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?

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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This is a very silly video from Improv Everywhere, a group that does, well, improv everywhere. Though this piece isn’t exactly improvised ... Basically these people set up some cameras in a grocery store produce section in Queens, wrote a goofy song about fruit and peace, and performed it in the middle of the day for lots of confused and bemused customers.

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?

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image courtesy of Caveman 92223

Holding a bright green perspective in a largely cynical world is difficult for me. I’m not used to thinking positively about the future or seeing my own decisions as an integral part of what is being created. It’s not what I was raised or trained to do.

Rather, I tend to see myself as separate from everything else, and I’m used to feeling bad about where “the world” is heading. Sometimes I feel like a kook when I try to reach for a more positive and participatory of view. Sometimes it even feels fraudulent. How can I talk about becoming new people and bearing new gifts when so much what I do and feel is old and dingy and dark?

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In this short video (which I saw on No Impact Man’s blog), researchers converted a staircase into a piano, making it a feature in an otherwise boring transit routine. As a result, they found that 66% more people chose it over the escalator than usual. There are other examples at TheFunTheory.com, a project of Volkswagen, and they are also running a contest with a prize of 2500€ going to the best new fun theory ideas.

Thinking about how this might work on a large scale is in and of itself a lot of fun. So much of environmentalism right now is about self-denial and shrinking—but does it have to be? What if it wasn’t? As we build new ways to live, how can we make them playful and more fun than what we are doing now?

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image courtesy of Nesster

Last week I watched the first episode of Ken Burns’s new documentary series on America’s National Parks. It focused largely on John Muir, the Scots-born American writer and philosopher who many think of as the first environmentalist.

Muir’s outlook was based largely on his deep spiritual connection with nature, gained through epic walks in the mountains of Yosemite and other wild places in the world, and conveyed through his writings. His words touched me as they touched so many of his contemporaries. He saw nature as God’s greatest expression and worked tirelessly to protect it from the encroachments of industrial society and its half-baked notions of “progress.”

Much of the environmental movement still has this anti-progress bias today. But I wonder, is this historically inherited bias still serving us? Backing up even more, can we look objectively at the concept of progress? I’m not sure that we can, but it’s worth a shot.

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image courtesy of John Althouse Cohen

I’ve been battling a cold the last several days, and have been spending some time catching up on my newsreader. I came across some wonderful things—some inspiring, some thought-provoking, and some pure policy wonk stuff—that I wanted to share with you.

First off—a place where inspiration and policy-wonkness meet! The Center for American Progress and the United Nations Foundation have released a new study that shows that, in addition to being the smart and right thing to do, cutting carbon emissions makes great economic sense. If we put our efforts on the lowest-hanging fruit—energy efficiency, reforestation, and renewable energy technology—we stand to save $14 billion over the next 10 years. That’s a lot of ducats to put into further changes.

Next up is an essay reminding us of an important distinction in our conversations about climate change. The systems that support our societies are far more vulnerable and less resilient than is nature itself. So when we talk about environmental devastation, we should be clear that what’s on the line are the achievements of human culture—the levels of health, wealth, material security, education, morality, and understanding that we’ve achieved through coming together in ever-larger groups. Do you want to leave your kids a Mad Max world or a bright green one? That’s really the question we are answering.

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Colin Beavan, aka No Impact Man, appeared on The Colbert Report last night to talk about his year-long project to live without having any harmful impact on the environment, documented in his new book and movie. Colbert, expectedly, goofs on him—he chastises Beavan for the fact that, since they don’t have a TV at home, his daughter had to hear about Scooby-Doo at school. But it’s pretty good natured overall, and Beavan gets an opportunity to talk about the No Impact Week that his is co-sponsoring with the Huffington Post.

I have to admit that I’m of two minds about Beavan’s project. On one hand, it’s marvelous that he and his family were able to explore living in a new way, and even better that they found their new lifestyle to be healthier, more fun, and far more rewarding than their previous mode of heavy consumerism. On the other hand, lifestyle changes are a poor substitute for the full-scale soup-to-nuts transformation that we have to bring about in our culture in the next several years. On yet another hand (who’s counting?), Beavan’s project has made a great impact on a great many people, getting them to think about the way they live in new ways.

What I love about his message is that seems to be pushing these small lifestyle changes as a gateway drug to considering larger and larger ramifications of what we are here for, and how we can reinvent our culture to support human health, wealth, and security instead of mere consumerism.

Here’s the video of his short appearance on the Colbert report, as well as a link to a recent critical New Yorker article about his and other similar projects called “What’s Wrong With Eco-Stunts?” and Beavan’s response to that article. Both writers make excellent points, and rather than choosing sides, I’m inclined to think that the most important thing is that this discussion is even going on. What do you think? Let us know below ...

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