Books

Over the holidays I read Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming by Paul Hawken. This is a book that is more a reference than a story and what will serve me well after reading the book is the extensive appendix, which is about 1/3 of the book. Hawken covers many themes familiar to readers of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth or Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down.

The approach taken by “the movement” to address problems, noticed by Hawken, is one that makes sense to me, given my own consulting business as well as some local initiatives that I’m involved with, such as our Commons.

The term solving for pattern was coined by Wendall Berry, and refers to a solution that addresses multiple problems instead of one. Solving for pattern arises naturally when one perceives problems as symptoms of systemic failure, rather than random errors requiring anodynes. For example, sustainable agriculture addresses a number of issues simultaneously: It reduces agricultural runoff, which is a main cause of eutrophication and dead zones in lakes, estuaries and oceans; it reduces use of energy-intensive nitrogen-based fertilizers; it ameliorates climate change, because organic soil sequesters carbon, whereas industrial farming releases carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and is the second-greatest cause of climate change after fossil fuel combustion; it improves worker health because of the absence of pesticide; it enables soil to retain more moisture and is thus less reliant on irrigation and outside sources of water; it is more productive than conventional agriculture; it is less susceptible to erosion; and it provides habitat for pollinators, birds, and beneficial insects, which promotes biodiversity. On top of all that, the resulting food commands a premium in the market, making small farms economically more viable. Solving for pattern is the de facto approach of the movement because it is resource constrained. It cannot afford “fixes”, only solutions.

This evening, I’m off to an executive meeting of the Sackville Community Supported Agriculture group, as we plan for this year’s challenge of supplying 60 families with good, locally-grown produce; up from 20 families last year.

I’ve just finished reading The Upside of Down, which is very disturbing, but at the same confirms some of my own directions in life. A good part of this book reads like An Inconvenient Truth, but Homer-Dixon adds more detail about how we got into this mess. Much of the book is dedicated to an explanation of the five tectonic stresses that we face as a civilization — population; energy; environmental; climate and economic. About 80% of this book is depressing to any thoughtful or caring person.

However, there is a positive note — in times of crisis and destruction come opportunities for regeneration. This requires a ‘prospective mind’ that can anticipate crises and prepare for them. For instance, Homer-Dixon encourages building resilience into our communities and economies, so that we are not dependent on tightly coupled global supply chains. Resilience implies redundancy and is evident everywhere in nature.

Homer-Dixon suggests two related tools for helping us to build more resilient communities – the Internet and open source collaborative problem-solving. He sees much untapped potential in using one billion interconnected volunteers to bypass elite special interests and tackle our urgent global problems. Connecting with a worldwide community of interest while creating resilient local communities is the general recommendation from Homer-Dixon.

Advance planning means we need to develop a wide range of scenarios and experiment with technologies, organizations, and ideas. We’ll do better at these tasks, and we’ll also do better in the confusing aftermath of breakdown, if we use a decentralized approach to solving our problems, because traditional centralized and top-down approaches are not nimble enough, and they stifle creativity.

Homer-Dixon’s argument and suggestion to address “catastrophe, creativity and the renewal of civilization” is a solid argument for many of the activities that I now find myself engaged in. These range from the creation of our community work Commons; our local organic food purchasing cooperative; and implementing open source organisational models. There is also the search for meaning, beyond that which was developed two millennia ago by the great faiths, during what is described in the book as the Axial Age, when “… people came to understand that they could use reason and reflection to see beyond their immediate reality …”. What we usually experience is more like this:

When we get in the door of our nearest church, mosque or synagogue, we find there’s no real opportunity for discussion. Instead, we’re handed a creed of some kind. We’re told what to think about values, not how to think about them.

The first step in our renewal as a civilization is admitting that we face a global crisis and talking about what we can do.