|
Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
|
|
Fuzzy Signalsextracting the signal from the noise |
To build off of Zaid's Postcards from the Global Food System, it's timely to talk about the latest food scare descending upon Europe. No, it's not BSE or foot and mouth disease. This time it's a seemingly harmless dry ingredient, Sudan 1, a banned carcinogenic red food dye used in making red chili powder, which entered the UK's food system early February. At last count this substance has contaminated over 600 products, and has spread to 14 EU countries. A specific recall was made for Crosse and Black Worcester sauce made by Premier Foods.
The scandal has been unfolding at a few levels. First, there was the initial shock that this illegal dye entered the country undetected, despite apparent warnings over a year ago that it was likely to do so. Given the myriad of go-betweens in the food supply chain, it's not surprising this happened. For instance, we know that about 1-5 tonnes of the red dye was purchased in India from Mumbai-based Gautam Exports by EW Spices in Essex. This importer then sold the dye to East Anglia Food, which sold it to Unbar Rothon, which sold it to Premier Foods, which manufactured the various products using the die, which were in turn distributed to all the major brands in the country, including Tesco, Sainsbury's, Waitrose, Unilever, Heinz, McDonald's and Schweppes. So we're talking at least 6-7+ degrees of separation between origination and end consumer ingestion. This is complicated matrix of distribution is not uncommon in a globalized food system where inputs often come from many different countries at different stages of manufacture, thus making accountability and traceability difficult even with good technology solutions.
The second and most serious cause of concern, however, is just how long it took regulators to respond to this problem, a slowness disturbingly reminiscent of how the UK handled the BSE crisis. After Sudan 1 was detected on Feb 7th, it wasn't until Feb 18th that something was done about it. So people were eating the known carcinogen for a full 10 days before they were notified! The food companies are being careful to distance themselves from any culpability. With the PR spin machine working overtime, they are stressing how quickly they were able to get the untoward products off the shelves, in less than 48 hours of being alerted, thanks to a new supply chain "traceability" process. That's all well and good, but this smells a little too strongly of self-congratulations, not entirely appropriate at times like these.
Then, when I was in London last week, admittedly reading the trashy tabloids, I noticed the topic shift and widen away from just blaming the regulators to also casting dispersions on consumer behaviour. Red dyes, for instance, are critical for making prepared and processed foods look appealing. With an increasingly large group of Britons subsisting almost exclusively on these foods, the scandal is now raising larger questions about the long term health implications about these eating habits and alarming diet trends.
It's a tricky and nuanced debate about where demand comes from and thus were the solutions lie: Are retailers just responding to the unmet needs of people who want convenient access to food in their overly-subscribed lives? Or do retailers create and inflate this demand? The answer is both/and. Yet until recently, the debate has favoured the suppliers' arguments (which is still the case in the US.) Despite the pressures of food industry lobbyists, however, the tide may be shifting in the other direction; it's getting harder and harder for food retailers and producers to avoid culpability, to avoid at least some responsibility in stimulating this demand.
Indeed, the mass availability of prepared foods in the UK is striking and clearly part of the problem. If you walk into a Marks & Spencer or Sainsbury's, it's not unusual to see 60-80% of the retail space devoted to just prepared foods. Craving something green, I frequently struggle to find something not prepackaged or shrink-wrapped, which is a huge contrast from my life in France, living just 100 meters from a farmer's market where most of what I eat comes straight from where it's been grown or killed. (Though France is becoming just as bad as the UK in many areas. See Baguettes-to-go.)
So while not quite "the next tobacco" hype, don't be surprised to see future government interventions encouraging, and even aggressively mandating, suppliers to produce healthier options for people. Consumers might be similarly incentivized, from both their governments and employers, especially once we get more conclusive evidence linking diet with things like an individual's performance. Already the UK government is taking a strong stance on addressing obesity, siding with mounting evidence from organizations like the WHO on the dangers of trans fats in our diets.
So while not immediately life threatening (truth is we don't really know), the Sudan 1 crisis highlights many of the vulnerabilities and unsustainable aspects of our global food system. Scandals like these are also good in raising public awareness about these issues, since so many facets and drivers within the food system are hidden and not transparent, often until well after the fact. Unfortunately, this one crisis is unlikely to change the behaviour of either consumers or producers. There are too many barriers at present preventing this kind of systemic learning. But as I wrote in Getting into the Dirt (which alludes to some of the multifaceted causes why the current system is so unsustainable) these kinds of food shocks and disruptions will increase in frequency and be those "inevitable surprises" we should have seen coming. Yes, a prediction of sorts because the pattern is becoming clear: like BSE, foot and mouth disease, and SARS (which was caused because of poor livestock practices in dense urban areas), this latest Sudan 1 crisis is the thunder signaling a much larger storm on the near horizon unless we make some big course corrections within our global food system.
The good news is that the process of envisioning, innovating, and prototyping new approaches to food production and consumption is well underway, thanks to the work of countless pioneers over the last decades. Large producers and actors like Unilever are waking up to this fact, which is encouraging. Many other manufacturers, however, still remain in deep denial about this, even if parts of these companies (people I know who exist because I've worked with them) are becoming more sensitized to what's ahead. The trick now will be how to scale these experiments, change consumer behavior in a more profound way, and get the existing actors to adapt and change their model in a way that's economic, cultural, and ecologically sustainable. This is why the Sustainable Food Lab is so important. It's one of the few noteworthy efforts I know trying to catalyze this process. So we'll look forward with bated breath to Zaid Hassan's timely reflections working on this project, his Postcards from the Global Food System.
To monitor coverage on the topic, see devoted sections in mainstream papers:The Guardian and The Times, and the FT.
Also check out the excellent Slow Food website and movement.
Paul graciously read my summary and comments of his lecture on The Long Green. He offered a few corrections and comments:
1. The Patagonian indigenous people he mentioned are the Yamana or Yaghan people, not the Yamuna, which is what I mistakenly wrote. (Yamuna is of course the famed river in India.)
2. Paul clarifies that the Natural Capital Institute is "not an offshoot of the book really." I'll try to interview him soon to get a better sense of what the NCI is doing beyond what we read on the website.
3. In describing the proliferation of social entrepreneurship and civil society activity around the world, I said "the trouble is, this movement has no name." Paul thinks this is a good thing, and not a problem at all. Capitalism wasn't named until long after it was a driving force. I agree and regret using that expression. It's only "trouble" for incumbents who don't get what's happening. Experiments are often best done away from the gaze of powerful interests and high expectations -- which is why so many of these big mega projects (say, the MDGs) are doomed to failure.
4. I suggested that it was naive to think that this movement was going to dismantle current power structures. As Paul counters, "Dismantling power is not naive in my opinion; it is an attempt to describe what I see. That could certainly and will most likely change. But I am trying to be anthropologist and see what it is saying and doing."
Fair enough. I see similar things too. I'm part of this process. Yet I'm cautious in my hopes. Given human history and some of the ugly stuff I've seen within many NGOs and activist groups, it's possible that adversarial politics might create an Animal Farm scenario. So my question is how can we avoid this from happening, from this cycle from repeating itself? Paul in his Long Green thesis suggests some clues: the distributed, non-ideological nature of this movement is probably the difference that will make the difference.
5. Paul's prediction is that climate change and resource scarcity in the future will make us homeless. He qualifies my reporting: "I hope I didn't say our homes would be beyond recognition; what I said is that no one's home will be as it is today."
6. Lastly, Paul told me that he's working on a new book, Blessed Unrest, so stay tuned for that.
Social values, it's commonly understood, move at glacial speed.
Yes and no: sometimes they can change astonishingly fast, a fact that many people overlook or downplay. A powerful case in point is the massive and relatively swift shift in attitudes and policy towards slavery in Britain during the late Victorian era. As the popular historian Niall Ferguson puts it in his highly readable Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British Empire and the Lessons for Global Power,
It is not easy to explain so profound a change in the ethics of a people. It used to be argued that slavery was abolished simply because it had ceased to be profitable, but all the evidence points the other way: in fact, it was abolished despite the fact that it was still profitable. What we need to understand, then, is a collective change of heart. Like all such great changes, it had small beginnings.
Small beginnings were necessary because overturning an ancient, almost universal practice was a seemingly impossible challenge. While considered barbaric today, slavery was accepted for most of human history as a necessary, if unsavory, part of the natural order of things. The Bible nor Christian tradition explicitly opposed it (although religious activists would later use the teachings of Jesus to support their cause), and slavery was easily rationalized by logic of the times which favoured a proto-social darwinian explanation for why people should be oppressed, for why the British Empire and white folks were at the top of the social hierarchy. Accidents of birth were justified in this way. (By the by, much of today's right wing economic policy is still highly influenced by these assumptions, however implicit, when it comes to the "have nots".) So given this widespread social mindset and the fact that powerful entrenched economic interests supported the trade, it's truly amazing how quickly and decisively this practice was overturned.
The Story of the Abolition Movement in Two New Books
(Picture to the right, "Slavery Series #1" by Nigerian artist, Chinwe Chukwuogo-Roy, University of Florida : Light and the Art. Online Image. 15 September 2000.)
So how did this happen? Through the efforts of a small but committed group of anti-slavery activists in the late 1700s. Remarkably diverse and equally as colourful, the champions of the abolition movement included religious leaders across dominations -- Quakers, Evangelicals, to Unitarians -- people like Granville Sharp and Zachary Macaulay who lead the Clapham Sect. We also had ex-slaver John Newton, enlightenment thinker Edmund Burke, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the industrialist and pottery king Josiah Wedgwood leading the charge.
Two new books recount this important story: Bury the Chains: The First International Human Rights Movement by Adam Hochschild; and Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial that Led to the End of Human Slavery by Steven Wise.
While I have read neither of these books (yet-- can't wait!) they are being reviewed well and extensively in many periodicals with a good review in The Economist (Feb 3rd, 2005), the back pages of which seem to be the best part of the publication these days. For Hochschild's book also see The Nation and Metacritic.com
The abolitionist movement is so interesting, so relevant today, because this was the birth of the modern NGO movement. They invented a new kind of politics, the politics of the pressure group, and marshaled an impressive groundswell of support which profoundly influenced legislators in Britain and did an end-run around the economic powers-that-be. This was one of "the first great extra Parliamentary agitations" says Ferguson.
These activists were particularly skillful in using the media and employing powerful images and icons to dramatize the horror and inhumanity of slavery. For instance, during an enquiry into the slave trade by the Privy Council in 1788, it was a diagram of a slave ship, the Brookes, showing slaves tightly packed and chained in rows, that started shifting people's perceptions. "For many people, this was perhaps the first time that the reality of the slave trade had impinged upon them: with their own eyes, they could see its cruelty," wrote The Economist reviewer.
(Image used in the Privy Council enquiry 1788)
To get some dates out there, the slave trade was banned in 1807 and eventually made illegal in 1833 within the British Empire. Britain cajoled and strong armed its trading partners -- Spain, Portugal and a reluctant France -- into accepting the prohibitions. Of course, this didn't end the lucrative trade; it continued on for years with about 1.9 million more slaves crossing the Atlantic to the United States and Latin America, especially Brazil where business was booming. The Royal Navy vigorously enforced the ban and did their best to disrupt the trade, an indicator of just how systematically and seriously the British Empire took this new law. Though, conveniently enough, there were some political and economic advantages to this moral crusade as well, as Britian's critics would point out. For instance, after they outlawed the trade, they "liberated" the main slave-port in Sierra Leone in 1808 and renamed it Freetown. This was the first precedent in international law for trumping a country's sovereignty on the basis of a higher humanitarian cause. Once "liberated", the territory soon became a protectorate of the Empire until Sierra Leone's independence in 1961. Sound familiar? In a perverse way the road to Bagdad started in Africa.
Lessons and Questions for the Future
Needless to say, this story is a timely and inspiring case study for worldchangers, raising some important lessons and larger questions. First, the lessons:
This is a good reminder that big things can be triggered by a minority of dedicated and savvy people. As anthropologist Margaret Mead famously said, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." Amen to that.
Related to this and my opening observation, highly entrenched beliefs can shift quite dramatically and seemingly overnight. While this meme has been made popular by Gladwell's The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference, social scientists are just beginning to understand how this might work and we're far from having any predictive models, that's for sure. Understanding changing social values is still a messy, complicated art. Recounting true historical stories like these, however, is a useful device to overcome the parochialism of the present. They are undeniable evidence that non-linear dynamics punctuate our lives more than it would seem, which is a trick I use frequently to readjust people's perceptions in my trainings and futures projects. Almost always people are grateful and often delighted by the new outlook.
Looking back in time also helps us be more strategic about the future because it helps us to see what's emerging next. Stories like these point out that these "sudden" changes are perhaps not so sudden after all. That in many cases they are part of a longer cycle of continuity, the dicernable products of the grooves of history. This is important because we quickly lose perspective; with the rapid pace of change, we're all becoming blasé about witnessing history. The extraordinary quickly becomes "normal". At the same time, and perhaps of more concern, our memories are increasingly short term. Our lessons of history are quickly forgotten, too culturally narrow, or were never learned because of disinterest and ignorance.
For instance, 1833 wasn't that long ago in the grand scheme of things, yet the accomplishments of this movement are ancient news. And just in our lifetimes, we've seen seismic shifts in social values regarding women, race and sexuality in the Western democracies and beyond. Also recall that the end of Apartheid in South Africa was barely imaginable just years before it happened. Margaret Thatcher epitomized this belief with her quip that "anyone who thinks the ANC will be running South Africa is living in cloud cukoo land." Rather it was her reality that was trapped in cukoo land. As recounted by Adam Kahane in Solving Tough Problems, there was an old joke floating around in the late 1980s in South Africa. It went something like this: to solve their problems there were two possible options for the country, one practical and the other miraculous. The practical option was for everyone to get down on their hands and knees and pray for a better future. The miraculous option was that a peaceful outcome would actually emerge. To everyone's surprise, it was the miracle that happened.
We rarely stop to acknowledge and appreciate these past miracles. I do, though. Ever once and a while I reflect on how lucky that I'm a woman today, and not alive at any other time in history. I reflect on my wonderful, diverse and free group of friends, many of whom, like my African-American buddies, were once slaves. 1867, when black suffrage was granted in the US, wasn't that long ago. (See a chronology here of the abolitionist movement.) No doubt this collective reticence is because we still have a long way to go in improving the lot of humankind. The apartheid syndrome is still write large in many places, both physically and psychologically. Paradoxes and contradictions persist, but I would argue that these are often symptomatic of a phase transition rather than a sign of regression or lack of progress. Which raises another disclaimer: our ideas about "progress" should be neither predetermined nor linear. Fears in the United States about women losing their reproductive rights during this Administration, for instance, shouldn't be dismissed as hyperbolic.
Rather, the lessons here are heuristic: that reality is stranger than fiction; that the biggest constraint in seeing and shaping how the future may unfold is our imaginations. And our imaginations are not tabula rasa;they come with cultural baggage and a cognitive apparatus that struggles with complexity and multiplicity. We have to invent better tools to overcome these constraints, and rethink incomplete or faulty frameworks that reinforce a more simplistic view of how things work. (A great, if abstract example: our thinking about probabilities -- one of the most important inventions in modern times -- is overly influenced by "normal distribution curves" which we all learned in statistics class. These systematically discount discontinuous change, whereas most of life is governed by "power laws". See this blog entry for a fuller explanation. In summing up paleontological neuroscience's verdict on our brain's evolutionary status, Ronald Wright said "we’re running 21st century software on hardware that was last upgraded 50,000 years ago." (See "A Short History of Progress", a recent Massey Lecture.)
Partly because of this, imagining "the miraculous option" is intellectually and emotionally hard for most people. In my work as a foresight specialist it's always the positive scenario that is the most difficult for people to see, a pathology that became distinctly worse since September 11th darkened collective perceptions. The amplification of negative messages within the mainstream media doesn't help either. Call it a form of corporate S&M, but decision-makers want to simulate pain these days, they want to rehearse the doom and gloom "what ifs?" and sometimes flatly refuse to develop better future scenarios. As I argue (and eventually persuade) not being prepared for the upside is just as risky; and not finding the courage and leadership to shape a more positive outcome is gravely irresponsible given the challenges the planet faces at present.
The irony is that "miracles" -- and possibly a profound "change of heart" in much of the world around key values-- will likely happen in the near future. While I'm far from a Dr. Pangloss and believe the future could go very wrong, ample signs also abound that we're in the midst of major worldview shift, the long term implications of which may be surprisingly positive. Of course, this shift may not be as clear and decisive as the anti-abolitionist movement, which had fewer parameters to contend with: that is, only one concentrated power base to influence (e.g. British lawmakers), and an empire infrastructure from which easily definable strategies could be deployed to bring about the change.
But this could happen and at least part of this will happen -- and it's likely to be a big deal. Dimly seen, this is a worldview shift as large as the Reformation split between Church and State or when the Feudal society broke apart at the end of the Medieval era. Clues and hints of what might emerge are being described by many people like Paul Hawken when he talks about The Movement with No Name. It's diverse, distributed, moral, and global character sound awfully similar to the early days of the abolition movement.
I also see this more concretely, albeit in fragments, when working with large corporations. These companies sense and measure how value shifts are affecting them, both in terms of attracting employees and customers, because this is how they survive and thrive. While they tend to discount the reality of big value shifts, and while conventional market research obfuscates and misleads at times, enlightened parts of these organizations are starting to wake up to the enormity of what's afoot, whether it's the shifting assumptions about producer-consumer relationships, the impact of new generational attitudes in an Internet age, or the contradictory impulses of post-materialistic behaviours in mature markets and the diversity of attitudes and needs in global emerging markets.
Lastly, a practical on-the-ground lesson of the anti-slavery moment is how effective images were in galvanizing support and getting people "see what they cannot or do not want to see." The modern organizational descendants of these abolitionists, the NGOs and activists of today, known this well. They have become sophisticated past masters at manipulating symbols and iconoclastic images; and on the other side of the ideological fence, advertising wizards and political campaign consultants are not far behind.
But unwittingly these image doctors have now diluted the effect of their instruments and tools. We're now awash in images and are thus becoming increasingly numb to them, or to be more nuanced, we have become adept at filtering them, a new development that image experts haven't fully understood or grappled with yet. And, as we've learned from the history of the environmental movement, images can backfire or create unintended consequences. For instance, the singling out of charismatic species -- like the dolphins, pandas, and eagles -- while great on one level, distorts perceptions in detrimental ways, such as where attention and investment should be focused, often leaving the countless pedestrian yet high leverage interventions underfunded and ignored.
However, some image-based strategies can be high leverage and authentically felt by everyone. I'm reminded of the campaign that made Stewart Brand famous in the 1960s when he demanded that NASA release the aerial pictures taken from space of the planet, something they were slow and reluctant to do after the moon landings. While ubiquitous now and integral to our self-image as a species, until then, no one had seen a picture of the "whole earth." Indeed, it's hard to imagine not having these pictures! By broadcasting images of spaceship earth in its full beauty and fragility, a rare and gleaming blue-green jewel teeming with life and abundance in the midst of a barren and hostile universe, he hoped that these would reframe our consciousness and show us the cause and effect of environmental degradation. While this worked for a while and provided the telos for a whole generation of activists and environmentalists, it's worth asking why these pictures didn't do more. Obviously images can only go so far. Nevertheless, this shouldn't stop us from thinking creatively and exhaustively about new strategies that dramatize at a core emotional level the inhumanity and insanity of certain practices that remain the norm on the planet. Some of the recent "before and after" images about climate change may be in this category, although I'm not sure about this.
Which brings me finally to some questions the story of the anti-slavery movement raises for me, questions that require an imaginative leap for all the reasons I've argued. Namely, just as slavery justly obsolesced, what practices and beliefs that exist today might be considered barbaric and inconceivable just decades from now? Perhaps our tolerance of absolute poverty. Perhaps the idea of cutting down slow growth trees for making ephemeral pulp and paper products will be considered a ridiculously foolish use of resources. What is your pick for a massive "change of heart" and how do you think it might happen?
Check out these pictures from the BBC,
From the Beeb:
While the effect of human activity on the global climate is hotly debated, physical signs of environmental change are all around us.Some scientists say an increase in the rate of melting of the world's glaciers is evidence of global warming.
Argentina's Upsala Glacier was once the biggest in South America, but it is now disappearing at a rate of 200 metres per year
. [Picture to the left]
Other scientists say its reduction is due to complicated shifts in glacial dynamics and local geology.
(Thanks for this pointer, Cameron Sinclair, our favourite Eternal Optimist at Architecture for Humanity)
"Another world is not only possible, she is on her way.
And on a quiet day, if you really listen, you can hear her breathing."
- Arundhati Roy
(Thanks to Sera Thompson, from the Cultivation Unit, Pioneers of Change, for this lovely quote.)
Yes, funny but not.
When I was doing work on the "future of healthcare", a big uncertainty was the long term impact of the American penchant for seeking techno-fixes -- which recursively breed more fixes that fix the fixes, and so on -- versus more preventative and systemic solutions. But those are much harder. And we all have days when one of these suckers would be a life saver.
(Thanks dearest Betina for forwarding this. )
From Oliver Thomson's study of Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler:
One should avoid abstract ideas and appeal instead to the emotions; one should constantly repeat a few stereotyped phrases, never be objective; in other words only put one side of the argument, criticize the enemy violently and always try to identity one special enemy.
Sound familiar?
I think Carl Rove & cronies have perfected the practice of this classic marketing text, not to mention Orwell's theory of thought control and manipulation of the masses. Their mastery of controlling the debate through controlling the metaphors being used is impressive, and depressingly so. (See New Frames for more on this. ) The Hindus are right: we move more in recursive circles than straight lines.
Stumbling upon some old notes, this was quoted in Robert Mason Lee's "One Hundred Monkeys: The Triumph of Popular Wisdom in Canadian Politics" which was one of the more unusual books I read during my undergraduate work at University of British Columbia. Think of the book as an earlier version of The Wisdom of Crowds, albeit within the Canadian context. The course was cool too; it was a seminar run by Ken Carty on the political party system in Canada -- a potentially dull subject to be sure. Fortuitously, I also met my future employer then, Angus Reid, when he came to talk. I was too precocious by half, I think, which seemed to work.
As an aside, Carty, also an academic advisor of mine, has left UBC on secondment and is now the "Chief Research Officer" for the Citizen Assembly in British Columbia for Electoral Reform. Dubbed as a revolutionary and unique process, because:
Never before in modern history has a democratic government given to unelected, "ordinary" citizens the power to review an important public policy, then seek from all citizens approval of any proposed changes to that policy.
A process to watch as big institutions try to re-legitimize themselves in the eyes of average people. And BC, which has suffered through a decade of decline, certainly needs a reinvigoration like this, if it's successful and perceived as legitimate. Good luck Professor Carty!
This is clearly one of the positive countertrends we're seeing in Canada compared to its southern neighbour. I recall the NPR Fresh Air show where Terri Gross interviewed Vancouver's Major Campbell about the new heroin injection clinic, an experiment that would be inconceivable in the United States.
During a project on the Future of Nuclear Waste, when Stewart Brand was asked what should Canada do in a post 911 world, he said in his typical pithy manner, "Continue being Canada." Meaning, continue going down its own unique path, one consistent with its values and history; don't be afraid to diverge from its neighbours, with its own experiments and solutions. Well put, especially since many Canadians struggle with being different from two directions at once: first, we struggle because we're perceived to lack difference compared to the US; and second because standing out in the crowd is rather un-Canadian, a wee trait we inherited from our British background. But that may be changing with a emerging sense of self confidence I've detected in recent years. As The Economist declared recently, it's cool to be Canadian. Well if they say so....
Check out the new film, Travellers and Magicians, by Khyentse Norbu a film director and writer -- and holy man from Bhutan. It's not often you get these two professions together, but he's the real deal: they call him a Rinpoche or "Precious One", the third incarnation of a 19th century nonsectarian saint and scholar.
The film takes place in the director's home country, the beautiful Kingdom of Bhutan, a tiny Himalayan country, and in my view, one of the more interesting places around. Experts in this area tell me that Bhutan feels like Nepal 30 years ago with all of the symbolic and religious allure of Tibet. So not surprisingly, this Buddhist theocracy is trying to learn from their neighbor's experience (especially the negative ones) and have decided to open their country slowly to the effects of globalization. They just got TV, for instance. They are also developing and testing new measures like Gross Domestic Happiness. All very cool, welcome and potentially important experimentation if you ask me.
But that's not why you should see the film, of course. Travellers and Magicians stands on its own from a cinematic point of view. More than just a "road film" and travelogue that takes advantage of Bhutan's breathtaking vistas, it's also touching with funny characters and encounters. Mind you, it's no Hollywood action flick (thank goodness) and definitely more languorous in pace. The film has a broader purpose and message as well (perish the thought!). It was made to be a time capsule, a visual record documenting Bhutan's uniqueness at this point of time before it has "50 Starbucks and McDonalds," to quote Norbu. It's like a "tangka painting for the next generation" says Alan Kozlowski, the director of photography. A tangka painting in Buddhist culture "leads people on a learning journey of awareness with messages encoded in them that liberate and inspire people." For this film, the message is about appreciating your life as it is, and realizing that it isn't always better on the other side of the mountain." A useful reminder for us all, I should think.
(Quotes from "On the Road, Bhutan Syle" by Nancy Ramsey, FT Weekend, 01/29.
Picture to the right is of actors in the film)
Michelangelo, one of the great creators in Western history, said this.
What a beautiful and concise phrase! While clearly timeless, this is the perfect epithet for the kind of pragmatic, "just do it" experimental and creative activity and attitude I'm seeing within this movement with no name. That is, the Cambrian explosion of civil society entrepreneurs and developments around the world, all trying to shift our collective assumptions about what a more sustainable model for living on this planet might look like, which Paul Hawken spoke of in his Long Green talk that I blogged about yesterday.
"Eve" [an archetypical creator] in the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo
(Thanks to whomever I clipped this from...Could have been a Worldchanger or Pioneers of Change. Not sure.)
One of the best lecture series online is the Long Term Thinking Series hosted by the Long Now Foundation, an organization I and others have mentioned a great deal here. For me it's personal and professional having been profoundly influenced by its founders -- especially Stewart Brand, Peter Schwartz, and Kevin Kelly -- whom I got to work with during my GBN days. As the website puts it,
the purpose of the series is to build a coherent, compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking, to help nudge civilization toward Long Now's goal of making long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare.
I've listened to most of the lectures and highly recommend them. Just last night I heard
Paul Hawken's talk called the "Long Green" (October 15, 2004). I've always enjoyed hearing Paul's often caustic, clever and passionate descriptions of the state of the world and its problematic relationship to our ecology. He definitely pulls no punches. I distinctly remember a conversation with him where he convinced me that the vinyl industry was evil. Whether you like him or not, you have to admire his incredible boundary-spanning knowledge of ecology, indigenous peoples, history, and social justice. Even so, I thought I had heard Paul's spiel enough times. But for this talk, the tone and content is quite different. As Paul states in the beginning, this is new content and territory for him -- and thus a work in progress.
The idea for the talk started with Stewart Brand observing that the environmental movement has taught us a great deal about long term thinking. This is because the environment functions on long lead and long lag times, where cause and effect are hard to see because they emerge across different spatial and temporal scales, and are thus decoupled from our social and political systems, which is why we miss key ecological signals of change (we few exceptions.) Within this context, he wanted Paul to reflect on the past, present and future of the environmental movement.
I know most people don't have time to sit and listen to the whole lecture (or read this long review for that matter). But I felt that talk was important enough to summarize, together with my additions and thoughts, so pardon me if I blur the line of strict reportage. Jamais Cascio also reported on this talk shortly after it was delivered and is much more succinct, so you can check out his highlights as well.
Above all else I found these ideas very helpful in articulating more clearly this "bottom up" movement of civic action and social entrepreneurship, this Second Superpower thesis and scenario I've -- and many others in the Worldchanging community -- have been perceiving (and not so dimly.) Indeed, this is exactly why we're here: as we've said in our tagline, another world is already. Paul Hawken is just adding another powerful voice and his resources to making sure that we see it.
End of the World Scenarios
We're awash in n-time scenarios these days, starts Paul. Both Abrahamic religions -- Christianity and Islam -- have in their scriptures strong visions of Armageddon and the end of the world. And while Hindus see time as being cyclical, they also have what they call the Kaligua phase (sp?) where the world heads into a downward spiral of destruction. Interestingly enough, the Kaligua gets the "prophetic nod" in its quirky list of indicators predicting the on-set of this phase, including things like: food becoming tasteless (check), young girls becoming mothers (check), old men becoming youthful (viagra, check), and this list goes on! Perversely amusing.
We're awash in these apocalyptic visions because fundamentalist factions of these religions believe (and/or employ for their power plays ) a belief that the time for reckoning is nigh. Like perfect mirrors of each other -- or using Paul's metaphor, like isomorphs -- both believe the other is the culprit. The Christian Right in the US, and a view strongly represented within the Administration, has it that with Al Queda as his army Osama bin Laden is as close as we're going to get as the Antichrist. Whereas the fundamentalist Islamic sects believe that Osama is the Mahdi, their new prophet, who is going to chase out the infidels from the Middle East and recapture the lost territory of Andalusia.
The green movement, by contrast, are very much of this world. They are the stay behinds and by choice. They are the people who don't want the world to end. They don't want to leave. But they are also not happy with the landlords of the planet and their upkeep of the place. These are people who have a deep sense of continuity with this place we call Earth. These people believe that the best way to ensure a better future for their offspring -- and the offspring they'll never see in generations to come -- is by taking care of one's habitat. Empirical evidence throughout human history and evolution seems to support this case in spades. Just read Jared Diamond's latest book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, for how this works.
A Brief Intellectual History of the Environmental Movement
Paul then gives a quick tour de force of the history of the environmental movement, albeit through a US-centric and Western-bent lens. (As he points out, Japan, China and India have had their movements too.) He focuses on the early years. Those seminal pioneers in the mid and late 1800s and early 1900s. He mentions the Luddite movement in Industrializing Britain, the ideas of Ruskin, Thoreau, John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt, the founding of the Sierra Club, and the tremendous public backlash to the cutting of the "Mother of the Forest" tree in Yosemite before it was a national park.
In tracing the genealogy of these ideas, he highlights a number of tensions that persist to this day within the "mega fauna of environmental organizations". For instance, the philosophical divide between Emerson's vision in "On Nature" which makes the connection between self and nature, and Marsh's view in "Man and Nature" which describes the interdependence between man and society but clearly keeps man on top of the pecking order. Emersonian organizations tend to be smaller, poorly funded, but are faster acting and more activist oriented and progressive. Friends and the Earth is an example. Marshian organizations are larger, well funded, more conservative and mainly rich white people, often with a hunting background. The Natural Conservancy and Environmental Defense Fund are examples of this group.
The legacy of this is that the Marshians are dominating the interest group power structures still. And while this may be changing, however slowly, policy makers and economists still insist on putting the environment as a subset of the economy, instead of placing the economy firmly within the broader circle of the environment. They do so even when faced with inescapable fact that without a healthy environment no economy can function, something that the Chinese leaders for instance know only too well. Who would have thunk that the Communists would become ecologists before the Capitalists?
Unlike other movements, the environmental movement is partly based on science. This doesn't mean emotions and other ways of knowing don't play a role, like indigenous practices, although there are certainly tensions there. The strategy of focusing on charismatic animals like dolphins and panda bears played a big role in making the movement more mainstream, but at the cost of less telegenic keystone species.
Like any other movement, however, it has specialized over time. Eventually this becomes counter productive, getting in the way of interconnection. Hence we see the environmental movement cutting off and ignoring other time-based disciplines such as anthropology, archeology, and historical preservationists.
After speeding through the 20th century, mentioning Carson's "Rites of Spring" and Dana Meadows, Paul Hawken wryly notes that not one Native American is mentioned in his list of notable thinkers and activists. To illustrate his point, he tells a sickening story of the now extinct Yamana or Yaghan people in Patagonia, a people who Magellan dubbed "beasts from hell" when he first spotted them on shore. Of course, years later, after we hunted and killed them to extinction, it was discovered that the Yamana people have one of the most rich and complex languages on the planet with far more verbs than English. This was a "local science" to quote Stewart Brand, with much knowledge embedded in it. For instance, the Yamuna word for depression literally meant a crab whose shell is molting but is struggling to shed it. Paul's point is that for the Yamuna people nature, the self, society were never separated as they have been in Western culture.
The Movement Without A Name
So, Paul concludes: environmentalism emerged from great alienation and separation. Today, the environment movement has effectively gone, he argues. It has morphed into something else, something that is a subset of a much larger movement. Social justice and environmentalism are coming together, for instance. People are not seeing the problem as just a resource flow issue, but also a quality of life and diversity problem. As we get a more sophisticated way of seeing the world, we're starting to see connections between poverty, disease, and private sector patterns towards resources. So this is a movement that spans a mind-boggling array of issues -- everything from indigenous rights, to immigration, to ecotoxcity, to emissions controls, to alternative healthcare, to restoration ecology, etc. It's becoming clear that these issues are connected in a deep structural way. And, to quote exactly, this has something to do with "humanity’s collective immune response to resist and heal political disease, economic infection, and ecological corruption caused by ideologies."
Yes, wow! That's powerful language and the description resonates deeply. David T. Suzuki and Holly Dressel make a similar case in their excellent, "Good News for a Change: How Everyday People are Helping the Planet."
Paul argues that this is the largest movement in the world and growing. There are at least 130,000 groups at minimum, but they could be off by a factor or 2 or 4 in measuring this. A half million groups could easily exist today. These are self-healing, civic groups -- some large, some small -- and they are in every country around the world. There are so many groups that even leaders like Paul can't keep track of them, although he is trying to study them at his new organization, The Natural Capitalism Institute, which is a direct offshoot of his book, "Natural Capitalism" which he coauthored with Amory and Hunter Lovins and "The Ecology of Commerce". What's clear is that this is bigger than anything else around. Bigger than Al Qaeda, bigger than the Catholic Church, bigger than the Neoconservative agenda.
(Another cross-reference: David Bornstein makes a similar case in How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas making parallels to when the gild system broke apart of the end of the Middle Ages and thus lowering the barriers to entry for entrepreneurship. A similar phase is happening now in the civil society space. )
Of course, the trouble is this movement can't be named yet; it's too early, so much so, that he cautions against categorizing too much. And Paul points out, this is not too unusual in the grand scheme of things. For instance, it wasn't until 1876 when Spengler named the Industrial Age, which had been going on for 175 years before that without any difficulties.
Mainstream Myopia
A good question is why is this not more visible to the mainstream? While it's clearly visible to Worldchangers, part of the problem is that this is so new and historically unprecedented that it's beyond the mental maps of most mainstream players. As cognitive science research has proven, large groups of people routinely fail to perceive things that are unfamiliar, even if they are plainly evident.
Another reason why this movement isn't being detected is that it's very distributed, non ideological (or has many ideologies), and has no clear hierarchical leaders. This movement also doesn't seek power but rather seeks to dismantle the current power structures. (Perhaps a bit naive here but I see his point.) Some in this movement believe the type of political power today is unnecessary and should be illegal. This is what makes this movement so different and unique: no movement has emerged without a codified ideology and without a central system at its core. By contrast, the 20th century was dominated by big ideologies -- capitalism, socialism, fascism --which demanded unreflective loyalty in our beliefs and preyed on our inner sensibilities. These "isms" all told us that salvation was found in a single system, whereas everything we've learn from nature and ecology tells us that health and stability comes through diversity.
Of the parts that are seen -- say the World Social Forum-- they are labeled by the media as fringe elements, ex-hippies, liberals, anti-corporate, no logo, etc. While all of this may be true, this means this movement is consistently misunderstood. While the mainstream often points out that this movement couldn't possibly amount to much because they are a ramshackle of interests and groups, what they don't see is the shared underlying values that informs this group. They also don't understand the power of bottom-up, self-organizing dynamics. Paul argues that this group is going to win at the end of the day because it has better technologies, better ideas, and is unstoppable because of the vitality and joy driving this movement. This is the Long Green -- and it will be the dominant force of 21st century.
"Deer on Hillside at Ecola State Park"
© Craig Tuttle/CORBIS
Rough Waters Ahead
Paul ends up very gloomy in the Q&A, which isn't unusual (and probably not unwarranted either). He has a scientific mind and a big heart for the planet and its' peoples. As he puts it, if you look at the data and you're not pessimistic, you're NOT looking at the data clearly. He argues were heading into an age of tremendous resource constraints and with corresponding depopulation. Citing the study on rapid climate change which Peter Schwartz helped lead where the best case scenario was still a nasty one for this century, Paul believes that climate change will be the ultimate driver of frugality and attention.
Most poignantly, Paul believes that in the next century we will become homeless. We'll see such changes in our climate that we won’t be able to recognize the places in which we live in. Our homes will be beyond our recognition. Having said that, Paul makes a beautiful distinction. While he can’t really be optimistic on the future based on current trends, he can be hopeful when he looks at the humans involved. We all have an amazing capacity to heal, he said, both within ourselves and our surroundings. With millions and millions of people trying to restore this place that we love, this may catalyze the perceptual change we need. Amen to that. Thanks Paul for these words.
"While he sat under the tree meditating, Mara, the Hindu Devil, appeared in his visions and tempted him to leave his introspective search and start upon a new life of doing good among the poor and distressed.But Gautama (Buddha) rejected this temptation, replying that not good
deed is, but faith and heroism, and wisdom - were what were demanded
of him.This resistance by Gautama to a temptation to "do good" is perhaps
the principal barrier that stands between his views and the Western
mind; for , as Conze has pointed out , "a show of benevolence is so
much more welcome to the contemporary mind than a profound insight
into reality."- "Communication & Culture in Ancient India & China" by Robert T. Oliver
[Robert T. Oliver, a former professor of speech at Pennsylvania State University and who wrote extensively on the subject of Asian rhetoric and A. S. Cua of Catholic University who written on argumentation and Confucian rhetoric.]
Gets you thinking, eh? This quote came into my in box this morning through fellow Worldchanger, Rohit Gupta, a Mumbai writer and driving force behind one of the relief portals for the Tsunami. Thanks Rohit!
This passage obviously resonates within the context of the massive empathetic reaction of the West to the Tsunami disaster last Boxing Day. The passage raises some difficult moral dilemmas on both sides of the cultural boundary.
For the Indian and Chinese worldview, perhaps the problem is not enough action and too much passivity, preferring to let a shift in understanding -- which often takes many karmic cycles -- to do the changing. Whereas for the Western worldview, the problem is too much unreflective action and action for mixed reasons. While this heresy for many, sometimes no action is better than some half-baked, questionably-motivated action.
Indeed, like some critics, I've had an uneasy feeling over the impulsive, guilt-driven response of Westerners to victims in the Tsunami, mainly because I know how these freak flows of money and attention distort the delivery of relief aid and perceptions, thus creating untoward unintended consequences. This is not the best example but rather just an aside: one of the recurrently disturbing requests Worldchanging was receiving were requests for adopting Tsunami orphans, something well out of our remit to say the least. For entities with some power, like the French Government, they went even so far as to reduce the bureaucratic barriers to adoption, a huge feat if you know "le systeme" here in France. The sad reality is that more children died than parents. Flooding and severe tidal action tends to favour those who can fend for themselves and swim. So an excess of orphans wasn't the problem; it was more like an excess of now childless families. Of course, with all of this money flowing into the system, this was an opportunity baby traffickers couldn't resist. I won't get into any more detail; I'm sure you can extrapolate what's been going on from there.
Having said this, I'm loathe to criticize any outpouring of empathy. This is critical if we're to overcome the parochiality of our current mindsets and see the local in the global and vice verse. But it's also useful to remind ourselves that this isn't enough. As the Gautama sagely councils, we need equal amounts of awareness into what we're doing and why. It's too easy in our interdependent world to do the wrong thing very well -- and with haunting consequences.
Untapped Human Potential
From a "big picture" pattern recognition perspective, there is something interesting to observe, and an hypothesis I've been wanting to test. Whether it be the tremendous influx of people to New York after September 11th desperate to help, or the huge emotional outpouring during Diana's funeral (remember that bizarre scene?), or this latest event in South Asia: they are all indicators of a tremendous amount trapped, latent human potential in modern life. They are indicators of just how hungry people are to make meaning of their lives through visible and tangible acts. And they are indicators of just howour current institutions -- whether they be the places where we work or channels for civic life -- are not coming close to meeting and tapping into these fundamental human needs.
So the question is: what if we could unlock some of this potential in a mindful, measured, mutually enriching, and (dare I say it) wise way? Of course, this is already happening from many directions. The vacuum is being filled by a proliferation of social entrepreneurship around the world, the communicators in the blogsphere, and organizing efforts like World Social Forum, just to name three examples.
But such logjams in the collective psyche of any society can turn ugly. Emotions tapped in the wrong way can breed disruptions and revolutions. Given all of the disparities on the planet -- both in wealth and worldview -- this is a plausible outcome within the next ten years. Like any incumbent system, this scenario is well beyond the cognitive radar screens of most of the power brokers in the West. As history is our witness, this myopia will prove ruinous for many established sectors.
Then again, all of this focus on reducing poverty by world leaders is code for avoiding this worst case scenario. This is in part why Royal Dutch Shell cosponsored the AIDS in Africa project. But my question is will these folks get down from their Versailles (if you've been to Davos, you'll see what I mean) and talk to the fish wives in the street? Only then will their perception of "doing good" match the reality of what the real needs are; only then will top-down actions become the kind of wise, reflective action cautioned by the Gautama. I can only hope.