smogharp

Creating Change: Climate Change

2009-10-11T07:07:00.003-05:00

Infoshop has a dense article up on how decentralized energy production could become a method of creating radical change:

"Over the past fifteen years, radical communities have focused their energies on the development of a diverse set of social, political and cultural institutions including bookstores, infoshops, zines, bands, food distribution schemes, broadcasting stations, internet databases, libraries, cafes, squats, video networks, public kitchens, clubs, online message boards, record labels, bars, and more. While this may seem like nothing more than an inflated opinion of your local anarchist coffee-shop, these activities and practices have the potential to create entirely new social arrays, altering the expectations, values and belief systems of individuals by linking counter-hegemonic social conventions with foundational, everyday material practices. Gardens, childcare co-ops, bicycle lanes and farmers’ markets can combine theory with practice in ways that form strong social-material-psychological bonds, bonds that are the bedrock for developing alternative ways of living.

Thus, contemporary radical communities should strengthen what they've made and continue to do what they're good at: building with culture. Rather than developing broad plans and strategies, the best place for radicals to begin creating change is in their own lives and build from there, constantly expanding the scope of projects and educating with the power of material practices. As Feeny hinted at in Workers Solidarity, 'green' education has the potential to be either exclusionary and/or unproductive if it does not connect with the reality of individuals' daily lives. By creating the resources for environmentally sustainable ways of life, radical communities have something to offer. This approach allows for individuals to understand and tackle the large-scale social and economic aspects of environmental problems by framing these issues within the context of daily life." Source

Tying this into a previous article, I think there's a window for creating radical change that involves creative use of local resources, creative application of government resources and community-based values.

Also, a brief reply to Jeremy from the comments. I understand and appreciate your objections, but I have to say -- this isn't theoretical. We applied for and received government funding to create radical change in a public school. This radical change continues in the school, and the 'core group' involved has gone on to start at least two additional schools implementing a radically different education model.

I have a basic understanding of how 'shock and awe' and 'propaganda' can be used to blunt and prevent change, and that this sustaining change once Sauron's eye starts peering down on you is is incredibly difficult. However, the system is not all-powerful -- and as funding gets tighter, that creates a window for creating change in the right direction. Using crisis to create radical change is a tool that can also be used to create change that empowers the community.

I'll have more to say on this subject in a day or two, I'm still shaking out chemical cobwebs from my head. Chemical injury means that you never know what percentage of your brain is going to be working on any given day, and right now that percentage is pretty low :)

A Model for Creating Change

2009-10-07T07:38:00.003-05:00

So how does one create change in a large system, when resistance to change is so profound?

I would point to two successful methods in education that have implications for the larger public policy discussion on 'how to fix our broken culture'.

Dropping Out of the System

The first is unschooling, open schooling or free schooling. There's significant overlap between these methods.

Open School: A school where curriculum is generated on an irregular basis, depending on the availability of learning opportunities and the interests of those involved. Marked by a strong appreciation for community resources and immense flexibility.

"Open schools (otherwise known as Informal Schools or Open Classrooms) operate under the central theory that children want to learn and will do so naturally if left to their own initiative. The open classroom is marked by learning areas, often without walls. Students are free to move from area to area, learn at their own pace and enjoy unstructured periods of study." Source

Free School: A school where students are entirely self-motivated, directed by teachers only when the students initiate the conversation.

"An anarchist free school, sometimes spelled free skool, can be a decentralized network in which skills, information, and knowledge are shared without heirarchy or the institutional environment of formal schooling. The open structure of this type of free school is intended to encourage self-reliance, critical consciousness, and personal development." Source

Unschooling: Unschooling tends to define its curricula in opposition to modern schools.

"(R)efers to a range of educational philosophies and practices centering around allowing children to learn through their natural life experiences, including child directed play, game play, household responsibilities, and social interaction, rather than through the confines of a conventional school. Exploration of activities is often led by the children themselves, facilitated by the adults. Unschooling differs from conventional schooling principally in the thesis that standard curricula and conventional grading methods, as well as other features of traditional schooling, are counterproductive to the goal of maximizing the education of each child." Source

These educational philosophies can be employed in small-to-medium sized schools, or through homeschooling. This is one way of creating change -- by dropping out of the system, and ignoring the dominant propaganda model.

The benefit to this method is that change can be immediate, which is very important when the welfare of a child is at stake. Particularly at an early age, modern educational methods can be very hard on a child's emotional and psychological well-being.

The drawback to this method is that it doesn't create change in the larger society; it's relatively invisible. Most people have never heard of the Sudbury Valley School, and tend to regard homeschoolers as kooky religious extremists.

Creating Change Within the System

Another method for creating change is to support alternative schools and charter schools, which exist within the educational bureaucracy.

These alternatives were generally created to serve the needs of at-risk students, but once they proved themselves as effective (and uncontroversial) many charter and alternative schools were allowed to begin recruiting from the general student population.

Alternative School: Defined by some degree of deviation from traditional education. Alternative schools may be very similar to traditional schools, or significantly more student-centered (with students choosing the curriculum).

Charter School: A school defined by charter to meet specific goals. A charter school is its own district/administration, and can be dissolved if it fails to meet its goals.

Not all alternative schools and charter schools are worth supporting, but many are. They may not represent as radical a change as a homeschool employing experiential learning methods (get the child out into the world to experience and learn from it), but many parents and students aren't ready for that kind of a break from the status quo. A school that looks fairly traditional, but employs student-centered education methods is a substantial improvement over the status quo.

In terms of supporting these schools, here's an excerpt from an earlier post:

"The first, and perhaps most important thing is to stop increasing the regulations on our schools. The progressive increase in paperwork, testing, and restrictions on curriculum are stifling innovation. Another important change would be to allow for more experimental schools within the charter school and contract school movement. As these schools are contractually obligated to achieve certain goals or face disillusion, they are already being held to higher standards than most schools are. Allowing for change and experimentation within the auspices of an existing contract is an excellent way to test out the validity of novel educational practices. If these practices are not beneficial to students, they will be closed either due to lack of students or a failure to meet their contractual obligations."

Allowing experimental schools to be exempt from existing regulations as long as their results meet certain benchmarks relevant to genuine student learning would (eventually) create a revolution in education. This was proven to be an effective way of promoting student learning 66 years ago.

Another excerpt:

"All of these changes require some degree of long-term planning. They presuppose a system of smaller schools within a larger system of choice. Within this system, revenues should follow the students, allowing for parental choice in which schools should remain open and fully-funded. These changes also presuppose a tolerance for diversity within the structure. A diversity of educational practices, within a system of choice, would do much more to benefit student learning than any new regulations from the Department of Education."

The other way to support these experimental schools would be to allow for complete student/parent choice in selecting a school. Only a minority of families would make this choice initially. However, as experimental techniques became more commonplace in the community and as the alternative methods of education were shown to be effective, then the number of families making this choice would increase over time.

The disadvantage of this method (change within the existing system) is that it's slow. It would take a decade or two for changes to really begin to manifest themselves within the system.

The advantage to this method, however, is that it has the potential to create large-scale change.

Public Policy Implications

This piece demonstrates an effective way to create change within a broken system.

1. Work to create alternative agencies, bureaucracies and programs within the larger system. It is critical that the method used to evaluate these experimental programs be based on genuine, real-world values like "clean water" and "kids who can read and write coherently". Standard evaluation methods are rigged to support the status quo, and were created to prevent radical change from occurring.

Being held accountable to standards is essential for any government program these days, but these standards must reflect real-world concerns.

2. Change the policy/law to allow community members to voluntarily choose these experimental programs, and that public dollars follow. This will seldom happen all at once; it is better to lobby for exemptions for underserved community groups like single mothers, at-risk students or convicted felons. These underserved communities tend to be invisible, and can provide cover for a nascent experimental program (few school administrators spend a lot of time thinking about the welfare of students who have failed 3 or more classes). However, attempting to allow 'the money to follow the community member' will be fought tooth-and-nail if it is not initially limited to an at-risk group.

3. The propaganda model is challenged by this approach because:

(a) The experimental program is being held to standards. It's difficult to argue against students who read and write 3 grade levels above the norm.

(b) Trying something new on an at-risk group isn't very controversial, and the experimental program can be shut down if it doesn't comport to established standards.

4. Once these experimental programs have proven themselves to be effective, and have created loyalty among one or more communities, then the programs can expand beyond serving at-risk groups and become models for other experimental programs. "You see? It worked over in Rochester, it can work here too!". The longer-term policy goal is to promote the creation of many small, experimental programs that provide an alternative to the status quo -- and eventually defund it.

These new programs don't have to co-opt a significant amount of resources; in fact, it's better that they fly under the radar screen for a few years. Once a critical mass of evidence in support of the program's effectiveness is generated, and enough community members are in support of the program to help lobby for it, then the experimental program can be expanded.

The trick is to find a crack in the door, and to slowly jiggle it open. Every system has vulnerabilities, and every system has communities that it underserves. These underserved communities are weak points in the propaganda model.

These weak points are the place to drive the wedge.

Education: A Resistance to Change

2009-10-06T10:01:00.004-05:00

Following up on the research paper I posted, there are a number of interesting observations I can make from the more distant perspective I have now.

One of these observations is that the resistance to change regarding education is profound, and has implications for future efforts to reform our larger culture.

The public's response to educational scare stories like 'omg the Chinese are beating us in math' is to have more memorization of facts, more high-stakes testing, and more carrot-and-stick incentives for teachers and students. This approach is similar to our culture's response to other problems: to keep adding more complexity to the system, figuring that somehow 'more of the same' will fix it.

Crime is high? More cops and more prisons will solve the problem!

Kids are using drugs? Scare them straight, and make the consequences of getting caught really high. That will get them to stop using (illegal, non-Pfizer-approved) drugs!

When people challenge these paradigms, the reaction is to retrench and build the pyramid higher. Sophisticated propaganda models like "our schools are great!" react to outside threats and work to humiliate, marginalize and/or destroy competing propaganda models.

When these propaganda models start to weaken, another model is ready to take its place:

We're running low on cheap oil? Well, let's open up more areas to drilling! And we'd better make sure to station more troops around the oil wells in the middle east. This has worked great since 1950 ... what could go wrong!?

(when this model starts to fail, we get ...)

OK, so there's actually some sort of limit on how much cheap oil is actually in the ground? No problem! Hybrid electric cars will solve everything. We'll just shift seamlessly from oil to electricity.

It's very difficult to create fundamental change in a system that is so adept at repairing holes in the dike. Public propaganda models are very sophisticated these days, are are very well-funded by established interests that profit from their continuation.

The systems are robust, but there are real people involved at level. How about appealing to the actors involved in maintaining the failing systems?

From the previous article:

"Holt argued for a radical change in the way schools were organized, but found that asking teachers to do things that were "so obviously beyond their power" was counterproductive. Instead, he asked teachers to make small changes in the classroom through a process of trial and error -- and to continue practices that proved effective. This effort, too, failed. The teachers he spoke to were too fearful to seek out their own answers, relying on the expertise of professionals above their own personal judgment."

Established systems also have sophisticated methods of filtering its membership. Teachers have to attend (at a minimum) 4 years of college, and 3 years of low status non-tenured teaching. Half of all people who make it through 16 years of schooling to become teachers do not make it through this three year trial period. This is a very effective method of assuring that teachers who would disrupt the status quo don't become professional teachers; and that even the few that get through are moderated by having to conform to peer expectations for at least their first 3 years (prior to receiving tenure).

This type of filtering is very common in bureaucratic organizations, and makes appealing to the regular people involved in a bureaucracy difficult. Not only have they been selected for their ability to conform to organizational expectations, their livelyhood is also dependent on the status quo.

This creates a very powerful paradigm, one that filters incoming information and prevents bureaucrats from seeing many of the worst abuses of their organization.

There is significant resistance to change in a large organization like a school district -- so how does one create change, then?

I'll follow up on this thought later this week.

Alternative Education Research Paper

2009-10-06T09:33:00.004-05:00

I did a lot of research into educational methods when I worked at an alternative school from 1999-2001. We prepared for, and then wrote a grant funding transformation of the school towards student-centered learning. I learned a whole lot more from Wayne Jennings and Designs for Learning, as they worked with us the following summer to change the school into a Community Learning Center.

What follows is a graduate school paper of mine gets to many of the reasons why school change initiatives seldom succeed -- and why the broken system is so good at perpetuating itself.

I'll follow up in the coming days with other observations on education; the writing will be less formal :)

Some links relevant to this piece:

The Eight Year Study, the most comprehensive study of educational methods ever done in America. Very few people choose to remember this study because it showed that experimental and nontraditional schools were more effective than standard classrooms.

Subbury Valley School: If a child can't be homeschooled at an early age, this is a pretty good alternative. I would have thrived in an environment like this one.

----

Our schools today greatly resemble those of a generation ago. Since its introduction in schoolhouses across America in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the dominant model of education has been remarkably static. Reform and revolutionary change have failed to fundamentally alter the way education is delivered in America. Successful reform efforts have been transitory, isolated within a larger structure and difficult to sustain. Despite a lack of research to justify the increasing time and resources being expended on education in order to improve this model, our educational institutions have consistently failed to articulate a clear vision of change in the light of past failed reform efforts.

The dominant model in education is based upon a teacher-centered method of delivery with the following characteristics: age segregation, tight curricular requirements, lectures, textbooks, and tests. The current structure of large schools dominated by non-teaching administrators are essential adjuncts to this model. This model continues to dominate educational thought and practice despite evidence that no amount of additional resources can perfect this method of teaching (Ciotti, 1998), meeting its goal of delivering high education standards to all students.
The evidence is clear that other methods of delivering education are more effective in raising student achievement than this traditional model (Jennings & Nathan, 1977). Alfie Kohn discussed the alternatives this way:

"(T)raditional education sometimes provides students with basic skills but rarely a penetrating understanding of what lies behind those skills, how they’re connected, or how they can be thoughtfully applied. By contrast, a non-traditional education … nearly always enhances understanding and often helps with basic skills to boot (Kohn, 1999, p. 233-234)".

In the Eight Year Study, longitudinal research was conducted in the 1930s with the assistance of high schools and colleges across the country. The results of the study, the most comprehensive in the history of educational research, showed that experimental schools and multidisciplinary curriculum greatly improved the success rates of students (Schugurensky, 1995).

There is ample evidence to show that the less traditional the approach, the greater the level of student achievement will be. The Sudbury Valley School, for example, teaches nothing -- its students are entirely self-directed. Yet, their students are among the most successful in the nation (as measured in reading ability, college entrance scores, and career success) irregardless of their socio-economic background (Greenbery, 1992).

These types of programs, collectively, fall under the "progressive" rubric. They emphasize student-directed, multidisciplinary, project-based, flexible and community-oriented methods of learning over teacher-directed, lecture-oriented classes with rigidly defined curricula .
Evidence for the utility of progressive education is incorporated in many teacher certification programs, where progressive and constructivist concepts are shared with emerging teachers. These concepts, however, are rarely incorporated in the classroom (Wagner, 1994). The clash between the educational philosophy taught in college, and that practiced in most classrooms, is hampered by the inability of most schools to adapt to change. Perhaps because of this clash, by the end of five years between 25-50% of all new teachers will leave the profession (Hare & Heap, 2001).

The rigidity of the dominant, teacher-centered mode of education is pervasive and well-rooted. However, there is very little evidence to support this ever-expanding system of large schools, non-teaching administrators, teacher-directed learning, age division and discrete curricular subjects (Kohn, 1999). There is even less evidence to support the continued "super-sizing" of our educational institutions, as the results produced by them continue to grow more and more disappointing (Nathan & Febey, 2001).

In trying to gauge the effectiveness of our schools, John Taylor Gatto compares quotes from scholars of education across 140 years and writes:

"It is hardly unfair to say that the stupidity of 1867, the fruitlessness of 1880, the dullness of 1895, the cannot be reformed of 1910, the absolutely nothing of 1930, and the nothing of 1960 has been continued into the schools of 2000. We pay four times more in real dollars than we did in 1930 and thus we buy even more of what mass schooling dollars always bought (Gatto, 2000-2001, p. 312)."

By investing more and more resources into a system that has proven incapable of substantial change or progress, our schools fail to meet their goal of educating every child.
Schools are not unique in this lack of progress in meeting their stated goals. Other social services, like welfare agencies and hospitals, have been shown to offer their clients little improvement through the addition of money and resources (Illich, 1976). Indeed, the bureaucracies of these social institutions can become so detrimental to progress that the very abolition of the institution itself becomes the most effective way to accomplish the organization’s principal goals.

Measuring the success or failure of an organization, or their ability to meet stated goals, is very difficult. Most measures of change gauge marginal change, and measure only the most tangible of quantifiable variables. In economic terms, only the marginal benefit of a reform or a new program is usually measured. The opportunity costs to other organizations, or to the community at large, are seldom considered.

John McKnight tackles this issue directly, stating that:

"In the fields of social work, developmental disabilities, physical disability, or care of the elderly, no traditions of routinely analyzing possible negative side effects exists. Instead, evaluation usually focuses on whether an intervention "made a difference." The intervention is presumed to help if it has any effect at all, and if it has no measurable effect, it is assumed not to have hurt (McKnight, 1995, 101)."

The problem, according to McKnight, is that these institutions can pre-empt other possibilities from emerging on their own to tackle the problem at hand. They divert resources, and prevent the natural social order from coalescing around a problem in order to solve it. In short, they can be disruptive to community-building and shared problem-solving.

In education, there are opportunity costs in the use of scarce resources that can benefit other needs. There is the collective weight of program upon program, which may be individually justified but collectively disruptive. There is also the time of the students themselves, who are precluded from other activities (both good and bad) while attending school.

There is some evidence to show that our schools may be iatrogenic. Perhaps most important is the inability of many schools to make education an inviting, intrinsically rewarding activity (Gormly, 1981). Most students given a chance, would not volunteer to attend school if all extrinsic rewards and punishments were removed. Other evidence comes from students who are home-schooled, or from students attending free schools or open schools . Home-schooled children and free-schooled children tend to do just as well as, if not better than their traditionally schooled counterparts. They excel, however, in more intangible measures like self-confidence, creativity and work ethic (Gatto, 2000-2001). Less formal schooling does not seem to hamper student success.

There is also some evidence that schools may be responsible for the magnification of certain learning disabilities through their focus on standardization and averages. William Glasser wrote that:

"Very few children come to school failures, none come labeled failures; it is school and school alone which pins the label of failure on children. Most of them have a success identity, regardless of their homes or environments. In school they expect to achieve recognition and, with the faith of the young, they hope also to gain the love and respect of their teachers and classmates. The shattering of this optimistic outlook is the most serious problem of the elementary schools. (Glasser, 1969, p. 26)"

The argument that our schools may be iatrogenic is unsubstantiated, but worthy of additional research. What the evidence does show, however, is how shaky the argument for traditional education is. Traditional teaching practices are difficult to defend against their abolition; they are almost impossible to defend against the proven utility of progressive teaching practices.
Despite this, traditional teaching and traditionally-organized schools remain the dominant force in education. Though alternatives are more prolific than in previous years, they still constitute only a minority of the schools. The majority of schools have changed little since they replaced the "one-room schoolhouse" over a century ago.

Jolene Morris considered the origins of these larger, more centrally managed schools and their effect on learning:

"In the beginning of schools, we had the one-room schoolhouse. Then came the Industrial Revolution and Frederick Taylor. Frederick Taylor was an industrial engineer who invented scientific management, the assembly line, and the current school system. It's efficient for the teacher; it's not designed for the student ... We lost that freedom we had in the one-room schoolhouse where we individualized the learning with the students. Students lost the ability to take responsibility for their own learning (Morris, 2000)."

These centrally-managed organizations were not created to benefit the students, but to deliver education in an efficient and cost-effective manner (Campbell, 1987). Once created, the need for an administrative structure became dominant (Callahan, 1962). The hierarchy of our schools branched upwards, creating a new class of leaders: superintendents, district office personnel, and professional school board members. The hierarchy also branched downwards, encompassing a new flotilla of services within the school: guidance counselors, nurses, psychologists, probation officers, network technicians, athletic directors, janitors and more. The school became a prolific source of jobs, the district a scientifically-managed entity fulfilling an increasing number of critical bureaucratic functions (Weber, 1922). Lost in this expansion was learning and education, which took up an ever-smaller percentage of a school's budget as each "need" was met by yet another paid professional (Gatto, 2000-2001).

Each of these non-teaching professionals has slightly different priorities, and a different purpose. A guidance counselor may view salability to potential employers as the goal of education, while an art teacher may see aesthetic creativity as the only true mark of an educated citizen. The goals of professionals conflict; the more professionals there are in a school, the larger the potential for conflict.

Adding to this is the inherent conflict between school administrators who are trained to view the ideology of the marketplace as paramount, and teachers who tend to view education as a lofty and ineffable calling. Line-item budgets and true believers seldom mix well.

The public also seems to prefer the stability of schools – or, rather, the lack of suspicious change (Meier, 1995). Schools often serve as a form of subsidized day-care for families. Predictable, timely extracurricular activities keep the community supportive. Successful students also like stability -- change means mastering a new set of strategies to maximize performance. Ironically, many unsuccessful students fear change because the expectations placed on them are so low that they can get by on inertia alone (Sizer, 1985). Our society is very comfortable with the rituals of school. Report cards, algebra class, study hall, summer vacation, detention, Mrs. Johnson's typing class, grammar drills, and test after test after test. It worked for us -- it's got to work for Johnny.

The lack of incentive for change may also be explained by the career track of most professional teachers, and how little incentive exists to adapt to the demands of outside actors. Tenured teachers are professionals in the strictest sense of the words, owing more loyalty to their profession than to the demands of their manager (Wilson, 2000). Thus, their jobs as professionals may be threatened by new techniques and practices through decreasing autonomy (Glanz, 1991).

In education, most incentives favor the status quo. Thus observed John Taylor Gatto, who wrote that, "An insufficient incentive exists to change things much, otherwise things would change." This must be true, for overwhelming evidence has shown that the status quo is in need of substantial remedy for over fifty years now.

In 1950, John Holt observed that:

"Schools should be a place where children learn what they most want to know, instead of what we think they ought to know. The child who wants to know something remembers it and uses it once he has it; the child who learns something to please or appease someone else forgets it when the need for pleasing or the danger of not appeasing is past. This is why children quickly forget all but a small part of what they learn in school. It is of no use or interest to them; they do not want, or expect, or even intend to remember it (Holt, 1950, p. 289)."

Holt reasoned that student behavior was a perfectly rational result of the process of education. He added that, "we adults destroy most of the intellectual and creative capacity of children by the things we do to them or make them do." (Holt, 1950, p. 274). Holt argued that schools, by their insistence that a base core of knowledge was essential to teach to every child, fought against human nature.

He also argued for a radical change in the way schools were organized, but found that asking teachers to do things that were "so obviously beyond their power" was counterproductive (Holt, 1950, p. 277). Instead, he asked teachers to make small changes in the classroom through a process of trial and error -- and to continue practices that proved effective. This effort, too, failed. The teachers he spoke to were too fearful to seek out their own answers, relying on the expertise of professionals above their own personal judgment.

John Holt was not the only person to see this disconnect. Many efforts to reform schools have been made over the years, and almost all of them have failed (Temes, 2001). Perhaps the most celebrated effort at reform has been the Essential School movement, which identified the structural barriers to student learning in the typical American school.

The founder of the Essential Schools group, Ted Sizer, identified several ways in which the bureaucracy of education gets in the way of change: It creates a drive towards monolithic rules and structures that ignore the reality of local conditions, it forces accountability through the use of easily measurable data, it creates a series of norms that do not allow for individual variation in students, it isolates students and teaches through the sheer numbers necessary to sustain specialized licenses, and "stifles initiative at its base" (Sizer, 1985, p. 209).

Despite evidence that our system of education is failing on nearly every level to increase the capabilities of its students and the reality that alternative models exist to replace the current system, nothing is really changing. The majority of schools look very similar to those we had a generation ago.

The primary attempt to reform education in America is a call for accountability through standardization of curriculum and testing, reducing the level of human judgment in the classroom. The goal is to provide more quantitative ways to measure the effectiveness of learning and teaching, creating a standardized, nationalized curriculum in order to set a minimum standard of knowledge for all students (Sykes, 1995). Then, by testing students regularly to see what students have learned, the effectiveness of individual schools and teachers can be measured (Sacks, 1999).

The premise behind this system of accountability is that these test results will ensure quality instruction by providing the public with irrefutable evidence as to the amount of learning taking place in each classroom. According to Deborah Meier, however, this sort of system is too crude to measure genuine learning or ability. She writes that:

"We need standards held by real people who matter in the lives of our young. School, family, and community must forge their own, in dialogue with and in response to the larger world of which they are a part. There will always be tensions; but if the decisive, authoritative voice always comes from anonymous outsiders, then kids cannot learn what it takes to develop their own voice (Meier, 2000)."

Despite our cultural penchant for attaching numbers to things, our drive towards further standardization of the curriculum will not result in positive gains for students (Kohn, 1999). All attempts since the dawn of professional management to standardize learning have failed (Gatto, 2000-2001).

In response to this demand for accountability, our schools have in turn demanded more resources to educate their students. These resources have primarily come through local bond referenda to ensure funding for popular programs and services, and through non-profit foundations and state governments to fund new initiatives. Despite these increased resources, however, education remains static and the benefit to students remains largely marginal (Berliner & Biddle, 1995). Some non-profits have even turned their back on public schools, after being discouraged by the lack of progress in previous years (Temes, 2001).

Substantial change and experimentation is occurring in education, but it is largely a marginal affair: traditional, teacher-centered learning still accounts for the overwhelming majority of schools. There is a minority trend towards smaller schools, teacher managed schools, alternative schools, charter schools and open schools within the country (Nathan & Febey, 2001). These schools demonstrate an immense variety of programs and options for students, but the dominant model still pervades deeply even in this minority of alternatives. Where it does exist, however, progressive education has proven to work (Kohn, 1999).

Progressive education theorist John Dewey taught that students engaged in "moving ideas" take more interest in their studies, learn more fully the import of their lessons, and become better people. Dewey believed that the teacher’s task is to "keep alive the sacred spark of wonder and to fan the flame that already glows. His problem is to protect the spirit of inquiry, to keep it from becoming blasé from over excitement, wooden from routine, fossilized through dogmatic instruction, or dissipated by random exercise upon trivial things." ( Dewey, 1991).

Dewey believed that the practice of learning through doing, the self-discovery of research, and the act of weighing contradictory evidence dispelled the certitude of knowledge and instilled a healthy spirit of introspective moralism in its practitioners. Dewey’s vision of progressive education was that the student, not the teacher, belonged at the core of learning.

These methods of teaching have been proven to work, as "few other educational approaches have documented such a direct, positive effect on student achievement" (Barr & Parrett, 1997). The difficulty, however, is that students "won't all learn the same things." (Quinn, 2000). This variation is difficult to account for in a Taylorized school environment.

Larry Cuban discussed the policy implications of research into progressive education this way:

"Were policymakers deeply interested in pursuing forms of schooling that aimed at cultivating the intellectual, social, and economic powers of individual children while creating democratic communities in schools, they would see that current classroom organization discourages students from learning from one another, limits the growth of independent reasoning and problem solving, restricts opportunities for student decision-making at the classroom and school level, and largely ignores the contributions that the community can make to the students and that students can make to the community (Cuban, 1993, p.278)."

If the results are so obviously biased in one direction, then why the lack of change? Perhaps because learning in itself is not the true mission of our schools -- but learning certain things is. (Glenn, 1988). Defining who learns what is a constant battle, and thus curriculum choices are among the most difficult decisions at most schools.

Besides community expectations over curriculum and course content, perhaps there is another factor at work here: job stability. If students were judged based on competence and graduated based on accomplishment, then what would prevent a self-taught student from "testing out" of a school early? With students flows revenue -- and with revenue flows employment. Changes in the way education is delivered threaten this structure, by placing the responsibility of learning back on the student. This changes the role of education practitioners and experts, who have a vested interest in the current system.

True reform, then, requires something more substantial. Herbert Wagner identified three key elements to successful reform:

"There are three essential, interrelated components to a successful school improvement process: establishing clear academic goals based on developing and assessing students’ competencies rather than on “covering” subjects; creating a caring community with explicit core values; and encouraging many forms of collaboration between teachers and students, parents, and community members. When one or more of these parts is missing, change is thwarted. And when all three are strong, schools can and do transform themselves – though such systemic change is neither quick nor easy (Wagner, 1994, p. 181)."

The difficulty of creating change in a system is echoed by educators who worked on the Community Learning Center model. The CLC design specifications states that “For a fundamental change in education to be lasting and effective, it must be a transformation that pervades all aspects of the organization” (Designs for Learning, 2000, p. 9). The design specifications go on to say that within an existing organization, it is not only change that is difficult – but also sustainability. Sustaining the momentum of change is even more difficult than initiating the original change.

In order to reform our schools and make them more active centers of learning for students, there are primarily two ways to assist in creating the conditions necessary for this change to take place. The first way is to focus on the reform of existing schools, creating an collegial atmosphere of open communication and dialogue, leading to a renewal of shared mission and values (Wagner, 1994). The other is to ripen conditions for the creation of new charter schools and contract schools, where the mission is specified by contract and the collegiality is assisted by the small size of the institution (Designs for Learning, 2000).

Of these two routes towards change, the most likely source of change is through the creation of new contract and charter schools. Although there is a growing recognition that small, site-administered schools are critical to the success of students, efforts aimed at creating smaller schools within an existing larger structure are strongly resisted in many districts. The process of “chopping up” a building to create smaller schools is a fairly disruptive experience, and it requires stronger leadership and more resources than most districts can currently muster up. Creating new charter and contract schools, on the other hand, creates rather immediate change. Charters and contract schools that do not meet their goals are disbanded.

There are many things that can be done to assist in the incorporation of research into progressive education principles into all of these schools, which will also assist in the education of students. The first, and perhaps most important thing is to stop increasing the regulations on our schools. The progressive increase in paperwork, testing, and restrictions on curriculum are stifling innovation (Sizer, 1985). Another important change would be to allow for more experimental schools within the charter school and contract school movement. As these schools are contractually obligated to achieve certain goals or face disillusion, they are already being held to higher standards than most schools are. Allowing for change and experimentation within the auspices of an existing contract is an excellent way to test out the validity of novel educational practices. If these practices are not beneficial to students, they will be closed either due to lack of students or a failure to meet their contractual obligations.

For existing school districts, the transition to smaller schools with local school-based management can be seen as a decades-long process. Just as it took a generation to transition from the one-room schoolhouse to the centrally-managed district, it will take time to change existing districts into smaller, self-autonomous places of learning.

All of these changes require some degree of long-term planning. They presuppose a system of smaller schools within a larger system of choice. Within this system, revenues should follow the students, allowing for parental choice in which schools should remain open and fully-funded. These changes also presuppose a tolerance for diversity within the structure. A diversity of educational practices, within a system of choice, would do much more to benefit student learning than any new regulations from the Department of Education.

Change within the structure of education in America has always been difficult, but it can be accomplished with a serious view towards what has worked and what has not worked in the past. In education, the will to create change has come mainly through crisis; change itself has come only to those institutions willing to enact comprehensive, system-wide reform. For the most part, however, change has come only through the creation of new schools and new institutions. In the case of new schools, and existing schools, the greatest thing that our society can do to assist in the creation of stronger centers of learning is to accept that the future of education will be different than that which they grew up with. The “standard model” of one teacher, thirty students and a podium is going to change -- at least in some schools. With this change will come new measures of accountability, and new methods of teaching. It is only through these types of changes that our schools will begin to meet the expectations that we set for them.

Appendix A

Traditional Education:
Defined by teacher-centered instruction (lectures, tests), age-separated classrooms, professional administrative oversight and strict curricular-based instruction.

Direct Instruction:
A “back to the basics” approach where facts and skills are repeatedly drilled and tested to ensure retention by students.

Alternative School:
Defined by some degree of deviation from traditional education. Alternative schools may be very similar to traditional schools, or significantly more student-centered (with students choosing the curriculum).

Progressive Education:
A philosophy of learning that places more value on higher thinking skills and creativity than on skills and facts. A belief that active, student-centered learning creates more effective educational opportunities for students.

Constructivist Education:
A practice of education whereby students construct knowledge actively, rather than being passive recipients of information.

Open School:
A school where curriculum is generated on an irregular basis, depending on the availability of learning opportunities and the interests of those involved. Marked by a strong appreciation for community resources and immense flexibility.

Free School:
A school where students are entirely self-motivated, directed by teachers only when the students initiate the conversation.

Charter School:
A school defined by charter to meet specific goals. A charter school is its own district/administration, and can be dissolved if it fails to meet its goals.

Home School:
A school based in the home. Privately organized and paid for by individual parents.

References
Barr, R. & Parrett, W. (1997). How to Create Alternative, Magnet, and Charter Schools That Work. Bloomington, Indiana: National Educational Service.

Berliner, D. & Biddle, B. (1995). The Manufactured Crisis. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Callahan, R. (1962). Education and the Cult of Efficiency. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Campbell, I. (1987). A History of Thought and Practice in Educational Administration. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Ciotti, P. (1998). America’s Most Costly Education Failure. Retrieved on: November 30, 2001. Located at: http://www.cato.org/dailys/4-29-98.html

Clinchy, E. (1994). Higher Education: The Albatross Around the Neck of Our Public Schools. Phi Delta Kappan, June 1994.

Cuban, L. (1993). How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1890-1990. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Designs for Learning (2000). Community Learning Center Specifications.

Dewey, J. (1991). How We Think. New York: Prometheus Books.

Follett, M. (1926). The Giving of Orders. In J. Shafritz; A. Hyde (Ed.), Classics of Public Administration (pp.37-43). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.

Glanz, J. (1991). Bureaucracy and Professionalism: The Evolution of Public School Supervision. Cranberry, NJ: Associated University Press.

Glasser, W. (1969). Schools Without Failure. New York: Harper & Row.

Glenn, C. (1988). The Myth of the Common School. Boston, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press.

Gormly, J. (1981). Comprehensive Assessment of Educational Systems. In S. Anderson (Ed.), Managing Effectiveness (pp 69-82). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers.

Gatto, J. (2000-01). The Underground History of American Education. Oxford, NY: The Oxford Village Press.

Holt, J. (1950). How Children Fail. Reading, MA: Perseus Books.

Jennings, W. & Nathan, J. (1977). Startling/Disturbing Research on School Program Effectiveness. Phi Delta Kappan, March, 1977.

Kanigel, R. (1997). The One Best Way. New York, NY: Penguin Books.

Kohn, A. (1999). The Schools Our Children Deserve. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Light, P. (1999). The New Public Service. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.

Meier, D. (1995). The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons From a Small School in Harlem. Boston, MA: Beacon Press Books.

Meier, D. (2000). Will Standards Save Public Education? Boston: Beacon Press.

Morris, J. (2000). Reach the Reluctant: Strategies to Win the Participation of Late Adopters. Retrieved on November 30, 2001. Located at: http://www.ucet.org/pmcurrent.hml

Nathan J. & Febey, K. (2001). Smaller, Safter, Saner Successful Schools. Retrieved on November 5, 2001. Located at: http://www.hhh.umn.edu/centers/school-change/reform.htm

Quinn, D. (2001). Schooling: The Hidden Agenda. Retrieved on October 17, 2001. Located at: http://www.ishmael.org/Education/Writings/unschooling.shtml

Sacks, P. (1999). Standardized Minds. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers.

Schugurensky, D. (1995). The Eight Year Study Begins. Retrieved on November 30, 2001. Located at: http://fcis.oise.utoronto.ca/~daniel_schugurensky/assignment1/1930eight.html

Seiber, C. (2001). Louisiana Student Aces College Without Prior Schooling. Retrieved on September 30, 2001. Located at: http://newsfinder.arinet.com/fpweb/fp.dll/$azoffbeat/htm/x_dv.htm/…/X5yKxSmVyGONY1X

Sizer, T. (1985). Horace’s Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School. New York NY: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Sykes, J. (1995). Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why America’s Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can’t Read, Write, or Add. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press.

Temes, P. (2001). The End of School Reform. Education Week. Available at: http://www.edweek.org/ew/ewstory.cfm?slug=29temes.h20&keywords=reform

Wagner, H. (1994). How Schools Change: Lessons From Three Communities. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Weber, M. (1922). Bureaucracy. In J. Shafritz; A. Hyde (Ed.), Classics of Public Administration (pp.37-43). Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers.

Wilson, J. (2000). Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It. United States: Basic Books.

From the Comments: Health Care Reform, Anarchist Public Policy

2009-10-05T00:18:00.003-05:00

Anonymous commented:

"You have some truly great suggestions here. I really enjoyed this. However, the one thing that gave me prickles was the idea of "regulating" toxic chemicals. I agree there should be no toxic chemicals in our environment, but how does one "regulate" this from an anarchist standpoint? "Regulation", unless voluntary, is a governmental function. The State regulates. And the big boys usually find a way to co-opt that process. In fact, it has historically been big business who funded and fueled the "progressive party" regulation movement. One possible direction might be to research and then remove laws which protect companies producing toxic chemicals from liability. Liability suits could then make it more costly for companies to produce, and if an anti-toxicity collective participated in such a suit, they could utilize the damages in part to pay for a big media campaign to educate people about the effects of toxicity. From there, a consumer boycott could be another voluntary, non-State technique to "regulate" these chemicals."

I guess I should preface my reply by stating that I am profoundly toxified and reactive to chemicals. It's something that has affected every aspect of my life and has brought me an indescribable amount of pain. So when I talk about regulating toxins, I speak from a very emotional place. I don't want this shit to happen to anyone else.

I understand your reluctance to regulate things, the government hardly has a good track record on this subject. But chemicals are so ubiquitous and easy to hide, as Lou showed in a recent post. I'm not sure that liability suits and consumer boycotts are sufficient. It's just such a huge and deeply ingrained problem -- I don't see anything other than the force of law changing it quickly enough to prevent another generation of children from being turned into chemistry labs.

Another way of saying this is that corporations are so powerful these days that I can't see individuals being effective enough to contain their abuses. If corporate personhood were ended and 150 years of regulations protecting them from liability were rolled back, then I would agree with you -- individuals should be able to manage their own regulations. But the playing field is not level and I don't see it being leveled anytime soon, short of a complete collapse.

Because of this, as a matter of public policy I have no problem with the government declaring that certain substances are simply too toxic to be allowed on the market -- and that their use is an assault upon the community.

As an anarchist, I believe that all power centers are to be distrusted and made less powerful. But as a practical matter, that's not the world we live in. So as an anarchist, I believe that the second best thing to do is to use one power center (the government) to limit the abuses of another power center (toxic corporations). This is no more contradictory, in my mind, than using a diesel truck to haul building supplies to build a passive solar home in the woods. I believe in using the tools available to us in order to promote a more sane and sustainable world.

I also wanted to add that I really like this idea:

"Liability suits could then make it more costly for companies to produce, and if an anti-toxicity collective participated in such a suit, they could utilize the damages in part to pay for a big media campaign to educate people about the effects of toxicity."

I appreciate the discussion, thank you.

Health Care Reform: A Cynical View of Where We'll End Up :)

2009-10-04T07:05:00.001-05:00

Click here for the entire series, this is part 4/4.

I expect the following things to happen in the health care reform debate in America:

1. 20-40 million people will have access to better health insurance at moderate cost to themselves, and another 300 million Americans will be abused less by their insurance companies when they get sick. This is a very good thing. But it's only a very good thing when compared against the (horrible! terrible! omg wtf!) status quo.

2. In exchange for this, everyone in America will be forced to buy insurance policies that support a broken model of health care. Whether they will be forced to buy public insurance or private insurance is consequential, but not as much as Democrats like to believe.

3. The rate of growth in health care costs will be slowed down a bit, but costs will continue to grow well beyond the rate of inflation/deflation. As unscrupulous marketers know, good health (or the illusion thereof) is something people are willing to pay dearly for even in a down economy.

4. Fundamentally, nothing will change. There's far too much money involved in health care, and the American government is far too dependent on corporate dollars to rock the boat very hard. The trends outlined in a previous article will continue.

Health Care Reform: Anarchist Public Policy

2009-10-03T12:24:00.002-05:00

From part 2:

"Promoting optimal human health means eating nutrient dense foods, living in a nontoxic environment, being physically and emotionally engaged in the world, and using medicine as a tool to determine what specific elements a patient is lacking (such as a magnesium deficiency, or spending 8 hours a day in a sick building). Taking pills created from petrochemicals, cutting invasively inside the body, and dosing the body with radiation would be a last resort once it was clear the body wasn't capable of healing itself."

I would argue that this is the starting point for human-centered health care. This would vary by region, vary by spiritual path, and vary based on a person's individual biochemistry. Some people thrive on a raw foods diet; others need cooked nutrient dense foods to thrive. This variability is entirely natural, and a human-centered health care system would recognize this.

Once in a while on this blog I dip my toe into what an anarchist public policy might look like. I recognize the difficulty and arrogance of this ... I see it more as playing around with ideas, not as some magisterial pronouncement of How Things Should Be :) Nor do I consider these ideas to be 'canon' with anarchist theory. So please consider this post in that light.

My starting assumption is that destroying 1/8 of the US economy and starting over from scratch isn't in the cards -- but I'm also assuming that systemic change through shifting of priorities would be possible.

With the caveats out of the way, I would consider these changes to be positive and in comportment with basic anarchist beliefs:

* Highly regulate all chemicals used in buildings, food, and industry.

The Obama adminstration has taken baby steps in this direction, but it is simply unconscionable that our lives are filled with toxicity:

“About 40 percent of (human) deaths worldwide are caused by water, air and soil pollution.” Source

10 year old girls should not be drinking BGH enhanced cow milk out of plastic bottles, nor should they be ovulating. Male sperm counts should not be 50% lower than a century ago. Plastic nanoparticles should not be more common than algae in the oceans. Mercury should not be in our lakes. Rivers should not be oily to the touch, nor should they catch on fire. 90% of our topsoil should not be in the rivers and oceans. Food should not be grown from oil. Uranium should not be allowed anywhere on the surface of the Earth.

This is evil.

If we don't change these practices, then our species deserves to be replaced by cockroaches.

* End the oligopoly on accreditation, and allow for alternate ways to demonstrate medical competence. Recognize that a decade of schooling and training in Western medicine isn't the best way to treat every single health problem.

* Allow patients to choose their own doctors and treatment methods, with significantly less interference from regulators or insurance actuaries.

I recognize the harm that could come from this -- it would need to be done very carefully. However, many beneficial treatment methods are also prevented from helping patients. It is far, far more common for the media to report scare stories than they are to report doctors being shut down for employing non-FDA approved methods that have clearly demonstrated an ability to help certain patients. As an anarchist who considers authority to be suspect, I trust in the power of individuals to determine their own path to optimal human health. The critical part is that people need to be able to seek out these alternate treatment paths while they're healthy and able to make informed decisions; it is difficult to make a good decision while you're sick and in pain.

* Significantly reduce the power of corporations, and put an end to for-profit medicine.

Yes, for-profit medicine can create wonderful things like pacemakers and prescription drugs. They might even be better at this than a nonprofit would be (although this point could be argued).

But the opportunity cost is significant. For-profit corporations promote drugs at the expense of vitamins, 'miracle foods' instead of solid nutrition, and are now beginning to patent the very basis of life itself.

* Stop subsidizing large insurance companies and hospitals, shift the money into community-based health care.

Any form of health care involves trade-offs, or (at worst) rationing. These decisions are better made at the local level. Local community organizations should be funded and empowered to decide their own (nondiscriminatory) priorities, and to promote the health of their community in a manner best adapted to their local health needs.

* Aggressively promote community-based agriculture, breaking up large corporate-owned farms and training a generation of unemployed young adults how to raise their own organic food and bring it to market.

* Significantly reduce highway subsidies, shifting funding into bike paths and electric rail. Encourage walkable, livable communities.

* Aggressively promote less toxic, renewable energy development. Significantly reduce the use of polluting fossil fuels.

* Aggressively promote less toxic, highly energy efficient home-building and remodeling.

These are the sorts of policy changes that would promote human health, and reduce the toxic burden we place upon our environment (which eventually comes back to affect human health).

It's important for people to be healthy ... but in the end, humans will only be as healthy as the environment we live in. If we don't address the larger issue of environmental health, then every effort at promoting human health will eventually hit a brick wall.

Health Care Reform: Problems for Human Health

2009-10-03T08:23:00.002-05:00

Click here for part 1.

Fundamentally, our health care system is a mess because it focuses on treating the symptoms of a diseased culture that manifest in the form of human ailment.

In other words, it's our culture that's sick ... and one of the side effects of this cultural sickness is that humans get sick, too:

"The main source of pain, disability, and death is now an engineered—albeit non-intentional—harassment. The prevailing ailments, helplessness and injustice, are now the side-effects of strategies for progress. Nemesis is now so prevalent that it is readily mistaken for part of the human condition.

Ivan Illich can be a bit obscure in his writing, but the gist of it is that our culture is blind to the effects of our sick civilization upon human health. We've lost the memory of what human health is in a natural environment, just as we've lost the memory for what a natural old-growth forest looks like in the Midwestern United States.

Because optimal human health has fallen down the memory hole, modern medicine has been able to succeed by promoting 'fixes' for health ailments. Modern medicine is great at cutting out a tumor, setting a bone or providing pills to regulate a specific body function ... but is very poor at determining what the body is missing in order to promote self-healing. Even the little preventative care available focuses on regulating things like blood pressure and body weight ... other critical variables like vitamin and mineral levels are almost entirely ignored.

This problem has been further compounded, as medicine has become a commodity in a profit-seeking economy. There is a lot more profit in fixing ailments, as opposed to promoting optimal human health ... and so interventionist techniques and pills have become the answer for nearly every question.

When people talk about 'preventative medicine', this really isn't the same thing. Promoting optimal human health means eating nutrient dense foods, living in a nontoxic environment, being physically and emotionally engaged in the world, and using medicine as a tool to determine what specific elements a patient is lacking (such as a magnesium deficiency, or spending 8 hours a day in a sick building). Taking pills created from petrochemicals, cutting invasively inside the body, and dosing the body with radiation would be a last resort once it was clear the body wasn't capable of healing itself.

We are very, very far from seeing this reality ... the medical industry is approaching 1/8th of the total US economy. It got to this point by promoting pills and surgery; changing this perspective would require a total revolution in medicine.

The problem that modern medicine poses to human health is that it discounts the importance of proper nutrition (which is far more complex than USDA requirements), sees disease as something to be fought and eradicated, and sees every problem as a nail to be beaten down with their every expensive (and very profitable) hammer.

This fundamental issue will not be on the table in any health care discussion, as it reveals the soft underbelly of our toxic culture: we're the cause of most of our own pain and misery.

Climate Change: Plausible Worst Case Scenarios

2009-09-30T09:00:00.000-05:00

Climate Progress has a great post up:

" * The Arctic could warm by up to 15.2 °C [27.4 °F] for a high-emissions scenario, enhanced by melting of snow and ice causing more of the Sun’s radiation to be absorbed.
* For Africa, the western and southern regions are expected to experience both large warming (up to 10 °C [18 °F]) and drying.
* Some land areas could warm by seven degrees [12.6 F] or more.
* Rainfall could decrease by 20% or more in some areas, although there is a spread in the magnitude of drying. All computer models indicate reductions in rainfall over western and southern Africa, Central America, the Mediterranean and parts of coastal Australia.
* In other areas, such as India, rainfall could increase by 20% or more. Higher rainfall increases the risk of river flooding.
* Large parts of the inland United States would warm by 15°F to 18°F."

Curt also recommended this video, modeling out the cost of climate mitigation:

When Deprived of Propaganda ...

2009-09-30T08:40:00.005-05:00

A followup on a previous post, I'm not sure how long it will take the right-wing propaganda model on climate change to shift. It seems pretty robust.

Anyone who believes in climate change is a fool, and a tool of the global elite:

"The people who believe the fictional UN story of man-made-global-warming also believe that people are kidnapped by space aliens and injected with non-existant material, or that the Egyptian peramids were built by ancient space aliens, or that the movie Star Wars is a documentary...or they are just servile puppets of the world's elite billionairs."

Climate change is a method of enriching scientists and government workers:

"(I)t is the Mother of all eco-hoaxes. It is perfect for politicians. It is very expensive to study and they can control the funding of studies. The scientists in the field (as well as "environmental journalists") have a vested, pecuniary interest in keeping the myth alive...and funded. The politicians gain power and control. The financial industry stands to make a killing by inventing a commodity out of a naturally occurring trace gas critical to life on Earth."

(Of course, there's no mention of the much much larger amounts of money being made by extractive industries that contribute to climate change).

If a crack appears in that armor, well ... you know ... we can't do anything about it anyways. So why bother?:

"I submit that even minimizing man's impact on the planet is all but useless. For one thing, it is a useless endeavour. China, India, Russia, flat out don't care. Meanwhile their populations are increasing and their "carbon footprint" (what a useless term) grows exponentially ever minute."

And if that all fails, well ... there's always geoengineering:

"(T)he most promising avenue is to invest $9 billion in accelerated research on so-called marine cloud whitening technology. The idea is to create vast fleets of robot ships to pump seawater droplets into the clouds above the oceans to make them reflect more sunlight back into space." Source

It seems like there's about 3 failure points already built into this propaganda model. Breaking through propaganda this powerful will probably take a generational shift.

----

Source for most quotes: http://comments.americanthinker.com/read/42323/432787.html

(I didn't want to provide a direct link, but I do need to offer an attribution)

Health Care Reform: A History of How We Got Here

2009-09-30T07:17:00.005-05:00

Our current health care system is a hell of a mess: It can radically alter and repair the human body, but spends little time assuring that the body has adequate nutrition and is free from major toxicity. The concept of 'promoting health' and assisting the natural regenerative powers of the human body is almost a foreign concept in modern Western medicine.

Health care is a good indicator of how far from reality our culture has drifted. So how did we get to this point?

Throughout most of human history, health care was very limited and out of simple necessity. Health care meant (at best) rest, good nutrition, simple bandaging and resetting of broken bones, and consumption of herbal remedies. Specialists in medicine may have had a broader knowledge of specific remedies and palliatives, but their knowledge was not fundamentally different than that of everyone else.

There are numerous examples of fossilized remains of humans (and non-human primates) who showed severe damage or deformities that had healed over. This is a strong indication that pre-civilized humans assisted one another in recovery when sick or injured; this would have promoted the overall strength and resiliency of each tribe.

Different cultures had different philosophical beliefs regarding how and why one became sick, but practical implementation of health care would have involved assisting the body in healing itself. This practice would be much more effective with the support of other humans providing mutual aid.

When humans began settling down in one place and interacting regularly with other animals, other health issues began to emerge. For one, the work was much harder and the level of nutrition was less diverse -- human health deteriorated, and lifespans became shorter. But a new malady also began to emerge in the form of disease epidemics, which were passed between species (due to close contact with humans) and spread quickly throughout densely populated settlements. As humans had no natural resistance to many of these diseases, the death toll would have been immense -- with morbidity rates approaching 100% in many cases.

These issues (poor nutrition and communicable disease) came to dominate human health over the next several millenia. They also influenced how cultures came to view disease and sickness -- as something external that affected an otherwise healthy person. Disease became something external and foreign, something to be conquered and driven from the body (much like human civilizations conquered nature to take down forests and plant rows of grain).

The other major change in medicine was the professionalization of the discipline. Like many other forms of specialization, medical knowledge became less accessible to the layman. And like other professionals before them, doctors worked to marginalize their competition (midwives and herbal remedies) ... sometimes with noble intentions. The status of the medical profession rose considerably when the germ theory of disease and its attendant protocols almost singlehandedly allowed large cities to expand and thrive. The net effect of these changes was to make make doctors more authoritative and essential.

New tools also helped to change medicine: antibiotics, x-rays, and drugs created through modern chemistry offered a number of new treatment options. Going into the hospital was no longer a death sentence (disease in hospitals has always been rampant), doctors could study the live human body in a much more detailed manner, and complex drugs offered a whole new avenue of treatment for chronic disease.

These three changes (a 'foreign' theory of disease, professionalization of medicine, and the introduction of modern tools) had a major effect on human health. During the past 40 years, in particular, these forces have combined to create an increasingly complex sector of the economy that shows no signs of slowing down.

Why Nothing Works

2009-09-28T02:32:00.004-05:00

Curt and Ran have both been exploring the same theme, which is why our civilization seems incapable of getting even the simple things right.

Though we may seem particularly incompetent in preparing for resource depletion, Americans aren't all that different from other cultures. Where we differ is that we've been shaped and molded for longer any other society in an environment in which maladaptive traits have been rewarded. As a culture, we haven't really had our teeth kicked in since the 1860s. We've lived in a nation of material goods excess within the living memory of everyone under the age of 75, where the American Dream meant things were just going to keep getting better and better. There's really been no one to take us aside and perform an intervention: "America, dude, you're fat and out of shape ... you're gonna have a heart attack if you keep this up."

Ran identified propaganda (public relations) as a major source of our stupidity, but I'd argue that it runs deeper than that. Modern propaganda techniques are adapted to work on broken or compliant people; they don't work very well on content and self-willed adults.

I'd argue that education is more fundamental to explaining why things are as screwed up as they are today, as children educated in modern schools are taught to be receptive to modern propaganda techniques. (This thought will be picked up in later posts).

It takes a generation for major changes to work their way into a society, as the children educated under the new system come of age. These children are more accepting of new moralities and values ... and they lack the memory of verdant forests, the quiet joy of lazy afternoons of fishing and skipping stones across the lake, and the ability to find contentment in simple tasks and trades.

What will happen to these people when reality begins smacking them in the face? Well, I expect that it will look something like this:

Section quoted from John Talyor Gatto:

"When they come of age, they are certain they must know something because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of incompetence. If true, our school adventure has filled the twentieth century with evil.

Ellul puts it this way:

The individual has no chance to exercise his judgment either on principal questions or on their implication; this leads to the atrophy of a faculty not comfortably exercised under [the best of] conditions...Once personal judgment and critical faculties have disappeared or have atrophied, they will not simply reappear when propaganda is suppressed...years of intellectual and spiritual education would be needed to restore such faculties. The propagandee, if deprived of one propaganda, will immediately adopt another, this will spare him the agony of finding himself vis a vis some event without a ready-made opinion."

Residual Warming and Clathrate Bombs

2009-09-27T00:05:00.001-05:00

There are a lot of changes coming to our world, but I tend to think that most of them are surmountable. Our civilization is massively wasteful, humans can be pretty resourceful when pushed against the wall, and not every country is as stupid as America.

I don't expect that the 2 billion poorest people in the world will see it this way when their food is turned into motor fuel, but neither do I expect that we'll see the wealthiest countries to turn into Mad Max overnight. I also don't expect a massive world war over resources -- there are many powerful actors on the international stage these days who depend on controlled intercine warfare that would stand to lose if an actual large scale 'hot war' broke out.

Change on the scale we're talking about tends to happen in a series of minor crises, over a number of years and decades ... and while you're living through it, these kinds of massive changes in lifestyle tend to happen relatively slowly.

However, the wild card in all of this is climate change.

Humans have added around 100 parts per million of carbon to the atmosphere. What is so insidious about this, however, is that most of the effects of this Co2 is being masked by air pollution:

"(S)ince 1950, the planet released about 20 percent of the warming influence of heat-trapping greenhouse gases to outer space as infrared energy. Volcanic emissions lingering in the stratosphere offset about 20 percent of the heating by bouncing solar radiation back to space before it reached the surface. Cooling from the lower-atmosphere aerosols produced by humans balanced 50 percent of the heating. Only the remaining 10 percent of greenhouse-gas warming actually went into heating the Earth, and almost all of it went into the ocean." Source.

This is a process called global dimming, which was documented in a great Nova piece. Actual real-world data confirmed this process in the week following the 9/11 attacks, when shutting down air travel led to an increased temperature in the continental United States.

Why? We removed a major source of air pollution; this pollution is more effective at blocking solar energy if it's deposited into the upper atmosphere (from the back of a jet engine).

Lou calculated that, "If we reduce our burning of fossil fuels enough to trim even 50% of the effect of their aerosol emissions (and we likely have to cut far more than that), we’ll add 0.6 W/sq. meter to the net effect of human-induced warming. That would push our net “contribution” from all human activities from about 1.6 W/sq. meter to 2.2 W/sq. meter, an increase of 37.5%."

So when we finally get around to reducing particulate pollution, we'll unmask the true effects of the global warming we've unleashed so far. Quite literally ... we have seen only a small percentage of the climate change effect of the 100 ppm of Co2 we've pushed into the atmosphere so far.

The potential of all this residual heat setting off a clathrate bomb scares me a hell of a lot more than running out of cheap oil does.

Alberta Tar Sands

2009-09-26T11:55:00.001-05:00

As odd as it may seem, my isolated corner of the North woods is part to the largest excavation project in human history. You can see the pipeline from google maps.

Here's a close-up satellite photo of the project.

The pipeline

The pipeline is coming down from the Alberta oil sands, through Superior, down to Chicago, then branching out towards the rest of the US and parts of Canada. It will be carrying low-grade crude oil.

These pools are holding tanks of oily, tarry slurry. They are extremely toxic.

You can already see these holding pools from space.

This Alberta oil sands project is the last gasp of an industry that can no longer replenish its reserves. It is energy inefficient, heavily subsidized (through low taxes), and environmentally monstrous.

Here's a great video series on the Tar Sands, and its affect on the community.

The Alberta oil sands project is an attempt to, literally, 'boil the oil out of the soil'. Say that ten times fast! The process tears the land apart, and consumes a lot of energy and water. The landscape photographs of this extraction process are horrific. The energy return on investment (EROI) is somewhere around 2 to 1, which is quite low. The process boils away around 1 barrel of water for every barrel of oil extracted.

Despite a long history of failed investments to monetize the oily soil, investors are still being draw to this project due to high government subsidies and the relative safety of oil extraction in Canada. The amount of oil sands present in the Albera soil are simply huge, the 20% that is close enough to the surface to extract is on par with Middle Eastern oil reserves.

These oil sands, along with coal liquefication, are being marketed as replacements for Middle Eastern oil. Current plans are to expand this project, making an even larger impact on the environment in Alberta.

Click here for more photos.

The scale of this scar is simply monstrous, and threaten to turn the boreal forests of Northern Alberta into a chemical slurry.

This is the kind of "investment" we're making in our future.

To say that this is insane would be an insult to crazy people.

The Annals of Human Stupidity: Garbage

2009-09-26T11:36:00.007-05:00

The north pacific garbage gyre has been getting more attention lately. It is composed of many many many tiny plastic particles, and estimates of its size range from 'really really big' to '10% the size of the Pacific Ocean'.

This is a really big monument to human stupidity, but it's not the most toxic.

Greenpeace has a good series on electronic waste, which is incredibly harmful.

But that's OK, right? These areas are vastly underpolluted. And they get, um ... jobs.

Trading the health of the ecosystem, and of ourserves, for short-term economic game is what winners do!

And frogs are supposed to look like this:

Source: Live Science

I feel so much better now that I've seen the light. Now I can work to convert the heathens who think that clean air, clean water and undeformed amphibians are more important than GM's quarterly earnings.

...

OK. Now where's my stock options and corporate speaking gig?

Upcoming Posts

2009-09-24T16:56:00.002-05:00

No, I haven't abandoned the blog :) I'll have more up over the weekend.

I'm simply very weak from toxin exposure right now.

Tiny Home v2.0: The Smoghut

2009-09-23T20:04:00.004-05:00

Doesn't smoghut sound terrible? :)

Other than adjusting the windows a little bit, this is close to what I'm looking at.

Comments or suggestions appreciated.

Tiny Home v1.0

New Domain

2009-09-21T22:18:00.002-05:00

The blog is being transferred over to smogharp.com ... sorry for any dead links this results in over the next 24 hours or so.

The Lust for Meaning, Joy and Purpose

2009-09-21T00:55:00.004-05:00

I got into a long discussion today about my dreams and goals.

After allowing me to fill dreams #1-4 with some variation of taking over the world, it was made clear to me that I'd better stop being so damned obstinate.

I can take a hint if you beat me over the head with it, wave it in front of my face and create a really cool diorama.

I didn't articulate myself all that well at the time. It involves community ... lack of isolation ... lack of pain, blah blah blah. So I spent some time tonight exploring how I got to this point in my life, in terms of life goals & ambitions.

I think the core of it is pure childhood joy. The kind of unabashed joy that children are allowed to feel before they're sent to school (where they're taught how to channel that joy into something more productive ... like memorizing multiplication tables).

When I was young, I loved knowledge and learning. I'd read encyclopedias, ask a million questions, take things apart to see how they worked (with the unfortunate lack of any skill in putting them back together), and generally just absorb knowledge. I particularly loved science.

I lost a lot of this joy after being in school for several years, and kind of drifted along for the next 15 years. Aside from writing in cursive or throwing a football, everything in school came really easily for me. I became bored, got used to everything being easy, and learned to follow the path of least resistance. I just kind of did what I was expected to do (more or less), and set my goals by established societal norms (go to college, get a house in the suburbs, woo a cute girl who fits into the same mold). But externally reified goals didn't really stir the soul.

I did finally shake a lot of the cobwebs out of my head in my early 20s, and recaptured that sense of childhood joy for a little while ... I was going to change majors and be a scientist :) This was going to be very difficult, requiring lots of advanced math ... but the thing is, when you have that driving joyful vision in your heart the challenges aren't all that important. I was going to be a scientist and take apart the universe piece by piece until I understood it all :)

(It would be someone else's job to put it back together again!)

Of course, developing fullblown MCS and being bedridden with a functional IQ of 30 for a year kind of put a damper on that idea.

When I was teaching at an alternative high school, I began reading a lot of alternative educational literature. I jumped quickly from Deborah Meyer, to John Dewey, to Ted Sizer, to Alfie Kohn ... and finally to John Taylor Gatto. The Underground History of American Education was one of the three most influential books in my life, in the sense that it helped to drag my liberal tendencies towards anarchism. We absorbed this knowledge and started to plan some really interesting things for the next school year. I was excited!

Well, the fates had different things in mind of course ... I lost my job over disability discrimination and had to find a new career (schools are pretty damned toxic). I continued reading and researching, becoming enamored with natural building techniques and low impact living. This knowledge fulfilled my intellectual quota, but didn't connect with me on a really deep level.

It wasn't until a few years later, when I learned about active ecovillages in the country and started investigating them that I recaptured that sense of wonder and awe. It wasn't just the simple living (and a rejection of the complex, toxic shit that had poisoned me) ... the closeness to the natural world ... or even the self-sufficiency. It was the sense of community, a group of people who had very little to do with our toxic culture on a daily basis. This part is really the key to what attracted me to ecovillages and (some) intentional communities. The people who lived in them had their primary allegiance to the land, to the patterns of nature on the land, and to the other people on that same plot of land. They didn't spend all day in a toxic workplace, and didn't see their home as some sort of recreational tool.

This concept grabbed me immediately, and I found a way to visit a cool ecovillage two states away.

Of course, this didn't work out either. I managed to blow out a tire in my car, get burned rubber all over most of my safe linens and clothing, and was reacting to the tiniest toxic insult at the ecovillage ... and then when I got home my only safe washing machine broke. This set me way, way back and precipitated operation "get the hell out of the city". I had to give up on an engaging dream again, and a part of me kind of died inside. (I've been trying to make it work in isolation, but it's a hollow alternative).

Now that I'm in a more stable position in my life (in terms of health) and am working on safe portable housing, I should soon be in a position to pursue this dream again. This is still the most engaging thing I can imagine doing with my life -- it simply feels right on every level. I felt palpable excitement and joy when discussing it with a friend yesterday; the little curious kid in me was waking up again.

So what's the point of this story? :)

What I'm trying to articulate is pretty simple: I believe that there's a lust for meaning, joy and purpose inside all of us that is an integral part of what it means to be human. Our culture likes to beat it out of us, but it's still there. When you can find this joy inside of yourself, and begin listening to it, then everything else becomes a hell of a lot easier.

It may mean pounding a lot of square pegs into round holes, and a lot of hard work ... because you're probably going to be going against the grain. But when you can find the dream that gives you joy and pursue that unabashedly, you may find that the difficulty doesn't really matter because you're too busy having fun to notice.

Part of the Journey

2009-09-21T00:41:00.003-05:00

I'm trying to maintain a balance in my writing on this blog. It's a documentation of my personal journey, yes, but with a focus on 'what's the larger issue at stake here'?

When I discuss something like how my father's cancer is affecting me, the intent is to articulate how a severe disability might be overcome -- as we all need to overcome barriers in our lives, if we're to prevent the worst abuses of our culture upon the natural world. What's really interesting, I think, is the process involved.

Sometimes I'm just documenting a bit of silly fun, but the attempt is to share a bit of joy with others ... joy that doesn't come from WalMart or cable TV. I find this kind of enthusiasm infectious and hope that others do, too.

I guess I'm simply trying to clarify things a bit for myself, and for the readers.

Smogharp isn't meant to be a public diary -- it's intended to be a reflection on the life, dreams and ambitions of a disabled guy trying to reclaim his sense of childhood curiosity and wonder. A guy pissed off at the toxicity of our culture and the destruction of the planet's ecology.

And in that, I'm still trying to find my voice. Thank you for following along on this journey.

Hiking with Only Moderate Amounts of Stupidity

2009-09-20T06:01:00.008-05:00

Getting out to exercise without hurting myself is ... well, it's a challenge. I always want to do stupid things like walk across logs and go sliding down hills to see what's at the bottom. But I managed to do this with only a small amount of stupidity yesterday.

Well, ok. A moderate amount of stupidity. Some of the logs weren't exactly cemented into place, and it wouldn't take a lot to cause them to roll down the hill:

It was fun! My sense of balance is pretty decent still (when I'm not dosed out on toxins), but I'll need to do more of this to wake my billy goat genes back up :)

I did, however, resist the urge to go sliding down the sandhill. I couldn't get a great photo of this, but it's basically a steep sandy slope without too many obstructions that ends at the creek's edge:

Damn, that looks like fun! But I rolled double 10s and won my resist check. Onwards and upwards! :)

I couldn't figure out what the hell this was. I didn't get too close ... I'm less concerned about critter danger than human danger. That appears to be a plastic wire or cord coming out of the entrance:

I also discovered the beavers are busy converting my bridge into a new dam; they cut one of the supports a few days ago and are busy building up debris underneath it. This will require further investigation:

Science and Nature

2009-09-19T04:09:00.004-05:00

I've never understood people who say that science takes the joy out of things ... as if somehow understanding the mechanism behind a phenomenon takes away its power and beauty. I find that understanding the science behind nature adds substantially to my appreciation.

First, let's start with the basics. What are we actually interacting with when we experience nature?

Well, the human body evolved a number of ways of transmitting information about the outside world to our conscious brain. These senses are abstractions. We do not generally experience 'the real world', we experience a filtered version of it.

Let's start with something simple, like temperature.

Temperature: When we feel heat or cold, what we're experiencing is the energy level of the gas particles that are striking against our skin. We don't experience the individual sensation of each particle hitting us; our nervous system summarizes and abstracts the data. If the temperature is sufficiently hot or cold, we may also experience pain -- which is the sensation of damage being done to our body.

A much complicated sense is vision, which defines how we experience the world more than any other sense.

Vision: When we see things with our vision, we're seeing a heavily filtered version of reality. The lens in our eyes focuses photons onto the photoreceptive cells in our retina, which are then transmitted into our neural network. Our photoreceptive cells only gather data on a limited part of the electromagnetic spectrum. These signals are heavily processed by our nervous system -- but are quickly made available to our conscious mind. We don't see the individual photons. We see a shifting panorama of color, texture and hue. Our brain is wired to pay particular changes to things that are out of place, as measured against our expectations, which are established by paradigms, which have been created out of the experiences and social interactions to that point in our lives.

This is a long and complicated way of saying: Our eyes detect some of the photons that strike us, our nervous system turns that into a 'movie' of sorts, and then our brain filters out most of that and focuses our attention on the parts it thinks are important. This all happens (nearly) instantaneously, entirely outside of our conscious awareness.

But I'm dancing around the crux of the issue, which is that we experience things on a macro (non quantum mechanical) level. This is particularly noticeable when we come to the next sense ...

Touch: When we feel the experience of touch, we are primarily experiencing the aggregate sensation of the electron cloud of one group of atoms (the thing we're touching) as it interacts with the electron cloud of the atoms in our skin.

All objects are made of atoms, which have an electron 'cloud' that is quantum mechanical in nature.

Image Source and Article

The 'cloud' of electrons in these photos is actually composed of 6 electrons -- two in the inner shell, and four in the outer shell. Due to the nature of quantum mechanics, these electrons are very very very random. They are so random that their exact position and momentum cannot be pinned down. This is not a limitation of our measuring tools, it is a fundamental quality of every object in the universe (this quality only becomes obvious on really small objects). In the photo shown above, this randomness can actually be seen as a 'cloud' of electrons -- because the position and momentum of the electrons cannot be accurately measured, they can only be seen as a hazy cloud of objects that are kind of in one place ... kind of in another place ... and, well, kind of in another place at the same time! :)

That's a photo of a single atom. Atoms form together like legos to form molecules, which look like this:

Image Source and Article

This is a pentacene molecule, which is composed of 22 carbon and 14 hydrogen atoms.

Every object in our environment is formed from many, many, many of these molecules. Really. It's a staggering amount.

So what we feel when we touch something is the aggregate of the outer electron cloud ... that wispy, ephemeral layer of randomness that can't actually be measured or pinned down (more on this in a moment).

Now, sometimes touching things can cause a chemical reaction ... like when you spill battery acid on your hand. A chemical reaction means that the molcules of your hand are interacting with the molecules of the acid, and they're changing into different molecules. This is a bad thing for a living organism.

Other times we experience a temperature differential (see above), only this time it's caused by touching a solid against another solid (or a liquid). The result is pretty much the same.

The Human Experience: What I find fascinating about this is how distorted our view of the world is. We don't experience the world as it is; our perceptions are heavily altered by our evolved senses.

The primary thing we don't experience is how random and bizarre the universe really is. Our senses act as protective parents, keeping us safe from all that scary knowledge outside our door :)

I'm excited to know that the leaf, the branch, the wisp of air that touches my cheek ... they're all created from the same star stuff. That it's all vibrating and shifting around randomly, twisting and churning in an endless dance ... a silent ballet, hidden from our view by the economizing force of evolutionary adaptation.

But hey, I'm a curious bastard. I can understand the evolutionary value of it all ... but damn it, I still want to see how everything works firsthand :)

This is where science comes in handy.

The most beautiful piece I've ever read on the natural world wasn't written by a poet or a philosopher, it was written by a scientist who saw patterns in the complex web of life.

(I had forgotten what a great opening chapter this is until I reread it recently).

What it comes down to is that the complexity of the living world emerges from (relatively) simple particles and forces. Understanding this doesn't reduce the world to a formula and make it mechanistic, it makes the complexity we see around us all the more miraculous.

(At least in my opinion) there's nothing that presupposes that we'd have to be here, conscious and full of wonder about the world. There's nothing written in the fabric of the universe that makes humans particularly special. What's special is that we're here at all ... what's special is that such brilliant complexity has emerged from very simple patterns.

We can't see a lot of this with our senses, but we can begin to understand it with our conscious minds. This adds to, rather than subtracts from, the beauty of the natural world.

Beaver Dam Photos

2009-09-18T20:00:00.003-05:00

Here's something you may not have in your area ... a beaver dam.

First, a video ... recording video is new to me, and kind of experimental :)

A path to the dam, clearly not created with 6'3" people in mind:

The upper part of the beaver dam, as of a few hours ago:

The same dam last year when the water was very high. It's hard to see it in the photo, but the dam is creating about an 8-10" change in the water level. The lower dam created a similar drop in water level.

And at very high water levels:

This is the upper part of the dam, shown in springtime. It's quite a bit smaller than the other dam, and is partially supported by a natural rock formation:

The destruction caused by the beavers is almost human-like in its intensity:

OK, not really quite to the level of humans ... but it's still pretty destructive.

Corporate Personhood

2009-09-17T22:36:00.011-05:00

Corporate Personhood was created on a shaky legal foundation, but it's likely to get worse as the US Supreme Court looks at the issue. They're likely to grant corporations even more free speech rights, further unfettering their ability to influence public policy.

Stephen Colbert tackled this subject in recent shows, I have to say I do not recall the concept of corporate personhood being questioned in the media in ... well, forever.

But even more surprisingly, Justice Sotomayor recently stated that:

"... the majority might have it all wrong -- and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.

Judges "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons," she said. "There could be an argument made that that was the court's error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics."

If there was a unified anarchist political party, I'd have to guess that ending corporate personhood would be at the top of the party platform.

Footprints

2009-09-17T20:33:00.001-05:00

I did some further exploration of the nearby beaver dam today (which is actually in two parts), and found the path most of the animals in the area take down to the waterfront.

I'm pretty sure this one is deer:

I'm not certain about this one:

EDIT, added later ... a bearprint:

And I could be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure this is human-who-walks-along-edge-of-creek-and-nearly-loses-boot:

I also discovered that beaver dams aren't very good for someone with mold sensitivities to walk across. When you compress the dam, it smells like a moldy compost pile :)

Tiny House Iterations

2009-09-15T18:23:00.000-05:00

For anyone that hasn't been severely injured by toxins, this may seem like an odd discussion to be having. But I think that it helps to illuminate some of the compromises mandated by this disability.

===

Regarding the tiny home design v1.0, Lou wrote:

"I really, really, really like the idea of having the entrance through the bathroom. That kind of thing would drive a feng shui person nuts (my mom too) but it makes perfect sense to the chemically sensitive. If anyone came over to visit they could wash off the chemicals and change into something non-toxic before entering the rest of the home."

I did not mock up the design; I'm working with a homebuilder.

We've modified the entrance slightly -- an additional 6" setback, with the shower set in a small alcove to the right of the door.

I may or may not decide to add ventilation to the room; having a screen door next to the shower may be sufficient.

The general concept behind this is that the interior of the home is a clean room, capable of being sealed up in the event of airborne toxic exposures (a neighbor painting their house, for example). An entry room with washable walls and a shower means that a minimal amount of toxins would be brought into the home.

I have found this is necessary, as when I become sick from toxic exposure I need a 100% safe place to return to. But a home can't be 100% safe if it's regularly exposed to outside sources of toxicity.

I'm not sure how many visitors I'd be entertaining, I see the interior of the home as a medical device. Friends or family coming in from the city carry massive amounts of toxicity with them.

This is where a nice three-season screen porch would come in handy :)

"A tiny home may necessitate additional consideration to vapors, something I never really thought about until now-in an area this small if someone is wearing a scented product and doesn't completely remove it, the vapors are going to be more concentrated and/or less avoidable."

I already have several carbon filters, my primary concern would be water vapor. This would be limited by water use in the home being (primarily) limited to the entryway room -- which can be vented out by opening the front door.

I'm a bit hesitant to add a vent fan, as any air sucked out is replaced by air making its way through gaps in the interior walls. This air isn't very safe.

There are air and heat exchangers available, but I prefer to keep things as simple and low-cost as possible. Technology like a front door, and a small fan to power the air filter are much simpler to repair and replace.

"Same goes for the kitchen-you may benefit from exhaust ventilation."

I've also redesigned the kitchen -- just a small sink and countertop at the far end of the room, with a small window above the sink (which could be opened to vent out steam/humidity). I'd use the side wall for food storage; canned vegetables and bulk goods, primarily.

I be doing most of my cooking outside. A rice cooker is pretty effective outside, up to around 20 degrees or so. Veggies can be steamed on top of rice, quinoa, millet, etc.

"Some fans built for mobile use are made for low voltage, what are your plans for power?"

I plan to have it rigged to run on regular A/C power (with a small amount of plugins), I can't see being off the grid being practical. Filtering the interior air is critical.

Any plans for the south wall? I noticed there was no window there..."

I was going to have a full bank of windows on the far end of the trailer, which would provide a great area for a computer desk and pub table.

"Just throwing this out there-how about a mansard roof? Has anyone tried that? It would give you a little more headroom when in either bed, but wouldn't raise the overall roof height any. In large homes the mansard roof requires a little bit of additional interior support, but a structure this small and light might be able to get away without it."

I considered the idea, I think that something like this would be more practical.

I really like the amount of light it adds to the loft.

"And the bottom view shows a foundation. Is the house going to be in the ground or is that a frame on a trailer?"

It's intended to be set on a trailer, and therefore to be portable. Where I live right now is not sustainable in the long term; I'm far too isolated.

The last time I tried traveling in search of community, it ended badly. I really need a portable "safe room" in which I can detoxify and regain my strength.

Thank you for the input, I appreciate it.

Putting Up a Big-ass Wall

2009-09-15T08:00:00.000-05:00

Please forgive my digression for a moment -- there's a point I wanted to make at the end of a little personal history :)

When I was growing up, my parents fought a lot ... and then they got divorced at an early age. This meant moving to the big city, where I felt really out of place and insecure. I never really fit in again after that. I made a few close friends, but then we moved again and I had to start the process all over. Having poor social intelligence skills didn't make this easy.

I cried a lot; I'd cry when I was sad, I'd cry when I lost or didn't get my way, I'd cry for no reason whatsoever. This led me to be further ostracized (boys don't cry), which led me to become even more disconnected from the people around me.

Eventually I learned to hide my feelings. I put up a big wall around me: wearing lots of black clothing, adopting an uncooperative attitude at school, being pretty negative about things and generally pushing people away from me. It wasn't a very wise adaptation, but building a wall did its job: it kept me safe from ridicule. This wall became deeply embedded into my psyche, and to this day it's hard for me to let down my guard regarding really private things ... things that reveal too much of my true character.

The point of all this?

When I talk about disconnection, it's not just some broad concept about our larger culture. I'm talking about it on a very personal level. Most of my friends don't even notice that there's a big-ass wall in front of them -- it's simply a part of being Erik.

I still struggle to open up to the rhythms of the natural world, to the thoughts and feelings of others ... it's very difficult for me. I can appreciate nature on an intellectual level, and I can relate to other people on an emotional and empathic level. But there's still a really big disconnect.

I have to imagine that this is the same type of difficulty people raised thinking that "meat comes from the grocery store!" have when you try to talk to them about factory farm practices. It's really hard to make that conceptual leap, because it doesn't just require new facts ... or a paradigm shift. It requires opening up a part of yourself to the unknown.

===

Yes, grammar nazis: When you put 'big-ass' in the title, it is proper to hyphenate it and capitalize the first letter of the word.

Beaver Sacrifice

2009-09-14T17:58:00.000-05:00

The beavers in my area have unique religious practices.

Here you can see them preparing a pyre, where they will later sacrifice a beaver heretic.

And in the Darkness Bind Them ...

2009-09-14T17:12:00.000-05:00

I used to watch the 700 Club once in a while for a good laugh*.

One of their more common segments was how "(insert name) had a hole in their heart, was doing all sorts of self-destructive things, and then came to find salvation in Jesus. You, too, have a hole in your heart. You know it's there ... a hollow place that's looking for meaning. You can find this meaning in Jesus Christ!"

Christianity is a movement that responded to the increased sense of disconnection felt by members of the aggressive culture that was spreading throughout the middle east.

As developed over 3 centuries, Christianity differentiated itself from Judaism by asserting that although you're an awful terrible sinner, that a god (one of your betters, which you learned from an early age was an important thing to keep track of) has sacrificed himself so that you can be saved.

The sense of disconnection you feel? A pang of guilt over the culture you're participating in, the pain of backbreaking labor? All of this is easily explained -- this life is meant to be painful and cruel. Your eternal reward comes when you die, but only if you play along while you're still alive.

There are many adaptations in our culture that account for, and even justify the sense of disconnection we feel. As you might expect, these memes have evolved to become quite powerful over the past 2,000 years. These concepts are often so deeply embedded into our culture, that it's a bit difficult to recognize them sometimes.

===

* Yes yes, I know ... I used to get a good laugh from tracking the exploits of right-wing nutcases. I have an odd sense of humor! :)

A Palpable Sense of Disconnection

2009-09-14T10:50:00.000-05:00

This is a concept I've been tossing around in my head over the weekend, it's a bit difficult to articulate right now due to lingering toxicity (which interferes with cognitive functioning). So I may take a page from Ran Prieur, and simply explore the idea a bit at a time.

It's a premise of mine that the members of our culture are very disconnected from a number of things.

The natural world: This should go without saying ... most people don't even know where their food comes from.

Human community: Getting together in small interest groups, engaging in the public sphere and segmenting yourself into a variety of disparate interest groups is quite a different experience than interacting with a small, close-knit tribe.

Authentic work: Our educational system diverts us from pursuing life-affirming experiences at an early age. Those who do well in this system have the opportunity to engage in creative, interesting work. The rest of us are relegated to work that serves a very narrow purpose ... work that does not provide fulfillment, work that is disconnected from the rhythms of the natural world.

These are fundamentally very humanizing things. The absence of these connections in our life is a significant part of why our culture is more than a bit messed up.

This Blog

2009-09-12T10:21:00.000-05:00

Ran Prieur provided a link -- thanks, Ran.

This blog has three basic topics that I'll be winding my way through:

1. The toxicity of our culture, both literally and figuratively.

I have severe chemical injuries and this profoundly affects the way I interact with the world. This provides me a with a bit of an outsider's perspective on how toxic our culture is -- I post about this sort of thing pretty regularly.

I currently live alone in the woods, quite isolated -- I will also be documenting my attempts to regain my strength, and find a safe community to live in.

2. Resource limitations, an exploration of peak oil and related topics.

I believe that complex adaptive systems seldom behave the way we expect, and that we're in for a hell of a roller coaster ride.

Oil prices: I tend to think that in the short to medium term, oil can't get much beyond $150-200 or it will begin sap too large a percentage of global GDP. We'll see a rubberband effect -- prices that are too high will trigger economic contraction, thereby reducing energy costs.

Renewable Energy: There are very significant issues with EROEI (energy returned on energy invested), and the fact that these technologies should have been implemented 20 years ago. But I don't think the problems are insurmountable. I expect to see distributed energy production that is specific to each bioregion over the next few decades.

New Technology: Genetic engineering of energy and food crops, concentrated solar power and high altitude wind are wild cards that cannot be easily accounted for. What kind of disruption would a drought tolerant, salt tolerant staple grain crop that returns nitrogen to the soil offer? Or selective breeding of bacteria and algae with useful characteristics, creating a number of new net-energy-positive industries?

The United States: We're going to see large changes in this country, but it's not entirely doom and gloom. Few countries besides the US have the capacity to generate a huge food surplus -- this can be traded for oil. The amount of energy used to create each calorie of food can be vastly reduced, as unemployed laborers can be substituted for oil on the farm (I expect to see a disapora back to the farm over the next few decades). Organic food production will become more common simply because in a world of resource constraints, fossil fuel additives will be a lot more expensive than crop rotation and organic methods of pest control.

3. Global climate change.

This one scares the shit out me. The threat of global climate change cannot be underestimated.

It's not just a matter of screwing up the planet for our grandchildren. We're on the verge of destroying the only cradle for complex, sentient life that is known to exist in the entire universe.

So, yeah, I moralize about this once in a while :)

Thank you for visiting.

A Followup to Post on Anarchism

2009-09-12T10:18:00.001-05:00

Maxcactus asked, "Is the size or power more concerning? It seems that to accomplish something big like an electric grid, or the internet it would take a big structure of people and resources. I would imagine that an anarchist would prefer the smallest organization necessary for the task."

Programs or institutions that are big, powerful and long-lasting tend to be problematic. It's possible to design a program so that one or more of these characteristics is limited.

For example, a way to limit power is by making an institution directly accountable to the public. The police would be less powerful if they were assigned to a neighborhood, and had to face the voters there every year.

A way to limit the power of a utility company would be by encouraging local power production and distribution.

Limiting the power of corporations could be accomplished by limiting their lifespan to 30 years. They could be big and powerful, but not immortal. (This isn't such a radical idea; this is the way corporations used to work).

I guess what I'm getting at is that anarchism doesn't mean "no government" as a tautology, I believe that as a political philosophy it can make a contribution to public policy discussions.

Nightshades <3 Erik

2009-09-11T11:30:00.000-05:00

I have a knack for growing members of the nightshade family.

My record was 40 tomato plants in my urban garden in Saint Paul (no, that's not overkill you heretic!). They did well, but nothing like my results last year. The plants were approaching 7' tall before I trimmed them back.

Tomatoes are difficult to work with in this climate, however. A late spring or early frost kills off the plants during their highest period of productivity. I tried building a cattle panel greenhouse this spring, but wasn't able to complete the project ... the plastic sheeting was simply too toxic to work with.

I planted potatoes instead this year, and ... well, the pattern holds.

I know potatoes are easy to grow, but damn.

Now if I could only learn how to grow a radish :)

5 Premises: A New Vision for Society

2009-09-11T10:40:00.000-05:00

These five premises create an outline for any new vision for society that hopes to avert a spectacularly dire climactic crisis.

Premise 1.

An unsustainable culture that uses resources around it for short-term advantage, and has a willingness to take those resources from other cultures, will have a competitive advantage over a culture that uses its resources sustainably.

This is why cultures which planted wheat to expand their population, denuded the soil, then took over their neighbor's land to plant wheat and continue the cycle, came to dominate the planet.

Premise 2.

Most civilizations collapse because they over-use their resources, become too complex and specialized, and cannot adapt quickly to change.

Premise 3.

When a civilization collapses because of resource exhaustion, and this civilization spans an entire continent or planet, pockets of this culture can remain in a high state of complexity. These pockets will generally have a competitive advantage over less complex cultures, and will continue to expand until resource exhaustion sets in again.

These pockets of civilization will be less reticent to exploit every advantage they can, despite health or environmental consequences, as they will have witnessed first-hand what happens when the resources run out.

This resource exploitation above and beyond the carrying capacity of the planet will continue, as it has for 12,000 years, until a hard physical limit is reached that makes this continued exploitation impossible.

These pockets of civilization may be only a small minority of the total population, but like in Premise 1 ... it only takes one group with a large competitive advantage to dominate.

Premise 4.

There is a way to voluntarily choose a different path. Collapse is not inevitable.

However, people will never choose a new unifying cultural vision that promises them less without going through a feisty internal battle -- denial, anger, then acceptance. This internal battle is difficult to wage when we're being bombarded by advertising and propaganda.

Therefore, any vision for a sustainable culture must promise a better way of life -- at some point in the future.

Premise 5.

In premise 3, I stated that resource exploitation will continue in some form until it reaches a hard physical limit.

This limit can take two forms:

1. The biosphere of the planet becomes incompatible with human life through anoxic oceans, nuclear war, disease, or another major disaster that kills the majority of humans. (Note: this is not to disregard the role of other species, but simply a recognition that other species are not carving deep holes in the planet to get at the oil tar).

2. An opposing force, of sufficient size or complexity, deliberately knocks down any group of people that is living unsustainably (as defined by the opposing force). This would assure that no group could gain a competitive advantage through unsustainable resource exploitation.

There is no other way to prevent the unsustainable exploitation of the Earth's resources and ecology.

Therefore ...

Any new unifying vision of society based on sustainability must offer the promise of a better life.

This new vision must also retain a level of complexity necessary to prevent other cultures from living beyond the carrying capacity of their region, and expanding this unsustainable vision into other regions.

Anarchism

2009-09-11T10:32:00.001-05:00

I used to be a liberal. I believed that society was perfectible, that the problem with the US government was that it spent too much money on guns and not enough on butter.

My political views have changed quite a bit since then, and have become much more anarchistic. This term tends to throw people off, however. They tend to think this means either "bring it all down, man!!!" or equate it with some form of libertarianism.

So, here's my stab at defining these political viewpoints.

Liberal

I define a liberal as someone who believes that, given enough resources and attention, most problems can be made better ... primarily through new or improved programs created by governments or nonprofits.

I'll repeat a Daniel Quinn quote used in a previous posting, I think it helps to make this point:

“Programs make it possible to look busy and purposeful while failing. If programs actually did the things people expect them to do, then human society would be heaven: our governments would work, our schools would work, our law enforcement would work, our penal systems would work, and so on. When programs fail (as they inevitably do), this is blamed on things like poor design, lack of funds and staff, bad management, and inadequate training. When programs fail, look for them to be replaced by new ones with improved design, increased funding and staff, superior management, and better training. When these new programs fail (as they invariably do), this is blamed on poor design, lack of funds and staff, bad management, and inadequate training.
This is why we spend more and more on our failures every year. Most people accept this willingly enough, because they know they’re getting more every year: bigger budgets, more laws, more police, more prisons — more of everything that didn’t work last year or the year before that or the year before that.” (Quinn. Beyond Civilization.)

Liberalism is an ideology that makes sense if you believe that bureaucracy is capable of deep and lasting reform.

Anarchist

Anarchism is an ideology that has very little traction in academia, particularly in political science. It is dismissed as the unenlightened stepchild of communism or socialism, or as an impractical utopian ideal.

I would argue, however, that anarchism has its roots in traditional methods of human social organization. It is a political viewpoint that respects natural law (defined here as the way the natural world organizes and sustains itself), time-tested methods of human social organization, and looks with skepticism on young upstart ideologies which are intent on transforming the world for the short-term benefit of human bureaucracies and economies.

That being said ... anarchism is difficult to define because it is not a very uniform ideology. In the context of modern society, however, most anarchists believe that increasing the scope and scale of human bureaucracies misses something essential about human society and natural law. At some point, these programs can become iatrogenic and do more harm than good.

The typical life cycle of a program or bureaucracy is as follows:

1. A problem is identified (for example: preventative health care in retirement homes), a small and limited program is created to solve it, and this program seems to work well. The net benefit is large.

2. The program is expanded. (After all, it worked so well in the small-scale or pilot program!)

3. Procedures which worked well in a small program are found to be flawed in a larger program. Loopholes are found, the program is abused by some people. The program is found to be lacking formal criteria to evaluate who it helps and the manner of help offered to them. To remedy this, case workers are given strict criteria on how to manage the needs of their clients. A bureaucracy is created to manage these new rules and mandates.

4. The program's managers and employees get used to their jobs, they like having a steady paycheck. There may be a few doubts ("We could help people so much more effectively in the old days, before we had all these managers and rules"), but most members of the program believe they are doing good by helping people. The program becomes an established part of the bureaucracy.

5. A new manager comes in, she intends to work there for 2 years ... then move up the ladder. In order to maintain this 2-year promotion cycle, she needs to pad her resume with a new initiative or program. She finds willing ears in the nursing staff when she talks about the need to expand the current program to reach more people -- rural retirement homes are being underserved. This means more jobs for nurses, perhaps even overtime.

6. Wouldn't you know it? Once the program is expanded, the nurses identify several other unmet needs in the rural retirement home population. The program expands to cover nutrition and psychological counseling.

7. The government has a budget crisis. 10% of the case workers are laid off, and one more middle manager is added to manage their caseloads (to maximize efficiency). The elderly population the program is serving is given less individual attention.

8. This same process, steps 5-8, occur half a dozen more times.

9. What was once a small, adaptive program that offered individual attention to retired people has now become a large, complex bureaucracy that does an awful lot of paper shuffling. The program absolutely improves the lives of some people. However, it also tends to push prescription medication (the costs are covered by a Federal program) and reinforces the idea that retired people are simply clients to be served.

10. The program has come to help people, yes, but it has also come to replace human social institutions which used to serve in its place ... such as families taking in their grandmothers and great uncles, where they are kept active by the bustle of life taking place around them.

Bureaucracies require complex rules and procedures to manage these programs, and the end result is that we become reliant on these technologies (see Marshall McLuhan) which causes our own internal aptitudes to atrophy.

An anarchist does not necessarily argue that this sort of a program is wrong, or bad on the face of it. An anarchist questions whether the establishment of another layer of complex bureaucracy is really the best way to help older people be more healthy and happy.

An anarchist is not opposed to programs and bureaucracy as a tautology, but as a practical matter believes that their scope should always be limited ... and that these programs should work with, rather than against, the natural processes that are already in place. Anarchists would never tolerate a bureaucracy that displaces older people from their communities, places them into holding rooms (called retirement communities by people with no sense of irony), then introduces new programs to help these older people cope with their disconnection from anything of consequence in the outside world.

An anarchist is much less hesitant to end a program or hobble a bureaucracy if they believe that it is causing harm. The reason is not that they hate government, but because they do not believe that these complex social institutions are capable of deep and lasting change. For example -- the aforementioned a retirement home is highly unlikely to transform into a thriving center of the community, a place that young and old alike come to in order to form connections with other human beings. The retirement home is far more likely to institute a 'community outreach program', make a lot of noise about it for 6 months, then quietly drop the program in 12-18 months.

In the case of the fictional program described above, an anarchist response might be to simply end the program and seed the money out directly into the community (let the locals figure out the best way to help retired people). Other anarchists might simply want to end the program and allow the natural societal processes the program replaced to re-emerge. Still another response might be to fire 75% of the managers, shred 90% of the program's governing rules, and let the case workers use their own discretion to a much larger extent than they've been allowed to. Another anarchist solution might be to fire *all* of the managers, put the retired people themselves in charge, and allow them to define what sorts of things the case workers should actually be doing to improve their lives.

Libertarian

While there is some overlap between anarchism and libertarianism, there are also significant differences on their views on property, power and human nature.

Libertarians want government to get out of the way so that individuals can do whatever they want. They don't seem concerned with what individuals will do with this power, just so long as the government isn't involved.

Anarchists want all private and public sources of authority to get out of the way whenever they infringe unduly on natural social or environmental processes. They are deeply concerned with the concentration and application of power, and seek to limit its scope whenever it is practical.

Destructive Ideas

2009-09-11T10:20:00.000-05:00

Humans are unique among all species on Earth in that we can create and propagate destructive ideas. Richard Dawkins referred to these ideas as memes.

With the advent of intensive agriculture and hierarchical based societies, humans lost one other important social device -- a filter for bad ideas.

In a small tribal society, the group was small enough that everyone knew its members by name. Small groups, by their nature, are not very private places. People tend to know everyone else's business. This meant that bad ideas did not have fertile ground to develop in.

In addition, the tribe had a number of social technologies that reigned in antisocial behavior. These social technologies developed as a method of maintaining social harmony for the benefit of the tribe.

What this meant, in practice, is that new ideas would need to gain the approval of (at least) the majority of the tribe before being adopted. Individuals who persisted in acting on their bad ideas without tribal approval would risk approbation, censure, or expulsion.

Perhaps an example will better illustrate this idea.

(Note: This is a metaphor based on a bad stereotype, but I'm at a loss as to how and explain the concept better. I apologize in advance!)

Let's say that Chuck believes that a spirit spoke to him, and told Chuck that the lands East of the stream belonged to him. The tribe discusses this idea. Although many tribal members have areas that are sacred to them, no one has ever been granted ownership before. They talk it over, laugh a bit amongst themselves, and tell Chuck "Sorry, the land belongs to the spirits of the earth, we merely borrow parts of it from time to time."

Chuck considers this, but insists that the hunting blind behind the old Willow is very sacred to him. He asks that this parcel, at least, be granted to him. He promises to provide the tribe with the boon of his exclusivity -- more meat, furs, and fall blueberries.

The tribe reconsiders, and once again declines to grant this property to Chuck. The goal of the tribe is not to maximize production, but to maintain social harmony. The precedent of setting aside pieces of land for members of the tribe would be inharmonious.

When humans adopted hierarchical decisionmaking, the criteria for making these sorts of decisions changed. The guy in charge (it was usually a man) was interested in maintaining social harmony, but in a civilization social harmony could also be maintained with physical technologies. In other words -- while wise Solomon-like decisions could maintain social cohesion, an extra loaf of bread per week could also suffice to keep people happy. This, increasing production had the added benefit of expanding his power, More food = more soldiers = more land = a larger pyramid for him to control.

If Chuck came to such a leader and asked for the same privilege, it may well have been granted.

(This scenario I've just described, where land once held in the common is turned over to an individual in exchange for a promise for increased production -- this is the foundational basis of our private property system.

Much of the land in the Western United States was taken from the native population and given away to anyone who could stake a claim, work it for seven years, and 'improve' the property. To this day, private land is held in stewardship by the individual but ultimately belongs to the state. An individual who fails to pays property taxes will have their land taken back by the government, as the individual is no longer fulfilling their tacit promise to increase the productivity of their land. The same thing may happen if a wealthy developer wants to turn your home into a shopping mall, and increase the productivity of the land. Your land can be taken away if you don't develop it to the satisfaction of the government).

Today, our civilization is rife with bad and inharmonious ideas. We have developed a series of complex laws to reign them in. These laws have met with only moderate success, controlling the worst excesses of modern hyperindividualism.

We are left with an vexing problem, then. If bad ideas can be developed in the dark and are not properly filtered before they cause disharmony, then how can we trust which ideas are sound?

Human civilizations have developed a number of ways to separate fact from fiction, and valid ideas from invalid ones. We call these tools 'philosophy', 'religion' and 'science'. These tools all provide a paradigm which can be used to filter out information and ideas. These tools, however, are contradictory and disharmonious.

This is a massive understatement!

The creation of new paradigms, which filter incoming information and largely define a person's view of the world, is subject to few restrictions. Paradigms are often mutually incompatible and impossible to reconcile.

How do Christians and Muslims resolve who the true prophet is, Jesus or Mohammed?

How does a community create harmony between a logging company and environmentalists, who each have very different definitions of property and the common good?

Fully describing the this issue is beyond the scope of this post. However, the validity of these kinds of moral decisions is relevant to the topics being explored on this blog.

We face an ecological crisis of staggering scale and import. Simply asking people nicely to stop breeding, stripping the tops off of mountains and dumping toxins into the groundwater is not effective. Since we lack a time-tested method of determining whether an action is necessary to maintain social and ecological harmony, we run the risk of introducing another bad idea and making things worse.

Since providing an example worked so spectacularly the first time (*cough*), let me try it again.

A new group of people, let's call them 'pale men who smell like cheese', show up one day and begin killing tribal members who come anywhere near the old Willow tree. They are very well-armed and pose a significant challenge to the tribe. The tribe discusses this, then decides to move along to their winter camp early. The pale men may be gone by next spring.

When they move to the winter camp, the smelly men follow and make it clear through their actions that they are not going to settle for anything less than all of the tribe's land. The tribe discusses this at great length, with loud raucous debates. They decide to fight and attempt to kill as many smelly cheese men as they can to drive them off. The tribe's decision to go to war was based on a system of decisionmaking that was developed over several generations, and was debated among equal members of a fully egalitarian society.

By contrast, modern people lack many of these social technologies. Decisions are made in small groups with little history together (certainly not several generations worth), by people who are used to acceding to authority, and who have been raised by a culture populated with inharmonious moral values.

When the question arises, "What actions are legitimate to stop a spectacularly bad idea from damaging our tribe?", we do not have adequate tools to make these decisions with much confidence or certainty. We are further limited by the disturbing truth that some of the most vile periods in human history have come about because a small group of people decided that they knew the right way to live better than anyone else.

We no longer have the long tail of several generations of ancestors speaking to us and guiding us. They were a barrier to progress and were removed from the conversation.

The Revolution of Lowered Expectations

2009-09-11T10:16:00.000-05:00

For the yin of voluntary simplicity, there is a yang -- increased complexity. While simplicity can provide us with more of what we truly want in life, like free time with friends and family, complexity and increased specialization do not benefit most people. They do, however, benefit the people on top of the hierarchy.

There is no cosmic law that necessitates an increase in complexity within an organization, nor is there a human gene that encodes a preference for byzantine systems of governance. These phenomenon have become endemic to our society by design.

Prior to 10,000 BC (12,000 years ago) humans lived in small tribes. These tribes were not technologically based, meaning that they were not defined by their use of tools like fire, stone, arrows or crop-growing. These classifications came much later, in the modern era. Tribes were socially based:

"Native people are not into technology. They spend only a couple hours a day providing for their simple needs, and they mostly use simple means. Look at their tools—few and crude, and their craftwork — basic and utilitarian. What a Native person excels at is what I call qualitative skills—how to sit in a circle with your clan mates and speak your truth, how to find your special talent so that you can develop it to serve your people, how to use your intuition, the ways of honor and respect, how to live in balance with elders and women and children, how to speak in the language beyond words, how to befriend fear and live love." Tamarack Song.

These social skills developed in adaptation to the tribe's local environment, as humans developed a unique niche in the African savannas through several million years of genetic and cultural evolution.

Humans excelled at cooperatively hunting and gathering food, with a particular focus on nutrient dense foods (like the internal organs of other mammals, wild herbs and vegetation). These nutrient dense foods allowed for increased brain development in their children. Pursuit of nutrient dense foods necessitated changes in human social organization, as even the best hunters and gatherers would regularly come home empty-handed. By banding together and sharing their food, as well as sharing skills and knowledge, a tribe became more robust and less susceptible to natural variations in food availability.

This diet allowed early humans to develop quite robustly:

“In the book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, by Weston Price, it was concluded that these primitives had unbelievable endurance, erect postures and cheerful personalities. They were found to have excellent bone structure and well developed jaw and teeth free from decay. In case after case, Price found no incidence of cancer, ulcers, tuberculosis, heart or kidney disease, high blood pressure, muscular dystrophy or sclerosis or cerebral palsy. Source.

This diet also allowed early humans to develop larger brains, and the beginnings of a social culture.

If you've ever wondered why humans became capable of building skyscrapers instead of chimpanzees or dolphins, I believe that it was a combination of opportunity (starting with a relatively smart species), a unique yet sufficiently generalist strategy (hunting and gathering nutrient dense foods), particularly strong selection pressure (see below), and enough changes in environmental conditions to create a new niche for humans without killing them outright. (Note: this is simply my working theory, there is not enough data to fill in all of these gaps).

This niche put strong selection pressure on humans, and also provided them with the nutrient dense food needed to express the newly adapted genes to fuller potential. The selection pressure was quite strong because it was environmental, social and sexual in nature -- meaning that a gene that provided for a better ability to communicate and 'read people' would allow an individual to become a better group hunter, more effective at bargaining for food with the 60 other members of the tribe, and more attractive to a potential mate. Strong selection pressure allows a variation to quickly spread through the gene pool.

As social complexity within the tribe grew over the generations, the pace of change began to accelerate. Tribal customs and practices could change much more quickly than genes can. This allowed humans to adapt to changes in the environment even more quickly.

What developed out of this genetic and social selection pressure was a particularly human institution, the tribe. The tribal community came to dominate human culture:

“The community is the oldest human institution, found absolutely everywhere throughout the world in all kinds of societies. As Rene Dubos has pointed out, more than 100 billion human beings have lived on earth since the late Paleolithic period, and "the immense majority of them have spent their entire life as members of very small groups...rarely of more than a few hundred persons." Indeed, he believes that the need for community has lasted so long that it is encoded in our genes, a part of our makeup, so that "modern man still has a biological need to be part of a group" - a small group, the community, the village, the tribe.” Kirkpatrick Sale.

This form of social organization served us well for most of our history as a species.

There may have been other offshoots of the tribal community. But as Daniel Quinn wrote, "Humans may have tried many other social organizations in those three or four million years, but if so, none of them survived.” (Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization, Page 62).

Within these tribal communities, egalitarianism among its members was common. Jason Godesky surmised that egalitarianism was an evolved response to the 'band together and pursue nutrient dense foods' strategy:

"Egalitarian societies built on sharing and cooperation and guided by consensus were much more adapted to the niche humans exploited than the hierarchical troops of other primates ... egalitarian societies–have an exponential number of relationships, as each individual relates to every other individual in new and different ways. As humans became hunter-gatherers, the simple hierarchical model that served so many other primates ceased to suffice. We needed to become egalitarian to survive, and in order to do that, we needed bigger brains relative to our bodies." Source.

The pursuit of nutrient dense foods required cooperation. Egalitarianism offered a survival advantage over simple primate hierarchies, but it also required a larger brain to keep track of the necessary social relationships.

Egalitarianism does not mean that early humans were free of bias, sexism, or fear of outsiders. It simply means that a social map of a tribe would display a swarm of connections, all relatively equal in stature within the community. A community based on hierarchy would be shaped like a pyramid, with the biggest alpha male on top.

Egalitarianism also does not mean that early humans were somehow better people, or free from social ills like violence and theft.

As Daniel Quinn wrote:

"Tribal life is not in fact perfect, idyllic, noble, or wonderful, but wherever it’s found intact, it’s found to be working well -— as well as the life of lizards, raccoons, geese, or beetles —- with the result that the members of the tribe are not generally enraged, rebellious, desperate, stressed-out borderline psychotics being torn apart by crime, hatred, and violence. What anthropologists find is that tribal peoples, far from being nobler, sweeter, or wiser than us, are as capable as we are of being mean, unkind, short-sighted, selfish, insensitive, stubborn, and short-tempered. The tribal life doesn’t turn people into saints; it enables ordinary people to make a living together with a minimum of stress year after year, generation after generation.” (Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization, p. 61).

Tribal communities, by focusing on social technologies, found ways to keep members of their tribe working together in relative harmony. Tribes which were unable to maintain peace within their community certainly did exist -- but not for very long. Over time, the most effective means of social organization (the egalitarian tribe) came to dominate the human community.

The other defining characteristic of early humans was that they were mobile, hunter-gatherer societies that engaged in a moderate amount of agriculture.

Agriculture is a scalable activity, ranging from 'dropping tasty seeds along the path we take to get to the winter camp' to 'tear up the ground and plant rows of seeds, then water and weed and guard them against predation'. There are a number of variations inbetween, which have a tendency to become optimized to the local climate.

To a tribe that was mobile and placed little value on possessions or physical technologies, intensive agriculture was not a very attractive way to get your food. It was a lot of work! It also required you to stay in one place, which meant that other food sources would not be available in the same quantities (such as seasonal berries, wandering groups of animals, etc).

But let's get back to this 'more work' thing:

"Agriculture is the most intensive form of cultivation, often requiring massive projects such as irrigation or terracing. This is borne out by empirical data. Due to the law of diminishing returns, though agriculture produces the most food absolutely, the ratio of food per unit of labor is in fact higher than any other subsistence technology. Agriculturalists must work harder for their food than anyone else." Source.

Hunter-gather lifestyles, by contrast, were quite a bit easier. Studies of numerous tribes have shown a comparatively easy lifestyle in marginal lands.

I realize that this is counter-intuitive to everything we're taught about primitive people. However, it is a key element of propaganda that alternatives that do not benefit the status quo are targeted. This particular propaganda campaign has been waged for over 10,000 years.

Despite these shortcomings, at least one group of early humans in the Middle East traded a hunter-gatherer lifestyle for an agricultural lifestyle filled with back-breaking labor.

In addition to its other drawbacks, intensive agriculture produced a lower quality of food:

"Excavations at Dickson’s Mounds show a sharp drop in all the customary benchmarks of health and nutrition, and also signs of immediate malnutrition." Source

The same monoculture techniques are used today, and provide modern humans with a much smaller variety of nutrients. The majority of our food comes from only three species -- corn, wheat and rice.

What intensive agriculture did provide, however, was a stable food surplus. This was obviously enough of a draw for at least one group of tribal people -- and, really, that's all it took. Once a food surplus was developed and a generation of children was raised knowing no other way of life, it became possible to begin expanding the intensive agriculture into other lands by force.

Thus began the revolution of lowered expectations. It was a trade of egalitarianism, ample free time and high food quality for guaranteed food surpluses.

Intensive agriculture also provided a way for enterprising members of the tribe to create a hierarchy by controlling access to the food. Having a food surplus required a storage bin. Guards. Someone to measure and distribute the food. It required lots of farmers, people of low status to till the hard ground and do the grunt work. This form of organization was shaped more like a pyramid than an egalitarian swarm.

Thus, with intensive agriculture came hierarchy. This was a replacement for the tribal community. This new form of social organization can be called, in broad terms, civilization.

Civilization can be distinguished through its focus on physical (rather than social) technologies, a development of food surpluses, a hierarchy to protect these technologies and food surpluses, and a clearly defined line between people who are foreign (one of them) and domestic (one of us).

Foreigners became more of a threat to an agricultural community, because they could come in at harvest time and take away a full season's worth of food. Foreign groups of hunter-gatherers were seldom threatening on an existential level, as there was no concentrated store of food to fight over -- merely territory.

This clear definition of foreign, when combined with locking up the food, allowed those at the top of the new hierarchy to begin controlling others through hope (food! to give your new child!) and fear (look our for those nasty barbarians who want to take your food and your superior way of life!).

Thus began the transition from tribal communities to villages, towns, cities and nations.

Intensive agriculture allowed groups of humans to stockpile food and develop specializations like ‘soldier’, ‘leader’ and ‘farmer’. However, this specialization led to a deteriorating quality of life.

But why would people choose to work harder for a lower quality of life?

The answer to this, at least in its specifics, is entirely speculative. I can imagine many scenarios where a tribe might accept temporary measures to bump up food production. Climactic variation may play a role. After several years of drought and harder-to-find food, a tribe may have found intensive farming less onerous. It may have even developed as a long-standing adaptation to droughts longer than 5 years in duration -- on the sixth year, the tribe settles down and becomes farmers until climactic conditions return to normal.

There are many different ways to engage in agriculture, from throwing seeds to plowing up the Earth. There are also a variety of ways to adapt to a changing climate, ranging from 'full-time hunter-gatherer' to 'full-time farmer'.

What is important for the purposes of this discussion is that, at some point, intensive agriculture became dominant in at least one Middle Eastern tribe. This practice allowed the farmers to develop food surpluses, expand their population, and begin creating armies.

With larger populations, food surpluses and professional fighters -- it became possible for these groups to expand. This became necessary, because agriculture left the land denuded after several generations of intensive farming. It became necessary to expand or die, because it was no longer possible to return to hunting and gathering on the denuded land.

This aggressive civilization became dominant through selection pressures, as bordering tribes were left with a choice:

1. The neighboring tribes could adopt similar methods to the aggressive tribe, and start building granaries and armoires.
2. The tribes could do nothing, and be overrun by the aggressive tribe.
3. The tribes could run away, allowing their land to be overrun by the aggressive tribe.

With each expansion the elites within the aggressive civilization grew in wealth, power and influence.

This new way of life continued to spread to other regions, primarily through force: "Agriculture did not spread peacefully into Europe as savages grasped its superiority; it spread into Europe as part of a genocidal wave of conquest, as farmers expanded to find new lands where they had not yet killed off the soil." Source.

Today, this civilization is the dominant force on the planet. Other ways of living are purged, 1984 style, from our history books. We are taught that nothing relevant happened before the first village attacked its neighbor in pursuit of more farmland.

This world-spanning civilization has denuded the majority of arable land on the planet, and is quickly running out of fossil fuel resources. Humanity as a whole is now at a crossroads that will determine the viability of the Earth to support complex life.

Though Richard Feynman was addressing the role of science in society, he described the core of this problem quite well:

"The phenomenon of having a memory for the race, of having an accumulated knowledge passable from one generation to another, was new in the world. But it had a disease in it. It was possible to pass on mistaken ideas. It was possible to pass on ideas which were not profitable for the race. The race has ideas, but they are not necessarily profitable. So there came a time in which the ideas, although accumulated very slowly, were all accumulations not only of practical and useful things, but great accumulations of all types of prejudices, and strange and odd beliefs." Richard Feynman, The Meaning Of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist, p. 185).

Humans are unique among all species on Earth. We can come up with shortsighted and destructive ideas -- and then try to convince other people that we're right! This is particularly true of ideas that externalize the bad consequences to other people or other species.

The revolution of lowered expectations that led to modern civilization is one of these bad ideas.

It should not surprise us that this manner of social organization was not created to benefit us. It was created to benefit the intellectual descendants of the elites who insisted that, "Gee, wouldn't it be a great idea if you all would dig holes in the ground and grow more wheat -- while I sit here and guard it?"

Humanity has spent most of its history free of hierarchy. Equality is not a liberal dream -- it was the reality for nearly every human being who lived prior to 10,000 BC.

We should hold no false loyalties to the heirarchy of our civilization, the backbreaking toil it requires of so many of us, the degredation of our natural world in the name of 'bidness', nor to its proponents who insist that "someone has to be in charge!" This is is a false myth -- and it is a lie.

A Quiet Revolution

2009-09-11T10:05:00.000-05:00

Our culture has failed us on multiple levels and is in dire need of change. One way (but not the only way) to bring about this change is through a quiet revolution in our own lives.

Modern humans are overly specialized, disconnected from each other, not terribly happy, toxified from industrial poisons, relate poorly to the natural world, and are be driving the planet towards the mass extinction of most complex life.

If this is true, you may be asking -- then why the hell are we continuing down this path?

The simple answer is that our complex society has grown very good at growth and self-defense, and that there are few viable ways to disconnect from this complexity. Unless you're inclined towards throwing yourself off of the nearest cliff to eliminate your carbon impact, there is no way to 'opt out'.

As Daniel Quinn likes to say, "Our culture has locked up all the food." This is also true for shelter, water, clothing, and social relationships. So much of our lives in this culture revolve around working at a specialized job we don't like to pay for basic subsistence, luxury items that our culture insists are essential, and interacting with people who are doing much of the same thing. Even if your idea of 'opting out' involves voluntary simplicity, finding the essentials to support yourself (food, water, clothing, shelter and human companionship) is no simple matter. They are all locked up to one degree or another.

Moreover, a communal life based around voluntary simplicity is a threat to a complex society that has eliminated all viable alternatives to itself through 12,000 years of expansion and genocide.

Yes, communes and kibbutzes do exist. A few isolated hunter-gatherer tribes exist. But the exception does not disprove the rule.

There are various ways that our culture deals with people who are not enraptured with America's SUV culture. The simplest way is that access to the essentials for life requires money, which can only be accessed through theft (risky) or doing work that supports the larger culture (like making burgers for people too busy to do it for themselves).

This is reinforced by how we raise our children. Our schools prepare students to become good employees and consumers, teaching practical skills like 'How to Balance a Checkbook' and 'How to Fill out a Job Application'. Advanced students are taught 'How to Start Your Own Business'. Teaching students how to build a home from primarily native materials, grow a garden suited to their bioregion, or gather wild plants with medicinal or beneficial nutrients would be considered *impractical* and would likely get a school shut down. Young people in our society are expected to go to school, get a job, get their own place to live, and start contributing to society (just like everyone else!).

Our culture has become very good at enforcing social norms with only the implied threat of violence. The social norm is, 'everyone works' and 'only well-educated people have the luxury of enjoying their job'.

If an adult decides that, once they've made it through this indoctrination, they still want to simplify their lives in a meaningful way ... the challenges are still pronounced.

There is not enough open land nor enough expertise for more than a tiny fraction of people to go back to living off of the land without purchasing property. Arable land is not cheap, and neither are the taxes need to keep it. Purchasing arable land as a community is difficult because building a cohesive community must allow for the patient development of community decisionmaking. Experience in developing these sorts of communities is something that we do not find in great abundance today -- failure rates for intentional communities approach 90%.

Even moderate simplicity, such as working less hours and spending more time on other pursuits (such as raising a family, political activism or growing your own food) has its own challenges. Perhaps rather than explaining them, I'll simply ask some leading questions:

A) How many middle aged political activists have trouble making ends meet, when they discover they are no longer healthy (no health insurance!) and willing to live in a 2-bedroom apartment with 5 people (who keep rotating in and out). But they have little salable job experience, no savings, hefty student loans, and aren't very good at moving up the promotional ladder via office politics.

B) How many two-parent families cut back to 1 income in order to raise their child(ren)?

C) Is it more cost effective to make your own soap, raise your own corn, bake your own bread ... or to work a few more hours at work and simply buy these items at the supermarket?

The answer to these questions is: A) Too many to count on one hand! B) Very few! and C) Wonderbread isn't real food!

Our culture is very good at channeling people into behavior that serves to support the culture. I make this point because a frequent (and biting) charge from right-wing friends of mine is that 'If you believe in all this hippy stuff, why aren't you doing XYZ!?!'

The simple answer is that it is difficult. It is particularly difficult if you're not young, healthy, childless, debt free, and in a supportive family or community environment.

The larger answer, however, is that it is essential to keep trying. The logic of the marketplace, where the value of an action can only be measured by its opportunity cost, is destroying the ability of the planet to support complex and diverse life.

This is a quiet revolution. It will not change the face of the problems facing our society, and our world. It is, nonetheless, essential to simplify your life to the extend that you're able to -- and then keep on pushing.

Our lives have not been improved by this massive degree of complexity and specialization, but they will improve as we turn towards spending more of our time on pursuits that bring us joy.

Tools

2009-09-11T10:00:00.000-05:00

As somewhat of a primitivist, I'm also pretty attached to certain pieces of technology for work/fun and also for medical necessity.

I guess I've come to accept that there's a balance to be maintained.

So when I came upon the ultra mega ninja stick 2000 (the marketing guys are coming up with a name, this is the working title), I wasn't sure what to make of it. It radiated power -- an ancient, primal, slightly skunky sort of power. I began to back away from the ninja mega super stick ...

That's when it attacked.

I don't want to bore you with the details, but I fended off the attack with my new jedi ninja super ultra mega sword. The mayor gave me the key to the city and not-too-subtle hint about the marital status of his daughter. You know, the usual hero stuff.

The blade no longer smelled like primal skunk, so I took it home with me. Being a magical blade, it fit perfectly (of course!).

The bad part about being a hero is that when you return home, your problems at home haven't been solved by a lower ranked hero. I had a patch of brambles to clear out.

This was a vexing moral problem. Do I use the primieval power that drains the soul of all nonbelievers within a 50 mile radius and condems them to a life of agony (I forgot to mention this part before, my bad). Or do I use the Black & Decker tool powered by 50 million year-old dinosaurs and ferns, which emits CO2 into the atmosphere, thus dooming us all to a really crapy 22nd century?

I think I made the right choice.

Tiny Home Design -- Input Appreciated

2009-09-10T22:26:00.000-05:00

A Very Sick Culture

2009-09-10T17:12:00.000-05:00

A few things I ran across today remind me that we have diverged very, very far from anything approaching rationality.

"I've always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste."

A blurb about the movie Crude reminded me that this mother fucker was almost made Obama's Treasury Secretary.

"My message on this topic is clear and direct. We are at a crucial moment in human history. 2009 is to climate change what 1939 was to WWII. Poland has been invaded – the Arctic is melting, the bushfires are burning, the droughts are strengthening and the floods are sweeping away communities. There is only one question you have to ask yourself: “what will I tell my children?”

This article is right on point. We have already passed the climate tipping point; the question now is whether we will merely precipitate a massive shift in the Earth's climate, or whether we will cause the extinction of most complex multicellular life.

By 2100, perhaps half of the planet will have entirely new climates to which no current species on Earth are adapted. We don't have to go down this road. We can stop digging up coal, sucking oil out of the Alberta tar sands, and develop a sane energy policy which produces less toxicity and less greenhouse gasses.

But the people in charge are virulently opposed to this, because it they fear any change which might result in a loss of power or wealth for them. They are the same class of people who took all the land, and killed our native forebears ... they killed the ones ones who dared to fight back, or be born free from indoctrination.

They sold the land back to the broken, the afflicted, and to those who did not fight back. They sold the land back with conditions attached, with a price -- make the land productive. Make a profit. Or else we take the and back and leave you cold and destitute, lying in the gutter.

The Rockafellers, Fords and Carnegies of this world have already taken our pride, the fruits of our labor, and most of our self-respect. They have divorced us from the price of a job well done. They found a way to make even more profit by taking the land back from our ancestors, finding them new and better places to work called factories. Very efficient! Coal smoke is good for you! Our 50 page book of regulations will make the workplace more fair! It was far cheaper to work a man (or a woman, they're not picky) for bare subsistence wages -- then profit anew from their rent, heat, car, food and medical bills.

The Union Carbides, Dow Chemicals and Monsantos of this world have already come for large portions of our lives. We live in a toxic stew of carcinogens, mutagens and neurotoxins. We eat carcinogens, mutagens and neurotoxins. We drink carcinogens, mutagens and neurotoxins ... with a dash of prozac, birth control hormones, and all the other drugs that wash into the sewers and find their way back into our drinking water. They kill us quickly, sometimes. Sometimes they kill us slowly. Most often of all, they simply make us suffer from unexplained illnesses that are caused by (or exacerbated by) the toxins they produce in enormous quantities.

And now their conglomerated power comes for the lives of generations to come. There is great profit to be had! And so they lie, they trick, they deceive. The blood of the trickster god Loki flows in their veins. They are wounding the planet's air, water and land in a staggering display of hubris. They are destroying the ability of this planet to nurture the complex web of life that sustains all living things.

Do we listen?

Do we accept the creature comforts they throw at us
listen to their lies
and accept that the Earth is simply too big to worry about?

There is no attic to hide in
we cannot ride out the coming storm

If no one stands up for us
if we do not stand up for ourselves
then there will be no generations left to curse our names.

Despite this chorus of anger, I am left inspired by another author, who writes:

"The situation is so immense, so mind-numbingly complex and difficult, so lost in the labyrinth of humanity’s perverse perceptions, that I’ve now moved beyond any notion of being “optimistic” or “pessimistic”. I will simply continue to fight as creatively and as hard as I can, and hope that my own perception is wrong."

In this sense, Derrick Jensen is quite correct. We are indeed at the "endgame". 10,000 years of cultural domination by the food hoarders, money lenders and lawgivers of this world have brought us to the precipice.

What do we do about it? I don't know.

But like most things in life, imperfect action beats sitting on your butt trying to come up with "the perfect plan".

A Hidden Talent

2009-09-10T15:46:00.000-05:00

I have a talent for driving people insane.

Sorry, J. I didn't mean to turn you into a gibbering bobblehead like that.

Forest Largesse

2009-09-09T22:57:00.000-05:00

This is the fun time of year for gardens.

And although my foraging skills are rudimentary, it's hard to miss blackberries.

Rockhopping

2009-09-09T22:44:00.000-05:00

I paid a visit to Gooseberry Falls today. A few differences from my previous visits:

1. It's fall, so the water is pretty low.

2. I was wearing flip flops, which are not helpful when rockhopping changes into rockclimbing.

3. After 3 years without much physical activity, I'm pretty damned weak now. It makes a difference with my sense of balance, too. I actually slid off the side of a few rocks while hopping across the river.

But I still had fun :)

Specialization

2009-09-09T22:23:00.000-05:00

From consumer appliances that save time and energy (dishwashers, self-cleaning ovens and microwave ovens!) to objects which help us multi-task our time (tapes to learn French in your sleep, meals on a stick!) to experts that help us manage our lives (accountants, pet psychologists, house cleaners, financial planners!), we’re all focused on efficiency. The end goal is to specialize so effectively in one particular task that you become expert at it – everything else can be parceled out to the lowest bidder.

What do we achieve, as a society, from this specialization of time? We have the highest standard of living in the world when measured in strictly material terms. The marketing departments of many Fortune-500 company would have us believe that this is the entirety of human motivation and satisfaction.

But many people realize that this is not the end goal of their lives. They want to spend more time with their families, or time pursuing the parts of their life that provide them with the most joy. But somehow, these other demands seldom seem to win out in the end. The demands of professionalism, careerism, and intense specialization are such that most people seem unable to voluntarily fall behind the rest of the pack.

Many years ago, Follett wrote that orders are disobeyed when they go against human nature (Follett. The Giving of Orders. Classics of Public Administration, pp. 37-43). This is also true for our daily activities, which are increasingly being managed by a host of specialists. The more complex our social structures become, the more they rub up against human nature.

Specialization is a form of technology, and like any technology it creates a disconnect between people and the appendage/skill that it took the place of (McLuhan. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man). A society that intensely specializes creates a rift between common sense (intuitive human nature) and the rules necessary to manage a complex society.

For example, common sense argues that local conditions should have bearing on who receives government benefits intended to help people who are temporarily down on their luck. (June, the single mother who everyone in town knows is a hard worker, deserves preference over the lazy bum Joe who never pays his child support on time). But complex bureaucracies cannot abode decisions like this to be made at the local level, as it would create disunity within the system. This is one example of how human nature and specialization can conflict.

This creates a deeper conflict, because the essence of human life is work -- work with meaning, purpose, and direction. Much of this work rubs against the grain of human nature (Gatto. The Underground History of American Education). Very few tasks in our society today have anything more than an abstract sense of meaning, purpose, and direction.

Even professions considered to be filled with meaning and purpose, such as education, are increasingly abstracted. Modern teachers do not produce students who can read and analyze complex works, they teach proscribed curricula that produces students capable of getting 70% of multiple choice questions right on their tests. There is overlap between these two goals, but the overlap is abstract and not terribly satisfying -- as evidenced by the fact that over half of new teachers leave the profession within the first five years.

This unhappiness with jobs that purport to be of service to others is not isolated to education. It is endemic in many professions.

McKnight notes a common refrain from young people, many of who ask him some variation of: “Can you tell me what good work needs to be done in America? I thought that professional training would lead me to good work, but it has led me to live off some people who don’t need me and others I can’t help."

McKnight notes that many service-oriented jobs, such as teaching and nursing, have a deep tendency to identify additional human needs in order to fund their own continued growth. This creation of deficiency in other people is also troubling to many people:

"The politics for a new definition of legitimate work in America may grow from the confluence of citizens angered by the professional invasion of personhood and young professionals disillusioned by lives wasted in the manufacture of need. The possibility for this politics requires an economy that can provide legitimate work for all those people who do not want to make a living by creating deficiencies in their neighbors.” (McKnight. The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits.)

Quinn is also critical of our drive to create more programs, stating that:

“Programs make it possible to look busy and purposeful while failing. If programs actually did the things people expect them to do, then human society would be heaven: our governments would work, our schools would work, our law enforcement would work, our penal systems would work, and so on. When programs fail (as they inevitably do), this is blamed on things like poor design, lack of funds and staff, bad management, and inadequate training. When programs fail, look for them to be replaced by new ones with improved design, increased funding and staff, superior management, and better training. When these new programs fail (as they invariably do), this is blamed on poor design, lack of funds and staff, bad management, and inadequate training.
This is why we spend more and more on our failures every year. Most people accept this willingly enough, because they know they’re getting more every year: bigger budgets, more laws, more police, more prisons—more of everything that didn’t work last year or the year before that or the year before that.” (Quinn. Beyond Civilization.)

It is important to note that humans did not always live this way. The story of other ways of living is a blind spot in our society. We are taught to believe that our culture is wonderful, that many people wish they could live like us, and that cultures more primitive than ours simply aren’t smart enough to build grain silos and organize standing armies.

But these societies often had something that we did not -- a sense of purpose, meaning and joy.

This is not intended to idealize a highly complex subject, but I do believe that the we need to recognize that human needs are generally not fulfilled by intense specialization. For every professional athlete who deeply loves their ability to do nothing but throw basketballs into metal hoops, there are a stadium full of people who derive very little satisfaction or joy from their own work.

Specialization is something that humans have practiced for all, or most of our history. Men and women had different roles within a family, just as older people had different roles than teenagers within a tribe. Based on studies of the few remaining hunter-gatherer societies in the 20th century, other specializations were also common -- such as tribal chief, medicine (wo)man, or 'that guy Joseph who is particularly adept at tracking wounded wildebeasts through the spring monsoons'.

There is a distinct difference, however, between specializations which are based on common sense and those which are based on organizational efficiency. It is common sense that not every member of a tribe can learn about the 11,000 plants and animals common to a bioregion, and that someone may specialize in maintaining a 'database' of this knowledge. However, it rubs against human nature when an 11,000 page rulebook determines whether or not a particular medical procedure will be covered by your insurer. Those whose job it is to tell sick people that, no, they cannot see a doctor or have a procedure performed -- these people are on the short and unhappy end of the organizational hierarchy stick.

This type of specialist did not used to exist:

"Hunter-gatherer societies ... contain no more than a few dozen distinct social personalities, while modern European censuses recognize 10,000 to 20,000 unique occupational roles, and industrial societies may contain overall more than 1,000,000 different kinds of social personalities." (Tainter. The Collapse of Complex Societies).

What we have, then, is a drive towards complexity that makes our lives less joyful.

This is the definition of insane or stupid ... I forget which one :P

A Tiny, Safe Home

2009-09-09T22:04:00.000-05:00

Well, the design process has begun on a very small, portable home -- something in the 15x8 range. The design will be based off of the wildflower, but will have a mud room with a shower right off the entrance. This will allow the interior to be completely sealed, preventing contamination of clothing and linens.

Some of the other design criteria:
- The bathroom being water tight ... floor, walls and ceiling. Perhaps with galvanized steel.
- The bathroom having a shower and small sink, with space for a composting toilet.
- A small kitchen sink and countertop.
- Other than this, the interior would be minimalistic.
- Metal framed windows.
- Metal siding and roof.
- Exterior wood trim would be black locust, finished with organic linseed oil.
- Framing wood: OSB with a minimum of glue, utilizing poplar 2x4s.
- Air-crete insulation.
- A dennyfoil vapor barrier.
- Interior wood in poplar and maple.
- The entire structure placed on wheels, making it easily portable.

Protective Parent

2009-09-09T21:59:00.000-05:00

I interpret this look as, "If you come any closer to my kid I'll leave a bag of flaming poo on your doorstep."

But my interpretation may be off. This is where my training at Hamline is much less useful than a stint at the Teaching Drum would have been.

Paint and Wood Finish

2009-09-09T19:51:00.001-05:00

A summary of experiences with various wood finishes and paints:

Milk paint is a nice product, but pretty expensive. I had a moderate reaction when mixing it, which continued until the product dried fully. You should be aware that the finished consistency isn't the same as for a 'standard' paint. It has a slightly rustic and natural look, and is not glossy smooth to the touch. But it's very safe. (We experimented with creating our own milk paint ... that didn't work out too well :-P The casein mixture needs to be just right in order to cure properly).

American Clay is another safe product, I used it to cover the plyboard in my bedroom (an imperfect solution, but I have very strong reactions to any sort of sealant). It's pretty safe and neutral; it has a slight borax odor to it. You can ask for specially-formulated bags made up without borax, too.

If you have any wood to finish, you might want to consider oil & wax. You can purchase a commercial mixture -- but you can also make your own, composed of walnut oil & beeswax (most food co-ops have walnut oil, and you can order bulk beeswax on ebay). But you should test it on a piece of wood that isn't in the house, then let it age ... although walnut oil is resistant to rancidity, all natural oils will develop a foul odor if not mixed with enough wax. (I simply heat it to the melting point in a double boiler, then add as much wax as I can until it becomes too difficult to apply. I rub it into the wood with a rag. After a few hours I come by with a second rag and buff off the excess). It's not a very user-friendly practice, but it's probably the safest and most affordable DIY option.

Zinnser shellac is also recommended for wood sealing sometimes, but I had a very bad experience with it (despite tolerance testing a stained board prior to interior application). It contains a few parts per million of very toxic solvent (I believe it's a xylene derivative), which isn't listed on the label on the smaller containers.

Linseed oil is another wood sealing option, but it also contains toxic impurities (very similar to the shellac). You can get organic linseed oil without additives, intended for use on cutting boards. This can be a bit dangerous -- it seems very safe in the can, but once exposed to air it oxidizes and undergoes a chemical change. My experience is that the unoxidized oil had a pleasant scent, but that the oxidized linseed oil was unpleasant and very toxic. I didn't test it any further, but I imagine that after a couple of days the organic linseed oil would be very safe. Especially if it was ozoned once or twice.

I'm not very happy with the quality of finish provided by AFM or Bioshield wood stains. Although, of the two choices, AFM is much easier to work with. We try to steer customers towards oil & wax finish instead.

(We've worked a lot with different wood finishes on our solid wood furniture).

As far as standard paints: AFM safecoat is generally tolerated better than Bioshield; Sherwin Williams Harmony zero VOC paint is an OK substitute if you need a 'more traditional' option for a landlord or employer. I find all of them to be around 1,000-10,000x less toxic than oil-based paint, but that's a bit like telling the Coyote that the cliff he followed the Roadrunner over is only 100 feet high.

One last point: don't be fooled by a commercial "Zero VOC" label, they are following federal guidelines ... and those guidelines are full of loopholes. AFM is much less toxic than anything you can get at Home Depot.