Learning from Dogs

Any lessons for today from the Valley of the Pyramids at Tucume in Peru?

The view of Huaca Larga (Photo: Heinz Plege/PromPerú)

Let’s set the scene,

It’s amazing to think that anyone lived here, that this valley was once green. Now it is sun-blasted, scorching hot, and the only life is the circling vultures and the rainbow-colored iguanas, like something out of a desert hallucination, skittering across the rocks.

The reminders of past life rise up around me, however, eroded to look more like drip castles than the pyramids they once were. I am in Túcume, the once-grand capital of the Sican culture, Peru’s mythical Valley of the Pyramids.

I am not far from Chiclayo, and even closer to the city of Lambayeque, where the Royal Tombs of Sipán Museum serves as one of the major tourist attractions on the north coast. Here at Túcume however, there are few visitors.

It is not hard to get to the site. Combis leave regularly from Chiclayo and Lambayeque, dropping passengers in the modern village of Túcume, from which an quick mototaxi ride leads to the ruins. By car or taxi, it is about a 30 minute ride from Chiclayo.

There are two main trails marked out across the desert plain in Túcume. One leads to Cerro Purgatorio, a craggy hill overlooking the 26 pyramids that comprise the site. The trail winds across the scorched valley, between several of the pyramids, before arriving at a staircase leading to different scenic overlooks on the face of Purgatorio.

WikiPedia, too, has a short reference.

Then there’s a long and revealing article on the InkaNatura Travel Site, which I recommend you go to.

So what happened at Túcume to cause the civilisation to fail?  Maybe this 10-minute film gives the answers, but just a note to say that there are some potentially upsetting scenes for the younger or more sensitive among us.

So anyone sufficiently brave to say that history won’t repeat itself.

Wonder which would be the ‘cursed cities’?

A personal reflection offered by Nick Hanauer.

Mr. Nick Hanauer

I hadn’t come across Mr. Hanauer before but thanks to some Facebook comments by Patrice Ayme found this YouTube video that is well-worth watching.  That’s an understatement!

The fundamental message that is contained in this short video seems critical, well to me it does, to society (that’s all of us, by the way) understanding why so many things seem to be going so very wrong for so many people.  But let me stop there before it becomes another of my rants!

Who is Nick Hanauer?  Here is a small extract from Nick Hanauer’s website,

Nicolas J Hanauer is a partner with Second Avenue Partners, a Seattle venture capital partnership specializing in early state startups and emerging technology. He has had a hand in such companies as Amazon.com and aQuantive among others.

Hanauer’s career began with a position as executive VP of Sales and Marketing at Pacific Coast Feather Company, a family owned manufacturer of basic bedding. In his time in that role, he helped grow Pacific Coast from several million dollars to more than $300 million in sales. Hanauer subsequently served as the company’s Co-Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer and remains Chief Executive Officer.

In 1988, Hanauer co-founded Museum Quality Framing Company, a company that has emerged the largest of its kind on the west coast with 60 locations. Hanauer was also one of the first investors in Amazon.com in 1995, where he served as a Board Advisor until January of 2000.

In 1996, he founded and served as CEO of internet media company Avenue A Media (later re-named aQuantive, Inc.) and became Chairman of the Board upon the first public offering in 2000. aQuantive was purchased by Microsoft in August of 2007 for 6.4 billion dollars; the largest acquisition in Microsoft history.

Now the video; less than 6 minutes long – do watch it!

As  a one-time entrepreneur back in the 80′s I can vouch for much of what Mr. Hanauer proclaims in his video.  The essence of successful marketing for any business, large and small, is understanding your market. Seeing the customer’s world through the customer’s eyes would be another way of putting that.

In plain language that means carefully and closely understanding what your customers, both actual and prospective, require, objectively and subjectively, and providing it to them profitably.  As the middle-classes (don’t like the term but it will have to do) are often the largest market opportunity, then it does follow that a healthy and vibrant middle-class is going to be best overall for the health and vibrancy of a country.  Indeed, in this very inter-connected world, that really equates to the health and vibrancy of our planet.

Which so easily leads on to a core truth. This one.  If all the Governments democratically elected on this planet truly acknowledged the democratic foundation, as Lincoln so ably put it, “government of the people, by the people, for the people” then those governments would be united in the one most important task facing the people – creating a sustainable way for us to live on the only planet we have!

Apologies, it did turn into a rant!

You may also want to read this TED and inequality: The real story.

Seeking your feedback, dear reader.

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by WordPress saying that Learning from Dogs had been selected for a trial of a new service on WordPress known as WordAds.  I can do no worse than by quoting from that WordPress webpage.

Introducing WordAds

by jonburke

Over the years one of the most frequent requests on WordPress.com has been to allow bloggers to earn money from their blog through ads. We’ve resisted advertising so far because most of it we had seen wasn’t terribly tasteful, and it seemed like Google’s AdSense was the state-of-the-art, which was sad. You pour a lot of time and effort into your blog and you deserve better.

Well we think we’ve cracked it, and we’re calling it WordAds.

Blogs are unique and they shouldn’t be treated like every other page on the internet. There are more than 50,000 WordPress-powered blogs coming online every day, and every time I explore them randomly I’m always surprised and delighted by how people are using the platform to express themselves.

As a WordPress user you’re breathing rarefied air on the internet: the Creators, the Independents. Creative minds aren’t satisfied being digital sharecroppers on someone else’s domain, and you want to carve out your own piece of the internet and have a space that you’re proud of because it’s so… you.

If you’re going to have advertising on your site, it darn well better be good, and beginning with our partnership withFederated Media we’re ready to start rolling out WordAds here on WordPress.com.

I see that in the last hour that the trial has commenced and now when you access Learning from Dogs you will see the advertisement, including one inserted to this Post

So please after a few days do let me have your views, as a comment to this post.  All comments will be published assuming, of course, they accord with my comment rules.

Thank you.

A moving, insightful postscript to the life of the late Ernest Callenbach.

This is a continuation of the republication of a recent TomDispatch Tomgram.  As I explained in Part One published yesterday I have been a follower of Tom Dispatch for some time and frequently find the essays most interesting.  However, reading the words of Ernest Callenbach touched me in many ways, some of which are still evolving.  Callenbach was clearly a man who many years ago not only foresaw how our world was heading but via his writings was able to articulate the solutions.  Today, as the video at the end of the Post so clearly exemplifies, those solutions are spot on.

The other point that strikes me is that in leaving this ‘message’ on his computer asking for it to be released after his death, Callenbach isn’t trying to prove anything.  We are reading the words of a person who feels so strongly about the fate of mankind that he wants those words to be his epitaph for ever more.  Trust me.  When you read the words below you will be as touched as I was, indeed still continue to be.  It is a rare privilege to republish them.

Ernest ‘Chick’ Callenbach

Epistle to the Ecotopians 

By Ernest Callenbach[This document was found on the computer of Ecotopia author Ernest Callenbach (1929-2012) after his death.]

To all brothers and sisters who hold the dream in their hearts of a future world in which humans and all other beings live in harmony and mutual support — a world of sustainability, stability, and confidence. A world something like the one I described, so long ago, in Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging.

As I survey my life, which is coming near its end, I want to set down a few thoughts that might be useful to those coming after. It will soon be time for me to give back to Gaia the nutrients that I have used during a long, busy, and happy life. I am not bitter or resentful at the approaching end; I have been one of the extraordinarily lucky ones. So it behooves me here to gather together some thoughts and attitudes that may prove useful in the dark times we are facing: a century or more of exceedingly difficult times.

How will those who survive manage it? What can we teach our friends, our children, our communities? Although we may not be capable of changing history, how can we equip ourselves to survive it?I contemplate these questions in the full consciousness of my own mortality. Being offered an actual number of likely months to live, even though the estimate is uncertain, mightily focuses the mind. On personal things, of course, on loved ones and even loved things, but also on the Big Picture.

But let us begin with last things first, for a change. The analysis will come later, for those who wish it.

Hope. Children exude hope, even under the most terrible conditions, and that must inspire us as our conditions get worse. Hopeful patients recover better. Hopeful test candidates score better. Hopeful builders construct better buildings. Hopeful parents produce secure and resilient children. In groups, an atmosphere of hope is essential to shared successful effort: “Yes, we can!” is not an empty slogan, but a mantra for people who intend to do something together — whether it is rescuing victims of hurricanes, rebuilding flood-damaged buildings on higher ground, helping wounded people through first aid, or inventing new social structures (perhaps one in which only people are “persons,” not corporations). We cannot know what threats we will face. But ingenuity against adversity is one of our species’ built-in resources. We cope, and faith in our coping capacity is perhaps our biggest resource of all.

Mutual support. The people who do best at basic survival tasks (we know this experimentally, as well as intuitively) are cooperative, good at teamwork, often altruistic, mindful of the common good. In drastic emergencies like hurricanes or earthquakes, people surprise us by their sacrifices — of food, of shelter, even sometimes of life itself. Those who survive social or economic collapse, or wars, or pandemics, or starvation, will be those who manage scarce resources fairly; hoarders and dominators win only in the short run, and end up dead, exiled, or friendless. So, in every way we can we need to help each other, and our children, learn to be cooperative rather than competitive; to be helpful rather than hurtful; to look out for the communities of which we are a part, and on which we ultimately depend.

Practical skills. With the movement into cities of the U.S. population, and much of the rest of the world’s people, we have had a massive de-skilling in how to do practical tasks. When I was a boy in the country, all of us knew how to build a tree house, or construct a small hut, or raise chickens, or grow beans, or screw pipes together to deliver water. It was a sexist world, of course, so when some of my chums in eighth grade said we wanted to learn girls’ “home ec” skills like making bread or boiling eggs, the teachers were shocked, but we got to do it. There was widespread competence in fixing things — impossible with most modern contrivances, of course, but still reasonable for the basic tools of survival: pots and pans, bicycles, quilts, tents, storage boxes.

We all need to learn, or relearn, how we would keep the rudiments of life going if there were no paid specialists around, or means to pay them. Every child should learn elementary carpentry, from layout and sawing to driving nails. Everybody should know how to chop wood safely, and build a fire. Everybody should know what to do if dangers appear from fire, flood, electric wires down, and the like. Taking care of each other is one practical step at a time, most of them requiring help from at least one other person; survival is a team sport.

Organize. Much of the American ideology, our shared and usually unspoken assumptions, is hyper-individualistic. We like to imagine that heroes are solitary, have super powers, and glory in violence, and that if our work lives and business lives seem tamer, underneath they are still struggles red in blood and claw. We have sought solitude on the prairies, as cowboys on the range, in our dependence on media (rather than real people), and even in our cars, armored cabins of solitude. We have an uneasy and doubting attitude about government, as if we all reserve the right to be outlaws. But of course human society, like ecological webs, is a complex dance of mutual support and restraint, and if we are lucky it operates by laws openly arrived at and approved by the populace.

If the teetering structure of corporate domination, with its monetary control of Congress and our other institutions, should collapse of its own greed, and the government be unable to rescue it, we will have to reorganize a government that suits the people. We will have to know how to organize groups, how to compromise with other groups, how to argue in public for our positions. It turns out that “brainstorming,” a totally noncritical process in which people just throw out ideas wildly, doesn’t produce workable ideas. In particular, it doesn’t work as well as groups in which ideas are proposed, critiqued, improved, debated. But like any group process, this must be protected from domination by powerful people and also over-talkative people. When the group recognizes its group power, it can limit these distortions. Thinking together is enormously creative; it has huge survival value.

Learn to live with contradictions. These are dark times, these are bright times. We are implacably making the planet less habitable. Every time a new oil field is discovered, the press cheers: “Hooray, there is more fuel for the self-destroying machines!” We are turning more land into deserts and parking lots. We are wiping out innumerable species that are not only wondrous and beautiful, but might be useful to us. We are multiplying to the point where our needs and our wastes outweigh the capacities of the biosphere to produce and absorb them. And yet, despite the bloody headlines and the rocketing military budgets, we are also, unbelievably, killing fewer of each other proportionately than in earlier centuries. We have mobilized enormous global intelligence and mutual curiosity, through the Internet and outside it. We have even evolved, spottily, a global understanding that democracy is better than tyranny, that love and tolerance are better than hate, that hope is better than rage and despair, that we are prone, especially in catastrophes, to be astonishingly helpful and cooperative.

We may even have begun to share an understanding that while the dark times may continue for generations, in time new growth and regeneration will begin. In the biological process called “succession,” a desolate, disturbed area is gradually, by a predictable sequence of returning plants, restored to ecological continuity and durability. When old institutions and habits break down or consume themselves, new experimental shoots begin to appear, and people explore and test and share new and better ways to survive together.

It is never easy or simple. But already we see, under the crumbling surface of the conventional world, promising developments: new ways of organizing economic activity (cooperatives, worker-owned companies, nonprofits, trusts), new ways of using low-impact technology to capture solar energy, to sequester carbon dioxide, new ways of building compact, congenial cities that are low (or even self-sufficient) in energy use, low in waste production, high in recycling of almost everything. A vision of sustainability that sometimes shockingly resembles Ecotopia is tremulously coming into existence at the hands of people who never heard of the book.

___________________

Now in principle, the Big Picture seems simple enough, though devilishly complex in the details. We live in the declining years of what is still the biggest economy in the world, where a looter elite has fastened itself upon the decaying carcass of the empire. It is intent on speedily and relentlessly extracting the maximum wealth from that carcass, impoverishing our former working middle class. But this maggot class does not invest its profits here. By law and by stock-market pressures, corporations must seek their highest possible profits, no matter the social or national consequences — which means moving capital and resources abroad, wherever profit potential is larger. As Karl Marx darkly remarked, “Capital has no country,” and in the conditions of globalization his meaning has come clear.

The looter elite systematically exports jobs, skills, knowledge, technology, retaining at home chiefly financial manipulation expertise: highly profitable, but not of actual productive value. Through “productivity gains” and speedups, it extracts maximum profit from domestic employees; then, firing the surplus, it claims surprise that the great mass of people lack purchasing power to buy up what the economy can still produce (or import).

Here again Marx had a telling phrase: “Crisis of under-consumption.” When you maximize unemployment and depress wages, people have to cut back. When they cut back, businesses they formerly supported have to shrink or fail, adding their own employees to the ranks of the jobless, and depressing wages still further. End result: something like Mexico, where a small, filthy rich plutocracy rules over an impoverished mass of desperate, uneducated, and hopeless people.

Barring unprecedented revolutionary pressures, this is the actual future we face in the United States, too. As we know from history, such societies can stand a long time, supported by police and military control, manipulation of media, surveillance and dirty tricks of all kinds. It seems likely that a few parts of the world (Germany, with its worker-council variant of capitalism, New Zealand with its relative equality, Japan with its social solidarity, and some others) will remain fairly democratic.

The U.S., which has a long history of violent plutocratic rule unknown to the textbook-fed, will stand out as the best-armed Third World country, its population ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-educated, ill-cared for in health, and increasingly poverty-stricken: even Social Security may be whittled down, impoverishing tens of millions of the elderly.

As empires decline, their leaders become increasingly incompetent — petulant, ignorant, gifted only with PR skills of posturing and spinning, and prone to the appointment of loyal idiots to important government positions. Comedy thrives; indeed writers are hardly needed to invent outrageous events.

We live, then, in a dark time here on our tiny precious planet. Ecological devastation, political and economic collapse, irreconcilable ideological and religious conflict, poverty, famine: the end of the overshoot of cheap-oil-based consumer capitalist expansionism.

If you don’t know where you’ve been, you have small chance of understanding where you might be headed. So let me offer a capsule history for those who, like most of us, got little help from textbook history.

At 82, my life has included a surprisingly substantial slice of American history. In the century or so up until my boyhood in Appalachian central Pennsylvania, the vast majority of Americans subsisted as farmers on the land. Most, like people elsewhere in the world, were poor, barely literate, ill-informed, short-lived.  Millions had been slaves. Meanwhile in the cities, vast immigrant armies were mobilized by ruthless and often violent “robber baron” capitalists to build vast industries that made things: steel, railroads, ships, cars, skyscrapers.

Then, when I was in grade school, came World War II. America built the greatest armaments industry the world had ever seen, and when the war ended with most other industrial countries in ruins, we had a run of unprecedented productivity and prosperity. Thanks to strong unions and a sympathetic government, this prosperity was widely shared: a huge working middle class evolved — tens of millions of people could afford (on one wage) a modest house, a car, perhaps sending a child to college. This era peaked around 1973, when wages stagnated, the Vietnam War took a terrible toll in blood and money, and the country began sliding rightward.

In the next epoch, which we are still in and which may be our last as a great nation, capitalists who grew rich and powerful by making things gave way to a new breed: financiers who grasped that you could make even more money by manipulating money. (And by persuading Congress to subsidize them — the system should have been called Subsidism, not Capitalism.) They had no concern for the productivity of the nation or the welfare of its people; with religious fervor, they believed in maximizing profit as the absolute economic goal. They recognized that, by capturing the government through the election finance system and removing government regulation, they could turn the financial system into a giant casino.

Little by little, they hollowed the country out, until it was helplessly dependent on other nations for almost all its necessities. We had to import significant steel components from China or Japan. We came to pay for our oil imports by exporting food (i.e., our soil). Our media and our educational system withered. Our wars became chronic and endless and stupefyingly expensive. Our diets became suicidal, and our medical system faltered; life expectancies began to fall.

And so we have returned, in a sort of terrible circle, to something like my boyhood years, when President Roosevelt spoke in anger of “one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-fed, ill-clothed.” A large and militant contingent of white, mostly elderly, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant right wingers, mortally threatened by their impending minority status and pretending to be liberty-lovers, desperately seek to return us still further back.

Americans like to think of ours as an exceptional country, immune through geographical isolation and some kind of special virtue to the tides of history. Through the distorted lens of our corporate media, we possess only a distorted view of what the country is really like now. In the next decades, we shall see whether we indeed possess the intelligence, the strength, and the mutual courage to break through to another positive era.

No futurist can foresee the possibilities. As empires decay, their civilian leaderships become increasingly crazed, corrupt, and incompetent, and often the military (which is after all a parasite of the whole nation, and has no independent financial base like the looter class) takes over. Another possible scenario is that if the theocratic red center of the country prevails in Washington, the relatively progressive and prosperous coastal areas will secede in self-defense.

Ecotopia is a novel, and secession was its dominant metaphor: how would a relatively rational part of the country save itself ecologically if it was on its own? AsEcotopia Emerging puts it, Ecotopia aspired to be a beacon for the rest of the world. And so it may prove, in the very, very long run, because the general outlines of Ecotopia are those of any possible future sustainable society.

The “ecology in one country” argument was an echo of an actual early Soviet argument, as to whether “socialism in one country” was possible. In both cases, it now seems to me, the answer must be no. We are now fatally interconnected, in climate change, ocean impoverishment, agricultural soil loss, etc., etc., etc. International consumer capitalism is a self-destroying machine, and as long as it remains the dominant social form, we are headed for catastrophe; indeed, like rafters first entering the “tongue” of a great rapid, we are already embarked on it.

When disasters strike and institutions falter, as at the end of empires, it does not mean that the buildings all fall down and everybody dies. Life goes on, and in particular, the remaining people fashion new institutions that they hope will better ensure their survival.

So I look to a long-term process of “succession,” as the biological concept has it, where “disturbances” kill off an ecosystem, but little by little new plants colonize the devastated area, prepare the soil for larger and more complex plants (and the other beings who depend on them), and finally the process achieves a flourishing, resilient, complex state — not necessarily what was there before, but durable and richly productive. In a similar way, experiments under way now, all over the world, are exploring how sustainability can in fact be achieved locally. Technically, socially, economically — since it is quite true, as ecologists know, that everything is connected to everything else, and you can never just do one thing by itself.

Since I wrote Ecotopia, I have become less confident of humans’ political ability to act on commonsense, shared values. Our era has become one of spectacular polarization, with folly multiplying on every hand. That is the way empires crumble: they are taken over by looter elites, who sooner or later cause collapse. But then new games become possible, and with luck Ecotopia might be among them.

Humans tend to try to manage things: land, structures, even rivers. We spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and treasure in imposing our will on nature, on preexisting or inherited structures, dreaming of permanent solutions, monuments to our ambitions and dreams. But in periods of slack, decline, or collapse, our abilities no longer suffice for all this management. We have to let things go.

All things “go” somewhere: they evolve, with or without us, into new forms. So as the decades pass, we should try not always to futilely fight these transformations. As the Japanese know, there is much unnoticed beauty in wabi-sabi – the old, the worn, the tumble-down, those things beginning their transformation into something else. We can embrace this process of devolution: embellish it when strength avails, learn to love it.

There is beauty in weathered and unpainted wood, in orchards overgrown, even in abandoned cars being incorporated into the earth. Let us learn, like the Forest Service sometimes does, to put unwise or unneeded roads “to bed,” help a little in the healing of the natural contours, the re-vegetation by native plants. Let us embrace decay, for it is the source of all new life and growth.

Ernest Callenbach, author of the classic environmental novel Ecotopiaamong other works, founded and edited the internationally known journal Film Quarterly.  He died at 83 on April 16th, leaving behind this document on his computer.

Copyright Ernest Callenbach 2012

The above video is 56 minutes long.  It consists of Ernest Callenbach and Harvey Wasserman chatting together in front of a camera.  But please don’t let that put you off watching it.  The video is deeply fascinating.  In it Ernest Callenbach (ECOTOPIA, 1975) and Harvey Wasserman (SOLARTOPIA, 2007) discuss the role of the visionary novelist in opening public discourse to ‘outside the box’ possibilities. They look at the many elements of Callenbach’s Ecotopian vision that have actually come into being (and some that haven’t yet) and explore the catalytic power of realistic hope to shape the present and the future. They agree the time has come to democratically enlarge our vision of sustainable society from local, national and regional spheres to the planetary context.

For more information here are their websites: www.ErnestCallenbach.com and www.Solartopia.org

Finally, I was delighted to come across a review recently written in The New York Times that is recommended to you.  Here’s how NYT author Mark Bittman closed that review:

Callenbach, who grew up in central Pennsylvania and lived to be 83, led a life as “American” — whatever that means — as any of us. The messages I take from him are these: hope is necessary, organizing is imperative, and a government by and for the vast majority of the people must not be considered impossible.

Hope is so necessary.

A remarkable insight into our present world and hopes for the future.

As many of you dear readers will know, I am incredibly fond of the essays that Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch fame publishes on a regular basis.  Indeed, it was just a week ago that I published a Tomgram from Bill McKibben.  Had it not been for Tom querying if I had read his Ernest Callenbach last-words piece I might have missed what, for me, has been one of the most profound ‘mind-stretching’ reads for a very long time.

I pondered for most of a morning as to whether to publish Tom’s essay in one piece, as Tom presented it, or to break it down into two.  Our much shorter attention-spans as a result of the world we now live in worked against it being two parts.  But I also wanted to include other materials that give an insight into the late Ernest Callenbach so, in the end, this TomDispatch is republished as two pieces.  I trust that works for you.

So without further ado, here is Tom’s introduction to the last words of Ernest Callenbach.

Tomgram: Ernest Callenbach, Last Words to an America in Decline

Thirty-five years later, it was still on my bookshelf in a little section on utopias (as well it should have been, being a modern classic).  A friend had written his name inside the cover and even dated it: August 1976, the month I returned to New York City from years of R&R on the West Coast.  Whether I borrowed it and never returned it or he gave it to me neither of us now remembers, but Ecotopia, the visionary novel 25 publishers rejected before Ernest Callenbach published it himself in 1975, was still there ready to be read again a lifetime later.

Callenbach once called that book “my bet with the future,” and in publishing terms it would prove a pure winner.  To date it has sold nearly a million copies and been translated into many languages.  On second look, it proved to be a book not only ahead of its time but (sadly) of ours as well.  For me, it was a unique rereading experience, in part because every page of that original edition came off in my hands as I turned it.  How appropriate to finish Ecotopia with a loose-leaf pile of paper in a New York City where paper can now be recycled and so returned to the elements.

Callenbach would have appreciated that.  After all, his novel, about how Washington, Oregon, and Northern California seceded from the union in 1979 in the midst of a terrible economic crisis, creating an environmentally sound, stable-state, eco-sustainable country, hasn’t stumbled at all.  It’s we who have stumbled.  His vision of a land that banned the internal combustion engine and the car culture that went with it, turned in oil for solar power (and other inventive forms of alternative energy), recycled everything, grew its food locally and cleanly, and in the process created clean skies, rivers, and forests (as well as a host of new relationships, political, social, and sexual) remains amazingly lively, and somehow almost imaginable — an approximation, that is, of the country we don’t have but should or even could have.

Callenbach’s imagination was prodigious.  Back in 1975, he conjured up something like C-SPAN and something like the cell phone, among many ingenious inventions on the page.  Ecotopia remains a thoroughly winning book and a remarkable feat of the imagination, even if, in the present American context, the author also dreamed of certain things that do now seem painfully utopian, like a society with relative income equality.

“Chick” — as he was known, thanks, it turns out, to the chickens his father raised in Appalachian central Pennsylvania in his childhood — was, like me, an editor all his life.  He founded the prestigious magazine Film Quarterly in 1958.  In the late 1970s, I worked with him and his wife, Christine Leefeldt, on a book of theirs, The Art of Friendship.  He also wrote a successor volume to Ecotopia (even if billed as a prequel), Ecotopia Emerging.  And as he points out in his last piece, today’s [tomorrow's, Ed.] TomDispatch post, he, too, has now been recycled.  He died of cancer on April 16th at the age of 83.

Just days later, his long-time literary agent Richard Kahlenberg wrote me that Chick had left a final document on his computer, something he had been preparing in the months before he knew he would die, and asked if TomDispatch would run it.  Indeed, we would.  It’s not often that you hear words almost literally from beyond the grave — and eloquent ones at that, calling on all Ecotopians, converted or prospective, to consider the dark times ahead.  Losing Chick’s voice and his presence is saddening.  His words remain, however, as do his books, as does the possibility of some version of the better world he once imagined for us all. Tom

Let’s find out a bit more about ‘Chick’ ahead of his words tomorrow.

This is the Wikipedia entry from which I quote:

Born April 3, 1929 in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, he attended the University of Chicago, where he was drawn into the then ‘new wave’ of serious attention to film as an art form. After six months in Paris at the Sorbonne, watching four films a day, he returned to Chicago and earned a Master’s degree in English and Communications.

Callenbach then moved to California. From 1955 to 1991, he was on the staff of the University of California Press (Berkeley). A general copywriter for a number of years, he edited the Press’s Film Quarterly from 1958 until 1991. He also occasionally taught film courses at U.C. and at San Francisco State University.

For many years Callenbach edited the Natural History Guides at the U.C. Press. He began to take environmental issues and their connections to human value systems, social patterns, and lifestyles just as seriously as he had taken film. He was heavily influenced by Edward Abbey. He is therefore known as an author of green books, namely as author of the ecological utopias Ecotopia (1975) and Ecotopia Emerging (1981). (While his novel popularized the term “ecotopia,” it was actually coined by the ethnographer E. L. Anderson.)

In terms of concepts of human involvement with the ecology, as well as some of the economic and social concepts, the Ecotopia books are related to what is known as the sustainability movement. Callenbach’s Ecotopian concept is not “Luddite” — he does not reject high technology, but rather his fictional society shows a conscious selectivity about technology. As an example, with its emphasis on personal rather than impersonal interaction, Callenbach’s Ecotopian society anticipates the development and liberal usage of videoconferencing.

Indeed, for all his involvement with print publications, Callenbach remained quite interested in visual media. Aspects of his book Ecotopia in some ways anticipated “reality TV” — which emerged into recognition, and was given a label as a genre, 20 or more years later — because in the story the daily life of the legislature and some of that of the judicial courts is televised in this fictional society, and televised debates (including technical debates concerning ecological problems) met a need and desire among citizens.

Callenbach has been a part of the circle of West Coast technologists, architects, social thinkers, and scientists which has included such luminaries as Ursula K. Le Guin, Starhawk (Miriam Simos), Sim Van der Ryn, Peter Calthorpe, Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, J. Baldwin, and John Todd. As with a number of these others, he has been a speaker, discussion panellist, and essayist.

Here is Chick’s website which is worth a careful peruse including his biographical details and some of his talks.

Finally, there are a number of good videos featuring Ernest Callenbach’s visionary ideas and one of his longer ones will be included tomorrow.

To close today’s Post let me leave you with this.

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF MOTHER EARTH
by Ernest Callenbach

I. Thou shall love and honor the Earth for it blesses thy life and governs thy survival.
II. Thou shall keep each day sacred to the Earth and celebrate the turning of its seasons.
III. Thou shall not hold thyself above other living things nor drive them to extinction.
IV. Thou shall give thanks for thy food, to the creatures and plants that nourish thee.
V. Thou shall educate thy offspring for multitudes of people are a blessing unto the Earth when we live in harmony.
VI. Thou shall not kill, nor waste Earth’s riches upon weapons of war.
VII. Thou shall not pursue profit at the Earth’s expense but strive to restore its damaged majesty.
VIII. Thou shall not hide from thyself or others the consequences of thy actions upon the Earth.
IX. Thou shall not steal from future generations by impoverishing or poisoning the Earth.
X. Thou shall consume material goods in moderation so all may share the Earth’s bounty.

Music: Marcome, “All Alone”
http://www.marcome.com

Free speech isn’t always free!

Recently over at the Blog Climate Sight, Kate wrote a Post about the antics of the group known as the  Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based PR group that denies the existence of human-caused climate change. Kate has given me permission to reproduce her post in full.

Stalin believed in gravity. Do you?

May 9, 2012 by climatesight

Here’s a classy way to slam people you disagree with: compare them to terrorists, dictators, and mass murderers.

Such was the focus of a recent billboard campaign by the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, a PR group that denies the existence of human-caused climate change. The only billboard that was actually displayed featured Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) and read, “I still believe in global warming. Do you?”

The message is clear: if a monster believes something, citizens of good moral standing should believe exactly the opposite. The Internet was quick to ridicule this philosophy, with parodies such as the following:

Similar billboards featuring Charles Manson and Fidel Castro were planned, but never publicly displayed. Heartland also considered putting Osama bin Laden on a future billboard. On their website, they attempted to justify this campaign:

The people who still believe in man-made global warming are mostly on the radical fringe of society. This is why the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.

Given that a majority of Americans accept global warming, people did not take kindly to this campaign. Public outcry and negative media coverage led Heartland to cancel the project after 24 hours. However, their statementshowed little remorse:

We do not apologize for running the ad, and we will continue to experiment with ways to communicate the ‘realist’ message on the climate.

Even though the campaign has been cancelled, the Heartland Institute continues to suffer financial repercussions. Dozens of corporate donors, including State Farm Insurance and drinks firm Diego (which owns Guiness and Smirnoff) have ended their support as a direct result of this campaign. Earlier in the year, Heartland lost financial backing from General Motors after internal documents exposed some of the group’s projects, particularly the development of an alternative curriculum to teach K-12 students that global warming is fake.

Will they recover from this failed campaign? Given Heartland’s reliance on donations, their prospects look poor. It seems that the Heartland Institute, previously one of the most influential mouthpieces for climate change denial, is going out with a bang.

My prayer is that the aforementioned institute goes out, not with a bang, but with the sound of whimpering!  Because the right of free speech is abused and shamed by such disgraceful actions.  Well done, Kate.

Modern medical practices raise questions about healing.

I am motivated to write today’s Post because a week ago, last Tuesday 24th April, I went to see my local doctor here in Payson.  I don’t want to rabbit on too much about that doctor’s appointment because that isn’t the thrust of this ‘essay’.  But let me just say this about that experience on the 24th, because it’s relevant to what I’m trying to convey.

A few years back, I was diagnosed with vestibular migraine but the reason for going to see the doctor was motivated by the realisation that over the last few months my memory was getting a little sporadic, for want of a more technical description!  But I felt that the vestibular migraine, that I still suffer from, was relevant to my assessment.  I should further add that the health clinic where this doctor is based have only seen me once before, for something minor.  In other words, they do not have a good understanding of me from a medical perspective.

So I enter the doctor’s room and in comes the medical assistant with her wireless-connected laptop.   Her fingers are poised to enter details.

I said, “Before we get going on my memory, can I talk about my vestibular migraine?“

The assistant replied, “Well I’m on the memory page, not the migraine page.  Which do you want to talk about?“

I sighed and indicated that she should ask me questions about my memory!

Ergo, this human that wanted to be seen as a human had to conform to the relevant medical label!

So with this still reverberating inside me, I was positively tuned to something recently published by Michele of Dogkisses Blog.  It was a very recent post called Green Healing – Horticultural Notes.  Let me ‘borrow’ a few words from that Post.

We always begin Horticulture Therapy by gathering in a circle to share plant news.  This time together is good, interesting and takes us in many directions.  We often visit our past of garden or plant memories and look to the future with hopeful or creative garden dreams and ideas.

Last week I arrived just in time to hear another participant sharing his idea for a creative planting container.  The young man was more engaged than usual and when he smiled and became excited about what plants to choose and where he would put his new container, I felt like I saw the heart of horticulture therapy.

I like to call these times Healing Happenings, which are moments in time when hope or happiness fills my heart and mind.  I’m not talking about everything being right or all problems being fixed.  I’m talking about a little piece of time when worry and stress take a back seat and the beauty of life emerges.

This got me thinking.  Is there a schism these days in modern medicine between curing and healing?  Have we created a situation where we rely on chemical and pharmaceutical technology to find a whole range of cures but, in parallel, is medicine losing sight of the need for healing?  Maybe some would argue that such a distinction is irrelevant; if one is sick then one is very needy for a cure.  But, overall, perhaps the evidence of better and better healing in our societies is pretty hard to find.    Take this that I read recently,

There is a growing epidemic of obesity, type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and predictions that 15,000,000 people in the United States alone will have Alzheimer’s Disease by the year 2050.

Back to Dogkisses blog,

Personally, ‘healing happenings’ include moments when I enjoy what I imagine most Mothers do, which is seeing our children, no matter what age they are, smile and be happy.  They’re also moments when I feel that my family will be okay.

There is always hope in a garden.  We hope it grows.  We hope it rains.  We hope to have a good harvest of food or lively blooming flowers that paint our world pretty.   I’m sure hope is part of why it feels good to work in a garden, whether you have a large field or a modest arrangement of containers on your porch.  Each day you have hope.

“When I’m in my garden, life’s troubles crumble away with the rich black soil between my fingers. I’m fully in my body, out of my head, my worries banished. My garden is my church, my time there sacred.”  (Garden your troubles away, by Amy Karon, PsycheScoop).

Here’s what I wrote as a comment to DK’s Post,

You using the phrase ‘green healing’ touches on the essence on what we all need to do to ‘survive’ in this crazy world. And, of course, I’m using the word ‘survive’ in a mental rather than physical sense.

It reminds me of the odd moments during the day when I hug one of the dogs and really give in to the feeling; almost as though the dog and I recognise it could be the very last hug in our lives. The emotional intimacy that flows from that private bonding across the two different (very different!) species is truly breath-taking!

So forgive my meanderings today but you may share my fear that by losing touch of the very powerful curative aspects of communing with nature, whether it be a garden, a walk in the woods, a swim in the sea or the warmth of an animal body, we may be missing real healing.  As Michele wrote, “Each day you have hope.”  Without hope there is nothing left.

A valuable contribution from a reader.

Yesterday, I posted an item built around a visit by Prof.  Nicole Darnall, ASU, outlining the practical ways that a society can respond to the present challenges.

That post prompted a email to me from a Environmental Specialist who did not have the authority to speak publicly.  Nonetheless, it seems perfectly valid to voice those views, as follows:

Dear Mr. Handover:

I found your posting via a Google alert I’ve set up. I like your idea of trying to pull the high-flying concept of saving the planet down to a local level by referencing analysis from a local expert.

But I wonder whether you chose the right expert; e.g., if Dr. Darnall’s forecast is correct, then her recommendation of Meatless Mondays won’t go far and fast enough. It can’t even be said to be a good start — as its very name locks people into thinking that just one meatless day suffices. In fact, no consumer product is ever marketed by asking consumers to use it just one day a week; e.g., very little Pepsi-Cola would be sold by prodding consumers to drink it one day a week, conceding that Coca-Cola remains the drink of choice the rest of the week. A City University of London prof might be making more sense when he recommends one meat day per week, see Eat meat on feast days only to fight obesity, says adviser.

Producing meat is harmful for the environment as growing animals requires energy and water, and cows produce the greenhouse gas methane Photo: Christopher Jones

Preceding Dr. Darnall’s recommendation is her assessment, which states that methane has 21 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide.  But climate authorities now say methane has 25 times the effect of CO2 over a 100-year timeframe and 72 over a 20-year timeframe — which many use because methane’s half-life in the atmosphere is only about 10 years — while others use even higher figures;  e.g., see Cornell Gas Study Stirs Heated Debate

A study examining the greenhouse impacts of methane leaks in the unconventional natural gas industry has proved highly controversial.

Below you can see I’ve addressed some even more basic points to Dr. Darnall directly;  I haven’t yet had any reply.

The Environmental Specialist also included some important and pertinent points that had been sent to Dr. Darnall but I have decided to delay including that ‘letter’ for a short while in the hope that Dr. Darnall will reply.  But read the items that are linked to above.

Footnote.

Do also read the comments that came in to yesterday’s Post.

Brilliant mathematics without the need for a calculator!

Thanks to the bottomless resources of the Internet, I could quickly find a relevant quote or two to open up today’s Post.  Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was reputed to have said, “Perfect numbers like perfect men are very rare.“

Sorry, couldn’t resist that!  It wasn’t the quote relevant to this essay but it was too good to miss.  (Descartes was also the person who coined the phrase: I think therefore I am!)

 The quote that I thought was relevant was this one from Descartes, “With me everything turns into mathematics.”  Well until I read something recently on the Big Think website I would have been certain that the emotions, such as happiness, were well beyond reach of the logical power of mathematics.  I was wrong!

Big Think recently reported on a new book from Mr. Chip Conley called Emotional Equations where he …….,

….. argues (against Einstein, as it happens), that everything that counts can and ought to be counted. A hotelier by trade, he says that GDP and the bottom line are blunt instruments for measuring the health of a society or a business. After the dot.com crash of 2001, and a visit to the Buddhist nation of Bhutan, which has a “Gross National Happiness” index, Conley and his team decided to create indices for measuring the well-being of their employees and customers.

And a paragraph later continues,

In Emotional Equations, Conley takes the mathematics of human happiness a step further, creating simple formulas like anxiety = uncertainty x powerlessness, which, when used systematically, he says, can give individuals and organizations a concrete method for addressing the human needs that drive them.

The description of the book on the Amazon website is thus,

Mr Chip Conley

Using brilliantly simple math that illuminates universal emotional truths, Emotional Equations crystallizes some of life’s toughest challenges into manageable facets that readers can see clearly—and bits they can control. Popular motivational speaker and bestselling author Chip Conley has created an exciting, new, immediately accessible visual lexicon for mastering the age of uncertainty. Making mathematics out of emotions may seem a counterintuitive idea, but it’s an inspiring and incredibly effective one in Chip Conley’s hands. When Conley, dynamic author of the bestselling Peak, suffered a series of tragedies, he began using what he came to call “Emotional Equations” (like Joy = Love – Fear) to help him focus on the variables in life that he could deal with, rather than ruminating on the unchangeable constants he couldn’t, like the bad economy, death, and taxes. Now this award-winning entrepreneur shares his amazing new self-help paradigm with the rest of us. Emotional Equations offers an immediately understandable means of identifying the elements in our lives that we can change, those we can’t, and how they interact to create the emotions that define us and can help or hurt our progress through life. Equations like “Despair = Suffering – Meaning” and “Happiness = Wanting What You Have/Having What You Want” (Which Chip presented at the prestigious TED conference) have been reviewed for mathematical and psychological accuracy by experts. Conley shows how to solve them through life examples and stories of inspiring people and role models who have worked them through in their own lives. In these turbulent times, when so many are trying to become “superhuman” to deal with our own and the world’s problems, Emotional Equations arms readers with effective formulas for becoming super human beings.

So it all seems not quite so daft as one might initially guess.  Indeed, settle down for twenty minutes and watch Chip eloquently explain his ideas captured at that TED Conference referred to above.

There’s also an audio conversation with Mr. Conley that you can download free from here.

Finally, let me close with yet another quote from Rene Descartes, “It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.” Amen to that!

Maybe there’s a new twist to that rather derogatory phrase!

For the life of me, I can’t remember how this story came to my ‘in-box’ but most likely it was from my Big Think subscription.  But I do know that the story has spread like wild-fire (poor choice of simile for Arizona!) and not without good reason.

Here’s how it was promoted on Science Daily,

Benefits of Taking Your Dog to Work May Not Be Far-Fetched

Man’s best friend may make a positive difference in the workplace by reducing stress and making the job more satisfying for other employees, according to a Virginia Commonwealth University study.

Stress is a major contributor to employee absenteeism, morale and burnout and results in significant loss of productivity and resources. But a preliminary study, published in the March issue of the International Journal of Workplace Health Management, found that dogs in the workplace may buffer the impact of stress during the workday for their owners and make the job more satisfying for those with whom they come into contact.

The VCU researchers compared employees who bring their dogs to work, employees who do not bring their dogs to work and employees without pets in the areas of stress, job satisfaction, organizational commitment and support.

Then over at the New York Daily News, it was presented thus,

Bring your dog to work to lower stress; Companies that allow pooches have happier workers

Amazon, Ben & Jerry’s and Zynga all have pup-friendly policies

A new study supports the stress-reducing benefits of bringing your pooch to work — to play with, look at, and pet while working.

According to a Virginia Commonwealth University study, having a dog at work not only reduces the owners’ stress level but also increased the level of job satisfaction for other employees as well. The study, announced Thursday, was published in the International Journal of Workplace Health Management.

“Dogs in the workplace can make a positive difference,” said head researcher Randolph T. Barker. “The differences in perceived stress between days the dog was present and absent were significant. The employees as a whole had higher job satisfaction than industry norms.”

Here’s a great example.  The photograph below,

One hand for the desk and one for the dog!

comes from the website of Interior Design Hound (seriously) where the by-line is Good Design with a Canine Twist! (No, I’m not making it up!)

Anyway, back to that NY Daily News item,

The study took place at Replacements Ltd, a service-manufacturing-retail company located in North Carolina, which employs approximately 550 people. The company has a dog friendly policy, similar to other  companies such as Amazon, Ben & Jerry’s and Zynga, according to CBS News, with around 20 to 30 dogs romping through the office every day. The study took place over a period of one work week, and subjects completing both surveys and saliva samples to measure stress levels.

According to The Humane Society of the United States, there are numerous benefits to having dogs at work, including improved staff morale, worker productivity, and camaraderie among employees.

Numerous studies have shown that having a pet is a good investment for your health. One study found that having a pet lowered your risk factors for heart disease, and another found that dogs encourage more consistent walking and exercise.

Seems pretty obvious to me.

Another tough day at the office!

Mind you, going back to the metaphorical ‘having a dog of a day‘ here’s one woman who probably wished she hadn’t got out of bed that morning,

Woman has a dog of a day in court

Sydney – If you have a phobia about dogs and hurt yourself running away from one, is it your own fault or should the owner of the dog pay compensation?

An Australian judge on Wednesday ruled against a woman who had put that case to him and ordered her to pay substantial legal costs.

Mileva Novakovic took her brother, Michael Stekovic, and his wife to the New South Wales Court of Appeal to try to overturn a lower court verdict that found they were not liable for injuries she sustained at his house in 2008.

Novakovic slipped and fell in a panic over finding a dog in their lounge room. She admitted to a fear of dogs and said she was compelled to run despite Cougar, a mastiff, showing no aggression towards her.

Very scary!