image courtesy of Victor Bezrukov

Over the weekend, I finally got around to reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver’s book about her family’s quest to eat locally, growing most of their own food and eating with the seasons.

What a great read—I tell you, that woman can really write about a vegetable! I loved reading about the joys and pains of gardening, the hard work of preserving food, and the satisfaction of seeing dozens of mason jars sparkling like jewels in the pantry at the end of autumn. I’m more excited than ever to work on my own little garden here in the ‘hood in Pittsburgh.

Kingsolver also spends a good portion of her book describing what is wrong with the food system in America. These ills have been well covered in the last several years—see Food Inc., Fast Food Nation, and most of Michael Pollan’s work. Our agricultural system is rather insane, and we have a lot of work to do to make it rational and sustainable.

But in Kingsolver’s work, and in that of many other writers and activists, there is something that bothers me: a confusion between technology and how it is used. She spends a good amount of time cataloging the evils of genetically engineered food, specifically going after Monsanto and showing how their practices limit choices and profits for small farmers, driving many of them out of business.

I wonder, though—is genetic engineering inherently such a terrible thing? Or is the problem that Monsanto is an unethical and short-sighted company?

There are people out there doing amazing things with genetic engineering, people who are motivated by a desire to prevent children from going blind and poor farmers from losing their crops in floods. In fact, human beings have been engineering plants and animals for thousands of years, resulting in unprecedented levels of health, education, and prosperity for more people than ever before in our history. Clearly, it’s possible that genetic engineering can do some good in the world. In fact, it already has.

This is just one example of our tendency to confuse tools with those who use them. Obviously, technology can be and has been used for good and not so good ends. Witness the internet’s explosion of information-sharing and multi-national scamming. Or the ability of cell phones to keep us in touch and cause us to crash our cars. Heck, even the humble automobile brings amazing benefits to humanity even as it causes sprawl and pollutes the atmosphere.

But this doesn’t mean that the internet, cell phones, or cars are inherently evil. It just means that we are not using them consciously and purposefully to improve our lives and our world.

This is the meat of the issue that we must address and overcome—our own decision-making processes. When we use a new technology, what are we using it for? Are we trying to get vitamins into children, or are we trying to dominate the marketplace?

In Whole Earth Discipline, Stewart Brand says that when we resist new technologies wholesale, we miss a huge opportunity to shape them. Why should we leave something as powerful as genetic engineering up to a company that clearly doesn’t have humanity’s best interests at heart? A better approach, he says, is to learn everything we can about emerging tools and get involved with developing them and infusing them with our values.

Look at Wal-Mart, whose innovative technology of cheap sourcing from around the world and cheap selling at home has made it one of the progressive movement’s favorite enemies. Because many dedicated people chose to engage with this beast rather than just resist it, Wal-Mart now carries organic and local foods, sells hormone-free milk, and requires its suppliers to use far less packaging than they did in the past. Soon they will implement green ratings for every product they sell, taking greenhouse gasses, water usage, and supply chain information into account.

Of course, Wal-Mart is only responding to their customers’ requests and making money in the process—their motives are hardly altruistic. But I don’t doubt that at least some of the people responsible for the company’s greening process want to make a positive difference in the world, and they have expended massive effort to show that doing good can also be good business. In doing so, they’ve started to change the course of the biggest retailer in the world.

This kind of bridge-building is the method by which we will make the leap into a zero-emissions, innovation-driven future. Instead of raising flags against tools we don’t like, we must find the courage to engage with them, inject them with our values, and use them with consciousness.

We can’t leave potentially harmful technologies to those who are interested in money more than anything else—to do so is an abdication of our responsibility as principled people. More importantly, in the tension between the forward march of technology and resistance to it, the resisters never win. Instead let’s get in there, get our hands dirty, and shape our future.

image courtesy of mikebaird

Most of the time, for most of us, life seems pretty consistent. Work, family, and home life may vary from day to day, but for the most part, things chug along remarkable steadiness. Then something happens—a job loss, an illness, a new opportunity—and we realize how tenuous our security really is. No one ever really knows what our lives will look like in a year, but we think we do.

Since I lost my job, I’ve seen how strong this self-delusion of security can be. In reality, there’s no less certainty in my life than there was a few months ago, but it feels like there is. The challenge is the same as it always has been—to be OK with uncertainty, to connect with the possibility inherent in it and not freak out.

This idea figures prominently in Whole Earth Discipline, the new book by Whole Earth Catalog and Long Now Foundation founder Stewart Brand. In it, Brand has a ball tearing into some of environmentalism’s most sacred cows—urbanization, overpopulation, nuclear energy, and genetic engineering. The science he cites and the stories he tells are compelling to say the least, but what strikes me most in his argument is how he looks at things—from a position of not knowing, having his own ideas but being more than willing to change them as new evidence and explanations arise.

Brand addresses this viewpoint head on, and urges environmentalists to approach research and technology without prejudice or pre-conditioned responses. He wants us to stop being hedgehogs and start being foxes.

What’s the difference? Hedgehogs have one stance and they stick with it in all situations—whether they are being attacked by a predator or observed by a child, the spines come out. Foxes, on the other hand, adapt their behavior depending on what works. They experiment and evaluate and adjust. This ability to read current conditions and adapt makes them effective.

The foxy approach makes good sense—of course we should always have another look at our conclusions when we take in new information. But in practice, most of us are much more comfortable sticking with the hedgehog strategy. We make up our minds on an issue and we never reconsider it again. We look at people who change their minds or their course as weak-willed and lacking in conviction. We even mock our policy-makers—people who should frequently be changing their minds based on the data—for being flip-floppers. We say we value change and innovation, and we do, but only after it’s proven right. Though we live in a world that demands foxiness, most of us cling to our hedgehoggy ways.

The problem with this rigid approach is obvious—it stifles growth. If adherence to ideology is more important than empirical testing and iterative development, then it’s not possible for anything to change. We end up with a highly polarized debate in which nothing is actually debated; talking points are merely spoken and then shouted with increasing vehemence. When we adhere to our pre-conceived ideas, we make the mistake of assuming that what’s important is our ideological consistency rather than our effectiveness.

At this point, most of us are still hedgehogs. We like knowing what our response will be to any question. We like feeling as though our worldview is “all done.”

But the truth is that when we value ideological consistency over practicality, we stagnate. Our simple, preconfigured ideas are not equal to the challenges facing us. We need to let go of our fundamentalism, allow ourselves to be unsure of the next step, to stray from the familiar path in pursuit of our goal, which is nothing less audacious than the transformation of our our whole way of living.

This orientation to life feels unsteady at first, but it is possible to get your sea legs with practice. My first day of unemployment felt like staring into the gaping maw of the void itself, but I’m getting more fluent in the unknown every day. My old way of maintaining security by having a lucrative though passionless job worked for a long time, but it’s not cutting it anymore. Neither is our typical picture of what it means to be an environmentalist. We need a new strategy, a foxier one, based less on what we think environmentalism is about and more on what actually works.

In this short talk, Derrick Jensen imagines what Star Wars would look like if written by environmentalists—would they file lawsuits against the Empire ... sell free-trade coffee to its citizens ... sign petitions against Darth Vader?

Now, it is a bit simplistic to characterize the messy real world of 2010 as the evil Galactic Empire. And of course I believe more in redemption/building on what is than revolution/blowing shit up. But he is right about one thing: most of us who want to change the world are thinking far too small.

I don’t say this to diss tiny choices. The decisions that we make to carry our own water and bags, eat better quality food, recycle more—all this stuff is significant. The drops in the bucket do add up, and, even more important, mindful action increases our capacity for more mindful action. Changing from the inside out is natural.

But if we see going green as no more than a collection of lifestyle changes, we’re focusing on the trees to the detriment of the forests (and oceans, and mountains).

Each of us exists in the center of a series of nested circles. The smallest one is me, my body, my day-to-day routine. Then the circles get bigger and overlap—personal relationships, communities, industries, and finally the whole world. We could debate whether spirituality is be a dot at the center or the unseeable edge of the page ... maybe both!

Anyhow, when we make changes, we tend to start with the innermost circle because that’s the sensible thing to do. We rethink our ideas and alter our daily habits. But stopping here won’t cut it. If we content ourselves with changes in the “me” circle, then—forgive my geekery!—but we’re like Jensen’s ineffectual rebels demanding sensitivity training for Stormtroopers while Alderaan burns. We need solutions in all the circles, even the big scary ones. Especially the big scary ones. Here are a few examples of wider-circle ideas:

• Worldchanging founder Alex Steffen recently challenged Seattle to become the world’s first carbon-neutral city. Citizens are already debating what that means and how to get there.
• Dawn Danby is updating one of the major tools of her trade—Autodesk—to help architects and designers make greener decisions throughout the design process.
• John Fetterman, mayor of Braddock, PA, and his team are working to create jobs and community in the ashes of what was once a bustling town just outside of Pittsburgh. They are in it for the long haul, but so far there’s already an urban farm, a bio-diesel company, and a growing artist community taking shape.

Of course, massive worldchanging ideas don’t conk us on the head all the time. We can’t snap our fingers and become genius politicians and architects and scientists. But!—we can think bigger today than we did yesterday.

And there are a lot of ways this can play out. Maybe you dream up an idea to push your business in a greener direction, or you consolidate all the smart technologies in your niche to make them more accessible to everyone else. Maybe you share an amazing idea with an important person in a passionate way, or you start a group to bring players together behind a unified vision. Maybe an apple falls and you figure out cold fusion. Who knows? The point is to be aware, to look for opportunities to impact every circle you’re a part of.

Thinking big isn’t something that we do all the time. We’re not used to taking a stand for something publicly, and it’s easy to feel impotent as the circles get wider and less familiar. It’s a stretch, and stretching can be painful, though it usually ends up being in that “hurts so good” kind of way. Thinking bigger than what we’re used to causes us to grow into the kind of people who can solve bigger problems and implement bigger ideas. And that’s exactly what the world needs us to become.

And there is this upside: thinking big is a lot more fun than thinking small. Dunno about you but I get way more excited to work on something with unknown-but-possibly-huge potential than I do to tinker with my own habits. Not that my own habits aren’t important—they certainly are!—but they are not the only or even the most important thing.

My goal for 2010 is to constantly be thinking about how to play for bigger stakes, how to connect more brilliant people for maximum impact, and how to leverage everything I’ve got to bring about the changes I want to see.

What’s yours? Pump it up and make it big and tell us all about it!

(spirograph image courtesy of chefranden)

image courtesy of petter palander

When you walk into a room, how do you position yourself?

I tend to evaluate who’s there and take one of two stances: superior or inferior. Either I’m better/smarter/cooler or I’m dumber/lamer/less experienced. And once I assume one of these positions, it’s damn near impossible to snap out of it.

If I perceive myself as better, then it becomes all about making sure everyone knows that I’m better—that my point of view is more comprehensive and impressive than theirs. If I put myself in a position of being less than, then I clam up like a shy little kid, barely even giving myself permission to speak for fear of looking like a nimrod.

I can see that this behavior is arrogant and immature, that it reflects an inaccurate understanding of reality. Is it true, or at all important, that I am smart or dumb, more than or less than? Isn’t it far more important that I show up in every situation ready to contribute something positive no matter who else is around?

This superiority/inferiority complex also limits my ability to participate and lead and create with other people. How can I be fully part of something big and awesome and world-changing when I insist on setting myself apart from every situation in which I find myself?

I am not going to be able to create the bright green future I envision on my own. I need to work in close and free-flowing collaboration with the many other brilliant people who believe in these possibilities. I can’t be overbearing, nor can I limit what I have to offer by shying away from those who are more accomplished than me. I have to learn how to not have it be about me at all.

Why do I evaluate every situation according to how I fit into it? Some mundane combination of childhood habits and murky psychological power plays, no doubt. But at this point, I don’t even think the “why” matters. What matters is the fact that I really want to change it.

It’s tricky, because, although I can see this pattern in myself after the fact, in the moment it doesn’t feel like something I’m actively doing. It’s pre-cognitive, a habit so deeply ingrained that I have a hard time noticing that it’s happening. So I think my first step must be to pay attention to what I am thinking, to look for that moment when I make a movement away from the group, and to resist that urge.

I doubt that I’m the only person who does this—in fact I see other people do it every day. We are hesitant to trust each other, afraid we might look stupid or be misunderstood or lumped in with a crowd that doesn’t reflect how we think about ourselves at all.

So we set ourselves apart by judging instead of coming together. Millions of us walk around positioning ourselves in relationship to each other without actually being in relationship with each other. What a colossal waste of time and potential!!

What might be possible if we each made the commitment to prioritize connection over looking good? If we decided to lay aside our ideas about who we are individually and instead discover what we can do together?

image courtesy of zoonabar

A few weeks ago, I found out that I’m being downsized from the company I work for. I haven’t written since then, because I haven’t been sure what to say.

It’s been 15 years since I graduated from college, and for most of those years I’ve been working in a narrow niche of software development for the printing and publishing industries. What I’ve learned in that time is immense. From a childhood of chaos and poverty, this career enabled me to create a stable financial life. I’ve learned how to complete complicated projects, hang tough in challenging situations, and work with a wide variety of people.

At the same time, coming out of a meeting last week, I realized that I had just spent an hour going into minute details about things that mean absolutely nothing in the big picture. I’m not one to linger on regrets ... but I do feel some sadness that I’ve devoted so much of my life to work that I don’t particularly care about.

At this point, there are many possible roads I can take. I can take a job right now doing pretty much the same thing that I’ve been doing for 15 years. I can look for something new. Or I can take the time I have and focus on breaking through my own blocks so that I can wholeheartedly participate in creating the awesome future I see in my mind’s eye.

For maybe the first time in my life, I have a great deal of empty space. The challenge is for me to resist the urge to fritter it away, to make good use of it. The challenge is, as always, to grow.

The frontier of growth is about embodying my ideals more and more deeply—honestly facing the ways in which don’t live in accordance with what I say I believe. I’ve done a lot of work, and I’ve come a long way, but I still have so much cynicism, arrogance, insecurity and uncertainty to overcome.

Part of me wants to take the easiest possible road and jump into a new job just like the old one. To sit back and provide color commentary on what’s happening instead of jumping in and playing. That part of me still sees my journey as entirely my own, unrelated and not beholden to anything larger than myself.

But there’s another part of me, a braver part, that sees all the incredible possibilities in where I’m at right now. This is the part I’m putting my attention on.

Have you been through a life-changing situation like this? How did it impact you? How did you use it to develop? I would love to hear your story as I sketch in the lines of my new life and work on a plan to flesh it out ...

image courtesy of billolen

I spent a few hours at the American Museum of Natural History yesterday, and between marveling at the gemstones and beautifully illustrative dioramas, I visited the exhibit on evolution. I saw models of wee furry people, skulls of multiple sizes, and a clear and detailed explanation of heredity. And in one of the videos, I heard a sentence that got me thinking:

Without evolution, biology would simply be little more than a kind of natural history stamp collecting.

I’d never really considered this before, but it struck me as both true and perfectly obvious once I’d heard it. Without a bigger story to infuse bits of knowledge and experience with a plot, there is no meaning to anything we do. There may be enjoyment in the moment, but if there’s no framework, there’s no sense of filling out a picture or advancing a cause. There’s just collection and consumption.

In the past, external forces provided this framework. Organized traditional religion told us to do good in the here and now to be rewarded later. Western individualism sprang from the Enlightenment and gave a different meaning to life: humans were meant to control nature and enjoy unending material wealth, so all of our hard work meant pushing forward into a new future.

But many of us no longer identify with traditional religion. Nor do we buy the notion that we are here simply to learn how to dominate nature and experience comfort. Our frameworks have been shattered, and many of us live lives in which the details add up to not much.

At this point in our history, we need to think about what our new framework of meaning will be. What is the picture we are filling out? From what skeleton of values do we wish to hang our future?

When we answer these questions, then the minutes that make up the hours and days and years of our lives can mean more, can point us in a direction with intention, can be made sense of as a whole story, rather than a collection of moments.

What is your framework? Are you collecting or building?

image courtesy of sektordua

Have you ever had an epiphany, decided to make a change, and then forgot about it within a matter of days? We’ve all gone through this process, and it makes sense because it’s largely how development happens. You make a breakthrough, and suddenly you’re in a new world. Or, more accurately, you have developed the ability to see things anew.

But the old way of seeing is still what you are used to, and gradually or suddenly your eyes lose their newfangled focus, and the world is old again, and you wonder whether your epiphany meant anything at all.

What happened is this: something new did emerge in you, but it wasn’t stable. This is how development occurs—in fits and starts, a messy progression of two steps forward and one step back. We go through 4 major stages in the learning process:

• Unconscious incompetence, where we don’t even know what we don’t know.
• Conscious incompetence, where we are starting to see the extent of what we don’t know. This part can be very painful!
• Conscious competence, where we’re starting to get it but it requires a lot of effort.
• Unconscious competence, where we’re so good at our new skill that we can sink into performing it, without having to think about it.

It’s like when you learned to swim, you paddled once or twice then screamed for your dad to hold you. Gradually, with help, you gained confidence in your ability to swim in new waters. But you couldn’t have expected to just jump in and do it perfectly the first time. You needed time and effort and help to stabilize it, to get over the painful hump of conscious incompetence to conscious competence.

This process applies to everything from financial skills to nutrition to spiritual development. We need courage to take our first steps, and then we need help to get through the awkward stage.

I know for me this external support is crucial. Without the exercise group I’m a part of, I would never have developed the habit of working out 5 hours a week. If not for community with other practitioners of Evolutionary Enlightenment, I would not be able to keep at it. Even simple education works much better in a group—I can read a book on my own, but I understand it much more deeply when I get a chance to talk about it with others.

It’s gotten to the point that when I’m struggling with something, I look for a way to bring other people into it. For instance, I have been seriously slacking on my meditation practice, and when I slack on that, everything suffers. So recently I joined together with some friends who are also working on their daily practice, and we made the commitment to each other to check in and care about what we are all doing.

At some point I will be strong enough to meditate daily without relying on anyone else’s support. But, for now, knowing that other people are part of what I’m trying to do has gotten me through more than a week with no missed sessions.

What are you working on? Can you see a way to bring your community into it so that you all benefit?

image courtesy of Mi Gi

If you’re reading this site, it’s probably because you care about the state of the world. You also recognize that the problems we have to solve are fairly intractable from the level we are at right now, and so you want to push yourself to be smarter, more comprehensive in your thinking, and more powerful in your actions.

If you’re anything like me, though, sometimes this cognitive recognition that we need to keep developing slips away a bit. After a long tiring day at work, the couch sings its siren song, and the laziness to which our culture says we are entitled takes over more hours than we’d like to admit. In the midst of everything most of us have to get done in a day, how can we stay motivated to make choices that keep us growing?

Put another way, if we are basically wired to do what we feel like doing, how can we make ourselves feel like doing the right thing?

We don’t have to be pushed around by emotions

It’s not a simple question. There are so many different factors that come into play: our low-level, precognitive reptilian brain that perceives danger everywhere ... the conditioned responses we’ve learned from long experience with defying and meeting expectations ... our inborn desire to connect with and please other people. All of these inputs and more feed into our emotions, and our emotions largely determine what kind of decisions we make.

But we don’t have to be pushed around by all the different systems that influence how we feel. I’ve found that it is possible—at least sometimes!—to point my emotional state in a positive direction. My higher selves—my moral and cognitive impulses—can get together and decide where to go, and then I can get all those other selves on board, too.

Paying attention to something bigger

How? It’s a matter of attention. When the couch and the television are calling my name, and I choose to put my attention on how run-down I feel, it’s very easy to give in. After all, what does it really matter what I do? I am such a small and insignificant part of the bigger picture. So I may as well do whatever sounds like it will feel good.

But when I actually put my attention on that bigger picture and what it really is, I can see very clearly that my actions DO matter in the most desperate way. If I don’t pick up the ball, if I don’t develop my capacities to their fullest expression and push the boundaries of what it means to be human, then who will?

Top-down perspective

When I connect with the big picture, I can see life from the top-down perspective. I can see that my decisions moment-to-moment determine how far forward we push as a species. I can see that I am far more responsible for how this experiment turns out than I could ever have imagined from my smaller me-oriented vantage point. And rather than feeling run down or bored or apathetic, I start to feel excited to explore and create.

Emotions are incredibly complex phenomena. They seem to arise mysteriously, and we sometimes feel powerless to make choices when we are bathed in a powerful feeling. But we don’t have to just push through our experience with grim determination. We can learn to conduct our internal states, to create conditions favorable for making good decisions, and to use our emotional energy to continue to evolve. It’s all a matter of finding something bigger to be interested in and remembering to connect with it on a daily basis. More on the daily basis part on Wednesday ...

What I love about this is how it breaks up normal expected everyday reality. Stuff like this puts a grin on our faces and interrupts our regularly scheduled programs. It causes, as author Jonathan Fields said in a recent post, “a momentary awakening to the utter lunacy of the patterns we’ve adopted. And, though it’s taken years to wear those patterns into existence, in a heartbeat, we become unusually open to the notion that we can choose to respond differently. To create a new pattern.”

Have a wonderful weekend! And if you decide to burst into song at the farmers’ market, let us know what happens ...

image courtesy of Cara_VSAngel

On his blog about American philosophy and evolution, Jeff Carreira recently wrote about humanity’s evolutionary crisis—our inability to adapt to the rate of change we have created—and the two primary shifts we have to make to adjust our ideas about reality to reality.

The first shift concerns unity, so that we go from seeing the universe as a bunch of different things interacting with each other to understanding it as a single whole comprised of many parts. The second involves recognizing the ever-changing nature of reality. Things are not as stable and static as we think they are. In fact, every part of this whole is constantly moving around, bumping up against other parts, and both changing and being changed by the friction generated.

Understanding these ideas cognitively is one thing—and it is a big thing. And yet there is much more to it than that. What does it mean to live as part of one comprehensive, ever-evolving process?

We have all had the experience of standing in a beautiful landscape and feeling awed and humbled in the presence of something unspeakably good. The first environmentalists saw humankind as separate from this immensity, and therefore as a danger to it. But we aren’t separate—we’re part of the same whole. The same processes gave birth to every object, creature, and system in existence. The glory of an unfathomable landscape is in us, too.

The difference is that a mountain doesn’t have a choice in where it emerges, or when or how. But we do. We also have egos and self-identities and ideas about being separate from one another and nature. All of those are constructs of our consciousness, and they have served us well through the centuries—how could we learn to see and understand the different parts of reality without seeing ourselves as another independent part of it? But at this point, those constructs are obviously breaking down. As Jeff says it in his post, “I often feel like I am still working on yesterday’s problems only to realize that today’s are already upon me.” We need to do something else.

The shift Jeff is talking about is a big one—maybe the biggest ever. And though it depends upon individuals making a personal decision to develop, it’s much bigger than what is typically called personal development. All the reaching that we do—to think bigger, become stronger, get smarter, and inquire more deeply—this is what it’s really getting at. It’s not merely about getting really good at life as we know it. It’s about changing our understanding of what life is.

Can we take the leap into recognizing our contiguity with all of nature? Can we let go of our historical baggage and lean into the future like the goddess on the bow of a ship? Can we learn to steer?

I think we can, and that the more we look into our own personal willingness to do this—to courageously develop past everything we know right now—the more the bright green mirage on the horizon will shimmer into clearer and clearer focus.