporate criminals in prison with the rest of the mass murderers and thieves.

But we're not going to get them. If we wait for them, we'll wait forever.

Also, ideally, if we were to create working models of a better way to live and make a living, they should attract enough attention that others would emulate them, in sufficient numbers to undermine the old economy. But as my friend Flemming says, sometimes you have to wait for the old deadwood hogging all the sunlight to collapse before the new seeds can germinate (or else you need to be a fungus).

So what can we do while we're waiting?

Here are a few ideas:

1. Get the facts out: Let people know that the real inflation rate is closer to 10% than 2%. That businesses with over 500 employees are actually destroying more jobs than they're creating. That over the last 30 years the real income and net wealth of 90% of the population has actually declined (it's just exploding levels of debt that have created the appearance that people are better off). That affluent nations have produced half of the world's environmental destruction while paying only 3% of its costs. Tell people what's really going on with a combination of real (little known or misunderstood) information and clever presentation. Ask people provocative questions. Tell compelling and illuminating stories. Don't just listen to the misinformation, oversimplification, and propaganda, say something! Most people are capable of critical thinking with a bit of a nudge: They're just out of practice.
2. Learn (and then teach) how Natural Enterprise works: We are desperately short of the skills needed to create our own responsible, sustainable, joyful enterprises. You won't learn it in high school, or business school, or executive training courses, or MBA programs. Unschool yourself. Go out and find and meet with successful entrepreneurs who've discovered you don't have to work 80 hour weeks, mortgage your assets or sell your soul to succeed. Read my book, and/or any of the books listed in its bibliography. Discover the competencies that any enterprise needs. Seek out and partner with people whose unique skills, passions and competencies dovetail with your own and who share your purpose. Learn how to do real, world-class business research, to find out what unmet needs you can fill. Learn how to innovate rigorously, continuously, and effectively. Learn how to make your enterprise powerfully networked and resilient. And then teach all this to others in your community.
3. Start a grassroots campaign to get people to buy local, buy organic, buy durable quality, and buy less: Be willing to pay more, but expect more for it. Tell the owners (not the sales clerks) of the stores you visit that you won't buy from them if they sell poor quality crap that takes jobs and dignity away from local workers. Patronize, celebrate, and start businesses who sell only 100% local/organic products. Be patient with new local businesses -- quality craftsmanship and quality service are lost arts, that will need to be relearned.
4. Learn and help others become self-sufficient: Work where you live, even if that means creating new, local, community-based enterprises, so you're not dependent on cars and oil. Grow your own food. Learn to make and fix your own stuff, including your own clothes. Make your own entertainment (games, music, art, theatre, films, sports), instead of depending on expensive canned entertainment from studios and extravagant commercial establishments. Create local cooperatives for community energy self-sufficiency (renewable of course). Unschool yourself and your children -- teach them how to learn for themselves and with and from each other. Value your time more than your money.Do all of these things collectively, in collaboration with those in your community. Trade the products of your know-how for theirs, for free, generously. An economy of self-sufficiency is a Gift Economy, and unlike one based on competition and growth, it's sustainable.
5. Extinguish your debts and don't take on any new ones: Debt and consumption are addictions, and the corporatists are determined to keep you addicted. Break the habit, as quickly and completely as you can. That will probably require you to own less. Are you ready for that? If you judge yourself and let others judge you by how much you own, breaking the habit is going to be doubly difficult, and doubly necessary.
6. Create local networks: Use technology to organize, trade among your community, and share information. Use these networks to create relationships, and trust, to collaborate and partner, to help find what is needed and ensure it's of high quality, to innovate together, to keep each other healthy, to create consensus, and to establish Peer Production.
7. Eat well and look after your health: The industrial health system is approaching total collapse, and the sooner we wean ourselves off it the better. Learn how to research health matters, how to prevent disease and how to diagnose and treat it yourself, as much as possible. Become a vegetarian: Eat food, mostly plants, not too much. Stay fit. And be good to yourself -- you're doing all the right stuff!

If enough of us do these things, will it be enough to transform our economy into a responsible, sustainable, joyful, Natural Economy? Probably not. But it will put us in good stead when the industrial economy runs out of steam (and oil).

While we can work now to starve the industrial economy of the four things it values from us (our tax dollars, our cheap and obedient labour, our consumption of cheap imported crap, and our attention to its political and commercial propaganda), the scourges of climate change, constant ever-expanding wars, overpopulation, the End of Oil, the End of Water, the Death of the Seas, the Death of the Forests, human pandemics, pandemic diseases of farmed animals and monoculture plants, and bioterror, will collectively bring that economy to its knees.

It won't go easily, however, and as it slowly collapses it will be the poor and the young who will suffer the brunt of its struggle to keep going -- desperate and indiscriminate drilling in the oceans and arctic, strip-mining for dirty coal and bitumen sludge, privatization of scarce water, massive incarceration and curtailment of civil freedoms, more cities written off like New Orleans, ghastly famines and floods in struggling nations, the eradication of life savings and pensions, the collapse of health systems, expropriation of property, soaring suicide rates, and unimaginable ubiquitous poverty.

At that point those who have started the transition to a Natural Economy will be able to withstand the collapse of the industrial economy, and will be the pioneers of its replacement. The transition is likely to be a painful one for most, unfortunately -- all 'normal curves' have a sudden and precipitous downside, and studies of past overheated economies and civilizations suggest our economy's will be no exception. We never seem to learn the lessons of history.

Category: Creating an Alternative Economy

A Short History of the End of Civilization: Mike Davis is a brilliant and provocative writer. Just go read his brief and incisive summary of what has led our civilization to the brink of collapse. Mike, you need a blog! Teasers:

The UNDP...warns that it will require "a 50 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 2050 against 1990 levels" to keep humanity outside the red zone of runaway warming... Yet the International Energy Agency predicts that, in all likelihood, such emissions will actually increase in this period by nearly 100 percent -- enough greenhouse gas to propel us past several critical tipping points...

Let's just ask: What if the buying and selling of carbon credits and pollution offsets fails to turn down the thermostat? What exactly will motivate governments and global industries then to join hands in a crusade to reduce emissions through regulation and taxation?...

And what if growing environmental and social turbulence, instead of galvanizing heroic innovation and international cooperation, simply drive elite publics into even more frenzied attempts to wall themselves off from the rest of humanity?... We're talking here of the prospect of creating green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an otherwise stricken planet...

National Academy of Science...found that the richest countries, by their activities, have generated 42 percent of environmental degradation across the world, while shouldering only 3 percent of the resulting costs.

Humans Have 23 Years to Go: IFTF is creating a game set 10 years from now that gives the players 23 'years' to deal with five cascading social, ecological and economic crises that threaten to end civilization. Sounds like fun, if they'll let us play (full access to members only, and the link above was down at time of writing). Problem is, they're calling the game Superstruct (literally: build over top). Seems to me that the only viable solutions to this problem will be bottom-up, not top-down. Shouldn't the game be called Substruct? Thanks to Jerry Michalski for the link.

Discover Undiscovered Musicians: Some great hand-made music from unknown artists you can browse and play to your heart's content -- IACmusic.com. Here's my own 'station' collection of what I've been listening to there.

Pictures Without the Need of Words: My friend Melisa Christensen is the photo director of a sweet little film, lovingly and exquisitely photographed, about human relationships and priorities.

Great Green Events Calendar: Leafing Through tells you where to go, greenly, all over the world.

See What Global Warming Has Wrought So Far: A couple of years ago I pointed out the NOAA viewer that lets you see a movie of glaciation, coastal flooding and vegetation change over the past 21000 years (since the last ice age). If you haven't seen it, take a look. What would be interesting would be to project it forward, assuming a hundred-fold or thousand-fold acceleration of rate of change.

The Only Diet for a Peacemaker Is a Vegetarian Diet: "Conscience dictates that the grain should stay where it is grown, from South America to Africa. And it should be fed to the local malnourished poor, not to the chickens destined for our KFC buckets." Even the orthodox churches are starting to get it.

Who Are You Trying to Impress?: Justin Kownacki analyzes the politics of conversations, and how disruptive they can be to making the conversation meaningful, valuable, and informative.

The Mortgage Lender Implode-o-meter: Keep up to date with the collapse of IndyMac, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and all your favourite wacky trillion-dollar irresponsible lending characters.

Google Offers Animated Avatars for Google Chat: The poor man's Second Life app "Lively", has just been released. Limited avatar options. Agonizingly slow. Much work needed.

Doug Rushkoff on Open Space Democracy: Democracy is a collective choice and emerges through collective action, he says. If we only care about what it means to us individually, and what we do individually, democracy is lost. Branding, advertising, the mainstream media, corpocracy, hierarchy -- these are all directed at us as individuals. We have to get past self-interest, past individuation of everything. Don't ask What can I do?, discuss What can we do? Thanks to William Tozier for the link.

Unintended Consequences: George Monbiot's latest article about the Death of the Oceans raises some more interesting thoughts about unintended consequences in complex systems. Of course high oil prices will reduce (somewhat) demand for gasoline and hence reduce CO2 emissions. But that reduced demand in affluent nations will also allow Asia to continue to pick up whatever oil is not contracted for, pushing emissions right back up again. And while high prices will drive some people to switch to more efficient vehicles, will those more efficient vehicles then be driven further than the gas guzzlers? Monbiot explains that high oil prices are keeping ocean-devastating fishing trawlers in port, but it's also got fishermen striking for subsidies, pushing politicians who want re-election to divert money from worthy causes to subsidizing uneconomic activities. And environmental laws designed to prevent permafrost and glacial melt and ocean disasters are being abandoned in the desperate search for a little more cheap oil, accelerating global warming that will ultimately require huge taxes on oil to curtail. This is precisely why the "market mechanism" that so many conservatives trust to solve global warming and everything else simply does not work. Complex systems are inertial -- they tend to adapt to stay in equilibrium until forced to a new equilibrium by either decisive intervention, or catastrophe.

Canada's Conservatives "The Republican Farm Team": George Bush's (last?) lapdog, arch-conservative Canadian PM Harper, is refusing to allow conscientious objectors to the Bush war to come to Canada, ending a two-century-old tradition of providing sanctuary for Americans of conscience. Bush now beckons Harper obediently to his side by barking "Yo Harper!" Meanwhile, as they shrugged off their responsibility for the global food crisis, Bush and Yo Harper and the rest of the G8 gang of thieves chowed down on an extravagant 18-course meal of high-energy, high-cruelty imported foods.(Thanks to Meg Fowler for the links).

Alberta Hypes Bitumen Sludge Mining to Obama & McCain: Despite growing realization that the Alberta Bitumen Sludge Mining operation (what the industry prefers to call 'oil sands', depicted above) is the most ecologically destructive project on Earth, the government of Alberta, whose economy is utterly dependent on this horror, is busy lobbying both US presidential candidates to endorse buying its dirty oil. They will almost certainly succeed: It's not in their backyard.



Find of the Day, above, found on top of a baby change table in a women's washroom in BC. Thanks to Darren Barefoot for the link.


© 1997-2004 original work by Andrew Campbell & Marysa de Veer

Thought for the Week: Being A Part: I've been chatting recently with Andrew Campbell and Beth Patterson about connection with the land and all-life-on-Earth. Andrew has pointed to the work of Gregory Bateson (whose first wife BTW was Margaret Mead) and his discussion of immanence -- the quality of remaining within as a part (of the environment, Gaia, the complexity of all-life-on-Earth), while our minds furiously attempt to analyze, to dissect, to set ourselves apart. Beth has collected a remarkable set of stories from readers that answer the question "Where is Home?" I replied to Beth that I thought the most evocative writing I had read about this was that of Sam Mills of the now largely-lost blogs feral and thistle & hemlock (she now writes the blog bitterbrush); here's an example of how she tells us what it means to be a part.

In September 2005 I summarized biologist David Ehrenfeld's prescient 1993 book Beginning Again, in which he lovingly tells the story of the giant green turtles of Costa Rica, who have lived there unchanged for 300 million years, skewers bureaucracy and hierarchy as twin evils of the modern era, laments the loss of the critical skills of craftsmanship and maintenance, insists that there is no adapting to catastrophes in complex systems (so we must learn to prevent them), champions generalists over narrow specialists, calls for restrictions on increase of human numbers, urges adoption of sustainable polyculture and permaculture to replace catastrophic agriculture, and warns (in 1993!) of the looming crisis created by the "bottomless pit of debt" in the US.

He likens our modern economy to "a massive flywheel, spinning too fast for its size and construction, coming apart in chunks as it spins". This, he warns, is what happens when you try to replace an effective complex natural system, with great resilience and redundancy evolved over hundreds of millennia, with an efficient complicated, man-made system, fragile, over-extended, unforgiving of any failure in any of its moving parts. The big losers when it comes apart, he warns, will be the poor and the young. The rich and old, who have hoarded what they need to pull them through, will increasingly closet themselves away from the masses as the cascading crises wreak havoc on everyone else.

Read the article.

there is an artist hiding inside each of us.

it wants to re-present what we see, sense, feel...


it wants to capture what is, what is astonishing, here, now...


it want to create what can only be imagined...


it wants to design miniature truths...


it wants to tell the world who we are, and what is going on...


it wants to create meaning, to say "look! there's a pattern here!"...


 it wants to inspire, to tell an important story, and convey what we feel. it wants to provoke change by showing what is now that cannot go on.

i'm writing a song. the artist in me is crying out for new means of expression.

there is so much that is important that we have to communicate. why are we wasting time debating, analyzing, planning?

we know what has to be, and what has to be done, and what we have to be and do to real-ize that.

what are we waiting for?

category: creative works
all artworks by the author

My first book, Finding the Sweet Spot: The Natural Entrepreneur's Guide to Responsible, Sustainable, Joyful Work will be published next month by Chelsea Green. The publisher is sponsoring a companion website/toolkit at http://naturalenterprise.org that is currently under development. I'd love your help with the design.

Just as a reminder, the book has six chapters, as follows:


The first chapter entails identifying your personal 'sweet spot', where your Gifts (what you do uniquely well), your Passions (what you love doing), and your Purpose (what is needed that you care about) intersect. It's a personal exercise. The last two chapters are operational advice, mostly for once you're up and running.

Chapters 2-4 are collaborative processes, and that's where naturalenterprise.org comes in. The site will offer a simple set of tools that will help you find business partners, research unmet needs, and collaborate to explore solutions to those needs. The diagram at the top of this article shows how it will be organized. Here's a walk-through:

naturalenterprise.org/community will allow you to offer and receive advice about Natural Entrepreneurship, and it will have three parts to it:

1. ASK A QUESTION: Will allow prospective entrepreneurs to pose questions about any facet of natural entrepreneurship, and others to offer suggestions in response to those questions.
2. POSE A PROBLEM: Will allow prospective entrepreneurs to describe challenges they're facing in the process of creating the work they were intended to do, and others to discuss these challenges and work towards resolution of them.
3. TELL A STORY: Will allow anyone to tell a success story or a 'war' story (about failure) about their enterprise or journey towards entrepreneurship.

naturalenterprise.org/partners will enable you to find partners for your Natural Enterprise, and it will have six parts to it:

4. DESCRIBE YOUR PURPOSE: Will allow prospective entrepreneurs to 'publish' their identified Purpose -- the need they've identified that they truly care about, and which they have some Gifts and Passions around. This is to enable other prospective entrepreneurs to browse and DISCOVER PEOPLE WHO SHARE YOUR PURPOSE, and connect with them (part 7).
5. DESCRIBE YOUR GIFTS AND CAPACITIES: Will allow you, once you've identified your Passion, to list the Gifts (that are also your Passions) you have that are in the 'sweet spot' i.e. 'on Purpose', consistent with the Purpose you identified. It will also allow you to self-assess your Capacities, from a list of twelve essential Capacities that the partners of any Natural Enterprise must have between them. These are the things you bring to the prospective Natural Enterprise. The book (and website) explains how, to find your 'natural' partners, you need to find those whose Gifts and Capacities complement your own, collectively providing everything that the enterprise needs without a lot of overlap. This will allow other prospective entrepreneurs to BROWSE your GIFTS AND CAPACITIES to see whether they are a good fit for their proposed Natural Enterprise, and, if so, connect with you (part 8).
6. DESCRIBE GIFTS AND CAPACITIES YOU LACK: Will allow you, once you've identified your Purpose, to list the Gifts and Capacities you don't have, which are needed to complement your own in order to achieve your Purpose. This will allow other prospective entrepreneurs to BROWSE your list of NEEDED GIFTS AND CAPACITIES to see whether they are a good fit for your proposed Natural Enterprise, and, if so, connect with you (part 9).

naturalenterprise.org/collaboratory will enable you to collaborate with potential enterprise partners and others to research and innovate, and it will have three parts to it:

10. EXPLORE A NEED OR PROBLEM: Will allow you to develop, together with others, a better understanding of a possible unmet need that is 'on Purpose' for your prospective Natural Enterprise.
11. CANVASS THE CROWD: Will allow you to poll all readers of naturalenterprise.org to gather 'collective wisdom' about the viability of an idea, about the future, about which of a set of alternative actions to pursue, about a subject you lack knowledge about, or about a market.
12. RESEARCH A NEED: Will allow you to study a subject collaboratively, assign partners work to do, and collect the results of your research in one place for group discussion.

It seems fairly obvious to me that for 1-3 we will need some kind of discussion forum, for 4-9 we will need a database that anyone can add to or browse in different ways, for 10 we'll need a wiki or similar tool, for 11 we'll need a survey tool like Survey Monkey, and for 12 we'll need some kind of project collaboration space/tool.

The question is, dear readers, how easily can we pull this together without the need for a lot of coding? Can we use existing open source forums (as Dick Richards did for his book Is Your Genius at Work?), and open source databases, wikis, survey tools and collaboration tools, and easily put them within the site 'umbrella' so users don't get lost? If so, which specific apps should we use? If not, how much work would it be to pull this together?

Category: Creating Natural Enterprises

Interface Carpets' sustainability model

It's tough explaining sustainability to executives. When it comes to knowledge, and acceptance of responsibility, they are all over the map. Surprisingly, those in the most polluting industries are often more advanced in their thinking than those in 'service' industries. The way to get attention for the subject, and the way to approach the issue, depends on who your audience is.

My French teacher likens it to the challenge of getting a very obese man to adopt a diet. If he thinks he's just 'big-boned', or thinks it's someone else's fault, or thinks the risks to him are non-existent or overblown, or thinks nothing will work, you have a challenge. If he's doing his best, but it isn't good enough, you have a challenge. If he thinks it's just 'his problem', and no one else is being hurt by it, you've got a challenge. And let's face it, diets are tough -- hard work, lifelong change, high failure rate, and no fun. And the worst thing you can do is point out how hard it's going to be, and how far away the goal is.

I've spoken to a lot of business execs about this subject in recent months -- delightfully, it's part of my job. And I've learned that there's a way to 'get to' everyone, if you listen enough first to know what approach to take. And I've learned that positive approaches that stress benefits and opportunities generally work better than approbation, though executives are naturally attuned to matters of business risk, if those risks can credibly be portrayed as big enough or imminent enough (a big 'if').

So I've developed a Seven Steps to Business Sustainability model, which I outline below. The trick with this model is not to overwhelm or discourage businesspeople who are still at the early steps by showing them all seven. My approach is to take them through a 'script' to discover what step they're currently at. If they're like the majority, still at step 1 or 2 (or not even there), I will only talk about steps 1-3. If they're at step 3 (about 1/3 of business execs are) they're ready to be congratulated and introduced to steps 4-5. If they're at step 5 (very few are) they're ready to be nominated as sustainability leaders, and ready to look at the whole enchilada.

What I like about the model is that it follows the process we all follow in dealing with threats, like forest fires or hurricanes or computer viruses. It starts with acknowledgement, and then moves on to short term and then long-term actions to cope with it.

Here's the model and the 'script':

1. Awareness: Do you know the facts about climate change -- what it means to your business and to our whole planet, and what the regulations are that affect your business and the businesses of those you deal with, and how important an issue it is to your customers, to your employees, to your competitors (and what they're doing about it) -- and to your children and grandchildren? This is the most difficult step, and it's rare I get an unqualified yes. If I don't:
• I take the exec through the effects of climate change on crop yields, forest and ocean resource productivity, the spread of hot-weather plant, animal and human diseases (like the mountain pine beetle threatening the entire Canadian boreal forest) and pandemics, on water availability, on demand for air conditioning, on ecosystem crashes and biodiversity losses, on weather patterns, drought, flooding, severe storms and desertification, on glacial melt, permafrost stability, ocean currents and global sea levels, and on
  stability of infrastructure and transportation
• I talk about the business risks associated with climate change: insurance cost spikes, risk of shortages of natural resource production inputs (and cost increases as they become scarce), disaster preparedness, recovery and contingency costs, business interruption risks, supply chain disruption risks, transportation interruption risks and cost increases, business relocation costs, and dirty-tech retooling costs
• I explain the reputation risks of companies perceived to be behind the curve, and the competitive advantages that clean-tech innovators and early-adopters can achieve
• I tell them what long-term investment fund managers and bankers are looking at in determining investment and credit worthiness of companies, and how securities authorities are responding to these investors' demands for more disclosure of what companies are doing about climate change
• I walk them through the current myriad of regulations in effect around the globe, and how they are quickly becoming more stringent and requiring more information collection and disclosure
• I provide current emission information for Canada and its provinces, along with reduction targets

So much for Kyoto: Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions 2006 and 2020 projections for Canada, MT CO2 equivalents, data per Government of Canada, map by Tory's LLP

2. Acceptance: Once I have the exec briefed on the facts, I ask: What do you think is the responsibility of your company to tackle the challenges of climate change and environmental sustainability? What is the responsibility of governments? What is your personal responsibility as a business leader, and as a citizen of Canada? How does that responsibility extend to other jurisdictions in which you do business? How do you trade off your short term responsibility to shareholders against your long-term responsibility to future generations? When I first started asking these questions, it was to surface global warming deniers, who even a year ago were fairly common. Now I'm astonished to discover this is quickly becoming one of the issues keeping executives (especially those with children) awake at night. When there's no microphone or camera on them, they will tell you they care about this issue. Most still think government needs to take the lead, to create a 'level playing field' they'll gladly comply with. But increasingly they'll admit that there is no level playing field, that cheats will always cheat, that greenwashing can work, that it's one thing to make complicated environmental laws and another thing to enforce them, that 'free' trade agreements can render environmental laws null and void, and that this troubles them. They're accepting responsibility, and now asking, not what do they have to do, but what can they do?
3. Compliance: Once they are aware of the issues, and accept responsibility for dealing with them, I ask them: Are you in compliance with climate change and other environmental laws in force at each level of government in each of the jurisdictions in which you operate? This is a fairly straight-forward discussion that depends, of course, where they do business. They need to learn about caps, emissions levels (absolute and 'intensity-based'), reduction targets, fines and penalties, credits and 'carbon' taxes. The frustration with the myriad of different regulations, and different types of regulations, is palpable. Most executives I speak with would prefer more stringent, but simpler, more consistent rules to the current situation.

Maps of Vancouver and Montreal showing flooding of Richmond/Ladner, lower mainland, Montreal East and South Shore if Greenland ice cap and West Antarctic ice sheet melt, via http://flood.firetree.net

4. Mitigation Strategy: I'm now finding that most businesspeople, even those in small businesses and those that do not directly emit pollutants or use large amounts of raw materials, water or energy, are ready to tackle steps 4 and 5. To explain mitigation, I say: To the extent a company is responsible for significant GHG emissions, or depends on suppliers that are, it will be essential to find alternative ways to produce goods and services that do not have such a negative impact on our environment. What programs do you have in place to measure and voluntarily reduce your carbon footprint, including that which originates from your suppliers' production and is incurred in foreign jurisdictions. There are some really novel programs out there, as well as some really poor ones. There are even some incentives available, aside from the reputation and innovation and first-mover advantages of bold mitigation strategies.
5. Adaptation Preparedness Strategy: Where mitigation is about reducing the company's negative impact on the environment, adaptation is about reducing the impact of environmental crisis and climate change events on the company. These impacts depend on the nature and location(s) of the business and include the matters described in step 1 above such as disease and pandemic outbreaks, chronic shortages of (and price surges for) water, energy and natural resources used by the company and by its suppliers, extreme weather events, flooding and water shortages of cities in which the company operates or sells products, chronic blackouts, brownouts and telecom and other infrastructure failures, loss of insurance coverage, market and rate instabilities, and threats and attacks from desperate individuals, groups and nations (the poor will suffer the worst consequences of climate change, and have the weakest social safety nets). No one can be prepared for all such eventualities, but simulations and other applications of complexity modeling, and disaster and contingency planning, can help companies be as ready and as resilient as possible. I've seen a fascinating simulation of how a global pandemic outbreak of influenza or a once-isolated tropical disease can cripple the global economy, not because of the number of deaths, but because of human panic bringing economic activity to a standstill.
   
6. Holistic Sustainability Strategy: The discussion of steps 4 and 5 above is usually all most businesspeople can handle at this point in our understanding of sustainability. But there are a few companies that have seen where this is all leading to, and I'm ready for them. The chart at the top of this article shows the Cradle-to-Cradle model that Interface Carpets uses. This is the ultimate resilience strategy: reuse and cycle everything, and produce more energy and cleaner water than what you use. This approach acknowledges that we are all part of a complex and interconnected economy, and that the environmental impacts of our suppliers and customers are as important as the ones we are directly responsible for. If you need no new materials or resources to operate, and if you take everything back from your customers and reuse or recycle it, then you have made your entire cycle of production endlessly renewable. Not only does this mitigate your environmental impact, it makes you relatively immune to the impacts of environmental crises and climate change on your suppliers and even your customers.
7. Zero-Growth Economy Strategy: Climate change is making us aware that there truly are limits to growth, and that no company or economy can keep 'growing' forever. Our current economy is completely dependent on consumers buying more and more 'stuff' every year, and it is truly unsustainable. Likewise, our capital markets, and shareholder expectations, are based on large annual increases in profits. So how can a company make the transition to a steady-state economy, and thrive with the same profit each year? Economists like Richard Douthwaite, Herman Daly and Peter Brown have suggested what would be needed to make such a transition at the macro (country) level. Businesses need to start thinking about how such a transition will affect individual businesses, industries and markets, and make the structural and strategy changes necessary to make that transition too.

I think there will be a huge market for business advisors who will be able to take companies one step at a time from step 1 to step 7. I know there are a few people (like Gil Friend) who do this. We'll soon need a lot more.

Category: Understanding Economics

(Several of the students from two Melbourne universities that we hosted yesterday said they thought I looked startlingly like Aussie star footballer Jason Akermanis, above top, except for the blond hair. I don't see it, but I'm flattered. Must be the mannerisms. Used to be told I looked like John Denver or Richard Belzer, above bottom. Who's your celebrity lookalike?)

Creating Space for What's Important: Another inspiring article by PS Pirro: "I know why I didn’t do it sooner, and I know why all that other stuff was cluttering up my list: following a heart’s desire is very scary stuff. It’s so much easier and so much less risky to spend your hours doing things that don’t really matter, to pursue lesser goals, to do the work that others think is important. When I clear space in my thinking -- and in my physical environment -- and then hold that space open for my own real and true desires, my heart recognizes the opportunity, and slips right in. And the next thing I know, I’m elbow deep in paper and notes and yes, I'm scared, but I'm also full of gratitude. My heart says thank you, thank you."

A Death Without Meaning: Oncology nurse Karen Crone tells a very short story about some people she briefly knew. The story will stay with you a long time, asking questions that have no answers.

Murder in the Park: Cassandra tells an unsettling story, and leaves us to imagine our own ending.

How to Use 'Mystery' Stories to Engage Your Business Audience: Matt Moore, who I met recently in Toronto, has a new podcast on Story Work featuring Shawn Callahan (who I met in Melbourne in April) and Madelyn Blair. At the end of it, Shawn talks about how scientists are framing their papers as mystery stories that expound on their problem (the 'murder') and their discovery of the solution (the 'murderer'). In another article he explains how that approach (Pose the mystery; Deepen the mystery; Home in on the proper explanation by considering (and offering evidence against) alternative explanations; Provide a clue to the proper explanation; Resolve the mystery; Draw the implications for the phenomenon under study) can be used to engage the audience in any expository presentation. And the best title for such presentations is usually a question.

Determined to Do the Only Thing You Could Do: Jen Lemen reminds us of an amazing poem, The Journey, by Mary Oliver.

The CN Tower Belongs to the Dead: Our Descent's weekly YouTube round-up includes this remarkable solo bravura performance of a song about Toronto's most famous landmark (I work about a block away from it) with some equally remarkable lyrics.

Another Great Mystery (Unre)Solved: There is something perverse about human nature that causes us to be dissatisfied with important mysteries that are never solved. The death of JFK (and several other up-and-coming politicians who embarrassed those in high places); the Anthrax Mail murders; the strange way the Trade Centre towers collapsed from below; the truth behind chemtrails; what happened to the plane that struck the Pentagon; the inability to find many of the world's most notorious murderers and criminals -- all of these mysteries beg for a solution. Even the most rational of us, in the absence of anything close to a resolution to these issues, can be tempted to believe conspiracy theories, because as other theories lead only to dead ends, they begin to appear more plausible. One of these unresolved issues back in the news is the perplexing fall of Trade Centre Tower 7, many hours after the twin towers' collapse, and without an airplane strike to explain it. Many years later, there is an explanation, but its implausibility is already restoking the conspiracy theories.

Collective Answers and the End of E-mail: After getting his pro-IM, anti-email article published in the NYT, my friend Luis Suares of IBM in Spain replies to reactionary critics: "Because I no longer have the stress of constantly having to check e-mail, the flow of the conversations is out in the open available to everyone else to contribute as well; it is no longer only me who can action something, my social networks can help chime in and contribute".

Is the Corn Ethanol Lobby Responsible for the Food Price Spike?: A new survey suggests as much as 75% of the recent massive increase in global staple food prices is due to land shifted from food to fuel production.

An Artist Shouts Out About Cruelty to Farmed Animals: Twyla Francois is leading an international campaign to raise awareness of the horrific abuse that farmed animals suffer in our society. Caveat: This site is not for the squeamish or easily depressed.

What Does the Quality Co-construction of Learning Mean?: Nancy White's Lisbon presentation on how to build (Velcro) bridges between teachers and learners.

Building Consensus in a New Community: Cheryl ("Mira") and I ("Cal") are part of an Intentional Community in Second Life that now boasts over a dozen members. We 'live' on a deserted island that provides us with all we need to live, but, like people suddenly shipwrecked together, we're still working out how to get along and what we intend to be and do on the island. We've agreed to come 'inworld' on a regular schedule (that works for all the members, who live in time zones all across the world) to explore these issues. Mira has documented our latest group conversation, where we try to develop a consensus on the objective and operating principles for our community, with unexpected and interesting results.

16000 Litres of Water to Produce a Kilogram of Beef: Now that you've figured out your carbon consumption footprint, and how to reduce it, it's time to get to work on reducing your water consumption footprint. Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link.

Kennedy Airport is Not Part of the US: That's the weasel ruling of a US court that assessed that Canadian Maher Arar, who was abducted by Homeland Security as he made a connection at the US airport while returning home, and sent to Syria for months of excruciating torture, could not seek damages for his arrest and kidnapping.

Have the Young Forgotten How to Read?: Blogger Amanda Kyffin thinks many people today have lost the ability to process text longer than a paragraph, or to concentrate on written material longer than a page. Does that inability pose a challenge to our ability to learn, or does it simply reflect that we need to find other, more visual, means to communicate? And in this attention economy, if it takes longer than a page to communicate a difficult concept, how can we hope to do so? Are stories the answer?



Just for Fun: Coffee Art: Latest craze at some coffee houses is mouthfuls of artwork (like that above) done with coffee, cream and chocolate. Here's an amazing video showing how it's done. Thanks to Cheryl Long for the link.

Thought for the Week: Literature as Remedy for What Ails Us: Alberto Manguel's book and lecture series The City of Words meanders through some of the great works of fiction throughout history and urges us to rediscover fiction as source of ideas to understand and remedy many of the maladies of our time: consumerism and corporatism (the Frankenstein myth and 2001: A Space Odyssey have much to teach us about inflexible human creations that can destroy their maker), political psychopathy, our fear of other cultures and our inability to synthesize the best of many cultures, our inability to recognize and reject business, political and religious propaganda, our lack of imagination and critical thinking, our lack of appreciation of the advantages and dangers of myth, our learned helplessness, and the oversimplification of what is important. The wise message of the book is simple: If you want to understand the world better and make it a better place, you would be better off reading great stories than books that offer oversimplified analysis and prescribed solutions.

In April 2006 I published the latest edition of my Save the World Reading List. It's probably due for an editing and revision, but, unlike the last revision, the next edition is likely to be only modestly different. Here are the books and articles I've read over the past two years that might make worthy additions to the list:

• The Great Depression, by Pierre Berton. In 1929 we thought the good life would go on forever, and eventually everyone, not only the upper classes, would benefit. We were wrong, and this book explains why, and shows us what will happen when the US dollar crashes.
• Figments of Reality, by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. We are a complicity of the separately-evolved creatures in our bodies organized for their mutual benefit; our brains are their information-processing system, not 'ours'.
• The Two Income Trap, by Elizabeth Warren. Families now need twice as many members each working twice as hard just to have what their parents had.
• The Idols of Environmentalism, online essay by Curtis White. How the very nature of our work mitigates against our environment.
• Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt. Correlation analysis dispels many of the cause-and-effect myths that underlie much of our modern society's and economy's behaviours.
• The Megacity, online essay by George Packer. A portrait of Lagos, Nigeria, the world's fastest-growing city, an endless sprawl of slums in a ruined country, whose people survive only on their wits, workarounds and the propaganda of hope it might somehow one day get better.
• The Other Side of Eden, by Hugh Brody. What we can learn from the world's aboriginal cultures.
• The Idea of a Local Economy, online essay by Wendell Berry. Why relocalization, bottom up, is the only way to reform our economy.
• Waiting for the Macaws, by Terry Glavin. Stories of the dawning of the sixth great extinction.
• A Theory of Power by Jeff Vail. A free downloadable book. How we can overcome the Frankenstein monster of our industrial corpocracy through a revolutionary rhizome (network) social structure based on self-sufficient, egalitarian non-hierarchical communities.
• The Logic of Sufficiency, by Thomas Princen. A set of principles, assumptions and connecting theory for rationally and collectively self-managing complex adaptive systems (like societies and ecosystems).
• Heat, by George Monbiot. A specific plan to reduce CO2 emissions by 90%, but it requires everyone's cooperation to work.
• Deer Hunting with Jesus, by Joe Bageant. Why the working class of the US, and perhaps of all nations, suffers quietly and resists all calls for action to deal with the outrages of our time (of which they are the primary victims) and the crises that threaten is.
• Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert. What it means to be human, explained through the author's personal stories.
• Life is a Verb, by Patti Digh. Say yes, Be generous, Speak up, Love more, Slow down, and Trust yourself.
• The Anglo Disease, by Jérôme Guillet. How corporations, governments and citizens have become co-dependent on a dysfunctional economy built on five fraudulent deceptions.
• Finding the Sweet Spot: The Natural Entrepreneur's Guide to Responsible, Sustainable, Joyful Work, by Dave Pollard. My new book on how to discover the work you were meant to do, and then start an ethical enterprise to make it reality.

I'm probably missing some important additions -- books or articles or maybe videos I've read in the past two years but forgotten, which belong on this list, but until I get my Table of Contents updated I won't know for sure. Here's the 2006 list:


How to Save the World Reading List - Revised and Updated (April 2006) In Beyond Civilization, Daniel Quinn says:

People will listen when they're ready to listen and not before. Probably, once upon a time, you weren't ready to listen to an idea than now seems to you obvious, even urgent. Let people come to it in their own time. Nagging or bullying will only alienate them. Don't preach. Don't waste time with people who want to argue. They'll keep you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to something new.

Five years ago, I became ready to listen, and, starting with Full House and Ishmael, began to learn the truth about what is happening to this world, and what we can, and can't do, to save it from civilization's excesses.

Here's the updated list -- 80 books and articles that have forever changed my worldview and my purpose for living. The fifteen most critical readings have a numbered triangle in front of them, with the numbers reflecting the order that, I would suggest, it makes most sense to read them in.

What Life was Really Like Before Civilization: Revisionist History

• [1] Full House, by the late Stephen J. Gould. The presence of man on Earth was an unlikely and random occurrence, and after the next Extinction Event life on the planet is likely to evolve very differently. We are not the Crown of Creation.
• The Wealth of Man by Peter Jay. The life of pre-historic man was easy, idyllic, and very pleasant. Hunt big slow game an hour a day, relax and enjoy the rest.
• The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race, (online) essay by Jared Diamond  Why the adoption of agriculture was 'a catastrophe from which we have never recovered'.
• [4] The Story of B and Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Also the IshCon discussion forum. The first two of these three books are fictionalized stories about human history from a different, anti-civilization perspective, with penetrating, astounding analysis and insight. Ishmael is more popular but I prefer The Story of B which recapitulates the entire theses in a series of 'lectures'. The two critical lectures are online here. 
• Original Affluence, by Marshall Sahlins. If you wanted to defend a new society that featured rigid hierarchy, agonizingly hard work, suffering, frequent starvation and slavery, wouldn't you try to portray the alternative life as 'short, nasty and brutish'?
  
• Extinction, by Michael Boulter. Our planet's history is one of cycles punctuated by massive extinctions and new beginnings. Our only choice is whether to end this one sooner (a century) or let it end later (several millennia).
  
• The Axemaker's Gift by James Burke and Robert Ornstein. How innovativeness has been increasingly corrupted to concentrate and retain power, instead of making the world better.
• [12] A Short History of Progress, by Ronald Wright. A survey of past civilizations makes clear that savagery and short-term thinking are responsible both for humanity's evolutionary success and its destruction.
• [13] Straw Dogs, by John Gray. While we have a responsibility to try to make the world better and joyful, for those we love and leave behind, we cannot be other than what we are: a fierce, brilliantly adaptable species destined to bring out the next great extinction, and annihilate ourselves in the process.

What's Going On Under our Noses: The Real News

• The Unconscious Civilization, by John Ralston Saul. How and why we've become helpless slaves of the political and economic system we built.
• Ockham's Razor, by Wade Rowland. What's wrong with our modern values, and where to look for new ones.
• Beginning Again, by David Ehrenfeld. A biologist's plea for a new partnership with nature, and prediction of the mechanized world coming apart like a broken flywheel if we don't heed his advice.
• [5] A Language Older Than Words, by Derrick Jensen. A profound and disturbing argument for why moderate answers to our current predicament won't work.
• [6] The World We Want, by Mark Kingwell. Why we are best served by trusting our instincts rather than what we are persuaded is moral or rational.
• People Before Profit, by Charles Derber -- How rampant corporatism ravaged the vast majority of people worldwide in the 1800s, and is doing so again.
• State of the World, by WorldWatch Institute, The 7 trends that most threaten eco-collapse: population growth, rising temperature, falling water tables, shrinking cropland per person, collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, and the extinction of plant and animal species.
• World Scientists' Warning (online), by the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course.  No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished.  A great change in our stewardship of the Earth and life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated."
• Dream of the Earth by Thomas Berry. "We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story.  We are in between stories.  The old story, the account of how we fit into it, is no longer effective.  Yet we have not learned the new story."
• Healing Time on Earth, by David Brower. An argument that life without wilderness is meaningless and unsustainable.
• The Future of Freedom, by Fareed Zakaria. How cultures change, and why they don't.
• The New Rules of the World, by John Pilger. A devastating portrait of how the world really works.
• The Demon in the Freezer, by Richard Preston. How vulnerable we all are to individual acts of terror, chaos and sabotage.
• [10] Against the Grain, by Richard Manning. How and why grain monoculture evolved, and how it's ruining the Earth.
  
• Population Projections, by US Census Bureau. They're no longer assuring us that US and Global Population will level out at 300 million and 9 billion. Would you believe 1 billion and 12 billion by the end of the century, and still rising?
  
• Global Warming, by NOAA. An online synopsis of US scientists' consensus on the causes and consequences of global warming.
• This Overheating World - Worried? Us? (online essay) by Bill McKibben. Article in the UK journal Granta explaining the psychology, and cynical political expediency, of denial.
  
• Are Cities Changing Local and Global Climates?, (online) by NASA. Studies of urban microclimates and how they contribute to local climate change and instability.
• Restoring Scientific Integrity (online) by Union of Concerned Scientists. The Bush regime's distortion of scientific research to forward its own political agenda, and how it threatens our planet.
• Climate Collapse, by David Stipp (online article) from Fortune Magazine. The possibility and chilling implications of global warming producing sudden drastic climate shifts.
  
• Conservative Myths on Global Warming (online) by Blogger Carpe Datum. A brief but thorough explanation of the science behind global warming, and the reasoning behind scientists' connecting it to human activity and worrying about the risks of resultant instability
• The Empire Strikes Out, by Kenny Ausubel. Corporatism and acquisitiveness run amok are ruining our world, but nature always bats last.
  
• The Tragedy of the Commons, by Garry Harding. The commons, that which belongs in common to all of us, is disappearing -- Why nobody really cares.
• Elizabeth Costello, by JM Coetzee. Why we tolerate a holocaust against our fellow creatures on Earth.
• The Machine in Our Heads, by Glenn Parton. How the ecological crisis is rooted in a human psychological crisis.
• Rogue Primate, by John Livingston. How anthropocentric cultural prosthesis has led our species astray, and how we can find our way back by rediscovering "the sweet bondage of wildness".
• In Defiance of Gravity, by Tom Robbins. An (online) essay that argues we must "insist on joy in spite of everything."
• The Slow Crash, by Ran Prieur. An (online) essay that explains how civilization will end, not with a bang, but with a series of whimpers.
• [15] The Long Emergency, by James Kunstler. The story of our dystopian future, caused by our cultural incapacity for preparedness, and sparked by resource scarcity and cultural conflict.

About Gaia: What Nature is Really About

• [2] When Elephants Weep, by Jeff Masson. Compelling scientific evidence that animals feel deep emotions.
• Mind of the Raven, by Bernd Heinrich. Compelling scientific evidence that animals are intelligent, complex, rational and communicative.
  
• The Sacred Balance by David Suzuki. A passionate explanation of James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis, the need to redesign how we live, and the importance of spending more time in nature.
  
• The Hidden Dimension, by Edward Hall. We need space and a natural environment to be healthy and human. When we're deprived of them, we get mentally ill.
  
• [7] The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram. How to reconnect with nature, and rediscover wonder.
• The World is Dying, by Richard Bruce Anderson. Online essay about our instinctive grief over knowing what we are doing to our beleaguered planet, and our feelings of helplessness about how to remedy it.
• The Weather Makers, by Tim Flannery. A scientific explanation of global warming, how we are causing it, and the possible consequences.
• The Truth About Nature, by Dave Pollard. My own essay, synthesizing the ideas in this reading list.

Toolkit for Change: Knowledge We Can Use to Save the World

• [3] Freeman Dyson's Brain (online interview), in Wired Magazine. The twin keys to building a better world are (a) establishing viable self-sufficient local communities to replace big centralized states and governments, and (b) selective more-with-less technologies like solar/wind energy coops and biotech medicines.
• The Developing Ideas Interview (online) with economist Herman Daly. An economic and tax program that favours communities and commons instead of corporations, and a 'contract' to reduce our population and ecological footprint.
• Tools for Conviviality, by Ivan Illich. "The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. Otherwise man will find himself totally enclosed within his artificial creation, with no exit." Full book is online.*
• Beyond Civilization, by Daniel Quinn. A prescription for creating a post-civilization world, starting with preparing yourself.
• The Unconquerable World, by Jon Schell. Why non-violence and consensus-building are the only viable way forward.
• The Support Economy, by Shoshana Zuboff A model for a post-capitalist economy.
• Unequal Protection, by Thom Hartmann. The case for denying 'personhood' to corporations.
• When Corporations Rule the World, by David Korten. The need to get corporations out of politics and create localized economies that empower communities within a system of global cooperation, overcoming the myths about economic growth and the sanctification of greed, and focusing instead on overconsumption, poverty, overpopulation, and reining in untrammelled corporate power.
• Radical Simplicity, by Jim Merkel. How to free yourself from possessions and wage slavery without sacrifice.
• The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell. What makes things change.
• The Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki. Why collective wisdom is better than accepted wisdom and expertise at solving problems, and how to tap it.
• Ten Ways to Make a Difference, by Peter Singer. A pragmatic recipe for change.
  
• [8] The Truth About Stories, by Thomas King. The truth about stories is that that's all we are. Want a new society? Write a new story.
  
• The Boycott List, by Responsible Shopper, and Good Stuff, by the WorldWatch Institute. What not to buy, and what to buy instead.
• The Corporation, by Joel Bakan. An action plan for undermining corporatism.
• [9] Humans in the Wilderness, by Glenn Parton. How we might reintroduce humans, well-spaced-out, into a primarily wilderness Earth.
• At Home in the Universe, by Stuart Kauffman. How self-organizing, self-managing systems work.
• EarthDance (entire book online), by Elisabet Sahtouris. Eleven steps to cultural metamorphosis (my summary is here)
  
• eGaia (entire book online), by Gary Alexander. How to achieve peace, cooperation and sustainability (replacing war, competition and growth, the fuels of our current culture) and a future state vision with vignettes from individuals' lives in a balanced and harmonious future world.
• [11] The Commonwealth of Life, by Peter Brown. A 14-point plan for stewardship of the Earth based on an accepted set of duties, responsibilities, and universal rights.
• Cradle to Cradle and The Hannover Principles, by Bill McDonough. Cradle to Cradle outlines a 5-stage design and materials usage approach to sustainability. The principles should drive the way we design, develop and operate cities.
• [14] Creating a Life Together, by Diana Leafe Christian. How to create and sustain model Intentional Communities.
• The Growth Illusion and Short Circuit, by Richard Douthwaite. A blueprint for creating Sustainable Local Economies. Short Circuit is free online [my summary is here].
• Biomimicry, by Janine Benyus. Lessons and approaches from nature that could transform and inspire our processes for food production, harnessing energy, manufacturing, health care, education, collaboration and entrepreneurship.
• The Cellular Church, by Malcolm Gladwell. An online essay that suggest cellular organization principles might allow us to accomplish, bottom-up, what political entities cannot.
• Is Your Genius at Work?, by Dick Richards. A guide to deciding how your talent and passion (your 'genius') can be applied to your purpose, and hence how you can best help to save the world.
• To Be Of Use, by Dave Smith. A sustainable entrepreneur's explanation of why creating natural, sustainable enterprise is essential to our planet's survival, and hence to our own peace of mind.
• Sustainability Within a Generation, by the David Suzuki Foundation. Eleven public policy programs that could achieve this extraordinary goal. This essay, by me, explains how these programs, along with my own four proposed programs (a sustainability information exchange, sustainable enterprises, personal sustainable living programs, and sustainable intentional communities) could bring both top-down and bottom-up synergies to achieving sustainability.

Every year at this time we get to read/hear/see some of the best commencement speeches to graduating classes. Some of them are quite inspiring, but what interests me is that, after years of supposed 'education', graduates get to hear advice, rather than information or knowledge.

If I had 30 minutes to address a graduating class I would resolve to actually try to impart some knowledge, rather than advice. Personally, I only take advice from people who know me, and who I trust, so I don't think giving it to a bunch of restless strangers is, in the long run, very useful.

When I mentioned this to a friend, she asked me:

If you had 30 minutes to teach (rather than preach to) a graduating class, what would you teach them?
In the past year I have learned so much that I would answer this question much differently today than I would have at any previous point in my life. What I would do would be to show them how the world really is, and I would do it entirely with data presented in graphical format. I would not interpret it, or tell them what it meant. I would let the facts speak for themselves, and trust them to be smart enough to figure out how to act on it. My objective would be to infuriate them, provoke them to say (as graduate students have told me on more than one occasion): Why didn't anyone tell me this before; why don't they teach this in school?

Here are some of the data I would show them:

1. Large corporations have, for years, been eliminating more jobs than they have created, and this trend is accelerating. The data supporting this (for the US) are shown above. Just to keep even wit