Our True Nature

You are not a thing.

You are a process.

Every cell, every tissue, in constant flux and turnover.

You drink water. That water becomes, for a while, you.

The air that rushes into your lungs is not the same air that leaves when you breath out. The air that leaves was, just seconds ago, you.

There is no environment that is not us.

Therefore, the Environmental Protection Agency might better be called the the Agency for the Protection of Everything That Flows Through Our Bodies.

Furthermore....

We share this gorgeous planet with other beings, our relatives. 

Who also are not things. 

Who also are processes.

Some of whom regulate processes essential for our own lives. All of whom endow us with beauty and awe and amazement and wonder.

Even if we decided to sacrifice our own well-being, we have no right to sacrifice theirs.

There is a bright side on this dark day for environmental protection.

Through us water has voice.

Through us soil can march on Washington.

Through us air and climate and ferns and porpoises can be mad as hell.

When we fight for our lives and the integrity of our children's bodies we fight for everything because we are everything.

Make Soup Like A Systems Thinker (or Think Like a Soup-Maker)

If you know how to make soup, you already know a lot about systems thinking.

At CI this month we launched our MOOC,* the Climate Leader, an introduction to the skills of systems thinking for people taking action on climate change.

There’s no one-size-fits-all definition of a systems thinker, but this afternoon as I puttered in the kitchen, it occurred to me that soup making offers a pretty good metaphor. Here’s a short list of things that all systems thinkers and all soup makers know:

The quality of the whole depends on the health of the parts.

The best carrots in the world won’t save the soup if the cabbage is old and rubbery. The best-resourced sales team in the world can’t save a business if the engineering department is stagnating. Pouring more wealth into the top 1% of families won’t produce vibrancy in the whole society if other families are struggling.

To get good results you have to look beneath the surface and back in time.

A major factor the deliciousness of my pot of soup today is that all the ingredients were grown right in our backyard. The freshness, the taste, the texture, the nutrients, all derive from the conditions of the soil, the care of the harvest, the attention to storage and preservation.

Focus on the health of the parts, and the quality of the process - then let the results emerge from your efforts.

You might know the individual tastes of potatoes, squash, beans, and leeks and still not quite know how the soup that melds them all would taste. This is emergence, that quality that is so mysterious and so fundamental to our lives, our communities, and our collaborations. Systems thinkers and soup makers both focus on quality, take care with the process, and then sit back and allow the magic of system (or the soup) to reveal itself. 

Like any art form there's more to systems thinking, and more to soup making, than these three simple ideas. But they are a start, and I'd welcome your additions to this short list. 

*MOOC = Massive Open Online Course

Three Reasons To Keep On Working on Climate Education and Energy Policy

“Wow.  I just want to cry.  Please tell me we are making a difference.”’

Those were the words of a colleague today after she watched a  video illustrating a recent Bill McKibben essay about a rising tide of climate change symptoms around the world.

Many months have passed since the disappointments of Copenhagen and the failure to pass climate legislation in the United States.

Facing urgency from the planetary physics and gridlock in the political process, it is probably natural to feel discouragement at times.

But there are good reasons to believe we are making a difference, and good reasons to keep on going.

Here are three that keep me going: 
While it may feel like time is running out, time is also on our side.

1. Climate symptoms will become stronger and more convincing with the passage of time, and so will the lessons from those trail-blazing communities that have already leaped into the transition to clean energy and begun to reap the benefits in cleaner air and better jobs. If we keep moving ahead and doing our best, the dynamics of the system are destined to provide us with lift and support. Keeping going means that we are planting our seeds, strengthening our networks and building our capacity to seize the moments that a changing climate and cutting edge energy experimenters will offer as time passes
2. No one can predict the evolution of attitudes and beliefs.
   Just like the climate system, human systems of attitudes and beliefs are complex and non-linear, with tipping points where change becomes unstoppable. If you made a graph of these patterns there would be a long, flat ‘tail’ rising suddenly and steeply when a critical threshold is passed. We can’t know where those thresholds are until we’ve crossed them, but they are one reason to keep on writing, speaking, teaching, analyzing, organizing, voting, lobbying, and doing whatever we can. Keeping going means adding, little by little,  to the cumulative total of small actions that could someday carry us over a critical threshold.
3.  There isn’t a point where it makes sense to stop trying, saying ‘all is lost.’
   Every tenth of a degree of temperature increase prevented means better odds of survival for some species somewhere, or some community sometime in the future. When it comes to climate change, making a difference isn’t so much a matter of solving the problem once and for all as it is tilting the odds and keeping more options open.

So there you are, three ideas that keep me going, convinced we are making a difference. Without doubt there are more than these three.

What are some more? Why do you keep going?

Borrowing and Sharing

In yesterday's post I wrote about studies of happiness that show people tend to define what they need to be happy in relation to what they see around them and discussed how this can lead to escalating consumption and escalating environmental impacts. The more stuff in a community, the more people feel the need for more stuff, or so the logic of this feedback loop goes.

But in real systems no feedback loop exists in isolation. Today scanning through my Cobb Hill community emails, I was struck by the evidence for the exact opposite process, at least in our little community of 23 families, where borrowing, lending, and sharing often saves us from needing more stuff of our own.

Here, from the emails over the weekend is a sampling of the evidence:

• I’m looking for a small piece of wire mesh, about 5x5” – could be a scrap of window screen or something heavier.
  
• Does anyone at Cobb Hill have a soldering iron suitable for electronics, that I could borrow for a few days?A short length of flux-cored solder would also be helpful.
  
• Does anyone at Cobb Hill have a socket set with 1/4-inch drive or similar, with sockets going from about 3/16 to 7/16 inch, and from 4 to 10 mm, that I could borrow for a few days? It doesn't have to have a rachet, a driver will do just as well.
  
• Anyone have a bulb for a mudroom florescent light they would lend us until we can get a new one? 2 tubes, four prongs. Your neighbors in the dark.

On top of the borrowing and lending there are four or five emails about activities this week that require no (or hardly any) consumption, from gingerbread house building for kids, to a weekly photography class for teenagers, to Christmas morning waffles in the common house.

All sorts of new habits are needed to move from a world where more abundance around us leads us to us want more and more material goods of our own to a world where more abundance around us means we can be happy with less of our own.

From learning to ask for help to remembering to return things in cleaner, better shape than we received them, none of this seems to be second nature for folks raised in modern industrialized societies. But, ten years into the experiment of Cobb Hill, informal trades and sharing seem to work much more often than they fail. And from simple community email lists to websites specializing in car sharing or barter, new twists on the kind of sharing our grandparents took for granted offer one of the lowest cost, most efficient solutions to the sustainability challenge.

Shifting Consciousness, Starting With My Own

Sitting in my post-vacation inbox was a very tantalyzing email inviting me to join a  distinguished group of sustainability thinkers and doers, including some old friends I'd dearly love to see and some folks I've always wanted to meet.The agenda looked inspiring, all expenses were paid, and I've spent the past few days badly wanting to reply with an enthusiastic "count-me-in" while simultaneously thinking how crazy that would be, having already committed to workshops and conferences in Burlington, Boston, Geneva and San Fransisco between now and November.

The allure of the invitation is a strong combination I'm somehow deeply susceptible to – a mix of intellectual curiosity, gratitude for being recognized and included, and the hope that somehow maybe this group could make a big difference, change the world, halt the damage, open the way to new possibilities. If you tell me I could do something to accelerate the shift toward sustainable human communities on this Earth,  I will be putty in your hands.

But, this time,  I haven't sent that enthusiastic reply, at least not yet.

Instead I left the computer long enough to walk a little in the wet late summer day, breathe the moist air, and think about all the not-so-glamorous things I need to do this fall, from finishing some scientific writing projects, to planting the winter greenhouse, to helping a ten year old adjust to a new school, to helping a new team at a new organization find its stride.

None of that is likely to be the unitary key to a global shift in consciousness, but some of it might be a small part in a greater shift that is already underway. The scientific paper, if done well and met with receptive conditions, could help expand the time horizon of climate decision makers. The growing team, with the right mixture of hard work and good luck,  has a chance to help people understand the urgency and the possibility of the shift to a low carbon economy.

I still I haven't hit 'reply' but I think the answer is arising for me, in me. I think I'll be staying home that week in September, a week that is among the most beautiful of all the weeks of the year on a farm in Vermont.

I can't say for sure whether the faint voice I am hearing is the voice of wisdom or the voice of exhaustion, but one principle of complex systems is coming to mind, finally after all the soul-searching: systems work because of the diversity of their parts. Each part has to do its part, but no part has to do the whole job. The heart cell just has to do the work of the heart cell, the aster in the meadow just has to be an aster, not a milkweed, not a grass.

There's something restful in that idea, and something that leaves me grateful to know that such a fine group will be meeting in California, without being desperate to be there myself. And that's a new kind of acceptance for me, one that just might qualify as a shift in consciousness.