Anticipating Collapse

SUBHEAD: Collapse can’t happen soon enough, as far as I’m concerned.

By Damaris Zehner on 16 January 2020 for Integrity of Life -
(https://www.damariszehner.com/post/anticipating-collapse)


Image above: "How the West Was Won" painting by Mark Bryant. For more detail and many other paintings by Mark visit (https://www.artofmarkbryan.com/recent-work/#!jig[1]/NG/427).

Collapse can’t happen soon enough, as far as I’m concerned.

By collapse, I mean the breakdown of the complexities of our current society. 

Those would be government bureaucracies, educational and credentialing systems, laws and regulations of all sorts, tax codes, the interconnected layers of our identities on the internet, the ballooning administrative sector, insurance, the stock market, multinational corporations, the military-industrial complex – all the way down to the proliferation of single-purpose kitchen gadgets cluttering our cupboards.

It's not that I long for the feral world, red in tooth and claw, portrayed in collapse fiction, although I know there are those who fantasize about mastering a post-apocalyptic wasteland. I acknowledge that the collapse of complex societies (the name of a great study by Joseph Tainter) is both the result of problems and the cause of problems in human relations and survival.

Collapse seems always to be tied to environmental degradation, although there are many other related causes, and is often accompanied by war, hunger, displaced people, and a fall in population. I would have to be a monster to want my family and neighbors to suffer all those things, and I'm not.

But there are two points I want to make about collapse: that it is inevitable; and that it is necessary before genuine reform can take place.

First the inevitability.

History and archaeology show that every complex society that has ever arisen has fallen. Ancient China, Babylon, Assyria, Hittites, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Mongols, Mayans, Incas, Mali, Zimbabwe, the Spanish Empire, the British Empire – these all followed a similar pattern of expansion, administration, and dissolution.

Some have fallen spectacularly and vanished from history, while others have rearranged themselves and emerged in another form, but none has survived for long at its peak of power.

There are lots of theories about timelines and patterns that you can read if you’re interested, but the central point is that complex human societies, like everything else in this universe, do not expand infinitely.

Eventually they all collapse, partially or completely, and something different rises in their place. This process will certainly be compounded and sped up in our generation by the looming climate catastrophe.

Discussion of the issue of collapse often takes a moral tone, asking what we've done that God, gods, or nature is punishing us for – and that is an appropriate and helpful process, one we should spend a lot of time thinking about, because we are moral creatures.

But the moral element sometimes distracts us from the natural inevitability of collapse, the pattern that we see when a sapling sprouts in a forest, grows, ages, falls, and leaves a gap for other saplings to fill.

Too often the moral approach assumes that we can avoid that natural pattern if we just shape up. To a degree and for a time that’s true, but ultimately it is hubris to expect that we and our institutions can live forever.

So the current Western society that we take for granted will collapse. I don’t know when or how or to what degree, but I know it will. It would be wonderful if we could assert our collective will to downsize voluntarily, to “collapse now and avoid the rush,” as John Michael Greer puts it.

It would be great if we could restrict our appetites, break away from our expectations, and be willing to imagine an unknowable future, rather than fighting to preserve the status quo. I have a tiny hope that some people might being willing to collapse well, which is what keeps me writing about human-shaped institutions.

On the whole, however, I expect that the collapse will be messy, not carefully managed by people of goodwill. I expect there will be conflict and competition, selfishness defending itself against need, and a dearth of imagination about how things could be different but still good. ]

Western society has made enemies of people and nature in its expansion, and those enemies will pour in when they get the chance if we don’t make peace with them first.

But the future doesn’t need to be a Book of Eli scenario of blasted landscapes, gangs, and cannibalism. My second point is that collapse is also an opportunity for new life, new systems, a new attempt at balance. In the gaps left by the fall of complicated, ossified institutions, more human-shaped ones can grow. It will be messy, but it could be good.

Think about this as an example.

I’ve been writing a lot about educational reform. I have a picture of the kind of school I’d love to start, and have even worked on making it a reality at various times in the past.

But starting a small, sane, countercultural school right now involves a lot of complexity: at minimum, credentials from states and/or independent agencies, which would dictate the training and qualifications of teachers; building codes; insurance of all sorts; and financing to rent or buy space. 

It involves competing with other schools for families who assume that interschool competitions in sports, music, debate, and other areas are necessary. It involves dealing with colleges who have become ever more demanding about transcripts and activities, and with parents who are afraid that alternative education would interfere with their children’s ability to get scholarships. 

And even if all of those issues could be successfully addressed, it means that only wealthy families could send their children to the kind of school that I think all children should go to.

If the public school system and its related institutions collapsed, however, the school I’d like to start would be a valuable alternative for the people who wouldn’t even consider it now. I could start it in my house, if I had to, and barter goods and services with parents who couldn't afford cash, all outside of the current bureaucracy. 

The same is true of all other fields: I know there are doctors who would love to open a practice independent of the nationwide networks, and, not dragged down by the crazy costs of education and insurance, treat patients for a reasonable price. 

There are farmers who would be more successful if they were no longer crushed by regulations designed for industrial-level food producers and no longer competing against the subsidized foodlike substances sold throughout our fast food nation. The same is true of producers of all sorts: clothes designers, carpenters, builders, writers, artists, and others.

(Let me insert a quick explanation here: I am not against regulations guaranteeing safety and quality. I have no problem with reasonable government at the appropriate level for the issues being considered. I’m just saying that the expansion of complexity ultimately stifles freedom and creativity, and that collapse creates an opening for freedom and creativity.)

The next question that needs to be asked, then, is what should we do in anticipating collapse, and how should we participate in the process? Is violent revolution inevitable, as Marx said? Should we proactively start a violent revolution to hurry things along, as Soviet Marxists thought? Should we use heinous methods to destabilize the status quo like the accelerationists? 

Should we try to work through our current institutions of law and government to create reform, as activists want? Or should we retreat to woods and communes to start a parallel society apart from our metastasized system, as used to happen millennia ago when there was more unoccupied land to retreat to?

I’m not confident that any of these methods would yield the results that I’d like to see. Nor am I sure that revolutions and reforms can direct the mighty forces of expansion and collapse that rule the universe. I see us more like people on a raft hurtling toward a surf-torn shore, arguing about whether we should be paddling forward, paddling backward, or jumping overboard.

Can we really change anything, or are the forces driving us forward too powerful to divert? I don’t know. You can go ahead and try the method that makes sense to you, so long as you act within moral bounds and don’t assume that the ends justify the means; I just don’t think it will make that much difference to the ultimate collapse of society. 

However, the choices we make will mean everything in the world to the kind of people we become and the future society we form: either motivated by greed, competition, and entitlement, or founded on kindness, humility, and balance.

.

To find alternatives to Capitalism

SUBHEAD: Why co-ops, regional currencies, and hackerspaces are pointing the way toward a new economic vision.

By David Bollard on 9 August 2017 for the Nation -
(https://www.thenation.com/article/to-find-alternatives-to-capitalism-think-small/)


Image above: Detroit man plays a sax at the Eastern Market built in 1891 where local food and products are sold. From (https://roadtrippers.com/us/detroit-mi/food-drink/eastern-market-detroit).

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s shocking election victory, a shattered Democratic Party and dazed progressives agree on at least one thing: Democrats must replace Republicans in Congress as quickly as possible.

As usual, however, the quest to recapture power is focused on tactical concerns and political optics, and not on the need for the deeper conversation that the 2016 election should have provoked us to have.

How can we overcome the structural pathologies of our rigged economy and toxic political culture, and galvanize new movements capable of building functional alternatives?

Since at least the 1980s, Democrats have accepted, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, the free-market “progress” narrative—the idea that constant economic growth with minimal government involvement is the only reliable way to advance freedom and improve well-being.

Dependent on contributions from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Big Pharma, the Democratic Party remains incapable of recognizing our current political economy as fundamentally extractive and predatory.

The party’s commitment to serious change is halfhearted, at best. While the mainstream resistance to Trump is angry, spirited, and widespread, its implicit agenda, at least on economic matters, is more to restore a bygone liberal normalcy than to forge a new vision for the future.

The impressive grassroots resistance to Trump may prove to be an ambiguous gift. While inspiring fierce mobilizations, the politicization of ordinary people, and unity among an otherwise fractious left, it has thus far failed to produce a much-needed paradigm shift in progressive thought.

This search for a new paradigm is crucial as the world grapples with some profound existential questions: Is continued economic growth compatible with efforts to address the urgent dangers of climate change?

If not, what does this mean for restructuring capitalism and reorienting our lives? How can we reap the benefits of digital technologies and artificial intelligence without exacerbating unemployment, inequality, and social marginalization?

And how shall we deal with the threats posed by global capital and right-wing nationalism to liberal democracy itself?

In the face of such daunting questions, most progressive political conversations still revolve around the detritus churned up by the latest news cycle.

Even the most outraged opponents of the Trump administration seem to presume that the existing structures of government, law, and policy are up to the job of delivering much-needed answers. But they aren’t, they haven’t, and they won’t.

These projects reject the standard ideals of economic development, emphasizing instead community and the mutualization of benefits.

Instead of trying to reassemble the broken pieces of the old order, progressives would be better off developing a new vision more suited to our times. There are already a number of projects that dare to imagine what a fairer, eco-friendly, post-growth economy might look like.

But these valuable inquiries often remain confined within progressive and intellectual circles.

Perhaps more to the point, they are too often treated as thought experiments for someone else to implement. “Action causes more trouble than thought,” the artist Jenny Holzer has noted. What is needed now are bold projects that attempt to demonstrate, rather than merely conceptualize, effective solutions.

The challenges before us are not modest.

But it’s now clear that the answers won’t come from Washington. Policy leadership and support at the federal level could certainly help, but bureaucracies are risk-averse, the Democratic Party has little to offer, and the president, needless to say, is clueless. It falls to the rest of us, then, to figure out a way to move forward.

The energy for serious, durable change will originate, as always, on the periphery, far from the guarded sanctums of official power and respectable opinion.

Resources may be scarce at the local level, but the potential for innovation is enormous: Here one finds fewer big institutional reputations at stake, a greater openness to risk-taking, and an abundance of grassroots imagination and enthusiasm.

Beyond the Beltway’s gaze, the seeds of a new social economy are being germinated in neighborhoods and farmers’ fields, in community initiatives and on digital platforms.

A variety of experimental projects, innovative organizations, and social movements are developing new types of local provisioning and self-governance systems.

Aspiring to much more than another wave of incremental reform, most of these actors deliberately bypass conventional politics and policy. In piecemeal fashion, they unabashedly seek to develop the DNA for new types of postcapitalist social and economic institutions.

The “commons sector,” as I call this bricolage of projects and movements, is a world of DIY experimentation and open-source ethics that holds itself together not through coercion or profiteering but through social collaboration, resourceful creativity, and sweat equity, often with the help of digital platforms.

Its fruits can be seen in cooperatives, locally rooted food systems, alternative currencies, community land trusts, and much else.

While these insurgent projects are fragmentary and do not constitute a movement in the traditional sense, they tend to share basic values and goals: production for household needs, not market profit; decision-making that is bottom-up, consensual, and decentralized; and stewardship of shared wealth for the long term.

They reject the standard ideals of economic development and a return on shareholder investment, emphasizing instead community self-determination and the mutualization of benefits.

Not surprisingly, the Washington cognoscenti have evinced scant interest in these emerging forms of social economy and their political potential.

As the 2016 campaigns showed, mainstream politicians can barely discuss climate change intelligently, let alone imagine a post-fossil-fuel economy (as the climate-justice and transition-towns movements do) or apply deep ecological principles and wisdom traditions to politics (as Native Americans have done at Standing Rock).

They are similarly oblivious to the hacktivists developing community-driven alternatives to Uber and Airbnb, and to the work of the social-and-solidarity-economy (SSE) movement to build multi-stakeholder cooperatives for social services.

But that’s precisely why those seeking profound change should be paying attention to these experiments. The commons sector goes beyond the orthodox approach to social change and justice, which tends to privilege individual rights and the redistribution of wealth via the tax system and government programs.

Instead, the animating ideals of the commons are collective emancipation and the “pre-distribution” of benefits by giving people direct ownership and control over discrete chunks of land, water, infrastructure, housing, public space, and online services.

With greater equity stakes and opportunities for self-governance, people are remarkably eager to contribute to their communities, whether local or digital. They welcome an escape from consumerism, exploitative markets, and remote bureaucracies.

These sorts of local and regional experiments not only advance effective structural solutions at a time when national politics is dysfunctional; they also provide meaningful ways for ordinary people to become agents of change themselves.

Almost 50 years ago, Fannie Lou Hamer came up with a shrewd strategy for dealing with community disempowerment—in her case, the vestiges of the plantation system and exploitative white-owned businesses.

The civil-rights leader purchased hundreds of acres of Mississippi Delta farmland so that poor blacks could grow their own food. “When you’ve got 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup for the winter, nobody can push you around or tell you what to say or do,” Hamer noted.

This is roughly the same strategy that must be pursued today. Relocalizing and decommodifying production and services represents a compelling strategy for the small cities, towns, and rural areas that have been ruthlessly hollowed out by big-box stores, online retailers, automation, big agriculture, and outsourcing.

In fact, that’s just what the local-food movement has done over the past few decades.

Faced with a long list of agribusiness horrors—pesticides, processed foods, monoculture farming, seed monopolies, a loss of biodiversity, and more—countless champions of localism retrenched to create a semi-autonomous parallel economy on their own terms: community-oriented, fair-minded, humane, and ecologically respectful.


Image above: The shares of produce from Smolak Farms of North Andover, Massachusetts is an example of successful Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) that began as a farm stand over 30 years ago. From (https://roadtrippers.com/us/detroit-mi/food-drink/eastern-market-detroit).

Today, there are more than 1,650 community-supported agriculture (CSA) projects and more than 8,000 local farmers’ markets across the country. Organic farming is a robust market sector, and agroecology and permaculture are pointing the way to eco-friendly approaches.

In California, the Food Commons Fresno project is one of the most ambitious regional efforts to reimagine the food system from farm to plate.

Even though Fresno is located in the heart of prime agriculture lands, the region has been ecologically abused for decades and is a food desert for half a million low-income residents and farm workers.

To develop systemic solutions, the Food Commons has established a network of community-owned trusts that bring together landowners, farmers, food processors, distributors, retailers, and workers to support a shared mission: high-quality, safe, locally grown food that everyone can afford.

Instead of siphoning away profits to investors, the Food Commons mutualizes financial surpluses on a system-wide scale, reducing market pressures to deplete the soil, exploit farm workers, degrade food quality, and raise prices.

This approach, writes the social thinker John Thackara, “marks a radical shift from a narrow focus on the production of food on its own, towards a whole-system approach in which the interests of farm communities and local people, the land, watersheds and biodiversity are all considered together.”

Another impressive innovation in regional self-determination is the BerkShares currency, launched in 2006 by the Schumacher Center for a New Economics (where I work) in the largely rural Berkshires of western Massachusetts. The goal is to strengthen the local economy and community life by reengineering the flow of money.

Anyone can exchange $100 in US currency for $105 worth of BerkShares at any of four banks with a total of 16 branches throughout Berkshire County, and then spend them at 400 participating businesses.

Consumers get a 5 percent bump in purchasing power from this buy-local strategy while boosting the regional economy and strengthening the region’s identity.

The BerkShares story is part of a global trend in which dozens of localities worldwide are deploying their own currencies to reclaim some measure of control from hedge funds and banks.


New-economy renegades are not shy about engaging with the policy world, but many regard it as a rigged game that won’t yield the transformations needed. In the meantime, they ask, why not grow our own greens and make our own gumbo soup?

As in Fannie Lou Hamer’s day, the focus should be on securing tangible results and greater leverage for change.
 

Relocalization strategies can also help reinvigorate democratic self-governance. Just as the rise of public-interest organizations in the 1970s propelled far-reaching changes, today our economic future is taking shape in new organizational forms.

Innovative cooperative structures, pool-and-share projects, self-managed digital platforms, and collaborative global networks are changing the topography for pursuing social change. 

One of the most notable new forms may be the platform cooperative, a socially constructive alternative to Silicon Valley start-ups, which famously like to “move fast and break things.”

Gig-economy companies rely on heaps of capital, proprietary algorithms, and political muscle to control new markets that leapfrog over government standards for public safety, fair labor, and consumer protection.

Platform co-ops are attempting to write a different story: Instead of using networking technologies to extract money from communities for the benefit of investors and speculators, platform co-ops work with communities, workers, and consumers to share the gains.

 These dynamics play out at Stocksy United, a global co-op of photographers that sells royalty-free stock photos and video, and on service-swapping platforms like TimeBanks, which uses a currency of hours contributed to helping people meet needs and build circles of mutual support.

Another vanguard player is Enspiral, a New Zealand–  based cooperative that developed the popular Loomio platform for online deliberation and decision-making. (For more on platform co-ops, see The Internet of Ownership)

When community commitment and digital platforms come together, they often give rise to “cosmo-local” production, as Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation calls it.

This is a new model of manufacturing that allows “light” nonproprietary knowledge and design to be collaboratively produced on a global scale, while enabling “heavy” physical things to be produced locally at minimal cost. This fledgling model could greatly reduce carbon emissions and transport costs while building local economic capacity.


Image above: The University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab hackerspace. From (http://terp.umd.edu/step-inside-a-hackerspace/#.WZNDvYVDSQk).

The rudiments of cosmo-local production are evident at fab labs (short for “fabrication laboratories”) and so-called hackerspaces—participatory communities of socially minded artists, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and techies who use computer-assisted tools to produce vanguard industrial designs.

This production approach has been dubbed “SLOC”—small and local, but open and connected—a framework that scrambles the standard understanding of the economy as controlled by nation-states and corporations.

SLOC integrates the local and transnational into a remarkably creative provisioning sector—commons-based peer production—that is already developing farm equipment (Farm Hack, Open Source Ecology), furniture (Open Desk), houses (WikiHouse), animated videos (Blender Institute), and cars (Wikispeed).

To conventional policy minds, altering the micro-dynamics of organizations may seem irrelevant to the task of making broadscale social change. But transforming organizational systems and cultures on a small scale may be one of the most effective ways to bring about macro-change.

Just as the microprocessor and the telecommunications network changed the inner dynamics of business, eventually transforming the global economy itself, the rise of self-organized governance and networked collaboration is opening up strategic opportunities on a larger scale.

Attempting to move beyond neoliberal capitalism may sound naive. But over the past two decades, some remarkable progress has already been made.

Besides a range of relocalization strategies, a new sector of commons-based peer production has revolutionized software development, scientific research, academic publishing, education, and other fields by making their outputs legally and technically shareable.

In the halls of government, however, policy-makers and even progressives show little interest in the profound political and economic implications of free and open-source software, Creative Commons licenses, citizen science, data commons, open educational resources, and open design and hardware.

Most of these and other movements are seen as too small, local, unorthodox, or little-known to be consequential. They don’t swing elections. Their participants tend to eschew politics and policy, and often don’t regard their work as part of a unified movement.


They see themselves as part of a pulsating pluriverse of autonomous projects, each working diligently in its own separate sphere.

Counterintuitively, this pluriverse may fuel a true progressive revival. “The next big thing will be a lot of small things,” the designer Thomas Lommée predicted recently, neatly capturing the structural logic of postcapitalist movements and the generativity of the Internet.

Acting on this insight calls for a new mind-set. Greater attention should be paid to places and players on distributed networks. The swarms of self-selected individuals and projects should be recognized as serious actors that can meet real needs in new ways.

We also need to acknowledge the limits of markets and centralized bureaucracies, which are so often hell-bent on asserting total control, engineering dependencies, and eliminating the space for social deliberation and genuine human agency.

By enabling self-organized groups to bypass large institutions and formal systems of authority, and to set their own terms for establishing social trust and legitimacy, we enter the headwaters of a new kind of politics, one that is more accountable, decentralized, and human-scale.

The substantive, local, and practical move to the fore, challenging the highly consolidated power structures and ideological posturing that have turned our national politics into a charade.

But, skeptics ask, can these countless small, irregular initiatives scale up? The question carries the false premise that some form of centralized management or hierarchical control is needed.

As a creature of open networks and sharing, the new social economy will not be directed by a political headquarters or a federal program. That kind of control would kill it.

The participatory local economy will expand only by engaging a diverse base of American pragmatists. That just might be possible, since it offers something for everyone.

As my colleague Silke Helfrich puts it: “Conservatives like the tendency of commons to promote responsibility and community; liberals are pleased with the focus on equality and basic social entitlement; libertarians like the emphasis on individual initiative; and leftists like the idea of limiting the scope of the market.”

To be sure, a constructive rapprochement with state power will have to be negotiated at some point, and in the meantime supportive laws and infrastructures would certainly help.

But the success of the commons sector will hinge on the independent vitality of its projects, the integrity of its bottom-up participation, and the results it produces.

Emulation and federation—these are the means by which a new participatory sector will expand. The point is to create the conditions for grassroots initiatives to self-organize and grow.

It helps to recall that the New Deal didn’t spring fully grown from the brain of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but emerged over time as the policy’s many precursors nurtured brave experiments for years. We need to plant a field of new seeds today if we are going to have anything to harvest in the years to come.

In defense of the neoliberal revolution in the 1980s, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously thundered a phrase that is often shortened to its acronym, TINA: “There is no alternative!”

The result has been nearly 40 years of privatization, deregulation, austerity, and corporate governance, now reaching their farcical, destructive extremes.

For those seeking to overcome this awful legacy, along with the oxymoron of “democratic capitalism,” it is time for a rejoinder: “There are plenty of alternatives!” The only question is whether the Democratic Party and mainstream progressives have any use for them.




.

End Power & Reduce Scale

SUBHEAD: Developing replacement and transition communities.

by Chuck Burr on 15 December 2008 in Culture Change - 
(http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php)





Image above: hunter Kalina with woman gatherer - by Pierre Barrere in 1743 From (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kalina_hunter_gatherer.jpg)

During the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, a minority of people invented a way to give themselves power over the majority. We call this invention “civilization.” For the first time large surpluses of food could be created, counted, and concentrated.

Before that we had limited forms of agriculture and animal husbandry. But this time it was different. Instead of supplementing the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, agriculture competed against all of nature in a novel form called “totalitarian agriculture.”

Instead of working with the native polycultures, the inventors of our culture found they could create great surpluses if they replaced natural landscapes with human food. This also allowed for the first time denial of food to other species and even wholesale destruction of species that competed for our food.

There is only one catch. You have to work about twice as hard to earn a living under agriculture as you do living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. You literally have to whip people to live an agricultural lifestyle. So, how do you get people to give up their life of leisure?

You lock up the food. This was the first means of control of the majority by a minority. The eventual closure of the commons and privatizing of the land gave whoever controls the land an iron clad control over the majority -- if you don’t work, you do not eat. It is that simple.

The Fall of man was caused by private property. Self-love arose when man started to quarrel over the earth -- he would shut all others out. Control of the land also means control of water, timber, fiber, minerals, and energy.

It has worked very well. In England .28 percent of the population owns 64 percent of the land. In the United States the top one percent of the population now owns more than the bottom 95 percent. A code of rules was needed to enforce privatization of the commons. We call these rules laws.

This ensured that society as a whole would enforce this system of privatization. With the control of natural resources, came the need of an interchangeable system of wealth -- money was born.

First we had commodity- and precious metals-backed money, then we had paper money, and now with our global financial markets and computers we have valueless virtual money. This has led to the speculative financial bubble that is now bursting.

There is now three times as much money in the world as the total value of all goods and services. It has become not the control of money that yields the real power but the control of the “flow” of money.

Money has become the oxygen of our economy that is now the life support system of humanity. This financial system is the lungs of the economy.

Whoever, controls the lungs controls the world. It is not the money, it’s the flow of the money that counts. This is why Wall Street got a $700 billion bailout and the auto industry got only a $15 billion bailout. Those in true power have set up private central banks in every major country.


The U.S. Federal Reserve is not a government agency; it is a private bank with confidential owners. Religion has also been a big factor is maintaining hierarchical control. Jesus said “choose,” Mohammed said “submit,” and Moses had the “ten commandments.”

God and heaven were invented to rationalize the daily drudgery of our lives. Before modern salvationist religions, all people shared one belief, animism. They just respected the fire of life in all living things. This was a spirituality that has no book, is not a religion, and is not even capitalized.

Power can also come in small amounts. Those who have significant power over you and your family include the boss at work, teachers, admission officers, utilities, credit card companies, airlines, politicians, healthcare providers, the media, the church, and the landlord or condo association. How do we get out?

Who wants to work all day building pyramids for someone else with no guarantee that you will not lose your job tomorrow or your retirement in the future?

First, I am beginning to believe that we cannot actually change our culture -- its not salvageable.

One of the stories we live by is that “civilization must continue.” Nothing lasts forever, and now at our current overpopulation level it is becoming apparent that our culture is actually destroying our true life support system.

Our culture has made humanity a species of uncontrolled growth. It has also made us not only cancerous to our home, while the financial system has made us parasitic. We are now financially consuming our own young with the deficits we are creating today.

Our children will have to pay our debts when we are gone tomorrow. It is humanity’s nature to live in harmony with our home.

Every cell in our body knows this. That is why we find no peace no matter how wealthy we become. We have lived in harmony with the earth for three or four million years. It is only in the last 10,000 years that our culture has made humanity toxic to its host. The answer is new cultures; not one new culture, but many variations.

The only way to get there is to become the change we want to see. We have to find communities of like-minded people that can give us the alternatives we seek.

For example, a suburban automobile-based lifestyle offers little of the alternatives that a pedestrian permaculture community can. But we have to do much more than become more interdependently independent.

We have to give up power. We have to give up control of anything that can be concentrated including food, land, housing, water, timber, and money. We also have to give up systems that enable a minority to control the majority.

Democracy is a system of tyranny of the majority to placate the masses. It makes us feel as though we get to be in charge of our destiny a little bit.

This could not be further from the truth, since our system of governance from the local to the national level grants a handful of people control of everything from spending, laws, and even going to war. We are never asked on a ballot to decide how much of our taxes goes to each department.

Our rulers are afraid we will eliminate the military -- the most profitable part of the military industrial complex. We give that power away to a handful people that often vote for what they believe is right and not want the voters want.

Congress got telephone calls at about 100 to 1 opposing the $700 billion financial bailout, but they voted for it anyway because the believe they know what is best. Congress members were also threatened with martial law if the bailout was not immediately authorized.

When it comes time to vote, those who make it on the ballot give us relatively little choice -- they are still defenders of our culture, Democrat or Republican. Our system of governance is an iron-clad system to control the population from sea to shining sea.

Modern nation states are concentrators and protectors of wealth and power. One of the problems of our culture is its scale. Do we really need a transnational company to flip hamburgers?

Do we really need a country a third the size of North America? Everything on a giant scale from corporations to governments are now being rendered failures as we begin to enter the grip of peak oil.

Why not let regional communities decide if they want to be part of the larger nation state or not?

Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia describes how northern California, Oregon, and Washington succeed from the union to create a steady-state society. I believe one of the first ways to reduce power is to reduce scale. The system of social organization that is evolutionarily proven to work for humanity for millions of years is not the global corporation, nor the nation state: it is the tribe.

Our culture has had 10,000 years to create a just and sustainable society but has failed completely. Here are some of the steps I envision. Make decisions in your community by consensus -- no town councils. Working committees should report to the tribal community as a whole.

End private property -- put your land in a land trust for the benefit of the community.

Work towards eventually replacing government, industry, and private ownership of the commons with local community ownership. Why should your local ecosystem be clear cut to benefit a few wealthy individuals thousands of miles away?

Shouldn’t the local community decide how local resources are sustainably used and who benefits from their use? However, even in small scale, there will be individuals who desire to put themselves in positions of power. We all know these people.

Again we must use consensus decision making on a local scale. Early North American native tribal leaders were largely ceremonial positions.

Colonist governments were frustrated because there was no one person “in charge” with whom to make treaties. Many tribal councils or governments were inventions of the white man to take away power from tribal consensus and give it to a few that could be dealt with.

Native American tribes that still operate by consensus have the greatest control over their resources today.

So why end the nation state and global power? Don’t they get things done? Well, that may precisely be the point, they get things we don’t want done. Progress is another word for destruction of nature -- our only life support system.

Based on my experience working in congress and the Executive Office of the President, and inside industry from fortune 500 companies down to small entrepreneurial companies, participation in local government, and nonprofit work, I would estimate that at least half of every dollar spent is wasted and or concentrated. That means that half of your entire work week is spent on wasted effort.

That is why I believe we should replace large scale systems with local interdependent tribal scale communities. Don't walk away from our culture, walk toward something better.

Maybe there is a blend for those who must be fed by our corporations and those who see that as a false culture and want our own cultures. I want to emphasize that I am not advocating the overnight tear down of our civilization without first developing a replacement and transition communities.

Follow a permaculture principle and be ready to replace a weed before you pull it.

Also, hierarchies have great defenses from attack from below, however, they have none for abandonment. I have suggested in the past that all remaining native cultures should be protected, expanded, and studied as our greatest world heritage treasures. Study in our schools what is truly sustainable about tribal communities instead of studying dead presidents.

The important part again is not how tribes live but what makes these communities evolutionary and sustainable. The solutions to most of our problems lie where there is no concentration of power. We have to let power fade in all of its forms.

See also:

To learn more about the Culturequake book and the online Magazine.  www.culturequake.org

Further Reading: Daniel Quinn
, The Story of B Marshall Sahlins,
 Stone Age Economics Toby Hemenway
, Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture 

Ernest Callenbach,
 Ecotopia Consensus 
www.consensus.net
 

A Manual for Group Facilitators Land Trusts
   www.cltnetwork.org 
www.osalt.org 

State of Jefferson  
www.jeffersonstate.com

.