Civility and Community

Civility and Community:

The word “civility” is cognate with “civilization.” And the word “communication” is cognate with “community.” Both civility and communication, I would argue, are essential, if we are to sustain our community and civilization, and thereby avoid endless tribal warfare, in our locality, in our nation, and on our planet as a whole. When civility and communication are undermined by bad faith, sneering, and rancor, it threatens both our community and our civilization. This is one reason why learning how to communicate ideas clearly, with civility, is so important—especially during an unprecedented global crisis.

The words “civility” and “civilization” both derive from the Latin world “civitas,” which means “city.” And cities, as opposed to small towns, are places where people of many different backgrounds—ethnic, social, religious, and ideological—are in constant commerce and interaction with each other. In order to do business, and in order to get along, people in cities had no choice but to learn how to communicate with people unlike themselves in a civil manner.

I have lived long enough now to remember when civility was the norm in our national political discourse. When I was young, there were only three television networks—ABC, NBC, and CBS. These networks were staffed with the top tier of career journalists—people like Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, Harry Reasoner, Howard K. Smith, , and later, Robert McNeil and Jim Lehrer, with a solid liberal arts education and backgrounds in both radio and newspapers, who had internalized norms of civility throughout their careers, and promoted critical inquiry and thoughtful debate among their guests. They also selflessly served the public interest, holding both Democratic and Republican administrations and elected officials accountable for their actions and words, and their newscasts were followed by everyone in the country.  And so, at that time, widespread public demonstrations like the 1963 March on Washington, or Earth Day 1970, were covered extensively by all three networks. At these times, America was the envy of the world, emulated by everyone else (except, of course, their ideological foes in totalitarian countries like Russia and China).

What happened? There are, of course, multiple causes for the decline of civility into the kind of divisiveness, sneering, blatant lying, malice, paranoia, and rancor that have contaminated our public discourse to the point where people are afraid to even discuss politics unless they know ahead of time that the person they are talking to is “one of us” rather than “one of them.” One could blame the Internet, of course, for creating a situation in which everyone can create their own information bubble, where giant media monopolies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon use algorithms to develop profiles of users and feed them only the news and views (and misinformation) they want to hear.

But this decline in civility and decency, at first gradual, became more precipitous with the rise of Fox News, the malignant brainchild of Australian media mogul and scandalmonger Rupert Murdoch and master Republican propagandist (and convicted sexual predator) Roger Ailes. These two evil geniuses—there is no other word—created a worldwide media empire by abandoning all the norms of decency and civil discourse, and appealing instead to sensationalism, and to the fears, hatreds, and prejudices of the lowest common denominator of their audience. In so doing, they outdid both Hitler and Joseph Goebbels in poisoning the well of public discourse in order to create an unholy alliance between the interests of the corporate elite, on one hand, and the uneducated, embittered, easily manipulated,  lumpenproletariat (i.e. suburban and rural white working class) whose communities were hollowed out and demoralized by globalization, due to multinational corporations exporting manufacturing jobs overseas in search of cheap labor.

Their agenda is to turn the growing rage of this population—not against the corporations that had once provided them secure jobs and a decent lifelihood—but against “the government” who has allowed this, and especially against the “lib’ruls” whom they demonize as “elitists” who pose a direct threat to all that is godly and American. Their logic is simple and deceptive: ethnic minorities and foreigners, supported by “lib’ruls,” are taking away their jobs—while the corporations (that abandoned them) are their friends and will come back as soon as enough corporate tax breaks are given and environmental regulations are lifted.   Through the brazenly partisan 24-7 propaganda of Fox News, led by scurrilous, sneering hatemongers like Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Ann Coulter, these angry, frustrated people are worked up into a lather of resentment and paranoia against anyone who supports taxing the rich or  legislation or regulations in the public interest—rather than against super-rich corporate interests.  Republican operatives call this “energizing the base”—a term whose double meaning should be an obvious indicator of their actual contempt for those they are manipulating.  And oil-funded billionaires like the Koch Brothers planned and subsidized so-called “grassroots movements” like the widespread “Tea Party” protests to defeat an Affordable Care Act that ironically benefitted the protestors themselves.

Yet as late as 2008 and 2012, basic civility between the parties was still evident at the highest levels. I well remember the dignity of John McCain, promptly and firmly suppressing the ugly sneering and catcalls of many of his supporters during his concession speech in 2008, saying of Obama, “He was my political opponent, but now he is my President, and we must all congratulate him.” 

Then came 2016, the rise of Donald Trump, and the end of all semblance of civility in public discourse. In the words of Matthew Arnold, “And we are here as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

The time has come...

This morning, my wife told me that J.C. Penney's--a renowned, century-old chain of department stores--has declared bankruptcy. And unfortunately, many other large, corporate retail outlets will soon follow in its wake--simply because the still-accelerating Coronavirus pandemic, and the social distancing it requires for our survival, has paralyzed commerce all over the world--and commerce--the buying and selling of commodities--is the lifeblood of what I call "Glomart"--the global market economy--upon which our national economy and our consumer-capitalist culture depends. So, as this grim article portends, the American economy is already into free-fall, self-accelerating collapse, and following shortly thereafter will be the corresponding collapse of democracy, any sense of the public good, and the social contracts that make affluence possible for all but the super-rich.

But despite the pronounced contempt that this European writer has for American culture, our collapse into poverty, tyranny, and chaos will likely be followed by the break-up and collapse of every other industrialized nation on the planet, starting with Britain (because of its foolhardy "Brexit" move).  In a pandemic and global depression, there are no "winners." Even the most intelligent and adaptive nations, such as South Korea, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Canada, will face a rapidly shrinking GNP once global commerce has broken down.  And because the flow of capital always gravitates toward the top, these countries will likewise face systemic unemployment, increased poverty and homelessness, and the breakdown of public support for the social safety nets like universal health care and free education, once people are too poor to pay the taxes that it requires. Tyranny--driven by nationalism and xenophobia--will likely follow in these countries as well...

And yet, as Bill Mollison famously quipped, "We are surrounded by insurmountable opportunities."
A crisis--even a terrifying existential crisis like this one--becomes an opportunity when we look at it through new eyes.  Here is one attempt to do so, by mapping the three core ethics of Permaculture--Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share--onto my own homespun slogan, a generic recipe for these challenging times:  "Grow Gardens, Grow Community, Grow Awareness."

Earth Care - Grow Gardens:  In these (or any) times of growing scarcity, the first thing we all need to do is to start growing our own food, as much as possible. This, of course, is easier said than done!  Gardening is difficult, and requires an array of skills and experiential knowledge that few of us suburbanites have any more. And in our affluent Glomart culture, whose major premises are alienation from nature and consumerism, our default sense of "gardening" involves monocultural lawns, attractive but inedible hybrid flowers (that are useless for pollinating insects), and neat, monocultural rows of vegetables, all nourished by external inputs of bagged topsoil (gleaned from the surface of new suburban developments), chemical fertilizer, designer mulch (often dyed for attractiveness), and of course, herbicides and pesticides galore. But if we combine the injunction to "grow gardens" with the ethic of "Earth Care" we get...Permaculture, which includes saving our "yard waste" rather than having it taken away, composting and nurturing our own topsoil rather than buying new soil, and cultivating biological controls for pests by lots of pollinating plants and shrubs that are attractive to insect predators, rather than spraying toxic herbicides and pesticides.  And this is only a start, for permaculture gardening involves lifelong learning, teaching, healing, and creating.  And this, in turn, leads to...

People Care - Growing Community.  In our Glomart consumer culture, we have all grown accustomed to simply buying what we need and hiring contractors to do what we were unable or unwilling to do--whether they were (ruthlessly exploited) housemaids to clean our houses; groundskeepers to mow our lawns or weed our gardens; plumbers, electricians, and other contractors to do what we lack the specialized skills to do around the house.  But in a contracting economy, such services will be harder to come by, and more expensive as well. There are two ways of coping with this increasing scarcity of commodities and of skilled labor on command.  The first, of course, is to make do with less.  But the second is to reach out to our neighbors--to grow community, whether by direct hire or barter (exchanging services, commodities, or skills) when cash gets short.  And then we may well find that our neighbors are willing to teach us skills we need to know, in return, perhaps, for services offered. Unlike the cash economy, which tends (especially in big box stores) to alienate buyer and seller, an informal barter economy tends to build community and solidarity. But we can take this further, of course, by creating organizations to learn, teach, and propagate knowledge and skills. And in this way, we take a giant step toward...

Growing Awareness - Fair Share Once people in neighborhoods and communities get to know one another and work together, and once they learn mutual respect in the process, it becomes far easier to grow awareness of what is happening in the larger world, and how that affects the local community. And by propagating permaculture, we also grow awareness of the social and ecological consequences of everything we do, so that sharing our surplus with the hungry and needy in turn becomes the first step in teaching them, in turn, how to grow gardens, grow community, and grow awareness. By such small steps, a new, localized, regenerative Gaian civilization can evolve, predicated on a culture of learning, teaching, healing, and creating.

Finally, awareness begins with self-awareness. None of the above can happen without a reservoir of good will; otherwise, in hard times, fear and hostility can all-too-easily take hold, and lead to truly ugly outcomes. As President Roosevelt aptly warned us, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."  And the first place to master that gnawing fear is within ourselves--by learning and teaching the time-honored skills of breathing, observing, and letting go. A good, simple "starter" mantra for this skill was recently given to us by the Dalai Lama:  "Breathing in, I cherish myself; Breathing out, I cherish all living beings."  So knowing that "we are tied in an inescapable network of mutuality"(the living Earth) let us all renew our Bodhisattva vow to "take care of everyone, and abandon no one" and to condition our minds to do so by breathing, observing, and letting go of whatever thoughts, feelings, or sensations arise in our minds--and then, being well, doing good work, and keeping in touch.

Coming back to Earth

Good morning, friends.   This week, as you may know, is the fiftieth anniversary of Earth Day.  It originated in 1970 as a great national and global awakening of environmental awareness--the awareness of the immense damage wrought by our industrial civilization on our life-sustaining planet. I was in college then, a junior at Ohio Wesleyan University, and like most of my peers, I was caught up in the enthusiasm of that moment, attending rallies, marching, watching the news.  We were full of hope that finally, our nation and world would commit--as we put it then--to "cleaning up the environment." How naive we were!

For a while, of course, the promise of Earth Day seemed to be coming to fruition, as our President--even a Republican like Nixon--established the Environmental Protection Agency, and our Congress passed landmark legislation like the National Environmental Policy Act, the Wilderness Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and so forth. What we failed to recognize at the time, however, was that the monied interests in their corporate boardrooms quickly realized that environmental awareness is bad for business.  Despite the efforts of people like President Carter to encourage us to save energy, develop solar and wind, and curb our reckless consumerism for the sake of future generations, the captains of industry--especially the fossil fuel industry--galvanized Congress and the media to reverse course.

And so, a mere decade later, in 1980, that first era of progressive environmental legislation came to a grinding halt with the election of corporate backed Ronald Reagan, who immediately set to work encouraging greed and consumerism, and slashing funding for every environmental protection program he could find. With a few exceptions, under Clinton and Obama, it has been downhill ever since.  Earth Day has been reduced to little more than a sentimental children's holiday for celebrating pandas and recycling bottles. Meanwhile, the use of fossil fuels throughout the world continues to expand, wreaking havoc on our climate, while plastics choke our oceans, species disappear in record numbers, natural migration cycles are disrupted, wildfires rage across Australia and California, ice caps melt, fisheries are depleted, and our elected officials are so thoroughly bought out by corporate interests that legislation in the long-term public interest becomes all but impossible.

 I do not need to remind you that we are all facing an existential crisis these days; a time when both a medical and an economic cataclysm with no clear end in sight is now crashing down on us at accelerating rates throughout the world. This is especially the case in our country due to the abysmally bad leadership of Donald Trump.

So here we are. As an unstoppable virus ravages the world, the global industrial and commercial civilization whose abundant fruits we have all enjoyed throughout our lives is paralyzed and is on tenuous life-support. Both medically and economically, our future is uncertain, but we can be sure that it will never be the same again. As Shakespeare writes in King Lear, "The worst is not/So long as we can say, 'This is the worst.'"

For many years before this happened, I was well aware that our global market economy was doomed. There are many convergent reasons for this, but they all derive from one fact: an economy and civilization based on the endless expansion of commerce is fundamentally incompatible with a finite living planet. 

Glomart--my coinage for the Global Market Economy, or the order of money--is the world we made. Gaia--the order of nature--is the world that made us. To survive, we need both: Glomart provides our livelihood--the money we make, the food we eat, the goods we purchase. But Gaia provides the very foundation of our lives: the air we breathe, the topsoil that grows our food, the water we drink, and the diverse ecosystems that both sustain and enrich our lives.

The major premise of Glomart, of any system based on money, is that More is Always Better. This is assumed without question by every corporate board room on the planet, and promoted by every ad you see on television. It follows that nature has no value in this system until it is transformed into commodities: forests into board feet, mountains into quarries for minerals, prairies into monocultures, land into real estate, and so on.

Gaia--our living planet--is a complex adaptive system based on regenerative, ecological networks, where the guiding rule is the exact opposite: Enough is Enough. Too much or too little of any biological value is toxic to the system; if we get too hot or too cold, we die. If we get too fat or thin, we die. If our population outgrows its carrying capacity, we die. And if we trash the matrix of our lives--our lands, waters, air, and biodiversity--we also die.

So in effect, Glomart is a cancer on Gaia--a subsystem of our living Earth that is parasitizing its own biological support system, in order to keep growing and growing. So the collapse of Glomart is--or was--inevitable.

Still, this knowledge is small comfort in these early days of Glomart's inevitable collapse. So how do we cope? How can we turn this crisis into an opportunity?

My short answer, formulated long before this current disaster, is a simple slogan: Grow Gardens; Grow Community; Grow Awareness. 

To unpack this slogan a bit: 1. Grow Gardens. Our global agriculture and food distribution systems are under immense strain as a consequence of this pandemic, so it is essential that we localize our food system as quickly as possible. We can start today by planning to turn our lawns and ornamental beds into food growing areas. We can study and practice Permaculture methods to regenerate our topsoil with compost and mulch, turn our yard waste into hugelcultur mounds, and dig swales to retain water in the dry season. (I highly recommend GAIA'S GARDEN by the late Toby Hemenway as an excellent guide to backyard Permaculture.) Learning to garden with Permaculture methods will not only ensure and diversify our own food supply; it will also diversify our skills, provide healthier food, reduce our collective reliance on toxic fertilizers and pesticides, save energy and water, sequester carbon, and regenerate our topsoil. In short, growing gardens with Permaculture methods is good for us, good for our communities, and good for our planet. 2. Grow Community. In our Glomart consumer society, we are defined by our possessions: "to be is to buy." So we are constantly urged to go shopping at impersonal, big-box stores, and to enclose ourselves within privacy fences, but this has greatly eroded and attenuated any sense of community with our immediate neighbors. So we need to get to know our neighbors, whether they are "people like us" or not. It is often the people who are least like us that have the most to teach us. And this is especially true with gardening and other practical skills. Reaching out to our neighbors can be a challenge, but it is a challenge well worth pursuing, because in a traumatic crisis--e.g. the breakdown of the food supply system--the neighbor we know can be our best friend, while the neighbor we don't know can be our worst enemy.
But growing community goes well beyond the basic skills of getting to know, appreciate, and work with our neighbors. It also involves getting more actively engaged in our larger communities--including (and especially) UUCS, but also local nonprofit and charitable organizations, and our city and state governments. Glomart thrives when we are passive consumers, sitting in front of our televisions or driving our cars to Walmart. But we must instead relearn the art of active citizenship--of our neighborhoods, our city, our state, our nation, and our living planet. 3. Grow Awareness. This injunction infuses all the others. I do not mean trying to win others over to our political or religious views--that is utter folly, and will only make enemies. I do mean chatting with people casually in our neighborhood, whenever we see them, learning from them, teaching them useful skills, helping them when they need it, and engaging in collaborative creativity to solve collective problems and challenges.
So growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness are all intertwined. Each strengthens and encourages the other. The more gardens, the stronger communities, and the greater levels of awareness we have in our neighborhoods, the better off we will be, if and when the larger systems that sustain us start collapsing all around us. So let us practice the arts of resilience, of neighborliness, and of compassion, to help each other survive this global ordeal, and to build the foundations for a localized, resilient, and regenerative economy and a culture that knows itself to be a part of, and not apart from, the life of our sacred living planet. As Glomart crumbles, let a true Gaian culture rise like a phoenix from its ashes--starting in our own backyards.
Amen.

Black Swan: Thoughts on the Pandemic

"Black Swan" is a metaphor introduced to me by my friend Mark. According to Wikipedia and other sources, it refers to 

"The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology, 

coupled with "[t]he psychological biases that blind people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and to a rare event's massive role in historical affairs."

With the recent emergence and rapid proliferation of the COVID-19 ("Coronavirus") pandemic, a true Black Swan has landed, right at our doorsteps. An entirely new strain of severe respiratory virus is engulfing our entire planet. It has a high death rate, no vaccine, far too few adequate testing instruments, a slow (and often invisible) incubation, and exponential transmission through respiration, and it is threatening shortly to overwhelm our hospitals and medical facilities, crash our economy, and plunge us into unimaginable chaos within the next few months. Yet our poisonously incompetent and corrupt so-called "president" and his morally bankrupt cronies are in complete denial about this, have slashed funding for research into preventive measures, and are concerned only about the stock market and about putting on a good face for the next election.  We have no leadership, and hence are on our own, facing what may well be the most catastrophic global public health crisis ever.  (For reliable information on all of this, check out Chris Martenson on https://www.peakprosperity.com/.)

When faced with such a global catastrophe, especially one where enforced isolation ("Social distance" is the term du jour) is the only known way to slow the exponential spread of this entirely new strain of respiratory virus (for which there is no immunity and no known vaccine), most of us (who are  not still in denial) are dealing with varying levels of panic, justifiably so.  This could be IT--the collapse of the globalized, industrialized, market-based world we have always known into utterly unpredictable chaos, starvation, violence, and mass die-off--starting with the elderly (that is, me and my wife, among others) who are most susceptible. (We may count ourselves lucky to die first, in fact!)

From a Gaian perspective, this virus could be nature's way of ridding the biosphere of a cancerous subsystem--agro-industrial humanity--which directly threatens its future viability. After all, "blooms"--the rapid expansion and subsequent collapse of algae or other organisms when a temporary new energy source becomes available--are a commonplace occurrence in nature. For many species, such boom-and-bust cycles are commonplace, when a population expands beyond the limit of its carrying capacity, and viruses may thus be part of a complex Gaian regulatory apparatus for dealing with pathogens like ourselves.  But this awareness, needless to say, does not do much to quell our current dread and anxiety.

What does?  Here I would begin with an often-quoted proverb coined by Bill Mollison, the founder of Permaculture, who had a deep, intuitive understanding of the way of nature, as it applies to our own necessary agenda (i.e. staying alive and building healthy human habitats that are symbiotic with, rather than parasitic upon, our biological support system).   And that proverb is "The problem is the solution."

At first glance, this may seem like a trite, almost frivolous cliche, given the gravity of our current situation, but when contemplated more carefully, it reflects an insight of great depth and resonance.  Our problem today, in a nutshell, is not only the virus itself, but also, the essential response to it that virtually everyone is practicing: cancelling every public event and retreating into isolation.  But that isolation--that "self-quarantine"--carries its own set of problems: when we are out of touch with each other, we fall prey to all of our inner demons at once--panic, depression, fear, short tempers, dread...

And this in turn can lead to larger pathologies of alienation--fear and mistrust of others, hoarding, stealing, rumor-mongering, etc.  How could there be any "solution" in such a "problem"?

Throughout history, in every wisdom tradition on the planet, those who reached the highest levels of insight and compassion were those who went into long periods of isolation, to facilitate soul-searching and/or inner development (call it what you will...)  Think, for example, of the ancient Hebrew prophets, Jesus confronting his demons in the desert, the Buddha abandoning his princely life to wander the world in search of enlightenment, Mohammed going out into the cave to encounter Allah...these stories are all variations on the same theme: isolation gives us the opportunity, if we choose to take it, for the kind of inner development that can spawn whole new cultures, new ways of looking at life.  So in this respect, our current, agonizing isolation may be a blessing in disguise--if we choose to accept it.

How so?

Each of us, of course, must answer this for ourselves, based on our own preferred spiritual practice. But here are a few tentative suggestions:

For Christians, Jews, Muslims, and all other monotheistic faith traditions, prayer is the thing. As the grandmother of one of my students once told her: "You can either worry or you can pray. You can't do both."  And prayer is definitely preferable to worry.  I can't claim to be an expert on prayer, since my own inclinations have lead me to embrace Buddhist practice (i.e. meditation) but I'm quite convinced that the two disciplines--meditation and prayer--are not all that different. They are really two different ideological frameworks for achieving the same goal--inner peace, equanimity, and compassion.  All of which are desperately needed these days.  For Christians, a good prayer to start with is the centerpiece of the Prayer of Jesus--"Thy will be done." Either that or the Gesthemane prayer--"Lord, please take this cup from me--not as I will, but as Thou wilt."

For Buddhists and other practitioners of Dharmic religions, or others attracted to these Eastern wisdom traditions, there are myriad meditative techniques to choose from. So I wish to share my own. It is compatible with any belief system--or none at all.  It goes like this:

1. Allot yourself time for 30 deep breaths--about 10-15 minutes will do. (The deep breaths, incidentally, will help your lungs stay healthy--which might be important these days to fend off the virus!)

2. For the first 10 breaths, in and out, focus consecutively on contemplating the value, to yourself and others, of each of the following verb phrases:

(a)  Breathe...Observe...Let Go

(b)  Be well...Do good work...Keep in touch...(with gratitude to Garrison Keillor, who coined these).

(c)  Learn...Teach...Heal...Create...

3.  Repeat these 10 phrases a second time, this time focusing on practicing them as you are doing so. In other words, look upon the words as "windows" describing what you are actually doing at that moment. Try turning them into gerunds if it helps (i.e. "Breathing, Observing, Letting go...") to keep yourself in the present moment.

4. If you can do so authentically, try repeating the 10 phrases a third time, this time vowing to stay with this practice regularly. Renew your vow every time you practice it, until it becomes habitual.

("I vow to breathe...to observe...to let go...")

5. At any time, once you are centered. you can simply drop the words and focus on your in and outbreath all by themselves, for as long as you wish. It might also help to start with a poem or invocation, and end with a blessing, such as "May all living beings benefit from this practice." But that, of course, is entirely up to you.

It might also help to keep a journal, in which you jot down your own thoughts about what each of these verb phrases means to you personally. This practice can be combined, as you wish, with any other contemplative or meditative practice that you already use, in any faith tradition.

I hope and pray that this inner work in solitude helps you maintain a measure of equanimity and compassion in this time of crisis, so that you can be an agent of global healing thereafter, as we return to growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness.

Our last, best hope

January 5, 2020

Like most thinking people on the planet, I have a heavy heart this evening. Ever since our deranged, maniacal "president" impulsively ordered the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, Iran's top general and second in command, our fragile global political order has been coming unglued, plunging ever-more rapidly downward toward the unthinkable cataclysm we have all feared for my entire life--"World War 3." As Thomas Paine once wisely said,

"He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death."

So it was when George W. Bush launched unprovoked invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan; so it was when Hitler bombed Poland, when the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serbian terrorist, when Napoleon invaded Russia, and so forth, through all the annals of history. But the (now apparently inevitable) war with Iran may spiral rapidly into a conflagration that will dwarf all these past horrors, especially if, in the acceleration of hostilities, Trump yields to his long-time fantasies of unleashing our vast nuclear arsenal, drawing Russia, North Korea, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and likely India and Pakistan as well, into the general, apocalyptic melee.

Behind the scenes of all this political madness and folly, of course, is the ever-accelerating pace of climate change--or more precisely, climate catastrophe, which has already engulfed nearly all of Australia in vast, uncontrollable wildfires, while unleashing unprecedented heat waves, hurricanes, droughts, and floods all over the globe, along with melting ice caps, sea-level rise, ecological collapse on both land and sea. This could be it: the end of history; the end of humanity; the end of life on Earth as we know it.

So where is this "last, best hope" I refer to? Is it not somewhat of a bad joke, at this juncture, to even mention the word "hope?" At a macro-scale, probably so. I have little doubt that our money-and-fossil-fuel-based global industrial world order is doomed, inevitably, to collapse, whether rapidly or incrementally, into chaos and horror and mass die-off, which will probably take most of humanity and the rest of life as we know it along with it. (The extinction may well be total--in which case, obviously, there is no hope at all for us.)

But I still hold out some hope, nevertheless.
Why, you ask.
My short answer? Permaculture.

How so?

As one wag (I forget who) once put it, "Permaculture is revolution disguised as gardening."

So what exactly is Permaculture?

It is a method of gardening, but more than a method of gardening.
It is a method of landscape design, but more than a method of landscape design.
It is a systems-based approach to the design of healthy ecosystems that include humans.
But it is even more than that: It is a way of thinking, an ethical way of living, and a way of interacting with each other and our living world, our local (and global) habitat, that includes all of the above.

In short, it is the seed of a new global culture, a Gaian culture, that has already taken root around the world, and may rise like a phoenix from the ashes of our current dying industrial civilization. It knows no boundaries; it embraces and nurtures the entire planet (human and nonhuman alike); and it is not daunted by any challenges at all, but flourishes in every conceivable habitat, from deserts to rainforests, from equator to polar regions, from back yards to farms to cities to whole communities and cultures--even distressed communities like refugee camps.

And above all, it is resilient enough to survive apocalypse: as long as there are humans living together and trying to cope with adversity, permaculture can take root. And since its basic principles are common to all living beings, it can even survive the extinction of humanity itself--for all living beings follow the 12 principles: they observe and interact;  they catch and store energy; obtain a yield, apply self-regulation and accept feedback, use and value renewable resources and services, produce no waste, design from pattern to details (if you don't believe this, watch a spider build a web!); integrate rather than segregate; use small and slow solutions; use and value diversity; use edges and value the marginal; and creatively use and respond to change.

And so by learning and teaching Permaculture, no matter what happens, we say YES to life itself.

I will end, as always, by sharing my Dharma Gaia mantra--a guided meditation I have formulated that helps me whenever I feel overwhelmed by grief and despair for our planet, people, and other living beings. On ten consecutive slow breaths, repeat (aloud or to yourself) each of the following verb phrases. For a longer meditation, you can try doing so three times in a row: first to contemplate them, then to practice them (in the present moment), finally to vow to adhere to them as long as you live and breathe, renewing that vow whenever necessary. The mantra is divided into three parts:

1. Reclaiming the Moment:  Breathe, Observe, Let Go.
2. Setting a Day's Agenda: Be well, Do good work, Keep in touch. [with gratitude to Garrison Keillor]
3. Revisiting your life agenda: Learn, Teach, Heal, and Create

Finally, remember the Permaculture slogan I have devised as well:

Grow gardens; Grow community; Grow awareness.

The Little Ones

Although I have no children of my own, I  heard this morning that my niece, Lillian, has just given birth to a little boy, whom she has named Charlie--a name of long lineage in my family, since it is also the name of my brother, father, grandfather, and even great-grandfather. So that makes a total of six grandbabies in my family: Rafi, age 7; David and Elsie, age 2 (or so)--all three children of my brother's eldest daughter Teresa; Lila and Amelia, the two baby daughters of Vickie (Teresa's younger sister); and now, newborn Charlie--my sister's first grandchild.

New births, new generations of one's family, are and always have been a cause for joy and celebration, and I would be a grinch indeed if I were to do anything other than share in the joy of my siblings, nieces, and grand-nieces and nephews.  But inevitably, the dark question arises: What kind of world are we leaving to them?  How long before the accelerating ravages of climate disruption trigger a cascading series of catastrophes, both natural and social,  that transforms their lovely world into a hellish landscape of chaos, violence, grief, madness, and starvation from which there is no possible escape? And is there anything we still can do to avert or even mitigate this catastrophic dark cloud over my descendants' future?

At a global scale, probably not. We had a chance, 30-40 years ago, when the reality of climate disruption due to rising CO2 levels first became widely known to the public. But due to concerted strategies of denial by the Fossil Fuel industry (spearheaded by Exxon) and parroted by Republican politicians, coupled with almost total neglect by both political parties and the pervasive, corporate-owned mass media, we have done next to nothing to curb our carbon emissions worldwide; in fact, recent figures have shown that we have pumped more carbon into the atmosphere since 1985 than we did during the entire preceding history of the industrial revolution since about 1800. This has been a catastrophic collective failure of will.

We all know why, of course. The entire Industrial Revolution, bringing with it a previously unimaginable growth in affluence, in population, and in technological innovation, arose entirely due to the sudden infusion of seemingly endless supplies of cheap fossil fuels--coal, petroleum, natural gas--that powered it.  Net energy, after all, is the foundation of any economy, and the vast amount of easily accessible and transportable net energy made available by fossil fuels drove the industrial revolution and spread it around the world, all within a mere 200 years--a geological eyeblink.

No one even imagined that there was a downside to this explosion of affluence and innovation until atmospheric sensors in Hawaii started recording rising levels of global CO2, around 1956.  (That was within my lifetime.) Subsequent years, of course, have solidly reinforced the conclusion that this rapidly rising atmospheric CO2 is entirely due to the burning of fossil fuels worldwide. Yet we are so addicted to fossil fuels--and the vast amounts of money they earn for investors--that we suppressed and denied this information until only recently, when the catastrophic effects of this rising concentration of CO2 became more and more obvious: melting polar icecaps, die-off of coral reefs worldwide, record hurricanes, floods, and wildfires, collapse of ecosystems and disappearance of species, and so forth. No thinking person (a category that excludes most Republicans, unfortunately) can any longer deny what is happening to our planet and why.

So why are people still having babies?  It's obvious--we are animals, and that is what we do.  And giving birth is the peak defining experience of femininity.  So I cannot and will not judge anyone for doing what comes naturally. But I am relieved that I never had any children of my own. It has spared me the personal dread and anxiety which will increasingly preoccupy the lives of my nieces and nephew as they raise their children and attempt to give them hope for their future. That hope will increasingly become elusive, at best, for the climate catastrophe will spare no one--not even the super-rich.

So here is my message for my grandnieces and grandnephews--a message I will never actually show them:

Dearest Rafi, Elsie, David, Lila, Amelia, and Charlie--

We love you all, but we have left you a broken, dying world. We have no excuses--we knew about what was happening 40 years ago, but we did nothing to curb our total addiction to fossil fuels. Addictions are hard to break--especially one that is the very basis of the increasing affluence that we enjoyed and took for granted all our lives, and that you still enjoy today. But not for long.

So here is what I suggest:

1. Let go of false hopes.  The future you inherit will be nothing like the present, and even less like the glorious techno-future that the mass media will continue to promote, in the teeth of growing evidence to the contrary.
2. Don't despair--your future will be hard and bitter, but this can be mitigated if you start now with the following suggestions.
3. Learn how to grow your own vegetable gardens starting now, using permaculture methods that minimize and even eliminate external inputs such as fertilizers, pesticides, and imported topsoil, and that adapt to changing climates through diversity. This way you will be able to feed yourself and others good, nutritious food after corporate agribusiness collapses.
4. At the same time, grow community: make lots of friends, and nurture those friendships by taking care of everyone, and abandoning no one. As your community expands, get involved in learning new skills, teaching them to others, healing each others' anxieties and illnesses, and creating innovative solutions to problems that arise.
5. Finally, grow awareness. Learn to think critically, so you can transform hostility into a teachable moment by calmly asking people two questions:a) What do you mean by ________(a word they just used--even an insult)? and b) Why should I believe what you say about it? (What is your evidence, and where did you get it?)  These questions, skillfully employed, can turn a fight into a dialogue.
6. Learn to meditate--Breathe, Observe, Let Go--whenever you find yourself afflicted by rage, anxiety, or craving.

And keep your eyes focused on a noble purpose for being alive--to cultivate the resilience, courage, and determination to create a new civilization that is symbiotic with, rather than parasitic upon, our biological support system. That new, post-industrial, Earth-friendly civilization starts from the ground up (quite literally, by building good topsoil)--not from the top down (by following demagogic leaders). Keep on trying--never give up--no matter what happens. And even if we all fail--even if our living planet goes into a runaway feedback loop that renders it uninhabitable, we will all die, but you will die in peace, comfortable with the inexorable reality of impermanence, just as you lived.

Blessings,

Uncle Tom

Beyond Money: A new way of imagining "capital."

The word "capital" has normally been taken to refer to available money, or--more precisely, "Wealth in the form of money or assets, taken as a sign of the financial strength of an individual, organization, or nation, and assumed to be available for development or investment." (from the Business Dictionary)

 By this common definition, capital is inherently rooted in our global market economy, which I call "glomart" for short. But that money-based economy is completely incompatible with Gaia, our biological support system, since it depends on the infinite growth of production and consumption of commodities--which is impossible on a finite planet.  Money itself is just arithmetic, after all--an abstract transform of information about the marginal value of commodities. Hence, without commodities, you cannot have money--and without money, you cannot have commodities. In order to have a "commodity" you need to put a (physical or abstract) boundary around something in order to sell it on a market.

But such boundaries inevitably isolate that entity from its context, and all of the relationships that sustain it, and that it, in turn, sustains.  This is why, historically, we decided that human beings could not be commodities.  The Civil War marks our nation's final decision on this matter--the point at which we recognized, legally, that a person's autonomous rights as a human being supersede his or her commodity value to a plantation owner.  Likewise, the National Park System arose in recognition that certain places had too much intrinsic (non-monetary) value to our culture to be reduced to commodities for the market. When something is too sacred to be traded, it is no longer a commodity; no longer a form of "capital" in the usual sense of the word.

But there is a big problem with this "usual sense of the word." The sole object of any business enterprise is to increase its store of capital--of money and/or the commodities that can be traded for money. And money--or capital--is a zero sum game: if one person has it, the other does not. So the object of business--of Glomart--throughout the world is to build their capital base by transforming nature into commodities as rapidly as possible: land into real estate; diverse and fertile prairies into monocultural farms; forests into board-feet; potentially valuable minerals into mined and manufactured goods; oceans into fisheries and fisheries into fishmarkets and restaurants; fossil fuels into cheap energy resources that power all of the above. The net consequence, of course, is the ongoing destruction of our biological support system, coupled with the commodification of everything--and increased isolation of everyone.

Is there a better way of thinking about capital?  Fortunately, yes. Recently, thanks to Toby Hemenway and other Permaculturists, I came across an eye-opening article called "Eight Forms of Capital" by Ethan Roland and Gregory Landua. Based on systems theory--conceived in terms of pools and flows--the article lays out a revised, more comprehensive definition of "capital" as any and all resources, both material and immaterial, that can be traded within a community or between them or combined ("complexed" in their lexicon) into other, more complex resources. The Eight Forms of Capital, which I have arranged holarchically, from simplest to most complex, are as follows:

1. Material Capital: Nonliving physical objects or materials which can be combined or transformed into useful tools or commodities. (Zero-sum and inherently degenerative--i.e. subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics)
2. Living (or biological) Capital: Animals, plants, microbes, fresh water, and topsoil. This kind of capital can be regenerative if wisely and prudently used, stored, and nurtured. But it is still partly zero sum--at any given moment, what one person eats or drinks cannot belong to or benefit another person (other than a mother's nursing child) as well. This is why there is competition for food and water in many parts of the world. (But it can, and does, benefit the microbes in our intestines and elsewhere that are part of our bodies' symbiotic matrix). Living capital can often, of course, be transformed into material capital as well (e.g. wood). These two--material and living capital--form the foundation of any economy or ecosystem, human or otherwise. The next four forms of capital pertain to individual human beings. 
3. Experiential Capital: The practical knowledge and skills we gain from our lived experience. These can include practical skills like housekeeping, carpentry or gardening, and can be "complexed" to form higher-level skills, such as engineering or architecture. It can be Positive Sum, in that the more experience you have, the more benefit you can bring to a community through solving their problems and teaching others what you know.
4. Intellectual Capital: This is what people go to college for; to gain the theoretical knowledge and thinking skills necessary to make wise decisions, to gain employment, and to collaborate with others on projects. Depending on the field of interest, it is generally combined with experiential capital to one degree or another. 
5. Social Capital: This refers to the "people skills" we acquire through collaborating with and socializing with others. It is likewise Positive-Sum, in that the more Social Capital you acquire, the broader your influence becomes on others, and the more you can accomplish collaboratively.
6. Spiritual Capital: This is the most abstract, least quantifiable form of capital. The Buddhists have codified it in their concept of Karma, which refers to the net consequences of any intentional action on both the inner (self) and outer (world) realms of experience. In Buddhist epistemology, Karma (spiritual capital) can be conceived as a kind of balance sheet, which transcends individual lives, and shapes our day-to-day experience.  The good news is, moreover, that Karma, (both individual and collective, past and present) while it determines the context in which we take any action, does not predetermine the action itself. Through mind training, we can learn to identify and expose the karmic roots of any thought, feeling, or impulse that arises, evaluate it accordingly, and then make a free choice as to whether to increase our karmic debt by indulging dysfunctional impulses--or pay off an installment of it by acting at that moment with wisdom and compassion.  And it is by such training--both in formal meditation and in mindful living--that we accumulate spiritual capital, manifested as loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. And so, like experiential, social, and intellectual capital, spiritual capital is a positive-sum game: the more we have, the more others benefit as well. The last two forms of capital are collective, rather than individual, in that they acquire value only through group interaction:  
7. Financial Capital: No need for further comment on this, which has generally been considered the only form of capital. Money is, of course, useful as an abstract medium for trade--that is why it was invented. But since it is simply arithmetic, it has two insurmountable problems. For one, it is inherently zero-sum: if one person has it, others do not.  On a finite planet, the logic of money is exactly that of a monopoly game, and a monopoly game has only one possible outcome: the winner(s) own everything, and the losers own nothing, and owe the winners rent for their houses and hotels. That is rapidly becoming a model of the world we live in today; a world where a handful of billionaires own everything, and all the rest of us work for them, are in debt to them, or have been abandoned (or imprisoned) by them to lives of poverty, homelessness, and destitution.  The other problem is that money must grow, or else it loses its value. And the only way to "grow" money is to turn everything else into it--that is, turn nature into commodities, citizens into consumers, and communities into "markets"--until the Earth herself is denuded of life and polluted to death.  Still, in our world, we all need money to survive. But the more we can rely on the other forms of capital, the less money we will need to lead happy, fulfilling lives. 
8. Cultural Capital: The last kind of "capital" we can accumulate and trade on collectively is that bestowed upon us by our respective cultural heritages and practices. It refers, according to Roland and Landua, to "the shared internal and external processes of a community – the works of art and theater, the songs that every child learns, the ability to come together in celebration of the harvest or for a religious holiday." These days, most people acquire their cultural capital from absorption in mass media culture--which has increasingly become their only common cultural currency.  Since most mass media simply reinforce the dysfunctional cultural premises of Glomart--(More is always better; To be is to buy)--people also adhere to fragmented and mutually hostile subcultures, whether they are churches, synagogues, mosques, football fan clubs, street gangs, or right-wing hate groups on the internet. But diverse cultural capital within communities can still be a fertile and useful resource for diversifying and enriching our experience (as in Mexican or Thai restaurants, Tai Chi and Yoga classes, community theatre, etc.)

If we can learn and teach people how to think more broadly about these various different forms of capital available to us, we will go a long way toward emancipating ourselves from the tyranny of Glomart, and the inner tyranny of predicating our self-worth solely on the size of our cars and houses and stock portfolios. The best way to grow our own spiritual, social, experiential, intellectual, and even cultural capital is to devote our lives to various forms of learning, teaching, healing, and creating.