Feb/Mar 2010
Living in a Time of Mythic Chage
Caroline Myss
The Value of Whole-Systems Design
Shaktari Belew
Playing for Keeps
Derrick Jensen
Motion to Amend
The Campaign to Legalize Democracy
Abolish Corporate Personhood
David Cobb
Ten Ways to Stop Corporate Dominance of Politics
Fran Korten
What's a Patriot to Do?
Riki Ott
The Transition Document
Reviewed by Dan Armstrong
Community Gardening in an Urban Garden Cooperative
Chuck Burr
On Planting Trees
Daniel Bish
A Cooperative Model for Community Supported Agriculture
Jude Wait
Move Your Money
Amy Goodman interviews Robert Johnson
The Mouth of Satisfaction
Peter Moore
Southern Oregon Birth Connections
Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain
Movie Mystic
Stephen Simon
The Value of Whole-Systems Design
By Shaktari Belew
Taking responsibility means far more than merely changing
light bulbs or recycling. It means being willing to ask
the difficult questions of ourselves. It means
designing our world as if all life matters.
Perhaps a desire to begin the new decade from a more empowering state of impeccability with myself has motivated me, but lately I have been exploring those areas in which I have not taken responsibility for my choices in the full sense of the word—namely my ability or willingness to consciously respond to challenges, circumstances, and opportunities in my life. Instead, I have given away my power by blaming others or by simply failing to consciously respond. Ferreting out those places in my life in which I have failed to take complete ownership of my choices is a subtle and challenging endeavor, especially in instances where I have perceived myself so clearly as a victim.
Yet therein lays the opportunity. As long as I choose to give my power away by blaming another for my current situation, I am actually perpetuating my experience of powerlessness. In those rare moments when I am willing to honestly assess my state of responsibility, I find that I often fail to step up to the plate on both small and grand scales.
Because I often give public presentations on the subject of transitioning to a less oil-centric culture while hopefully developing an even higher quality of life for our communities, I try to “walk my talk.” But an honest review of my household reveals many places in which I have chosen comfort or convenience over effectiveness and true responsibility. There are daily instances where a careful assessment of the source of a product or its life-cycle would offer me more than enough reason to make a different choice.
We all know we could be doing more. So why don’t we? Perhaps I have been waiting for someone else to be “the leader,” especially when feeling overwhelmed by the immense complexity of our situation and the worsening data that bombards our waking hours. This is not the world I wanted to hand my children, and I sometimes feel helpless to make enough of a difference.
How could we have so blindly made choices that have brought us to the brink of disaster in the coalesced form of climate change, peak oil, exponential population growth, uncertain and sometimes counter-productive economic structures, diminishing potable water and arable land, highly insecure food systems, vanishing healthy and diverse ecosystems, and any number of other issues I have yet to perceive? What were we thinking?
Then I am reminded that we are a very young species. To get a clear idea of just how young our species is, you can use a 400-square toilet paper roll to visualize our place in earth’s history. On this scale, if you roll the paper out completely, each 11cm long square would represent about 12.5 million years of the total approximate 5 billion year history. The first proto-humans appeared 3.5 million years ago, or about 3.1 cm from the end of the roll, the first homo sapiens appeared approximately 100,000 years ago or only 1 cm from the end, and all of recorded human history appears only in the last 0.1mm of the roll. On this timeline, we truly are infants on this planet.
Is it any wonder that we have made some choices that weren’t in our best interest? Isn’t that true of most infants? So, the question is, are we willing to open our eyes, learn from the very loud feedback we are currently receiving from earth’s systems, and finally make some corrective choices?
But before we look at what those choices might be, or how we might go about making them, we have another issue to contend with—the proclivity of humans to see only what we choose to see.
When I saw the 3D film, Avatar, which lived up to its promise of spectacular visual effects, I was surprised to see how beautifully it also fit my growing awareness of perceptual filters. While it is true that each person has a unique and ever-changing perceptual filter through which one’s sense of reality is discerned, I counted at least four dissimilar humanoid-type collective perceptual filters active within the film’s story line. This is important because each group perceived the exact same object—the planet of Pandora—through distinctly different filters, and subsequently responded to similar stimulus in vastly different ways. There was the perceptual filter of the scientist (Pandora as the object of curious exploration driven by a desire to understand), the corporate executive (Pandora as a resource trove to be commoditized), the military (Pandora as the fear-producing and life-threatening enemy to be subdued at any cost), and the indigenous population (Pandora as a beautiful, balanced, interconnected whole-systems web of life to be supported and cherished). Each group’s perceptual filter determined the quality of their experience, and severely limited their ability to communicate with each other. Sound familiar?
Sadly, we couldn’t have been offered a better example of this same kind of perceptual blindness on our own planet when, immediately following the tragic earthquake in Haiti, televangelist Pat Robertson stated during a broadcast of The 700 Club on the Christian Broadcasting Network that Haiti’s freedom from French slavery was the result of a “deal with the devil.” He concluded, “ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other.” While the rest of the world witnessed the suffering in Haiti with compassion, rushing humanitarian aid to the millions of people affected by the quake, Robertson saw through the lens of myth, judgment and blame. Same event, yet perceived in vastly different ways. (It will be interesting to see, as time progresses, how many corporations see Haiti’s tragedy through the lens of opportunity as well. See Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine—The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.)
If such diverse perceptual filters are normal among humans, how can we begin to discuss new species-wide choices regarding how we design our lives and how they impact the rest of earth’s population? How can we take full responsibility for our choices, and what exactly does that mean?
I often imagine the choice to take full responsibility for my actions as equivalent to the concept of ownership. When I own something, I am free to make choices about its use. Take my home for example. Since my name appears on the title, despite the fact that a large portion of the value is held by a bank, I have the privilege of deciding how my property is used within the limits of the law. My decisions affect the overall value and quality of the property, just as our collective decisions affect the well-being and quality of life of the entire planet.
But in my case, the sense of ownership goes deeper because I also designed and built my home. In a sense, every square inch constitutes a design choice I made that impacts the quality of life experienced by anyone living in my home. The inter-dependent nested systems that combine to make up the overall design, function or fail to do so, solely because of the quality of my design skills. Although I considered every necessary aspect I could imagine in the design, as any designer will tell you, the complexity of the project makes that task virtually impossible. After ten years of living in my experimental design, there are some subtle changes I would now make based on my experience.
I wouldn’t call those changes mistakes, as I was operating with the best of intentions using the best information available at the time of the initial design. But I now possess valuable additional information in the form of systems’ feedback after inhabiting the design for ten years.
In many ways the systems-wide feedback our infant-like species is now receiving from the interdependent systems that make up life on earth are analogous to the systems-wide feedback I experience from living in my home design. We can choose to heed the feedback and hone our design accordingly, or experience the consequences. As dire as those consequences have been predicted to be, we have an opportunity to do something that our species has never done before—we can consciously design the many complex interdependent systems that constitute our species’ impact on earth.
The following questions then arise: How many of us are prepared to actively take responsibility for the design of our many complex and interwoven systems (culture, business, economics, technology, food, water, etc.), how many of us have had any training in design, and where do we begin?
Luckily, even though few people in our culture currently receive training in whole-systems design, or any design methodologies for that matter, there are many resources to draw upon. Many of the indigenous cultures of the world approached the development of their cultures based on careful observation of life’s complex operating systems. We can tap that ancient wisdom, developed over thousands of years of observation, by studying the lens through which they experienced their world and the wisdom acquired. More recently, the development of Permaculture, a design methodology based on observation of earth’s systems, has yielded tremendous insights in the form of simple design principles that can be applied to diverse contexts, from agriculture to economics and even community systems.
One of the most exciting approaches to design is Biomimicry. Just as its name implies, it offers a design methodology based on mimicking the results of earth’s 3.4 billion years of evolutional experimentation. Biomimicry seeks to find existing natural solutions to our design challenges. For example, here are two distinctly different ways in which nature has solved the issue of keeping surfaces clean. In the first example, the wing surface of the Morpho butterfly sheds water and dirt using a hydrophobic microstructure. Once fully understood, that same method could be used to develop self-cleaning windows, paints, and surfaces. Likewise, the leaves of the sacred lotus use nanoscale bumps to keep the surface clean. In this minimal sampling alone, nature has developed two distinct ways of accomplishing similar goals.
What other solutions has nature developed and tested over time? You can learn more about Biomimicry at AskNature.org. Be sure to Google Janine Benyus, a leader in this field, who notes that design based on Biomimicry forces one to ask distinctly different questions like, “What do you want your design to do,” instead of asking, “What do you want to design?”
Benyus asks questions like “Who is involved with the problem and who with the solution?” “Where is the problem and where will the solution be applied?” “How does nature do and not do this function?” When trying to find champion adapters in nature she asks “Whose survival depends on this?” She then recommends looking at the extremes, just as in Permacuture, which observes the edges of a system (where it meets other systems—as in a meadow meeting a forest) usually offer the best opportunity for creative adaptations.
As you begin to select champion adaptors, Benyus continues, choose those with the most relevant strategies to your particular design challenge, and then abstract from this list the repeating successes and principles that achieve this success. Open yourself to learn in unexpected ways. As you move to the mimicry portion of the design process, incorporate effects of scale and other pertinent design considerations, evaluating your success against the underlying principles exhibited in all life. Nature develops small feedback loops, by which it is constantly learning, adapting, and evolving. Our designs could do the same.
For example, nature uses food waste as compost to build soil. Yet our culture has by-passed that successful closed-loop design by installing garbage disposals that chop those nutrients into compost-sized particles yet dump them into the “waste” stream, thereby forcing municipalities to spend millions of dollars cleaning them out of the water. Why not send them into a compost system instead, just as nature does? By doing so, we can rebuild our soil and lower the burden on our waste systems.
Seeing the world through the eyes of a Biomimicry scientist/design team suddenly broadens our options. What other solutions have been sitting in front of our eyes all along that we have failed to perceive due to our individual and collective perceptual filters?
Perhaps just as useful as our growing awareness of natural solutions is our growing awareness of the design process itself. Neri Oxman of MIT combines principals of Biomimicry with the design and construction of built environments. She began her research asking, “What is the origin of form, how do we invent form, and where do we begin?” Focusing her investigation on how nature creates form forced Oxman to shift her thinking. Instead of seeing nature as a creator of form, she now sees nature as a creator of processes, or recipes that mix material and environment together. It is from those relationships that form emerges. Oxman’s focus on process steps beyond merely designing products, and approaches design in a fresh and highly flexible manner. Her website (www.materialecology.com) offers specific examples of her work. She suggests asking not what an object wants to be, but what a material wants to be. This shift forces the designer to observe both the material properties and the environmental constraints, defining the designer as an “editor of constraints.”
In her highly recommended talk on www.PopTech.com Oxman notes that nature is a grand materials engineer and knows how to organize matter. But even as she asks, “What can nature do for us,” Oxman also asks, “What can’t nature do for us,” and sites two examples: Nature has not yet invented pumps or wheels. Those are the two inventions, states Oxman, that have contributed greatly to the degradation of our environment.
Using the human bone, which has the capacity to modulate and remodel itself based on structural load, as inspiration, Oxman noticed that bone performs analysis, modeling, and fabrication in one process—something we rarely do. She calls this “Environmental Fitness,” and it is the inspiration for a protective glove she is helping design to assist those with carpal tunnel syndrome. What makes this glove special, however, is that it is custom designed for each individual to provide structure and softness in the exact locations to optimize pain relief and functionality. It is as if she is designing from the cellular level, allowing form to emerge from the process.
Stepping into the footsteps of the late Victor Papanek, (one of my design heroes), is Emily Pilloton, Founder and Executive Director of Project H Design (www.projecthdesign.org), established to “provide a conduit and catalyst for need-based product design that empowers individuals, communities, and economies.” Pilloton’s intent is to “connect the power of design to the people who need it most, and the places where it can make a real and lasting difference,” by gathering a team of designers and builders engaged locally in quality-of-life projects, designing “with, not for” their clients; and then documenting, sharing, and measuring the results of their solutions with the rest of the world. Focusing on systems instead of “stuff” results in effective solutions catered to those without access to creative capital.
A fine example of their creative solutions to widespread problems was developed by Oxford Physics Professor Joshua Silver, whose Adaptive Eyecare (www.adaptive-eyecare.org) offers affordable and adjustable-lens eye glasses that can be custom adjusted to the specific prescription of the wearer with just a turn of two knobs. With approximately a billion people worldwide unable to access corrective eye wear, this design offers a significant new system of eye care—not just a new product. I invite you to visit the Project H website for more great ideas.
What is the significance of these approaches to design? First, they are sourced from asking fundamentally different questions that force us to focus our attention on aspects of design and nature that have previously been ignored. Second, they allow new questions and new ways of perceiving our complex challenges to emerge, significantly expanding the scope of possible solutions.
Whole-Systems approaches have been used throughout history, they simply haven’t been given much press or attention in modern times until lately, when the feedback that our old ways of seeing and problem solving have grown loud enough for us to finally pay attention.
Take our economy, for example. Numerous authors have attempted to wave the red flag regarding the failures of our economic systems, including David Walker, author of the newly released, Come Back America—Turning the Country Around and Restoring Fiscal Responsibility. Formerly head of the Governmental Office of Account-ability, he now heads the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the organization famous for releasing last year’s great documentary, “I.O.U.S.A.”
In a September Wall Street Journal interview by John Fund entitled, “Warning: The Deficits Are Coming!” Walker outlined his take on the deficit and possible solutions we could adopt. Citing four deficits—budget, savings, value-of-the-dollar and leadership—he noted that an overall strategy would be to save more (conserve resources), reduce oil consumption (slow consumption of non-renewables while lessening environmental degra-dation), hold politicians accountable (develop and use multiple feedback loops), and get more value from health-care spending (stack functions).
David Walker states, “We are treating the symptoms of those deficits, but not the disease,” and suggests “entrenched incumbency” and “political careerism” as basic roadblocks to favorable results. “Members of Congress ensure they have gerrymandered seats where they pick the voters rather than the voters picking them, and then they pass out money to special interests who then make sure they have so much money that no one can easily challenge them.”
The recent Supreme Court decision that effectually gives corporations unlimited ability to buy legislators only exacerbates this problem. Walker supports a constitutional amendment that limits congressional candidates to accepting donations only from those able to vote for them.
Both the article and his book contain specific whole-system changes that impact the entire system, including health care, taxes, Presidential powers, and economic education. Walker’s comprehension of our situation can be summed up thusly, “Our $56 trillion in unfunded obligations amount to $483,000 per household. That’s 10 times the median household income—so it’s as if everyone had a second or third mortgage on a house equal to 10 times their income but no house they can lay claim to.”
When referring to the projected additional $1.8 trillion dollar deficit, he continues, “A deficit that large is $3.4 million a minute, $200 million an hour, $5 billion a day.” After recovering from the shock of that statement, what do we choose to do about it?
Finally, how can we apply the wisdom of each of these whole-systems visionaries to real life problems? Each of the designers highlighted above has taken their knowledge of whole-systems approaches and focused on specific areas of application. But in the case of Haiti, where just about all social, environmental, governmental, and economic systems have been destroyed, where do we begin? What lessons can we learn from the projects cited above, both for rebuilding Haiti and for redesigning resilient, relocalized systems in our own locales?
Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, every one of our own communities has vulnerabilities similar to those so easily revealed in the Haitian earthquake. How many produce enough local food to compensate for the lack of food deliveries due to oil shortages, trucker’s strikes, or natural disasters? How many have backup water systems or local energy systems based on renewables like wind, sun, geothermal, or tides? How many hospitals have access to locally produced medicines? What currency is available locally if the dollar suddenly plummets in value?
Such redundant systems are commonplace in nature, but rare in human developments. Humanitarian aid during disasters can constitute a heart-warming display of humanity’s best characteristics, but it rarely encompasses a whole-systems approach. Responses based on Permaculture design are the sole exception. The Permaculture Research Institute of Australia’s January 14, 2010 article, Permaculture Relief Corps Forming For Haiti Earthquake Response? describes Permaculture-based relief efforts in the past, including those in Kosovo and Cuba. Author Evan Schoepke cites the Cegrane Camp Permaculture Rehabilitation Project as a prime ex-ample, though on a smaller scale (http://northeasternpermaculture.wikiwiki
spaces.com/Cool+Permaculture+Examples). The lessons learned are still applicable on a by-village or neighborhood basis.
Schoepke suggests several long and short-term approaches that, taken together, constitute the beginning of a whole-systems approach:
Short Term: Building sewage systems, compost-ing toilets, compost and recyclying centers, rocket and solar stoves, temporary shelters, water catchment, and plant nurseries.
Long Term: Permanent natural buildings, water stor-age, earth works, renewable energy, permaculture food forests, broad-scale reforestation, farms, aquaculture systems, health centers and schools.
Finally, he recommends the Haiti-based team from the Organization for the Rehabilitation of the Environment (ORE). Originally founded in 2003 to address flooding following a hurricane, the team later tackled the challenge of designing low-cost housing adapted to Haitian rural families with the full collaboration of the local community. ORE’s goals include many of the systems mentioned above, as well as development of community centers, design for reduced stress and greater privacy, green spaces for crops and enhanced quality of life, wind pattern utilization in heating/cooling cycles, community covenants to protect quality of life, and food/fruit production.
Not only can we rebuild communities using whole-systems approaches that diminish the intensity and likelihood of future disasters in the same location, but we can approach the entire concept of natural disasters in the similar way that we are now approaching the challenges of peak oil, climate-change, etc.—by proactively re-designing our systems from the ground up before disaster strikes, to allow for the highest level of resiliency regardless of our daily circumstances.
The 1999 paper, “Reframing Disaster Policy” (http://bit.ly/5Y4ilT) offers five initiatives for reducing the number of future disasters:
1. Interdisciplinary assessment of risk in a geographic place-based approach to vulnerable regions, one that includes anthropology, architecture, engineering, geog-raphy, law, meteorology, public administration, public policy and sociology.
2. Multi-way information exchange systems.
3. Informed action at the local level. Similar to the intention of Transition Towns, local efforts to reduce vulnerability by designing community systems that are both locally oriented and resilient while increasing community participation through education, training, capacity building, and resource transfers can all assist this process. Networking assets (skills, experience, knowledge, and tangibles) through Asset Mapping can improve vital response time while offering an accurate assessment of what is in abundance and what is missing.
4. Maps of the decision processes for disaster mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. The desire is to “identify critical actors at each jurisdictional level, their risk assumptions; their different types of information needs, and the design of an information infrastructure that would support their decisions.” Again, Asset Mapping would go far in providing this necessary data. Feedback loops that monitor each effort and its accompanying results over time would greatly assist this process.
5. Enablement of affected populations. The time of top-down efforts in which outsiders sweep into a disaster area as rescuers, only to leave after the initial work is declared (again by outsiders) to be complete, is over. We now realize that disaster relief begins long before disaster strikes—in the design, testing, and implementation of community systems. It is imperative, therefore, that those who benefit from disaster relief actually lead the overall effort whenever possible—before, during, and after. It is, after all, their community and their choice. Similarly, the local population should benefit economically from any commercial efforts to reconstruct damaged areas. Opportunistic and speculative businesses from outside the region should be prohibited from participation unless qualified local businesses are not available. Even then, locals should be hired whenever possible.
As I assess my ability to take full responsibility for the quality of my life and the life we are handing the next generations, I am overwhelmed with a sense of awe generated from the understanding that the success of our accomplishments will be sourced as much from our innate abilities and knowledge as it is from our willingness to constantly ask new questions and perceive new possibilities. In a sense, then, we are participating in an endless dance of ever-expanding exploration and experimentation.
Taking responsibility means far more than merely changing light bulbs or re-cycling. It means being willing to ask the difficult questions of ourselves:
• Who am I willing to be in the context of this moment?
•What assumptions drive my perception and limit my ability to see options?
• Am I allowing comfort and complacency to dictate my choices?
• How can this seemingly small choice, in this moment, impact the lives of the next several generations?
•How can I find the best available infor-mation in the midst of “expert” contradictions?
• What do I truly value in life? (Beyond what I think I want.)
• Are there ways of increasing my quality of life without damaging others?
• Since I determine what I perceive and what I deem truly matters, what do I choose, and how do I live my life as a reflection of those choices?
Taking responsibility means being willing to stand in the unknown until it becomes familiar territory. It means testing new perceptional options with eager curiosity and joy. It means finally making the choice to design our world as if all life matters.
The worldwide Transition Movement offers me the opportunity of exploring the unknown with the assurance that millions around the world are networking to design, implement and test new possibilities together. That realization alone fills me with excitement. We are the next frontier. No longer must I feel alone as I explore the possibilities within my life, and our collective experience as a species. I invite you to join the fun.
Shaktari Belew is one of 22 nationally certified trainers from TransitionUS offering a two-day workshop called “Training for Transition” to communities throughout the USA. If your community is interested in hosting this potent workshop, contact her at Shaktari@AshlandHome.net. Shaktari holds an MSc degree in Organizing Learning for EcoSocial Regeneration from Gaia University, is a certified Permaculture teacher, founder of the non-profit Thrivability Institute, and the author of the book Honoring All Life—A Practical Guide to Exploring a New Reality (2005).
Transition Town Ashland (www.TransitionTownAshland.org) meets on Thursdays every month, with an introductory talk on the first Thursday of every month at Peace House, 7pm. TTA community planning group meetings take place the third Thursday of every month in the Gresham Room of the Ashland Public Library, also 7pm. Please check our website for other opportunities to participate.
