Earth Day

Writing of the Irish Rising of 1916, the poet Yeats wrote a verse that has proved to be the epitaph of boomer efforts that began 40 years ago to prevent what has transpired: the loss of a planet and a civilization:

"We pieced our thoughts into philosophy
and tried to set the world under a rule,
Who were but weasels fighting in a hole."

Earth Day 2009 arrives in a boomlet of entrepreneurship and activist enthusiasm. Perhaps a little reflection on reality would be more useful. Since the first Earth Day, we have neither stopped the leviathan of debt and growth from desolating the world, nor put forward an inspiring alternative sufficient to compete with consumption and death.

When I promised my teacher Paolo Soleri that I would build a sustainable compact town in central Arizona before my departure back in 1978, he told me, "you have no idea what you are up against", which was certianly true. But such excuses take us only so far. A preposterously complicated and meaningless global economy was built in the interval on the flimsiest of premises--so much so that historic low levels of mass education and thought control were needed to sell a discredited, obsolete system educated Britons has abandoned as untenable. In fact only a few benefited, as readers of Morris' Pax Britannia Trilogy will note. Environmentalism, like the peace movement, simply defined itself as the business nanny brand. Any inspired ambition to pick up the work of Classical or Renaissance culture long ago was forgotten. Today's alternative dystopias range from salvaging suburban tracts (David Holmgren) to survivalist grunge in a sailboat in toxic seas (Dmitri Orlov). The halcyon rebirth of hunter gathering in a wasteland is now a best case scenario. Such is the fate of movements defined as "against-", including my own, "against things": Arcosanti.

To return to Yeats' lament, on reflection what stopped us was nothing as daunting as finance or engineering. It was a seemingly mundane but incredibly powerful technology: semantics. Left brain language cannot produce Right brain results. Enter Marshall Rosenberg. Change the word "weasel" for the Compassionate Communication nown for left brain thinking, "jackal", and the truth becomes obvious. That it is also more difficult to build such a semantic remodel within ourselves than to develop a 10 story sustainable compact town is less obvious, but will become so on attempting it. I'm convinced, in the words of Yeats that inspired me in youth, that it is the "possible" of

"the soul takes upon itself the the task most difficult of those not impossible"

and will devote what remains of life to this endeavor, the prerequisite to the former.

Founding Statement

My blogs all begin with the premise that I am personally the main person responsible for the destruction of real wealth in the last 30 years and for the opportunity cost that entailed: denying a wonderful life to much of the human race and preserving much of our natural inheritance. Instead, immense suffering and irreversable damage have occured. I knew what to do to avoid that, and did not. My students, colleagues, and my teacher Paolo Soleri will understand this is so, though it may sound strange to others unfamiliar with the history. I promised my teacher and my community to manifest his design for the world's first sustainable compact town. This would have lead to the adoption of sustainable town building as the norm for the last 30 years, instead of collapse, out of pure competitive advantage over growth and debt. I was unable to do this for at least 3 reasons: I could not instill a sense of urgency, though this was indeed the only chance to "save mankind", just as I stated then, that would have compelled cooperation among the founders. I was ignorant of the tools of compassionate communication required to ask for what I needed others to do, and to compassionately meet the needs of my co-workers. It was more important, in the words of Marshall Rosenberg, for me to be right, than to make life wonderful. Lastly, I did not recognize the gifts of wisdom about the nature of capital investment offered to me by Richard and Nancy Gushman, Skip Sagar, Bill Graham, Desmond Miurhead, and others, blinded by ideological parochialism.
Sic transit gloria mundi. What a screwup! What to do now will be the focus of these ruminations.

I begin by giving us all empathy: we all did the best we could at the time to meet our needs based on our best current knowledge and judgement.