Cairns #51
Beginning of the Long Nights, 2007
The mission of H.O.P.E. is to turn the prow of our entropyship, the Earth,
back upstream so that Earth’s evolving consciousness may explore the
headwaters of the Universe for billions of years to come. The work of H.O.P.E.
is to make visible the larger relationships we live within - relationships that
inspire visions of wonder and works of hope.
Into
the Wild
I went to see Sean Penn’s
“Into the Wild” with some trepidation and reservation but came out loving
it. If you like the spirit of
But beyond the form is the
subject of the movie. I’ve been reflecting on that a lot because my early
manhood was very similar to that of Chris in the movie except he starved to
death and I didn’t. Apparently, much of the response to the original book
revolved around whether Chris is “heroic” or an arrogant, foolhardy
incompetent. I believe this focus on judging a personality misses the main
point. Throughout history, many individuals have gone “on the loose”. What
is the nature of that experience? Why do people do it? These questions bring up
several, independent themes, all of which need to be acknowledged.
The first is the ecstasy of being
footloose, of being free/responsible to choose every single action one does
throughout the days. Shall I lay in the tent and sleep all day or read a book or
climb that mountain or maybe should I head to
Second is the nature of food.
Probably the most profound development in human history was the change from
hunter/gatherers to industrial agriculture. It has altered the landscape,
altered the proportions of human life to non-human life, altered our
relationship with the land and each other. In one sense, it has made us far more
free - a few hours of my labor can translate into enough food to allow me to go
roaming in the
The third, fourth, and fifth
strand sort of snarl together in a way that is hard to untangle. Speaking from
personal experience, there is more than the ecstasy of roaming that draws young
people (especially men) out into the wild (in many senses of that word). I think
part of it is genetic. In a lot of species, the young (especially males) need to
leave their home territory and go find a vacant territory. This is a very
dangerous time and many die. But just as the parents of every salmon were
genetically programmed to go into fresh water and their death in order to mate,
so we might be genetically programmed to accept the need to go out in search.
Some gene kicks in somewhere in youth and produces some hormone that
psychologically insulates the “potential victim” from the paralyzing
awareness of imminent death lurking - insulates them with an incredible sense of
adventurous invulnerability/immortality that drives parents crazy.
It’s the siren song of the
edge. If you go over the edge, you die. But if you hang out along the edge, you
just might come upon a place where, with a jump across, you will land in a vast,
uninhabited territory and you will be the sire of millions of its future
inhabitants. The siren song of the edge calls us out onto adventures in which we
seek to establish autonomy, confidence, and dominance.
Then there is the universal myth
of the hero journey and Joseph Campbell’s interpretation that all of us have
within us this psychological/spiritual calling to complete a quest, the goal of
which is to find some gift from beyond, unique to us, and bring it back for the
enrichment of our people. I reflect back on my roaming days with that
perspective.
Couple this with our culture’s
lack of puberty rites, initiation, purpose. Getting your driver’s license,
graduating from high school/college, being able to drink are psychologically
fairly shallow. When does a boy become a man? A sense of manhood doesn’t come;
it must be earned, created. Some of our sub-cultures define and support this
transition but the mainstream culture does not. I would speculate that it
doesn’t (in part) because it doesn’t want autonomous, self-confident men. It
wants subservient workers, people who will go along with the system. So the boys
age into their twenties and their jobs but without a sense of connection to
their life force, without a sense of walking on one’s Own life path.
For at least all these reasons,
young people go straying, finding something in that roaming they would otherwise
not experience.
Chrysalis
Update
The county board of supervisors
unanimously approved the first of three steps that lead to building permits on
Parkville Ranch. The next step requires a site plan which we hope to finish
sometime in December. We are collaborating with our local resource conservation
district to develop ways to fund a conservation easement and a mangagement
council for the ranch. The main challenge remains funding for building the
school. We currently have enough money to get the infrastructure and three used
modular classrooms on site but not enough to get the entire school on site. But
it has to happen because the site is so perfect. Everytime we take kids on field
trips there, I have visions of what is possible.
Green
School Summit
I attended the Green School
Summit in Pasadena Dec. 4-6. I went to learn more to help us develop our school
in a way appropriate to the spirit and site of Parkville Ranch. The summit did
that plus more. I share some of it below.
California has decided that
global warming is real and it is imperative that we change course immediately
and mindfully. Apparently, 70% of America's energy consumption is in buildings.
This percentage includes more than heating, cooling, lighting requirements. It
also includes all the mining, harvesting, manufacturing, transportation, and
assembly of materials to construct the buildings. All the energy to maintain.
All the energy to tear down and deal with the end products. Public schools
represent a very large percentage of the buildings state governments fund. So
California has taken the lead in “greening” school buildings. People
attended from beyond California and reported that California was light-years
ahead of where they were from. A greater diversity of skills were there than I
anticipated and an amazing percentage of them were there in a learning mode. For
example, there were lots of architects there. Some of them were there as
presenters/vendors but there were also a lot there to learn how to green their
designs and all of them were talking among themselves and with other vendors.
There were financial institutions and public utilities and high-level
governmental people present and lots of industry vendors representing a diverse
cross-section of all the ways to “green” a school.
The conference went beyond making
schools more energy-efficient to a deeper level of revisioning buildings from a
“cradle to cradle” perspective. It's like switching to seeing our towns as
forests with generation after generation of buildings arising, maturing, and
dying to be replaced with new ones. From a forest perspective, trees draw from
nutrient pools and decompose back into them. So too with buildings. An
interesting example of this point of view was part of one presentation where an
architect (with an EPA grant to go way in-depth) was analyzing various building
materials. Aluminum requires a high amount of energy per pound to produce.
Concrete requires a very low amount of energy per pound to produce. However, the
typical building uses not many pounds of aluminum and many, many pounds of
concrete so most of the energy going into the building is represented by
concrete. Then you look at the “death” of the building. Aluminum can be
pulled out and recycled for far less energy than was required in its initial
production. Concrete, on the other hand, is just a heavy, pulverized tonnage of
rebar and concrete that just gets dumped in places. So how do we redesign the
utilization of concrete so that concrete can be reused? That kind of vision and
thinking underlay the summit.
This kind of thinking has led to
two similar, overlapping evaluation systems for buildings: LEED and CHPS
(Coalition for High-Performing Schools). Building a LEED-certified building is a
way for an organization to demonstrate their green commitment and designing a
school with a high CHPS score is a way to receive more state-funding so that is
part of the reason the architects were at the summit. Master these techniques if
you want to be on the thriving, cutting-edge of your profession. Two of the
goals of these standards are grid neutrality (producing as much electricity as
you consume) and carbon neutrality (the distant promised land). Looking over
these standards stretches one's mind as to what “green schools” can mean.
What happens to the rain that falls on the school? Does it contribute to
stormwater runoff and pollution or is it somehow mindfully retained for a higher
use? Is the school built with materials made from virgin or recycled resources?
Again, think of a school as part of a forest and nutrients and energy are
flowing through. Do they flow in a way that depletes the ecosystem or sustains
and even uplifts it? From this point of view, a “green school” can be the
highest architectural expression of green; imagine a school that is carbon
neutral, that actually produces more electricity than it uses, AND uplifts the
next generations of minds to be capable of developing iteratively wiser
generations. What a building! That is our goal for Parkville.
The
Gradient of Wealth and the Invisible Hand
In the physical world, the flow
of water creates a stream gradient that erodes and nourishes the land into
characteristic landscapes. In the same way, the flow of wealth through human
society has the power to organize and shape many attributes of culture. One of
the most important feature of this gradient of wealth is how moving up or down
within it changes one’s experience. This change of experience is one of the
main allures for acquiring wealth. However, the change happens in more ways than
we are usually aware of. The most important change is that “moving up”
brings us into contact with a new group of people - people associated with more
money - and further away from many of those people we associated with before.
However, once things readjust
after we’ve moved up, we will experience ourselves as still somewhere in the
middle. This is unavoidable because wealth is a gradient. You will always be
surrounded by people with more money and with less money. You will never get to
the top. Any economic desire based on getting “to the top” will be
insatiable. However, there is a very strong chance that as you move up, you will
meet more people for whom the possession of wealth is important to their
self-image. This is because these people are more likely to invest more of their
life energy to accumulating wealth and so they concentrate higher in the
gradient.
Just as hiking up a watershed can
lead to many headwaters, so there are many paths by which one can move up the
gradient of wealth. One of these paths is the one shaped by people for whom
wealth is very aggressively sought. I’ve met these kinds of people only a few
times but their aggression was so strong that within minutes I realized that for
me, no amount of money could compensate for becoming like that. (To hear this
mentality, watch Enron: Smartest Guys in
the Room and listen to the voice recordings of some of their traders during
the California energy “crisis”.) What happens to one as one moves up within
that particular channel of the gradient of wealth? For them, the world is like a
Monopoly game and they are trying to get control of as much of the property and
money as possible. Pursuing this “game” brings them into association with
others who see and behave in the same way so that this game becomes their
reality. One emergent part of the game is aggressively using your wealth to
alter government operations in ways that steer more wealth to you. There are
abundant opportunities for this because these people are so aggressively
centered on gaining wealth that sustainable societies have created barriers to
limit the damage from their greed. (Child labor laws, environmental regulations,
truth in advertising laws) Like goats pushing against fences, so these people
will push with their money against regulations that limit their profits. For
them, it’s a simple economic calculus quite independent of any philosophical
intent. If a two million dollar investment in lobbying can alter money flows to
create a three million dollar profit, then that is a 50% return on your money -
a solid investment. As the gradient of wealth draws these people together, they
will develop ever more ways to create more opportunities for profit. One of the
things that emerges is reverential references to Adam Smith’s “invisible
hand”.
I want to talk about that
“invisible hand” by backing up first and talking about stream dynamics. If
the stream is steep, the water speeds up, acquiring sufficient power to erode
the streambed and make it less steep. If the stream is too “flat”, the water
slows down and deposits its load, raising the streambed, making it steeper.
Steep sections wear down; flat sections steepen until a mature equilibrium
gradually develops that unites all the sections of the stream - from headwaters
to the mouth - into one mathematical curve/shape. I remember the first time I
read about this in a college geology textbook; I thought this was so cool - an
internal feedback mechanism within
water and slope that dance them to a certain predictable shape - stable and
sustainable. I feel beauty and proportion within this dance - a rightness that
lies beyond myself. Like God at his creation, I look upon stream dynamics and
find it good. It’s one of the reasons I love playing with flowing water.
Adam Smith, the early economist,
was one of our first “systems thinkers”. He contemplated supply and demand
and discerned a marvelous wisdom within the market system. He used the image of
“an invisible hand” to convey how a pricing system that was in alignment
with reality could emerge from millions of individual transactions. Dynamic
equilibrium within a constantly changing world is always a marvelous thing. It
delights the mind and spirit whenever encountered with understanding. Others
have found similar marvel in the balance between predator and prey or a
governmental system of checks and balances or the way the body maintains
homeostasis. I can easily empathize with someone for whom the free market was
their first encounter with dynamic equilibrium. Just like I love going out in
the rainy fields, so I can imagine them roaming about the fields of commerce
altering flows and watching things accumulate in their favor.
In my book, I describe a helium
balloon on a string coming to rest at that oscillating equilibrium point where
the weight of the string balances the lift in the balloon. Push the balloon down
and more of the string lies on the ground so that less string is pulling down on
the balloon and the balloon will begin to rise. But as its momentum carries it
past the equilibrium point, more string is lifted into the air than the
balloon’s lift can counter and the balloon settles back down. The balloon is a
simple example of dynamic equilibrium, of an invisible hand bringing the balloon
to just the right height. I can understand Adam Smith’s delight in his
“invisible hand”. However, the delight he discovered more than two hundred
years ago must be augmented with the development of systems thinking since then.
There is nothing sacrosanct about any particular height at which the balloon
comes into equilibrium. If you come back the next day, the balloon might be only
an inch above the table because some of the helium leaked out. Or if you replace
the string with lightweight fishing line, the balloon will rise higher.
Similarly, there is nothing
sacrosanct about supply and demand. The marvelous thing about dynamic
equilibrium is that it responds to all aspects of reality. In stream
equilibrium, the hardness of bedrock, the vegetative cover, the rate of tectonic
uplift all influence the dynamic equilibrium. So with supply and demand. If a
significant group of people boycott a product, that is part of supply and
demand. If the California Supreme Court declares hydraulic mining a public
nuisance and shuts the industry down, that is part of the dynamic equilibrium.
The French mob guillotining the king and queen is part of the dynamic
equilibrium. A revolutionary government nationalizing an industry is part of the
dynamic equilibrium.
Adam Smith’s invisible hand has
been used to duck all ethical concerns and moral responsibility. The invisible
hand frees me from being my brother’s keeper. I best serve the common good by
aggressively pursuing my self-interest. The invisible hand provides the cultural
cover to smother moral outrage as plunderers rise up that particular channel of
the gradient of wealth. Why was there no outcry at the predatory sub-prime
mortgage lending practices? Because people saw a way to get wealthy at other’s
expense and the “invisible hand” provided a way to draw an ethical curtain
around the whole operation.
It’s amazing how entrenched
this misinterpretation is because history is full of examples where (a)
plunderers use the “free market” to crash a system, causing systemic damage
far, far greater than their short-term personal profit and (b) the moment one of
these plunderers get caught in the crash, they will run to the government (which
is theoretically supposed to keep its hands off and let the free market do
whatever it is going to do) and ask for some form of intervention that will
protect them from their personal loss. We’ve got to laugh/protest this
greed-based interpretation of Adam Smith out of our culture’s assumptions. A
wide chasm exists between clever plundering and sustainable wisdom.
An example of the tension between
the two is the function of money. From a societal and governmental point of
view, the function of money is to create a simple, reliable medium of exchange
so resources and new ideas can flow easily throughout the society. But from
another point of view, money is like Monopoly money; winning it all is the goal
of the game. However, as money gets concentrated, its social function of
providing a medium of exchange breaks down. If someone “wins” the game by
getting all the money, the money becomes devalued because the society will have
to come up with some other medium of exchange. Society and the govenment has a
strong interest in keeping the money spread out enough to serve in this
capacity.
So one thing that emerges from
the gradient of wealth is a dynamic equilibrium between a concentration of
people with little ethical ballast who are extremely aggressive financially and
a variety of institutions, especially government, that keep their greed in
check. But the dynamic equilibrium is changeable; no particular position is
sacrosanct. What I see currently is concentrated wealth warping the government
to create more concentrated wealth that gives it even more power to warp the
government. One example of this is the conflict of interest I see inherent in
our corporate media.
The way a candidate comes across
in the media is usually a very significant factor in that candidate’s success.
A candidate has two ways to get his/her message through the media to the public,
advertising and news. In a media company’s balance sheet, the advertising part
is revenue and the news part is an expense. This creates a massive conflict of
interest, tempting the media’s news departments to portray more favorably
those candidates that can supply more advertising revenue. A frequent way this
plays out is for the media to label as the “major candidates” those
candidates who raise more money - independent of the source. The “minor”
candidates are relegated to less news air time and questions like “why do you
bother staying in the race? Aren’t you just being a spoiler?” This borders
on extortion.
During these months before the
first primaries, I feel a concerted media effort to declare front-runners based
largely on access to money. This creates a system in which money has first
chance to select who the candidates should be. As access to money becomes more
critical to success, candidates must do more of the bidding of those with the
money.
One of the consequences of these
feedback loops involving money, media, and a politics catering to greed is that
more and more money is being “invested” in creating what I call
“trances” - a skewing of our sense of reality so that we see illusions and
accept conditions we would never tolerate if we were awake. (The purported
morality of the “invisible hand” is used in this way.)
One example of generating a
trance is the carton of matches we bought off the supermarket shelves in 2004.
It was packaged with an American Presidents theme with a drawing of Abraham
Lincoln. Each book had a predominantly red cover with blue and white lettering
announcing the presidential theme on the back and on the front was a drawing of
a different American president with his name below. Eventually we realized that
the carton contained only a few presidents: Lincoln, McKinley, Theodore
Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and George W. Bush. Half the matchbooks were of Bush. The
others were all Republican presidents who were known for victorious military
leadership. We bought the carton in 2004, during the presidential campaign.
Associating Bush’s face and name with victorious Republicans is invisible
genius. Nothing is overtly stated so no resistance is generated. The user just
subconsciously keeps seeing Bush’s face associated with Lincoln and Teddy
Roosevelt. No campaign contribution was required or recorded. The supermarkets
carrying the matches were probably unaware they were carrying campaign
propaganda. That’s one small example of the intentional efforts to lull us
into trances. Though I acknowledge the genius behind those match covers, I also
grieve at the waste of talent, of life energy going into the spinning of
trances, whether it be matches or editing global warming out of government
documents. We make the best decisions when we are awake. This leads me to the
next topic.
The
Year Ahead
Bush’s popularity is very low
and there is a widespread attitude that come January, 2009, we will have a
different administration. I want to discuss the possibility of a
“postponement” of the election due to some “national security” reason -
in effect, a coup and the end of constitutional government. I have no interest
in conspiracty theory paranoia. However, we must acknowledge several dark
characteristics of this administration.
First, there is strong evidence
that this administration has been corrupt in the extreme and that the Executive
Branch - along with a rubber stamp congress until at least 2006 - is the main
barrier to investigation and prosecution. If the 2008 election looks as if it
would remove that barrier, all the leaders and organizations affiliated with the
corruption could feel desperate to preserve themselves at any cost to the
country. (Examples: billions of dollars that disappeared in Iraq; possible
connection between Cheney’s energy task force and the invasion of Iraq; the
war profits of Halliburton, Cheney’s company; the billions that were supposed
to go to Katrina reconstruction; firing, possibly even jailing, of people who
refused to disenfranchise Democratic voters,... )
Second, there is ample evidence
of this administration’s willingness to disregard the intent of the law.
(Signing statements by the president, the “outing” of Valerie Plame,
conducting government business on Republican email accounts which can be
deleted, disregarding Geneva Conventions, extraordinary renditions, warrentless
surveillance, suspension of habeas corpus for “enemy combatants” who are
American citizens)
Third is the viciousness with
which they attack those who disagree with them. This characteristic goes beyond
this administration to include many of the congressional Republicans and the
Republican Party. (Swift boating, outing Valerie Plame, the blatant sliming by
Fox News,...)
Fourth is their demonstrated
preference for secrecy. They want to keep as much of the government as invisible
as possible for reasons of “national security”. (Running government business
through GOP emails not subject to laws.) One implication is that if they were
planning a suppressions of elections, they have the procedures in place to keep
it secret.
Fifth is evidence that their
supposed base of the “religious right” is waking up to realize that their
misplaced political fervor helped drag their deepest beliefs into the mud - that
allowed the image of Christ to be associated with torture, kidnappings, greed
and corruption. The church in Europe permanently lost much of its authority as a
result of religious civil wars when it became a participant in something quite
the opposite of its purported message. If this loss of the conservative
Christians is true, then the forces behind this administration will be out of
power for the lifetime of everyone involved. Therefore, they might be tempted to
not let go. Hundreds of billions of dollars have started flowing their way,
thanks to this administration, and that will be lost if there is a political sea
change.
Sixth is the drumbeat for war
with Iran. The fomenting of war strives to create trance states warped enough to
make the trancee wish for and celebrate the death of others. If the drumbeat can
lead many into a war-desirous state, then some tragedy, accidental or created,
could be used to create hysteria and justify a state of emergency that required
the suspension of elections.
Seventh, more and more Americans
will be in economic distress by next year. (Foreclosures, credit card debt,
price of gas, lack of medical insurance) Economic fear can make people more
suggestible to a dark trance of desiring dictatorial leaders (Germany during the
Great Depression).
Finally, there is Blackwater.
This company has skimmed off many of the best-trained soldiers from the military
so they have a military capability stronger than their numbers would suggest. We
have a company not bound by military regulations that wishes to grow into
multi-billion dollar contracts but which could lose it all with a change of
administration. The soldiers they have hired will lose their higher salaries if
the contracts aren’t renewed. Our primary defense against a rogue military
contractor is the military itself but it has much of its power pinned down in
Iraq (and possibly Iran by next year).
These factors in combination
suggest that this administration refusing to step down is, though hopefully
remote, at least a possibility worth considering. One of the trances being spun
is “you are all alone and powerless to change things. Nobody else feels the
way you do so you will look pretty silly if you don’t go along with the
flow.” If that trance were strong when a “postponement” was announced,
people might accept it and resistance would spurt and fizzle. I point out the
possibility so that we can each firmly and publicly say no to it - so that
everybody is aware that they are a communicating part of an overwhelming body
politic that would oppose such a move. One of the most interesting phenomena of
the last twenty five years is the number of governments that have faded away
when several hundred thousand people peacefully stand in the streets to witness
their opposition to that government. We need to bring this possibility up for
mass contemplation with the intention of creating such an overwhelming awareness
within the body politic that a refusal to step down is never even considered.